Der Frau im Mond, (directed by Fritz Lang) was the silent at the Paramount on Monday, a 2 hour and 40 minute film that left me gaping and Viv snoozing.

The film was released in 1929 but is not well known because it was suppressed by the Nazis (the scientifically correct depiction of lunar rocketry offended Der Fuhrer himself, apparently– it was a state secret, and so it was rolled back).

The film tells the story of Helius, an aviation industrialist who commits to a Lunar flight but is blackmailed into bringing a blackguard along. The first reel sets up the blackmail with such deftness, suspense, and humor that the theater was alive with the energy of the audience.

The bad guy in the film, Walter Turner (played by Fritz Rasp) is a totemic achievement of character design: he looked as though Edward Gorey had reached back in time and created his own real-life top-hatted, spat-wearing bounder. What a creation.

The first forty-five minutes are the most fluid, spirited filmmaking I’ve ever seen from Lang. Lang is a much admired director whose best work was in Germany prior to emigration to the US. He turned in M, featuring Peter Lorre as the hounded killer, and of course the great touchstone of silent cinema SF, Metropolis.

This film benefited from the matured film industry in Germany and joy of joys, the print we had, although with a few inserted scenes of slight roughness, was for the most part the sort of voluptuous silvery grey photography we associate with high Golden Age cinema, simply delightful to look at.

Sadly, the film itself ran too long and suffered from occasional pacing problems. An interesting aspect of the film was that the majority of the acting was acceptable by modern standards, but when those German film actors have to show extreme emotion – well, let’s just say it’s less effective in Seattle in 2003 than it was in Berlin in 1929.

Nonetheless, the film is lighthearted throughout, although deadly serious about attempting accuracy in its’ subject (except for positing an atmosphere on the Moon). Interestingly, show organist and film historian Dennis James claimed that Werner Von Braun had consulted on the film, and I’m inclined to lend credence to the claim (Googling led to some German-language sites that mention von Braun and the film at the same time).

There was even a film-within-a-film in which the basic principles of translunar rocketry were briefly, accurately explained. There were enormous, detailed engineering drawings. There was a cutaway, large scale model of the lunar rocket, which of course featured crash couches, at least three decks, and a central ladder core for deck access. The film clearly has some of Man Conquers Space‘s DNA.

Interestingly, this very pretty Thomas Pynchon site has a nice backgrounder on Lang.

One other I noticed, first with the dense, efficient, highly entertaining introductory section. Then, second, many details of the rocket and voyage very strongly resemble the work of Hergé in his Tintin books generally but also very strongly in the two-part Tintin story, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. For example, in the visualization of the moon’s surface as potentially having water or ice, but more strongly in the profound detail with which the rocket is presented. Also Hergé’s character of Professor Calculus appears to in some way be inspired by the nutty old professor that comes along for the ride in the Lang rocket – he even goes off dowsing on his own!

There were extensive documentation of Hergé’s sources and inspirations at the Tintin site but, dashitall, they’ve up and gone. Some one get Thomson and Thompson on the case!

Fantastic double feature at the Paramount’s Silent Movie Mondays (unfortunately for them, they make it impossible to link directly to the schedule, so no link for you! Get out!) last night which featured really clean prints of both Der Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Both prints were tinted, as originally distributed, and the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari also featured an astonishing duo-tone solarization effect in the intial framing sequence (the narrator, seated on a bench, begins his tale).

I’ve seen Caligari umpteen times since I was a teenager, and much of the novelty and freshness of the wild staging wore off long ago for me, leaving a slightly boring film that suffers from the tacked-on framing sequence. (The site I’ve linked to includes a breathtaking lobby card for the film at the end of the page).

This print was awesome, however, and reinstated much of the impact of the production. It’s also probably the first time I have seen the film in an optimal viewing enviroment.

The other film, Der Golem, is a film I’ve wanted to see since, what, at least 1976 when I received a book that reproduced a still from the movie in the context of an article about the Golem legend. The film was a huge hit when it was released, and is generally credited with being the first feature length horror film (or is it science fiction? fantasy? alchemical film? hermetic cinema?).

