Quote of the Day (Monica Bellucci, on How Maria Callas ‘Created What She Wanted To Be’)

“She [opera singer Maria Callas] created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle.’ They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”— Italian actress Monica Bellucci quoted by Elisabeth Vincentelli, “Reviving the Aura of a Diva,” The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2023

I had become intrigued by this quote almost two years ago, but it’s come to the forefront of my consciousness now with the release of the Angelina Jolie biopic about Callas, Maria. If anyone understands the artistic creation of illusions in the manner described by Ms. Bellucci, it would have to be Ms. Jolie, I think.

(The image accompanying this post, of Maria Callas in her home in Milan, Italy, was taken in 1957 by Federico Patellani.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Psalm 55, With Lines Influencing Henry James)

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
    because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they bring[a] trouble upon me,
    and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
 
My heart is in anguish within me,
    the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and trembling come upon me,
    and horror overwhelms me.
And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
yea, I would wander afar,
    I would lodge in the wilderness,
I would haste to find me a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest.’”—Psalm 55:2-8 (Revised Standard Version)

These biblical verses are the source of not one, but two prominent book titles. One phrase gave rise to one of the cornerstones of modern philosophy: Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 title, Fear and Trembling.

The other might not be as recognizable to those who have read a novel whose title echoes another verse here: Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

Contemporary readers of this work from the mature period of American expatriate novelist will hear the character Milly Theale, an American heiress stricken with a serious disease, explicitly likened to a dove because of her innocence, and leave it at that. (James, incidentally, left a clue to the real-life source of the character through the initials “MT”—Minny Temple, a vivacious, innocent cousin who died of tuberculosis at age 24.)

But readers in James’ own time, familiar as they were with the Bible—especially in the King James version—would have heard an echo in Psalm 55’s “wings like a dove,” and would think back to the entire passage—someone beset not just by the “terrors of death,” but also “the noise of the enemy” and “the oppression of the wicked.”

Milly, like the narrator of the psalm—though without knowing it (at least initially)—is at the mercy of conspirators: in this case, the cash-poor lovers Merton Densher and Kate Croy, who hope that, by Merton marrying the soon-to-die Milly, he will inherit her money, freeing him to wed Kate.

James’ personal religious beliefs appear to be unconventional, a byproduct of his father, Henry James Sr., who rejected orthodox Protestantism and became a follower of Swedish philosopher and Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But traditional faith can leave an indelible imprint, and James—Junior, like Senior—would likely hear that phrase “wings like a dove” reverberate in the imagination in contemplating the object of the web spun by Croy and Densher.

Kate and Merton have committed the worst kind of transgression in exploiting the innocence of another human being. That violation will not go unpunished.

In the quest for material possession that justifies and finally undermines the love of Croy and Densher, the novelist might have found an equally apt literary allusion from Psalm 68: “The women at home divide the spoil, though they stay among the sheepfolds—the wings of a dove covered with silver, its pinions with green gold.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, with Alison Elliott as Millie, Linus Roache as Merton, and Helena Bonham Carter as Kate.)

Quote of the Day (Elijah Wood, on the Courage of Frodo in ‘Lord of the Rings’)

“One of the great messages of the [“The Lord of the Ring”] books as it pertains to Frodo and the hobbits in general is a sense that even the smallest person, not just in stature but in terms of what one feels they’re capable of doing, is capable of greatness, of affecting real change, of having real impact. What Frodo was up against seemed insurmountable, and yet he was able to accomplish it largely because of goodness, kindness, a purity of heart and perhaps innocence. Those are the things that hobbits embody, and inherently why they’re able to withstand the corruption of the Ring for longer than humans. But what makes Frodo unique is a way of seeing the world without any kind of cynicism. There’s also courage, maybe even a blind courage, of not necessarily knowing what’s ahead and therefore not allowing himself to be afraid. If I’m to learn one thing from all of that, it’s that there’s fortitude in his outlook that makes it all possible.”—Actor Elijah Wood, on what he learned playing Frodo in the film adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, quoted by Carlos Aguilar, “Frodo Still Lives In One Actor’s Heart,” The New York Times, Dec. 22, 2021

