The Ugly Prince: Louis XIV in Rossellini’s The Ascension of Louis XIV

I have been reading Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. Since Xenophon's Cyrus is the basis of so many other depictions of young monarchs, it might be useful to understand Rossellini’s movie through the lens of Xenophon’s book. Xenophon describes Cyrus: “And even to this day the barbarians tell in story and in song that Cyrus was most handsome in person, most generous of heart, most devoted to learning, and most ambitious, so that he endured all sorts of labour and faced all sorts of danger for the sake of praise.” (Cyropadeia, 1.2.1)







Indeed, it is a commonplace, even among fairy tales, that the young prince is handsome, tall and well-spoken. Rossellini’s Louis XIV is almost astonishingly different from this – he is short, stout, comparatively ugly and speaks poorly. The actual Louis XIV of history was indeed short, stout and not especially handsome. But allegiance to the details of history was not critical for Rossellini – Rossellini takes numerous liberties with other historical facts. Rossellini must have had other reasons (or additional reasons) to depict Louis XIV as so different from our image of the archetypal young prince.



Rossellini’s reasons for this are to me unclear. But potential answers are likely to be at the center of an interpretation of this movie.

Philosopher and Prince

Unfortunately, my new book project and my new job are taking away from my blogging efforts. Since you, my loving readers, probably want to know what my new book project is, allow me to describe it for your approval.

As I’m sure my loyal readers by now know, one of my favorite authors is Machiavelli, and appropriately, one of my favorite books is Machiavelli’s Il Principe. What is less well-known is that Il Principe is part of a long tradition of a genre of philosophers writing to princes or rulers. Indeed, this tradition stretches back to the very first day of philosophy itself – Socrates’ infatuation and involvement with Alcibiades.

The plan of the book is to discuss the role of this genre within philosophic writing to trace the genre as it existed throughout most (but not all) of the history of philosophy.

Here is my plan as of the moment:

Philosopher and Prince: Activity and Contemplation
Socrates and Alcibiades
Plato’s Letters to Dion
Xenophon’s On Tyranny
Thomas Aquinas and Ptolemy of Lucca’s De Regimine Principum
Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum
Nicholas Oresme’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Politics and Economics
Desiderius Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince
Leibniz’ Portrait of the Prince
Philosopher and Prince in Modernity

Maimonides on how to read Guide of the Perplexed

"You who consider that you understand a book that is the guide of the first and last men while glancing through it as you would glance through a historical work or a piece of poetry: collect yourselves and reflect, for things are not as you thought."

Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 1.2

Most Beautiful Unknown Libraries: Eger Lyceum, Eger, Hungary

Hungary’s Eger Lyceum Library is partially the story of a failed university. Eger would have been a fine site for a potential Central European country university along the lines of a Tubingen or Heidelberg – Eger is the sight of an ancient bishopric (now an archbishopric) and has an excellently preserved Baroque city center, as well as being sited in Hungary’s vineyard region (always something that appeals to students). Unfortunately, the bishops of Eger wanted a bit too long to start on the potential university – by the time the bishops completed the large central university building in 1765, the Empress Maria Theresa was not willing to countenance another Jesuit instition, so the building instead became a large lyceum.



The pride of the library is the large ceiling murals, which depict heretical books being miraculously struck by divine lighting at the Council of Trent.

New DVD Review: Rossellini’s The Taking of Power of Louis XIV, Part I

The number of truly political films – films that examine politics as politics and not as a phenomenon of economics, culture or religion (i.e., examining politics as anything but politics) – are actually very rare. One of the few that does is the newly released DVD version of Rossellini’s The Taking of Power of Louis XIV, originally create for French television in 1967.



Part of the interesting features of this film is that it is a film that examines a monarchy without the sentimentality or romanticization of the vast majority of historical films about past statesmen. That is, past statesmen all saw themselves as politicians trying to solve concrete political problems. But most historical films don’t take the politics of their statesmen seriously, instead tending to focus on non-political matters like the statesman’s psychology, sexuality, love affairs, personality quirks, religious beliefs – i.e. things above politics, things below politics, but not politics.



Rossellini’s taking politics seriously leads to the movie more closely resembling a Renaissance history play than anything else, particularly one of the “accession of the young prince” dramas like Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The reason WHY trickle-down tax cuts don't work

The theory behind trickle-down tax cuts is that, if the rewards to certain very talented businesspeople is increased, they will then be incentivized to create even more economic activity.

The problem with this picture is that it completely misrepresents what businesspeople can do. In certain very rare instances and environments, a very small number of businesspeople with very specific talents can build large enterprises. Usually these environments occur when a new industry either initially begins or when an old industry drastically restructures.

In those very short moments of opportunity (historically, they rarely last more than a few years), a handful of businesspeople with incredibly specific skills, talents, connections, personalities, etc. can build up enormous business firms, employing huge numbers of people in a very short space of time. But once that moment of opportunity closes, often there is no new moment of opportunity in that industry for many decades (or even longer).

Thus, once that moment of opportunity had closed, the resulting Bill Gates or Andy Grove or Ray Croc is very wealthy indeed. But Gates or Croc's skills and experiences are very focused on the single opportunity they exploited. It has almost never happened that a single businessperson built two successful industry-dominating firms from ground up in two different industries (in fact, I can't recall a single example of this).

Further, a businessperson of this caliber in the very special environment we're talking about is largely unaffected by comparatively small changes in his tax rate. The opportunity presented to him is so unique and compelling that he would do the same things for much less money, and would do them for much more money.

Thus, when you increase the reward to the ALREADY successful entrepreneur (i.e., he has already made a big pile from his entrepreneurship), you don't actually encourage him to do anything new. He can't, he's ALREADY done the one single great thing he could do. The firm he already built up dominates his industry, and he will be extraordinarily unlikely to be able to do it again. All you end up doing is giving him more money to give to his kids.

World's Most Beautiful Unknown Libraries: Pasadena Central Public

Pasadena’s Central Library is a combination of Spanish and Classical elements, combined with a free and innovative hand by one of the twentieth century’s most neglected great architects, Myron Hunt. The library was built as part of Pasadena’s 1920s revamp of it’s major civic buildings – Pasadena’s City Hall, with a similar, though more formal, mix of Spanish and Neoclassical elements, was built simultaneously. The exterior of the library provides an interesting visual conflict. A brutally simple wall is topped by heavily elaborated Corinthian windows peeping out above. After clearing this wall, the visitor enters a courtyard of unexpected interest. We now see a full-fledged, quite elaborate façade.

Hunt however maintains his contrast between lavish decoration and severe, even brutal plainness – while the entrance façade is lavish, the rest of the courtyard is an almost minimalist expanse, relieved only by a very simple fountain.

The main hall of the Pasadena Library is the most imposing interior feature. Extending over two hundred feet from the building’s end to end, it’s a vast churchlike space with only the most minimal of decoration.

Besides being an admirable compliment to the Pasadena City Hall across the street, Pasadena's Central Library is one pinnacle of Myron Hunt's largely unheralded campaign from 1903 onwards to create an architecture particularly suited to the Southern Californian landscape, based upon Hunt's early career with the Prairie School in Chicago and his study of the work of the First Bay Area Regional School - especially the work of Willis Polk.

Though Hunt's work initially appears to be merely a sophisticated gloss upon versions of Spanish revivalism if not examined closely, the Pasadena Central Library shows Hunt to be highly adept at combining revival elements with a free and unique hand. And you have to love the palm trees poking out from the courtyard.

The Most Beautiful Unknown Libraries

Rogier van der Weyden's Portrait of a Man Holding a Book


As you’ve probably gathered from the general interests of this blog, I like libraries. Obviously, since I’m also an architecture enthusiast, that means I really dig library architecture. Moreover, I worked my way through college being the Theater Department Librarian, so I've spent quite a few hours sleeping in libraries (er, that is working in libraries, that's right).

There’s the obvious choices for most beautiful libraries, which fall into a number of buckets:

The Big European National Libraries: the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, Library of Congress, the British Museum Reading Room, and so on. Most of these are enormous nineteenth-century piles, gigantic boxes of extravagant neoclassical Victoriana. Not really to my taste. Most countries have a one (or even several) of these things in their capitals, and for the life of me, I can’t tell why you’d prefer one over another, or even been able to tell them apart. But they do have a certain fairly standardized beauty, and the Victorians certainly didn’t skimp on the budgets.

