ABOUT "PSYCHO"

In 1998 Gus Van Sant did a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho," which was done in 1960. It was a pretty courageous thing to do, and I for one am glad he did it. Poor Van Sant suffered from the comparison, and it probably hurt his career, but I envy him for the lessons he must have learned, and I'm grateful for the light he was able to shine on the original.

Van Sant's version really underlined the importance of casting in the earlier film. Janet Leigh (above) has an arresting face that seems to reveal everything that's going on in her soul.  Hitchcock thought of her character as "bourgeois," but Leigh adds dignity and gravity to it, so that we care about what happens to her.  I love the throaty voice she has here. I heard that he looped all her dialogue to make sure that quality came through.

Here (above) she's being taunted by a flock of unearthly white car demons. She's only just stolen the money and already Hell is opening up behind her. Hitchcock believes that you should never flirt with evil. Doing so puts you on the radar of a frightening supernatural netherworld.

This long road sequence (above) is the best thing in the film for me, even better than the famous shower sequence. Hitchcock believes in the importance of mise-en-scene, where script and characters are less important than visuals, editing and sound in conveying deep meaning.  He strives to get effects through pure film.

Hitchcock said the shower scene (above) was the most important thing in the film for him. Every thing else in the story was there to lead up to it or take us out of it. Fascinating!

That's how I've done storyboards over the years. I search the script for the most important sequence in the film, the one the audience is likely to remember...the thing the story is actually about...and I'll board that first, giving it the star treatment. Everything else in the story is just what leads into that and out of that, and is subordinate (still creative, hopefully, just subordinate).

Anne Heche (above) played Janet Leigh's character in the remake. Heche made bad choices here. Her character has no gravity, no depth. You don't care what happens to her. She's said to have asked Van Sant if she could play the character as being amoral. Baaaad idea! A situation where a good person steals money is full of potential for inner conflict. An amoral person does the same thing and it's just an event.

By the way, who did the sucky lighting (above) in the Van Sant film?  Look how flat and unappealing it is in black and white. Compare it to the frame grab of Janet Leigh.

My friend Chris had an interesting observation about the Van Sant film. He said Heche doesn't seem to care deeply about the guy she's with (above) in the opening scenes. I guess Van Sant thought that detachment would make her appear more modern. But if that's the case, then why would she go to all the trouble of stealing money so they could be together? It doesn't make sense.

Hitchcock's lovers were also a bit detached, but only enough to remind us, noir style, that they were trapped in some situation larger than themselves. We never doubted their affection for each other.

And what's with the candy color anne Heche is wearing?




Here's Hitch in the original trailer for the 1960 film. I kinda like it.

ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING: MYSTERY WRITER

No, this house (above) isn't from one of Elisabeth Holding's film adaptions, it's from "House on Telegraph Hill," which has nothing to do with Holding. I include it because so many of Holding's stories take place, "Jane Eyre"-like, in large, spooky houses. It seemed like the right way to illustrate an article about one of the queens of 30s and 40s noir, the writer Raymond Chandler called the best suspense writer he knew of....Elisabeth Holding.

You have to read this author! I've read four of her books so far, each one a gem. If you only have time for two, start with "The Blank Wall," then move on to "Miasma." Holding is a master of surprise. Even as you read these books you'll find yourself asking again and again how she manages to keep the suspense so intense. I think I know the answer, and I'm dying to tell you what it is, but if I do it'll ruin the stories for you.

BTW, I read most of these stories in old library volumes, some of them first editions. The type from the 30s and 40s was elegant, easy to read, and beautifully spaced on the page. The paper was thick and pulpy, and had a nice smell...something like old construction paper. The books felt like the products of craftsmen. They felt good in my hands.

On the other hand, you could make a good case for owning the recent reprints. The new paperbacks are nicely laid out, and you usually get two books for the price of one. If you're a student of writing you'll want to own them so you can underline and make notes about the technique.

 

PUPPET MADNESS!!!!!!!

Steve Worth recently turned me on to Punch and Judy, and now I'm a big fan. But why watch puppets when you can be a puppet? I envy the puppet life where you get to beat up your friends and show off in costumes that you could never afford if they were real size. No doubt about it, puppets know how to live!

