Charlotte Rampling

After seeing The Night Porter for Valentines day, I had to review it recently. It's still one of the most awful/beautiful films I know. Rampling is remarkable, and my new viewing project, after Sopranos.

Lovers at the movies

Lovers at the Movies, ca. 1940

How many do you recognise?

Man with a movie camera at the BFI

Mérimée, Bizet and Preminger’s Carmen

Speaking of exoticism (see previous video) here is a comparison of 3 Versions of Carmen, where France exoticises Spain as the oriental other. Geeky, but enjoy.

Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954) is one of the most popular all-black cinematic spectacles ever made, and became the film which rose Dorothy Dandridge to stardom and an Academy Award nomination as best actress. Based on the Broadway musical by the same name, again based on the opera by Bizet, which is an adaptation of a novella by Mérimée, it combines Bizet’s original score from the opera with new lyrics, and modernises the story for its contemporary audience. This essay will briefly compare the film to novella and opera, with main focus on the former, and its representation of Carmen as a character and the question of race.

The story of Carmen Jones is much that of the opera, although in a modernised version where Spain has become a southern American state during WW2. Preminger’s Carmen is sexy, fierce and independent, not with a band of gypsies like in the novella, and when on the run with Joe, they go alone. What limits her individualism, which easily could have slipped into selfishness, is their visit to her grandmother, and the affection shown her from the village-people. Mérimée's ultimate other, has become a Carmen belonging with her (black) people. On their love, we found our affection for her as character, something which never happens in the novella, but is a construct of Bizet.

Bizet tried his best to make Carmen milder and thereby more audience friendly, Carmen Jones takes this even further. Here, like in the opera, Carmen is not married - on the contrary, she declares proudly “Marry? Me? Never! ” She is no smuggler, and although she still might economically benefit from going with sugar-daddies, it is unlikely that she will be stealing their watches like in the novella. This de-criminalisation of her makes her sympathetic, a heroine, rather than the villain who tears good men down for her own gain. Smoking and lying about where she got the money from, seem like minimal wrongs, compared to what the original Carmen was capable of. She is a feminist, rather than a femme fatale. There is little of the diabolical woman left in Dorothy Dandridge’s interpretation, the remains are found in Mérimée's constant use of animal imagery, emphasising her animalistic and elemental features. Pursued by Joe, she bites, kicks, screams and crawls on all fours, and must be tied on hands and feet like a captured animal. Here Carmen’s wild nature and primitive background, from Mérimée and Bizet alike, shines through. It reminds us that she is still Carmen the stereotype, based on a Romantic notion of the gypsy as in touch with nature, irrational, and full of savage passion - opposing the rational and intellectual white man.

The criminal, cheating she-devil of Mérimée, has become the freedom-loving feminist, stating how “Carmen ain’t for sale,” and like her predecessors challenging patriarchal authority. She avoids the mother obsessed, old fashioned Joe, who can not accept her as provider, in the easiest way. Where Mérimée's Carmen, as José F. Colmeiro notes in Exorcising Exoticism, threatens several cultural and political norms through her free sexuality, use of black magic, resistance to law and order, crossing of geographical borders and mocking of authority, Carmen Jones challenges mainly the traditional gender roles by claiming independence as a woman in a patriarchal society. Although the film seems to focus on the Carmen’s theme of male anxiety in the face of female emancipation, its being as all-black film, inevitably proposes an underlying theme of race, which is present in all three variations of the story. The, at the time progressive, choice of exclusively Afro-American actors, raises the question of whether it suggests an otherness confined to a limited space – a segregation through the media – as well as an equation between Afro-Americans and gypsies, both historically seen as exotic and primitive, prime examples of otherness.

