STOLEN APPLES (Arts Blog)

Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz: In Mourning and in Rage (1977)

2012-02-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

http://youtu.be/767U43psfn4 (watch 1977 video sample here)

In 1977, Suzanne Lacy started to collaborate with Leslie Labowitz. Their first collaboration, In Mourning and In Rage, considered a model for media intervention through public art, was performed outside the Los Angeles City hall and brought women together to protest again the media's sensationalised coverage of the spread of violence against women. Both artists founded Ariadne, a Social Network, an organisation aimed at bringing together in the arts, media and government women commited to feminism.

Robert W. Paul: "Whaling Afloat and Ashore" (1908)

2012-02-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

Robert W. Paul was born in London in 1869. At the age of 22 he established an instrument-making company, the Robert W. Paul Instrument Company, and three years alter he would be responsible for the design of the first camera ever made in England, the Paul-Acres Camera. His 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' (1986), would be the first camera to feature reverse-cranking.

Letter from Pollock Snr to 16-year-old Jackson Pollock (1928)

2012-02-03T02:29:00.001-08:00

Dear Son Jack,

Well it has been some time since I received your fine letter. It makes me a bit proud and swelled up to get letters from five young fellows by the names of Charles, Mart, Frank, Sande, and Jack. The letters are so full of life, interest, ambition, and good fellowship. It fills my old heart with gladness and makes me feel ‘Bully.’ Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.

I think your philosophy on religion is okay. I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without too much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power, a supreme force, a governor, a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist; gas, vapor, ashes. They are all there just the same.

I had a couple of letters from mother the other day, one written the twelfth and one the fifteenth. Am always glad to get letters from your mother, she is a Dear isn’t she? Your mother and I have been a complete failure financially but if the boys turn out to be good and useful citizens nothing else matters and we know this is happening so why not be jubilant?

The weather up here couldn’t be beat, but I suppose it won’t last always, in fact we are looking forward to some snowstorms and an excuse to come back to the orange belt. I do not know anything about what I will do or if I will have a job when I leave here, but I am not worrying about it because it is no use to worry about what you can’t help, or what you can help, moral ‘don’t worry.’

Write and tell me all about your schoolwork and yourself in general. I will appreciate your confidence.

You no doubt had some hard days on your job at Crestline this summer. I can imagine the steep climbing, the hot weather, etc. But those hard things are what builds character and physic. Well Jack I presume by the time you have read all this you will be mentally fatigued and will need to relax. So goodnight, pleasant dreams and God bless you.

Your affectionate Dad

Jackson Pollock and Ruth Kligman taken by Edith Metzger during the weekend of Jackson and Edith's deaths

Letter courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly:

Suzanne Avalon: The Blue Room (1923)

2012-01-31T10:31:00.000-08:00

Instead of presenting the female body as a lush surface isolated and controlled by the male gaze, Valadon emphasises the weird gestures of figures apparently in control of their own movements. Valadon often placed her women in specific domestic settings, surrounding them with familiar domestic items.

Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky: Box for Our Industry Caramels (1923)

2012-01-27T03:59:00.000-08:00

Nadezhda Udaltsova (1885-1961), "At The Piano" (1914)

2012-01-25T10:38:00.000-08:00

Udaltsova attended the Acádemie de la Palette in Paris, assimilating the principles of Cubism from Le Fauconnier and Metzinger. She remained loyal to the primacy of studio painting, resisting the pressures–especially in the wake of the October Revolution–to adjust the fine arts to the applied or utilitarian. She continued to concentrate on Cubist compositions–and it was these that attracted attention at the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1922.

Artemisia Gentileschi, "Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting" (1630s)

2012-01-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Artemisia was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, one of Caravaggio´s most important followers. She is the first woman in the history of Western art whose historical importance is unquestionable.

Sofonisba Anguissola: Self-Portrait (1561)

2012-01-25T04:56:00.000-08:00

Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait (1561)

Born in 1535, Anguissola´s social status banned her from selling her works (they circulated as gifts). She was the first woman painter to achieve fame and respect. Daughter of Amilcare Anguissola, a nobleman who educated his seven children according to the humanist spirit of the Renaissance. Three of her sisters also became painters.