Big American University Libraries: Some of these are variations on the Big Neoclassical Box : Harvard’s Widener, Columbia’s Butler, Berkeley’s Doe – and these are no more exceptional than other massive piles of neoclassical box-mania. Again, they’re usually well-done (usually more tastefully restrained on the decoration), but where’s the exceptional charm or interest in any one of them individually? Much the same applies to the big-box neoclassical public libraries: New York, Boston, the old Chicago and San Francisco Public Libraries and so on. Where the extra-large class of library gets interesting is when American universities decided to get funky with the architectural styles. The main choice was Gothic, of course (what better for a university?): the best ones being the University of Washington’s Suzzallo, Cornell’s Law Library, the University of Oklahoma’s rather eccentric pink faux-Gothic Bizzell Memorial and the University of Chicago’s Harper. And then we get to universities that start to go out on a limb: UCLA’s Romanesque Revival at Powell, for example.

Then there is the height of the art: the Baroque and Rococo monastery libraries of Central European monasteries – Melk, Admont, Strahov and St. Gallen. The college libraries of Oxbridge form another well-known group.

Well, all of these are well-known libraries, many of them are gigantic to outrageous in size or artistically well-heralded, and you didn’t need me to tell you about them. A sign of true knowledge is the connoisseur who guides his adepts to previously little-known wonders. The following is a list of wonderous libraries I will highlight in the future:

Pasadena City Library, Pasadena, California
Amorbach Abbey, Amorbach, Bavaria
St. Mang’s Abbey, Fussen, Bavaria
Dawson College Library, Montreal, Canada
Chetham’s Library, Manchester
Denison Library. Scripps College, Claremont, California
Hackley Library, Muskegon, Michigan
Carnegie Library, Reims, Normandy
Cranbrook School Library, Cranbrook, Michigan
Poblet Abbey Library, Poblet, Spain
Former Monastery Library, Zwolle, Netherlands
Ames Memorial Library, North Easton, Massachusetts
Lyceum Library, Eger, Hungary
University Club Library, University Club, New York, New York
David Sassoon Library, Mumbai, India
University of Mumbai, Mumbai, India
Shrewsbury Library, Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Art Moment

Master of the Virgo inter Virgines, The Entombment, c. 1470-1500, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool


Sister Wendy writes of this painting:

"We do not know the name of the artist who painted The Entombment. He is known as the Master of the Virgo Inter Virgines after one of his most popular paintings showing a seated Virgin Mary surrounded by a circle of well-born young ladies. Historians think he lived at the end of the 15th century in the Netherlands, but whoever this unknown artist really was, he clearly had a unique vision and he remains a profoundly impressive painter. No other artist could paint the Entombment with such passionate originality. The actuality of the death of Jesus is forced upon us, the body bleeding and the hair falling loose over the slack arm. Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus, who carry the body, thrust him almost grimly towards His grieving mother. The impression of passion, of genuine involvement in the scene, is almost overwhelming. The set expression on their faces, echoed by that of Mary Magdalene behind, is emphasized by the extraordinary richness of their garments."

Election Movies - Part I

Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good Government, 1338-1339, Palazzo Publico, Siena


For a blog that’s ostensibly devoted to politics, this blog probably has you confused. Explicit discussions of “political” movies – that is, movies that explicitly deal with modern politics like elections, scandals, government policy – have been nonexistent on this blog.

A large part of this is my explicit highlighting of the differences between ancient and Renaissance drama versus film. Of course, ancient and Renaissance tragedy is almost exclusively about explicit politics – pageants of kings, princes and heroes so to speak.

When we turn to the moderns, political tragedy essentially immediately vanishes. Examine the following: the greatest poetic works of the ancient Greeks are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, stories of the kings and heroes fighting the Trojan war. The greatest poetic work of the ancient Romans is Virgil’s Aeneid, which has the same subject. The greatest poetry of Renaissance England is that of Shakespeare, who’s tragic subjects are the history of the English monarchy, the politics of Rome (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra) and tragedies befalling medieval or Renaissance princes (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet).

But when we turning to the most modern of modern states, the United States, we encounter a literature that is essentially entirely devoid of depicting a major statesman from the inside. Certainly, American literature often depicts major political developments acting upon non-politicians. But, except for a mere handful of potential examples, American literature seems actually unable to depict a major political actor convincingly.

This inability to depict actual active politics in a substantive way seems to apply also to American cinema. Essentially invariably, statesmen are either portrayed with a cartoonishly shallow level of understanding – either as buffoons, villains or ethereal saints.

Halloween Special: Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” in Shades of Darkness

Odilon Redon's The Night, Cleveland Museum of Art



As we discussed last year, while the horror or ghost story has not infrequently reached great heights, the horror movie genre has generally been a failure. While not a superlative addition to the extremely limited number of superior horror films, Granada Television’s early 1980s series Shades of Darkness nevertheless has interesting features. This anthology show dramatized a number of ghost stories from some of the greatest horror writers like Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen.

The best episode of the series is the dramatization of Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”. Unlike many other ghost stories, Wharton neatly pivots the genre to directly confront modernity, and in addition, the startling reflections of modernity in the past. “Afterward” is a haunted house story – but this time this haunted house story is built upon the economic basis of the large English country house. In essence, the question the story asks is what suffering were these symbols of wealth built upon?

“Afterward” depicts the Boynes, an middle-aged American couple, who, striking it rich through stock market speculation, now wish to flee their drab origins in Wisconsin and purchase a remote and ancient Elizabethan country house in the South of England. Naturally, the house has it’s secrets, but so do the Americans. The American couple initially romanticizes the old house, but really as part of their romanticization of themselves. They prefer to believe that their speculations (eventually revealed to be somewhat dubious in precisely the archetypal American fashion) are buried in a now-forgotten past.

Since the house contains…..an entity that forces the Boynes to confront their own history which they prefer to forget, the reader / viewer also wonders (since the entity has long been whispered about among the house’s previous owners) what remains buried in the house’s own past. After all, the previous owners of many centuries have seemingly hurriedly decamped for Switzerland........

Architecture Moment: AlexanderKirche at Zweibrucken, Rhineland - Palatinate

Emergency, Bay Area Film Lovers, Emergency!

Go to see the showing of Rob Nilsson’s 9-film series, 9@Night, now. NOW. This week at the Roxie, next week at the San Rafael Film Center. RUN, go there NOW.

Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: His Fall

I have just begun Ben Jonson’s Sejanus: His Fall and it begins with the following dedication:

“To the No less Noble by Virtue than Blood

Esme Lord Aubigny”

No doubt Lord Aubigny liked this dedication, since Lord Aubigny’s lineage was of the finest. The intermarryings of his clan were the basis of James I’s claim to the English throne and Esme’s father was the great friend and confidante of the young James forty years before Jonson wrote Sejanus. Yet the dedication has a hint of something less flattering to the Lord, which the Lord perhaps did not perceive.

Patrick Stewart as Sejanus in I, Claudius

The dedication slyly implies that there are two nobilities, one by blood and one by virtue, that rarely coincide – otherwise, why would Jonson feel the need to indicate that this was especially praiseworthy in Aubigny? This dichotomy creates a paradox: titles of nobility (and the power and honor associated with them) descend by inheritance – but Jonson indicates that this has little connection with the virtue of those who inherit them.

Thus, in this dedication, Jonson already presupposed the conflict of two claims to aristocratic rule: the claim of those with the right inheritances and the claim of those of the greatest virtue. Only in the happy occasion when the two are the same are all questions of legitimacy answered. Jonson proposes that this is true in the person of Esme Lord Aubigny, but we wonder what of the unhappy places and times where this is NOT true. Lord Aubigny could take it for granted that his blood was of the noblest, but Jonson’s claim is that Jonson himself, the wise man, knows who is truly virtuous. Thus, the wise man or knower is fundamentally superior to those of noble blood – they merely know who’s blood is noble, but the wise man also knows in addition who is virtuous.

Patrick Stewart as Sejanus in I, Claudius

Orson Welles and Howard Hughes’ F for Fake : A Response to GoatDog's Movies About Movies Blogathon

Everybody knows that Citizen Kane is about a media mogul modeled after William Randolph Hearst. What is less realized is that the mogul (specifically as a figure controlling a vast conglomerate) appears in roughly half of all of Welles’ films set in contemporary times – Kane in Citizen Kane, Arkadin in Mr. Arkadin, Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons and Howard Hughes in F for Fake. Notably, Welles himself acts the title mogul role in Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin. Further, Welles would act in many mogul roles over his career – highlights include Theo Van Horn in Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days Wonder, Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, JP Morgan in Tesla and the voice of Robin Masters in Magnum PI and, more arguably, Harry Lime in The Third Man.

