Return to Dunsinane

Fiona wanted to do a direct comparison between Joel Coen’s and Roman Polanski’s THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, so we ran the Criterion Blu of the latter, and my opinion of it rose considerably. (The picture upgrade on that disc, over the DVD my frame-grabs are from, is massive: Gilbert Taylor, who had previously shot REPULSION, was one of Polanski’s finest collaborators.)

The Coen film is a rather compelling blend of film and theatre — everything it does with its visual approach seems to me just right, building on Olivier’s Shakespeare films and Welles and Kurosawa. It does take some textual hints from Polanski and Tynan’s adaptation, building on the idea of Ross as a schemer and traitor to both sides, something not specified in Shakespeare but which makes sense and allows him to grow from a Basil Exposition kind of attendant lord into a proper dimensional character.

Polanski does something very literal, very blunt — he decides to make Dark Age Scotland as visceral and real as he can. Olivier had considered doing this for HENRY V but worried that the audience would say, “Okay, so that’s a tree and that’s a house and that’s a horse… why is everyone talking so funny?” Polanski’s Horrible Histories visualisation begs that question very urgently indeed, and also creates unnecessary problems out of the asides and soliloquies. Can Macbeth talk to the camera/audience, and if not, what does he do instead.

In fact, we see in ALFIE that an actor can do asides in an otherwise naturalistic film, and it’s a device I’d like to see tried more. (It would have been an absolutely natural thing to try in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, frinstance) Polanski has Jon Finch sometimes do quite long internal monologues, making faces to try to match his dubbed-on thoughts, something I never find satisfying or engaging. More successful, because more playful, are the segues from this device into spoken monologue, the character talking to himself like John McClane in DIE HARD (another besieged warrior with marital troubles). Polanski is always keen to credit Olivier as an influence, so I suspect this is borrowed from the similar tricks in HAMLET. But why Polanski didn’t consider using some of that film’s stripped-down theatricality I don’t know. I guess he’s just more of a realist, and not a man of the theatre like Sir Larry.

But rewatching a film is great for seeing past the things that bother you on a first viewing. Polanski’s whole aesthetic may be sort of counter-productive to doing Shakespeare, but he goes at it very enthusiastically indeed, and if the grit and sharpness are an odd fit for the iambic pentameters, they’re surprisingly close to the sharp focus of outright hallucination — Polanski seems to be using his 60s experience of LSD to give us freak-out visions that render Macbeth’s experiences, particularly with the witches, horrifyingly up-close and alarming.

And the casting of young actors, which was absurdly controversial at the time, seems like a no-brainer now. Older actors have more experience of both life and acting and can often do more than the photogenic youngsters. But what they can’t do is BE YOUNG. I think a middle-aged Macbeth could work if you play him as desperately grabbing what seems like his last chance at success, but the whole question of his wanting an heir becomes academic, an anaemic character motivation, if he has a menopausal wife.

I found myself liking Jon Finch’s performance, bad wig aside, more than before. He’s a star who should have been huge, but his biggest roles, this and FRENZY, didn’t do him the most justice, I always felt. His perf in THE FINAL PROGRAMME, on the other hand, MY GOD that is a star turn. But now I think I was too harsh on his Macbeth: there didn’t seem a single point where he didn’t have exactly the right take on the text.

Francesca Annis is also terrific: she seems readily able to seduce Macbeth into his crimes, as opposed to Frances McDormand’s Lady M who essentially bullies her husband forward. The text tells us she has nursed a baby but has no children now, but there seems no reason why she couldn’t be expected to have more kids and so Macbeth can realistically desire to see his children inherit the throne from him.

Annis looks not much like Sharon Tate but I found myself reminded of her a good deal, maybe because I recently saw Tate standing on a castle tower in EYE OF THE DEVIL.

What everyone used to talk about is the violence, which there is a lot of. It’s very matter-of-fact. The men barely react to someone being hanged or bludgeoned to death in front of them, and for the women and kids there’s always bear-baiting. The play is certainly full of mayhem but Shakespeare’s attitude to it is probably a little different — in Shakespearean tragedy, the normal order of things typically goes awry, and you get fathers against sons, eye-gougings, and so on. At the end, typically order is restored and everyone left alive is happy. A bit sad about all the mayhem but happy it’s over. Shakespeare’s politics are roughly speaking conservative — well, he had a monarch to please. Macbeth seems to have been intended to appeal to King James, who was a big believer in witches — a bunch of women in Scotland had just been tortured and killed for supposedly cursing him. Fortunately, there’s a lot more to Shakespeare than his politics.

