Out of Area

2006-06-13T23:32:00.000-07:00

Reading list for the summer:
Михаил Ростовцев. Эллинство и иранство на юге России [Greeks and Iranians in the South of Russia] (1918). I couldn't find a reasonably priced copy in English online, so I ordered a cheap Russian edition of Rostovtsev's work on the steppe peoples and their interaction with Greek settlers. I was referred to the book by Neal Ascherson's popular travelogue, Black Sea. When it comes to Russian born classicists, not many besides R. come to mind. (Then again, Viacheslav Ivanov wrote his thesis on the Roman taxation system. Speaking of classically educated Russian symbolists, I also have a first edition of Dmitry Merezhkovsky's Рождение Богов: Тутанкамон на Крите [The Birth of the Gods: Tutankhamen on Crete] which I obtained cheaply on eBay. Despite the attractive sketch of a bull on the cover, Mary Renault it isn't).

Gian Biagio Conte. Latin Literature: A History. Trans. Jospeh B. Solodow (1994).

Thomas Mann. Joseph and his Brothers. Trans. John Woods (2005). Thomas Mann, as you can see from the previous post, has secured his place in my heart by only one book, The Magic Mountain. I took up the translator's suggestion and began reading a few chapters in: Mann's retelling of the story of Dinah.

2006-06-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite films is Zinnemann's A Man for All Seasons. For fiction of any kind to appeal to me, its plot must hang on ideas. This is why Mann's The Magic Mountain is one of my favorite thick novels; it would be 500 pages of plotless drudgery if the novel's sanitorium was not the background for an epic debate between the humanist Lodovico Settembrini and medievalist Leo Nafta. Of course, Hollywood provides a much more limited canvas than a book (of often lumbering prose, in the case of such twentieth century intelligents like Mann). This makes what Zinnemann attempts to do all the more interesting: a film whose hero is a personified idea. Scofield, in playing More, does not aim for historical verisimilitude. (I doubt the historical More, who was posthumously painted by Rowland Lockey with his gold chain of office and gaudy robes, was innocent of ambition (nor his family)). If the real More were like the character in the film, then he would have pursued that village teaching post -- the "quiet life" of rustication -- that the Scofield character advises Richard Rich to take in the film.

Reading the film like we would read a 16th-century morality play, Scofield's More stands for the Anglo-Norman ideal of the rule of law. The scene in which Henry VIII visits More's Chelsea estate particularly drives such a playful allegorical interpretation. Henry and his train, covered in mud, represent (in contrast to More) the royal license that Milton would later criticize in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Having lumbered up the steps from the Thames to the grassy park before More's house, Henry demands music and dancing (at a later party scene he sings). (Indeed, the historical King "Harry" penned the lines, "For my pastance / Hunt, sing, and dance, / My heart is set"). For the debate between king and chancellor, the camera frames the quiet More sitting to the right of the boistrous Henry. (Perhaps this was unintentional, but the left is of course sinister in Latin). More not only chastises the King's behavior by his personal example (salvation by good works, on display in the later Protestant autobiographical accounts of George Fox and John Bunyan). He also reasserts here and elsewhere the firmly medieval belief in the divine right of kings (e.g. after the fashion of John of Salibury's Policraticus). This tests the modern viewer's ability to enjoy the film (how can we believe in such a character as "the king's good servant," who remains passive until the penultimate scene in the movie, when he finally allows himself to denounce Henry's divorce? (and when it is too late)). But these observations reinforce abstract, completely unrealistic nature of the character.

An inability to read the film in such a 16th-century fashion explain certain negative reviews. A reviewer complains, "As a nonbeliever, maybe I just can't accept that someone would abandon his family and condemn himself to death over a fear of being damned to hell -- I find it sad that people will deny their whole lives for the illusory promise of another one." I don't know if appreciation for the movie hangs on a particular belief system (This statement itself is a product of post-medieval culture; it is only with post Reformation plays like Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that we sense that the author is acknowledging the audience's multiple belief systems (e.g. Calvinists and Catholics)).

Of course, Robert Bolt's parable on the devil and the law, which he has More speak to his son-in-law, Will Roper, is what actually made me want to see the film. I first read it in the front matter of a monthly state bar magazine.

2005-12-19T22:13:00.000-08:00

Мне трудно понять, что классика американского кино, как Клеопатра, была доступна к Тарковскому, который жил за железным занавесом. Где ему можно усмотрить? Но в этом интервью он критизировал этот фильм сильными словами: "That's a commercial spectacle intended to impress the imagination of simple people. And even then Cleopatra, I understand, was a fiasco. Viewers are no longer interested in such pictures."

Тарковский выразил мнение, что правдоподобие важнейшая цель режиссера. Но я с точки зрения, что средство кино, как литература и живописание, уже далекое от жизни.