Chelsea the Cinéaste

Best known as Shakespeare’s great tragedy that supplies archetypes of young, innocent lovers wrecked by rash, inauspicious love and the interminable enmity of their feuding families,  Romeo and Juliet , conceived at the dawn of the dramatist’s career, is in many ways a blatant departure from what a traditional tragedy is like. Throughout the play the comic, oftentimes farcical, elements are astoundingly profuse, insofar as the tragic coda seems lack of a crucial, consistent built-up to generate any eruptive climax. One is inclined to label the play a “tragicomedy,” but then isn’t every of Shakespeare’s play to a certain extent and in some respect a tragicomedy? The fact that the comedic and the tragic are basically interchangeable in Shakespeare’s play testifies to how thoroughly the dramatist knows of the volatility of human nature: the laughter of one may easily be the tears of the other. Two contrasting moods may be divided only by a thin film, and a typical Shakespear...

Howard Hawks was once on a fishing trip with Ernest Hemingway when the director casually betted that he could make a good film out of the latter’s worst novel. The bet took place in a period when Hemingway, though already produced most of his major works and thus established the status as America’s great writer, had found little favour with the cinematic world. Only two notable adaptations were made- Frank Borzage’s pre-code  A Farewell to Arms , starring Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper, and Sam Wood’s box-office hit  For Whom the Bell Tolls , of which Hemingway personally handpicked the leading cast, including Cooper (again) and Ingrid Bergman. A third one would soon be making its way to the screen, and it was brought about unpropitiously by a fatuous bet. Hawks ultimately plumped for  To Have and Have Not , which he contemptuously called “a bunch of junk.” Critics had been equally acerbic to the book: “Mr. Hemingway’s record as a creative writer would be stronger i...

The epigraph to  A Streetcar Named Desire  is a stanza from Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower”:   “And so it was I entered the broken world   To trace the visionary company of love, its voice   An instant in the wind [I know not whither hurled]   But not for long to hold each desperate choice.” These words, and with the poignant image they evoke, resonate enchantingly with a mood of unmitigated desolation, of both the protagonist and the locale, that pervades the play, which is now considered one of Tennessee Williams’s best, and indisputably his most well-known. Continuing his interest in the paralysing effect of misplaced hopes and dogged delusions,  Streetcar  repeated the success of  The Glass Menagerie , by all accounts the play that catapulted Williams to fame, when it opened in Broadway in 1947. A cinematic version soon appeared in 1951, of which Elia Kazan, fresh from his critical success with the s...

Roundly and resoundingly booed halfway into the film, the director Antonioni and its star Vitti fled the theatre. Both could probably half-guess the audience’s hostility- being fed on films that abide by the dictates of consistency and logic, many could hardly brook L’Avventura ’s general uneventfulness and the director’s irrepressible urge to detract the storyline from its central current; but none expected the film to win, days after the disastrous premiere, the Jury Prize, the third most prestigious prize of Cannes festival. And more awards followed up, as the film blazed through the Continent, incurring more ire and bemusement. The hullabaloo was intense but short-lived. Counterculture that initiated by the discontented youngsters swept through the Western world like virus; the iconoclasts of the yore now found themselves ironically amongst the majority. It was considered “hip” to revolt against the established order, to denounce traditional values and to revel in moral de...

In the  trailer  of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964  Marnie , the director describes his latest picture as one that is difficult to classify: “It ( Marnie ) is not psycho, nor do we have a horde of birds flapping about and pecking at people willy-nilly.” With his distinctive, devious drawl suggestive of sinister presentiment, Hitchcock refers to the two protagonists as two “very interesting human specimens,” one of which, the heroine, may be called a “sex mystery.” In view of other mysterious femme fatales of Hitchcock’s former works, Marnie shares very little of their competence at keeping her cool and concealing her secret motives when in adverse conditions. Her role as a kleptomaniac and a pathological liar is disclosed at the outset. She flusters at the sight of red objects and at the sound of thunderbolts. Invariably recoiling from intimate contacts with humans of all kinds, she devotes a frustratingly unreciprocated love to her mother, whose bizarre lack of affecti...

As a leading figure of Italian Modernist cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni made films that defy facile understanding. With their sharp deviations from conventional approach to storytelling, and a freewheeling style of filmmaking as constituted by a propensity of interspersing main events with disparate incidents, many of Antonioni’s famous works, including  L’Avventura ,  La Notte , and  L’Eclisse , are bold statements of a revolutionary redefinition of cinematic art. It was with an incredible sense of audacity and surprisingly little resistance that, straight after the making of  L’Eclisse , the reception of which was, much like the other two that preceded it, a mixture of raves and rants, Antonioni undertook his first venture to the realm of polychromatic film. The result was  Red Desert  (1964), a stunning classic that looks hardly like the director’s inaugural attempt at an unexplored medium, in which the colours, though appear bizarrely gaudy a...