Quote of the Day (Hugh Grant, on His ‘Horrible’ Experience as a Film Producer)

“I did a bit of that [producing], and it’s actually horrible. I don’t know if you’ve done it, but it’s like driving a car from the back seat. You’re just tearing your hair out while someone else is driving, saying, ‘No, no, no, slower, go right.’”—English actor Hugh Grant quoted in Lacey Rose, ““No One Wants to Be the Good Guy’”:Hugh Grant, Richard Madden, Billy Porter and The Hollywood Reporter Drama Actor Roundtable,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2019

(The image accompanying this post, of Hugh Grant at a charity fundraiser held in South Bank, London, was taken Mar.15, 2011, by Julien Rath. Judging from Grant's smile, his producing experience was long behind him by this point.)

Quote of the Day (Kenneth Branagh, on Moving Out of Ulster During ‘The Troubles’)

“That rupture was the most significant event in my personal life. There was a sense that before that mob came up the street [i.e., a riot he witnessed as a child in Belfast in August 1969], I knew who I was and that I was at peace. From that point onward, a whole series of identities and masks was constructed. What I wanted to do [in his new film Belfast] was peel some of those away. To do some self-remembering without indulgence, simply trying to open what had been covered up. Because there’s so much of who I am that was formed in that period up to 8 years old and before that riot occurred. But from that moment there was a guardedness, there was an inability to roll with things in the way that one had done before.”—Actor-director Sir Kenneth Branagh quoted in David Marchese, “Talk: Kenneth Branagh Is Finally Processing His Childhood Trauma,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 7, 2021

Nearly 30 years ago, while still married to Kenneth Branagh, actress Emma Thompson told an interviewer that, because of the sectarian unrest he had witnessed during his Ulster boyhood, the sight of a church left her husband almost physically ill as an adult.

Now, in Belfast, Branagh immerses moviegoers in a semi-autobiographical recreation of that traumatic childhood. 

I have been following the actor’s career off and on since he first attracted wide notice here in the U.S. with his Oscar-nominated performance in Henry V. But, as an Irish-American, I am especially interested in how he treats this particularly intense chapter in the tangled British-Irish relationship in his critically acclaimed new movie.

A move away from all the friends, places and other certainties one has known to date can be difficult for any child. The decision by Branagh’s parents to relocate to England as a result of the wrenching violence that erupted in Northern Ireland in 1969 must have been far worse.

Fans of film and theater should be glad that he and his family survived. It should never be forgotten that far too many others died—physically, emotionally or spiritually—during the three-decade period that ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

One can only hope that the Protestants and Roman Catholics of Ulster’s six counties will be able to work out on their own a future of justice, peace, opportunity and equal rights for all, without the specter of the gun ever darkening their lives or the history of that region again.

(The accompanying photo of Kenneth Branagh was taken on July 10, 2009, at the Roma Fiction Fest that year, by Giorgia Meschini. For a fine short piece from six years ago, hailing Branagh’s “diversity of work” while centering on his abundant productions of The Bard, I urge you to check out this this post from “The Shakespeare Blog” by Sylvia Morris.)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on How the Days in Our Lives Are Not Equal)

“[I]n our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1913-1927)

This past weekend marked the 150^th birthday of Marcel Proust, and before the time passed by irrevocably, I really had to take note of it here.

I would not change my basic opinion of the French novelist expressed in this blog post from eight years ago. But the age of COVID-19 has certainly deepened my appreciation for the achievement on which his reputation rests: the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, the result of his massive outburst of “involuntary memory.”

