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paint-lady · 3 years

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hey, if you don't mind, i want your advice: i'm going to be running a chronicle set in chicago (i am using the chicago by night 5e book) for players who are new to vampire for the most part in a few days and i can't For The Life of Me to come up with an interesting chronicle hook (yeah i have read the hooks in the book). any ideas/suggestions/general advice?

Hiya! I could talk your ears off on how I write my chronicles- so hopefully I have taken all my processes and reduced it down to a lovely World of Darkness jam.

Here are two good hooks I just came up with- feel free to use them! The third is what I got for my first chronicle, and I just think its a narrative that works very well for new players.

>Option 1: Guilty Until Proven Innocent ”Chicago is a series of paradoxes and transitions, of ever changing paradigms and whimsy,” (CbN 47). Have your coterie be newbies to the city. Ask why they have come to Chicago. Power? A new start? Perhaps this is a political arrangement between the clan of one city with another. Whatever their reason, they have arrived right when a Primogen vanishes- and guess who is first on the suspect list? The fresh faces on the streets >:) The coterie, having barely settled, has to suddenly prove their innocence. And finding evidence lets them uncover something much more sinister....

This one is ideal for new players as it sets everyone on an equal footing. Even if they create a character that has been a vampire for 50+ years and has amassed several dots of influence, herd, status- whatever, they are still new to the city. And being new means you have to start all over again. (This may be frustrating to a player that invested all those points at character creation- but it is on you as the ST to make sure they have opportunities to use those dots and on them as a player to think cleverly.)

Starting the tale off with defending their innocence is actually a very engaging questline. It effectively sets the stage for the political powerhouses. It lets new players know there are rules- and those in power are watching. It also sets the consequences for failure. Understand that the Camarilla probably isnt going to outright kill the coterie if they fail- always make the punishment just harsh and grueling enough to make final death feel like a mercy. Failure isn’t the end of the story.

For new players- I would be lenient with the time it takes for them to find evidence. But within reason. Think like your Prince and Seneschal. Do you really want this coterie running around for a full week, unsupervised, making more messes? No. You don’t. (You might wanna send an npc with them to watch and keep em out of trouble. Your npc is also able to vouch for them.)

This story lends itself to be a Camarilla Chronicle very easily. You can go Anarch, but an Anarch leader suddenly vanishing and blaming the newbies is much more quickly going to end with blood spilled. Thank your local sweeper.

> Option 2: Containment Breach Blacksite 24 (Loresheet on page 264) was temporarily occupied by Operation Firstlight. It has now been transformed into a medical research facility. While most kindred of Chicago know of Blacksite 24, they have zero clue what happens inside other than bad news for them- the less they know the safer they are. The chronicle opens with a car crash. The captured soon-to-be coterie was in transit to this feared medical facility. The crash did kill the driver and the agent in charge of transporting them. The crash did not fully break their restraints, but it did enough damage that first responders are freaking out. They are all at hunger 3. The chronicle is a hunt. The coterie should have some knowledge of what had happened to them and how lucky they are to have escaped. Operatives are already on their way to recapture them. They must hide in this city- and do their best to survive and stay out of sight.

The point of this story is to invoke dread. I highly recommend one player either being a thin-blood (or an npc) with the Daydrinker merit, or a player to have a ghoul. If they decide to not have a daywatch, they increase their chance of being found.

This story also sets up a feeling of desperation. They would be willing to take shelter from anyone- anyone. Eventually the other kindred will catch on that these guys are on the run from something. Any sane kindred would toss them out to protect themselves. A compassionate kindred who takes them in will suffer the final death as a compassionate fool- or join them in captivity.

This story lends itself to be an Anarch Chronicle much more easily. This is the time the Camarilla will likely be a bit more paranoid and bloody. While they might not outright kill the coterie- they will send them somewhere that is a death trap. They wont dirty their hands with this. After all, you do not want any evidence to fall into the hands of the SI if you hired the hit.

This story is ideal for newbies without background merits. No allies, no influence, no herd. Let them take more mythic merits such as bloodhound and unbondable (Consider finding some from V20 too! There are some really awesome supernatural merits!). These powers would certainly be more fascinating for a medical team to study- not how many instagram followers they have. This kind of story also lets your players feel more powerful- but out of the loop. It lends itself to them forging alliances and getting caught in one-sided favors a lot more quickly.

The challenging aspect of this story is that is starts with a masquerade breach. New players may not know how to handle such a blatant breach and thats okay. I would let the crash slide- and the Camarilla in the background handles it. Breaches after the crash need to be handled with proper consequences.

> Option 3: New Blood This is what my storyteller did to me and my first time players (and its also very close to the plot of CoNY). We were shovelheads. Embraced to make a huge mess for the Camarilla and die quick deaths. We were all thin-bloods. The last thing the pcs remember is the sweet rush of ecstasy washing over them, before clawing out of the earth and driven mad by an insatiable hunger. The thrill of the hunt, and the sweet, warm blood on their tongue, nothing was going to be better. All three will awake next to each other, surrounded by the corpses they drank dry in their frenzy. What a way to play the name game! The players have three nights were they figure out their new condition or coverup their tracks (if they think to do it). They contend with their hunger and hatred of sunlight, wrestle with accidentally drinking their family member dry. After three nights, the Scourge comes knocking. Rather than outright killed, they are dragged to Elysium. For some reason, they are adopted by an upstanding member of the Camarilla- or the Prince orders a political rival care for them (hoping they fail). The players are the errand childer of this kindred, and slowly they figure out what they have been gathering through all these errands....

This one lets the characters all have the moments where they discover their disciplines and powers- and bestial tendencies. It naturally flows to allow players to slowly discover the rules and mechanics as well. All players must play fledglings for this tale.

This story is much more a personal tale than a political one. Eventually politics makes its way in...but it does not have to be a focus.

This story has less of a hook and more of a “Figure it Out” survival mode until the errands begin. The story is how the character’s react to their condition. It very quickly lends itself to a narrative of finding your own path in the night, rather than mindlessly obeying.

So here are a few questions that I ask myself when crafting a chronicle story:

1. What kind of story do you want to tell? Not asking for a plot hook, I’m asking for a general concept. Is it a tale of good triumphing over evil? (Not necessarily a wrong answer, but if you wanna play good guys...vampire is not the best game for that). Is this a chase? Is this a race against time?

2. How do you want your story to make your players feel? Do you want to tell a story that invokes as much dread as possible in your players? Do you want them to feel ultra powerful? Vampire is both a power fantasy and a dread inducing game- it can do both.

3. If you don’t know what kind of story you want to tell, switch gears to worldbuilding. CbN has so many NPCs with the rumors already written for you. Its your setting, perhaps switch two rumors around with prominent NPCs. Decide which ones are true in your setting- Maybe Primogen Annabell did kill her predecessor. Perhaps the Lasombra are attempting to infiltrate the Camarilla as everyone fears- but no one is able to prove it or stop it. Deciding what is true, false, and undetermined usually blossoms into hooks and stories worth investigating.

4. What is a historical event of the city that the Vampires would have endured/ scars would have remained? For example, in my chronicle set in Richmond, the tale of the Richmond Vampire is true. Depending on who you ask, it is the Camarilla’s best or sloppiest cover up. Have the chronicle coincide with the events and the coterie live through them. No one said this must take place in 2021- you can do 2015, 2008, -hell go back the 1990s. Its actually super fun if you set your chronicle in the 90s and your Malkavian is using phrases from 2020.

5. One of my things I do when writing scenes and moments is play Dread by myself. Dread is a role playing game played with jenga. There are no dice rolls, if you want to attempt something, you have to pull pieces from the tower. If the tower falls, you die. If there is a moment where I really really really dont want to pull from the tower, though the reward for succeeding is so so sweet- I keep the moment. If its really easy to shrug and go eh, I can live without performing that action- go back and rewrite it. If you have no incentive to pull from the tower, why would they?

6. Examine your player’s desires and ambitions- and do not neglect them in your chronicle. The plot wont magically allow all of them to achieve their ambitions. However, provide opportunities for them through the plot. Its on them to strive for what their character wants- its on you to make them struggle but have the path to get there. For example, if a player wants to become a Baron, provide a political opening. Perhaps then by announcing their power, they have made a bigger name for themselves and it has become harder to hide. Perhaps by doing this, the kindred they owe a favor is suddenly much more vocal about it.

Here are some suggestions for handling new players:

> You are going to have to handhold them through some things. New players to vtm won’t be able to see the cascading political web and how the consequences of their actions will ripple into waves. I like to use Wits+Insight and call it Common Sense. Common Sense was a merit in V20- and damn is it WONDERFUL. All they need is just 1 success (they can take half) to have you explain how whatever plan they just thought of is actually a TERRIBLE idea.

> Do your RPG consent list. Know what is safe to discuss and what is off the table. I highly recommend utilizing something my Storyteller used for my first chronicle, and subsequently I use for all my ttrpgs now: Invoking the Veil. The metaphor is that you are slowly lessening the intensity of a scene- as if raising the opacity or looking through layers of fabric. Eventually, there is too much fabric and you can no longer see the scene. If something is too intense, the ST or the player may announce they are invoking the veil. Reduce the scene by lowering music, speaking in third person, or avoiding heavy descriptors. You can reduce it further to just dice rolls. Role play stops, and the consequences of the scene are solely dictated by the dice. Or fade to black. If a player is repeatedly fading to black on something- ask to talk to them about it. Clearly something is too intense and they are not having as much fun as they can. Debriefing after a session is also a good idea. Do something silly! Share and check all the memes in the discord chat. Its important to make sure you and your players know that at the end of the night- its all just a game.

> I find the sabbat and new players don’t tend to mix well. You may absolutely still use the sabbat in your chronicle! But the dogma and philosophical ideals of the sabbat can be offputting and downright upsetting to a first time player. You may absolutely build to it- that’s what I did to my players. And in the moment of the truth, they chose to cling to humanity.

> The taking half mechanic is your friend! V5 says players may announce how many dice they are rolling- and if the dividend is greater than the DC- they auto succeed. This streamlines play. Of course, you as the Storyteller may say this is a roll they are not allowed to take half on. Usually these are contested rolls (combat).

> The three turns and out rule keeps combat intense but not too lengthy. It actually streamlines encounters super super well.

> My ST used a phrase, “The quickest way to kill Cthulhu is to give it a healthbar.” If Methuselahs and Elders are involved in your game- avoid giving them stat blocks. This cultivates a conflict that new players must find a way to overcome without brute force combat. It makes them think critically and defy these super old antagonists through narrative means. This also gets the notion out of your and their heads, “if they die, its over.” Its never that easy. Never.

#steph answers questions #thanks for asking!#vtm #vampire the masquerade #vamp tag #storyteller vibes #ghostravens

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joestarsecrettecnique · 3 years

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I am so very sick and tired of the toxicity that’s been poisoning the snk fandom as of the last couple years. I gave myself time to digest the ending and my feelings on it, before embarking in a journey to debunk many misconceptions and critiques I’ve seen floating in the fandom.

By the way, by no means I think this ending is perfect. I think this is textbook execution by Isayama to tie together every loose end left behind in an orderly manner, and I think that it was a bit rushed and oversimplified. I would’ve wanted more of Eren and Armin’s conversation, more of the squad realizing what his true goal had been, and some narrative choices I don’t 100% agree with. But still, what I saw in other fans’ critiques post 139 frankly appalled me, so I feel the need to make this. Also, this obviously are my own interpretations, I am not Isayama himself lol

“Ew, so Eren did pull a Lelouch after all”

No, Eren did not pull a Lelouch. While his action and the final result may seem similar, I find very different nuances between the two. Lelouch wanted for the whole world to be united in fighting against him, and thus he made himself the world’s greatest enemy. His will to turn himself into a monster was selfless. Eren didn’t give a damn about the world, he had no noble intentions whatsoever. He said it in chapter 122, his goal was to protect Paradis and, more specifically, his closest friends. He turned himself into a monster, killed 80% of human population, and endangered the lives of those very friends he wanted to protect, so that by stopping him, those friends could be safe. Eren had no intentions to break out of the cycle of hatred or unite the world against himself, he just wanted to give his friends a chance to survive, and that is not selfless, it’s selfish. Eren’s goal was incredibly selfish, and biased, and driven by his feelings instead of rationality. Nothing like Lelouch!

Now this, this I myself am not the greatest fan of. I feel like it makes that great scene in chapter 122 loose a bit of its strength, Ymir obeying the king for 2000 years just because she loved him. Honestly, I always thought there was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome going on, but I didn’t think it would be the only reason. However, like it or not, it’s undeniable that it makes perfect sense in the narrative that aot has always strived to tell. Love has been a theme strongly woven in the story, and it also draws a great parallel between Karl Fritz/Ymir and Eren/Mikasa. Ymir was a slave to her love for King Fritz, just like Mikasa was a slave to her love for Eren, in that she struggled to accept reality until the very end despite the atrocities that Eren committed. Ymir stayed bound by her love for King Fritz, until she saw Mikasa break from her own poisoned love, aknwoledge it, and kill Eren despite of it, or maybe because of it. Only Ymir knows that one, heh. But the point is, Mikasa showed Ymir that she could break free of a toxic love, she was that someone that Ymir had been waiting for to finally free her of her burden.

“What? But that makes no sense!”

Now, on my first read, I simply thought that Eren had ordered Dina to avoid eating Berthold, and that he had made her walk down that road unaware that his mother was trapped (because we know that the Attack Titan’s future memories aren’t infallible, there are still gaps), killing her indirectly. I’ve since then read some theories stating that Eren willingly killed his own mum in orther to give kid himself a reason to feel enough hatred to kickstart the whole story. Honestly, I like this version maybe more! But let me explain to you why this is not a plothole, like many people think. In this same chapter, we have Eren explaining how the Founder’s power works in synergy with the Attack’s: “There’s no past or future, they all exist at once”. This means that time travel in aot doesn’t work in a manner where Eren extracts himself from time and space, and from a separate realm he operates on the past. The way I understood it, the mechanics works kind of like Tokyo Revengers’ time travel. MInd you, I only watched episode one, so my understanding might be jackshit.

Spoilers for Tokyo Revengers’ episode one. In the show, the main character loses consciousness and finds himself reliving his past. He interacts with someone in this “new” past, and when he wakes up again in the present, past events had been over-written by the changes he made. I think this is how aot timetravel works, with the exception that, since past and future (and present, of course) all happen at once, side by side, there is no old past to be rewritten, neither a future to return to, and present Eren wouldn’t be aware of the changes that his future self would make. It creates sort of a time paradox, yes, in the sense that there’s a loop where present Eren’s mom has been eaten because future Eren, in the future, operated on the past by causing past Eren’s mom to be eaten, but all these Erens are one and the same, as all timelines exist at once.

“Boo-hoo they ruined Eren’s character, he’s such a wimp!”

I have to confess (isn’t this appalling, that this is a thing that I have to confess, what the actual fuck), I am an Eren stan. I absolutely do not consider myself a Jaegerist, I think Eren’s option was better than Zeke’s, yes, but it was morally wrong and awful and he absolutely was not only in the wrong, but also if he wasn’t dead I’d want him to be punished for his crimes. I didn’t particularly enjoy him pre-timeskip, and I started to like him because I found his evolution fascinating. I wanted to understand his motives, what was going on in his head, he was a puzzle that I wanted to solve. Maybe because I’m a psychologist, who knows. Anyways, if you’re an Eren stan only because he acted like a chad and now you cry his character was ruined, I’m sorry to say, you never understood him. Eren was not a god, he was not a strategist playing 5d chess with perfect rationality, Eren was the same he has always been. He was a young man spun along by his passions. Eren feels things with burning intensity, he lets himself be driven by his emotions. He almost flattened the world because he was disappointed that he and his friends weren’t the only human beings inhabiting it, for fuck’s sake, he’s always been irrational, selfish, and immature. Of course he doesn’t wanna die, of course he want’s to live with all of them. You really expected a 15 year old hot-headed brat to become Thanos after he suddenly found out he killed his own mum and all his dreams had been crushed? Of course he felt conflicted, of course he suffered, of course he wanted to live, “because he was born in this world”. Honestly, when I read his meltdown, I felt relieved that his character hadn’t been turned on its head, it was heartbreaking to see that he really was the same brat he’d always been, that he’d tried to steel himself to do horrible shit for his friends’ sake and that he felt bad about it! It made me appreciate his character a lot more, I felt nostalgic towards the times when I was irritated by his screaming and pouting. Suffice to say, this is also my answer to all those people that believe his internal monologue to convince himself the Rumbling was what he really wanted were bullshit since he “pulled a Lelouch”. How can it be bullshit? Maybe he planned to be stopped, but he also said that he thought he would’ve still done it if they hadn’t. He also said that killing a majority of the population was something that he wanted to do, not a byproduct of the alliance not stopping him early enough, because with the world’s militaries in shambles Paradis would’ve had time to prepare accordingly. Anyways, of course he needed to convince himself to do this awful thing even if he knew he wasn’t gonna succeed completely, can you imagine how horrible it would be to know your only chance is to kill thousands?

I also maybe think it was because of the spine centipede thingy? When Eren says “I don’t know why I did it, I wanted to, I had to”, he gets this faraway look on his face and we get a zoom in on one of his eyes, which is drawn very interestingly and kinda looks like the Reiss’ eyes when they were bound by the War Renounce Pact? So maybe it was also the centipede’s drive to survive and multiplicate that forced Eren to do the Rumbling so that its life wouldn’t be endangered. I don’t know how much I like this, I feel like it takes some agency away from Eren and also makes it feel like he’s not as responsible for the genocide he committed that we initially though, which mhhh maybe not, let’s have him take full responsibility for this. As I said, I’m not defending Isayama blindly, I do have some issues myself with what went down.

“What the fuck, did he say thank you for the genocide?”

Guys c’mon, this is like,, reading comprehension. Yes, it was poorly worded and a bit rushed, but by now you should have full context to make an educated guess on the fact that no, he didn’t thank him for committing a genocide what the fuck you guys. Armin started bringing up the idea that maybe they should have Eren eaten because he was doing morally questionable things ever since the Marley Arc, which for manga readers was like what, 2018? Isayama has been showing for three years how not okay Armin was with Eren’s actions, how could it make sense for him to thank him for a genocide? You see some poorly worded stuff, and your first instinct is to ignore eleven years’ worth of consistent characterization to jump to the worst interpretation possible? Let’s go over this sentences and reconstruct what they mean.

“Eren, thank you. You became a mass murdere for our sake. I won’t let this error go to waste”. Armin recognizes that Eren had no other choice, but does not condone it. He clearly calls it an error, which feels like an euphemism but for all we know the japanese original term used could’ve been harsher. Point is, he clearly states he think what Eren did was wrong. But he recognizes that Eren’s awful doing opened up a path for Paradis to break out of the cycle of hatred. Not a certainty, but an opportunity. He thanks Eren for giving them this chance, and promises not to waste it, even if it was born out of an atrocity. He thanks Eren for sacrificing himself for their sake, even if he doesn’t agree with the fruit of his labor, so to speak. He’s thanking Eren for the opportunity that his actions gave them, not for the actions themselves! Where the hell do you read “thank you for the genocide” guys, sheesh. I’m mad at y’all.

“How could Eren send MIkasa memories if she’s an Ackerman and an Asian, and their memories can’t be manipulated by the Founder? I call plothole!”

Now, here we’re going into speculation territory, so you’ve been warned. I don’t think that that information they gave us was true, about Ackermans being immune to memory manipulation. We know at least that the clan is in some way subject to the Founder’s power, or Mikasa and Levi wouldn’t have been called in the Paths by Eren multiple times. Stories never being entirely true or false, or relativity, better said, has been a strong theme in the story, we know this by Marley’s and Eldia’s different accounts of history compared to the actual Ymir backstory we got. So who’s to say that the belief that Ackermans aren’t manipulable is the truth? Maybe they’re just hard to control, not impossible. We know that by the Founder’s ability Eren experienced past and future happening simultaneously, so he could’ve very well been trying to send those memories into Mikasa’s head ever since the beginning of the story, only just succeeding in chapter 138. It would at least explain Ackerman’s headaches as Eren trying to manipulate their memories and failing. Of course, we’d need Levi side of thing to know for certain, as he had headaches too and we weren’t shown in the chapter if Eren spoke to him in paths like he did with the rest of the squad. We know he didn’t talk to Pieck, but he even went and spoke to Annie who he basically hadn’t seen since Stohess, so I hope he spoke to Levi too. Who knows, maybe he even spoke with Hanji, but she died before she could remember. I wish we were shown that, honestly, I’m sad that it was skipped, especially after Levi said in an earlier chapter that “there was so much he wanted to tell Eren”. Fingers crossed for the anime to expand on it.

“So Historia’s pregnancy was useless”

What? No, it wasn’t useless! Eren told her to get pregnant to save her life, so that she wouldn’t be turned into the Beast Titan. If she became the Beast Titan, then Eren would’ve had to enact the plan with her instead of Zeke, and yeah, Ymir brought the power of the titans with her, so theoretically Titan Shifter Historia would’ve had her time limit removed, but we saw that the only way for the Alliance to stop the Rumbling was killing Zeke, so Historia would’ve had to die. Useless to say, when Eren talked to her about his plan, she was very vocally against it, so I don’t think she would’ve helped Eren with his plan. It was Zeke or nothing, and the only way for Zeke to keep his titan was for Historia to be unable to be turned, hence the pregnancy. Did y’all read the same thing I read? Anyways, she could’ve definitely been handled better, but she wasn’t necessary to the plot anymore, and her being removed from it in such a way was sad, yes, but it made sense.