Explaining the cultural construction of Spain as exotic and oriental, José Colmeiro's definitions in many ways seem applicable to the image of Afro-Americans presented by Carmen Jones. He finds in European consciousness, a romantisation of the exotic other, which is clearly expressed in the Carmen story as the love/hate relationship of simultaneous fascination and repulsion towards the other, represented by her as non-European, non-male and none-white. As found in the novella, France consistently projected an image of Spain as oriental, and the gypsy as

‘primitive, uneducated, sensual, degenerate, living on the fringes of society, and devoted to thieving and fortune telling ... while simultaneously revealing other traits dear to the romantic fantasist ... as rebel outcasts and outsiders, travellers, musicians and dancers, whose free spirited women possess both the power of seduction and the occult.’ (Colmeiro, 2002:133)

Applying this description to Carmen Jones, we recognise an image of blackness, based on the same stereotypes. The image of the gypsy shows easily transferrable to black culture, and the similarity seems to suggest an equation between the two groups. One could argue that the film’s American black is to the white what the novella’s gypsy and Spanish is to the French - the fascinating, but primitive other, distinguished by their language, music and use of black magic.

Music is present in all three versions, but Carmen Jones, like the novella, particularly emphasise its racial connotations. Mérimée's Carmen sings, while doing magic rituals, a song reminiscent of ‘the great queen of the gypsies’, Maria Padilla, linking the music to the people. In the film, the white dubbers’, exaggerated ‘black’ pronunciation emphasises the assumed blackness of the songs. Pearl Bailey’s number ‘Beat out Dat Rhythm’ (the opera’s ‘Gypsy Song’) is a prime example of this association, with its self-consciously ‘primitive’ drum rhythms and wild dancing, typical of Afro-American culture. Jeff Smith notes how Bailey, being the only main character using her own voice, ‘must bear the burden of Carmen Jones’s construction of racial identity.’ (Smith, 2003:36) The song comes to establish the Afro-American exoticism portrayed in the film, an exoticism also portrayed through Carmen and her grandmother’s knowledge of black magic, and the conscious use of ‘black sociolect’ – equivalent of the gypsy language Mérimée includes in his story for authenticity.

The similarity between the representation of gypsies and Afro-Americans is also to be found in the story’s resolution, as the white man’s flirt with exoticism must come to an end. Returning to the notion of a fascination/repulsion relationship with the other, where Carmen represents both Romantic freedom, and a threat to male-dominated society, it is necessary to tame, and ultimately destroy her, and all she represents, in order to restore order. Carmen’s death is inevitable. The cultural contexts which have created her must reinforce themselves by destroying her threatening otherness.

In novella and film, it is mainly the otherness of race, which must be exorcised. Don José exclaims in the last line ‘Poor child! The Calé are to blame, for bringing her up as they did’ (1992:53), not only infantilising her, but also exposing the inferiority of Gypsies, and the fate to which their otherness dooms them. Carmen Jones’s Joe has no such explanation, but the same principle is found in what Donald Bogle calls ‘the tragic mulatto’ character, in his book on black actors. To Bogle, Dandridge is the ultimate tragic mulatto, the traditional black character who because of his or her mixed race, feels at home neither amongst whites, nor blacks, and in the end gets their life ruined, often ending in their death. In this matter, Carmen Jones is exactly like the first Carmen, her mixed blood, belonging nowhere and thereby threatening boundaries and authority makes the tragedy inevitable. Although one could argue that Mérimée's Carmen deserved it for her demonic ways, the end of the story is that the drop of dark blood, like the gypsy blood, will ruin her life, as she belongs nowhere and with no one.

In the fundamental ambiguity of the Carmen-story, each adaptation finds its own focus, shaped by the ideas of the author, but also of its contemporary context. Carmen Jones uses the story, characters and music from Bizet’s opera to address the two themes most common to readings; the issue of female emancipation, and in the eyes of modern spectators also the harsh judgement and stereotyping of race found in the original text. As time has brought changes in the reading of the story, so it has for reading of the film, as ,although perhaps not intentional, the film shows to which extent Afro-Americans were stereotyped and branded as primitive, but exotic other, just as the gypsies were in Europe, at the time of publishing of the story. The feminist reading too changes over time, as the spectators’ judgement of Carmen’s actions vary from ‘unacceptable’ to ‘a necessary escape from a mother-obsessed psychopath’, as women’s role has changed with time. The universality of the story makes forever new readings of the text, opera and film inevitable.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, James (1983), Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press)

Bogle, Donald (1994), Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks- New Third Edition (Oxford: Roundhouse)