I awaited the inevitable racial crudities with bated breath, and was relieved when they did not show themselves in any exeptionable way. No unfortunate racialist caricatures, with the possible exception of the Golem himself, whose makeup lends him a resemblance, probably accidental, to a player in blackface getup. However, he plays the same role as a slave in early cinema – he’s simple, dangerous, superhuman, has trouble with the lusty feelings, and so forth. In Der Golem he’s played by the director, Paul Wegener, and I thought it was interesting that in this German film, based on Czech legends, the person playing the Golem should have Slavic features.

(This thoughtful review of a DVD edition notes that the depiction of Rabbi Loew in the film as a secretive practioner of the black arts still reinforces the underlying antisemitic attitudes of Northern and Central Europe at the time. Well, maybe. But then there’d be no movie, I think.)

It was somewhat unsettling to watch this legend of a pogrom averted in the Prague ghetto while knowing that the same ghetto had a fate unimaginable to the players in the film lying in wait, about 20 years down the road.

A major, incredibly cool element of the film was its’ fantastic set design – imagine if Antonio Gaudi designed a crude medieval village and you’re right in the neighborhood, so to speak.

The film appeared to me to be a more fluent and carefully designed film, cinematically, than Caligari.

TCM offers their usual thorough and informative writeup on Der Golem. Here’s a site with a bunch of stills (definitely a deifferent version than the print we saw).

Next week is the official end of the cycle this time through. However, last week, Dennis James (the organist for the shows) mentioned that they were trying to put together one extra showing – of the eagerly awaited Wings, the first film to win Best Picture in the Academy Awards and the first airplane spectacular – and by howdy, is it spectacular. If you like old canvas and wood airplanes as much as I do, this film presents a curious spectacle of enthrallment, inaccuracy, and tragedy – the filmmakers crashed countless surplus WW1 biplanes in making the film. The inaccuracy resides in the many creative ways the set dressers were able to rework the U.S.-made and readily available Curtiss JN-1 Jennies to resemble other models. They’d been made in huge numbers here for export to the front when peace broke out, so they were sold for as little as $25 each, so my unreliable grey cells inform me.

(But, uh, if you’re not a plane nut, it’s – like all too many Best Pictures – kinda mediocre.)

When he mentioned that was what they were trying to do, applause broke out. Boeing may be leaving town, but this remains a city of airplane people.

Here’s the whole run this cycle:
JANUARY 6, 2003: the monster, 1925
Starring: Lon Chaney
JANUARY 13, 2003: the lodger, 1926
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
JANUARY 20, 2003: cabinet of dr. caligari, 1919 & der golem, 1920
Directors: Robert Wiene (Cabinet) / Carl Boese & Paul Wegener (Der Golem)
JANUARY 27, 2003: the women in the moon, 1929
Director: Fritz Lang

And just for good measure, some linkylove:

Silent Era, the indispensible resource for this stuff.

Silents Are Golden, a bit more homey in feel.

A reader whom I’ve never met wrote an e-mail the other day requesting that I review The Two Towers. Unaccountably, this had never occurred to me.

When the note arrived, I was just about to go see the film for the second time. I endeavored to keep the idea in mind as I watched the film, more or less unsuccessfully.

The first time I saw the film I was distracted sufficiently by a couple of alterations that director Peter Jackson made to the plot (in comparison to that of the book) that I was uncertain, on balance, how I felt about the film. Additionally, Vivian and I were seated somewhat farther back from the screen then I would’ve preferred, and thus I found myself at a loss in forming a personal opinion, in itself somewhat odd.

The second time we saw the film, we were seated much closer to the Cinerama’s gloriously huge screen, and I found it more satisfactory. Predictably enough, it was more difficult to apprehend the details in comparison with the longer vantage afforded us by our previous seats in the balcony. However, this superabundance of visual stimuli contributed positively to the viewing experience.