“They massacred Reiner!”

Yeah, can’t really say anything about this. I definitely understand the sentiment behind this scene, which I appreciate. It’s to show that thanks to his Titan being removed and the times of peace approaching, Reiner was finally able to shed the weight he bore on his shoulders and “regress” to his more carefree persona he had when he thought he was a soldier, instead of a warrior. I am very happy for him, and I think it’s a nice conclusion to his arc, that he’s finally happy, but it could’ve been portrayed in a less comic relief-y way. It just sledgehammers all his characterization. Feels surreal that we saw him attempt suicide a couple month ago in the anime and now he’s sniffing Historia’s handwriting.

Guys, this absolutely sends me. There are people who unironically believe Eren actually reincarnated in a bird? Guys. It makes no sense, it violates every rule that Isayama established for his universe’s power system. How could he even reincarnate in a bird? Guys, c’mon, this is symbolical! Birds have been heavily used in aot to portray freedom, and this is a nice, poetic, symbolic way to show that Eren who lived his whole life chasing freedom and never actually got it, is finally free, like a bird, now that he’s dead. It’s also a pretty explicit nod to Odin, I think. Aot is heavily inspired by Norse Mithology, and I think there were some pretty clear parallels between Eren and Odin/Loki in the later arcs of the story. Eren has been shown to “communicate” through birds like with Falco in chapter 81, or with Armin in chapter 131. Emphasis on “communicate” because again, this is symbolic, I don’t think he actually spoke through the birds, he simply talked to them via paths, but birds are associated with Eren’s character (see also the wings of freedom, y’know?) and the shots were framed so to give the impression that he was talking through the birds, but he wasn’t. Symbolism. Anyway, I really think they were supposed to be a nod to Odin’s crows.

Aaaaand that should be it! Even though I most definitely forgot some other criticism on the chapter, it’s crazy the amount of negativity floating around. Hope I didn’t bore you!

#attack on titan #aot #shingeki no kyojin #snk #snk manga #aot manga #aot spoilers #chapter 139 #aot ending #eren jaeger #mikasa ackerman #armin arlert #aot 139

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forgottenlivesobverse · 3 years

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Philip Purser-Hallard Q&A

Our final Q&A is with Forgotten Lives’ editor Philip Purser-Hallard. His story for the book, ‘House of Images’, features the Robert Banks Stewart Doctor, and opens like this:

‘The usual dreadful creaking and bellowing from the rooms above the dusty office informed me that the Doctor would soon be coming down to check on my progress. I really don’t know what he does up there to make that racket. If you asked me, I’d have to guess that he’s trying to invent a mechanical walrus, and enjoying some success.

‘Honestly, Auntie, I wouldn’t put it past him. My employer is a strange man, with obsessive interests and a deeply peculiar sense of humour.’

FL: Tell us a little about yourself.

PPH: I’m a middle-aged writer, editor and Doctor Who fan; also a husband, father, vegetarian, cat-lover, beer-drinker and board games geek.

A couple of decades ago I wrote stories for some of the earliest Doctor Who charity ‘fanthologies’, Perfect Timing 2 and Walking in Eternity (whose co-editor, Jay Eales, has contributed to Forgotten Lives). These led directly to my published work in multiple Doctor Who spinoff and tie-in series, starting with Faction Paradox.

Since then, among other things, I’ve written a trilogy of urban fantasy political thrillers for Snowbooks, and two Sherlock Holmes novels for Titan Books. I’ve also edited six volumes of fiction for Obverse Books, in the City of the Saved and Iris Wildthyme series. And I founded, coedit, and have written two-and-a-half books for, The Black Archive, Obverse’s series of critical monographs on individual Doctor Who stories. (Mine are on Battlefield, Human Nature / The Family of Blood and Dark Water / Death in Heaven.)

But those two anthologies are where it all started.

FL: How did you conceive this project?

PPH: I’m fascinated by unconventional approaches to Doctor Who, an interest fostered by three decades spent reading the Virgin New Adventures, the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures and such experimental spinoffs as Faction Paradox and Iris Wildthyme. (Again, I’m glad to have worked with alumni of those series, including Simon Bucher-Jones and Lance Parkin, on Forgotten Lives.) I love the Doctor Who extended universe when it’s at its most radical, questioning, deconstructive and subversive. The Morbius Doctors, standing outside the canon with a foot in the door, are a great vehicle for exploring that.

Once I had the idea for the anthology, the charitable cause followed naturally. These are the lives that the later Doctors have forgotten, and that loss of identity and memory could only put me in mind of the experience of my grandmother, who lived with Alzheimer’s for many years before her death. Gran was a shrewd, intelligent woman, and it was deeply upsetting to see her faculties steadily deserting her. All charities are going through straitened times at the moment, of course, and all of them are in need of extra support, but I felt Alzheimer’s Research UK was particularly worth my time and effort.

FL: Each story in the book features a different incarnation of the Doctor. Tell us about yours.

PPH: As I’ve written him, the Robert Banks Stewart Doctor is a grumpy, ebullient name-dropper with quietly brilliant detective skills and a penchant for deniable meddling. So far, so quintessentially Doctorish, but this incarnation also has an unusual interest in magic and alchemy, a long-term mission on Earth, and an old nemesis demanding his attention.

FL: These Doctors only exist in a couple of photos. How did you approach the characterisation of your incarnation?

PPH: The photo of scriptwriter Robert Banks Stewart that appears onscreen in The Brain of Morbius has a grim look on his face, but there’s another where he seems to be having a lot more fun in the costume. I played with that contrast by making his Doctor a man of excessive, rather theatrical moods, curmudgeonly and charming by turns. With his fur collar, there’s something rather bearlike about him, which made me envisage as quite physically large.

I also love Paul Hanley’s artwork for the character, where he elaborates on the costume to portray this Doctor as a kind of renaissance alchemist – Paul says ‘I like the idea that this is the Doctor who was most interested in “magic”, psychic phenomena, etc.,’ and I certainly leaned into that.

Banks Stewart’s own persona comes through in the Doctor’s Scottish accent and in some of the story choices. Both the Doctor Who scripts he wrote are set in contemporary Britain, so this Doctor’s story is a ‘contemporary’ one – though the timeframe I was envisaging for these forgotten Doctors means that works out as the 1940s. Banks Stewart created the TV detective series Bergerac and Shoestring, and so this Doctor fancies himself as a detective. And he also wrote for The Avengers (and for the Doctor and Sarah rather as if they were appearing in The Avengers), so there’s a flavour of that in the action, the whimsy, and the relationship between the Doctor and his secretary, Miss Weston.

FL: What's your story about?

PPH: The Doctor is in early-1940s London, observing the geopolitical progress of World War II on behalf of the mysterious power he represents, when he’s distracted by a burglary carried out by men bearing a close resemblance to the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. This brings him into conflict with a figure from his past, a sorcerer known as ‘the Magus’, who represents another cosmic faction with its own agenda.

FL: The stories are intended to represent a ‘prehistory’ of Doctor Who before 1963. How did that affect your approach?

PPH: Since the eight forgotten Doctors are supposedly the incarnations preceding Hartnell, it was part of the concept from the first that these stories would reconstruct – thematically and narratively, though not in terms of TV production values – Doctor Who as it ‘would have been’ in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. In one sense that’s a very conservative approach, but it also highlights the ways in which Doctor Who in reality has been a product of its various times.

For my own story I drew on two mid-20th-century influences – Charles Williams, a friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, who before his death in 1945 wrote occult thrillers infused with his own very eccentric brand of Christianity; and the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films set during World War II. Between them they led me to this story of a magicianly Doctor doing detective work and getting involved with affairs of state during the Blitz, and to provide him with his very own sorcerous Moriarty.

FL: Who would be your ideal casting for a pre-Hartnell Doctor?

PPH: The other authors have given most of the good answers already – Margaret Rutherford, Alec Guinness, Waris Hussein or Verity Lambert, Peter Cushing – so I’ll say either Boris Karloff or a young Mary Morris, depending on taste.

FL: What other projects are you working on at present?

PPH: I’ve got a short story and a novel for Sherlock Holmes in the works; plus another Holmes novel partly written, with a more unusual premise, that I’m trying to persuade someone to publish. I’m editing the next batch of Black Archives, of course, and writing our book on the Jodie Whittaker story The Haunting of Villa Diodati, which is due out in December 2021. And I have further ideas for original novels that I really need to devote more of my time to. One of them’s got vampires in.

#philip purser-hallard #forgotten lives #obverse books #robert banks stewart #the banks stewart doctor #morbius doctors #the brain of morbius #doctor who #dr who #doctorwho #drwho #fanthologies #paul hanley

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marginalgloss · 5 years

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a glass bell

This book is a short collection of stories by Stefan Zweig. There are only four of them collected here. I’ll describe each one in turn.

The Invisible Collection describes a visit to the home of an old blind man by an antiques dealer. The dealer arrives expecting to get a look at a set of valuable prints at the home of an old customer. But when he arrives, he finds himself complicit in a sort of ruse with the blind man’s family. The prints have been sold long ago. The pages in the folios still so lovingly turned by the owner’s hands are blank. The story has the subtitle ‘An Anecdote from the Years of Inflation in Germany’ — on that level, the metaphor is perhaps a little too direct. Like money, those pages have a value which essentially depends on a sort of collective delusion as to their worth. The story has that heightened quality of anguish that is common to Zweig’s work. It is essentially an overwritten, over-dramatised rendition of a poetic image; but the image is haunting regardless.

Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life is a little more developed. It is tempting to call it cinematic, given that it is so driven with the power of a direct, silent image — in this case a figure glimpsed repeatedly from across a street, or across a room. That said, as with all the stories in this collection it uses a frame narrative. After a minor scandal in a country hotel, an older woman recounts to the narrator an event from years ago. She tried to help a man, a gambler, who had lost a huge amount of money; she ended up falling for him; he ran away; she couldn’t stop him gambling. As a conventional story it is perhaps the most complete thing here. It is also madly overwrought. Zweig was popular in his lifetime but he was not always well-liked, and in this story it’s easy to see why. Every emotion is heightened to breaking point.

Incident on Lake Geneva is comparatively slight, and highly restrained. It is not much more than ten pages long. In the year 1918, a naked man is found by a fisherman, clinging to a set of broken spars; when he is brought ashore, only the ex-manager of the local hotel can speak to him in his native Russian. He is a nameless conscripted soldier who somehow became separated from his regiment, and is entirely lost. It is unclear how exactly he came to be on Lake Geneva — it seems he picked west when he should have wandered east. At any rate he is stranded in neutral Switzerland — he cannot leave without traversing other non-neutral countries. He is distraught and, in the end, he drowns himself in the lake. The story is a bleak, minimal thing. It concludes on a stark image: ‘…a cheap wooden cross was placed on his grave, one of those little crosses marking the fate of nameless men that cover our continent from end to end.’

A Game of Chess is perhaps one of Zweig’s most famous stories. (Oddly, it has had various titles in English under various translators: ‘The Royal Game’, ’A Chess Story’, ‘Chess: a Novel’ or sometimes simply ‘Chess’.) The narrator is on a ship bound for Buenos Aires when he discovers that a famous chess grandmaster named Czentovic is on board. Czentovic’s story is well-known: he was the uneducated son of a poor peasant when his matchless talent for the game became apparent. The narrator is fascinated by this imposing, uncouth figure, and in an effort to draw him into a game he falls in with an arrogant passenger wealthy enough to put up enough cash to draw Czentovic’s attention. The two of them challenge him as a team, and they are almost beaten when they draw the attention of a third — a nervous stranger named Dr B who has his own uncanny gift for the game. He claims not to have played for twenty-five years, and his advice seems to come from a place of desperation, but he seems like the only one capable of defeating Czentovic. Soon enough he tells his own story.

Dr B was resident in Austria when the Nazis annexed that country. He was taken prisoner by the Gestapo, who believed he was keeping information from them regarding the old Austrian monarchy; being an otherwise respectable middle-class citizen, he was kept under arrest in the relative comfort of a hotel room. But with nobody to talk to and nothing to read or watch or do, his solitary confinement became tortuous. It is a haunting picture of isolation:

‘I lived like a diver in a glass bell in the black ocean of silence, a diver who guesses that the cable connecting him with the world above is severed and he will never be drawn back up from the soundless deep.’

The most affecting image here is not the darkness or the silence — if those can be called images — but the glass bell. The thing which, in spite of everything around it, keeps us aware that there is some distinction between the self and the void. It is from the awareness of this distinction that the pain arrives.

One day Dr B finds solace. He steals a book from the coat pocket of an officer which turns out to be a book of chess problems. At first he is disappointed, not having any pieces or a board, but eventually he becomes fully proficient in playing the game entirely in his head. For a while he becomes happy and mentally stronger — but he cannot rid himself of his unspoken obsession with chess. The 150 problems in the book soon become exhausted, and to maintain his interest he is forced to play against himself.

‘If black and white are one and the same person, a preposterous situation is produced in which a single mind is supposed both to know something and not to know it, so that its white self should, by self-command, forget all the aims and intentions of its black self a minute earlier. The premise for such dual thinking is a totally split consciousness, with the brain’s functions being switched on and off like a mechanical apparatus. Wanting to play chess against oneself is thus as much of a paradox as wanting to jump over one’s own shadow.’

Dr B describes the effect as akin to a split personality. But it is not simply a duality — to compute every one of the many alternative moves effectively requires a multiplication into countless simultaneous selves. The strain becomes too much. After a violent attack on a guard, he ends up in a hospital. Eventually, with some help from a benevolent doctor, he is released. He leaves Austria and tries to forget about chess entirely.

A Game of Chess was the last story Zweig ever wrote. He and his wife had been living in exile in South America during the second world war; a day after posting the manuscript to his publishers, they committed suicide. It is hard to avoid thinking about this while reading this story. At first it seems much like most of his other stories — the format is the same, with the heart of the matter being framed as an encounter with a stranger in some marginal travelling space. But where the drama should be is only a terrible void. There are no questions of shame or moral or ethical responsibility; there is only a man kept in a room forever, slowly losing his mind.

The coda of the story is, as you might expect, a match between Dr B and Czentovic. The latter finds a weakness in B’s otherwise impregnable approach — B must play quickly. He works to the speed of his own brain, and so any kind of forced delay in between moves becomes intolerable. And so Czentovic begins to take longer and longer to move until B begins to become confused. Errors are forced from his opponent. He loses. And in this, we glimpse something uniquely cruel. It is not so much that Czentovic behaved in an underhand way because he couldn’t find a way to win on his own terms — that much might be expected from any cunning sportsman. The cruelty comes from the spectacle of a man finding another man’s weak point and pressing down on it with all his strength. It is a uniquely horrific sort of exploitation. But this is what competition does to us. Perhaps society relies on men like Czentovic in order to go on functioning.

The chess games that went on in Dr B’s head were sustained by the idea of constant, total multiplicity: given that both sides were always ultimately B’s side, there could be no real process of elimination — no winners and losers. There could only be an endless selection of moves, categorised as ideal, optimal or otherwise. The confusion would become total, but he could never really defeat himself when the only opponent was his own expectations. But every game of chess that happens in the world outside B’s head must result in the ultimate submission of an individual. Czentovic understands this, and places B in a situation which he cannot survive. It is not sufficient to calculate the perfect move from every given variation when you suddenly find you have forgotten the rules.

#books #stefan zweig #a game of chess

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nautilusopus · 5 years

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Serious non-troll: What if you like the cop-outs and the scrambled bullshit plots and the nonsense towers of half-constructed ideas? I agree that for example Nomura is a goddamn crazy person but I find his convulsions fascinating and want to see more of them.

i mean, you’re entirely within your rights to do that. it’s just frustrating that there’s visibly no effort put into any of it, and he’s just writing for the sake of what makes the trailer look good, and that’s been 100% to the detriment of the story ever since he’s started doing it

i’m not even inherently opposed to ridiculous convoluted bullshit. i’m one of those pretentious fuckheads that unironically likes End of Evangelion and thinks it made perfect sense, obviously, duh, with all its absolute nonsense of adam and lilith and rei being a god-analogue from absorbing both the white and black seeds and allowing shinji to dictate the ultimate outcome of third impact in the culmination of a couple of really fucking long and extremely obtuse character arcs. i mean, hell, i’m 38 chapters into a fic that is running off nothing but weird high-concept ideas of how reality and parallel universes work and abstract metaphor andsleep deprivation. in any other circumstances, i’m fine with convoluted batshit nonsense.

i think the best way to explain the heart of the issue is to look at what happened to the matrix trilogy. or actually wait this is tumblr, everyone’s in high school and would’ve been foetuses or something when Revolutions came out. homestuck, then. we’ll look at homestuck.

okay so homestuck. remember when that was as big as it was? initially, the big stumbling block was the slow pace of act 1 where john just kind of fucks around throwing glass at clown dolls for a while and if you weren’t into that kind of humour that was where the comic immediately lost you, but what ultimately got the ball rolling was [S] WV: Ascend. the general metric back then was if you weren’t hooked by that one, you wouldn’t like homestuck at all, and for many people that was the point of no return. the reason WV: Ascend was as big of a deal as it was is that we’ve been seeing a bunch of disconnected nonsense happening all over the place, and this is the first time we see our first major time loop actually closed, with the promise of a few more being set up. all that supposed joke nonsense we’d been watching the whole time? it actually mattered, surprise! from there, the narrative spends a lot of time introducing a lot of new concepts – we have captchaloguing and paradox slime, and time travel, and doomed timelines, and exiles and future versions of planets from a parallel universe the metanarrative being perpetuated by the author being diagetic and fuck knows what other things i’m forgetting about. and then, to throw you for a loop twelve whole other characters show up on top of that. so then the narrative needs to spend time establishing who these people are and what their relevance to the story is – which it does, by having them be active participants in the first arc as things go on. this ultimately culminates in [S] Cascade, where we see all these different concepts eventually tie into one another because they were deliberately set up to, and it’s at that point that you figure, well shit we’ve hit a point where all the time travel stuff has finally come to a head. and with it, you’d expect it to also bring all the character stuff to a head too, but instead hussie has an entire extra act to go so we can’t have that resolve yet.

so in the meantime, here are 20-ish whole other characters doing some other things. but we don’t have time to establish what’s effectively the silmarillion by now, so we have to speed past it, meaning we aren’t given a chance to care about these new people. but we can’t have a chance to care about them either, because we still have to tie all this into 5 whole previous acts that are meant to feed into this. at this point, homestuck is visibly collapsing under its own weight. character arcs are forced to fart around in circles because the status quo can’t change because we still need to make it to endgame with these character dynamics more or less intact. but that’s boring to read so we’ll do this entire “what if” thing and then retcon it all out of existence, and then have the fact that you can retcon things suddenly become vital to the resolution of the coming in place of anything we’ve already established previously – not the time travel, not the parallel universe with the trolls, not even the whole thing with the Scratch leading to the alpha kids being here in the first place – when the mechanic was only introduced in the first place to sloppily patch a story together that had long since devolved into infodumps that served to paint hussie further and further into a corner as he was forced to define his lore to get the plot to keep moving forward despite the fact that the narrative wasn’t focusing properly on the people that could make that happen anymore because the story had since switched focus from those people almost entirely.

and in the meantime the damn thing got eaten up by filler, and suddenly characters from that filler are showing up like they were totally relevant to the main story the whole time even though literally nothing they did in their own subplot had any direct bearing on the story at large, unlike the initial 12 trolls. why yes, Alternate Universe Calliope was a completely necessary addition to the story! didn’t you see our important sidestory thing where they do Stuff, and then her showing up in the climax to resolve some other things that are sorta disconnected from the main plot anyway?

not to mention the shipping. nothing ruins a story faster than throwing in a love triangle or eight, and then immediately invalidating all the character growth that happened on top of that anyway by having it literally never happen. not that it would’ve mattered anyway, because remember, we never actually got to have any of this really developed to begin with.

by the time we hit end of act 6, there’s been so many new concepts haphazardly stapled onto the story and so many threads brought up and discarded entirely when we already established back with [S] Cascade that the story works best when they actually do this and it is doable, that it stops being merely complicated and off the wall, and starts being spread too thin, incomprehensible, and ultimately no longer part of a whole narrative deliberately comprised of interlocking storylines. shit’s just kinda happening at you, and rather than getting to see parts of a text interacting as a result of them coming from somewhere for the express purpose of then going to somewhere, you’re just being asked to accept that, yup, that’s a thing that’s going on right now. neato. sure is some stuff happening and whatnot. and in the end, for all that posturing, it didn’t even do anything. in pre-cascade homestuck that wouldn’t have even been a full flash. a bunch of nonsense happens, and then They Fightan Good, and then it’s over and there’s not a single time paradox or meta-interaction to be found. none of the stuff they built up to over all these years mattered, and neither did any of the stuff they just threw in, either.