Colmeiro, José F. (2002), ‘Exorcising Exoticism: Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain’, Comparative Literature, 54: 127-144

Espert, Nuria (1991), Carmen by George Bizet [Recorded Opera performance at The Royal Opera House Covent Garden]

Hutcheon, Linda (2006), A Theory of Adaptation (Oxon: Routledge)

Mérimée, Prosper (1992) Carmen and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Nowinski, Judith (1970) ‘Sense and Sound in George Bizet’s Carmen’, The French Review, 43: 891-900

Preminger, Otto (1954) Carmen Jones

Raitt, A. W. (1970) Prosper Mérimée (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Ltd.)

Smith, Jeff (2003), ‘Black Faces, White Voices: The Politics of Dubbing in Carmen Jones’, The Velvet Light Trap, 51: 29-42

Debra Paget in "Das Indische Grabmal"

A comparison of 'Reigen' and 'La Ronde'

Written in 1896-98, Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen was, due to its controversial story, not dared performed until the 20s, and then only for a short period of time before scandal and censorship put and end to it, lasting an incredible 60 years before it again was performed on stage. Although the play was considered scandalous and immoral, it remained in focus as part of European literary culture, and was adapted to the cinema as La Ronde by German director Max Ophüls in 1950. Ophüls had already filmed Schnitzler’s Liebelei (1932) in Germany, and after working around Europe and Hollywood during the war, he ended up in France, with a cast of the finest actors. Known for his romanticised visual language, in sharp contrast to Schnitzler’s cynical tone, the film is a beautiful piece of work, though taking generous amounts of artistic freedom from the original. This essay will compare the play to the film, considering particularly the change of medium and time, looking mainly at the alterations made in the film version for it to suit a European post-war audience, and how this affects and separates the two works of art.

Kemp finds that the cold cynicism originally found in the play, criticising contemporary society, has in La Ronde has been replaced by a ‘bitter-sweet irony, viewed through a haze of poetic nostalgia.’ (Kemp, 2001:2) The metaphorical message of the spreading of venereal diseases intended by Schnitzler, is an example of the harsh reality non-existent in the filmic version. Instead we are presented with a romantic reflection on the nature of love, sex and (non-) commitment, set in a foreign and distant pars. Little is left of the play’s biting critique of the morals in the decadent Viennese society at the turn-of-the-century. Where, like Ibsen, (and in his field Freud) Schnitzler would open the doors into the private lives of the bourgeoisie, stretching out to the lower and higher levels of society, to expose their hypocrisy. Ophüls, after two world wars and, as Alter points out, with Europe and America looking for their lost innocence, turns to a game of flirtation and sex, under a veil of melancholy. He presents to the audience the beautiful decay of a long gone time, with questions of sexuality, longing and search for affection. The times of production, and strong personalities of the authors, have set its mark on both pieces. Where Schnitzler’s play attempts politics, Ophüls film turns it into poetry.

In his romanticised vision of a decadent ‘belle epoche’, Ophüls applies a cleverly ‘calculated device, carefully designed to lure audiences into acceptance of a point of view long considered outmoded: the stylized sentimentality.’ (Archer, 1956:3) He invents the godlike playmaster and narrator. An omniscient character able to transcend time and space, he moves between the real word, where he addresses the audience, and the storyworld, interfering with the characters. Alter argues that this adaptational invention, interweaving story and reality, not only softens the cynical portrayal of sex, death and loneliness found in the play, using wits and humour, but also plays a double role as both metteur-en-scene and commentator, leading the film towards a brechtian form. As the metteur-en-scene, he manipulates the characters in their actions, leaving less to free will or the subconscious drives than Schnitzler, and guides them through the world he, as a reflection or alter-ego of the director himself, has created for them. His, and the director’s pleasure lie in seeing how the characters follow their set paths.