In the end though, I was clearly disappointed. The first film’s experience for me was such a unique moment – such a remarkable fusion of an important childhood experience with an adult enthusiasm, capably translated and with similar emotional effect – that The Two Towers, like the book is largely draws from, is an emotional letdown.

The structure of the novel places the characters of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum in the midst of their cheerless, excruciating journey through the wild, and Tolkien’s leaden prose in this section has defeated more than one reader. In an effort to avoid this narrative pitfall Jackson has chosen to, firstly, cut back and forth between the three main narrative threads, and secondly, to omit one important, if niggling, plot point while utterly fabricating another.

it speaks well for Jackson’s judgment and execution that in the case of the first alteration, I did not know the difference, and again for him in that the second did not grate. I’ll not note it here, as it adds nothing to the experience of the film to realize what’s been shifted about.

The second alteration did, however, cause me a moment of some curmudgeonly frowning first time I watched the film, and an outright nitpicking failure of the suspension of disbelief the second time I viewed it.

SPOLER ALERT: The next few sentences have been colored white. To read them select them with your cursor.

In the scene, which is beautifully envisioned, and wholly invented for the movie, Frodo faces a Nazgul and the wraith’s steed, an enormous flying saurian creature whose Tolkien-name escapes me. Doughty Sam saves Frodo in the nick of time and Faramir, a military commander of Gondor, is somehow convinced by this that he should free the captive hobbits.

Jackson could easily have avoided this problem by filming the scenes as written in the book. No moment of heart stopping dinosaur-baiting occurs in them and Faramir must rely on his heart’s judgment alone.

END SPOILERS

Less problematically, some of the CG rendered elements of the film simply collapsed on second viewing. For example, in the scenes of Treebeard carrying Merry and Pippin in his hands, rather than focusing on the Ent’s face, I focused on the figures of the hobbits. Unfortunately, the figures were unconvincing for several reasons, including the weird, gravity-free motion of their oddly elongated limbs.

This is not unlike a moment in the first film, in which Legolas leaps to the back of a cave troll and for brief moment the computer generated illusion fails. In both cases the figures’ movements briefly become too crisp, too videogame-like.

It should be noted that the great majority of the effects in both films – the invading horde at Helm’s Deep for example, and, interestingly, the dragon-like beast that faces Frodo in the scene critiqued above – are both unobtrusive and spectacular.

Gollum, for all the hype, was not as successful as might be hoped. His presence in shots is ungrounded. Interestingly, this is appropriate to his character as a corrupted victim of the ring. Still, I found it distracting. The creature is without a doubt the most successfully integrated CG character in a film of all time, but why haven’t filmmakers concentrated more on meshing the CG into the actual space being photographed rather than the impressive mechanics of the bitmapped flesh or multiply articulated facial muscles?

For example we have no difficulty accepting the advertising mascot Jack, of Jack in the Box, despite his big round ball of a head. I know he’s not CG. My point is, simplicity in detail combined with true visual integration into a space is more than enough to convince us of the reality of the character. Likewise, greater success in integration, and less fretting about rendered detail will be necessary to carrying synthespian depiction forward.

Really, these are relatively minor critiques. They do predominate in my memory and reflections on the film. What about Rohan, you say? And don’t forget Helms Deep! Well, uh, yeah, that was OK, I guess. I hated Legolas’ stupid stair-surfing trick – what idiocy – and tolerated the dwarf tossing jokes. The best part of the Helm’s Deep sequence was Jackson’s sly depiction of the non-combatants in the caves. They cower under the sounds of an aerial bombardment, a clever reference to the contemporary experience of urban civilians in time of war.

This is possibly an excavated reference to the Blitz from Tolkien’s original work; while he doesn’t emphasize this, he did put the civilians underground at a time when he’d just seen such a thing in his own life. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Jackson’s referring to more contemporary experiences of urban aerial bombardment, however.

There were other shots, generally of like duration, that stood out: the monumental opening sequence, in which we chase Gandalf’s fall to the battle with the Balrog; the elven longbowmen firing up and over the battlements of Helm’s Deep as the camera sweepingly traces the arrows’ arc; the company’s ride to Rohan as the Westfold burns in the distance, across a river; Aragorn tenderly nosed awake by his horse.