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at with this.

(also he treats the women in his stories like shit and quite frankly i’m sick of it and even more sick that people keep giving him a pass for it because it’s practically reached parody levels at this point , so there’s that)

i have no problem with convoluted twisty bullshit in and of itself. but it has to accomplish something aside from just existing, and nomura doesn’t do that. by his own admission, kingdom hearts wasn’t planned, and it shows really badly. characters and entire story mechanics and plot lines are introduced solely for the sake of introducing them. they don’t go anywhere or build to anything, because they can’t, because fuck we have to stall for kh3 shhhh just keep adding more soras and hopefully no one will notice. i think the last time any of this actually mattered was kh2, and even that had a lot of the issues i’ve mentioned here. as a result of all of this, the character arcs suffer a lot, and you’re left with nothing but a big ball of plot twists that goes nowhere, and a bunch of characters that only somewhat have anything to do with any of it.

i don’t feel like it’s overly nitpicky to find this kinda gross and seriously insulting of the audience’s intelligence. it’s just lazy time-stalling. i get that people sometimes really don’t care about stuff like narrative and character development and are just here to see riku punching mike wazowski in the teeth or whatever, but i think it’s disingenuous to pretend that these aren’t nonetheless important parts of a game’s construction – especially a studio that used to openly pride itself on selling games with a focus on story.

and the genuinely frustrating part is, no one cares. people are gushing all over everything square puts out because it’s square, so they know they don’t have to put effort into their stories. i’m well aware i’m in the minority for saying that these games are bad. but i also thought we were done with treating, “it’s just a video game, bro! why do you care so much about the story having quality as a narrative? this isn’t an english class!” as a valid rebuttal.

maybe i should’ve used the matrix trilogy instead. most people hate movies 2 and 3 for the weird “YOU’VE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE/EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS AN END NEO” shit and the bonkers christ-allegory ending. i hate it because neo is about as interesting as the rock that cracked goofy’s skull open.

#asks #kangdan horfs #do i put this in the discourse tag even though its's not vii?#squid alienates kh fans #that's a tag now #hamsteak #Anonymous

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antialiasis · 6 years

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Dear Evan Hansen

So I developed an interest in this musical during my semi-recent Groundhog Day obsession, when thanks to following everything posted about GhD on Tumblr, I ended up on the periphery of the general Broadway/Tony discourse. Everyone was talking about Dear Evan Hansen, either how good it was or how overrated it was, and I stumbled across some post suggesting it involved teens with issues and suicide, at which of course my ears perked up because I am me.

I listened to the soundtrack and read a basic plot summary on Wikipedia. The songs weren't amazingly up my personal musical alley for the most part, but still pretty good, and I was quite intrigued by the character work in them - the increasingly obvious wish-fulfillment of Evan's story in For Forever, culminating in the choked-up repetition of "He's coming to get me", suggesting without having to say directly that actually no one came to get him; the repeated "falling in a forest" motif never quite saying he let go but making it clear this moment was more meaningful than one would expect long before the plot summary indicated we'd find out he'd been suicidal; Zoe's subtle denial in Requiem; the tragic irony of Evan inspiring everyone with a speech about how you will be found when he knows better than anyone that sometimes you won't. This was good shit! I wanted to try to see it on the same trip as Groundhog Day, but the tickets were all well sold out, and ultimately I more or less gave up on the possibility. (I'd actually missed that there was a lottery for the show, but we tried it when we were in New York and didn't win.)

It just wouldn't quite leave me alone, though, so with no prospects for being able to see it legitimately at any point in the foreseeable future, I ended up giving up and watching a bootleg.

(Excessive overcritical rambling about characterization, subtlety, etc. under the cut! It is very critical, so by all means scroll on by if that’s not your jam.)

After all the mental buildup, I ended up sort of underwhelmed by the actual show, unfortunately. When I listened to the soundtrack I'd filled in blanks, imagining all the rich development that might be happening in between the songs - Evan slowly growing closer to Connor's dad before To Break In a Glove, say. But actually watching it, it felt like there was a lot less development than I'd imagined. There isn't really anything about Evan growing closer to Connor's dad other than the song itself, or a lot of development for Connor's dad at all outside of it. Zoe's conflicted feelings about Connor, legitimate fear and hatred coupled with a strange, paradoxical longing for him to really have had a better side to him that actually loved her, are fascinating, but aren't really explored outside of what I'd already heard in Requiem and If I Could Tell Her - Zoe's role ends up being mostly about being the target of Evan's dubiously ethical romantic interest, without really tackling the things about her that were actually interesting.

When I first listened to the soundtrack, I didn't actually pick up on Jared or Alana existing as characters. I'm not great at discerning voices on a first listen, so while for example Sincerely, Me was a bit confusing, I parsed it just as a dialogue between Evan and the imaginary Connor in his head, with "Connor" making the sardonic suggestions to ridicule Evan's pathetic efforts in between theatrically reading out what Evan was typing. They were in the plot summary, though, so I figured it out eventually, and the Tumblr fandom was full of posts about Jared and Alana - how complex they were, how much people related to them, everyone shipping Evan with Jared (of course). So I looked forward to seeing more of these characters that the soundtrack didn't really show off.

As it turned out, though, they weren't much in the way of characters, really. There are a couple of lines about Alana's anxiety and how she also feels like she's alone and doesn't matter - but they're ultimately throwaways. Alana is mostly just a plot point, as the person who's invested enough in the Connor Project to care but still detached enough to start to notice and question the discrepancies in Evan's story. Her dialogue is almost entirely either pure plot advancement or jokes; she may be secretly troubled and anxious, and eventually she spells out that she originally latched onto the Connor Project because of that, but the show just keeps kind of making fun of her - the most prominent characterization she gets is the running gag where she acts like she was so totally close to Connor while making it obvious she actually barely knew he existed - and she doesn't really get to act out the complexity the show wants to imply. We never see the Connor Project affecting her life, or get a real sense that it's giving her meaning that she was lacking before; it's told and not shown. That makes sense for a minor character who's mostly there to play a role in the plot, but the fandom had made me expect a lot more, and I really think she could have been done a lot more interestingly if they'd just spent less time making jokes about her.

And Jared... is desperately unlikeable. A lot of people on Tumblr were criticizing the play for not punishing Evan enough for his actions - but at the same time everyone was in love with Jared. This is baffling, because as far as I can see, it's pretty much Jared who ropes Evan into this in the first place. Evan originally tries to tell the Murphys that Connor didn't actually write the 'suicide note', but they dismiss him and Cynthia acts extremely upset, and Evan is too timid to try to be firm and argue with these grieving parents in order to explain to them that actually their dead son had no friends. After this he's panicking and anxious about having to clear up the misunderstanding, but it's Jared who convinces him he absolutely can't tell them the truth and has to just smile and nod and keep up the pretense. After this, Jared relentlessly mocks and bullies Evan as the lie spirals out of control, makes a silly attempt to insert himself into it, gets mad when Evan says they must stick to the established story where Jared necessarily wasn't involved, then gets hurt and complains when Evan stops hanging out with him once he's got something else to do and other people who like him. Obviously Evan is in no way an innocent party here - he does start to latch onto the fantasy of this imaginary friendship with Connor and this doting family that wants and likes him, and soon he's clearly keeping up the charade for himself and not to make Connor's family feel better. But none of this would have happened if it weren't for Jared convincing him he absolutely needed to keep up the lie, yet what Jared says when it's all gotten out of hand isn't "Look, I'm sorry, this is wrong, I was wrong, you should have told them the truth from the start", but "You should remember who your friends are." Maybe Evan would remember who his friends are if you'd ever been anything resembling an actual friend to him, Jared! I gather stage directions and cut songs and so on show that Jared actually has a very low self-esteem and is covering up his insecurities with sarcasm and bullying behaviour, which is great, but I wish any of that really got through in the actual play, because in the actual play Jared is just intensely unsympathetic. As it stands, his narrative function is to show how friendless Evan is (the best he's got is this guy, who freely tells him he only hangs out with him because he's literally being paid for it) and to be the person who's callous enough to think lying to a grieving family about being friends with their dead son to save face is okay, because Evan is actually better than that and wouldn't have done it otherwise. Like with Alana, I'm sure there's something interesting there, in theory, that the actor taps into while playing him. But within the actual show, the way he acts by and large isn't interestingly informed by his insecurity; he's just being a mean-spirited, bullying, opportunistic asshole. He has no real redeeming qualities and then just kind of vanishes abruptly from the story towards the end, before he gets the chance to even react to the lie being (partly) exposed (which could have been a nice opportunity to show him being a non-dick for once).

I was also sad to discover that in the actual play, things that were subtle and interesting on the soundtrack are just spelled out. Evan explains in so many words near the very beginning, before we even hear For Forever, that he broke his arm because he fell out of a tree and the funny thing is nobody came to get him so he was just lying on the ground alone for a while. That beautiful, emotional repetition in the song - And I see him coming to get me. He's coming to get me. And everything's okay. - isn't using Evan's emotion as he makes up a false wish-fulfillment narrative to implicitly tell you about something that really happened; it's just a straightforward lie contradicting something established explicitly earlier on. There's nothing wrong with that, but man, I thought it was something sublime. Even stuff like To Break In a Glove - on the soundtrack, Evan says, "Connor was really lucky to have a dad who... who cared so much, about... taking care of stuff," and it establishes nicely, implicitly, that Evan's own dad never cared and never played baseball with him, which Connor's dad clearly understands in the pause that follows even though he doesn't remark on it directly and just reiterates his instructions about the glove. But in the actual thing, they spell it out. A moment that wasn't a big crowning moment of subtlety or anything but still nicely understated, trusting the listener to get the implied meaning without stating it outright, isn't even that. That's a bit disappointing.

I wonder if in some previous iteration of the story it used to be subtler, but they later made it more explicit to make it easier to follow. That or, you know, I extrapolated subtlety simply from having incomplete information. One of the two. (If it's the latter, though, I'm amused at how coincidentally good that incomplete information is.)

I was also surprised by just how little we learn about the actual Connor, even after seeing Tumblr jokes about Mike Faist being nominated for a Tony for spending fifteen minutes onstage. I expected fifteen minutes meant we'd see just enough of Connor to be able to form a reasonably complete picture along with the stuff we'd learn second-hand - but we don't really get to form any clear picture of Connor at all. We see that he smokes weed, that he suffers from severe paranoia, that he has violent episodes. There's, I think, pretty much exactly one scene giving real, subtle, humanizing insight into his character - the one in the computer lab, where Connor talks to Evan and signs his cast despite his outburst earlier (showing that he awkwardly wants to make up for shoving Evan but is still unwilling to directly apologize or address it), and he jokes about how they can both pretend they're friends (implying he too might be lonely and wishes he had friends, and if things had gone differently perhaps they could have become friends for real), but then when he sees Evan's letter referring to Zoe, he lashes out with sudden intense paranoia again and pushes him away (implying he does care about his sister on some level, as well as showing just how bad his mental health issues are and giving an idea of why he's not exactly popular). This one scene really is very good and exactly the sort of thing I wanted from this musical! But this is his last scene before he dies, and the majority of Connor's time onstage is as the imaginary version of him in Evan's head, which isn't very well developed and doesn't have very much to do with the real Connor. Moreover, we don't end up learning very much from Connor's family after his suicide at all. They used to have picnics at an apple orchard; Connor once had an episode where he screamed he was going to kill Zoe; that's pretty much about it. I was expecting imaginary Connor to kind of be developed as a character in his own right, based on Evan's perception of what the actual Connor was like at school, but imaginary Connor doesn't end up getting much in the way of characterization, instead serving more as a mouthpiece to manifest some of Evan's inner monologue as it pertains to how he relates to Connor and projects his own feelings and experiences onto him. That kind of makes sense, since Evan knows basically nothing about Connor, but just the same, it feels like a missed opportunity to flesh out Connor's character in general. When Connor and the made-up fantasy of him that Evan creates are such a huge part of the story, it seems natural to make use of the real Connor to compare and contrast Evan's fantasy Connor, but the show ultimately doesn't really go there, and Connor remains kind of just the potential to be a character more than a real character. I think that's a shame; it'd be fascinating to get a good look into the mind of someone with Connor's kind of severe mental health issues (as opposed to Evan's anxiety, which is much easier for an average person to grasp and relate to), and I think it'd strengthen the show's commentary on teen suicide if the kid who took his own life were a real, developed character that we can properly understand and empathize with.

All that having been said, though, it's still a good show. I might have appreciated it more if I hadn't spent weeks making up my own version in my head before I gave in and watched the bootleg, but there are still a lot of things it does do really, really well. Evan's anxiety and general self-hatred and character progression is well portrayed; he's relatable and sympathetic while making hugely misguided, horrible choices, with real, intriguing psychological depth actually driving the things he does. And some things really are good and subtle in the final product, like Evan relating to Connor and projecting onto him because he'd been suicidal himself, the general hints at that fact before it actually comes to light. So Big / So Small is genuinely one of the best-done tearjerker songs I've ever heard; the truck story is kind of cheesy but it's so cute and childlike and tragic and spaced out in the perfect way with Heidi's feelings of being helpless and overwhelmed. Heidi in general is such a good character; she's trying so hard, and loves him so much, but she has to get by and just doesn't have the ability to be there for him as consistently as someone like Cynthia. And with how hard she works, and how much she loves him, of course it hurts her to learn her son has found this second family behind her back, a family of rich strangers that feel sorry for her and want to give her handouts. She's so flawed and I love her.

(After Anybody Have a Map?, where Cynthia and Heidi's experiences of trying their hardest for their sons when they don't really know how are compared, I was hoping they'd both be getting similar levels of development, but alas, Cynthia definitely gets the short end of the stick. She gets more development than Connor's dad, and the way she unlike the rest of her family unreservedly loved her son in spite of everything is interesting, but again, without actually getting much insight into Connor, it's hard to gain a complete understanding of why she feels that way, or of her mental state in general.)

Requiem is a really beautiful song and my favorite in the show, although the aforementioned So Big / So Small kind of needs its own scale because damn. Sincerely, Me is very catchy. The "To disappear, disappear" chorus of Disappear was one of the first bits that stuck with me on the soundtrack, particularly the way the quiet abruptness of the latter "disappear" actually conveys the feeling of disappearing. Good for You and Anybody Have a Map? are both good.

And the performances are very good in general. Rachel Bay Jones as Heidi may actually be my favorite because as I explained above I really like Heidi, and Ben Platt's anxiety as Evan is palpable and believable. I may not like Jared the character, but Will Roland does nail the role, I think. And of course, I'm sure the show is much better live than watching a bootleg. Live theater is a whole different experience, and if I ever do get a good chance to see it properly, I'll go for it.

(But I liked Groundhog Day better.)

#dear evan hansen #review #ramble #characters #incredibly long overanalytical rambling about characterization in a musical involving suicide: the most Me thing(tm)#suicide

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passiveagressiveukulele · 3 years

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FILM NARRATIVE 2

TEENS ON SCREENS

Coming of age story is my favourite kind of story. From 10 things I hate about you, Clueless and Breakfast club to Sing street and Ladybird I’ve seen it all (to say multiple times would be an understatement). Paradoxically, I’m not a big fan of the hero’s journey plot arc. It’s a very western, predictable, underdog-esque storytelling I find unfulfilling in most cases. But this formula doesn’t fall short for teen films. In fact, it does quite the opposite for me - it fulfils.

Teenage years are all about alienation, not fitting in, getting out of your comfort zone and finding your own way in the world. Basically, what I’m saying is - teenagers are superheroes. Grumpy, hysterical, annoying and frequently mean, but hey, flawed is the predisposition for human. And I find that films concerning these young humans carry a few interesting lessons that seem to get overlooked in other genres.

Babyteeth (and the other way is wrong)

Within coming of age stories there’s a particular subgenre of teen films - teen cancer films. The fault in our stars’ black and white clouds on a baby blue background are practically their trademark, but let’s not forget the lesser known classics such as A walk to remember, Midnight sun and very topical in 2020/21- 5 feet apart. The premise is simple - a dying girl only has only so much time left on this Earth so in 120 minutes of the film’s runtime a handsome (often angsty but free spirited) young dude knocks on her door, breaks ups her daily, medication induced routine, turns things upside down (to quote John Green: “gives her a forever within the number of days and she is eternally grateful for it”), but then after she’s gone he’s the one who realises that things will never be the same (along the way he also makes best friends with her dad who initially hated the dude).

There’s nothing particularly problematic about this storytelling formula itself, but rather the way cancer gets treated along the way. Writers gets so tangled up in the “romantic” idea of a pretty girl destined to die (something Jesse Andrews caught on in the early years of this trend and tactfully used it in the title of his Me and Earl and the dying girl). Even worse, in some cases this pretty girl’s soul purpose of the remaining days is to show her newly acquired dude “the way”. Alyssa Rosenberg’s definition of this trope stands - “Hollywood is determined to deliver a heavy dose of pain relief in the name of prettiness.”

This is why I found it particularly enjoyable to watch Netflix’s latest release Babyteeth. It’s a story about 16 year old Milla. Milla falls in love with a 23 year old Moses. Milla’s parents disapprove. Milla also has cancer. Notice how cancer comes last, how cancer is tied to also, how cancer does not define Milla.

This is a story about Milla’s first love. Milla meets him on a train station, where he makes an entrance to her life high on adrenaline, foolishness and immaturity (and some other substances, as we later find out). It’s all it takes for her, she can fill in the rest. It’s her call to adventure.

It’s clear she’s intoxicated by him, it is unclear how he feels about her. Her fascination has no explanation. And it needs none. He’s her first (potentially unrequited) love. In his talk about first love, Stephen Fry said that it demands to be unrequited because “it’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It’s an atom bomb... like matter meeting anti-matter. It’s almost important that all you do is worship, yearn and long.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SciBpkvtGe0

What writers of these teen cancer stories fail to understand time and time again is that cancer is not what makes cancer girl’s love tragic. When heart skips a beat and when it aches, when hands sweat and they touch, when eyes meet and tear up it’s romantically tragic enough. Love will inevitably run its course and the characters know it in their bones, but what matters is that they give it a shot. They worship, they yearn, and ultimately - they long. And all of this is accompanied by an impeccable soundtrack (but more about that in the following case study).

We are who we are (or how to swap Sufjan Stevens and the Psychedelic Furs for Blood Orange and Chance the Rapper)

Speaking of subgenres in teen films, Luca Guadagnino is on a good way to create his own - a coming of age story of a sexually troubled young man in Italy. Apart from the before mentioned protagonist, other tropes of this genre include - swift unmotivated pans, hyperactive piano scores and excessive amount of adolescent boredom. (And truly, the latter is the show’s biggest throwback - the slow pacing of 8 one hour episodes very soon starts to resemble a Bela Tarr project).

Whereas in his previous feature, Call me by your name, Guadagnino characterised his protagonist and surroundings with a playlist which mainly included Sufjan Stevens’ hits such as Futile devices, Mystery of love and Visions of Gideon, here he adopts a much more versatile approach. Sometimes directly in the shot, sometimes outside it and sometimes barely in it and muffled by the earphones Fraser never seems to take out, the music of David Bowie, The Smiths, Little Simz, Backstreet Boys, Kanye West, Frank Ocean and most importantly, Blood Orange is at the very heart of teenage landscape.

This is something almost every teen movie/series seems to get right - the role of music. Sometimes retro, sometimes indie, sometimes unbearably underground, but everpresent. The only other genre that employs this much melody are musicals and I’m sure we can all agree they’re a separate category. Just think about the role Clueless had in launching Radiohead’s career straight into the jaws of the mainstream or Bowie’s German rendition of songs used in Wir kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Lately I noticed a frequent use of singles by The The and Sharon Van Etten in all things considering characters aged 15-19.

What both Babyteeth and We are who we are do alongside comprising a colourful playlist is employ instrumental pieces that built up a library of leit motifs. In Babyteeth string quartets establish Milla’s relationship with her mother and in We are who we are piano transitions serve as a constant reminder of Fraser’s kindred spirit.

I suppose the inexperienced ears must come in pair with the inexperienced heart. When you’re young everything you hear is new, different and intoxicating. The overload of emotions can only be covered by a wide range of sounds. In turn, this only makes the cinematic landscape all the more exciting. I think many filmmakers would benefit from building up an archive of characterful tunes instead of leaving it all up to teen movies, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch.

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journalxxx · 7 years

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January 17th, 2013

Albeit coded with my most complex cipher, the delicate and personal nature of the events that have occupied my mind for the past hours makes me hesitant to record them in writing. However, my thoughts have been spinning in circles for so long that I think that even the simple process of establishing a chronological and causal narrative order among them could be of some use to me.

First off, something I had genuinely forgotten until this evening. During my travels, I once found myself temporarily detained in the small jail of a local custom house, for reasons which have no bearing on the topic at hand. The cell opposite mine was occupied by two fascinating jellyfish-like creatures, whose appearance strongly resembled that of our Pelagia Noctiluca species here on Earth, except nearly as tall as an average human being and perfectly adapted to terrestrial survival and ambulation. Since my translator had been confiscated by the authorities and we were such fundamentally different organisms, all my attempts at talking with them were unsuccessful, and the three of us spent the long hours of imprisonment without interacting in any meaningful way. That is, until they started interacting with each other.