Further, all but one of these mogul figures (Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons) are depicted as either having major media holdings (Kane and Hughes) or some sort of significant shadowy control over media (Arkadin). Further, all three of these moguls (Kane, Arkadin and Hughes) are based upon real-life figures who indeed had major political impacts upon the times. Considering that Welles’ fascination with the media mogul figure spanned from the very beginning to the very end of his film career (from Kane to his last uncompleted film, The Other Side of the Wind), much of this work can be interpreted as (among many other things) Welles’ life-long meditation upon media industries and their organization.

In F for Fake, Welles “investigates” four media figures: Elmyr de Hory ( a fabled art forger), Clifford Irving (a literary forger who wrote a fake "autobiography" of Howard Hughes), Pablo Picasso and Howard Hughes. While most discussions of F for Fake tend to revolve around Elmyr de Hory, it is critical to understand how the four figures interact in the film. Two of the four are artists (de Hory and Picasso). Two of the four’s moving images do not appear in the film (Picasso and Hughes) – we only see still photos of Picasso and only hear what is said to be Hughes’ voice. Elmyr fakes Picasso, while Irving fakes Hughes. Picasso and Hughes (the imitated) are both (largely) unseen, elderly, secretive, wealthy, eccentric, shadowy yet immensely successful figures within the film. So, the “real” in the film is unseen and largely unverifiable, while we see much footage of the fakers (de Hory, Irving and Welles, who proclaims himself to be a faker within the film).

Elmyr de Hory

Structurally, Picasso is thus repeatedly closely connected with Hughes in the film. Which seems bizarre on it’s face, admittedly. Further, the figure of Welles himself is an anomaly within the film – Welles declares himself a faker, but it’s unclear who he’s faking. Welles is also a great artist, but it’s unclear who’s imitating Welles. It’s clear that Welles connects himself to Picasso within the film: Welles is an artist like Picasso, Welles often resides in Paris, the South of France and Spain like Picasso, and Welles and Picasso are both depicted as desiring Oja Kodar (Orson's real-life longtime mistress) sexually.

Which naturally points us to the intriguing question: is it also possible that Welles has some connection to Hughes? But here’s where the complexity grows: both Welles and Hughes were film directors – Welles being the great director of his time and Hughes a mediocre one. So, it is Welles who is the real, while Hughes is the imitator or fake. Conversely, both Hughes and Welles were both businessmen (and both were the sons of inventors whose inventions made both their fathers wealthy) – but Hughes was the great businessman of his time and Welles a mediocre one. So, it is Hughes who is the real, while Welles is the imitator or fake.

Both Welles’ and Hughes’ voices are important in the film – we do see Welles frequently but essentially never see Hughes at all but instead hear Hughes’ voice at a critical juncture.. This is underscored by the amount of time Welles gives in the movie to his radio fakery in the War of the Worlds broadcast (i.e., a hoax created solely by Welles’ voice and aural effects). Meanwhile, de Hory and Picasso are both visually depicted: we never hear Picasso’s real voice at all (though we do see still photos of him). We both see and hear de Hory, but it’s his visual aspect (forgery by visual means) that’s his critical characteristic, not his voice. Picasso’s main action in the film is to stare (i.e., visual action) at Oja Kodar. Welles both looks at and talks to Kodar, tying himself simultaneously again to both the verbal and visual.

Architecture Moment: Mariendom at Zwickau

The Mariendom in Zwickau was built from 1506 to 1536 as part of a wave of new church building at the extreme end of the Gothic era in the highlands of Saxony. This region benefited from several economic trends: the growth of major mining activity in the area and the solidification of the ducal state of Saxony into a vibrant and successful Renaissance principality. The proximate cause of Zwickau’s prosperity was the 1470 opening of the great silver mines at Schneeburg, 17 kilometers southeast of Zwickau. More politically, the growing economy of Saxony was encouraged by the stabilization of ducal Saxony.

Dr. Norbert Nussbaum, in his seminal German Gothic Church Architecture, links Zwickau’s Mariendom with Rochlitz’s St. Kunigunde, Mittweida’s St. Mary and Leipzig’s St. Nikolai.

The cathedral contains the above fine altarpiece by Michael Wolgemut and his workshop, an excellent early Renaissance pulpit (c. 1538) and an astonishing double staircase.

Art Moment: Portrait of a Woman

Portrait of a Woman by the Master of the Holy Kinship
c. 1485 (this unknown master was active in Cologne)
Cleveland Museum of Art

The Beginning of Henry James’ Daisy Miller and Plato’s Republic

Part I: The Meeting in the Garden

Henry James was the son of a widely known writer about theology, and the brother of a great philosopher. When I began reading James’ novella Daisy Miller, it struck me how it’s opening is evocative of many philosophic works in general, and of the beginning of Plato’s Republic in particular.

James begins his novella by placing it in the town of Vevey. In the region of Vevey is also the setting for Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Heloise, the first romantic novel. It is not likely that James, profoundly knowledgeable about French literature, was ignorant of that association.

Many philosophic dialogues have traditionally begun in enclosed gardens. The greatest and best known of these is Plato’s Republic, but also include Thomas More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s On War. Daisy Miller begins in the gardens of the Hotel Trois Couronnes – like the settings for the other three books, an actual location. In being the garden of a hotel, it most closely resembles the setting for More’s Utopia, which is also set in the gardens of a hotel.

Art Moment: Hans Multscher

Hans Multscher's Model of a tombstone lid for Duke Ludwig the Bearded, 1435. Now in Bavarian National Museum, Munich.

Theodor Muller in his Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain 1400-1500 says of this sculpture:

"Here we have a supreme example of Multscher's treatment of surface. Even the background is full of incident, since the heraldic emblems of the duke are displayed, as indeed he requested. They are like embroidery in thick raised materials on a curtain. In the lower foreground the duke is presented as an eques Christianus, i.e. with the features not at all life-like, but equipped with all the insignia of his rank and looking up to an image of the Trinity in the upper part of the relief. This is an astonishing spatial arrangement whose magic is enhanced by the fact that the composition juts beyond the narrow projecting frame, thus deepening the latticed background and lending the maximum vividness to the whole presentation." (page 73)

photo from the Bildindex.de image archive.

Commentary on the Recent Political Debates

Socrates: "Well then , why did you people take the trouble to deliberate yesterday on matters you don’t understand, and try to find out the best course of action for the city to take? Why weren’t you learning those things, rather, from someone, who understands them, so that you could take the best course of action for the city? Instead, it seems to me that you spent the whole day yesterday sitting there, making things up and divining about matters you didn’t understand, instead of taking the trouble to learn them – I mean those who govern your city, including you."

from Plato's Sisyphus.

New Book Review: Howard Sturgis' Belchamber: Bathos and Frustration

The New York Review of Books Press, in it’s incomparable Classics imprint, has just republished Howard Sturgis’ Belchamber (originally published in 1904 and long out of print). Sturgis’ friends and contemporaries seem to have mistaken their knowledge of Sturgis (1855-1920) the effeminate entertainer and host – Sturgis’ famed country house hosted such luminaries as Wharton and Henry James – for his tough and even harsh novel.

Superficially, Belchamber is a polite novel. No immigrant workers, steel mill riots, impoverished farmers, communist writers, cowboys, gangsters, alcoholic sports-journalists or other commonplaces of American writing penetrate (and ultimately, Sturgis couldn’t escape that he was an American living in England). The main characters are Englishpeople of (mostly) noble title – the title being the name of both the ancient country seat of the Chamber clan and their title, the Marquis of Belchamber. This fine country house, lavishly described by Sturgis (clearly a writer who knew his architecture), is a great marvel of England – and perhaps expectedly is equally a container for a clan of drunkards, degenerate gamblers, foolish skirt-chasers, sluts and plain scumbags stretching back into the mists of English history.

Belchamber condemns almost everybody within it’s world. The titular character is a naïve and foolish weakling, the Marquis Belchamber, whom his world mockingly nicknames Sainty. Strangely enough, as the novel progresses, we grow ever more fonder and fonder of Sainty, who’s infinitely taken advantage of by his idiotic hunting and showgirl-mad brother, his shrew of a wife, his smooth-talking but ultimately trivial and snobbish professor and his sly malicious bastard of a cousin.