An image that did not impress me quite as much as these moments yet which I enjoyed was the great gates of Mordor. Where were the flying monkeys? Was it just me, or was the urge to chant “yo-lee-oh, yo-la” overwhelming? In that scene, Jackson seemed to be deliberately noting the impressive number of overlaps between the filmic Wizard of Oz and Tolkien’s original books, something which is really worth investigating further.

There were other images which were satisfying but somehow didn’t reach the heights of the stand-out moments cited above: the destruction of Orthanc. Sam’s oliphaunt. The Entmoot.

So, on the whole, why do I feel that the film disappointed me? First, the inherent challenge of the narrative material limited the emotional payload of the film, something Jackson attempted to remedy with his crosscutting and additional moments of dramatic tension and danger, unsuccessfully in my mind. Secondly, the filmmakers have overreached in their use of CGI in constructing the film. In the first film, only one large set-piece was reliant on the technology; here, not only a main character, but two entire acts are wholly dependent on it. Granted that this is the case, it would be more surprising if I lacked nits to pick.

All of this would have been essentially minor if the one great narrative problem I cite above had not been introduced. It’s a cardinal rule of fantasy and science fiction that the internal logic of the world depicted not encourage the reader to make critical examinations of the internal logic of the world. By presenting a character’s actions which beg for critical analysis, Jackson jeopardizes the structure of the whole.

In summation, then, I think the film suffers from mostly minor flaws, and those flaws, unfortunately, appear to be the result of overconfidence on the part of the filmmakers. On the whole, this bodes ill for the final film. The narrative structure of the remaining tale does not require quite the degree of dependence on CG imagery as employed in this film, however. There are many more peaks and valleys in the narrative yet to come. It is hoped that Jackson will refrain from further wholesale additions and inventions as he completes the trilogy.

Hustled to catch Star Trek: Nemesis before it leaves theaters, probably the middle of next week. For some reason, Paramount pretty much negelected to promote the film energetically until about three days before the mid-December opening date, and the result was that it opened with the lowest first-weekend revenues of all the Next Gen flicks, and the next weekend after that, The Two Towers opened; the film’s revenues dropped by over 40%.

Since The Two Towers is still selling out, I expect many theaters to replace Star Trek: Nemesis with the fantasy film.

Guess what? Paramount was off base not promoting this; it’s pretty good. As we’ve come to expect, it’s not up to the standards of the best episodes of the TV shows. It does have a decent A-B plot interplay and the prerequisite drawn-out big-screen effects set piece, which was OK, I guess.

Unfortunately, the overemphasis on action which has come at the expense of ideas since the end of DS9 across the entire franchise holds true here. It’s not so much that the ideas presented in the film are dopey or too far out, but that they are not explored sufficiently to be convincing, and instead, we get a car chase in the desert, at least two firefights, and the effects set-piece mentioned earlier.

Naturally, since we get to see Captain Picard make like Mad Max, the most important illlustrative element of the film’s premise is delivered via voice-over. Sigh. What is the deal with Hollywood’s action fixation? It’s chanted like a mantra among the studio people I interact wth at Cinescape; the phrase “darker, edgier” is uttered so frequently it’s like a prayer or a handshake or maybe both.

From my perspective, when I hear this phrase I’m inclined to imagine that it means the producer has issued an edict requiring more explosions and less talk. Films like Crouching Tiger, The Matrix, and Pulp Fiction demonstrated how it’s possible to do action movies that are both radically interesting for their originality of vision and smarts; unfortunately the easy way to guage if a movie has enough bang-bang is to squelch the talk.

This is probably a bad sign, coming from someone who works for a magazine devoted to covering action, horror, SF (in Hollywood, people actually cringe and correct you to “sci-fi” if you use the term I prefer), fantasy, and comic-book adaptations.

It should be noted in the silence following the set-piece a very young male voice loudly whispered “Cooooool” into the dark, so the film wasn’t completely failing to reach the kids.

