I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know who took these pictures. Anybody here know? They're all serious, seemingly 0ff-the cuff pictures of literary people from the 50s. Maybe the John Houston picture above was taken a little earlier, I'm not sure. Click to enlarge.
It's funny that the intellectuals of that era preferred raggedy, hazy, snapshot-type pictures like this one (above) of Sartre . My guess is that a formal picture, taken with a view camera and lights, was considered bourgeois. I think it still is some circles. I like both kinds myself.
Here's a picture of Edith Piaff who's one of my favorite singers. She has a tragic face which is appropriate for someone who sings so often about love gone awry.
But love gone awry or no, intellectuals were expected to have tragic faces. My guess is that they wanted to convey how difficult it was to live in a society dominated by the man. The fact that they lived in a liberal democracy with universal education and a standard of living unmatched in history made no difference. Their job was to convey great suffering and inner anguish.
This (above) is Becket, a playwright that I find unreadable. I forgive him though because his face is a gift to caricaturists everywhere.
I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know who took these pictures. Anybody here know? They're all serious, seemingly 0ff-the cuff pictures of literary people from the 50s. Maybe the John Houston picture above was taken a little earlier, I'm not sure. Click to enlarge.
It's funny that the intellectuals of that era preferred raggedy, hazy, snapshot-type pictures like this one (above) of Sartre . My guess is that a formal picture, taken with a view camera and lights, was considered bourgeois. I think it still is some circles. I like both kinds myself.
Here's a picture of Edith Piaff who's one of my favorite singers. She has a tragic face which is appropriate for someone who sings so often about love gone awry.
But love gone awry or no, intellectuals were expected to have tragic faces. My guess is that they wanted to convey how difficult it was to live in a society dominated by the man. The fact that they lived in a liberal democracy with universal education and a standard of living unmatched in history made no difference. Their job was to convey great suffering and inner anguish.
This (above) is Becket, a playwright that I find unreadable. I forgive him though because his face is a gift to caricaturists everywhere. 
22 comments:
Ha! I can't read Becket either! Not for beans!
Reading Beckett is a bit hard, I only got halfway through Watt. That title is deliberate! But the half I read had some very funny though excruciatingly painful passages. The business with the dog, too complicated to summarise.
Watching Beckett is easier, and in parts very funny, I think. Endgame, with the parents kept in bins, and the newspaper ads read out in Happy Days, the banana addiction in Krapp's Last Tape.
My friends Stephen Walsh and the late Brian O'Toole did a comic strip sitcom about Beckett and James Joyce sharing a flat, which is on my site here.
at least a few of those are by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He's a real genious!
The one of Sartre is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my idols. He was a master of timing, knowing at just which split-second he should press that little button. The result was his trademark look of unrehearsed spontaneous realism. And Eddie, you are so right about intellectuals being continually depressed and angry. They still are. After all, the world keeps ignoring their advice -- and getting along fine without it!
I think the second to last photo is Alberto Giacometti; Bresson photographed him alot.
"Waiting For Godot" isn't unreadable! It's a tribute to Laurel & Hardy. (In Beckett's "Watt", an onstage character refers to a healthy shrub as a "hardy laurel".)
"Godot" also references Buster Keaton. (Keaton appeared in an obscure talkie in 1949 called "The Loveable Cheat", in which a character waits for his boss, who never appears. The boss character is named "Godot" in the film.)
Beckett revered slapstick comics, even if it could be argued that he didn't understand them - as anyone who's seen "Film" could have guessed.
Eddie, I'm surprised you dislike Beckett so much. His dramas have a lot in common with cartoons. Every single word, image and movement in a Beckett play is very deliberately thought out - there is nothing random about them, they all have a greater meaning in regards to the play as a whole, much like every frame of a cartoon is significant, and is carefully placed by the animators in order to develop the greatest meaning.
The issue many people have reading Beckett, I imagine, is that he is very much concerned with the inability of words to properly convey the human experience, the frustrations we feel when we realize that, even though words rarely work in the way we want them to, they are still our most-used tool of expression and understanding. Because of this, language plays a very different role in his dramas.
And, as a person who is much endeared with films and comedy of old, you should know, Eddie, that almost all of the humor in Beckett's works comes from Marx Brothers films. The hat-switching scene in Duck Soup where Harpo, Chico and the lemonade vendor (played fantastically by Edgar "Slow Burn" Kennedy) is repeated almost exactly in "Waiting for Godot". And that's just the tip of the iceburg.
Well taking the fun out of life is a serious business, they sure did practice what they preached
Kellie, Mike, Anon: (Groan!)I'm afraid Beckett's use of classic comedy references doesn't make the man more appealing to me. Since so many people recommend him I'll take another look next time I'm in the bookstore, but I'm not optimistic about the outcome.