As E.M Forster writes in a 1935 afterword to Belchamber (thoughtfully reprinted in the latest edition from NYRB Press): “His [Sainty’s] tragedy is only partly due to his own defects: he really fails because he lives among people who cannot understand what delicacy is; at the best they are dictators, like his mother, and miss it that way; at the worst they are bitches, like his wife.”

Ultimately, Sainty’s world is run by trivial people ruled largely by pure self-interest. Read it for a tough take on a world very much like our own.

Sidenote: The pictures above are of Basildon Park outside of Reading in Berkshire, built 1776-1783 by prominent local architect John Carr and an excellent example of a Palladian mansion. Perhaps too small for the Belchamber mansion described in the novel, but most tasteful and delightful in its own way.

St. Egide and St. Benoit

St. Egide and St. Benoit

by Viet Wagner

c. 1515 (originally from Strassburg)

now in Mulhouse' Musee des Beaux Arts

Best Movies of 2007: No. 9 Il Caimano (Nanni Moretti, 2006)

Silvio Berlusconi has not only been the dominant figure in recent Italian politics but also an increasingly influential example for numerous other European politicians – Sarkozy, Putin and Aznar being merely the most prominent imitators. Caimano is several stories intimately tied together. An aging director from the heyday of Italian cinema tries to face the reality of the decline of Italian media (partially caused by Berlusconi, and partially by the mediocre efforts of the director himself). A young screenwriter struggles with the now-decrepit and trivial Italian film industry. A movie somehow gets made about the rise and rise of Berlusconi…….

Soldiering in Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding

Reading a recent essay by Michael Mosher (a political philosophy professor at the University of Tulsa) on the warrior in Plato and Nietzsche, I was reminded that a central character in Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding is a minor criminal and local celebrity nicknamed Soldier. And names are very important in My Brother’s Wedding. The central brothers Pierce and Wendell Mundy have clearly been named by their parents to signify or predict their sons’ entrance into the professional classes. Pierce and Wendell are not only NOT archetypically black names, they are names given by parents (white or black) making a statement – that this child will be of a certain economic / professional class.

As we have already mentioned, Pierce is caught in a dilemma where many traditional human types have been intentionally removed by modern politics or modern economics – the aristocratic warrior, the landed gentleman, the priest and even the worker have effectively disappeared. Soldier is a man who does not fit into this modern world – which is partially why he exists primarily in prison. And once released from prison, he quickly dies. We are reminded that warrior heroes do not seek long life, but rather glory. But Soldier dies not gloriously or courageously, but prosaically, in an automobile accident. We do not live in a heroic age.

My Brother’s Wedding does give us glimpses of why Soldier (or the warrior) is admirable, and ultimately useful. The prosperous Mundy laundromat is an appealing target for thieves. We see it threatened several times by criminals. Notably, it is never defended by Wendell Mundy, a lawyer and thus theoretically one who should be an aid to the law. Indeed, Wendell is in fact a criminal defense attorney, and boasts of the dangerous criminals he has manipulated courts to release – Pierce accused Wendell of the echoes of the charge against the Sophists – making the weaker argument the stronger and undermining the laws. In essence, Wendell does not know friend from enemy.

Knowing friends from enemies like a good guard-dog is precisely the definition of a warrior in Plato’s description. And Soldier, unlike Wendell, knows friends from enemies and is courageous and active in the defense of his friends. Of all the men in My Brother’s Wedding, only Soldier evidences even any courage (as when he chases violent thieves away from their attempted robbery of the family Laundromat).

Appropriately, women are attracted to Soldier’s courage and warrior bearing. Unlike Wendell, who views his upcoming marriage as another commercial transaction, Soldier, a remnant of a more romantic and non-commercial type of human, more truly engages in amour (again, Soldier is the only actual male lover we see in the movie).

Finally, the warrior is traditionally envisioned as occupying a patriarchal role. Pierce and Wendell’s father is pathetic and infantile, a ludicrous figure. Their father attempts to reassert his lost manliness by childishly wrestling with Pierce. It is not surprising, in a family full of emasculated men, that Pierce turns to the man named Soldier.

Top 10 New Films of 2007: No. 10

No. 10: The Hawk is Dying (Julian Goldberger, 2007)

Paul Giamatti plays an auto shop owner at the end of his rope. At the other end of the rope is a hawk. Both hawk and man are falling apart physically and mentally, though Giamatti is the better actor. An excellent performance from Giamatti showing a a man in mid-life crisis and the growing burdens we carry as we age. Adaptation from a Harry Crews novel.

Details of Hans Witten's Tulip Pulpit

Hans Witten's Tulip Pulpit, Cathedral of Our Lady, Freiberg, Saxony 1508-1510

New DVD Review: Charles Burnett's My Brother's Wedding

Attached to Milestone's new (and long-awaited) release of Charles Burnett's 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep, Milestone included Burnett's sophomore effort, his 1983 My Brother's Wedding. Killer of Sheep has been heralded (justly so - it is one of the greatest American movies ever), but little seen. My Brother's Wedding, however, has been equally unseen but also largely unpraised, unlike the better known Killer.

My Brother's Wedding continues much of Killer of Sheep's neorealism aimed at the non-stereotypical aspects of life in African-American Los Angeles. But My Brother's Wedding shifts focus from Killer of Sheep's spotlight on the struggling working-class to a focus higher in the classes. Pierce Mundy, the handsome protagonist, is the scion of a family rapidly moving into the upper classes - his parents run a thriving laundromat, a landmark of their neighborhood, and are prominent supporters of the local church. But they aim even higher, and his elder brother Wendell is an attorney with a flourishing practice. Wendell plans to solidify his rise with a upcoming marriage into a wealthy, prominent and cultured family - who are quite similar to Huxtables in the 1984 Cosby Show. Wendell and Pierce's parents eagerly plan for this upcoming wedding and put pressure on Pierce, who has preferred to remain a truck driver and assistant in the laundromat to pursuing white collar professional success, to pursue further education and a "good" marriage - a good marriage clearly being defined as one like that of his elder brother.

Pierce, however, is alone in this family of being dubious of the costs of this social climb. He is attracted to the lifestyle of his friend Soldier, who is released from prison during the course of the movie. Soldier has a widely-held reputation of being "trouble", even though he is from a once-respected, though now declining, family. Though Pierce is repeatedly propositioned by an obnoxious and immature 16-year old girl throughout the course of the movie, Soldier clearly attracts much attention from many beautiful and more sophisticated women. Soldier acts as an object of wish-fulfillment for Pierce, who goes so far as to allow Soldier to secretly use the laundromat as a love-nest (even though it would make more sense for Pierce himself to use the laundromat that way - but Pierce remains almost pre-sexual in avoiding mature relationships). Still, the pull on Pierce of community responsibility is strong and he avoids participation in Soldier's outlaw lifestyle except by vicarious observation.

Money grubbing social climbing and the outlaw life of the street seem at first glance to be the sole options open to Pierce. His earlier desires of remaining a skilled and expert blue collar laborer (he was once a truck driver of the most dangerous and difficult loads) are made impossible by the 1980s deindustrialization of America. Though Pierce is inundated by advice from his parents and relatives to enter the white-collar professions, they ignore another possibility that only we viewers see in other scenes of the movie. Initially forced by his parents to care for several disabled elderly persons in the neighborhood (partially as a punishment for remaining blue collar and not vanishing into an office), Pierce proves to be caring and even provides religious solace to these isolated and despairing oldsters.

We are shown in this movie that both the educated professions and the criminal life are both corrupt "hustles". But the possibility of serving the divine might, just might, seem to be both the best thing simply and the best thing for Pierce. At the end of the movie, as he swerves around Los Angeles in a borrowed Porsche to find the Soldier's (killed not during crime but in a commonplace auto accident) funeral ceremony, Pierce has the wedding rings in his pocket.

Pierce and the Obnoxious Horny 16 Year Old

Our Lovely Paranoia Keeps Us From Being Bored

Memling, Last Judgement, c. 1469, National Museum, Danzig (Gdansk)

Kachyna's The Ear, Robson's The Seventh Victim, Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us, Bruce Wagner's Wild Palms and Friedkin's Bug.

Most of the afiaciandos of horror, poor undereducated devils that they are, often try to extend the history of the genre back to the particularly luxuriant Mannerist growth of the Jacobean revenge drama. Besides the frequent ghosts and supernatural occurances, the over-explicit scenes of perverse violence, the revenge drama often feature political conspiracies that resemble modern political paranoia.