What other major novelist could have not merely survived our pandemic, but thrived? At the height of his powers, Hemingway would have gone crazy without the chance to fish, hunt big game, ski, watch bullfights, or simply drink at cafes. Dickens, unable to tramp the streets of London, would have felt cooped up inside with his wife and kids. Balzac would have bemoaned all those hours not spent in Parisian salons, soaking up social manners. Even Henry James would have withered if he couldn’t have taken afternoon teas with friends.

But Proust? He would have been made for this situation. Asthmatic, he would have been even more determined to shut out the world than he had been when he got down to work in his cork-lined apartment. Though it’s almost impossible to imagine, he might conceivably have produced even more than the 4,000-plus pages and nearly 1.3 million words of his magnum opus. There would have been nothing to distract him from his geyser of memory.

If there is any limit to the devotion of Proust fans, I have yet to discover it. Consider these examples: 

*The presence of multiple blogs paying tribute to him: “182 Days of Marcel Proust,” a journal about reading In Search of Lost Time at the rate of at least ten pages a day; “Proust for All,” with French and English posts; and “Reading Proust for Fun.”

*A book-length analysis of his life and art that functions as a kind of literary self-help manual: Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life; and,

*In a fictional example of this last title, the decision by the title character in Larry McMurtry’s Duane's Depressed (the concluding volume of his “Last Picture Show” Trilogy) to follow his lesbian psychologist’s prescription for his late middle-age melancholy: read Proust. (A remarkable plot development, considering that Duane’s reading to this point in his life has been limited.)

What also fascinates me about Proust is how he represents not just a kind of Mount Everest for readers, but also for filmmakers. For a medium that consists fundamentally of moving pictures, In Search of Lost Time can be a stark challenge: long on leisurely description and rumination, short on dialogue and plot.

But that hasn’t stopped screenwriters and directors from dreaming about bringing the novelist to screens big and small. In 1984, Volker Schlöndorff directed Swann in Love, with Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and the director himself taking a crack at Swann’s Way. Raúl Ruiz adapted Time Regained (1999), based on the last novel in the series; and Chantal Akerman's The Captive (2000) focused on the fifth volume, The Prisoner.

Both Luchino Visconsi and Joseph Losey were forced to abandon their plans to adapt In Search of Lost Time when they could not secure enough financing. But in Losey’s case, all was not lost.

In 1978, his collaborator, Harold Pinter, published the unproduced screenplay. Had it been filmed, it would have clocked in at about four hours—pushing the boundaries of visual narrative, just as Proust had stretched what future writers could do with the novel.

(See Peter Bradshaw’s 2013 essay in the British newspaper The Guardian on “the troubled history of Proust on film.”)

Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on Writing Screenplays With Budgets in Mind)

“[When writing for independent film producer Roger Corman], [h]e would always say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about the budget.’ Then the poor directors would come squealing, ‘I’ve only got $800,000 to shoot this thing!’ I wrote a science-fiction movie for [director] James Cameron. The fun with that was that anything I could think up, if he liked it, he would invent it. Even if the technology didn’t exist. He’s so good at that stuff that there were no restraints in the storytelling. When I’m writing for myself, though, it’s different. For instance, the movie I’m about to make in Mexico is half in Spanish. The minute you have any subtitles in a movie, you’re talking about a much smaller potential audience. So you have to worry about what it’s going to cost. The minute you have any kind of action or adventure in a movie you probably increase your chances of selling it overseas, and so you can think about a little bit more of a budget. Of course, action-adventure usually costs more to make.”—Screenwriter-director-actor John Sayles quoted in “Back to Craft: David Goldsmith Speaks With John Sayles,” Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #4 (2002)

Quote of the Day (Producer Peter Guber, on ‘Power and Sex’ in Movies)

“This business, movies, is all about two things—power and sex. And guess what, they're the same thing.”—Producer Peter Guber (Batman, Rain Man), quoted in Tina Brown, diary entry for June 6, 1989, in The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 (2017)

For decades, Hollywood execs pushed Guber’s neat equation to its natural limit. While most of America came to see rape as less an act of sex than an assertion of power, Hollywood continued to operate under a different set of rules, as old as the proverbial “casting couch.”