To this day, I have no idea what they were actually doing. They may have been fighting, or playing, or even simply communicating. What I do know is that their actions were extremely intriguing to watch. Each movement seemed incredibly slow and cautious, almost lazy at times. They kind of drifted towards each other at first, lightly and gradually, as if they were somehow fluctuating in an immaterial sea current. Their thin and lucid tentacles brushed, then slid along each other, and finally tangled and coiled like the strands of a rope, or the superhelix of a protein. Their appendages seemed to meld as they grew closer and, at one point, when their limbs were so deeply tied that they appeared impossible to unravel, their bells flipped sideways and their rims adhered perfectly, creating a roughly spherical shape above their bodies. They stayed like that for quite a while, at least half an hour, squirming and ondulating slightly against each other.

I remember wishing that the room had been more brightly lit, to allow me to observe the phenomenon more clearly, maybe even catch a glimpse of their inner anatomical structures through their translucent tissues. I remember squinting in the darkness to make sense of the dim reflection of the outer light on their skin, trying to gauge whether their position had changed or the situation had evolved. I remember the strange, subtle scent that slowly pervaded the area, something akin to ammonia. I remember most vividly the noises they made, the soft and wet rustling of their fringed tentacles sliding and knotting, the sharp smacking sound of their bells suddenly misaligning, and then quickly sticking back together like powerful suction cups. I remember, not without shame, my interest gradually turning into something other than purely academical, something of much less intellectual nature. I did not question it at the time, nor would I know how to interpret it even now. I can only imagine that something in their attitude, regardless of what their actual intent may have been, must have resonated with my own human schemes of behavioral interpretation. What may have been the most normal and ordinary social interaction in those aliens' society did look to me as... uniquely intimate and suggestive. I wish I could say I only went as far as acknowledging that bizarre interest, and then promptly and discreetly shrugged it off. I did not. I wish I could blame the hours of boredom, or the years of loneliness, but the recent developments warn me to be wary of such simplistic excuses. As much as it pains me to admit it, I did allow that peculiar sight to rouse me beyond reason and dignity, to the point that I couldn't do anything but relieve that troubling pressure as I could, then and there. The creatures didn't seem to notice in any way, nor did the curious incident have any kind of material or moral consequence. It may have indeed remained buried in my memory for another decade or forever, if something deeply different yet somehow similar hadn't sparked its recollection. I have already written about Stan's penchant for indulging in brief and casual dalliances in most of the towns where we happen to dock. It isn't uncommon for him to spend an entire night out once in a while, nor to display unexpected familiarity with the most diverse individuals, in spite of every and any linguistic or cultural barrier. He is as discreet about it as any man with my brother's particular character and brazen sense of humor might be, though I'm glad to say that this habit of his has never caused us troubles or misunderstandings. However, I now find myself incapable of thinking about this matter like I did before, like an innocuous and abstract piece of information about his usual past-times. And once again I can't help but draw the conclusion that I don't know my brother nearly as well as I thought. I didn't notice anything remarkable about the plain diner we went to yesterday evening and, on Stan's suggestion, today as well. Everything from the food, to the furnishing, to the friendly waitress taking our orders looked absolutely nondescript and ordinary. I did notice the abundance of warm smiles and lingering glances the two were trading but, well. I surprised Stan practising cheesy pick-up lines both on his pet axolotl and on a miner copper statue, so I've always thought that flirting comes as natural to him as breathing. I definitely didn't notice anything strange when he excused himself to "take a leak", as he eloquently put it. Therefore, when I went to the bathroom as well a couple of minutes later, I didn't expect in the slightest to catch a glimpse, behind an ajar "Staff Only" door, of him and waitress clutching at each other, his mouth latched on her neck and his hand under her skirt. Paradoxically, the most remarkable aspect of the whole thing was how strangely unremarkable it was, in some ways. They remained mostly quiet for the entire time, save few hushed encouragements and instructions. As strange as it may sound, it looked like they barely moved, once they started properly. They barely even looked at each other, or rather they did, but only at their bodies, cheeky winks and bright smiles unexplicably gone. For some bizarre reason, the incident in the custom house popped in my mind, and, just as inexcusably as that time, I simply observed, instead of discreetly going my way. I left only after they were done, and I finally headed to the bathroom to gather my thoughts for a minute. I must confess that, if I had witnessed such a scene just few months ago, I fear it would have left me completely unimpressed. I probably would have spared it very little thought, and many denigratory judgements. However, I believe - I want to believe - that I have learned something about Stanley since my return, and that's that he is, despite the appearances, a very whole-hearted man. It boggles my mind that he may be so careless and superficial with something that, in the life of every human being, I believe should be treated with at least some modicum of consideration. I may be reaching, but I feel that, just like with the jellyfish aliens, I may be missing some crucial contextual element, something critical to let me understand exactly what the hell have I stumbled into. Otherwise, it just... doesn't make sense to me. For the sake of honesty, I can't omit the fact that, despite all these puzzling and troubling thoughts, the sight didn't leave me unaffected. I did not indulge my 'interest' - for lack of more delicate definition - like the last time, as I also want to believe that I have some modicum of consideration as well, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't consider the idea, however briefly. Whatever the source of this questionable fascination may be, it wasn't remotely slighted by the fact that one of its objects was my own kin. I don't really know what to make of this either. When I got back to the table, Stan was casually picking the last fries from my plate, calm and cheerful as ever. Not a single word or gesture was out of place when we paid, and the amicable looks and smiles were back in their place. Sometimes I forget how much of a good liar my brother is. If his good mood was even a facade. Maybe not. I honestly have no idea. We set sail to our next destination a few hours ago. I never quite noticed how utterly unaffected Stan seems to be by the idea of leaving his occasional acquaintances for good, people whom he must have bonded with to some degree, I suppose. It strikes me as beyond odd, now, though I may be just overthinking it. We're scheduled for almost a full month of navigation before hitting the next port, so I guess I'll have plenty of time to try to make sense of my doubts.

#stancest

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boymonsters · 7 years

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Demna Gvasalia and Paul Franco discuss contemporary youth

As filmmaker Paul Franco debuts his latest project narrated by the designer, the two discuss social media, reality, and why you can’t really fake Vetements jeans

“I was looking for a clear understanding of what our time is composed of,” explains filmmaker Paul Franco of his latest project FASTbeat, a short film captured over the course of a year in Paris featuring model Sasha Melnychuk. So, Franco reached out to interview the man whose work has played a key role in shaping today’s fashion and youth cultural zeitgeist – Demna Gvasalia.

His speech (an extract from the full interview below) overlays the film, which Franco describes as more impressionistic than a traditional narrative. “I wanted to create a film that’s a sensation and somehow, an archive piece that we may only really understand in ten years time,” he says. “This movie is more of an emotion than it is a story.”

The resulting piece comments on the way we live our lives simultaneously on and offline; the images’ fast rhythm drawing a parallel to the overload of information in the digital world, counteracted by the slow pace of photographer Mark Borthwick’s music.

“Today, we experience a lot in a short time span. I wanted to distort time to express this feeling and a fast information flux – we cannot grasp all of the images and have to focus on the slower pace of the spoken word,” explains Franco. “It’s basically what we experience in life every day, a constant flow of information online versus the slower pace of real life. The ending is about reality and how that is what matters most.”

[...]

Paul Franco: It seems our generation has developed a strong interest in reality in contrast to the 90s, which was more about fantasy or a dream. How do you think this happened?

Demna Gvasalia: I think reality has become very important today because of a lack of time. The dream requires time; it might feel like we were wasting it when trying to dream, or live in the dream. Now, there is no time for anything. You have to run, you have to rush, Insta-life – I feel that this will really bring us down to earth. More and more, I want to concentrate on pure things, and not drift away into the clouds. We live now – and that’s the most precious thing.

Paul Franco: Would you think of the internet as such a cloud? Forever refreshing, we receive new information and content all the time. We can enter the most diverse realities from anywhere in the world.

Demna Gvasalia: Which is paradoxical. Because it’s not reality, but on our screen.

Paul Franco: People seem to shift realities. Rather than an actual self, they build an online character.

Demna Gvasalia: Because there are many things a lot of people in real life don’t even dare to try. People have complexes, people have fears. I think when it’s on your screen you tend to lose these fears and complexes – that makes it so powerful. Once you’re hidden, you can be whoever you want.

Paul Franco: Does that make it dishonest – does it strip us of sincerity?

Demna Gvasalia: Yes, in a way. People try to protect themselves physically and emotionally, and that defines a lack of sincerity. They wear a shield around them.

Paul Franco: I approached you on Facebook. If you think back in time, Cristóbal Balenciaga felt more like a studio than an actual person, even to some journalists. Now we can have a virtual conversation any time.

Demna Gvasalia: Which is amazing, I think.

“I approached you on Facebook. If you think back in time, Cristóbal Balenciaga felt more like a studio than an actual person, even to some journalists. Now we can have a virtual conversation any time” – Paul Franco

Paul Franco: We are all closer to each other. Via social media, people become more approachable.

Demna Gvasalia: Then again, I see myself as a person first of all. I have a Facebook, I even have a relationship with someone on Facebook, which is really strange… Talking about reality is quite ironic here. It really changes communication between people. In a way people have become more sociable in real life but on the other hand, online, things are so much easier – to approach someone, or have a conversation. Or to fall in love, even.

Paul Franco: Talking to people online can be liberating. We tend to reveal more, because we don’t even consider meeting our virtual partner in real life.

Demna Gvasalia: Exactly, we are presented with freedom. Even half drunk at a party, there is still this filter in front of you – I guess because you’re physically there. On the keyboard, it’s a completely different sense of freedom. It makes interaction feel so honest and direct, which is fascinating about our times.

Paul Franco: Vetements in itself is a young brand, taking inspiration from youth – but given the price point it is not exactly directed at young people. Why do you think it still resonates with them?

Demna Gvasalia: I don’t think of our target audience as adolescents. But I do think youth is the most interesting thing in the world; the kind of naivety, the braveness, doing it your way, and questioning things. That’s the most inspiring. At Vetements, from the beginning, we realised that this was the conversation we wanted to have. The social conversation was with the youth, because that’s where you discover a lot of things.

Paul Franco: What are the symptoms of a youth that disappears to make way for maturity?

Demna Gvasalia: When you talk to somebody who is 19, 20, in their early 20s, there is much less judgment toward things. With age we become judgmental very often. They see things the way they are, and accept that.

Paul Franco: We lose our naivety.

Demna Gvasalia: With age it disappears, unless you learn how to handle it. Still it remains very hard to keep. That’s the most interesting thing about young people – they have an openness and passion towards things. They’re passionate about having a hoodie and passionate about some new track that just came out. They can be passionate about those things.

Paul Franco: What I really liked from the beginning at Vetements was this sincerity of the process, and how you make this sincerity accessible. Which reminds me of the story when you found a pair of trainers in the medina of Marrakech, which said Nike on the side…

Demna Gvasalia: …and adidas on the top.

Paul Franco: I bring this up because I recently read an article with instructions to copy Vetements jeans just by cutting the hem.

Demna Gvasalia: Of course you can fake them.

“The most immense and incredible feeling I remember in the beginning of the 90s and for the people of my generation, was this notion of freedom” – Demna Gvasalia

Paul Franco: How do you feel about that?

Demna Gvasalia: Well, you can fake certain things, but you cannot make them the same. These jeans need a whole system of processing – it’s about their fit and how they work. There is a lot of process behind them, though visually they are very simple. So for Instagram you can fake it but for real life, to wear them and feel flattered, to feel that your butt looks good – you can’t really fake that by just cutting the hem.

Paul Franco: I have never been to Russia – I lived in Berlin, but…

Demna Gvasalia: That’s nowhere near the same.

Paul Franco: I feel there is some kind of a new Russian avant-garde, which gives hope to many people. What’s interesting about this Russian aesthetic is its roughness and authenticity. It feels relatable irrespective of social background or location.

Demna Gvasalia: Because all of these things have already happened in Western culture, they are something you can relate to on some level. In Russia everything happened much later, it was very much behind in terms of cultural and social developments. The part of this – what they call ‘Eastern European’ thing – that people can relate to here is almost nostalgic.

Paul Franco: I feel it can help people grow and give them an idea of everything being possible.

Demna Gvasalia: It rather is about being daring, in a way. ‘Whatever, we don’t care about those rules, we want to do it our way.’ I think that’s mood we had after the Soviet Union collapsed. That’s when I was a teenager, and the people I work with now also come from there. It was a period we all know very well; this idea of suddenly having things available – suddenly you could do things, and that spirit is exactly what would present that feeling of hope. A kind of new European dream with its possibilities and freedom. The most immense and incredible feeling I remember in the beginning of the 90s and for the people of my generation, was this notion of freedom. Now we have lost it a little bit in Europe, in the exchange for Western culture. Russia today is the opposite of freedom, which is a paradox.

Paul Franco: To me as a European, this aesthetic feels like a new vision and hope. To be honest about our realities. Apart from it already being a trend, do you think it could become an actual sensibility for the youth of the world?

Demna Gvasalia: I don’t know if it’s a new vision – I mean, there is actually nothing new about it at all. It’s all based on a certain period of time which is not even ten years ago. It might feel new for those teenagers who are 15 years old… they don’t know about all of this stuff, so for them it is different from the things they have seen in the past decade. I don’t think it’s a vision, but rather a certain aesthetic that is easy.

Paul Franco: I like to understand it as a way of life.

Demna Gvasalia: It is a way of life too. At Vetements we are product oriented, but in the end we do create some kind of following in terms of people who like us or don’t like us. For those who do, it is a kind of lifestyle at the end of the day – they’re not likely to sit in college learning mathematics. It gives you a certain energy, and I believe that’s the most important part of it. It’s what I feel each time we do a show. For us, it’s less important to show the clothes than to express an energy and their dynamics.

Paul Franco: Has Vetements changed your vision, your idea of our generation and culture?

Demna Gvasalia: It hasn’t really changed. I think however, the brand has enhanced the impact our culture and our society have on us. We live in Paris and work here – the things happening today and what we see on the street, a certain aggression and maybe a fearful attitude, definitely have an effect on us. We translate that into our work. So I feel it’s the opposite which defines us: we overcome fear by doing what we do.

Paul Franco: Would you mind if the movie features the line: ‘From everything to nothing’?

Demna Gvasalia: From everything to nothing and back to everything, I would say. I think it’s a circle that we are running in, it never ends. That’s the nice part of it.

Paul Franco: I feel this sentence could mean a lot for Vetements.

Demna Gvasalia: More than that, it’s a very accurate sentence in the wake of what’s happening in the world. I think we need to go back to nothing to be pure again. I believe deconstruction is the meaning of creation.

Interview by Paul Franco

Text by Emma Hope Allwood and Tim Neugebauer

in Dazed Digital

[With images and videos not included. See source link.]

#read #boymonstersread

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goodra-king · 4 years

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Transcript of Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation

Transcript of Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Michael Margolis. He is the CEO and founder of Storied, a strategic messaging firm specializing in the story of innovation and disruption. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Story 10X: Turn The Impossible Into The Inevitable. So Michael, thanks for joining me.

Michael Margolis: John, thank you. It’s an absolute thrill for us to connect today.

John Jantsch: So when did the Story come into your life? I mean, we all have stories, childhood stories, but when did you start realizing it was a tool that you could or should use?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, what a great question. So for me, like it is for many of us, I came to Story and my sense of this path out of huge failure and disappointment.

John Jantsch: Which is a story by itself, right?

Michael Margolis: It always is, right? And it was … And for me specifically, it was at the age of 23 after my first career, I’d been a social entrepreneur. So I came of age at the birth of the internet economy and co-founded a nonprofit, had very quick fast success working on poverty, race, the digital divide, complicated stuff, right? It’s not like selling cupcakes. And despite all the quick success that we had within a couple of years, it all fell apart.

Michael Margolis: And I remember sitting there after it all kind of crumbled and there was this sense, John, that something like was missing from the conversation. Like I knew it intuitively, but I didn’t have the language for it, specifically how to tell the story of innovation, because when you’re dealing with innovation, in this case, this was social innovation, like culture change, much less business innovation. But when you’re dealing with innovation, by definition, you’re overstepping, doing something you’re not supposed to be doing. It’s heretical, it’s taboo, it’s off limits, it gets lost in translation. And it was really that struggle and frustration that set me off on the journey that’s been now 20 years of mapping and decoding and developing narrative frameworks that we deliver and teach inside some of the biggest companies in the world today.

John Jantsch: So storytelling, books about storytelling, are quite hot right now. So in your estimation, what does Story 10X kind of offer that maybe carves out its unique spot in the storytelling realm?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, absolutely. So what people have described it as is actually the world’s first book on storytelling for disruptive innovation. So one of the things that we often forget is that when it comes to storytelling, which is universal. I’m a cultural anthropologist by training. I’m fascinated with the universality of story and its use across time and history. But storytelling is contextual to the format or the medium.

Michael Margolis: So for instance, if you are writing a screenplay that’s for a film, that’s a very different format in which you’re going to construct and tell a story than a thousand page novel. Well equally, there’s a completely different context, not just for applying storytelling to business, but applying storytelling to innovation and disruption in the context of business. Because it’s, if you think in the traditional storytelling terms, John, when someone sits down to watch a movie or read a book, in a certain way, there’s a contract with your audience, which is they’ve agreed to suspend disbelief to go on a journey with you.

Michael Margolis: And now we live in an age of Netflix and like ADD attention span, so that that window is shorter and shorter before you go, “Ah, I’m going to go watch something else.” Or, “Ah, I don’t like this book.” But nonetheless, your audience is willing to suspend disbelief to go on a journey. Now when you walk into an executive board room or you’re leading a town hall with 5 thousand employees, or you’re in front of investors, pitching them on your next series of funding, I promise you, nobody’s giving you that benefit of suspending disbelief.

John Jantsch: I suspect the opposite’s true, right? You have to wade through the I don’t believe you.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, and that’s the paradox. So what are we taught to do, John, is we’re taught to lead with data and conclusions. But if you lead with data, the story is dead on arrival. So that’s the paradox, because we often forget our audience doesn’t have context, they don’t see the big picture. And they also don’t have emotional self identification. So instead you’re presenting the data that doesn’t mean anything to them. And what you’ll usually hear back in response is, “Well, how’d you come up with that data?” Right? Or, “I don’t know if I agree with that conclusion.”

Michael Margolis: So this is what we describe in the book. It’s actually a three-step narrative framework, which helps people to understand that people have to see it and they have to feel it before they can believe it. So data is a critical part of the story, but it’s the third step in the sequence. And when you actually address getting people to sort of see it, capture their imagination and see the possibilities and get people to empathize and emotionally identify or relate, then they’re going to be begging you for the data that supports what you’re selling. But that one shift makes all the difference.

John Jantsch: It’s almost kind of like they have to be bought in, they have to realize the problem, and then it’s like, “Okay, well then tell me how this is going to work for me.” I mean-

Michael Margolis: Exact … Well, yeah, and to your point about the problem, how often are you in front of an audience that you don’t have shared problem definition? Or how often is that audience complicit if not responsible for that problem? So of course, where you go presenting the problem, they’re going to get defensive.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I mean think about how many products have gone out there and failed because they were solving a problem the audience didn’t know they had. And I think that that’s … But that’s, it’s not necessarily a big leap, but it takes some skills sometimes because of just what you said. I’ve gone out on stages before and said, “Well, you need to do this and you need to do that.” And you can immediately see the arms cross. It’s like, “You don’t know my business. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Michael Margolis: That’s exactly it. And we don’t see, we have this blind spot. So people like you, people like me, and many of your listeners, those of us who are the innovators, the change agents, those who carry the torch where we’re like, “I see the future, I see where things are going, I know what we can do.” We get so passionate and enamored with the new story that we forget that the moment you present the new story, anybody that lives in the old story is likely to feel wrong, bad, judged, stupid, or defensive. And then we’re like, “But what’s wrong with people Why don’t they see what I see?”

Michael Margolis: And like the old saying, John, we teach what we need to learn most. So a lot of this storytelling stuff for me was I’ve always been someone with a strong point of view and sort of get ahead of my own britches sometimes. And I used to struggle when I was younger of like, “What’s wrong with people? Why don’t they see what I see?” And that frustration of feeling like I’m hitting my head against the wall. And I started to realize, “Oh, well there were actually ways I could adjust how I frame and convey my ideas to create more of a receptive feel to make it more relatable and accessible.” Because disruption, innovation tends to trigger fear. It’s the unknown, it’s the unfamiliar for folks. So it’s been a humble learning process for my own.

John Jantsch: So you have an entire section of the book on this framework called the undeniable story. So you started to allude to it and I think I interrupted you. Do you want to kind of say like, here’s part one, here’s part two, here’s part three?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, for sure. So, as you said, undeniable story. So the very premise of this is how do you talk about the future in a way that’s difficult, if not impossible to reject? Because remember, the biggest thing we’re up against? Disbelief. So how do I talk about this way? And again, we do a lot of work in Silicon Valley. We work with heads of product and heads of design at places like Facebook and Google and Hulu and Tesla and the like. And then we also work with a lot of Fortune 500s that are trying to be like Silicon Valley and lead digital transformation and all of this kind of change. So leaders are often having to present this vision about where we’re going and what’s next. And inevitably, they’re up against the VP of no. And so from that perspective, how do you, again, get people to see it and feel it before they believe it?