Of course, since most horror aficiandos are political naifs or wonder-children, they do not recognize the difference between the aristocratic conspiracies we see in Jacobean drama, and the paranoia of the modern state. Part of this is the much higher level of technology that the modern state both uses and intentionally creates. And the modern bureaucracy is
perhaps the greatest technological invention of the modern state.

Thus, once the conspirators of the aristocratic revenge drama are gorily killed, the aristocratic state quickly returns to it's eternal role of attempting to find the most virtuous prince to rule it (even if no princes immediately show up to properly occupy the throne). The aristocratic state undermined by conspiracy and revenge quickly collapses, allowing other princes to fill the vaccuum.

The Jacobean revenge drama ultimately makes us nostalgic for such a simple and easily comphrensible politics. As the above five films show, the modern state does not permit us to so easily dispense with our modern paranoia.

All five films clearly show up a perplexing phenomenon of modern life. As we know from John Locke, the modern state removes the colorful and exciting political turmoil and honors of the old aristocratic and royalist states (the turmoil precisely depicted in the Jacobean revenge drama) in favor of almost all citizens focusing on private business (i.e., commerce or capitalism) with government religated to a dry and hidden technocracy. All five of these movies show the impossibility of this - the bourgeouis life is simply too boring for humans to exist in it.

Or, in other words, Plato was correct in claiming that part of the soul is spirited and desires honors or fame or nobility or virtue. In a noble or well-formed regime, such desires could be properly channeled into public activities that satisfied such desires with benefit to the state. In the Jacobean revenge drama, an evil aristocratic regime prevents the virtuous young men (such as Hamlet) from assuming the throne through the conspiracy. The gory mass murder at the end of the Jacobean revenge tragedy is the only way the thwarted noble desires of the spirited young men can be assuaged.

I.E., in the Jacobean revenge tragedy, even though the tragic land (Denmark or Malta) is ruled by a conspiracy, the conspiracy is limited (by technology and it's character as an aristocratic conspiracy). Virtuous young men by ominous and dire deeds (and noble counter-conspiracies) can undo these regimes.

In the modern paranoia state, however, we see that the young people desire to do good, but that modern society drives them by design away from noble public service. In The Ear, the young politician is swallowed up in the infinite bureaucracy of the state. Thus, he perverts his soul by engaging in minor and bloodless political infighting and superficial consumerism.

In Paris Belongs to Us, the young students of Paris want to do good things, but the immensity and opacity of the interlinked Cold War security apparatus does not even allow them the basic information of what their states are engaged in. Since the modern state has forbidden all clear paths to revolting against it (unlike the more changeable aristocratic state).

The Few Really Scary Movies: Horror for October

Franz v. Stuck's Lucifer (1890)

Horror movies are not a genre that I'm particularly fond of. That's not unusual, but unusually, I'm conversely a fairly enthusiastic fan of horror literature. My problem with horror as a film genre lies in it's seeming inability to hit the emotional profundity regularly encountered within the best horror literature.

The greatest horror literature in my opinion was created in two short time periods: the three decades of the 1890s and 1910s (until about 1913), and the period of 1945-1975. I find most horror works before 1880 or so to be personally less appealing. The Yellow Nineties and Double Oughts however produced a cornucopia of the most excellent horror literature, ranging from Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Atherton, Oliver Onions, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, E.F. Benson, M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearne, W.W. Jacobs, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, Ambrose Bierce, M.P. Shiel and many others. Writing at least an occasional ghost story was almost required to be a fiction writer of the time – beyond the aforementioned Henry James, Wharton and Bierce, such figures as Maupassant, Wilde, Twain, Hardy, Beerbohm, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, O. Henry, and many more would at least try their hands at a ghost story.

Odilon Redon's Crying Spider, 1881 (charcoal, private collection)

Conversely, while the immediate after-war period produced many excellent horror works, they were largely written by writers who specialized in horror writing, and many of whom were neither well-known during the time nor today. The best of these figures were Richard Matheson, Robert Aickman, Fritz Leiber, Fred Chappell, Ramsey Campbell and Gerald Kersh.

However, the horror movie has not been as successful as the literary genre has been. Notable stand-outs tend to be few and already widely heralded: such stand-by's as Dreyer's Vampyr, Tourneur's Cat People, Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari, Wiene's Kabinett of Docktor Kaligari, Murnau's Nosferatu, James Whales' 1930s films............and that's about it.

Furthermore, perhaps more than most other genres, horror movies made outside of the Anglosphere received little attention until the recent recognition of J-horror. Even the recognition of J-horror has largely been limited to recent Japanese horror productions, and ignored that the ghost and demon story genre is many centuries old in both Japan and China. Even worse has been the almost total ignorance of continental European horror except for a narrow genre of movies made in Italy.

So, I'd like to celebrate Halloween this year by focusing a month's writing upon lesser known horror films and also trying to avoid the Anglosphere as much as possible.

Here's some potential topics:

Jean Epstein's Fall of the House of Usher
Paranoia Quartet: Rivette's Paris Belongs to Us, Kachyna's The Ear, Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim and Friedkin's Bug
Pereira dos Santos' How Tasty was My Little Frenchman
Franju's Blood of the Beasts

As usual, I'll be decorating with my posts with appropriately frightening artworks.

Michael Wolgemut's Dance of Death, 1493 (woodcut print, illustration for Schedel's Chronicle of the World, Nuremburg, 1493)

New DVD review: Resnais’ Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places)

Coeurs is, for Resnais detractors, one of a long line of confusing domestic light comedies or dramas that Resnais has been engaged on since at least his Melo (1986). Confusing because these films seem to reject Resnais’ early, more political and seemingly more experimental work.

Careful examination (as with Resnais’ Pas sur la bouche) indicates the opposite. Coeurs begins and ends with failed real estate transactions. The first shot of the movie is an aerial zoom over Paris. We expect Paris to evoke history or politics or revolution or culture. Resnais negates these comforting illusions by ending his initial zoom into a small and badly remodeled condominium – the heart of this Paris is real estate speculation.

Resnais reminds us continuously that Paris is a nexus of transactions: most of the characters live within a realm where the most vulgar commerce dominates their lives, even though most of them openly dislike this reality. They dislike it so much that all have built pathetic comforting illusions: religion, alcohol, long-failed relationships, romantic illusions about Internet dating, TV shows and pornography.

Most commentators have focused on the obvious reality in the movie that almost all of the attempted relationships within the movie never really existed, except in fantasy. What is interesting is that many of the characters have come across bits of grandeur or nobility or truth, but the flawed nature of modern society does not allow them to pursue these discoveries.

For an aging real estate broker at the center of the film (played by Andre Dussolier seen above), this is symbolized by his gaze always turning towards the portrait of his 18th century solid bourgeoisie ancestor – when bourgeois status really was part of the Enlightenment and soon to become the stable foundation of society after the Revolution. Now, the bourgeoisie have fallen to the level of real estate hucksters and peddlers afloat in a sea of commercial fantasies and illusions (i.e. real estate hype over horribly remodeled random bits of real estate), rather than any actual production or sale of real goods.

Adam Kraft: Schreyer Memorial (Entombment of Christ)

c. 1490, in St. Sebald's, Nuremberg for the prominent patrician family Schreyer.

New DVD Discussion: Venom and Eternity

Isou’s Venom and Eternity’s title would indicate it is composed of two parts – Venom and Eternity. Instead, the film actually is composed of three segments – The Principle, The Development and The Proof – none of the parts are called either Venom or Eternity.
It’s clear that Venom and Eternity is a philosophic film of an unusual order. The film, in an opening crawl, explicitly declares that this is the first film deriving from Letterist thought, discusses major Dadaist and existentialist thinkers, and provides a lengthy sequence where Isou’s theoretical books are lovingly displayed (for sale?). The film is broken into three parts, which might indicate some sort of classic three-part construction – instead, the three parts have no obvious relationship to each other.

The three parts are “The Principle”, where a young man named Daniel wanders the streets of Paris and thinks about a raucous film debate he has just exited; “The Development”, where he recounts some of his romantic activity with two women; and “The Proof”, which is a lengthy sequence of Lettrist poetry over abstract animation.

