We are two part-time academics. Ellen teaches in the English department and Jim in the IT program at George Mason University.
Albert Finney as Tom Jones leading the charge (1963, Tony Richardson’s film)
Dear Friends,
As I’ve now finished updating my Clarissa website (except for a planned brief essay on Anna Barbauld as the first important voice on Richardson and his first editor and biographer), and told of my adventures among friends in Richmond, it’s time to write about the ASECS sessions themselves. For the BSECS this year I went chronologically (google for this as “site:moody.cx BSECS”): here I’ll group the summaries thematically, and first up are the sessions on film.
John O’Neill was the panel chair of the session at which I gave my paper, “How you all must have laughed. Such a witty masquerade: Clarissa 1991: “The Eighteenth Century on Film—I” (Fri, 4:15 to 5:45 pm). Since I was too nervous to take detailed notes, I can give only the gist of the other two papers. The first paper, excellent, suggestive, by David Richter was on Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice. Prof Richter kept up a stream of carefully chosen clips with music heard as he talked over what we were seeing: he showed that Wright was developing visionary contrasts of inside and outside to project a numinously romantic world, which was meant as a modern rewriting (or commentary) of Austen’s book.
I have now just rewatched (two and three nights ago) Wright’s Atonement and find that Prof Richter has explained central aspects of the experience of this movie too. In both movies the characters’ subjective inner worlds are made into landscape projections of their moods, with rapid & often wordless cutting & juxtaposition. Ian McEwan’s book Atonement imitates Virginia Woolf in its interiority and techniques, alludes to Northanger Abbey, uses picturesque landscape and poetry, and is a masculinist rewrite of Clarissa, the film which is itself loaded with letters (like the 1991 film Clarissa), and uses the sound of a clacking typewriter throughout also to suggest to us what we are seeing is the product of Briony’s writing a novel; it’s symbolic, visionary, moving from rich interior to nightmarish exterior.
A characteristic visionary scene from Wright’s Atonement: Keira Knightly as Cecilia Tallis
The third paper was given by Beatrice Fink and it was a good thing she came last or I might not have gotten to give my paper (after all the work I did). She took the rest of the time after I finished, just ignoring all signals she had gone overtime. She had not made clips or stills, but (as with the woman who gave a paper on De Sade movies), expected the audience to watch her find sections in her DVD which exemplified what she wanted to say. She didn’t have a clear line of argument. She seemed to be asking us to see that Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule is a satirical take on how shaming (ridicule), masquerade, nasty gossip and gross vengeful actions by arrogant aristocrats are today thought to have characterized the upper classes of 18th century France.
The central cast from Leconte’s Ridicule
I should say the parts of the film she managed to show (a startling scene of one young man pissing into the lap of a crippled older one) were meant to shock us, and I was fascinated by the use of masquerade in the film (as I found a similar use of the motif in Clarissa 1991: to show a rank and vicious world). Prof Fink seemed as mesmerized by Fanny Ardant (who played Mary of Guise in the recent Elizabeth movies starring Cate Blanchett) as Prof Reichek said we were intended to be Asia Argento as Vellini (see below).
The second session run by Prof O’Neill (also same title as above, with a “II,” Sat, 9:45-11:15 am) was one of the best sessions I attended in the conference. I was charmed by the first paper, by Bonita Billman, because it was about the 1945 Paramount movie, Kitty, directed by Mitchell Leisen, based on a romance by Rosamond Marshall, starring Paulette Goddard, with Cecil Kellaway as Gainsborough. The third speaker, Raymond J. Ricketts, who spoke about Tony Richardson’s 1963 Tom Jones said it was this film which inspired him to want to study the 18th century. I raised my hand after the papers were over to say that while Kitty, the film didn’t inspire me to study the 18th century, it was my first encounter with the period. I was 8 and saw the movie on Channel 9. I remembered the 18th century as particularly alluring and romantic ever after, and that I still remembered a book of black-and-white stills which I treasured. At this Prof Billman produced a copy of such this book.
Prof Billman was concerned to show us how Leisen worked to make the details of his film historically accurate. The story line is that of Pygmalion with first Gainsborough and then Ray Milland as Sir Hugh Marcy (rhymes with Darcy) teach the street waif and potential prostitute to be a model and then grand lady.
Paulette Goddard as Kitty getting into costume
The clothes and postures of Goddard were modelled on actual paintings of the era (not all by Gainsborough), Gainsborough’s real studio evoked, with an attempt at replications of real buildings. I suggested afterwards that Pam Cook and Sue Harper have argued that the popular film usually eschewed historical accuracy in order not to intimidate the audiences and also allow their imagination to run free (as central to the point of popular films is erotic release, dream-like wish-fulfillment adventures). Prof Billman agreed and said Leisen was unusual in his interest in the historical period of the film.