Michael Margolis: So those are the three steps. Step number one, see it, is actually all about naming the change. So this is actually the most critical step of the three, John, where we often take for granted that people can locate themself in our story. And that also that we’re giving them directionality. See, story is like a GPS. So it’s a location device. Like where are we? And story’s also a transportation vehicle. It takes us places. And the question is where is it taking us and do we want to go there? So part of what we have to do when getting people to see it is we have to frame a context that people can see and that speaks to how the world is changing. So this is one of the storytelling hacks that we figured out here, which is when the world changes, you have to change your story to reflect that new world. It’s a way to externalize the change or the conflict so that you don’t put people on the defensive, but that did something wrong.

John Jantsch: Is there simple way for you to give an example of that?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, for sure. So it’s everything, like inside big companies, it’s things like predictive analytics, and/or things like AI, automation, like pick any of them that are these big trends, and then help people understand, “What can we do now that we couldn’t three or five years ago?” Because of the forcing functions of technology, economics, culture changes, there are all these forces of change that are creating new opportunities and possibilities. And we take it for granted, but like the things that we can do.

Michael Margolis: I was just on a call earlier today with one of our clients that is a Fortune 100 in the insurance and financial services space. I was speaking with their chief digital officer. And one of the things they were pointing out is, “Look, you know, we pay out $40 billion in claims every single year.” So when someone, someone dies early and unexpectedly, or there’s a car accident, or property damage, so on and so on. Well, what if actually through our predictive analytics, we now actually have the ability to identify signals and indicators that we could do, for instance, monthly screenings in different ways that actually would help to identify breast cancer earlier in the lives of of a middle aged woman for instance?

Michael Margolis: Now that’s something that’s completely outside the traditional remit of this company, but they’re realizing as an insurance company it’s like, “Okay, how can we get further ahead in the curve of that customer experience based on the commitment we have to our customers, but let’s actually like create the interventions earlier on.” So that’s the kind of example and obviously this guy is a real visionary inside his company and he has to then be able to convey, communicate this within a broader enterprise that’s going through transformation. Does that help?

John Jantsch: Yeah, it does. I was afraid you were going to say that they had with AI and predictive analytics, they were going to be able to tell who was going to die. So I’m glad you didn’t go there.

Michael Margolis: Sadly, I have a feeling they can figure that out too.

John Jantsch: Pretty darn close, I bet. Wanted to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. And this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation email auto-responders that are ready to go. Great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships? They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docuseries, a lot of fun. Quick lessons, just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyond BF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about personal stories. So obviously a product needs a story and you need to ways to simplify concepts and information. But does everybody need their own personal story? I mean obviously speakers are very well trained to go out on stage and some sort of connection device. I mean, but is that become sort of standard fare now for anybody that, whether whatever you’re doing, whatever your career is, you should have your story?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, well the answer is yes, absolutely. And it plays out. Sort of, let me give two quick examples. The real simple one for everybody listening is before any business meeting you’ve been Googled. Which means that people are experiencing your story online before they experience you in real life. So let that sink in for a moment cause that’s an existential, “Oh fuck,” for just about every single one of us, right? Because it’s like, “Oh God, does this website make me look fat?” It brings up every insecurity and inadequacy, and we all have it in some form or another.

Michael Margolis: But your LinkedIn profile, your about page. I mean John, you and I have so many mutual friends in common, but as we were introduced, I’m sure before our call today, you Googled, right? Like you followed up on some of the other things that, I forget who introduced us, but it was a wonderful friend. But in follow up to that, it’s like you follow the breadcrumbs. We all do.

Michael Margolis: And so that’s the first place. And we actually even created an online course for this called The New About Me. It’s our bestselling online course, which is like how do you talk about yourself online without sounding like a wanker? And like writing that about page using storytelling principles. So that’s a basic, everybody has to do it. And even if you are working inside a company, your own personal brand, it shows up in many different ways as you’re building your reputation and your expertise and so on.

Michael Margolis: So that’s the basics. We spend a lot of time working with senior leaders inside companies. And so for instance, we just three weeks ago were with another Fortune 500 client. And we did a leadership summit for the CEO and their top 200 leaders. They were presenting their vision and strategy for the year, big transformation they’re leading. Every single one of those 200 leaders, SVP and above, over the next month were all going to lead town halls for all of their direct reports down the line.

Michael Margolis: And so our session was all about how do you personalize and humanize the larger company vision? And we often forget it’s tough because many of us, I know you’re very passionate about servant leadership. So many of us who have this servant leadership mindset, we go, “But it’s not about me. I’m here to serve others.” And so part of what we point out in support though is you can’t separate the message from the messenger and that by helping people understand your own personal backstory or why do you care about this vision? What is it about this new go-to-market or the three pillars of transformation that somehow connect to what you’ve gone through before in your life or how you’ve had to lead a transformation somewhere else.

Michael Margolis: People need that personalized emotional connection. And we had leaders share. We had one leader share story about how their first job was delivering cakes in like a delivery truck and like all of the comedy of errors that would happen and trying to balance like five layer cakes and making sure that they didn’t show up turned upside down. Or another one of the senior leaders told this story about her first job working at a dry cleaners and the things she learned there about customer service that were these humble lessons that inform how she applies the work today. So you’d be amazed at how these little personal vignettes will go to humanize you as a senior leader and help people connect with that.

John Jantsch: Okay. You ready for the tricky question?

Michael Margolis: Oh yeah. I love tricky questions.

John Jantsch: How much of your story has to be true?

Michael Margolis: Great question. I’m a big believer … I live in Los Angeles, so there’s the old Hollywood adage, based on a true story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

Michael Margolis: So, what I often-

John Jantsch: They really play around with that one too. Sometimes it’s like based on some things that could have been true.

Michael Margolis: Well, so I’m a big believer first and foremost of truth with a capital T. So truth with a capital T is you better really be speaking to something that is fundamentally true about yourself, about life in the world. And then it’s understanding, just like a good Hollywood screenwriter, is that if you’re taking a book like Lord of the Rings and you’re adapting it for the screen, you have to make choices that are going to serve your audience.

Michael Margolis: Sometimes you have to simplify the story. Sometimes you make slight zhushes because it’s just not going to translate otherwise effectively. So I do think sometimes, there is a little creative flourish and sometimes you’re editing, but you have to always ask yourself, “The choices that I’m making, am I doing it in service to my audience or am I doing it in service to my ego validation? Or am I doing it in service to somehow fundamentally deceiving and misleading people on something of material fact that somehow negates or warps?” Would they feel truly betrayed if they found out about the adjustments that you’ve made. So that’s the subjective line that I counsel clients around.

John Jantsch: So people have used story to manipulate. The classic sort of, the one that I see that if I get a pitch from somebody that starts with how he or she lost everything and they did this and did that and now they’ve overcome and they’re doing whatever. The essence of that pitch is, “You’re broke too. And like I used to be, and now you can be rich like I am.” And the essence of that pitch really rubs me the wrong way. How do you see that being an issue of … And I’m not saying all of those are trying to manipulate people, but there certainly is a manipulative aspect to that.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m trying to think what’s a simple way to answer that. Because we could spend the next hour unpacking that, John. But so here’s what I think. I think that we are increasingly living in an age where our audience is getting smarter and smarter, is getting more and more discerning about whether I can believe this story or not. It’s because we’re asked to process and analyze.

John Jantsch: I’m sorry.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, go ahead.

John Jantsch: I’m sorry, I hate to interrupt you, but I should have interjected a political joke right there. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Michael Margolis: Oh, we could.

John Jantsch: About our audience believing the truth and getting smarter. But I digress.

Michael Margolis: Well, no, no, no. Look, well and I our political environment right now is a great morality tale around manipulation of story and truthiness and post-fact era and all this other kind of garbage. I still fundamentally believe at the end of the day that because of the age of transparency that we’re in, that at the end of the day, the half life of a lie is shorter and shorter and shorter. The truth comes out and we do pay attention to the clues and markers of, “Do I trust this? Do I believe in this? And most importantly, how does this story make me feel?”

Michael Margolis: And we’re more and more skeptical of stories that make us feel like crap. This is a big part of the premise of the book Story 10X, which is something that Jonah Sachs, another colleague of mine in the world of storytelling wrote the book Story Wars. He talks about this, that for the modern marketing from the 1950s to the last about 10 years ago was this era of inadequacy marketing of basically selling and preying on our fears and insecurities. And I think we’re becoming more and more resistant to those kinds of messages.

Michael Margolis: So if we feel something is heavy-handed, we have a sense of it, people are going to react. I think those strategies are less and less effective in this era where we’re looking for authenticity, where we’re looking for … We’re trying to figure out who can we trust and what can we believe? So there’s no simple, clean answer to it, John, other than I think that that character matters.

Michael Margolis: I think that natural authority comes from being able to talk about, “Here’s what I know or here’s what my gift is. And you know what? Here’s where I’m a work in progress. Here’s the stuff I’ve struggled with too.” And the key to it is to make the journey be an open loop. Basically you’re inviting people to join you in the unfolding journey as opposed to back to data and conclusions, the end, the story is over. I’ve wrapped it up in a pretty little bow. And so that shift in mindset I think is the paradigm shift for all of us to think about because you have to invite people into a story where there’s more chapters to be written, if that makes sense.

John Jantsch: Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely. Become a part of the story. So Michael, thanks for dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast to talk about Story 10X. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, absolutely. So you can find Story 10X on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and all your local booksellers. You can also go to our website, GetStoried.com, that’s G-E-T-S-T-O-R-I-E-D.com. And if you go to /Story 10X, you can actually download the first 70 pages of the book. And feel free to reach out to me through social media. I’m especially active on LinkedIn. You can find me there, Michael Margolis.

John Jantsch: All right. Thanks, Michael. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon one day out there on the road.

Michael Margolis: I would love it. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it.

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IN 2010, I moved to Girona in Catalonia. I lived in a run-down apartment, near a gelid river, and spent most of my time pacing the streets, trying to keep warm. I spent the rest of my time obsessing over the literature of Catalan writer Josep Pla, which I had discovered a few years earlier. His work hadn’t been translated into English yet, and I felt as though I had found a secret literary well at the foot of the Pyrenees. The magic of literature often makes us believe that we are a singular witness to the secrets of the page, but luckily, we are never alone in our obsessions. In fact, Peter Bush was already in the process of translating Pla’s masterpiece, The Gray Notebook.

Josep Pla was born in Palafrugell in 1897. As a young adult he left for Barcelona to study law, but was forced to return to his sleepy seaside village of Palafrugell during the 1918 Pandemic. He spent the year recording deaths, reading, writing. He taught himself how to translate the landscape into words. He became consumed with writing. Decades later, he published an expanded version of his diary under the title The Gray Notebook.

What most fascinates me about Pla is his ability to fictionalize memory, to recycle his own work; over the course of his writing life he built an interconnected universe of books that have an encyclopedic relationship to one another. A complicated moody man caught between his Catalanist and Catholic identities, Pla spent the last decades of his life living in a 17th-century farmhouse in Palafrugell, known as Mas Pla. He died there in 1981 and is buried at the cemetery in Llofriu.

The Gray Notebook was published by the New York Review Books in 2014. I read it again in English while living in Chicago (also gelid, though at least my house is warm). There is a growing collection of Josep Pla’s works available in English, all exquisitely translated by Bush. Bush is not only a prolific translator, but also a political activist and an innovative pedagogue. He set up the MA program in the Theory and Practice of Translation at Middlesex University, where many stellar translators (like Anne McLean and Lisa Dillman) got their start. Peter Bush and I discussed his childhood and his long career: his translations of Marxist texts, which garnered the reproach of the Oxford academic establishment; his award-winning translations of Catalan literature; and of course, Pla’s epic masterpiece, The Gray Notebook.

AZAREEN VAN DER VLIET OLOOMI: You began your translating career by working with Marxist texts. How did you come to literary translation? How did this shift change the direction of your life?

PETER BUSH: I was a political activist in Oxford and London for six years from 1967. As I was one of the party members with a knowledge of languages, I translated Marxist texts and was also a journalist on the daily newspaper covering Spain, Latin America, Portugal, and Italy. This wasn’t to the liking of the ex-MI6 Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish at Oxford University, where I was researching — the one idealized by Javier Marías as Toby Rylands — and I found it difficult to find a post. My references said things like, “Peter Bush spent more time haranguing at demonstrations than reading in libraries,” or in more Oxonian cadences, “He went outside the society of the university.”

Eventually I taught in inner-city London schools for 14 years. I was head of languages at Holland Park in west London and had been teaching Campos de Níjar/Níjar Country, Juan Goytisolo’s account of his visits to impoverished Almería and Murcia. Juan Goytisolo was one of the most prominent Spanish writers at the time and some of my students’ grandparents were migrant workers from those areas or from Larache, in the former Spanish protectorate in Morocco. I thought they’d be interested; they weren’t — they wanted to be part of swinging London. I prepared a critical edition hoping that some socio-economic background might help students come to grips with the narrative. Juan Goytisolo liked it and when the first volume of his autobiography came out — Coto Vedado/Forbidden Territory — I thought it was wonderfully original and was discussing it with a colleague, John Lyons, a translator of Ernesto Cardenal, in our little staffroom and he asked: “Why don’t you translate it?” That’s when my career as a literary translator kicked off.

When did you first travel to Catalonia and become aware of it as a region with a cultural identity that is distinct from the rest of Spain?

I first traveled to Catalonia mentally when I was reading French and Spanish as an undergraduate in Cambridge. In the second year of the course, I opted for the Spanish medieval literature and culture course and that’s when I discovered the importance of Catalonia in the Middles Ages and read the whole of Vicens i Vives’s economic history of Spain. I could also have opted to learn Catalan but I didn’t; I chose to read all of Cervantes instead. However, my closest friend at the time did choose Catalan and with him I read the great poets Carles Riba and Jacint Verdaguer. Ironically, my friend fell in love with a madrileña, and spent his whole life in Madrid.

Cambridge also had strong Catalan connections — exile Batista i Roca lived in the city and Catalan lecturer Geoffrey Walker was a leading member of the Anglo-Catalan Society. There was somewhat of a division in the faculty: those who were into the 1898 Generation and Ortega y Gasset, and those who thought they were all second-rate — with the exception of Machado — and were more drawn to history. David Barrass was one of the latter and he offered a course on contemporary Spanish history that had a strong Catalan focus. (No Latin American literature was taught in Cambridge until 1968.)

I first traveled to Barcelona in 1968 in pursuit of my academic research into the relationship between writers and working-class organizations at the time of the 1868 Revolution. Many of my sources were newspapers, chapbooks, and pamphlets written in Catalan, so that was when I first began to read Catalan. In 1970, I returned to Barcelona to pursue my non-academic activities. Oxford historian Raymond Carr had gathered around him a group of postgraduate researchers from Spain, and some of them took an interest in my political activities — Pepe Varela, Juan Pablo Fusi, and Santi Udina. Santi was an economic historian and had published in the New Left Review under a pseudonym, given that Franco’s dictatorship still had Spain under its heel. Santi was active in a left-wing group in Barcelona, and I went over for 10 days to give lectures and talk to a range of intellectuals and trade-unionists mainly in an abandoned flat on Carrer de Balmes. I stayed with Santi in Sant Cugat and that’s when I first heard Catalan being spoken en famille. I also visited activists in Baix Llobregat, workers in the Seat factory who spoke in southern Spanish, and textile workers in Terrassa who spoke Catalan. I had previously spent three summers teaching English in Madrid from 1964 to 1966, and my sense of the difference between Madrid and Barcelona was, yes, that there was the Catalan language, with very little public presence, and that Barcelona seemed much more like a city under occupation. It was very gray; Gaudí was covered in soot.

I often think of learning a new language as a kind of love affair. Can you describe your love affair with Catalan? How is your relationship with Catalan different from your relationship to Spanish, French, and Portuguese?

Everything depends on your point of departure. Estrangement, evasion, the search for another place to be are all elements in a love affair, and as consciousness is so located in language and culture, the addition of other languages leads to an expansion of consciousness and culture (in its broadest sense).

I was brought up speaking a non-standard working-class dialect of English — a hybrid of my father’s rural Lincolnshire and my mother’s urban Yorkshire. When I entered elementary school and was told this wasn’t “proper” English, I was shocked. I knew standard English from radio, movies, and newspapers, but it wasn’t what we spoke at home. The situation worsened when I passed the exams to go to the Grammar School, the first time anyone from my family had gone to this place that had existed in the town since the 16th century. At the elementary school, most pupils came from the neighborhood. The Grammar School was the “natural” home for the sons of the middle classes. I felt increasingly estranged from my home language and uncomfortable with the standard that the majority used in their homes in very different parts of town. So Latin and French rescued me. Here we all started from zero, and I excelled, and then came Spanish.

My estrangement was linguistic and cultural. My father was a print worker and active trade-unionist, not a manager, banker, shop-owner. I loved jazz, rock ’n’ roll, country-and-western; school music was only classical. I only really came to like and read English literature for pleasure when I was 16 and reading Virgil and Horace, Balzac and Lorca and company in the original. Those three languages freed up my imagination, feelings, and intellect, got me over what I suppose was a narrowness caused by a visceral sense of class that simultaneously was powering me into other places. In Cambridge, for example, I was more interested in going to Raymond Williams’s lectures on European drama and the English novel and Nikolaus Pevsner’s on the Baroque than most of my Spanish and French literature lectures, though I was thoroughly enraptured and absorbed by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Proust and Galdós and Gide, Camus and Sartre, who were the authors most in vogue. I started to learn Portuguese when I was a journalist and consolidated that when I translated Chico Buarque and made a TV documentary about him. I began to learn Catalan at the end of the 1970s as I was hoping to live in Barcelona for a year. That didn’t turn out — I went to a small town in Murcia!

Later it was literally a matter of love. When I was director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, I met my wife, Teresa Solana, the director of Spain’s Translators’ House. We both left our posts to go and live in Barcelona in 2003. That’s when I really started to be fluent in Catalan. For the first time, I was learning the language properly in the country where it was spoken. Again, the linguistic shift wasn’t straightforward. I met Teresa speaking Spanish and that’s what we still mostly speak to each other. Teresa speaks Catalan to our daughter, who speaks to me in English, and most of our conversations are trilingual, even after our move to the United Kingdom in 2014.

Many of the Catalan books you’ve translated deal with exile and disenfranchisement, with lives lived at the margins. Do these themes speak to you personally?

I started in Spanish with Juan Goytisolo and Juan Carlos Onetti, both exiles and victims of dictatorship. The exclusion of my working-class culture from my own education led me to embrace other languages and literatures and want to bring those into the English-speaking world through translation, to challenge, as it were, the hegemony of the nationalist standard and canon.

Memories of disenfranchisement came from my family. I was to an extent franchised by the postwar settlement and the welfare state; I studied at Cambridge and Oxford and it didn’t cost me or my parents a penny. My new reality clashed with the visions of life my parents and other members of my family retailed in story after story. I’ll just mention a few details. My grandfather in the village of Pinchbeck was a shepherd living in a tied cottage. He fell ill, and the landowner threw him and his family onto the street. (This was at the end of World War I when three of my uncles were killed in France.) My mother came from Sheffield, lived in the center of the city of steel, and enjoyed an urban working-class culture — socialist cycling clubs, visits to the theater and opera, movies and dancing — until she was put into service with an uncle and aunt, which she left to go strawberry-picking in Lincolnshire in 1929. She met my father and never went back. Then came World War II, and my father was away for two years in France and four in the Middle East; when he returned, he was a stranger to my mother and his young daughters. I was then born into a family that had been ravaged by war. It was a “happy” family on the surface, but turbulence was never far away.

When I was school teacher in London, I taught in schools that were multilingual — 50 or 60 languages spoken by students — and I was fortunate that there was a progressive educational authority, and we attempted to forge a curriculum that responded to the experiences of our students. Students would suddenly appear on the school doorstep as a result of conflicts thousands of miles away — from China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Cyprus — exiles in flight from civil war and dictatorship. We developed whole school policies on language and culture. All that pedagogical potential was ended by Thatcher, who abolished the educational authority. All these memories and experiences, as well as my academic and linguistic knowledge, nourish my translations, driven by a political anger.

My encounter with Catalan literature also made me angry with myself. I considered myself as a Hispanist, but I had virtually ignored a literature where some of the best fiction of the civil war was written — Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales, In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda, or Josep Pla’s amazing short fiction, as in Life Embitters. Shouldn’t all students of Spanish have to read these authors? Shouldn’t they be as well known to general readers in the English-speaking world as Zafón, Cercas, or Marías?

Do you think the art of translation has anything in common with the art of listening? Do you consider the process of conducting a translation to be an embodied experience?

The art of listening is about capturing nuance, subtext, irony, wordplay, social and political resonances, and being able to listen alertly, whether it be in an exchange with a butcher or to a lecture by Judith Butler, about being interested in and interpreting what another person has to say. On the other hand, listening is usually a one-off; translating involves rereading and then rewriting, researching, and self-editing, interactions with editors and, sometimes, writers. Though, in oral cultures, like my family’s, it involves hearing the same stories many times, over many years, and catching the fresh elements and variations in what is being recounted, and, in my case, nearly all those storytellers are now dead, or have dementia or Alzheimer’s, and that leaves me alone to tell them.