Well, Polanski seems to see the order of things as continuous violence and chaos, which, given his life experiences is understandable (everyone thinks of the Manson killings here, but the Holocaust is at least as important, and though RP has denied that the film was his direct response to his wife’s death, he’s admitted that the behaviour of Macbeth’s henchman when entering the Macduff family home was based on that of an SS officer he witnessed in occupied Poland. So Duncan’s reign is unspeakably violent and horrible, Macbeth’s is maybe slightly worse, then he’s killed and it looks like the witches are going to recruit another patsy so the cycle of carnage can continue. Joel Coen steals that idea outright for his new film. It’s very modern and very unshakespearean, but like I say, Shakespeare’s politics are kind of his least appealing aspect.

(The biggest exception may be KING LEAR, where the few survivors are so shattered by what they’ve been through (The biggest exception may be KING LEAR, where the few survivors are so shattered by what they’ve been through and seen, none of them have the heart to really take stock of the situation, which seems somehow apocalyptic.)

I’ve written elsewhere about how Polanski films have a tendency to arc back to their own beginnings, swallowing their tails — from TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE through REPULSION, CUL DE SAC, FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, PIRATES. Even if they don’t literally end in the spot they began at, or near it, often the ending is a call-back in some way — CHINATOWN begins with its main title, and ends in Chinatown. It’s a rather despairing vision of the world, where we always end up back where we started only substantially the worse for wear.

Polanski and his co-adaptor, Kenneth Tynan, have not only moved Macbeth’s decapitation from discretely offstage to graphically onscreen, an almost essential change which nearly every filmmaker has followed, varying only in their explicitness, he’s chopped all the summing-up by the survivors which reassures the play’s audience that the line of kings will now continue in a legitimate way. Most other movie adaptations follow the same pattern, based on a reading of the play’s TRUE subject as Macbeth himself, not the crown of Scotland. When he’s dead, it’s mostly over.

One of Polanski’s most brilliant and alarming touches is the aftermath of Finch’s lopping, with his head whooshing about on the end of a pike, and handheld shots that COULD be his point of view, as if consciousness has not quite fled and he has a chance to take in, in a wobbly sort of way, the scene of his death.

At times, the film’s visual ideas clash with the playscript — when the witches say “Hover through the fog and filthy air, before they exeunt, it’s pretty clear Shakespeare’s suggesting they’re flying, as witches are said to do. Here, they just say it, and don’t even waddle off: it seems to be just something witches like saying. (The Coen film has no broomsticks, but strongly implies that the witch/es can turn into crows.) And the fights are terrifically staged by the great Bill Hobbs, but I don’t quite get why Banquo’s injuries should be so different from what the murderers’ describe in their report to Macbeth. Interestingly, when he sees visions of Banquo, some of them accurately show the axe in the back which he has no way of knowing about. But witchcraft can do that.

Deft little additions make Lady M’s swift descent into madness almost TOO gradual. I chatted with Angela Allen, the film’s script supervisor, who spoke somewhat sceptically about Polanski’s temper tantrums and karate chops (he’d had lessons from Bruce Lee and could snap great beams with the edge of his little hand), and while she was full of praise for Annis, she felt Finch knew the performance he WANTED to give, but perhaps couldn’t quite reach. But he’s physical, brooding, handsome, and he can speak the verse. And he probably gets over more of the character’s slow corruption than the other big movie Macs. “Macbeth is a play about the slow decay of the moral sense,” says Ltnt Kinderman in EXORCIST III. But he practically starts off with regicide, regarded as the worst crime possible in Shakespeare’s day. Say rather it’s about guilt, which destroys Lady Macbeth’s sanity and turns her husband, progressively, into a monster. Because one way of dealing with guilt is to deny it, to keep doing the stuff that makes you feel guilty, trying to prove that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not a GOOD way of dealing with it, but it’s quite popular.

