even a pencil has fear to

I was on amazon.com today (looking for the Adam West Batman TV show on DVD, which isn’t out yet, but is coming! Soon I hope, but as soon as it does, I will know because I told Amazon to alert me) and came up this little gem of a book, which my grandparents had and I used to read when I went to visit them.

In fact, my earliest memories of Little Women come from this book, which I’m sure my grandmother intended, or at least hoped, would teach me to be a thankful, kind, sharing person (these are, if I remember correctly the themes Little Women is boiled down to for the purposes of this little book). But what surprised me the most about this, and other Little Women books that focus on one girl or on aspect of the girl’s lives, is that they are all credited to Louisa May Alcott. There’s a pretty prominent editor credit, but even though probably nothing in these versions come directly from Little Women, the idea presented is that this is, in essence, what Alcott wanted us to take away from the book.

I watched the 1994 version of Little Women Friday afternoon, since I recently found it in the 5 dollar bin at Wal-Mart and bought it. I first saw this movie when I was nine with my mother when it first came out. We went, not because I asked to, but because she wanted me to go with her in what, I suppose, was intended to be a mother-daughter bonding activity. I remember this outing for a number of reasons, partially because many of the film’s scenes have stuck with me ever since then and because it’s the first time I can remember desperately wanting to hide something I felt from my mother. Needless to say, the outing probably didn’t come out quite as she intended. I was surprised at how many of the film’s moments I remembered (Amy and her limes, Laurie coming out of his hiding spot, Jo cutting her hair, both times Beth’s on her death bed, Amy’s plunge into the ice) as well as how those scenes that either scared the crap out of me or really resounded with me didn’t this time around. When I was nine, I was so distressed at Beth’s first “dying” scene I convinced my mother that I absolutely had to leave the theater to go to the bathroom (she wasn’t too happy about leaving the theater as I recall). I tried this the second time around, but to no avail. So, my nine year-old self sat next to my mom, biting my lip hard to keep from crying because I was too embarrassed to tell her watching Beth die really upset me. Maybe, this time around, because I knew it was coming it wasn’t as traumatic. Or maybe its because I’m older and have experienced the death of a family member, or maybe its because I can better separate fiction and reality. But what I think it really is, is that when I was nine I identified most closely with Beth. Like Beth, I played the piano, tried to help people when I could, liked babies (fat lot of good that does Beth!), and was often painfully shy. Watching the movie this time, I found it hard to identify with anyone but Jo, not because she’s the type of woman I have grown into, but because she’s the girl the film highlights by virtue of giving her the strongest voice and having her narrate the film. The other girls took a backseat to Jo, and to my much older eyes, had less developed, more stereotypical, flat characters. Despite that, give Kirsten Dunst a hand, she’s a fabulous Amy.

Oh, one more thing, when I first watched Little Women I told my mom, “Wow, they must have to have waited a long time for all of Jo’s hair to grow back!” She told me “No, they probably just did all the scenes with her long hair first.” I was shocked they didn’t make a film in the right order. How would they know what’s going on! So, like the book does for so many, this movie represents a coming of age for me. I wonder if the fact that my growing up is encompassed and wrapped up in the viewing of a movie says something about our culture.

I wanted to speak in defense of Meg, again, because I don’t think I fully expressed (or had realized) my thoughts on the matter in class, and because I feel Meg needs a little bit more defending. I’ll preface by saying this entry will basically be me looking at my personal life as a lens for Meg, which make take my argument down a little on the intellectual scale, but will, I think, put Meg in a more here-and-now human context.

I’m getting married this summer, which I suppose makes me identify with Meg strongly, which makes me feel I have some insight into what her inner life would have been like. While I’m excited about getting married, there are certain things I will be giving up, like grad school. While I have teetered on the fence about whether grad school is really the environment for me, the more I work to narrow my interests, the more I think I could be successful there, and the more I think I would enjoy it. Alas, where we’ll be living doesn’t have a grad school with appropriate programs in commuting distance. How does this relate to Meg? Well, Meg’s no dummy, obviously, as she serves as a governess. Not to mention in her day-to-day interactions with Jo she is receiving intellectual stimulation and the ability to discuss ideas and philosophies with someone else. While this may still be possible in her married life, the form it takes will be drastically different, and I think she must have struggled with the idea of loosing this outlet for her intellect.

I also, occasionally, feel I will be loosing a certain amount of my independence. I don’t mean independence in the sense of physical freedom, more in the idea that I have to make decisions for more than one person, but also that I won’t get a chance to see if I’m truly capable of taking care of myself, paying bills, ect. While I’m confident I can, part of me would really like to be positive. I suppose this goes back to longing both for independence and family and the idea you can never truly have both. I think Meg would have felt this tension particularly when Jo went off to New York to live on her own and becomes quite successful. I believe she would have questions her ability to succeed and would have wished she could have a chance to see if she could do the same.