I like the idea of “conducting” because it is as if you are appealing to all the strands in the text as instruments you have to weld into a new whole. The various drafts feel like a succession of rehearsals for the final performances which will be the readings by others. And that is a very intense, embodied experience — as is any act of reading — but more so because you are rewriting and rewriting, and that’s physically exhausting: body and mind are engaged. Literary translation is embodied in another sense. It’s a livelihood. It’s the means to pay the rent and put food on the table.

Has the act of translation changed how you think about yourself? Do you think of literary translations as a form of self-translation? Or is it more like a journey?

It is self-translation in the sense that you are moved deep into the language and experience of another person and culture, into unknown territory that then speaks to parts of yourself; through translation your own experience and imagination are extended, your use of language is broadened.

In my case, translation has taken me on real journeys to Havana, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, and Palafrugell. My translations of Cuban literature, for example, sprang from a commission to make a TV documentary about Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Translating Pla, Sales, and Rodoreda has changed my view of the civil war and Spanish culture. These writers and their work are obviously embedded in Catalan language and history and have suffered as a result in terms of recognition both inside and outside Catalonia because of the civil war and dictatorship. However, I think in the act of translating, you say to yourself and others, these are great books about specific moments in Catalan and Spanish history, but they are also about a young man forging himself as a writer, or a group of radical students in the early 30s whose lives are ruined by the rise of fascism, or an older working-class woman looking back on her struggle to survive with her children in a city under siege.

How do you approach teaching the art of translation? What advice would you offer a novice translator?

I approach it as a form of creative writing where students must read widely and learn to become writers in their own language. Most come from degrees that have prioritized academic discourse, which, generally, isn’t the language of literature! I advise emerging translators to be proactive, to think laterally and network extensively in the world of professional literary translators and publishing. And to start building up a vitae by translating short stories, poems, or excerpts from novels in magazines.

We share a deep love for Josep Pla, whose work wasn’t translated into English until you took on El Quadern Gris. How did you happen to start translating Josep Pla? What is the most enjoyable part of translating Pla, and the most challenging?

You’ll probably be shocked by my response. I came to Pla via Valle-Inclán. I had translated Tyrant Banderas for Edwin Frank at the NYRB. A few months later, Edwin wrote to tell me he’d bought the English rights to El Quadern Gris and asked if I knew someone who could translate it. I’d not read a word by Pla. I consulted with my wife, and she said I’d enjoy translating the book. I responded to Edwin that I could do it. The adventure of translation …

The most enjoyable part [of working on the book] was the humor and the description of literary life in Barcelona; the most challenging was Pla’s description of land and sea. I’d translated a lot of complex literature, but never such descriptions. Here is an example:

The sunlight is like a sheet of glass. Wind and sea battle in a futile, delirious fury. Everything stays the same, impassive and still — the coral of the almond trees, the playful kitten, the aioli, and the anglerfish soup. The things of the world pass by the light in my window — wind, water, and diamond spray racing toward the raw purple of the horizon. The brightness turns daylight into haze and my eyelids droop after that sudden, shimmering, dazzling illumination.

I had to draft and redraft these sections. I had to develop a new strand in my literary writing.

You are currently working on another of Pla’s books, Aigua de mar.

It’s another stylistic challenge because of the descriptions of the nautical world, of boats and fish. It also shows the immense humanity of Pla. He was at home in the bohemian, expat colony in hyper-inflationary Berlin or boarding-houses in London or Paris, but he never turned his back on the fishermen and farmers of the Empordà and Costa Brava.

What is your favorite region in Catalonia? Do you like to spend time in the cities or provinces described in the books you are working on?

I lived for 10 years in Barcelona and frequently return. Beyond Barcelona, I love the small towns on the Costa Brava described by Pla — Begur, Calella de Palafrugell, and Cadaqués.

I’ve always liked to see the places in the books I translate. Learning other languages and reading other literatures makes me want to go to where they come from.

Do you feel optimistic about the future of Catalonia? How has the recent geopolitical crisis affected your work or influenced your process as a translator?

By nature, I’m an optimist, but at the moment it’s hard to be optimistic about Catalonia, the United Kingdom, the United States, or anywhere, what with Vox, Brexit, and Trump and the rise of the extreme right all over the world.

The crisis has affected my work, in the sense that I now promote Catalan literature widely, and some say that I’m “anti-Spanish,” which is ridiculous. I’m still translating from my other languages and have spent years promoting the teaching of the Spanish language and its literatures. I’d say rather that I’m enjoying becoming a specialist in Catalan literature and discovering for myself all these great writers I want to bring to readers in the English-speaking world.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of Call Me Zebra.

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Feature: Favorite 25 Films of 2018