We’re about to see if the guilty verdict this week against Harvey Weinstein (pictured when he was riding high) is going to alter matters—if it actually represents “the biggest seismic change that we have ever had” that Oscar winner Julianne Moore thought she had witnessed last October. 

Don’t bet the ranch on it; the forces of reaction are awfully powerful. But maybe, after all this time, something fundamental has changed.

Bully baby that he is, Weinstein complained about the injustice of his indictment, saying his “work had been forgotten” after he had done so much for women. These last several days, that ludicrous statement may have turned out to be true after all—but only because it required a monster as repulsive as Weinstein to bring Americans face to face with the consequences of what they had excused for far decades.     

   

(The photo accompanying this post was taken by David Shankbone of Harvey Weinstein attending the 2010 Time 100 Gala. Seven years later, the magazine would feature Weinstein on its cover, in far darker hues, with the tag line, “Producer. Predator. Pariah.”)                               

Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on Film a Century Ago, in Its ‘Wild West’ Stage)

“The movies are still in the Wild West stage of culture. They have yet to produce any authentic artists, or such an artist could not endure the kind of life nearly all movie people have to lead. The great magnates of the movie world would strike him precisely as a Hearst or a Harmsworth strikes a man of letters, or the sales agent of a phonograph company a composer of good music. It may be suggested here that perhaps Wagner was an exception—that he showed certain tastes that recall those of a movie star. But it must be manifest on reflection that there was actually a vast difference between the society of even a crazy king and that of a movie magnate, and an even vaster one between the atmosphere of Triebschen or Bayreuth, even with Cosima in the house, and that of Hollywood.” —American journalist, essayist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

Reading the notebook entries of H.L. Mencken was something of a letdown for me. The material he poured into his columns and books in his lifetime featured his funniest, most erudite thoughts. The notebooks featured his darkest, most bilious meditations on religion, democracy and racial and ethnic groups he did judged as falling outside the cultural elite.

The passage I am highlighting here differs from his other, more dispiriting private ideas. At the height of Mencken’s influence, in the Roaring Twenties, movies were coming into their own as a mass medium. But, even with his often piercing insight into culture, he couldn’t see that early filmmakers were not only pioneering a new kind of visual medium, but a new kind of storytelling. 

Moreover, he missed parallels to his hero Richard Wagner that went beyond personal taste or loutish lifestyle. Just as the German was pushing the boundaries of musical theater with his operas, so were early Hollywood directors inventing a new kind of vocabulary to depict emotion. And, just as Wagner sought to build new arenas that could incorporate his ideas on musical drama, Hollywood was developing an entire apparatus for its new dream machine—movie theaters, projectors, elaborate backdrops for scenes, and even the coming of sound.

The new vocabulary and forms developed in the Twenties were quickly copied across continents. We saw the culmination of this process on Sunday night, when Parasite became the first foreign-language film to receive the Best Picture Oscar. One wonders what Mencken would have made of all of this.

Quote of the Day (Ingmar Bergman, on Film and the ‘Twilight Room of the Soul’)

“Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”—Swedish stage and film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, translated by Joan Tate (1987)

Quote of the Day (Indie Auteur John Sayles, on the Difference Between Film and Fiction)

“A script is to a movie as a blueprint is to a building. So many of the things that will later be major, visceral aspects of the storytelling — cinematography, music, sound effects, costume, performance, the rhythm of the editing — are only just indicated or assumed, and will be realized by a team of talented collaborators. The fiction writer has to serve all those functions alone, with his prose, selecting information so a handful of notes let readers hear the symphony. A screenwriter creates potential — a novelist has to fulfill it.”—Indie screenwriter-director-actor John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Eight Men Out), quoted in “Up Front,” The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 2, 2011