Finally, one of the deepest fears I imagine Meg had was that her children wouldn’t see her as intellectual. I too fear this, because I have never thought of my mother in this way. While my mother’s quite smart (she taught advanced math during my formative years) I don’t think she ever engaged in my intellectual development the same way my father did. My father tried to guide my reading and expose me to new ideas and viewpoints and discuss these ideas with me, while my mother was concerned with teaching me things like how to cook or fold clothes. There’s nothing wrong with this and just happens to be the way roles in my family fell as my mother is exceptionally good and overseeing these types of things (not to mention she’s a fabulous cook!), but I think there’s a deeper problem, that it is extremely difficult to view someone who cooks your meals and cleans up after you as having a rich intellectual life. That my (future) children might not see this in me terrifies me, and it must have been so for Meg.

So, I say, let’s not discount the decisions and sacrifices Meg must have made to choose marriage and the domestic life. Because I strongly believe she choose it. She might not have had many choices, but she did have a choice (Jo, after all, had a choice, which seems evidence enough that Meg did as well), but I don’t think her decision was an easy or clear-cut one at all.

On Saturday I went into DC and visited the Library of Congress. I was a bit disappointed I didn’t have a readers card to access the reading rooms (AMAZING!) and that they didn’t have their “American Treasures” exhibit open (apparently they had lent a lot of things to the Ford Theater for their anniversary celebration of Shakespeare), but I did get to see the Miens Bible (what is supposedly the last handwritten Bible) and the Guttenberg Bible as well as an exhibit called “Cartoon America.” I was surprised to find a comic called Secret Agent X-9, written by Dashiell Hammett. So of course, I had to take a picture to post to my blog! To make viewing a bit easier, I’ve broken the strip down into three images. I’ve also transcribed what the explanation plate beside it said:

In this airplane sequence the title character, Special Agent X-9, stands at the cockpit aiming his machine gun at a plane carrying “The Mask.” Dashiell Hammett wrote the script and Alex Raymond (1906-1956) drew the hard-boiled detective comic strip. Hammett left after writing four stories, and Raymond too, stopped drawing the strip to devote his time to Flash Gordon. Raymond transformed the art of the comic strip from tight pen-and-ink drawing to loose dry brush strokes to create a sense of dynamic action. He was drawing his strip about a scientific detective, Rip Kirby, when he died in an automobile accident. (The strip was published December 7, 1934)

I think what’s great about this strip is that you can tell its done in Hammett’s style; the spars prose and coloring really suits him. I also love the progression in the framing of the panels. First, we have a fairly close, tight shot, packed with a lot of people and a good amount of things going on. But, this is scene is all about setting up the story. Next, the scene becomes a bit simpler, focusing on just two characters with a third, threatening object in the background. Here we get a slight sense of upward motion as the scene builds, especially with Raymond’s use of quick, blurred lines in the body of the plane. Finally, we reach the strip’s climax, with a plane literally shooting upwards, mimicking the drastic upward motion of the end of Hammett’s paragraphs, where the most important and thrilling piece of information is revealed or action takes place. So, like the film adaptations and the novel, the comic strip has the same rising action “graph.”

For comparison, I’ve included a 1941 strip; a strip from after the time Hammett stopped writing the story lines. Here we see more of the romance of the strip, but we see the narration seems to have strayed slightly from what was characteristic of Hammett.

I also went to the National Portrait Gallery, where a portrait of Hammett was included in their “Twentieth Century Americans” exhibit. Alas, then I walked across the street to the Spy Museum where I didn’t see anything relevant to Hammett. Though maybe I didn’t look hard enough – they have a LOT of cool spy things!

Very dapper Dashiell.

After today’s class, I thought it might not be a bad a idea to list and define some “key” terms in film studies; I thought it would be easier if we had a list of a few important things in one place so when ideas like cut, mise-en-scene and camera angles come up, we’d have some of those already defined. Most of these terms come from Understanding Films which is a highly useful film studies book if anyone is interested in a little background reading.