I want to take a moment after all that Tolkien-ing to point out another film that you should by all means rush out and see. It’s Donald and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, a screwy, ambitious post-modern comedy based loosely on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief.

The film is directed by Spike Jonze and stars Nicolas Cage as twin scriptwriters Donald and Charlie Kaufman. Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay for the goofy Being John Malkovich, apparently invented his twin brother Donald for the script. However, Donald is credited as a co-writer, and should the film receive any awards for its’ writing (as it clearly should), Donald will be a recipient of record.

The film is about the process of writing and about genre expectations for Hollywood films. It also carries genuine emotional weight, anchored by the two most visceral screen renderings of automobile accidents that I’ve ever seen (or, in this case, not seen, as in one case I involuntarily threw my hands over my face in fear as the accident unfolded).

Several days after having seen the film, the imagery of the accidents haunts me, a residue that takes me by surprise. The film is a densely-constructed pomo mannerist flick, something akin to the verbal layer cakes Tom Stoppard reliably thrills and exhilarates me with. However, Stoppard’s mind-bending minuets and fugues of ideas and language are very, very verbal. Adaptation presents as densely allusive a field, but it does so cinematically. As a viewer it’s not always readily apparent how a given scene is a requisite reflection of another at an earlier point in the film’s narrative.

Nicolas Cage, as the twins, one garrulous and apparently “oblivious”, one inward directed and paralyzed by self-doubt, is also hilarious as the schlub who can’t act on his internal narratives and ultimately emotionally effective in the role. The screenplay (which his characters are depicted writing) directly attacks the idea of providing emotional closure for the characters on screen characterizing the technique as “fake” and “Hollywood,” yet Cage’s performance remains touching.

I referred earlier in my last essay on The Lord of The Rings to Pulp Fiction. The excitement that film generated was due in part to Tarantino’s amazing use of symbology and allusion in the role of structuring devices. These devices frequently escaped notice in the headlong rush of the story. Yet they flowered in memory to create the powerful sense of depth that the film offered as one of its’ unique accomplishments.

Adaptation offers a similar sense of unfolding depth when regarded via memory. It’s also hilarious; in the theater I had to laugh into my arm throughout the film in order to not disrupt other filmgoers’ experiences of the movie. When I emerged, my stomach muscles hurt.

If you have ever sat in front of a keyboard and done battle with your inner distractors insisting that rather than write you should get a cup of coffee or that what you had written was unjustifiably awful, you owe it to yourself, and possibly to your friends and family, to go see Adaptation.

Do it now, while the lines are long for The Two Towers.

On Wednesday, The Two Towers opened internationally. By the end of that day, the film had grossed about $42 million in and out of North America. By the end of the weekend, the North American grosses were reported to be about $101 million. At a party that Vivian and I went to Saturday night, at which the majority of the partygoers were by no means card-carrying members of the D&D club in high school (or otherwise dyed in the wool fantasy and SF readers), the only film which was discussed, coming up over and over again, was The Two Towers. Guests who had seen it respectied the universally expressed desire of those who had not to remain mum save expressions of approval.

The last film that I recall prompting such universal fascination was Quentin Tarantino’s never-equaled-by-him Pulp Fiction. I have memories of leaving the theater among countless impassioned, amazed discussions. I treasure the memory of seeing the audience so energized by a film, by a work of art and entertainment.

Given the level of interest that this season’s entry in The Lord of The Rings cycle has generated, I must assume that Peter Jackson has gotten medieval on our asses.

I noted earlier my admiration for the marketing that Lord of the Rings is generating, and I’d like to reiterate this. Jackson’s game plan appears to be to release differentiated DVDs of the films, with unique editing, packaging, and special features, at intervals of approximately every four months. Thus we can expect to see The Two Towers on DVD sometime in spring, and an extended edition sometime in fall.

I suspect that these releases will also be accompanied by repackagings of The Fellowship of the Ring. The extended edition of The Two Towers may also be available in a package deal with some new variation of The Fellowship of the Ring. That’s a marketing strategy I expect to see carried out to the nth degree by sometime after the release of the third movie.