Once upon a time, Derek Smith wrote: “2017 was a year endured rather than lived.” But all due respect to the past, because here we are creeping into this new 2019 and things are so much better than we thought they’d be! True, the year probably felt like 37 years or whatever removed from Rick Deckard’s squared-off tie and malfunctioning memory. And truth be told, the political crisis unfolding in the gray hallways might seem more honest if it resembled the light-starved, gnarled noir of Blade Runner. At least Schwarzenegger and The Running Man promised that 2019’s only choice would be “hard time or prime time,” even if its presentation of a neon capital, corporate-owned world seemed, you know, subtle. And for all the (dead) kids in cages and bodies bleeding out on street corners here and abroad, Michael Bay and The Island had a perfectly-drooped Buscemi diagnosing our humanist crisis: “I mean, you’re not human. I mean, you’re human, but you’re not real. You’re not a real person, like me.” A lot of people were told they weren’t humans in 2018. This isn’t a writerly evasion or poetic epithet designed to elicit righteous ire/compel you to read another year-end list. Because what else could you call the concentrated attempt by some humans to discourage the freedoms of other humans? Our narrative didn’t turn science-fiction to let us off the hook: these non-humans weren’t clones or replicants or estranged Atlantean denizens returning to claim their kingly right. They just weren’t human enough (or the right kind of human) to matter in the eyes of louder, more powerful humans. All of our past’s proposed images of our worst futures pale in comparison to this denial of basic humanity that we see out our windows. It is unsurprising, then, that cinema, our most volatile cultural mirror, began to show the stretch and strain in its images of our species. But what is surprising is that cinema in 2018 retained nuance and compassion as it mediated the cruelties and depravities of its age. Unlike this slab of prose, movies in 2018 moved beyond mediating good and evil in simple, monolithic terms. They attempted to sketch the boundaries of real freedom in an unjust world (BlaKkKlansman). They investigated, more acutely than ever before, the responsibilities of what it meant to keep (Shirkers) and tell (Madeline’s Madeline) another human’s story (If Beale Street Could Talk), especially in remembrance (Roma). They presented distorted genealogies (Hereditary) and fisheye-lens histories (The Favourite) to track the human body’s motion (Suspiria) in and out of comradeship (Support the Girls) and trauma (Burning). In 2018, we hurled our betrayed humanities up against foreign corpses (Zama), scorched country (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), alien twins (Annihilation), and incongruent voices (Sorry to Bother You). We began to see, in everything, something like a way through the darkness. Why else keep watching the past (The Other Side of the Wind) if not to plot something we’d never imagined before (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)? Our moving images in 2018 proposed that real love (Eighth Grade) and genuine care (Lazzaro Felice) could stretch impossibly across time to add up to a life steeped in both nuance and compassion (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). Our love would not look the same (Leave No Trace) nor could it resound in strictly-feasible tones (Mandy), but we would recognize its absence; we could see that sometimes humanness looks like something we’ve never seen before (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). More than anything, as one derelict theory proposed, “Through the negative you could see the real, inner, demonic quality of the light.” In laying the responsibilities of the filmmaker and artist at the feet of a murderer, The House That Jack Built came perilously close to endorsing our worst demons. Those demons shook and raged and hissed at us, urging us to give in to despair and make a world in their image. How did we let it stand? Thomas Merton was a central figure in a figurative, feral lens for our year, and he wrote that “despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.” To levy our humanity so close to inhumanness, suggesting that our better angels are distortions, is dangerous. To know, as these 25 films know, that there can be nothing without despair until there is love is to actually be human. To look, as we did, through our ruinous year and resist the despairs of all our oppressors and lowest urges, to shout, in image and montage and light and shadow, that this is how I deny you is to attain, beyond our humanity and into the future, a new kind of prayer. –Frank Falisi --- 25 Roma Dir. Alfonso Cuarón [Netflix] Roma was Alfonso Cuarón’s excursion into simplicity, a self-imposed challenge that drew back from his earlier, more extravagant films. Cuarón told his simple allegory in a monochrome treatment, but while wearing multiple hats — he also produced, shot, and edited the film. The choice to go black and white not only focused the elements of filmmaking to its barest essentials, but it also emphasized its nostalgic underpinnings. Though it made use of elaborate staging for its more chaotic events, Roma paradoxically found fascination in the quotidian and the mundane. The film was dedicated to the maid that the Cuarón’s family employed when he was a child — realized as the previously unknown Yalitza Aparicio, who brought an indelible humanity to her role — but the story itself was secondary. It was presented more as a series of tableaus, culminating in a climactic sequence at the beach. Here, Cuarón’s camera lingered, unedited, in a harrowing scene that illustrated Aparicio’s undying devotion to the family and revealed the film’s true heart. –Tristan Kneschke --- 24 Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Dir. Morgan Neville [Focus Features] With no dirt to dig up on his subject, director Morgan Neville tended to accent the blue-tinged notes heard throughout the Neighborhood in his Fred Rogers documentary. The director’s seamless cardigan scene-weaving stitched together instances of cluster chords and doubting puppets into a portrait of vulnerability that reinforced one of Rogers’s core motifs: It takes a person, not a hero, to protect children. Not a pie-in-the-face kind of guy, we watched Fred McFeely Rogers ponder in the tall grass in between changing shoes and tackling hard topics like grief, death, and terrorism. Demonstrations of his honesty, inclusivity, kindness, patience, listening skills, and unconditional love revealed the subject as the archetype for a timeless paternal figure. Although his ministry athwart sensationalism took place in the era of broadcast television, we imagined that any younger generation in the history of the world could connect with and feel empowered by his carefully worded and well-tempered mission. –Rick Weaver --- 23 Leave No Trace Dir. Debra Granik [Bleecker Street] Few directors are as curious about or sensitive to alternative modes of existence as Debra Granik, who followed Winter’s Bone and the documentary Stray Dog with this tale of a father and daughter willfully attempting to live off the grid in the present-day Pacific Northwest. Leave No Trace was quiet and deliberate, but not remotely uneventful: Granik showed Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) moving through a handful of makeshift, scrappy, and industrialized communities. With minimal embellishments, Granik made each change of scenery feel at once seismic and utterly authentic. Moreover, she guided her two lead actors through agonizing psychological arcs without a whiff of cliché, as a daughter gradually discovered that her life and well-being will be enriched by community, while her PTSD-afflicted father confronted the fact that he can’t abide by the obligations and niceties of modern civilization. Granik’s film had a Bressonian bleakness, but it was entirely heartfelt and so convincing in its particulars that it couldn’t help but realign our sense of the world. –Christopher Gray --- 22 Support the Girls Dir. Andrew Bujalski [Magnolia Pictures] Your workdays don’t end with you back home ready to decompress; they are your back-home and your decompress. Maybe you slept or something like that (scrolled? drank? had a crisis?), but you aren’t really awake till the first table is seated, and you better leave everything else at the door (lol). Your customers are guests, your wage is nil, and your smile is forced by uninvisible hands. Your coworkers are either No Face or your own flesh and blood, the only ones keeping your head from falling off and bursting into flame at the foot of the heat lamp. They get it! They get you. Or they get the gist, which is about as much of you as you get anyway. Because if you actually stopped to think about… No need to pretend: You hate this place, and you find yourself doing anything for it, for each other, because you all know the conditions are absolutely fucked and fuck that. Your favorite regular is here; you’re in a good mood for some reason. You act certifiable, you scream, you screw your head back on. The POS is down. You’re short. You make it. Your coworker says, “[That manager] can suck my dick.” Or, “I am going to murder this couple.” Or, “Y’all come back now!” You loved her for that. This movie loved her for that, through all of it, and it loved you too. A double whammy: Regina Hall et al. returned the workday to life itself and transformed working class unity into grace (laughter), something we could use. You have nothing to lose. –Pat Beane --- 21 Eighth Grade Dir. Bo Burnham [A24] In an interview with NPR, former YouTube star Bo Burnham said he wanted to make a story about the internet and how it feels to be alive right now. OK, sure, he succeeded in doing that by having 13-year-old Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) create and upload vlog entries on how to best navigate the social anxieties of being a young teen. However, by the end of the film, what this angle really emphasized with great nuance (perhaps unintentionally?) is that children of every generation — regardless of the gap — suffer from the same anxieties, sexual insecurities, and self-blame. Identity has always been a fluid performance; the internet has simply made it more permanent. To star a young girl currently living the same age IRL that she portrays brilliantly in the film is in large part what made Eighth Grade not only one of our favorite films of 2018, but also one of the most genuine coming-of-age films, period. This casting decision made it impossible for Burnham to project his experiences and memories onto the story, which fortunately meant it was not biographical or about nostalgia. Rather, Eighth Grade was simply a present-day story about a complex experience that has always transcended the outlets through which they’ve been mediated. –NB [pagebreak] 20 Suspiria Dir. Luca Guadagnino [Produzioni Atlas Consorziate] In 1980, during Italy’s “years of lead,” Bologna Station, built in neoclassical style during the Fascist era, was bombed by neofascist terrorists — 85 died. Today, despite the coffee-drinking herds pouring through it, the station retains a bleak and melancholy atmosphere. Luca Guadagnino captured something of this in his remake of Suspiria. Set in the German Autumn of 1977 (the release date of the original), the poisonous and paranoid atmosphere of Cold War Berlin, when Leftists turned to violence in the face of failed denazification and a conservative establishment, bubbled in the background. To its cold occult decadence, the film added stylized and unforgettable body horror. The whole built to an over-the-top conclusion, which was perfect both as a nod to the campiness of the original (and the giallo genre) and because Guadagnino’s deft melding of physical and emotional horror was a slow-burn that demanded combustion. It was a wyrd companion piece to surreal works grappling and playing with similar legacies, from Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (a.k.a. The Revolution Is My Boyfriend) to Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany. The personal was also political: the original was a masterpiece of style and ambiance marred by subtle misogyny, but in Guadagnino’s vision, this became an exploration of the fraught heat and darkness of dynamics between women in their exercise of power and community. Dakota Johnson lacked fire in the belly, as did Thom Yorke’s anaemic soundtrack, but a subplot some thought needless served up the film’s most appalling moment: a sickening portrayal of the pain of lost love regained, then once more ripped away with casual malice. This was more than a memorial suspiria; it was a wholly worthy rebirth of the Mater Suspiriorum. –Rowan Savage --- 19 Lazzaro Felice Dir. Alice Rohrwacher [Netflix] Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature, the Cannes-celebrated Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro), was built on the many tensions it engendered &mdash namely, between a humanistic premise and the layers of dejection it was buried underneath, the timeless aspirations of a fable and a cynically bitter view of modernity, and the rustic realism of its form and the story’s fantastic detours. The film followed the threadline that, like the wolf, men will exploit men in all spaces, times, levels, and situations: A Marquise keeps a group of peasants working for her in near slavery; they in turn abuse and overwork the titular Lazzaro, a young peasant whose innocence and goodness paint him into the archetype of the “holy fool.” He roams through the story in a perplexity recalling the Christ-like dispossessed of classic Italian cinema. His mission on this earth, it would seem, is to prove that even the lowest of the low, the wicked and the perverse, are capable of gestures of kindness. How enduring, truthful, and integral these were to their characters, to the essence of their humanity, was something Lazzaro must discover at his own expense, paying ever higher costs in this beguiling yet disturbingly recognizable modern parable. –jrodriguez6 --- 18 Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Dir. Masaaki Yuasa [Toho] You wake up after a long night out. You aren’t hungover at all — it’s a miracle, truly a miracle. What do you remember from last night? Not names, certainly. Maybe not even places. It’s all like a strange fairytale, one of glowing neon and drinks that tasted better because you didn’t pay for them, of hilarious characters and absurd triumphs. Did that bouncer really let you in, even though you were $9 short of cover? You feel fantastic. This feeling was alive in Night Is Short, Walk On Girl: an insensible, overwhelmingly jubilant, and optimistic perspective on “a night on the town.” Pulling trade tactics from films like Amélie, El Futuro, and A Town Called Panic, the movie was full of humor, bliss, and no pulled punches (friendship punches or not) when it came to devilish winks. With not a single frame lacking in humor or joy, the film left us feeling like hangovers are something we’ve never experienced, like each night is full of mystery and romance, like our next big moment is waiting just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll make this a big weekend — go out on Friday and Saturday? — who knows… –Lijah Fosl --- 17 If Beale Street Could Talk Dir. Barry Jenkins [Annapurna] Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel was perhaps the most aesthetically accomplished and jaw-droppingly beautiful American film in years. It’s difficult to avoid hyperbole or rampant name-checking when confronted with an opening crane shot and a sumptuous autumnal wardrobe straight out of Douglas Sirk, or with a bracingly musical, time-shifting sense of montage that conjured numerous titans of contemporary Asian cinema, or with a swelling score by Nicholas Britell that exquisitely captured the film’s oscillating currents of unabashed romanticism and great melancholy. Despite the film’s sweeping, sexy, earnest depiction of the bond between pregnant teenage shopgirl Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a sculptor in jail accused of rape, Jenkins’s adaptation was clear-eyed and anguished about how they have to navigate lives of subjugation, a theme brought to the fore in alternately haunted and agonized performances by Brian Tyree Henry and Regina King. As such, Jenkins remade Baldwin in his image, trying with all his might to conquer fury with love. –Christopher Gray --- 16 Burning Dir. Lee Chang-dong [CGV] Deep under the delicate melodrama of a love triangle, the noir-ish mystery of a disappearing woman, and the moody male rivalry that plays out in its final act, Burning was charged with the same currents that power our defining social divisions: rural against urban, men against women, working class against dubious wealth, connected against isolated. Director Lee Chang-dong’s comeback thriller was a Trojan horse stocked heavy with political anguish, a dense, angular ballet of themes erupting just out of sight under a sensitive character drama that forced three young people of clashing identity and privilege into a pressured environment of overlapping interests and dark secrets. What stood out about Burning was how it probed not these ideological struggles themselves, but the existential uncertainty they inspire, as well as the insidious psychological toll they take on the individual. In all its discomfort and beauty — aided by subtle performances and distinctive cinematography — Burning served as both a careful portrait of a quietly revolutionizing South Korea and an uneasy study of the antagonisms and paranoia gradually tyrannizing the youth of today’s globally tainted age. –Colin Fitzgerald --- 15 Madeline’s Madeline Dir. Josephine Decker [Oscilloscope] From the very start, Madeline, and by extension the audience, was told that performance is not identity, that the emotions an actor renders are borrowed from someone else. This warning was not heeded. We met the eponymous 16-year-old (Helena Howard) as she shuffled through roles: a cat, an actress, a daughter, a sea turtle, an assailant, a pig on the run, a prisoner, a confused young woman of mixed race. Some of these identities played out on the stage of her experimental performance troupe, managed by maternal — and directorial — surrogate Evangeline (Molly Parker), though they inevitably bled through to her “real” life and back onto the stage, forming a tight, indiscernible tangle as this feedback loop began to dominate the production. Driven by the tension between the neurotic, controlling impulses of her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the haphazard psychic excavation spearheaded by Evangeline, the film, cut to the rhythms of a psychological thriller and as improvised as the troupe’s performances, unreeled with disorienting, balletic, colorful, and oftentimes invasive cinematography. Madeline’s Madeline was a complex film of blurred and appropriated identities, one concerned, reflexively (as it is in some sense a retelling of how Decker and Howard came to collaborate and make this very film), with self-authorship, self-ownership, and the power dynamics inherent in representation. “I’m really interested in people who are out of control of their circumstances,” stated Evangeline at a dinner party. But what do we owe these lenders of emotion and what does it mean to tell a story that is not ours? As we move through psychic strata leaving our own fingerprints everywhere, inhabit or direct bodies that look and experience differently than our own, what are our responsibilities? Where is the ethic of storytelling? Of course, no film could satisfactorily answer such questions, but Madeline’s Madeline grappled with them in a dense, dizzying, hyper-expressive, sometimes frustrating, and self-castigating manner that spoke to the immense trust between actor and director. –Cynocephalus --- 14 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman [Sony Pictures Releasing] In an arena that seems to be getting more overstuffed with each passing year, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse surprised us just by being the most fun superhero movie we’ve seen in ages. From the second it revved its engines, Into the Spider-Verse hit a breakneck speed as exhilarating as a web-slinging joyride through the city, its mesmerizing 2D/3D graphics illustrating each thought, sound effect, and surreal set piece with an eye-popping neon panache. Each character was sketched with just the right mix of sympathy and self-awareness, whether it was our immediately relatable hero Miles Morales, the cynical, sweatpant-clad Peter B. Parker, or the wounded, monstrously gargantuan Kingpin. Even down to the music, Into the Spider-Verse kept its pace relentlessly fresh, washing us in waves of Swae Lee and Juice WRLD as we journeyed across alternate Spider-Man histories and dimensions in search of a way to once again save the world from destruction. It all somehow added up to a movie as unexpected and experimental as it was unabashedly pop — a classic, trope-skidding superhero tale that you’ve got to see to believe. –Sam Goldner --- 13 BlacKkKlansman Dir. Spike Lee [Focus Features] In BlacKkKlansman, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) was a man caught between two worlds. Too black to be taken seriously as a police officer, too loyal to his duties as a police officer to be taken seriously as a proponent of Black Power. Naturally, Stallworth did what anyone would do in this situation: become the first black detective in Colorado Springs, infiltrate his local Ku Klux Klan chapter by posing as a disgruntled white supremacist on the phone, enlist his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) to pose as him at Klan meetings, catfish David Duke himself, and foil a deadly bomb plot. The KKK, as portrayed in this Spike Lee Joint, could be best described as a gang of bumbling idiots. Just literal morons who blow themselves up. If the events of the film weren’t based on a true story, they would seem almost too absurd to be true. As racism today threatens to tear the country apart from the inside, BlacKkKlansman did all it could to call out white supremacists and serve them a modicum of justice. But the film also recognized just how dangerous the ideas of these people can be and how imperative it is to keep fighting to bring them down. –Jeremy Klein --- 12 Annihilation Dir. Alex Garland [Paramount/Netflix] There is a common fundamental misconception that Nirvana is either a place, like Heaven, or a state or period, like Peace. In reality, Nirvana means something like “blowing out” or “extinguishing.” Attaining Nirvana, then, isn’t an attainment at all, because it isn’t a summit or a destination or really even a “thing.” It is not, however, synonymous with Annihilation, but just as Gravity housed symbols that could be appreciated as “Buddhist,” Annihilation beckoned us into life’s terrifying glimmer of impartial consequence so that we could assess our way out of it. In The Shimmer, karma accrued, leaving behind not moral threads, but matter in forms as disparate as flowering corpses and a bear made of screams. Locating Buddhist imagery in film is often a sign of clumsy analysis, but witnessing these women worn by this violence of culmination grapple with their own threads of being was like witnessing a hierophany, a horrifying refraction of sacred DNA in a profane plane. It’s enough of a reminder of why we even started making existential art. Awfulness irrupted through Annihilation in that old-school religious studies sense, because it refracted what many of us associate with being human: self-destruction. And whether or not we could explain what we saw when we faced ourselves in that lighthouse, we left changed in a way that only prayer or film could catalyze. –Jazz Scott --- 11 You Were Never Really Here Dir. Lynne Ramsay [Amazon] Adapting a book by Jonathan Ames, writer/director Lynne Ramsay upends the thriller/character study by making a brilliant film about violence without showing the actual violence onscreen. It was a choice born of necessity — the filmmaker didn’t feel comfortable shooting action sequences — but it was completely within the spirit of this bold and haunting look at a man (Joaquin Phoenix) whose sole gift of violence and pain followed him like a heavy shadow. By focusing more on the consequences of violence that weighed deeply on him as he navigated a path of righteousness, Ramsay depicted a compromised world, shattered long ago by a trauma that reverberated louder with every new transgression. The film was angry, mournful, and frightening, but it also pierced through the oppressive darkness without sugarcoating the ordeal. Propelled by Jonny Greenwood’s incredible score, You Were Never Really Here was a gorgeous movie that waded into bleak territory without feeling like tragedy porn, a beautiful tale — even amongst the grotesque — about the inherent need for salvation that drives us forward. –Neurotic Monkey [pagebreak] 10 Hereditary Dir. Ari Aster [A24] Hereditary, the first feature from writer-director Ari Aster was more than just the spiritual descendant of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho. It was not just the latest addition to the A24 family of slow-building, well-crafted horror films. Hereditary was about the unavoidable legacies that our families leave us, and for this it bore an uncanny resemblance to the bleak family dramas of Bergman or Haneke. Annie (played by Toni Collette in a career performance) said and did unforgivable things to her son and husband (Alex Wolff and Gabriel Byrne), and we squirmed. First out of angst, then disgust, and finally fear. And after being emotionally worn down with 90 minutes of this, the film fully committed to its supernatural heritage and delivered some of the best frights of the year. We loved it because it was an assured first step from a new director and a further commitment to excellence from an exciting young distribution company. We loved it because if the first two-thirds were painful to watch, then the last third offered us the voyeuristic release of a horror film. But most of all, we loved it because it married the visceral and the cerebral, giving birth to an unholy experience that stuck with us, like a tick. –Jeff Miller --- 09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen [Annapurna] The last two decades have had their share, but 2018 was a proper trifecta of spirited, inventive Westerns. Audiard’s Sister’s Brothers was the bitter pill rendered unexpectedly sweeter; Damsel was a triumphant anti-romance (a nice thematic companion piece to 2015’s Slow West); and this anthology gave us a perfectly-blended fun, dark, and heartbreaking (namely the beautiful, merciless “Meal Ticket” segment) genre classic. The tone shifted wildly, well heralded by the eponymous opening tale (cartoonishly musical and silly, but cleverly undermined with graphic violence and grim meta-commentary). We had our requisite rich characterization native to a Coen Bros. film, with strong turns from Zoe Kazan, Stephen Root (natch), Harry Melling, Grainger (“DOG HOLES!”) Hines, and Chelcie Ross, for a start (Brendan Gleeson almost does “The Unfortunate Rake” as well as Ian McShane, but not quite). But there was also a curious, world-weary current fusing the episodes, one of exhausted sadness and a dread-dodging sort of hindsight. Life and its lore as a turgid tangle we’re a little too anxious to leave behind. A long goodbye to the “the meanness in the used to be.” –Willcoma --- 08 The Other Side of the Wind Dir. Orson Welles [Netflix] For all the excitement that it stirred, there was a fear among cinephiles that Orson Welles’s final film, completed 33 years after his death, wouldn’t live up to the story of its own production. These fears were unfounded. Suffused with moments of staggering brilliance, The Other Side of the Wind was a dense, multivalent, sometimes maddening film, one that we are lucky to have in any form. Much like Henri-George’s Clouzot’s Le Prisonniere (and its ill-fated precursor Inferno), The Other Side of the Wind evidenced a master filmmaker pushing himself in his late period to fully explore the visual representation of aberrant psychology through abstraction, deconstruction, and exaggeration. Both Clouzot and Welles amplified color to impressionistic, oversaturated heights, but whereas Clouzot’s experimentation was primarily formal, Welles upended narrative, creating a mise en abyme that was at once hagiography and self-assassination. Even what was clearly intended as pastiche (Hannaford’s film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, was essentially the De Düva of Antonioni’s then-recent work) was utterly riveting, with balletic mise-en-scène that presaged and rivaled the best of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. Most impressive, however, was the juxtaposition of the aggressively stylized film-within-the-film and the faux-vérité surrounding it — Hannaford’s film was all propulsive jump-cuts on action in a self-consciously auteurist mode, while the frame story comprised a messy collage of film stocks, focal lengths, and framing styles meant to suggest a polyphony of perspectives, or perhaps a fracturing of one’s psyche; editor Bob Murawski, working from Welles’s extensive notes and workprint, sutured it all into a kinetic rhythm both jarring and cohesive. This was absolutely essential viewing, an invigorating testament to the medium itself and a reminder of how much further it can still go. –Christopher Bruno --- 07 Shirkers Dir. Sandi Tan [Netflix] Shirkers was, among other things, a portrait of young creativity, folklore, fragile egos, self-discovery, DIY practices, and the cultural impact that a film can have on a country. The documentary told the story of Sandi Tan, a Singaporean teenager who set out to make the country’s first notable road movie in 1992. With the help of the “established” Western director Georges Cardona, a gang of dreamy-eyed college kids put their lives on hold for the film (also named Shrikers) in an attempt to write their country’s film history. However, in the final stages of the process, the footage disappeared with Cardona. What followed was a decades-long search for a rebellious movie that was supposed to blow Singapore wide open, its creator, and the man plagued with an imperialistic obsession for fame. It was a real-life story that could only happen in a movie. –Sam Tornow --- 06 Zama Dir. Lucrecia Martel [Strand Releasing] Look: Don Diego de Zama has come unstitched in time. He stands at the edge of earth and sea. Waves are undertow, proof that the future is unfolding somewhere. But time has ripped itself up and away from him. He turns from the waves and walks up the shore, still in frame. He pauses, walks back, trapped. He is not entitled to languish; his days are spent running ruined bureaucracies. He appeals to a succession of fat governors to be sent away or home or anywhere else. But he is here. He is casually cruel and pathetically hopeful that he will be rendered reverence. He will not be. Lucrecia Martel, the master, adapted the fevered anti-history of Antonio Di Benedetto’s prose into transformative euphoria. Her cinematography was for freeing bodies. Zama didn’t represent colonialism so much as it canceled the notion that belonging has a place anymore. By pinning her hero to the same useless hope as he decayed through the years, Martel created a world of unwavering indigenous bodies and mocking llamas. She papered over Zama like an unmoved fungus, reducing him back to ephemera to be fertilized. She said no to his hopes. The corregidor, the man who can’t be king, remained in frame. –Frank Falisi --- 05 The House That Jack Built Dir. Lars von Trier [IFC] Lars von Trier’s movies are not easy to watch, but past the gruesome violence, the fucked-up interpersonal relationships, and the heady themes, there’s always something there. Case in point: The House That Jack Built, a pitch-black film in which a serial killer explains five “incidents” from his life to a mysterious companion. And unsurprisingly, with its aggressive depictions of the macabre, the film enjoyed about as divisive a public response as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring did at its riotous 1913 premiere. At Cannes, von Trier’s film reportedly moved over 100 people to walk out; yet, when it ended, it was met with thunderous applause and, indeed, a standing ovation from those who remained. Yes, it was shockingly violent, but it was also incredibly funny, and as its protagonists traveled through their Dantean hellscape, they offered profound and unique meditations on art, time, and history. In other words, the film’s brutality was in service of something, not just an end in itself. Today, people are obsessed with talking about how everyone should and should not behave, what people should and should not think and say. But they’re far less interested in examining the pathological reasons why we have those urges to say or do the “wrong” thing in the first place. Some would argue that this is the exact reason art exists, to examine ourselves at a deeper level. And this film asked big questions: Can destruction be art? Can murder? Is depicting something the same as validating it? If you don’t want to subject yourself to this movie, my opinion is that that’s exactly why you should watch it. If you get through it, you may learn something about yourself. I did. Lars von Trier isn’t afraid to channel and complicate humankind’s darkest, most sadistic desires, and that’s a good thing. In fact, isn’t that one of the essential roles of the artist? –Adam Rothbarth --- 04 Mandy Dir. Panos Cosmatos [RLJE] Words like psychedelic, hallucinogenic, revenge, rage, and insane got tossed around liberally by those attempting to summarize Mandy, the sophomore directorial effort by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) starring Nicolas Cage in all his nouveau-shamanic glory and then some. But those were understatements. Mandy was a maximalist assault, a new death yarn whose title screen didn’t even arrive until an hour and 15 minutes in, when protagonist Red went hunting for Lysergicenobites and Jesus freaks. Like antagonist Jeremiah Sand, Cosmatos, Cage, cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and late scorer Jóhann Jóhannsson all weaponized complete sensory overload to mesmerize and capture their audience. But unlike the Mandy character, we could hardly muster a laugh past “Erik Estrada from CHiPs” — we merely watched in wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe at the un(adulte)rated, undefinable phantasmagoria — the bathroom scene, the chainsaw scene. OK, so maybe that wasn’t what Roger Ebert had in mind when he rightly called Nicolas Cage one of the greatest actors of his generation, but then Ebert probably also wouldn’t have imagined the actor spending two nights in his underwear, tied to a fence in a Belgian forest to prep for a scene (apparently, yes, that happened). That’s the point, though. The hype was realer than real. Mandy was a masterpiece beyond what any of us could ever have imagined. –Samuel Diamond --- 03 Sorry to Bother You Dir. Boots Riley [Annapurna] Every day, they take a little bit more. For months, we’ve heard about how Amazon runs its warehouses like sweatshops. A couple weeks ago, it was Facebook selling your private messages. If WorryFree were to step forward tomorrow with a unique, 21st-century approach to living debt-free, would any of us be surprised? For all its detours into the surreal and the absurd, Sorry to Bother You never felt that far removed from the world we inhabit. The questions it asked and dilemmas it presented touched on everything from the changing face of corporate power in the age of tech startups, the challenges of navigating predominantly white spaces for non-whites, and the complicity of individuals in larger systems of oppression. Moving through the world today is an act of gliding from one outrage to the next, and Riley shares our outrage, but he coupled it here with a sense of playfulness and hope that rendered Sorry to Bother You one of the most important films of 2018. –Joe Hemmerling --- 02 The Favourite Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos [Fox Searchlight] Early on, Duchess Sarah admonished her lover, Queen Anne, that love has its limits — to which the queen replied, “Well it shouldn’t.” The story proceeded through a delicious series of political and bedroom maneuvers to prove the queen utterly and tragically wrong. Yorgos Lanthimos has always taken a perverse glee in sticking his movie knife into the banal, received wisdom of Western right-thinking. His trajectory from Dogtooth forward had increasingly tightened the thumbscrews on his audience; The Killing of a Sacred Deer was as muscle-bound and torturous to watch as it was incisive. But The Favourite turned that sensibility inside out, exploding with bright and colorful production design, brilliantly mining 18th-century courtly fashions for visual comedy. Rouged, powdered, and highly wiggy men ponced about like overbred poodles through all the absurd ornamentation, as a raging battle of wills played out among the film’s three towering female protagonists. The script was nastier than Dynasty and invented a patois of 18th-century Queen’s English and contemporary colloquialisms that somehow felt organic, but it had a Shakespearean heft at its core that played out in a perfectly odd and dissonant finale. –Water --- 01 First Reformed Dir. Paul Schrader [A24] 2018 was filled with days when hopping from one social media platform or news network to the next resembled a modern-day Stations of the Cross, with each subsequent click offering something that was somehow more terrifying, depressing, and enraging than the last. With the massive sprawl of readily available information, staying informed was more effortless than ever, yet it could easily, almost imperceptibly, transform from a desire to remain dutifully cognizant of our ever-shifting global landscape into a form of unabated and isolating self-flagellation. In Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, it was this hyper-awareness of earthly perils that plagued Michael (Philip Ettinger), a young environmental activist who believed it immoral for his pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) to bring a child into this crumbling world, when he desperately met with Ethan Hawke’s already jaded, world-weary Reverend Toller for counsel. Despite telltale signs of suicidal thinking, Toller found their discussion not troubling, but “invigorating.” And when Michael blew off his head with a shotgun, the good reverend reacted not with sorrow or regret, but by taking on Michael’s all-too-real concerns of potential global disaster, bearing them like a cross upon his shoulders as he confronted the duplicitous evils that have infiltrated both his tiny, sparsely attended church and the superchurch that funds the relic he was keeping alive after 250 years. In this year’s cinema, there was perhaps no greater metaphor for the failure of American institutions to serve the public in any meaningful way (as many have slowly been reduced to thinly veiled money-laundering schemes for the wealthy) than the fact that Toller was stuck in a historically famous church with a broken organ, forced to hawk cheap souvenirs merely to keep the doors open. First Reformed deftly tackled this notion of the individual vs. implacable global forces, with an acute focus on the unsettling merging of ecclesiastical forces with those of an unbridled and amoral capitalist system. Schrader’s ascetic vision, informed most explicitly by Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Yasujiro Ozu, offered the perfect aesthetic framework through which traditional systems of belief could collide haphazardly with the ruthlessly unfeeling, profit-hungry, hyper-modern business models that dominate both corporate and institutional cultures. Schrader’s camera was almost exclusively immobile, yet this stillness presented a deeply perceptive gaze and compositions as stark as the cold New England winter. It was a vision of the world as unwavering as that of Toller, who lived a life virtually sealed off from the real world, indulging himself with the sort of small rituals we all tend to hold onto to provide a semblance of order and meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. But for all of Toller’s pain (often self-inflicted), First Reformed offered a vision of grace and tenderness in the heavily symbolic Mary, who prevented the film from tipping into the complete and utter despair that Toller found himself in. In one of the year’s most remarkable sequences, Mary arrived at Toller’s office and together performed a ritual that she often did with her now-deceased husband. As she laid on top of the priest, making as much body-to-body contact as possible and matching his breathing patterns, the two achieved a temporary sense of communal transcendence, slowly rising from the floor as they began to travel over vast mountains and beautiful oceanside vistas. But Toller’s thoughts couldn’t remain fixed on utopic ideals for long before visions of city life and landfills of untold sizes took over. Such incessant and uneasy wavering between hope and despair, sensuality and violence, love and rage, faith in the future and the fatalistic acceptance of our environment’s demise filled First Reformed, which stands as the most eloquent yet soul-shattering microcosm of the world that we saw all year. –Derek Smith http://j.mp/2H7Z1Nd

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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Every week, a few members of the Vox Culture team gather to talk out the latest episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. This week, critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and staff writer Constance Grady discuss “Holly,” the 11th episode of the second season.

Todd VanDerWerff: If the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale has a major flaw, it’s that the show has, in many ways, grown past its protagonist. June’s story, which drove the first season forward in myriad fascinating ways, has reached a bit of a narrative cul de sac, just as everybody else on the series has found new interesting dimensions. (Even the Commander gets some bitterly human moments in “Holly.” Ol’ Patriarchal Fred!)

I hope that the series has a fix for this in season three, because it can’t tell a long-term story where June almost escapes multiple times, only to end up back in the twisted soap operatics of the Waterford household, without feeling deathly repetitive, especially after seemingly everybody in that house is ready to murder each other.

Maybe June joins the resistance while keeping her Handmaid cover. Maybe she escapes to Canada. Maybe she goes on the run in search of Hannah. But the show needs to find something else for her to do. It needs to give her agency again, as unlikely as agency is for a Handmaid in Gilead.

That’s the central paradox of turning The Handmaid’s Tale into an ongoing TV series. You can tell a story about a character who can’t materially affect her circumstances in any way for a season or two, because you can examine the contradictions in the idea of giving someone powerless the reins of a story for long enough. But you can’t do so forever, because stories, on some level, require the protagonist to gain some measure of power if they run long enough.

All of this, I’m aware, sounds like I’m lining up to give “Holly” a poor review, but instead, it crystallized for me why the series has backburnered June so much this season. It’s a terrific, gutting episode, one that will surely win the terrific Elisabeth Moss (who gives a gutting, almost wordless performance) another Emmy Award. (Justice for Keri Russell!) It also gives June the most agency she’s had in the series so far, while also constantly reminding us that the prison she’s held in is bigger than one house. It has a wolf. And (someone I’m 99.9999 percent sure is) Oprah!

But even if June ultimately decides to be recaptured, after realizing she will probably need medical attention after delivering her baby (named Holly, after her mother) by herself, we’re still sending her right back to the Waterford house. I get that this is part of the nightmare of the show, part of the way it uses the status quo mechanisms of television against an audience that wants desperately to escape the house of horrors. But after “Holly,” I find myself hoping, even more, that the series knows what it’s doing with its main character.

Constance, is Oprah as the voice of the American resistance on the nose or just right or, somehow, both? (I vote both.)

Watching Serena Joy unravel has been one of season two’s best ideas. Hulu

Constance Grady: I shamefully did not realize that the voice on the radio was Oprah until you told me so, Todd, which I realize means that I am no true American. Now that I know … I kind of love it? It’s hokey, sure, but it also seems so inexpressibly comforting that even in the horrors of Gilead, you can turn on the radio and hear Oprah! She’s still out there! It makes escape to Canada or Hawaii — to a world with Oprah in it! — seem even more idyllic, which makes June’s decision to stay in Gilead to save the baby that much more of a sacrifice.

But I agree with you, Todd, that the show desperately needs to find something new for June to do besides try to escape and then narrowly get recaptured, over and over and over again. The endless sequence in which June prepares to drive off to Canada, only to realize that, oh no, she has to find a key to the garage first, and then oh no, she has to cover her red Handmaid’s gown before she drives away and then oh no, the garage door is iced shut — it’s all tense, sure, but it’s also starting to feel dull. And not dull in a productive “I’m learning something about totalitarianism” way. Dull in a boring way. You know that it’s not going to go anywhere.

Serena Joy’s plotline is repeating itself this season, too — in more or less every episode she’s forced to reckon with the fact that she does not enjoy living in the world that she helped create — but there’s enough slow unraveling happening there to keep it compelling. This week, she finally breaks down enough to confront her husband with how unhappy she is. “I gave up everything for you, for the cause,” she tells him through tears, “and all I wanted was a baby.”