I do like some of Joyce, but only in small doses, read by a native speaker.
Brad, Lester: Bresson! That sounds right! And Giacometti, that must be right because I saw a picture of him once that looked a little like this one. Thanks much!
Woody Allen once cited the Marx Bros and George S. Kaufman as his main influences (back when he was still funny), as well. Beckett was equally influenced by the same sources but his stuff came out sorely lacking entertainment value. To entertain an audience, it was long believed by academia, would be selling out, and selling out, as recently as thirty years ago, was thought to be a bad thing. Today people everywhere are lining up to sell out. Were Beckett active today he'd be on the American Idol jury, about as funny as the other judges but with a killer vocabulary.
I think that absurdism contemplating the abyss etc can be great when applied to comedy like cook and the pythons did
Whit: Well said!
academics hate comedy, cartoonists like don martin and looney tunes are dismissed as kids stuff but they go nuts over the "postmodern genius" of magritte parodies
Maybe Beckett would be more palatable if you thought of him in this way, Eddie. Consider "Duck Amuck" by the fabulous Chuck Jones. There is little or no plot; plot is irrelevant - the key to the humor and the "entertainment" was to consider the medium of animation and the things that the animator does. What can they do, what can they not do, how do they do it; essentially, what the limitations and what do we typically think of when we label soemthing as a "cartoon". It calls attention to the medium as a whole when Daffy gets changed and morphed and warped into whatever persona or shape Bugs wants, but we still recognize him as Daffy Duck. It also throws the dynamic of watcher/watched or audience/participant into question.
Many of Beckett's plays had a lot to do with calling attention to the nature of the medium of theater. In "Waiting for Godot", Estragon leaves his boots outside the curtain during the intermission. Vladimir acknowledges that he leaves the theater space to go down the hall and urinate in the backstage bathroom. Vladimir also frequently breaks the fourth wall and comment on the quality of the people he sees watching him in the audience.
Beckett isn't for everyone, and I'm not going to ridicule or condescend and think that people who don't understand him or like him are ignorant. It's just something you have to dedicate yourself to, in order to fully wrap your head around it.
So that's what Beckett looks like! I haven't read a whole lot of Beckett, but what I've read I've really enjoyed.
Eddie, I read this post this morning and was thinking about it while I was running this afternoon, and I think it gave me an idea for some kinda short story, (not to say I'm much of an author or anything.) It's about two guys who are taking the bus downtown one day. One of the two is a poet, and the other is a cartoonist. They both happen to sit across from each other at the back of the bus, no idea who the other is, and they're just sitting there waiting for their stop, when *WHAM*, the bus gets smashed in by a truck. Consequently, these two guys are the only two to survive, but they both have near death experiences. Now, while in this state, they both happen to see the same thing: the whole of human history played back right in front of their eyes. Just as the vision ends, both guys happen to wake up at the exact same time in the hospital. The poet, overwhelmed with pity, begins to weep, cries for the repeated follies and mistakes of mankind, just streaming forth tears from the anguish of it. But the cartoonist, though he saw everything the poet saw, can't help but laugh, laugh til he's horse and red in the face, laugh til there's no air left in his lungs. And he grabs a pencil from a nurse and snatches a scrap of paper, and he starts to draw wildly, caricature everybody he sees around him, and he can't help it, he just has to. Anyway, the poet ends up being hailed as genius while the cartoonist ends up being thrown in an asylum. I guess it's a kind of analogy. I wouldn't even be typing it if I wasn't a little bit sauced right now, but I hope it gets my point across.
And Eddie, you are so right about intellectuals being continually depressed and angry. They still are. After all, the world keeps ignoring their advice -- and getting along fine without it!
Getting along for sure, but "fine" in this context is hyperbole. Trying to convince the well-fed of this, for whom everything is relatively "fine" is where the depression and anger comes from.
Some highbrows think there's too much slapstick in Beckett. When Harold Pinter performed Beckett's play 'Krapp's Last Tape' recently, he refused to do the business with the bananas. There's a telling irony in a playwright like Pinter refusing to follow another playwright's stage directions.
I have yet to see a film with a Pinter screenplay that had any fun or energy at all.
Kellie: I agree. I'm not a fan of Pinter.
I also used to dislike Tom Stoppard but he redeemed himself by writing "Shakespeare in Love," which had me in tears when I left the theater.
Bob: Ha! An interesting point! Poets are too ready to hit the sad note! Why are there so few happy poems?
Years ago I saw THE CARETAKER with Gary Sinise at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. It's my only Pinter experience, but it was excellent. Whatever odd quality is in Pinter, they nailed it.
i saw a movie about Piaf. She had a very tragic life.
beautiful voice though!
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