I anticipate some limited release of all three movies to the theatrical circuit as well a year or two after the release of the last film, probably in support of a one-to-two hundred dollar completist’s DVD set. All of this is simply speculative, of course. As someone who has worked on both software and DVD marketing plans and products, I would say that anything less would be slightly unprofessional.

The extended edition DVD for The Fellowship of the Ring surprised me. Jackson’s team decided to treat their filmmaking experience as analogous to the detailed notes and background stories and appendices and grammars which Professor Tolkien included in his books. It’s both a simple reflection of marketing expectations for DVDs (Jackson is far from the first film maker to offer commentary and featurettes and still photos on a special edition DVD) and an inspired extension of the densely-documenting aesthetic that clearly appeals to both the casual and the committed Tolkien fan.

As a kid, I devoured the additional information that was available in the books. However, at some point I realized that the data was not only useless to me personally but in some ways may have prevented Tolkien from delivering a better book. Currently I have a sort of indulgent fondness for the material, tinged with regret at what could have been.

Therefore, as someone who hovers between the categories of committed and casual, I have found myself surprised to be so deeply interested in learning about the process that went into the film. The extended edition DVD for The Fellowship of the Ring offers no less than four commentary tracks: the writers, the director, the production designers, and the actors. I’m looking forward to watching the film with each track. No, really, I am.

The last aspect that I wish to touch on before I return to my regularly scheduled blogging is what meanings the film (and, to an extent, the writing) carries in the world depending where the audience member is standing.

In the United States, the struggle against the Dark Lord reflects not only our pop-culture experience of George Lucas’ borrowing of him as Darth Vader but also the American experiences of World War Two and the Cold War. Mordor, in this view, is a metaphoric representation of either the Axis or the Soviet Bloc, enslaving and twisting people. I’ve noted that Tolkien explicitly disavows this sort of interpretation, but it must be recognized and discussed as a layer of the story’s meaning.

Now, let’s take a moment to imagine what the film might mean from the perspective of a viewer in, say, New Zealand, where the films were shot, and a country which has banned naval vessels that carry nuclear weapons from port. Here’s a quote from a Dodgy Magazine’s question and answer session held last Wednesday in Wellington at the film’s hometown premiere:

Dodgy Magazine: There has been a lot of debate over the years about Tolkien’s work and whether he was trying to send a message; anti-war, anti-industrialisation. What are the key messages that Tolkien gave, if any?

Richard Taylor (costume designer): Tolkien certainly tried not to profess that this was an analogy but we decided very strongly from the beginning, I’m not saying Peter did, the people at Weta that we did want to treat is an analogous piece of writing and therefore draw the messages from it. The sweeping aside of cottage industry England for the coming of the industrial revolution, the creation of the minions the masses and the working class, the demoralizing of the working class.

I think the greatest message that Tolkien was writing in these books that is so much more pertinent today than even the calamities of the first world war, life in the trenches of the first world, is so imperative for us to appreciate in the globalised world we live in, is that; unless all species, all races, unless dwarves can live alongside men and men alongside elves there is no ability for our own Middle Earth to conquer and vanquish evil. And how resounding that fable is today to the people on this planet. We very firmly need to sit up and listen to the chap.

Here’s another.

Dodgy Magazine: A lot of people say that there is a message behind Tolkien’s trilogy. Anti-war. Anti-industrialisation. What’s the message for you?

Karl Urban (Faramir): I don’t think there is one central messages, I think there are many messages, ideals and considerations. I think the themes that strike the most resonance for me are primarily the destruction of the environment. I think that has a particular pertinence and resonance to today’s society especially with certain policies of certain large foreign governments. I think that the whole idea of altruism strikes a chord for me. I really appreciate and respect the extent of the loyalty and the connection of the fellowship. The fact that Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli run for days and days and days just for the merest chance, the merest possibility that they can save their friends. Vastly outnumbered by a group of orcs. That’s the extent of the loyalty, altruism, and friendship.