I'm leaving the world of humans and bailing out into felt...well, for a short time I am. Henceforth (or hence-a-few-weeks-forth) you'll find me on this site, acting out Uncle Eddie's characters as puppets on the stage of Theory Theater. If I'm not there you'll probably find me crumpled up on the bottom of the toy box.

BTW: You can read about Steve's puppet theories on the ASIFA-Hollywood Archive site, 9/29/10 entry:

http://www.animationarchive.org/

P.S. ...a nod to Mike F., another Punch and Judy fan of note.

Also BTW: YouTube informed me that Sony requires them to take down my H. P. Lovecraft reading from 6/11/2008. For those who haven't seen it, here's (below) one last chance. It's a little slow getting started, sorry about that, but the whole thing only lasts a few minutes, and I kinda like the peanut butter action. Not everybody did, though. A commenter said he wished he could stuff the peanut butter up my...well, you know.

ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Above, that's a dragon...though it's a little hard to see.

While researching Uccello and the Renaissance for my previous post, I came across a lot of pictures of St. George and the Dragon. I was surprised to find that most artists had trouble with it. You'd think that after painting all those nativity scenes, they'd have been chomping at the bit to try an adventure theme, and maybe they were, but not this particular one. They just couldn't get a handle on it. Odd, isn't? I thought it might be fun to see if we could figure out why.

Above are modern depictions of the famous fight. Nowadays we seem to take a Marvel comics or UFC view of it. That's okay, but I suspect there was a lot of subtext in the original stories, and I don't see any of that here.

A lot of pictures depict the dragon as being small (above), about the size of a puma. That's odd. I'd have thought they'd want a creature as big as a T-Rex.  Maybe the dragon was supposed to be related to the normal-sized serpent that tempted Eve. Maybe the beast was small to focus our attention on St. George, and what he represented.

Big creatures (above) don't work. The idea that a knight could kill a creature bigger than a house is just too implausible. 

Here's (above) a 19th Century picture showing St. George fighting a creature that's the same size as a Komodo Dragon. George is so much bigger...you almost feel sorry for the poor animal. 

We see the girl who was being saved. She appears almost as big as George, even though she's in the background. I'll bet the client insisted on that. 

Here's a modern gold sovereign that portrays the fight as a Greek myth. You have to admit that the story does feel Greek and no doubt some Renaissance artists treated it that way....

 ...but that (above) seems to trivialize it. Making St. George out to be a Greek hero like Hercules can't be right.

Even when Rubens does it....and does it impressively....the idea of treating St. George exclusively as a hero seems lacking.

Some artists tried to improve on the story. Here (above) the knight, the horse and the dragon all appear to be dead. They gave it their all, and this is the tragic aftermath.  Nice, but it's a big deviation.

Above, the work by the only artist who got it right, in my opinion....Raphael. Only he realized that St. George was a story about hope.

That's a virtue that you can only understand when facing adversity. I'll bet the story originated in the Dark Ages when warlords ravaged Europe and a lot of ordinary people must have wondered if life was worth living. From the pulpits came the admonition to hope. Despair was labled an unforgivable sin. St. George would have been a symbol of the fight that has to be waged against barbarism in the outside world, and a symbol for the fight against despair in the inside world. Heroism, yes, but in the service of hope.

Raphael's style was perfect  for this. A too realistic picture would have turned the fight into an adventure. The iconic black knight on a white horse fighting a black dragon puts it squarely in the realm of hyper reality and myth in the grand style. It fires our imaginations. It makes us want to be brave like the figure in the picture.

PAOLO UCCELLO (1397-1475)

I'm always handy with a tip for a present, especially if the receiver is artsy fartsy, like I am. Well, here's my latest tip,  a reproduction of of one of my favorite paintings (above): Uccello's "Hunt in the Forest" (click to enlarge).

Acording to my net sources, what we know about Uccello comes mostly from Vasari. The painter's described as an amiable recluse with one foot in the old Gothic style and one foot solidly in the Renaissance. He loved the new ideas about perspective, but he also loved the flat, medieval look with it's  patterns and pageantry.

In the end he eclectically combined every influence that interested him, regardless of how out of sync he appeared to others. He paid the price, though. Internet biographies differ about his influence, but most say that no other Renaissance painter appears to have been directly influenced by him. When his time was up, he simply slipped out of history til he was rediscovered in the 19th Century. 