Serena has always been an avatar for the “fuck you, I got mine” ethos of commodified white feminism: Her whole thing is very Ivanka Trump posting a picture of herself hugging her son on Instagram while families are ripped apart at the border. But the complication with Serena is that she has not yet quite gotten hers yet. She doesn’t have her hands on the thing that she believes she is owed, which is a baby. Which means that she’s been operating under a “fuck you, I’ll get mine” mindset for the entire run of the show, and the more that she doubts that she will actually get “hers,” the less willing she is to embrace the status quo.

But the episode ends with June getting picked up in a van, presumably to be escorted back to the Waterford house and deliver baby Holly to Serena. If Serena at last gets what she believes that she is owed, do you think she’ll fall back in line with Gilead and the Commander?

Todd: I kind of think no, but I also don’t really know what form her rebellion might take. The season has been so focused on building up Serena Joy’s character in a way to make her unhappiness seem palpable that it’s clear the writers are laying groundwork for something. And the fact that baby Holly is a girl in Gilead can only increase the pressure Serena will surely feel about whatever is to come next.

That said — how good was that fight between the Waterfords, who are finally just done with each other but forced to stick it out because they created a society where admitting it’s over could just as easily mean they hang as anything else? I loved the Commander snipping at Serena that even if they hang, he’ll be forced to be right next to her, the sort of darkly exasperated lashing out that typifies a fight between a married couple who’s just had it with trying to be nice and thoughtful.

The fact that June can’t open an iced-over garage door sort of strains credulity — not even the car will break it open? — and I say this as someone who has labored mightily to open up iced-over doors and finally given up in favor of finding another way. But both it and that fight between the Waterfords are good examples of the way season two has weaponized its very existence against the characters. They’re all trapped together, foot on the gas, trying to make a break for it. But the only thing out there for them is more horror and death. The trees are full of wolves.

This is one of the reasons I hope that season two’s expansion of the world beyond Gilead — here we find out that the United Kingdom, at least, is leveling sanctions against the country — is pointing in the direction of some sort of longer-term arc about the American resistance. (Now I’m imagining Oprah marching through the rubble, waving the flag.) The premise of the show necessitates that the audience be kept as much in the dark about what’s going on in the wider world as the characters — another weird similarity between this show and Westworld — but to give itself room to operate, the series has to keep dropping little hints. I have to believe they’re pointing somewhere, but maybe I’m ramming my car into a garage door, too.

One other little hint of “something else” sprinkled into this episode is the presence of June’s mother, whom I was pretty sure had been a one-off role. But no, here she is again, in the flashbacks, which manage to bring in much of the show’s cast in a way that reminds you they’re out there. What do you make of all of this? Is June’s mom still alive somewhere? Are we being set up for Canada to have an increased presence in season three? Or would that break the show?

Oh, right, there were flashbacks. Hulu

Constance: In order: I am into it, I hope so, I hope so, I don’t think so.

I absolutely think that June’s mother is still out there, if only because she’s such an enormous presence in the book that she’s always struck me as slightly underused on the show itself. Holly the First stands for a kind of slightly old-fashioned radicalism, a second-wave feminist rage that postfeminist June believed that she would never need, and putting that relationship into Gilead to see how it changes would be too good of an opportunity to lose.

At this point, I don’t think that the show is sustainable without expanding into Canada. We’ve become so used to how horrifying Gilead is that — as episode nine proved — we need the contrast of Canada to fully feel the horror at this point, and this episode showed that we need the plot mobility Canada offers to keep June’s storyline from continuing to stagnate and repeat itself.

That doesn’t mean that June needs to escape to Canada with her two daughters and live there happily ever after for the rest of the show, but it does mean that something in her status quo has to evolve, instead of grinding on and on forever unchangingly, and thus far Canada and the resistance that lives there seems to be the best route to that change that we’ve seen.

Besides, I’d love to get to see Elisabeth Moss play a few new notes with this character. She’s been doing wonderful work all season, and her mingled rage and gritted-teeth determination in this episode was enthralling to watch — but wouldn’t it be great to see what she can do with a June who has stopped repeating herself?

Todd: Yes, but also it’s amazing to me how Moss keeps finding new notes to play in a scenario that would have exhausted most other actors. I’ve occasionally called her the most talented actor of her generation, and watching this episode reminded me why I’ve said that. Her guttural cries as she delivered a baby, by herself, in front of a fire, in a large, rambling country manse, felt like they came from some other portion of her soul than we’d gotten to see before.

I’ve said in the past that I think all great TV shows can be boiled down to one word, if you really try. This isn’t necessarily the “core theme” or anything like that, but it is a sort of touchstone, a thing to return to, again and again, so the series doesn’t lose sight of itself. For The Handmaid’s Tale, that word is, I think, “survival.” And for the gripes I’ve shared about season two here, I think it’s been a stronger season on the whole than the first, precisely because it’s colored in some shades of survival that the first season just didn’t have access to. What do you sacrifice when you must survive at all costs? And whom do you become?

So if The Handmaid’s Tale is a survival epic, then it needs a strong performer for us in the audience to be stranded with. The series can shift June to the back burner. It can even make her a supporting player on her own show. But it always needs to be, at a moment’s notice, ready to tune back in to her as she hears the familiar but haunting strains of “Hungry Heart” or runs a car into a garage door or hobbles away from a wolf. “Holly” wouldn’t work without Elisabeth Moss. But neither would The Handmaid’s Tale.

Original Source -> The Handmaid’s Tale gives Elisabeth Moss a dynamite showcase in “Holly”

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shprojectphotography · 6 years

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Essays on Art during my studies at Goldsmiths University

THE MENZALIAN SIUBJECTS AND THEIR POWER TO ABSORB

by Stephanie Houghton

FIGURE 1. Adolph Menzel, The Théâtre du Gymnase, 1856, oil on canvas, 46x62, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

In this essay, the act of attention is being foregrounded. As Michael Fried has observed years ago: “the demand that the artist bring about a paradoxical relationship between painting and beholder – specifically, that he find a way to neutralize or negate the beholder’s presence, to establish the fiction that no one is standing before the canvas.” Here, Fried suggests, is a shift happening in what once was understood as complete painting, is now entering the realm of the autonomous. The central thesis in this paper is based around Friend’s concept of ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’, and its relation to the ways we address paintings after Denis Diderot (1713- 1784). The concept of ‘absorption’, was originally found in Denis Diderot’s studies on new principles of organization of pictorial space. Diderot achieved this by dwelling on paintings of Chardin and Greuze, proving that they form a new ethical and aesthetic value system, and a new theory of composition that overcomes the ‘’intimately decorative’’ reaction of the Rococo period, which had a tendency to turn the picture into a kind of theatrical stage, towards the ‘’high seriousness’’. According to Diderot, the tendency of inexhaustibility in a work of art must always give a reason for the game of an imagination. By developing Diderot’s ideas, Michael Fried conceptualizes observations made by Diderot and provides us with new insights into works of art. ‘Theatricality’, in Fried’s terms, is not about the performance or a spectacle per se, but a beholder. It opens up a question whether a painting has to include a spectator in order for it to be complete, and if so, the work can be considered as theatrical. If it can perform autonomously, it is then denied of it’s ‘theatricality’. What is important to consider when exploring Fried’s theory is that the act of representation is no longer external, and instead is built into the painting. Regardless of the fact that Fried’s concept of ‘absorption’ was mainly concerned with early and mid-1750s French paintings, his ideas have managed to attain an international recognition. Menzel’a paintings, however, were epitomized Germany. By being confronted with Fried’s complex theory, I have made an attempt to apply his ideas to Adolph Menzel’s paintings, in particular his later pieces such as ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ and his other fascinating pieces ’Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffolding at Rheinsberg’’, and ‘’Marketplace in Verona’’. Along with the play of sensations that the painting can provide us with, the properties of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ show a dual role in the process of overcoming the theatrical painting: first, it becomes the basis for the emergence of a new kind of Realism that is radically different; secondly, it’s mechanisms to achieve self-worth and autonomy in paintings as such, as the necessary conditions for the birth of modern art.

Adolph Menzel’s life and work celebrates the conditions, attitudes and tastes of Prussian culture, primarily the city of Berlin. Menzel’s hand has developed the stylistics of German Realism with a strong narrative. The artist was influenced by his predecessor Caspar David Friendrich, one of the leaders of German Romanticism. Later on, the classic of German painting has inspired Edgar Degas, who considers himself as Menzel’s successor. The art historian Peter Paret has suggested that Menzel’s compositions are ‘’daring, and his free brushstrokes possess great suggestive power; his narrative expresses a penetrating intelligence’’.

FIGURE 2. Adolph Menzel ‘’Supper at the Ball’’,1878, oil on canvas, 71x90, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Another art historian, who is also fond of Menzel’s oeuvre, Peter Peret, has observed the great ethos in Menzel’s narrative. He claims; ‘’At his best, he uncovers infinite riches in everyday life. But when he moves from sketches to a painting, narrative pushed too far may damage its cohesion and impact. Menzel’s oeuvre is marked by an unusual combination of opposites.’’ Perhaps, Menzel’s rapid brushstrokes indicate that his subject cannot remain stationary in order to be drawn accurately. The painting ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ (Fig. 2) tends to fall under Peret’s category of a ‘’narrative pushed too far’’, as ‘’the chaos we see here –one overflowing with both complexity and specifity-is best described as a studied chaos.’’ The compositional balance is broken, and instead the painting is overpopulated with the exclusive crowd of Prussian court, both men and women struggling to find a place to rest or encounter. However, nothing in the painting’s motif is repressed in favour of the other, nothing is given a secondary significance, which is peculiar. Such complexity can be seen alongside Mannerist paintings, which stylistics and objects were rendered and compound in an act of ‘’movement’’. Menzel is shown to be an artist who not only explodes our temporal understanding of events, but positions his figures in an essentially disorganized framework.’’ Neither the beholder, not the extravagant public depicted on the canvas acknowledges that they are or can be watched. One can perhaps suggest that ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ falls into Friend’s category of a successfully ignored beholder. However, at the same time, the public has gathered there to be seen. All these lavish costumes and respectable titles worn by high status men and women are insisting on attention. But is that signal directed to the beholder in front of the painting or the people in the panting before whom they appear so immaculately attractive? At the same time to Michael Fried, the concepts of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ have been associated not so much with the audience, but the figure of the character being depicted. As Fried suggests; “This was to be done in the first place by depicting figures so engrossed or (a key term in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century criticism) absorbed in what they were doing, thinking and feeling that they appeared oblivious of everything else, including the beholder standing before the painting. To the extent that the painter succeeded in that aim, the beholder’s existence was effectively ignored or, put more strongly, denied; the figures in the painting appeared alone in the world (alternatively we may say that the world of the painting appeared self-sufficient, autonomous, a closed system independent of, in that sense blind to, the world of the beholder), though it was also true that only by making a painting that appeared to ignore or deny or be blind to the beholder in this way could the painter accomplish his ultimate purpose – bringing actual viewers to a halt in front of the painting and holding them there in a virtual trance.”Can one suggest that Menzel’s characters are autonomous?

This centrality on the act of attention, which have also been taken up by Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer (1990), has created a new paradigm in what he calls the ‘’autonomization of sight’’, an endless oscillation of senses, in which, as Michael Fried have agreed, emerges a ‘’newly ‘’purified’’ form’’ of vision. It is seen, in many art historical texts, that nineteenth-century subject, which gave birth to genre painting, Realism and Impressionism, was announced to be the greatest time of optical experience and modernization. Our attention is changed and no longer demands a passive participation. Crary’s argument lies in this shift from the global balance to an act of touch. You become aware of the touch of the brush differentiating the parts, as seen in Menzel’s work and the actual ‘’touch’’ in the painting’s subject. Taking Crary’s observations as the basis for further discussion, the following points can be made. Fried draws an analogy between Menzel and the Frenchman Gustave Courbet, as he also painted in the nineteenth-century. Fried has proclaimed Courbet for his ability to ‘’ transport himself as if corporeally into the painting’’ and express the sense of his ‘’own embodiedness and to negate or neutralize his status as first beholder’’. His paintings contained emotionally and materially weighted subjects, as seen in ‘’The Grain Sifters’’ and ‘’Self-portrait (Man with Leather Belt)’’, in which Fried particularly emphasized on the physicality of the human hand. What Fried seems to develop in his thesis on theatricality is a theme of bodily identification. Alongside Gustave Courbet, Menzel’s artwork can be treated in a similar manner Fried has treated Courbet. There is a range of multiple operations being performed in ‘’Supper at the Ball’’. Amongst them are the movements, such as ‘’the near-impossibility of eating a buffet meal while standing up’’. Fried writes, that in order to understand the composition, one has to unbind the composition and look at it in detail. This is where the concept of absorption becomes active. Sooner or later our attention becomes taken by a man trying to balance his hat within his legs meanwhile consuming his dinner (as seen towards our left on the canvas when looking at it), or an abandoned plate, a champagne glass and pieces of cutlery on a chair next to this man on the right. In the same manner, another of Menzel’s paintings titled ‘’Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffolding at Rheinsberg’’ (Fig.3) is an obvious comparison containing these seemingly unnoticeable details likewise in ‘’Supper at the Ball’’. The abandoned dishes left on a chair, (which Fried has pointed out in ‘’Supper at the Ball’’), is being replicated here, although, here we see a single wine glass being left on a piece of decorative balustrade. Amongst the intricacy and brilliance of the interior décor in Menzel’s gouache piece, we are also witnessing the apparent vivacity of inanimate objects, such as a wooden mannequin being rested on the floor with his hand stretched out, the unexpected splashes of paint and the silence of a played violin. Similarly to Courbet’s ‘’Painters Studio’’, our gaze ‘’roves continually, coming to rest first here, then there, without settling permanently anywhere’’.The viewer becomes absorbed as he tries to grasp these small, but integral parts of Menzel’s ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ and ‘’Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffolding at Rheinsberg’’. Such examples are theatrical, as they arrest our attention and invite us to intertwine with these seemingly temporal performances. Within this play of imagination, Fried sees ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ as a painting which was done with respect to momentariness and duration, as if the ‘’artist had a moment before put his dinning utensils down in order to paint his picture.’’

FIGURE 3. Adolph Menzel, ‘’Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffolding at Rheinsberg’’, 1861, gouache on paper, board backing, 24x32,Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Margaret Iversen, by reading a close study of Fried, writes that ‘’Friend’s ideal of coherence is completely internal, even hermetically sealed- the type of painting he admires is ‘‘self – sufficient, a closed system which in effect seals off the space or world of the painting from that of the beholder’’.Fried’s interest in painting tend to lie in the heart of Ponty’s argument, in which he states that concealment is part of a perception process as well. As I have mentioned before, ‘’Absorption is a total enthrallment to the point of self-forgetting’’. It is the state of obliviousness that becomes so absorptive. There is also a sense of temporality in both of the paintings. There is this precise moment which Menzel chose to depict that allows him to capture both the fleetingness and the crush of the crowd. The use of oil paint as a medium contributes towards flexibility. Painting here is a performance of traces and brush marks full of ambiguity and meaning. Subjects are rendered through light and dark contrasts. The painter allows marks to remain marks on purpose. Certainly, in Menzel’s work one must concentrate on little aspects in order to create a narrative. The viewer is put into participating dialogue with the painting. Margaret Iversen then continues; ‘’Absorption is a guarantee of plausible narrative; the figures are not guilty for posing for the spectator because they are so manifestly oblivious to being observed.’’ These ultimately undefinable faces of individuals who are engaged in social interactions in ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ contrasts with the size and density of the larger crowd, where everyone seems to be getting in someone else’s way. Menzel’s intentions in this painting involve actions unfolding. It almost as if even Menzel when creating this piece didn’t rely on a reliable story plot, rather allowed his subjects to open to the viewer unintentionally. Fried, has also observed this consistency in Menzel who ‘’was passionately concerned with evoking aspects of his subject-matter that could not strictly or directly be seen but could only be intuited, or otherwise imagined on the basis of the visual evidence.’’ If these were in fact Menzel’s implications, precisely that sort of unconscious action is a sign of intense absorption.

Alongside Iversen’s response to Fried’ interest in the inaccessible and veiled, Louis Edmond Duranty responses to Menzel’s ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ by giving favour to its compositional wildness. He praises this:

‘’...wild and deformed hidden beneath these embroideries and laces, this hurly-burly, these contrasts, the outburst of instincts, of appetites, under the levelling down of usages and moeurs, the few physical or moral elegances swimming across the violent of faded vulgarity of civilized man, the strangeness of this crowd, of this animal, or its forms, its habits, its manias, all the elements of the immense curiosity, the immense raillery and the immense stupefaction...’’

In Duranty’s approach, the artist is associated with extremeness or absoluteness of the idea of spontaneity, an involuntary response to the world around him. By reading Duranty’s response, one can say that Menzel’s compositions are a subject of contraction, as its elements are being divided and almost cut out if we look at ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ and ‘’Marketplace in Verona’’ (Fig. 4). Both canvases tend to project the ‘’bodily difficulty of the multiple operations’’, a space without boundaries which creates this stunning virtuoso experience. ‘’Marketplace in Verona’’ is depicting a crowd of an Italian town citizens and tourists shopping and working on the market. Fried associates this scene with Simmel’s critique of the metropolis, although Simmel’s theory postdates Menzel’s paintings by almost twenty years, Fried sees a great resonance with what Simmel calls a blasé attitude. The essence of Simmel blasé attitude consists in ‘’an indifference toward the distinctions between things.’’ Each individual is being so absorbed in their own routine, that no one pays attention to what is happening around, neither to the observer who might be watching them at a distance. See for example a man who has climbed on top of the canopy to catch something (towards the left) or that woman carrying a small child making her way home after purchasing some necessary groceries, or even that old woman behind her who is so oblivious to the crowd around her in the foreground of the painting. Simmel main argument in his essay lies in individualism, an emotional alienation from everyone. This ‘’bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance [between individuals] only more visible.’’ The ‘’Marketplace in Verona’’ can be seen as a primal form of what we now call cosmopolitan city. Indeed, each of the Menzelian character has a life of their own. They can exist separately, such as that man who I have mentioned previously who attempts to balance his hat between his legs while consuming food in ‘’Supper at the Ball’’, that solitary musician playing a violin in ‘’ ’Crown Prince Frederick Pays a Visit to the Painter Pesne on His Scaffolding at Rheinsberg’’, and this scene of a disorientated crowd in the middle of a piazza in Italy.

FIGURE 4. Adolph Menzel, ‘’Pizza d-Erbe in Verona , (Marketplace in Verona)’’, 1884, oil on canvas, 74x127, Gemaldegalerie, Neuer Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlunge, Dresden.

Throughout this essay, I was in the position to consider Adolph Menzel’s masterpieces within the framework of Fried’s theatricality and absorption, although he himself claimed that he would be ‘’mistaken to assimilate Menzel’s art to the paradigm of absorption.’’Although, ‘’Supper at the Ball’’ seems to fall under Diderot’s concept of the tableaux, a new stage dramaturgy that you would find in painting, rather than theatre. Fried stresses this in Absorption and Theatricality: ‘’Diderot urged playwrights to give up contriving elaborate coups de theatre (surprising turns of the plot, reversals, revelations), whose effect he judged to be shallow and fleeting at best, and instead to seek what he called tableaux (visually satisfying, essentially silent, seemingly accidental groupings of figures), which if properly managed he believed were capable of moving an audience to the depths of its collective being.’’The tableaux of ‘’mere proliferation of incident’’ in a painted scene provides us with an intense ‘’pictorial dramatic experience than the French theatre had hitherto envisaged.’’Michael Fried approaches Menzel’s art with a compelling idea that the viewer is ‘’repeatedly invited to perform feasts of imaginative projection‘’.This means that the act of viewing a painting invites the viewer to participate in this appearance of complex and kaleidoscopic plot cluttered with detail. What we are witnessing in Menzel’s paintings is that play of imagination, which Diderot himself appreciated and found as a true spirit of theatricality.

References

Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, ‘’Adolph Menzel 1815-1905: Between

Romanticism and Impressionism’’, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,1996). Crary, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture,

(Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press, 1999). Fried, Michael, ‘’Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot’’,

(Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1980).

Fried, Michael, ‘’Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin’’, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002).

Fried, Michael, Courbet’s Realism, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1900). James Gurney, Drawings and Paintings, (Mineola & New York: Dover Publications, 2016).

Margaret Iversen, ‘’Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory’’, (Cambridge, Massachussets & London: MIT Press, 1993).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, trans. Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception, (London: Routledge, 1962).

Paret, Peter, ‘’German Encounters with Modernism 1840-1945’’, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Simmel, Georg, ‘’The Metropolis of Mental Life’’ in G.Bridge and S.Watson, The Balckwell City Reader, (Oxford, Malden & Massachussets: Blackwell, 2002).

Wood, Paul,‘’Jason Geiger: Modernity in Germany: the many sides of Adolph Menzel’’ in The Challenge of the Avant-Garde, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,1999).

Other Sources: ‘’Adolph Menzel, The Supper at the Ball [Das Ballsouper], 1878’’, accessed on 26th of

October, 2016, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1268. ‘’ Differing Views: the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, France’’, last modified August 31st, 2015,

https://eclecticlight.co/2015/08/31/differing-views-the-tuileries-gardens-paris-france/.

#art essays #university #writtenpiece #art #paintings #menzel #germany #fried

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