Now, just imagine for a minute that you’re an audience member in a non-Western country, one with some familiarity with the idea and image of the United States as a source of cultural disruption, the icon of loss of traditional economic means of support and the replacement thereof by industrialization, and as a great wellhead of temptation away from the traditional.

It does not take an effort to understand that to a viewer with such a cultural background, Tolkien’s Dark Lord and rings of power created to ensnare the unwary in bondage will be immediately understood to represent the United States and our media and economic culture.

Within the U. S. , diametrically opposed interpretations of the story will, and do, coexist. There will surely be pundits comparing the War on Terror and the War of the Ring, uniting “the free peoples of Middle-Earth”. The opposite interpretation, however, in which the forces of a medieval, magical worldview struggle to defeat an enslaving vision of global unity under an industrial future can plausibly be argued as a more faithful understanding of Tolkien’s original aims.

Shuttle external view liftoff video.

On um, Monday (?) they added a new feature to the Shuttle liftoff – real time video on the shuttle itself, looking down.

The link is to an archive of space and rocketry vis, inlcuding the listoff vid.

Via BoingBoing sideblog.

These were hung right next to each other. The one on the left is an ad for a design competition. One hopes that the designer of the yard sale flyer will enter it.

(from Lawrence of Arabia, at widescreen museum; film frames from the 2002 restoration.)

So I just spent the last four hours watching this movie.

I gather I am the only person in the English-speaking world that hadn’t ever seen it before, even on TV. The film I saw was a restoration shown in 70 mm at full length, with intermission. It was easy to see why this film has such an elevated reputation. The combination of the setting with the large screen cinematography was sufficiently persuasive on its own; O’Toole’s seriously troubled Lawrence, and the script which drives this antihero are obviously even more important.

The film first played in Seattle as part of the festivities for the Cinerama’s reopening several years ago. I missed it then, I wasn’t gonna miss it now.

Of course, the film has shifted meaning since a restoration first played here. The first half of the film, about 2 hours long, is a beautiful, if standard-issue European-American morality play concerning the importance of national identity and the grand lowercase-l liberal democratic revolutionary European ideal of the nation overthrowing monarchy, imperium, and superstition.

In essence Lawrence’s project in Arabia is Lord Byron’s in Greece one hundred years before. Indeed, the opressing imperial power in both cases is the Turk. Alec Guinness’ Prince Feisal’s family was actually militarily defeated by the house of Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia but, if I understand my research, did snag the throne in Jordan, and Feisal himself became king of… Iraq.

It’s worth noting that EVERY SINGLE ASSUMPTION I had when viewing the film about this character was incorrect. I assumed he represented the house of Saud.

You can see how an American audience might approach these arguments with some distance today. Unfortunately it’s not the arguments that appear discredited, and we can expect to meet some patriotic founding fathers of another Middle Eastern nation shortly, I believe. The story Lean was cribbing from here is too deeply embedded in our pop culture narrative to get rid of it that easily.

I’d say the film does argue against imperial involvement in the Middle East, although it bases that argument on some very European ideas, and clearly celebrates the idea of, um, the proxy force.

Happily for me, the man himself says this: “Do make it clear,” he wrote to D. G. Pearman in 1928, “that my objects were to save England, and France too, from the follies of the imperialists, who would have us, in 1920, repeat the exploits of Clive or Rhodes. The world has passed by that point.”

Lawrence, although unquestionably depicted as highly troubled in the film, is the very inspiration of European and American special services operations. He’s the OSS, CIA, and Special Forces all rolled into one classically educated, masochistic queer package.

It was interesting to watch the film not deal with Lawrence’s sexuality, even as O’Toole appeared to. I’d be interested, I suppose, in Lawrence’s own self-awareness as an avatar of Byron in Greece, and for that matter Alexander out of Greece. I’d guess that O’Toole, at least, and possibly others involved with the film, were thinking of Alexander in certain scenes. Byron’s ghost did not appear, to my eyes.