This obvious role as the director’s alter-ego becomes even clearer when Ophüls uses Brechtian techniques of distancing throughout the film. The opening scene shows him changing into old fashioned clothes, while reflecting on his appreciation for the past, and the role of the audience, walking across stages and film sets before arriving at the square where he starts the carousel and the story. He humorously links the episodes together, keeping the audience fully aware of the narrative structure, and thereby limiting identification with the ten characters forming the circle. Although, as Metz notes, the fragmented structure of ten episodes is that of a modernist play, reminiscent of Brecht’s epic theatre, at the time still to be defined, one would assume this lack of identification to be quite removed from Schnitzler’s original intention. His diagnostically, realistic observations in Reigen, using Viennese dialect and references to well known places for emphasis, is by Ophüls transformed to a more romantic, and arguably traditional, storytelling, using the created distance between the audience and characters to soften Schnitzler’s harsh critique.

Instead Ophüls chooses to let the playmaker take the lead, stating in his opening monologue that ‘I am you (…) the personification of your desire to know everything,’ and how he by seeing ‘in the round’ is able to see everything and thereby understand. If accepting this identification, one might see La Ronde going even further from the play’s basic intentions, arguing that the new narrator-audience identification minimises any accusatory aspects of the story, as the audience is safely placed within the omniscient and transcendental world of the playmaster. Where in Reigen there is no mediator to justify what is happening, and the audience is thrown into a direct identification with the lovers, Ophüls’ link brings the distance which makes for a comfortable experience, reflecting on topics we can relate to, but not necessarily are made to identify with. Schnitzler’s attacks have in the film been transformed to a comfortable shock, improper enough to create a sensation, but still within the comfort zone of the audience, a practice that would by the end of the 50s be criticised by the Nouvelle Vague.

Alter notes how Ophüls ‘had no scruples about changing the script to maximise use of different medium.’ (Alter,1996:2) By introducing the playmaster, he opens up the film to a self-reflection on its own medium, an aspect only present in the play in the characters of the poet and the actress, discussing their roles and how to act them out. La Ronde picks up on this theme of acting and masquerade, turning the whole play into a ‘story within a story’. At several occasions, most notably in the scene with the young man, he breaks the fourth wall, engaging directly with the audience, leading again to reflection on the medium of film and the situation of the viewer.

The highly cinematic style evident in La Ronde’s excessive mise-en-scène, with its layers of veils, curtains, staircases, mirrors, decorations and framing windows and doorways, add to the romantic notion Alter and other critics find in the film. It is further emphasised by the Strauss waltz musical theme following the narrator and characters. That such romantic music and exaggerated mise-en-scène would be used in a stage production is most unlikely, especially when considering the realist social drama of the time, written by i.e. Ibsen, with its realistic rendering of bourgeois home-style sets to emphasise the actuality of their subject matter, addressing the bourgeois audience, represented by the married couple right in the middle of the play, with a reflection of their own homes. The playwright expose what he saw as the issues of his day, the amorality and deceit behind closed doors. Again, Ophüls distances the audience from these matters through nostalgic, theatrical sets, more likely to cause awe and admiration than recognition.

This highly cinematic visual language can also be said to draw attention away from Schnitzler’s intricate language. Perlmann describes how it is multi-layered and symbolic in its task of covering and unmasking the characters as they charm and deceive each other. The language of Reigen becomes loaded with meaning through patterns, phrases, details of the dialogue such as the difference between ‘du’ and ‘Sie’ and double meanings. The translations made of the original play were according to Alter far from satisfactory, none capturing the essence of Schnitzler’s nuances and dialogues. In comparison to the film, the play puts far more emphasis on the use of language, and Perlmann relates Reigen’s play with the social status and etiquette of language, most noticeable in the episode with the maid and the soldier, to that of Ödön von Horváth. In his 1932 play Kasimir und Karoline, as in Reigen does an awkward use of high German and fine etiquette become characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie, as a mask in their attempt to appear more refined and of higher status than what their own language allows. Although ‘du/Sie’ translates to French ‘tu/vous’, this whole aspect appears less predominant, and more like light coquetry than an important detail to character types.