Shot — an unedited strip of film, continuous from the time the camera starts to when it stops filming
Frame — the dividing line between edges of screen image and the enclosing darkness of the theater. Also a single photo from a filmstrip
Mise-en-Scene — the arrangement of objects in space, the art of the long and extreme long shot.
Dominate Contrast — the area of an image that immediately attracts our attention because of conspicuous and compelling contrast (note: this is often easier to see when the image is turned upside down. Try it, its cool!)
Bird’s Eye — camera angle where the camera is directly overhead, giving the audience and “bird’s eye view”
High Angle — camera placed on a crane to give the audience a greater overview. This angle seems to slow movement down and reduce subject importance.
Eye-Level camera placed approximately 5 to 6 feet from the ground, the eye-level of an average-height person. This presents all characters on an “even plane” and allows the audience to make their minds up about the characters on their own.
Low Angle — camera placed on the floor, or some other low point, and angled upwards. Seems to speed up motion, give a sense of confusion and minimize the environment while heightening subject importance.
Oblique Angle — a lateral camera tilt which suggests tension, transition and impending movement.

So those are my “important” terms, which may or may not play out in this class, but they’re certainly interesting things to notice in any film! Also, another interesting fact I came across recently is that they human eye can only see and process 8 elements at a time, which would explain why we often have to watch a film more than once to see find every meaningful thing the director has packed in there.

I wanted to add a bit to the class discussion from Friday about the different “feels” of Yojimbo and The Glass Key. Dr. Campbell told us “feel” didn’t quite encapsulate what we were trying to articulate, and I’d like to propose an alternate word – aesthetic. According to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), when used as an adjective, aesthetic describes a sensuous perception. So the way we perceive things, the sense we get about the story, changes with the film. The Glass Key fills the plot lines of the novel, but Yojimbo gives us more the novel’s aesthetic, if not the same plot structure and events. Interestingly, an alternate definition of aesthetic is, (noun) “of or pertaining to a late nineteenth-century movement in England of artists and writers who advocated a doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake.’” Now, I know neither film was made in 19th century England, but I do think this gives us a window of insight. We have established that Yojimbo is a much more “self-conscious” film, one that wants to call attention to the fact it is an art form rather than pretending to portray reality. This is, at least it is my understanding, of the concept of “art for art’s sake.” So, perhaps it is better to say that Yojimnbo captures the aesthetic of Hammett’s Glass Key, while the film The Glass Key, captures more of its plot structure.

I want to talk a bit more about adaptations, but I’m late for a phone date, so that will have to wait ‘till tomorrow. Also, we haven’t really talked about Miller’s Crossing in class yet, so I’d like to wait and see if my ideas on adaptations will pan out after we discuss the film in more detail.

I wanted to talk a little bit about what Kurosawa is doing with framing in Yojimbo, particularly in the scene where Sanjuro has killed the six men protecting Nui and is destroying the house. This comes, as we all remember, directly before Sanjuro seems to loose control over the game he’s playing and is beat up and nearly killed by Ushitora’s men.

So first,

Sanjuro is shown at the top of the frame in a full shot.

Then,

he moves to the middle of the frame.

Sanjuro stays in the middle of the frame for a bit longer,

until finally,

his back is to us and he is at the very bottom of the frame.
Traditionally in film, characters at the bottom of a frame are powerless or vulnerable. Kurosawa ends this scene with Sanjuro at the bottome of the frame, showing the viewer that Sanjuro’s actions will lead to his subjugation to Ushitora, if only for a little while.

Ah, I have nothing very smart, witty, or intellectual to say in this post. Its possible what I say will not even anything remotely relevant to our study of Yojimbo, but I just figured out how to embed videos into my blog, and I’m eager to use my new talent (not that its difficult to do, but I’m still excited about it).

I found this nice little clip from the end of the film and thought I’d share it, mostly because I like it. One of the things I think is interesting about it is the way the smoke obscures our “hero” as he walks towards his enemies. I think this is representative of how little we know of him as well as how he is able to obscure his true motives after arriving in the town.

This brings me to a thought I had earlier today about this movies relation to The Glass Key. At first, I wondered what the relation between the book and this film could possibly be. After doing some online research, I discovered that this film might be a much closer adaptation of another of Hammett’s novels, Red Harvest. The plot, which involved a detective who watches a town slowly destroy itself, seems to fit this film much better, but I still think there are some similarities to The Glass Key. The film seems to draw out the secrecy of Ned Beaumont; just as we never know Ned, we never really know the bodyguard. We discussed in class how we could never really know what Ned was thinking or what his motivations were, and we see that much more with the bodyguard than we did with Ed. Yojimbo also highlights Ned’s more negative characteristics, while those were only touched on with Ed during his visit to the Matthews’. Yojimbo also tries to give the viewer a fuller picture of Ned/Ed/the bodyguard by portraying him as a flawed character, but one who tries to redeem himself by doing good. I suppose The Glass Key attempts to do this as well with the Janet storyline, but I think Yojimbo accomplishes this much more effectively.