Apparently the film is not available as a DVD; it is one of 700 films locked up in a disagreement between Paramount and Universal.
I had trouble understanding some of Waltraud Maierofer’s paper on Anne Goldin, lezte Hexe (translation: the last witch) as she was a German speaker and I knew nothing before I cam in about the hideous torture and unjust cruel execution of this woman in Germany. Golden was accused of infanticide, & was the victim of a power struggle between two families.
Cornelia Kempers as Anna Goldin on trial
The movie was written and directed by Gertrud Pinkus, based on a famous novel by Eveline Hasler, and it emphasizes how the process of writing down what was said as well as coercing terrified false self-accusation made this woman seem guilty. In the movie and book, the records are shown to have been heavily manipulated, with the woman’s own dialect words never quoted; her direct speech is erased and substituted for it middle class distanced generalizations. (Danielle Ofri shows in her Singular Intimacies shows this is something one sees in medical records and examinations at mortality & morbidity reviews in hospitals. ) Prof Waierofer said the movie showed the importance of words, and is part of a new historicism in movies whereby movies tell history more or as effectively as verbal narratives. She suggested that the film leaves the viewer wondering if truth ever comes out of court room and deposition statements. The novel had apparently made extensive use of original documents.
Prof Waierofer seemed not to want to get into the issue of infanticide, though she acknowledged there is a long history of blaming women for the death of infants and when the woman is powerless murdering her if she is unmarried and cannot prove herself innocent. Anna Goldin was a servant who wanted desperately to keep her job. Prof Waierofer then went on to say a child’s testimony (upper class) was believed over that of Anna, and Anna was forced to say she was not harassed by a woman who had pressured her and is said to have left a bad impression on the public when she tried to tell the truth of how this upper class family had treated her. (So much for the idealism and romance of Richardson’s Pamela.)
The paper by Raymond Ricketts on Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, screenplay by John Osborne, was on an important topic hard to and hardly ever talked about in detail, partly because many film studies people may not know enough about music: he wanted to show us that although this film has been much praised for its translation of Fielding’s book and counter-establishment culture subversion, it continually uses music in ways that lead the audience to have conventional complacent responses to what’s going on. He showed us the overweaning lavish score was a compound of elaborately orchestrated mid-20th century music practice with quotations from harpischords and recognizably 18th century sounds. He argued (rightly) scores produce, reinforce and alter mood, provide interpretation of what we are seeing and hearing, establish continuity from scene to scene. He played pieces slowly so we could hear the modern piano playing inbetween the 18th century instruments. Martin Battestin may argue the movie is comic and witty and distanced, but looking at the music, we find it’s nostalgic, and gratingly or simplifyingly pointed (e.g., using intertitles when the baby Tom is born to distance and entrance us).
So to take specific instances, Prof Ricketts revealed how the famous long tracking hunt where there is no music only apparently realistic sounds of a hunt ends in a sequence of highly romantic music where Tom (Albert Finney) saves Sophia (Susannah York); how comedic music is used to make us dismiss the over-sexualized Molly (he said her leitmotif was a “sexy slut” theme):
Tom and Molly Seagrim (Diane Cilento)
The women are presented as pursuing sex with the man: Lady Bellaston is introduced by a saxophone, while Sophie is accompanied by sweet tunes, sounds of birds. He said scholarship on film must start to deal directly with music. In Brave Heart the ullian harps were important; in Frears’ and Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses Handelian music was used to powerul effect.
When he finished, I was wishing I had said more about the anamnesic music in Clarissa which I think is central to its gothicism, but myself didn’t know enough about what I was listening to beyond that the harpischord was being used in odd modern percussive ways. I also was proud and glad I had participated in Prof O’Neil’s panels.
Prof Guy Spielmann was panel chair for an earlier session on film, “Envisioning the Eighteenth-Century through—or against—film, I” (Thurs, 11:30-1:00 pm). The first paper by Dorothee Polanz was on De Sade movies and at least informative. She said De Sade films are 1) presented as film adaptations of his books, and are erotic fantasies; are 2) biographies where much liberty is taken with the factual record; or 3) depict him as a kind of horror, a monster, often with dark magical powers, likening him to figures like Dracula. Very few of De Sade’s works have really been adapted (in the 60s 7 films); 15 focus on his biography, mostly his later life and these explore issues of sexual censorship. She showed some awful movies, grade Z (The Whip), where the level of understanding or audience aimed at was like that of Jason and the Argonauts (famously imbecilic); of interest to me was the actors playing ordinary people in one of these films were meant to be taken as Americans, and the woman was presented as sickened and disgusted by De Sade while the man disdained him. I wondered if the real subject of these awful films was a stereotypical idea about American audiences and puritanism.