Susan Sontag, "Duet for Cannibals" (105min., 1969)

2012-01-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

http://ubu.com/film/sontag_duet.html

DUET FOR CANNIBALS, screenplay and directed by Susan Sontag; 105 minutes.

Francesca . . . . . Adriana Asti
Bauer . . . . . Lars Ekborg
Tomas . . . . . Gosta Ekman
Ingrid . . . . . Agneta Ekmanner

Alberto Burri, "Sackcloth" (1953)

2012-01-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

The italian artist Alberto Burri worked with reference to his war experience as a doctor. His abstract composition after the War, such as Sackcloth, were formed from textured, bandage-like material stretched across the canvas and drenched with paint. The dark stains revealed in various places appear like gapping wounds beneath the density of the material. Anna Moszynska.

"One Flat Thing, reproduced", William Forsythe and Thierry de Mey (Dresden, 2007; 22min.)

2011-12-27T14:42:00.000-08:00

http://www.ubu.com/film/forsythe_flat.html

In thematic variations on »One Flat Thing, reproduced«, William Forsythe and Thierry de Mey investigate movement from a variety of perspectives. The individual studies and their order of performance provide viewers with new insights into William Forsythe’s choreographic vocabulary.

http://www.williamforsythe.de/installations.html?&no_cache=1&detail=1&uid=26

Robert Smithson: Quasi-Infinites and the Waning of Space (Arts Magazine, November 1966)

2011-05-31T02:57:00.000-07:00

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lOQBYMTV01s/RgB0bpcZevI/AAAAAAAAAG4/tlFPi-zi07g/s1600-h/quasi-infinities+%26+the+waning+of+space+%281966%29+--+1.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lOQBYMTV01s/RgB00pcZeyI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/25-a8-B6cpk/s1600-h/quasi-infinities+%26+the+waning+of+space+%281966%29+--+2.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lOQBYMTV01s/RgB0rJcZexI/AAAAAAAAAHI/ZgoHm-KEsAQ/s1600-h/quasi-infinities+%26+the+waning+of+space+%281966%29+--+3.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_lOQBYMTV01s/RgB10pcZe0I/AAAAAAAAAHg/GKdJp-sWxbE/s1600-h/quasi-infinities+%26+the+waning+of+space+%281966%29+--+4.jpg

How will the local elections on 5 May affect artists, creatives and cultural organisations?

2011-04-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

http://fabrica.org.uk/

How will the local elections on 5 May affect artists, creatives and cultural organisations?

Fabrica is part of Brighton & Hove Arts Commission, an independentpartnership made up of people from the city's arts and creative industries, plus representatives from the main political parties.

At the most recent Arts Commission meeting on 4 March Cllr David Smith (Conservative), Cllr Rachel Fryer (Green), and Cllr Melaine Davies (Labour) presented their election policies for arts and culture. The Liberal Democrat Party did not make a presentation.

It seemed like a good opportunity to video the presentations and send them out through the arts and creative sector network. After all our sector provides 10% of the city's jobs and 20% of the city's companies so what we think matters.

We’ve also set up a blog so that we, the sector can post questions andcomments for the elected members, and they can respond. Follow the link below to see the video presentations. They last about 8 minutes each. If you haven't got time to watch the videos there's also a brief summary of the parties’ election policies listed as well.

http://bhacelection2011.wordpress.com/

-- Liz Whitehead
Co-Director
Fabrica
40 Duke Street
Brighton BN1 1AG

Scorsese´s Original Drawings for the Climatic Scene of Taxi Driver

2011-04-26T06:42:00.001-07:00

Click on images to enlarge

Gaudí in Black and White (drawings, photographs and studio)