But these three parts do relate to each other if one views Venom and Eternity as a philosophic film, and Isou as a philosophic film-maker. The film begins where philosophy begins, in a philosophic speech analogous to The Apology. Daniel is telling the truth about film to a hostile, prejudiced audience in a cinema club, which condemns him and throws him out. Public, politically focused philosophizing based upon reason or dialogue fails. The non-philosopher and philosopher cannot communicate well, and though the philosopher indulges in many rhetorical flourishes, he cannot overcome the audience’s hostility. Of course, the cinema club cannot execute Daniel as Athens executed Sokrates, but they do exile him. Since exile was the other possibility for Sokrates’ punishment that Sokrates rejected (but Daniel accepts), we know Daniel is not Sokrates simply. This segment’s title of “The Principle” indicates we are within the space of traditional philosophy.

Part II: “The Development” is concerned with ordering Daniel’s romantic life. Romantic or domestic life is where one flees if one has been frustrated by the public life of politics. Here the plot resembles in it’s quirky way one of the most cherished topics of the earliest Romantic literature, with Daniel picking between two women. So, Isou is turning from ancient Greek philosophy to Rousseau, with the theme of the young man confused between the two women, both of great but different virtues. Except that, of course, Isou is not a Romantic and there is little virtue to be found in erotic things in this movie. Daniel finds only a bit more satisfaction in love than he did in dialogue.

So, in Part III: “The Proof”, we turn away from philosophy to art: art of a primitive and brutal sort – harsh Lettrist poetry made up of nonsense words yelled, screamed, growled and shouted by unseen male speakers as we watch abstract animation. The title of this segment indicates that this segment is where Isou wants our intellectual journey to end. But it ends in a place that has no reason (no words to reason with) and no love (the speakers are all males reciting poetry in anger). This is not a realm of people (the images of Paris and young women earlier in the film disappear), nor one of community (none of the unseen male reciters evidence any sense that there are other humans besides himself). While “The Principle” reminded us of philosophic debates, there is no rational sense in what we see in “The Proof” is an actual proof of anything.

100th Post: Mike Leigh's uncompromising attitude

"Life is abrasive for a lot of people...and there is no getting around it. I think a function of art - and the cinema not least - is to confront these things...I'm absolutely committed as a film-maker to be entertaining and to amuse; but I am also concerned to confront, as I did in Life is Sweet and other films."

Mike Leigh

Architecture Moment: Sherborne Abbey, Dorset

As dedicated readers of this blog know, my main architectural interest is in late Gothic architecture in Germany, Eastern Europe, Spain and Portugal. These were the areas where late Gothic architecture was most innovative technologically and artistically. England, on the other hand, was a different story. Because the Wars of the Roses lasted until 1485, comparatively less building was done in England for the bulk of the 15th century. After the wars ended, pent-up demand meant that most of the churches of England received at least some refurbishment in the period between 1485 and 1534. However, England was less urbanized than many other regions of Europe and it’s towns were both small and had extremely limited political power. In addition, the Wars of the Roses destroyed the old nobility, so the nobility of the period only funded a handful of projects. Therefore, most of the more elaborate buildings in this period were a limited number of royally-funded projects – the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey (1503-1509), Eton College Chapel, King’s College Chapel at Cambridge and St. George’s Chapel in the royal castle at Windsor.

Sherborne Abbey was the project of one of it’s last Abbots, Abbot Ramsam (abbot 1475-1504). The old abbey had been partially burnt down by the townspeople, necessitating rebuilding by the wealthy abbey. Although this was not a royally-funded project (the townspeople were heavily fined) , many of the local nobility and gentry participated in the rebuilding.

English architecture of the period revolved around the fan vault, though Continental innovations in vaulting were known and occasionally utilized. Sherborne has several different fan-vault schemes, and it’s brightly painted choir vaults, resting on unbroken thin vault shafts that rise from the floor, is one of the most beautiful in England.

New DVD review: Makavejev's Sweet Movie and Aristophanes' Assemblywomen

Criterion’s recently released DVD of Makavejev’s Sweet Movie is the first major DVD release in the US format of a Makavejev film along with his better known film WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

Sweet Movie elaborates on a grand theme of Makavejev: sexual revolution as part of political revolution. Makavejev is pondering one of the central paradoxes of all modern political revolutions – whether the English, American, French, Bolshevik or Chinese revolutions – that those all of these revolutions experimented with political and economic arrangements, but most of them ended up with largely conservative sexual arrangements.

The ancient Greeks were not so incoherent in their thinking – they could carry through the idea of democracy to its natural end. Now, as Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen argues (as does Houellebecq), there is a problem with sexual democracy: no one wants to have sex with the old or ugly.

The problem with Sweet Movie, unlike WR, is that Makavejev wishes to sidestep this phenomenon. Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen characters at least make an attempt to square the circle by ruling that, before having sex with a beautiful person, one must first make love to an ugly one. WR’s Reichian philosophy – WR is, among many other things, a documentary about the sex-positive physchological philosophy of Wilhelm Reich - offers some hope that this difficulty can be at least ameliorated, as we see older persons undergoing Reichian analysis and (hopefully) improving sexually.

Sweet Movie disappoints because Makavejev unfortunately chooses a comparatively trivial depiction of sexual liberation. Both female protagonists only (voluntarily) sleep with young and extremely handsome men, and both are themselves extraordinarily attractive young women. All older characters seen in the movie (two Texas billionaires: Mr. Kapital and his mother, and the “scientist” Dr. Mittlefinger) are shown as extremely unappealing, and, in fact, none get to have any sex in the movie.

Kings and Princes: A Thought Project of a Potential Aristocratic Film

Perhaps the greatest problem of film is it’s newness as an art form. Precisely because film was born around 1900, we have no film that exists outside of modernity – indeed, no film exists outside the most recent period of modernity. One result of this is we do not have films that exist outside of contemporary political ideas – whereas much of the greatest drama and poetry come from monarchic or aristocratic regimes (Shakespeare, Racine, Homer, Cervantes, Montaigne and many others). This means that the expanse of film experience is really quite limited because all films share a limited range of political ideas - the limited range of politics we’ve experienced inside of modernity.


That means that film, as it stands now, confines us to modernity the way that most other art forms do not. Even if an individual prefers modern architecture, for instance, his love of architecture and growing discernment in architecture will gradually lead him to acknowledge other eras of architecture. This will lead him to at least question his attachment to modern architecture more critically: it is not so easily answered if Frank Lloyd Wright is superior to Palladio or Borromini, or Faulkner greater than Cervantes, or Picasso greater than Memling. Meanwhile, every exploration in film history cannot escape that no films whatsoever existed more than a comparatively short while ago.


So, in the spirit of an outrageous thought experiment, what would an aristocratic film actually look like or exist as? Of course, there have been almost innumerable films about monarchs or aristocrats. However, none of them were made FOR aristocrats in an era where aristocrats actually ruled in a serious fashion. So, up till our thought experiment, no film has been made that takes aristocracy or monarchy as the best future politics – that advocates that aristocracy is not an glittering era now expired (the general trend of movies made about aristocracies) but that believes in aristocracy as the best political form simply. Even worse, we have no film which indicates how a future aristocracy would look like, moving from our current political regimes towards that future aristocracy (i.e., how would the aristocrat appear today and then moving forward in time to eventually assume power?).




Of course, we do have numerous (indeed, mountainous) literary and artistic materials from such eras. But no films. First, we must confront several misleading assumptions about aristocracy – that aristocrats would shun modern technology and thus not consume film. It’s true that artistocracies envision entertainment and consumption in extremely different ways than do modern people. It’s also true that the novelty of film as novelty would be less appealing to a potential aristocracy than it is to modernity.


But the evidence shows that aristocrats can and do absorb technological advances – including the printed book, the firearm, the stirrup and much else: and some technological advances increased their political power rather than reduced it. An aristocratic society must be one in which agricultural production is a very significant (and preferably predominate) section of the economy. This is not an economy that would easily support the production of a very advanced industrial product such as film.


Still, assuming that this difficulty has been overcome, it might be possible for us to project an aristocratic society that has film, since we do know that aristocratic societies can absorb and utilize technological advances.

Poetry Moment: Museum Piece by Richard Wilbur

Museum Piece

The good gray guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Here dozes one upon the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.

See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.

Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.

Richard Wilbur

Architecture moment: Town Hall, Leuven, Belgium

Flanders was the wealthiest and most populous area of Europe in the late Middle Ages. Leuven was a very prosperous small city, due to it’s hosting of the hottest newer university of the era. Even though the University of Leuven was many centuries younger than the more august institutions of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Cambridge or Padua, the new university (founded 1425) attracted many of the brightest academic stars: Erasmus, Thomas More, Mercator, Lipsius and numerous other great minds flocked to the university in the late 15th and the 16th century. The university was much favored by the Popes (including Adrian IV, who was the chair of theology there before ascending to the papacy) as well as the Hapsburgs. Appropriately, the burghers of Leuven announced their prosperity by building perhaps the finest town hall of all the middle ages.