The second paper was superb: Bradley S. Reichek talked about Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maistresse (2007), which I saw with Yvette earlier this year. The movie is an apparently faithful adaptation which uses intertitles to situate the viewer in an earlier time than 1830, specifically we feel we are in the time of LaClos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The novel by Jules-Amedee Barbey d’Aurevilly was written in 1830 and hovers between the two eras, with the hero as a weak & amoral dandy. Prof Reichek went over details in the film to show how they translated the book effectively, and from a feminist standpoint. For Breillat female sexuality is fatal forcem and the aristocratic world of the 18th century decadent. What I thought interesting was the idea that the 19th century novelist and 20th century audience regards the 18th century as an era when put on film as a place to examine and explore (break taboos over) sexuality in contemporary life. I think this is true of the 1991 Clarissa. He also suggested this film shows us a certain vision of the 18th century as an amoral time, where scandal was hypocritical gossip and people interacted performatively and with wit.
Nonetheless, the theme of the actual novel, a man conflicted between choosing a highly sexualized devouring and amoral woman, and a chaste, innocent, wife to live respectably with is a theme found in 19th century novels. Our hero is torn between a dangerous passion and a quiet safe life. This reminded me of many of Trollope’s males in his novels. The film had a number of powerful women, beyond Vellini, for example, the wife’s grandmother. It was a kind of replay of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with different characters in place of Madame de Merteuil and Tourville. Asia Argento who played Vellini has elsewhere done highly sexualized women.
One of the chaster pictures of love-making in Une vieille maistresse. Ryno, the seduced hero (Fu’ad ait Aattou) has just been shot and we have witnessed close up the ghastly pulling out of a bullet from his body, and Vellini (Asia Argento) is allured by him because of his pain and the blood
We did in the discussion afterwards talk about films set in the 19th century and based on 19th century books. The consensus was films adapted from 19th century matter, history and themes can deal with sexuality then and now, but often this becomes implicit or is a matter of intense repression (another theme then). Instead such films tend to deal with class, social and economic arrangements, and particularly males and females struggling for dominance over one another. Someone decided that the Austen films were a “class apart,” but I didn’t get a chance to ask him why he said that. It is true that Austen films are ostensibly set in the later 18th/early 19th century and yet present a repressed and often very conservative vision of women’s sexuality (so belong to 19th century films so to speak). The remark did cheer and give me pause because one of the thoughts I want to develop in my book (to be begun this summer) is that the Austen films do constitute a subgenre of women’s films or costume drama & film adaptation apart, different, distinguishable from all others.
It had taken Prof Spielmann and his technical assistants over half a hour to get the equipment working, so there was little time left at the end for the third paper. Perhaps this was why the French scholar who had written it gave it in French reading at top speed, looking down at his paper. It was on Marie Antoinette so this was disappointing for me.
I missed another paper which may have been a brilliant and even important paper: I did not make it to the second of Prof Spielmann’s panels (same title, with with a “II,” Thurs, 2:30-4:00 pm), and thus didn’t hear Robert Mayer (who is the editor of a volume of good film studies, Eighteenth Century on Screen). Prof Mayer spoke “Three Queens, the Eighteenth Century in Classical Hollywood Cinema.” I had gone to hear Mary Trouille’s paper on law and custom in marriage in France, and since there were so few people in the room didn’t have the nerve to scoot out after she finished. I should have. There followed two graduate student papers, one of which was silly (about how one should pity Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility); earlier I had scooted out from a crowded Clarissa session to hear a paper that wasn’t worth it after all, and then found I had no seat when I returned so I did stay. It’s so difficult to guess what is best to do. I am learning that not only are the sessions with respected or “big” people crowded because they are semi-stars, but because often such experienced people do give better papers.
One of the themes of Mayer’s paper (told me by hearsay, i.e., someone who was there) was one found in all the papers Prof Spielmann chose: what do these films tell us about our ideas of the 18th century & their queens, & how do these reflect our own concerns today. In the first session run by Guy Spielman two of the speakers brought out how not only films about Antoinette but modern historical fiction and good or intelligent biographies about her & other famous 18th century figures are really dramatized modern depictions of sexuality, sometimes heterosexual (Zweig for example), sometimes more lesbian covertly (e.g., Chantal Thomas’s Adieux a la Reine).
Petit Trianon in Marie Antoinette’s garden
Ellen
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Posted by: Ellen
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