2011-03-31T04:44:00.000-07:00

Section through the building in Gaudí´s La Pedrera project signed February 1906

Gaudí´s workshop in the Expiatory Church of the Sagrada Familia, 1904

Gaudí aged 26, after having completed his Architecture studies

Gaudí participating in a procession as member of the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, Barcelona (1924)

Plant-motif drawings by Gaudí when he was a student

Casa Batlló (Gaudí), Casa Amatller (J. Puig i Cadafalch) and Casa Lleó Morera (Ll. Domènech i Montaner)

The Intersection between Passeig de Grácia and Carrer de Provença, ca. 1918

Gaudí as seen by Quelus (1926)

G. W. PABST: Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931; 80min.)

2011-03-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931) is a French-German co-production directed by G. W. Pabst. This humanitarian film tells the story of a mine disaster where German miners rescue French miners from a collapsing mineshaft. The story takes place after the end of WWI in the Ruhr mining area along the border between France and Germany.

Francisco Goya (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, ca. 1797) vs. Janet Cardiff (The Murder of Crows, 2008)

2011-03-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

Francisco Goya (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, ca. 1797) vs. Janet Cardiff (The Murder of Crows, 2008)

“All those distortions, those bestial faces, those diabolic grimaces of his are impregnated with humanity."

--Charles Baudelaire on Los Caprichos, Ciofalo

Francisco Goya (1746-1828), El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1797)

Plate 43 of series Los Caprichos

El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, ca. 1797) belongs to Goya´s book of satirical images Los Caprichos. In this manuscript, the Spanish painter explores superstition, sensuality, greed, vice, violence and man´s weakness. The etching on display here, an allegory of reason and truth, shows Goya asleep at his desk with owls and other creatures hovering in the background as if emerging from the artist's dreams; i.e. when reason sleeps, our wicked imagination produces monsters and insanity. The lynx is a symbol of secrecy, and the owl indicates wisdom but, in conjunction with the cat, can also refer to depression and sadness. Goya added to the etching the thought: “Imagination abandoned by reason generates improbable monsters; but added to it, it becomes mother to the arts and the fountain of every marvel.”

These etchings were produced during the Spanish Enlightenment (1790s), an era in which people and intellectuals began to question ecclesiastical authority, royal hierarchies, but always aiming at bringing some rationality and reason to our understanding of the world, the heavens and mankind. Soon after hearing he had been reported to the Spanish Inquisition (abolished for good in 1834), Goya withdrew the set from sale.

An “itchy” sketchy representation and brief notes of the subject matter by the author of these lines

The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters (design for the Caprices, plate 43)

Sepia pen and ink drawing

1797-1798

Yinka Shonibare, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

(C-print mounted on aluminum)

2008

Photo by CARDIFF & MILLER

Janet Cardiff’s installation The Murder of Crows (2008) consists of ninety-eight speakers, chairs, stands, and a gramophone horn. The artist explores the idea of creating sculptural and physical sounds whilst mirroring the illogical but interconnected affinities experienced in dreams. A central theme for the piece is Goya’s “Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”. At the centre of The Crows there is one element that echoes Goya’s etching: a small desk with a megaphone speaker lying on its side. Cardiff’s voice comes out of the speaker occasionally, reciting accounts of shocking dreams. All that is combined with other recorded sounds such as machinery, Gregorian chants, military songs, and the caws and wing flaps of a murder of crows. The sounds and music in Cardiff’s installation act like the owls and bats surrounding the sleeping man in Goya’s etching: the artist’s voice, like Goya’s dreamer, cannot escape from her apocalyptic dreams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfa2fvWZ6II

Finally, let’s keep it eclectic. Two more sound sculptures to definitely consider:

Haroon Mirza’s first solo show at Lisson Gallery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lal40ahCS-4

Printmaker, sculptor & industrial designer, Arieto Bertoia (1915-1978) made hundreds of sound sculptures in the early 1970s, primarily focusing on the spatial and tonal environment created by his installations, i.e. “Sonambient”. To achieve a variety of organic and mysterious sounds, Bertoia worked manipulating shapes, length and thickness. http://www.ubu.com/sound/bertoia_1029.html

BOB DYLAN: Hava Nagila (Lon Angeles, September 1989)

2011-03-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan accompanies son-in-law Peter Himmelman and Harry Dean Stanton in this unorthodox rendition of "Hava Nagila." 25th Anniversary of Chabad, a Lubavitch organization.
Los Angeles, September 24, 1989.