Polanski faithfully stages the spectre at the banquet just as the text suggests (Macbeth doesn’t sit because there’s somebody in his chair, but nobody else can see this person…), only adding some weird special effects so that the ghost is differently horrible each time we see it. And our view of it is tied to Macbeth’s — it’s only seen in his POV shots.

(Important to keep things straight — Banquo’s ghost is a manifestation of Macbeth’s guilt, which he’s not emotionally smart enough to process. In the Coen film, the ghost is associated with crows, and this with the witches. This is quite, QUITE wrong.)

Best of all, perhaps, is the witches’ sabbat, a Goyaesque bad trip. The mirrors within mirrors, a giddy fast-motion rush of shots spliced together with artful opticals, perfectly visualises Macbeth’s cry of “Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?”

I’m glad I got over my feeling that Polanski went at this the wrong way. I still think he did, but he went at it so aggressively he basically made it work.

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH stars Jerry Cornelius; Lady Jessica; Judge John Deed; The Bloody Barron; Keats; Adolph Bolm; King Vishtaspa; Engywook; Mr. Tupper; Book Person: Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ (uncredited); and Robin Hood Junior.

Page Seventeen III: The Search for Spock

Seven passages from seven page seventeens from seven books purchased from Edinburgh’s second-hand bookshops, most of them from the all-you-can-eat bookshop on Ferry Road. For the best effect, I suggest reading them all in Noel Coward’s voice.

Some Little Girls lived nearby, and I forced them to act in a tragedy I that I had written, but they were very silly and during the performance forgot their lines and sniggered, so I hit the eldest one on the head with a wooden spade, the whole affair thus ending in tears and a furious quarrel between the mothers involved.

As a result of this unusual posture of my legs, I seemed shorter and my gait was quite changed. For some reason my whole body was slightly inclined to the right side. All I needed was a cane. One was lying near-by so I picked it up although it did not exactly fit the picture of what I had in my mind. Now all I lacked was a quill pen to stick behind my ear or hold in my teeth. I sent a call boy for one and while waiting for his return paced up and down the room, feeling how all the parts of my body, features, facial lines, fell into their proper places and established themselves. After walking around the room two or three times, with an uncertain, uneven gait I glanced in the mirror and did not recognize myself. Since I had looked in it the last time a fresh transformation had taken place in me.

‘I’m pleased to hear it.’ Jerry’s voice was sardonic as he entered the room rather theatrically and closed the door behind him.

‘That is what we call Forced Acting,’ defined the Director.

‘And how would you know,’ inquired the actress, ‘ with false teeth?’

The Archbishop then enters, and in a speech of paradoxical and somewhat abstract imagery, makes a difficult pronouncement about the human will and its place in the divine pattern of being, what it must suffer and how act ‘that the pattern may subsist’: what Becket says to the Chorus, as their instructor, is said to Becket at the end of the Act by the Fourth Tempter, with a fine dramatic irony; for Becket is to act and suffer, willing both, that the pattern may subsist, yet cannot see (until later when light breaks upon his understanding) how he can do either ‘without perdition’; the advice he has given is turned against him, and both paths before him–acting and suffering–seem to ‘lead to damnation and pride.’ Because the speech is difficult, it seems to need explanation, word by word; and yet, as Dr. Johnson has said, ‘ the easiest word, whatever it be, can never be translated into one more easy.’ It is a difficult thought:

“Well in film you play the theme, and then you play the theme again and then you play the theme and then you play a variation of the theme and then you play the theme . . . “

…said the Actress to the Archbishop.

Present Imperfect by Noel Coward; Building a Character by Constantin Stanislavski; The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock; An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski; Acid Drops by Kenneth Williams; by Nevill Coghill’s introduction to Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot; Michael Kamen quoting Carl Prager in Knowing the Score by David Morgan.

An Odyssey in Pieces #2: The Dawn of Man, Day One

Oh yeah, I was blogging my way through 2001, wasn’t I? Or at least, I said I was. My first post on the matter is here.

How can you have a dawn divided into days one and two? Well, that’s what we’re doing. After all, it’s not a literal dawn, even though there’s literally a shot of the dawn as the caption appears. One of the things I recall about my first ever viewing of the film, aged 11 or so, is that this seemed slightly on the nose. I may have snorted back an inaudible laugh. On the other hand, this vista connects us to the sunrise in space we’ve just seen.