Henry James’s  The Turn of the Screw  has sparked disputes over years with largely two sides of critics endeavouring to constitute a tenable interpretation of this canonic ghost story. Edmund Wilson, who had recanted his views incessantly, ultimately settled on the proposition that the ghosts in the story are non-existent and merely conjured up by the hyperimaginative, delusional governess. Countering that line of thought is Brad Leithauser, who chooses not to dismiss the probability of supernatural occurrences, but also considers the process of arriving at a definitive conclusion especially problematic when taken into account that the story is recalled by a possibly deranged mind. But what is James’s stance on this? Inkling can be deduced from the preface to his last ghost story, “The Jolly Corner,” according to which the author expresses his preference for ghosts that are extensions of everyday reality: “… the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of th...

Wallace Stevens writes in “Imagination as Value”: “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before reason has established them.” Both imagination and reason are the chief mechanisms of constructing our worldview: postulated first by imagination and henceforth affirmed by reason. Elsewhere Stevens talks of noble art as “imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality,” acknowledging creativity as the potential force of disentangling men from the fetters of mundanity. These two meditative epigrams posit our perceptions of the world as shaped largely by imagination- not that of a virginal imagination perhaps but one that is refined by the developing of a cognition. But, one may ask, what is the genesis of our cognition? Is it yet another product of the imaginative faculty? Or is it also partly in thrall to the tyranny of reason? In the midst of such paradoxical argument a plausible interpretation arises: imagination and reason are, in essence, two s...

In  Life ’s feature on the bizarre case of Christopher Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero, a bashful, honest, family-loving string bass player of the then snazzy Stork Club, who was arrested for crimes he never committed, Herbert Brean, the writer, supposes the inconceivable event possessing the “somnambulist quality of a bad dream.” Alfred Hitchcock, basing a film on the incident three years later, conferred on the “bad dream” a touch of Kafkaesque disquietude. Though jettisoning much of the suspenseful streak that characterises his style, Hitchcock introduces in  The Wrong Man  (1956) a new suspense that is induced by a palpable sense of emotional detachedness. For years to come this would ultimately evolve to a semi-documentary approach of impassive-observing that culminates in the menacing sobriety of Psycho . To enhance the desperation of a tangled, never-ending nightmare, Hitchcock pardonably distorts a few facts to give rise to the dramatic. In the film, Manny’s ...

Frank Capra’s  It Happened One Night  (1934) comes as a perfect antidote to the seemingly endless crises and depression of present age. It celebrates love and happiness at their incorruptible states; affirms the existence and possible prevalence of “pure-at-hearts” goodness, and restores hope to a world that has shown signs of incurable damages. Even when seeing the film now under a slightly different social context, its counter-Depression positivism can seem at times too implausible a pipe dream. Ellie’s (Claudette Colbert) utilitarian kindness towards the hunger-stricken mother and son is largely induced by and acted on the strength of Peter’s (Clark Gable) disposition to boastful jests- he flaunts the money and pretends to be a millionaire; she responds on cue and squeezes that money into the hand of the son. Ironies like this indicate a discrepancy between the privileged and the destitute that is only going to widen: charitable instincts come more easily for those who...

Now widely regarded as an epoch-making masterpiece, premonitory of the rise of Italian modernism, Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) suffered a thorough drubbing in its box office, though was greatly admired by auteurs like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. The film is, at its core, a bracing study on the fraught relationship of reverse elements- George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman played a British couple journeying to Naples to sell an inherited property; the husband is a stolid rationalist whilst the wife a sensitive romantic. Their glaring disharmony is more acted out through their overt disdain for one another; both are susceptible, the moment they touch down the foreign land, to the immaturity of making each other jealous to express their longing for mutual understanding. Amongst many of the couples’ venomous exchanges, the wife, on one occasion, recalls a past fancy for a now-deceased poet, to which the aggrieved husband responds derisively: “He was a fool… [...

M (1931) was Fritz Lang’s first attempt at sound cinema, after an impressive corpus of silent classics including the Dr. Mabuse trilogy and Metropolis , the highly expressionist style of which earned him the epithet- the “Master of Darkness.” To be making films during the dawn of sound era, the filmmakers had the privilege and the license of exploring many unchartered territories- the effects of sound as incorporated with motions and images was a vitalising experimentation for many; given the luck and the inherent ingenuity an innovative work of art was engendered. Such is not to write off the many legendary figures as merely “chancing upon” innovations whilst experimenting without a definite aim, but to underline Lang’s remarkable assurance and skill of tackling a new medium like an old hand- as a seasoned auteur whose previous films were noted for their austerity of technique and style, Lang, throughout his long career, never once explored or experimented like a reckless adven...

Psycho is in a class of its own; its brilliance insuperable by many. Released in 1960, in the wake of a spate of successful films, Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho as if it were his last, foregoing the wry humour and beguiling romance that set the tone of his previous films, and favouring the clinically menacing. Such bold and drastic departure from the familiar Hitchcock bent yielded a result that continues to fascinate and astound its viewers decades after its release, and is indisputably the paramount of horror films, with many filmmakers strove to follow its example and consequently failed. Pioneering a new genre called the “slasher film” without too heavily depending on the gratuitous violence and gore, Hitchcock evokes the old school horror, the preoccupation of which is a mixture of psychology and suspense. The film promises no let-up on its shuddering excitement; the audience’s breath is held bated from start to finish. One important factor of its success is that it plum...