G. W. Pabst: "Kameradschaft" (Comradeship, 1931; 80 min)

2011-03-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

Thea von Harbou (1888 - 1954) & Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927; 118 mins)

2011-03-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

Thea von Harbou (1888 - 1954) had her first novel published in 1905. From 1906 until 1914, Harbou acts on the stages of Dusseldorf, Weimar, Chemnitz and Aachen, and five years later Harbou's career as a screen-writer gets under way. During the preparations for the filming of her novel Das Indische Grabmal she met Fritz Lang, and would provide the scripts for all of his movies between 1920 and 1933. Harbou also wrote scripts for movies by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Carl Theador Dreyer and Arthur von Gerlach. In 1932, she joined the Nazi Party, and two years later she wrote a cinematic adaptation of the play The Assumption of Hannele, which she also directed. After the war, she was detained by the British military government, and sent to do unskilled labor. She died in Berlin in 1954.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat (1923)

Der Zweemann, No. 8, 9, 10 (Hanover, 1920)

2011-03-11T01:50:00.000-08:00

Der Zweemann, No. 8, 9, 10 (Hanover, 1920)

David Foster Wallace: Backbone (The New Yorker, March 2011)

2011-03-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/03/07/110307fi_fiction_wallace

Lawrence Ferlinghetti´s New Poem: 'Song of the Third World Birds'

2011-03-05T11:52:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Ferlinghetti´s New Poem: 'Song of the Third World Birds'

A cock cried out in my sleep

somewhere in Middle America
to awake the Middle Mind
of America
And the cock cried out
to awaken me to see
a sea of birds
flying over me
across America
And there were birds of every color
black birds and brown birds
and yellow birds and red birds

from the lands of every

liberation movement

And all these birds circled the Earth

and flew over every great nation

and over fortress America

with its great eagle

and its thunderbolts

And all the birds cried out with one voice

the voice of those who have no voice
the voice of the invisibles of the world
the voice of the dispossessed of the world

the fellaheen peoples of Earth
And which side are you on
sang the birds
Oh which side are you on
in the Third World War
the war against the Third World?

"Don´t Give Me"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Aleksandr Petrov: The Old Man and the Sea (1999; animated short film, 20min.)

2011-03-05T02:31:00.000-08:00

In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s novel. It took Aleksandr Petrov and his son Dmitri nearly two years to paint each of the 29,000 frames. Petrov used his fingertips and paintbrushes to paint on different glass sheets. After photographing each frame painted on the glass sheets, he modified the paintings one by one.

Raymond Chandler: Oscar Night in Hollywood (The Atlantic, March 1948)

2011-03-01T03:08:00.000-08:00

Five or six years ago a distinguished writer-director (if I may be permitted the epithet in connection with a Hollywood personage) was co-author of a screen play nominated for an Academy Award. He was too nervous to attend the proceedings on the big night, so he was listening to a broadcast at home, pacing the floor tensely, chewing his fingers, taking long breaths, scowling and debating with himself in hoarse whispers whether to stick it out until the Oscars were announced, or turn the damned radio off and read about it in the papers the next morning. Getting a little tired of all this artistic temperament in the home, his wife suddenly came up with one of those awful remarks which achieve a wry immortality in Hollywood: "For Pete's sake, don't take it so seriously, darling. After all, Luise Rainer won it twice."