I love the frantic energy in this picture (above), the menacing widescreen forest, and the composition which is simultaneously chaotic and ordered, funny and frightening. The aristocrats and their dogs are at the threshold of a great mystery, but they're so keyed up that they don't seem to notice. There's an air of pageantry about it. The people in their finery are giddy with the excitement of it all, but how will it end? Nobody knows.

Here's a portion of another favorite, "The Battle of San Ramone." It makes a powerful argument for a decorative approach to the depiction of historical events. The lances are great, as are the gold balls (helmets?) that seem to float in the sky. Kandinsky used balls like that in some of his representational pictures. Jack Kirby was partial to them. Now I'm wondering if my own drawings are in need of gold balls.

Incidentally, how do you like the linoleum surface on the ground? I imagine it's there to heighten the perspective.

Here's (above) another portion of the same picture. Why is the face of the Prince so ill-defined? My guess is that Uccello had trouble with realistic human faces, but maybe it's the result of physical damage to the painting.

How do you like the drybrushed cerulean blue on the horse?

Here's (above) Uccello's famous stained glass window showing the Resurrection of Christ. Uccello's discomfort with the human form actually worked for him here. The lack of detail makes Christ's figure seem light and airy. I can only imagine how heavy stain glass windows must have been...I mean, they're made of thick glass and lead...but the whole window seems as light and graceful as a feather here. Once again there's the trappings of pageantry, and the detailed Celtic-type frame reminds us of the power and fun of tradition.

If you buy a poster of this glass window, I recommend that the image be no bigger than a foot long. It should be able to sit modestly, pinned on a cork board, sans frame.

BTW: I intended to link to a site where you could buy these posters, but the reproductions I saw looked horrible. I didn't visit all the possible poster sites, though. Maybe you'll have luck where I didn't.

MORE ABOUT THE GOLDEN AGE OF NEWSPAPER COMICS

Some of what I have to say here I've said before, but great truths bear repeating. Besides, this gives me an excuse to put up some killer drawings. All the artwork is from the period 1900-1910, my favorite decade for newspaper comics. Opper (above) did some of his best work then, and so did Herriman, Goldberg, F. W. Marriner, and Fenninger.

Some modern comics fans don't like Opper because they think his drawing style was primitive. That's an odd thing to say. Compared to what's around now (above), Opper was Michelangelo.

Besides, Opper was an important influence on artists like F. W. Marriner (above) who were indisputably killer draftsmen. How do you like Marriner's sketch of the teacher above?

  The pre-Krazy Kat Herriman (above) flourished during this time. Why Herriman ever did Krazy Kat, I'll never know. It was a come-down for him.

Above, more Herriman. What a guy!

I wish I'd copied down the name of this strip (above) and the artist. Who drew it? Was it one of the Felix artists, Sullivan or Messmer? You can see how newspaper strips influenced animated cartoons. You can also see the Opper influence.

 I love the weird, slapstick stories in the old newspaper strips. Here's one (above) of a vengeful goat who sells who sells his enemy's babies to a wandering Italian guy. The mother sees what's going on and delivers a big bear bite to the guy's side. 

Once again, you can see the Opper influence. 

I'm amazed that American newspapers were able to lure fine German artists like Lionel Fenninger (above) over here (actually Fenninger had a complicated lineage...see Norman's comment on this in the comments section). Germany had a wonderful crop of funny artists in this period, and we managed to bring a lot of them over here. 

Maybe that brain drain was catastrophic for Germany. For comparison, imagine that another country like Japan managed to lure away all our great jazz musicians at the start of the Jazz Age. Imagine that China had lured away Elvis and Chuck Berry, and all the great Rock and Roll musicians when Rock and Roll was just starting. 

Then again, Germany was in a mood to be serious in those times. If the funny artists stayed home they might have been ineffectual.

Milt Gross (above) was, of course, from the 30s. I include him here because he carried the cartoony, slapstick, anything-for-a-gag sensibility of the 1910s right into his own era, and he made it work. Don Martin had a lot of that sensibility. 

Current newspaper cartoons are too introverted, too smug, too tiny, too politically correct. I wish they were more outgoing, more...more noisy.

BTW, most of the pictures here are from Allan Holtz's superb blog, "Stripper's Guide," link in the sidebar.

Holy Cow! Where is everybody!? I think I'll take advantage of the lull to give myself a little vacation. I'll be back Wednesday, Oct.6! See ya then!