There was a great deal of building during the 14th-16th century in Flanders, much of it elaborate, due to the great wealth of the region. However, the churches of late medieval Flanders closely imitated those of France (rather than the more interesting architecture of Germany to the east or England to the west), and largely are uninteresting. The secular architecture of Flanders has considerably more interest – the towns of Flanders wished to announce their wealth and status by building extremely fine town halls, guildhouses, hospitals, belfries and other structures. These structures were also designed to host the court of the nominal prince over the region – the dukes of Burgundy, with whom the leading towns often had very strained relations. Thus, these structures were partially designed to impress upon the ducal court that the towns were well organized and well provisioned to fight against him, if need be. The ducal court of Burgundy (and various neighboring lesser princes closely imitated them) had extremely fine artistic taste – it was the patron of such artists as Van Eyck, Roger van der Weyden, the composer Dufay, the sculptor Claus Sluter, the historian Froissart and many others, it’s only rival the most fine princely courts of Italy for artistic patronage. Later, the towns had similar relations with the Hapsburgs, who were great patrons of the arts as well. Leuven in particular was often visited by such dignitaries.

The Leuven Town Hall is a lush and extreme example of these town halls. Four stories high of sandstone, the exterior is literally dripping with 236 statues and elaborate decorations. These statues represent a highly complex scheme of religious and political history (as befitting a university town): political figures from the town’s history, saints, historic feudal overlords and religious scenes are all depicted on the town hall walls. Note: most of the actual statues are from the late Nineteenth century, but follow along the lines of the original scheme.

The town hall was constructed from 1448-1469 by the prominent architect Matheus de Layens, who also designed Leuven’s town fortifications, the principal church of Leuven, a number of other churches in Flanders and later the very fine but more spare town hall of Mons.

Meandering Film Noir Thoughts

my meandering collected commentary from Girish Shambu's discussion of an interview between Fujiwara / Roberts ( view Girish Shambu's blog for the full on version)

I'm more annoyed with too much focus on film noir:

Not that I don't like the actual films, I do, and sometimes very much so. But I think we over-emphasize noir in our current depiction of American film history. I think the over-emphasis on noir gives a falsely positive impression about what our film history actually was. Noir allows us to pretend that the Hollywood studios allowed more ideological and artistic freedom than they really did allow. Also, noir gives us in the present too much freedom to seperate the good crime/gangster films of that time from the many more numerous bad ones. During the heyday of noir, the viewing public didn't see these movies as individual art works, but more like we view crime dramas on TV (which is in fact where noir went).

There's too little critical reflection (except perhaps from Naremore) on why noir literature and film died so abruptly just after both forms were achieving their second highpoint in the mid-Fifties. Lastly, there's not enough contemplation on how noir was a part of a worldwide phenonmenon (Simenon's roman durs being just one example, but many others worldwide: Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, for just one) that continues as a literary force largely OUTSIDE the US today (Hans Werner Kettenbach, Massimo Carlotto, Gene Kerrigan, Jean-Claude Izzo and many others).
"Why only noir and why not all the other richly deserving genres/periods/filmmakers that are languishing for lack of attention?"It was and is a useful version of history for much of the 1970s film-maker generation (Scorcese, Coppola, Friedkin, De Palma, etc)and those who are too wedded to them. It gave them this secret heroic, manly past (even if that past was mythical). Most of these guys couldn't really do great work outside of the crime / gangster / thriller / war genres. Ignoring everything outside of those genres allowed them to seem greater than they are. See Scorcese's history of American movies, where everything outside of noir and Westerns is close to entirely ignored (Allan Dwan captures more of Scorcese's time than Chaplin and Lubitsch combined).

I.E., most of these guys thought they learned the lessons of neorealism and Cassavetes, but their life works prove that they never had a clue.

If we see American film history with noir being a massive aspect (which, during it's historical moment, it simply wasn't) then that makes these guys look very good because they do make good (and sometimes great) thriller or crime pics. If we see American film history as much more diverse, then many of them look limited artistically. When you have an American film history that more accurately highlights big budget literary items, musicals, drawing room comedies, Jerry Lewis/Frank Tashlin and so on, then you also have a film history where Elaine May, Mark Rappaport and Albert Brooks are the true geniuses of the 1970s and Richard Linklater is the voice of the 1990s/2000s, as opposed to Tarantino.

"And thanks for those Euro-noir names, none of which I know."

Remember that the concept of noir was first established by the French publishing house Gallimard's long series (now over 50 years old) Serie Noire, which published both American noir literature in translation and French contributions as a seperate genre of writing - which was not how it was viewed in the US (in the US it was called hard-boiled crime/mystery and wasn't really viewed as anything intrinsically worthwhile). So the genre is really as much (or more) European as it is American even very early - Simenon's roman durs predate much of American noir. The Euro noir movies, besides Carne and Renoir (who made the first Simenon adaptation with Night at the Crossroads) are extremely extensive. As I've argued before, noir influenced Europe more than the US.

Some things to meditate upon include:
1. the French polar, a continuing genre of French cinema (usually likened to a US police procedural, except that the polar is usually vastly more dark and cynical than the average US version).
2. JP Melville - Samourai, Red Circle, Un Flic, Second Breath, Flambeur
3. Clouzet
4. Germany's Christian Petzold (Wolfsburg, Something to Remind Me)
5. Corneau's Serie noire - an adaptation of Thompson's A Hell of a Woman
6. Tavernier's Coup de torchon - adapting Thompson's Pop. 1280
7. Three largely unknown later American noirs: Murder by Contract, Blast of Silence, Burt Kennedy's The Killer Inside Me (1979).
8. Claude Chabrol as noir film-maker (see The Ceremony)
9. Godard and Truffaut's relationship with David Goodis

Architecture Moment: Palace Church, Meisenheim

As I’m sure you’ve recognized by now, my favorite architecture is the very late Gothic from 1350-1550, largely in German and Spanish-speaking areas. Outside of Germany and Spain, late Gothic architecture was largely influenced by the more decadent French Flamboyant style, which emphasized decorative features rather than constructional advances. Much of German late Gothic architecture lay behind the Iron Curtain, so it was largely unavailable to Western scholars until quite recently. One of the most interesting yet largely ignored examples is the Palace Church in Meisenheim (in the modern German state of Rhineland – Palatinate). Built from 1479 to 1503 for Duke Ludwig the Black of Pfalz Zweibrucken as a church near his residence, it is an example of the princely devotional / mortuary chapel that was often a highpoint of late Gothic architecture (see also the Ducal Chapel at Brou, the Lady Chapel at Westminster, the Champnol in Dijon, the Wilibrodi Church at Wesel and many others).

Designed by the prominent architect Philip von Gmund and widely admired during it’s era (study drawings by other architects and artists of the period survive to this day), the church is most notable for the extremely innovative and daring use of the flying rib vault, comparable to Our Lady in Ingolstadt. Unlike previous uses of flying rib vaults, in which the flying rib only briefly was detached from a surface, Ingolstadt, Meisenheim and Wilibrodi all have distinct layers of utterly detached flying rib vaults floating below a more traditional vault structure. Meisenheim and Wilibrodi’s flying ribs imitate the shapes of flowers, while Ingolstadt’s imitate the forms of branches – all using the widespread nature imagery of late Gothic.

Jump Cuts: Muriel in many Slices (New DVD Review)

Question 1 on Muriel: Why turn THIS

into THIS:

Upcoming Highlights

Returning back to film-talk, I'll be posting on the following topics within the next several weeks:
New DVD review: Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
The Politics of Welles' Lady from Shanghai
New DVD review: Preminger's Angel Face
poems from Richard Wilbur, AR Ammons and Donald Justice
New DVD review: Resnais' Muriel
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

"Then" by Richard Wilbur

Then
(from Ceremony and Other Poems, Richard Wilbur, 1950)

Then when the ample season
Warmed us, waned and went,
We gave to the leaves no graves,
To the robin gone no name,
Nor thought at the birds' return
Of their sourceless dim descent,
And we read no loss in the leaf,
But a freshness ever the same.

The leaf first learned of years
One not forgotten fall;
Of lineage now, and loss
These latter singers tell,
Of a year when the birds now still
Were all one choiring call
Till the unreturning leaves
Imperishably fell.