To those who did not see the famous telephone scene in The Great Ziegfeld, or any of the subsequent versions of it which Miss Rainer played in other pictures, with and without telephone, this remark will lack punch. To others it will serve as well as anything to express that cynical despair with which Hollywood people regard their own highest distinction. It isn't so much that the awards never go to fine achievements as that those fine achievements are not rewarded as such. They are rewarded as fine achievements in box-office hits. You can't be an All-American on a losing team. Technically, they are voted, but actually they are not decided by the use of whatever artistic and critical wisdom Hollywood may happen to possess. They are ballyhooed, pushed, yelled, screamed, and in every way propagandized into the consciousness of the voters so incessantly, in the weeks before the final balloting, that everything except the golden aura of the box office is forgotten.

The Motion Picture Academy, at considerable expense and with great efficiency, runs all the nominated pictures at its own theater, showing each picture twice, once in the afternoon, once in the evening. A nominated picture is one in connection with which any kind of work is nominated for an award, not necessarily acting, directing, or writing; it may be a purely technical matter such as set-dressing or sound work. This running of pictures has the object of permitting the voters to look at films which they may happen to have missed or to have partly forgotten. It is an attempt to make them realize that pictures released early in the year, and since overlaid with several thicknesses of battered celluloid, are still in the running and that consideration of only those released a short time before the end of the year is not quite just.

The effort is largely a waste. The people with votes don't go to these showings. They send their relatives, friends, or servants. They have had enough of looking at pictures, and the voices of destiny are by no means inaudible in the Hollywood air. They have a brassy tone, but they are more than distinct.

All this is good democracy of a sort. We elect Congressmen and Presidents in much the same way, so why not actors, cameramen, writers, and all rest of the people who have to do with the making of pictures? If we permit noise, ballyhoo, and theater to influence us in the selection of the people who are to run the country, why should we object to the same methods in the selection of meritorious achievements in the film business? If we can huckster a President into the White House, why cannot we huckster the agonized Miss Joan Crawford or the hard and beautiful Miss Olivia de Havilland into possession of one of those golden statuettes which express the motion picture industry's frantic desire to kiss itself on the back of its neck? The only answer I can think of is that the motion picture is an art. I say this with a very small voice. It is an inconsiderable statement and has a hard time not sounding a little ludicrous. Nevertheless it is a fact, not in the least diminished by the further facts that its ethos is so far pretty low and that its techniques are dominated by some pretty awful people.

If you think most motion pictures are bad, which they are (including the foreign), find out from some initiate how they are made, and you will be astonished that any of them could be good. Making a fine motion picture is like painting "The Laughing Cavalier" in Macy's basement, with a floorwalker to mix your colors for you. Of course most motion pictures are bad. Why wouldn't they be? Apart from its own intrinsic handicaps of excessive cost, hypercritical bluenosed censorship, and the lack of any single-minded controlling force in the making, the motion picture is bad because 90 per cent of its source material is tripe, and the other 10 per cent is a little too virile and plain-spoken for the putty-minded clerics, the elderly ingénues of the women's clubs, and the tender guardians of that godawful mixture of boredom and bad manners known more eloquently as the Impressionable Age.

The point is not whether there are bad motion pictures or even whether the average motion picture is bad, but whether the motion picture is an artistic medium of sufficient dignity and accomplishment to be treated with respect by the people who control its destinies. Those who deride the motion picture usually are satisfied that they have thrown the book at it by declaring it to be a form of mass entertainment. As if that meant anything. Greek drama, which is still considered quite respectable by most intellectuals, was mass entertainment to the Athenian freeman. So, within its economic and topographical limits, was the Elizabethan drama. The great cathedrals of Europe, although not exactly built to while away an afternoon, certainly had an aesthetic and spiritual effect on the ordinary man. Today, if not always, the fugues and chorales of Bach, the symphonies of Mozart, Borodin, and Brahms, the violin concertos of Vivaldi, the piano sonatas of Scarlatti, and a great deal of what was once rather recondite music are mass entertainment by virtue of radio. Not all fools love it, but not all fools love anything more literate than a comic strip. It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.