It’s also a day in the life of a tribe of ape-men, subdivided into little blackout sketches. They get up and potter around, rather aimlessly, until one of their number is attacked by a leopard (the life of a caveman is boredom interrupted by flashes of bloody death). Fade-out. They engage in a territorial shouting match with another gang by the waterhole. Fade-out. Night falls and they huddle nervously by the shelter of a cliff. Fade-out.

What do these hirsute ladies and gentlemen eat? We see tapirs foraging fearlessly among them, evidently not regarding themselves as even potential prey. Yet there are a lot of bones about. Maybe leopard leftovers. But the ecology is a little nebulous.

This sequence arguably features the best special effects of the film: I find it impossible to conceive that all the ape-man footage is shot on a front-projection stage with plates of the African desert being shone behind the costumed mimes. And while I know in my heart that the ape-men aren’t real, they’re able to interact with baby chimpanzees without either set of primates looking like impostors. (The little chimps had make-up applied to make them look more like their screen parents, but they licked it off one another: this is the cutest fact I know about 2001.)

I once saw the film miss-projected so you could see off the top of the frontpro screen: a bunch of scaffolding poked out from behind the African skyline. The effect was like something from THE TRUMAN SHOW. The setting remained insistently REAL.

There’s a shot at dusk of a leopard reclining beside a slain zebra, and I simply don’t know if it’s a shot taken in Africa along with the background plates, or a studio mock-up using the trained leopard and a stuffed zebra. Probably the latter. But YOU CAN’T TELL. I suppose the fact that the setting sun is behind kitty, but kitty’s eyes are reflecting something BRIGHT, might be a clue. But not one that triggers conscious doubt until you overthink it like me.

British cinematographers were known not so much for an individual style, though we’ve had a few distinctive DOPs, more for their technical mastery and ability to deliver any style of photography the film in question demanded. Geoffrey Unsworth does seem to have been something of a soft focus specialist — see SUPERMAN, for instance. But there’s no diffusion here. The crispness of this film is one of its signature qualities.

Kubrick struggled to get his prehistoric protohumans to be convincing, and it seems to have been the input of Daniel Richter as “Moon-watcher,” the lead ape-man, which made the whole show come together. Richter’s training in physical performance allowed him to adopt convincing mannerisms, and his thinness, combined with his insistence on a tight monkey suit to perform in, lifted the creature design out of the fake gorilla tradition which Charles Gemora had helped inaugurate. It seems really important that these guys not remind you of previous faux apes you have seen.

(But Jon Finch at the end of THE FINAL PROGRAMME is still the best simian-human cross I have seen. I can’t figure out whether he’s the work of Alan Boyle, Ann Brodie, or someone else.)

I love how, in the waterhole dispute, an ape-man turns and yells right at us at the end. We might compare it to Malcolm McDowell’s insouciant toast at the start of CLOCKWORK ORANGE. And to the Starchild’s restful gaze at the end of this film.

The only unconvincing bit is the night sky, blatantly a blue-filtered day sky. Given the FX budget, a starscape might have been considered, added over a desaturated African desert shot, but maybe Kubrick didn’t want an image that a real camera couldn’t capture. Stars could be photographed in 1968 only using a long exposure. A cloudless sky might have been better, though.

This sequence feels long but isn’t, really. It’s the effect of plotlessness, wordlessness. I suspect that, had Kubrick not originally intended to plaster his film in ponderous voice-over, he might not have thought of such a slow beginning. VO would have added “interest” in the form of information, and made it crystal-clear to us why we were being made to look at these things. It would have removed all mystery, and ruined the sequence’s poetry. Often the very best things in cinema seem to come from catastrophic mistakes, spotted and averted in the nick of time.

One thing the film can’t do, really, is make Moon-watcher into a character distinct from his tribe. Deprived of dialogue, looking the same as everyone else, and behaving the same as everyone else, Richter’s excellent performance blends into the surrounding savages, so that we don’t attribute an individual identity to him until the next bit of action (in my next chapter), where he, alone of his tribe, has a Transfiguring Experience.

By making us live through a typical missing link day, Kubrick prepares us for the shock of change, an unexpected intervention.