Architecture Moment: Notre-Dame, Louviers

The church of Notre Dame in Louviers (30km outside of Rouen) is one of the finest examples of the profusion of decoration in the very last era of French Gothic architecture. Unlike the late Gothic of Southern and Eastern Germany, which saw numerous advances in structural engineering and decorative concepts, the late French Flamboyant architecture was an elaborate conservative pouring of decoration onto traditional forms. The church includes this fine altarpiece:

Evil Regimes and Mediocre Regimes

Le colonel chabert quoted from Alain Badiou:

"In truth, our leaders and propagandists know very well that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime, unjust, and unacceptable for the vast majority of humanity. And they know too that our "democracy" is an illusion: Where is the power of the people? Where is the political power for third world peasants, the European working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian–where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone–is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships....That's why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually defend the brutal power of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for manual laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today would defend the Stalinist terror, the African genocides, the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It's there that the consensus concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext of not accepting Evil, we end up making believe that we have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state of affairs—even if this best is not so great."

My commentary:
I think Badiou has hit here on something that could also be found from comparing ancient Greek democracy to modern liberal capitalism.

1. ancient Greek democracy always had the ideal of all citizens having relatively similar wealth - i.e. as close to true economic equality as possible. Of course, in practice, this was very hard to achieve, but whenever the ancient Greeks write about establishing new colonies in previously uninhabited places, they give each new colonist the same size plot of land and usually have laws that try to keep that economic equality in perpetuity. This was also the intent behind ancient Israel's equal distribution of Canaan's land to all Hebrews equally - which was defended by the Jubilee laws (each family recieved back their original plot of land - even if they had sold it - every Jubilee year).

2. what's interesting is that analysis of class is absolutely rife within ancient Greek philosophy and this analysis totally disappears in Locke and many other early modern philosophers, for instance. And class only reappears in Rousseau and then Marx.

3. You might call the thing Badiou describes as "the mediocre regime" - a regime that aims only to avoid great evil, and not a regime that aims to become good. I think you can track advocacy of such a regime from Machiavelli on.

Art Moment: Ruth Asawa's Wire Sculptures

I made my own pictures of Ruth Asawa's work from her recent exhibition at the DeYoung Museum, but these snapshots from Asawa's own website should keep you satisfied for the moment.

Top Ten Movies of 2006

Yes, I know it's almost February, but this is a very weighty topic requiring much contemplation (ok, I'm a lazy bum too):


1. Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski)

2. Cache (Michael Haneke)
3. The Wayward Cloud (Ming-liang Tsai)
4. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater)
5. Triple Agent (Eric Rohmer)
6. The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker)

7. The Motel (Michael Kang)
8. The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)
9. Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater)
10. Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Edsall’s Building Red America: Triviality that Almost Succeeds

Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America is a frustrating book. Edsall’s topic is how the New Right has achieved power, and possibly permanent power, by permanently transforming, in a revolutionary way, American society at all levels. In his general thesis, Edsall is certainly correct (even if his thesis is not precisely new or groundbreaking or deep). For this, Edsall should probably be praised.

What is frustrating about Edsall’s book, however, is much more interesting than his correct overarching thesis. Building Red America is a book about Right politics in America that does not even mention the word capitalism. As frustrating as a book about Left politics that failed to discuss capitalism would be, a book about Right politics in America without capitalism is simply incoherent and eventually trivial. The frustrating fact is that Edsall is very close to understanding a great deal, but seemingly intentionally verves off into shallowness.

The heart of the discussion over how the New Right attained such power lies in the following conundrum: the middle class and upper working class in America (outside of the South), like most middle classes in the vast majority of liberal capitalist democracies, had accepted moderate Manchester liberalism for most of American history (think the liberal Republicans who dominated the politics of many states outside the South for roughly 100 years after the Civil War). Accepted it, that is, until the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the white middle classes moved almost universally to a quite extremist version of Manchester liberalism coupled with nihilist and radical versions of fundamentalist Christianity.

This has been the primary puzzle of intellectuals and political pundits for the past thirty and more years, of course. In some sense, it’s simply a version of the 100 years old Marxian false consciousness of the proletariat thesis updated for the current American scene. The Marxian false consciousness thesis, however, describes a continuum – the working class has never opposed capitalism as much as Marxists do. This has been a constant throughout the Industrial and post-Industrial eras. What is inexplicable in the American scene is a recent move from a very long-held moderate Manchester liberalism to a very extremist version of the same (and, of course, newly combined with the above mentioned fundamentalism).

One fundamental fault of Edsall is beginning his book by discussing “politics at the top” – i.e. current politics as it looks primarily from elite circles in Washington, DC. This is not a repetition of the too-common criticism of elitism. Rather, my criticism is of the value of Edsall’s particular elitism to understanding this phenomenon. The power of the New Right is not primarily explicable by the New Right’s machinations in the 1990s and 2000s. Those machinations were only made possible by the near-universal popularity of the New Right’s politics on a grassroots level starting in the late 1960s, thirty years before the New Right began it’s latest stage of concretizing its power under the second Bush administration.

Edsall analyzes the effects before analyzing the causes (if he can be said to analyze the causes at all). The primary puzzle is how the middle class in America became radicalized, not how that radicalization was later transformed into political power. It’s comparatively easy to gain political power if a lot of people are already willing (even eager) to vote you into office.

Edsall’s background as a journalist makes him ill-prepared to perform this analysis. Journalists primarily understand politics at the overt political level – reporting on elections, government ministries, policy plans, parliamentary developments and so on. Strangely, this type of journalism is actually most useful in an aristocratic, pre-Enlightenment states. In aristocracies or monarchies, who is King, who are the King’s ministers, who the heads of the leading aristocratic families are is actually of the highest importance.

This is not true of liberal capitalist democracies, which shift conflict from the political realm to sublimate that conflict primarily within the economic realm (and sometimes in the religious realm). The political, economic and religious are all one thing in the pre-Enlightenment state: the polis in Greek philosophy. But the Enlightenment state separates these things into separate realms, even though that separation has always been largely illusory.

Thus, the identity of government ministers or overt policy plans or the composition of the legislature within liberal capitalist democracies is paradoxically not of very great political importance. Most of the primary political decisions have already been made by Enlightenment ideology long ago: the social contract state from Hobbes and Locke, capitalism from Locke and Smith, private life by Rousseau’s romantic family and so on. Pre-Enlightenment (which also means pre-ideological) states had more politics on an overt level because many more decisions (political, economic, religious, private and public) were overt political decisions.

So, Edsall’s focus on the elite end of democratic politics in Washington is not very helpful in answering our puzzle.

The New Noir Comes from Europe: Hans Werner Kettenbach's Black Ice

One mystery of literary noir fiction is the why of it's disappearance in America after the mid-Sixties. The genre continued to have it's immense cultural impact upon Europe - we can't imagine the Nouvelle Vague or Italian post-war cinema or even the German New Wave without American noir literature. But except for Patricia Highsmith, the actual American writers of noir literature had all shut down most of their creative activity by the mid-Sixties.

Highsmith, of course, is precisely the writer who pointed the way out for noir literature. Certainly, a large part (but only a part) of noir's decline in the Sixties was due to the vast majority of white Americans moving out of the inner cities (noir's beloved environment) and into the suburbs, which made many of the noir trappings, plots and even philosophy implausible. It was Highsmith who was able to transcend noir's original inner urban setting and make suburban angst work for noir - see in particular Highsmith's The Cry of the Owl, but also her A Suspension of Mercy.

Few American writers have taken up Highsmith's clarion call, preferring to degenerate to the commonplace of today's mediocre mystery/crime genre scene. But we might expect that some Europeans might take up the challenge - and Hans Werner Kettenbach's Black Ice (originally published in German in 1981) is apparently merely the first of these to appear in English translation, from the spanking new publishing house Bitter Lemon Press.

Black Ice comes as a revelation as to what English-language crime fiction could be, and has now fallen so far short of. Taking place in one of the affluent small towns that cover Southern Germany, Kettenbach uses the mystery genre to begin to dissect such topics as class structure, the toxic nature of modern day office life, the dead-ending of careers and ambition and so much more. Kettenbach's stunning results of applying realism back into the mystery genre allow Black Ice to cut deeper, to be more truthful than any English-language crime novel from the past 30 or more years.

Read it.

Art Moment

Tilman Riemenschneider, Mary Magdalene w/ Angels, Bavarian National Museum
Taken by my own hand, September 2005