Worth noting here is that at the time the film was made, the winking knowledge that Lawrence was gay underpinned the experience of the filmmakers. This site very much wishes to make a countervailing case and did not strike me as hysterical. I have not had time to evaluate the information presented.

The second half of the film, also about 2 hours long, depicts Lawrence’s passion, if you will. His increasing disillusionment and sense of self-loathing drive him first out of the field and then back into it, with military if not political success.

The film’s depiction of Lawrence as a tormented genius grants his character no mercy even as it delivers the conventional heroic victories of any given historic or fictional hero. In this sense the film is a product of its time and place and foreshadows the importance of the antihero in much film of the sixties.

The film remains grounded in the idea of a great white man guiding the benighted savage; and it uncritically adopts attitudes concerning nobility and privilege which might be best described as old-fashioned. I kept wincingly preparing for some awful Jar-Jar fetchit sequence; thankfully, there were none.

I will say this: there were a LOT of blue-eyed Arabs in the film. It looks dumb. I mean, they had contacts in 1963, I’m assuming. Maybe inaccurately.

I can’t imagine watching this movie on DVD because Lean’s cinematography depends so heavily on setting tiny human figures against the vast mass of his landscapes. Additionally, the movie brought to mind one of my great bounty of privileged childhood experiences.

In January of 1982 or 3, my family spent two or three weeks visiting Algeria, the home of a very close family friend. Algeria is a North African state, her north coast Mediterranean; her southern border deep in the Sahara. Lawrence was shot in Morocco, in part, which borders Algeria to the west.

While we were in Algeria we drove south from the coastal city of Algiers, the country’s capital, up and over the mountains to the south. These mountains are the home of the Berber people, and where our family friend was born. We visited with him and his family at their mountain village for a few days and then began a different leg of our journey. We continued south into the Saharah itself.

In my recollection we drove for two days to reach a town called Ghardaia. Ghardaia was a mud-walled oasis town at the edge of the true desert. On the way down we stopped and climbed one of the towering pinkish tan dunes that bordered the highway.

I have gazed upon the sea of sand and felt its’ wind. It was something that has stayed with me, although I prefer the wet and the buildings. Throughout this movie, I was reflecting on that trip.

A&E’s Lathe of Heaven came as a total surprise. I had no idea that an adaptation was in the works; I was surprised that it was on A&E and not scifi; and I was surprised to see respected B-list faves leading the cast.

We clicked into it about halfway through, and I immediately wanted to take the costume designer to task for absurdity; shortly, however, it became apparent that the costumes were necessarily wacky because it was one of the primary ways that the plot was moved forward.

The plot concerns an unhappy young man who lives in a dystopia; he believes his dreams change the world around him. The changes are signified partially via the costumes.

In addition to the lead, George Orr (…well, no accident), played by Lukas Haas; we had Lisa Bonet, James Caan, and the music of Angelo “Twin Peaks” Baldamente. The flat, unsettling tone of the music, combined with the monochrome mise-en-scene employed in the dystopian sequences very nicely captured the flavor of the original work, one of the true greats of 70’s SF (by Ursula K. LeGuin, whose body of work I must reread soon).

I have vague memories of reading the work, originally, but I do recall the deep sense of unsettlement I had on completing it. I suppose it helped form my tastes for more than a few of the great dystopians of seventies SF.

Unfortunately, the A&E site is flash based and does not link easily to detailed production info. I was reminded of some european sf comics.

However, the subdued, flat quality of the actors’ delivery, combined with the score and the inherent dystopian subject matter made for what I would characterize as appropriately leaden viewing. How can I express this?

I really, really like the original Russian film of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which has long stretches with no dialog or action on screen, and is also about subjective perceptions and danger. But the film is renowned for its’ oppressively slow pacing. That pacing is absolutely appropriate to the subject matter, and it makes the film physcally uncomfortable to watch.

This film doesn’t have the ambition or scope of Tartovsky’s; but it’s interested in similar effects.

I totally missed the PBS adaptation a few years ago, so I cannot draw a comparison to that series.