As Schnitzler’s intended cynicism and exposure of his characters becomes softened through its absence, due to Ophüls change of focus, it is as said replaced by a bitter-sweet, more romanticised atmosphere. Archer suggests that the film ‘can be appreciated only as a romance (...) an obvious contradiction to the sharply realistic approach of Schnitzler’s wry commentary on social classes linked by disease. (Archer, 1956:4) In his reading of the film, he finds a parallel, more linear narrative structure alongside the obvious circularly organised episodes. This reading could arguably also be applied to the play, though most likely unsuccessfully as the romance, absent from the play, is what allows the interpretation. Archer uncovers what he sees as;

‘a single romantic thread; the beginning of momentary desire, riding to exaggerated youthful passion, gliding through mature consummation to a poignant attempt to recapture the adolescent fervour, fading ultimately into the bored familiarity which

breeds over-sophistication.’ (Archer,1956:4)

The film goes from the beginning’s high comedy, through romanticism into the tragedy of the last sequence, where the count realises the impossibility of a more significant relation, as ‘too much experience has dulled sensation of every meaning save empty regret.’ (Archer, 1956:4)

Unique amongst all the other characters, the film’s count’s suggested realisation leads to a moral conclusion of Ophüls’ unified work. Archer here proposes an entirely new aspect to the story. Within Schnitzler’s circular play structure, where none of the involved are able to reflect on their situation (or break the circle), the film director has introduced a parallel, more linear storyline, by opening up for the possibility that his characters might learn from their mistakes. If not directly linear, this storyline appears more spiralling, than simply circular. Ophüls thereby mutes some of Schnitzler’s connotations to epic theatre, where the characters don’t necessarily learn, as the reflection on their situation is expected to happen in the audience. By letting the count show signs of regret, although by no means saying that he will not repeat his actions, he presumably to a certain extent sees the result of their behaviour. Ophüls adaptation returns to the more classical narrative style.

This alteration of the narrative structure, introduction of the mediating alter-ego of the director-artist, his excessively romantic visual language and self-reflexivity on the roles or author, audience and medium, all come together as romanticising factors, turning Schnitzler’s diagnostic observation into a sentimental meditation on human sexuality and relations. Comparing Reigen to La Ronde, we see how Schnitzler’s skilful use of language, cynicism, realism and believed understanding of his contemporary society’s failing morals expressed in his play are still present, though more as a shadows, in the film version of the play. Schnitzler, as Freud’s contemporary, focusing on the ‘von Triebverdrängung hervorgerufene Unbehagen in der Kultur’ (Perlmann, 1987:43) in an attempt to unmask the decadent turn-of-the-century society. The notion of him criticising his own surroundings, styling it to strengthen its reactionary effect, has had its contemporary edge softened by Ophüls, turning it towards a more distanced representation of the universal questions of love, sexuality and commitment. Made 50 years later, in a Europe completely changed by war and modernisation, the society portrayed is not only disappeared, but the spirit of Schnitzler’s critique does not fit the society for which the film was made. It addresses how authors express themselves through their work, even in an adaptation. And the alterations made are part of the film director’s artistic identity, a director who after all ‘adores the past.’

bibliography:

Alter, Maria P. (1996), ‘From Der Reigen to La Ronde, Transposition of a Stageplay to the Cinema’, Literature/Film Quarterly, (USA: Salisbury University)

<http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1308993661.html> Accessed 15.12.09

Archer, Eugene (1956), ‘Orphuls and the Romantic Tradition’, Yale French Studies, 17: 3-5. (Yale University Press)

Kemp, Philip (2001), ‘La Ronde’, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers (USA: The Gale Group Inc.) <http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G2-3406800760.html>, Accessed 15.12.09

Kilian, Klaus (1972), Die Komödien Arthur Schnitzlers, (Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag).

Metz, Walter C. (2006),‘“Who am I in this story?“: On the Film Adaptations of Max Ophüls’, Literature/Film Quarterly, October, (Salisbury University)

<http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1173413951.html>, Accessed 15.12.09

Ophüls, Max (1950), La Ronde

Perlmann, Michaela L. (1987), Sammlung Metzler – Realien zur Literatur. Arthur Schnitzler, (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel GmbH).

Roe, Ian P. (1994)‚The Comedy of Schnitzler’s Reigen’, The Modern Language Review, 3: 674-688.

Schnitzler, Arthur (1900), Reigen: Zehn Dialoge, (Reclam Philipp Jun. Published: 2002)