The motion picture admittedly is faced with too large a mass; it must please too many people and offend too few, the second of these restrictions being infinitely more damaging to it artistically than the first. The people who sneer at the motion picture as an art form are furthermore seldom willing

to consider it at its best. The insist upon judging it by the picture they saw last week or yesterday; which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer quantity of production) than to judge literature by last week's best-sellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway hits. In a novel you can still say what you like, and the stage is free almost to the point of obscenity, but the motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom. If it were merely a transplanted literary or dramatic art, it certainly would not. The hucksters and the bluenoses would between them see to that.

But the motion picture is not a transplanted literary or dramatic art, any more than it is a plastic art. It has elements of all these, but in its essential structure it is much closer to music, in the sense that its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can. Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel.

In painting, music, and architecture we are not even second-rate by comparison with the best work of the past. In sculpture we are just funny. In prose literature we not only lack style but we lack the educational and historical background to know what style is. Our fiction and drama are adept, empty, often intriguing, and so mechanical that in another fifty years at most they will be produced by machines with rows of push buttons. We have no popular poetry in the grand style, merely delicate or witty or bitter or obscure verses. Our novels are transient propaganda when they are what is called "significant," and bedtime reading when they are not.

But in the motion picture we possess an art medium whose glories are not all behind us. It has already produced great work, and if, comparatively and proportionately, far too little of that great work has been achieved in Hollywood, I think that is all the more reason why in its annual tribal dance of the stars and the big-shot producers Hollywood should contrive a little quiet awareness of the fact. Of course it won't. I'm just daydreaming.

II

Show business has always been a little overnoisy, overdressed, overbrash. Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety. Some of these qualities prolonged beyond a strict necessity have passed into the Hollywood mores and produced that very exhausting thing, the Hollywood manner,which is a chronic case of spurious excitement over absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, and for once in a lifetime, I have to admit that Academy Awards night is a good show and quite funny in spots, although I'll admire you if you can laugh at all of it.

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, "In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived "; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn't good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

Glancing over the program of the Awards before the show starts, one is apt to forget that this is really an actors', directors', and big-shot producers' rodeo. It is for the people who make pictures (they think), not just for the people who work on them. But these gaudy characters are a kindly bunch at heart; they know that a lot of small-fry characters in minor technical jobs, such as cameramen, musicians, cutters, writers, soundmen, and the inventors of new equipment, have to be given something to amuse them and make them feel mildly elated. So the performance was formerly divided into two parts, with an intermission. On the occasion I attended, however, one of the Masters of Ceremony (I forget which—there was a steady stream of them, like bus passengers) announced that there would be no intermission this year and that they would proceed immediately to the important part of the program.

Let me repeat, the important part of the program.

Perverse fellow that I am, I found myself intrigued by the unimportant

III

I am also intrigued by the voting. It was formerly done by all the members of all the various guilds, including the extras and bit players. Then it was realized that this gave too much voting power to rather unimportant groups, so the voting on various classes of awards was restricted to the guilds which were presumed to have some critical intelligence on the subject. Evidently this did not work either, and the next change was to have the nominating done by the specialist guilds, and the voting only by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

It doesn't really seem to make much difference how the voting is done. The quality of the work is still only recognized in the context of success. A superb job in a flop picture would get you nothing, a routine job in a winner

I do not feel any profound conviction, for example, as to whether The

The governing board of the Academy is at great pains to protect the honesty and the secrecy of the voting. It is done by anonymous numbered ballots, and the ballots are sent, not to any agency of the motion picture industry, but to a well-known firm of public accountants. The results, in sealed envelopes, are borne by an emissary of the firm right onto the stage of the theater where the Awards be made, and there for the first time, one at a time, they are made known. Surely precaution would go no further. No one could possibly have known in advance any of these results, not even in Hollywood where every agent learns the closely guarded secrets of the studios with no apparent trouble. If there are secrets in Hollywood, which I sometimes doubt, this voting ought to be one of them.

IV

As for a deeper kind of honesty, I think it is about time for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to use a little of it up by declaring in a forthright manner that foreign pictures are outside competition and will remain so until they face the same economic situation and the same strangling censorship that Hollywood faces. It is all very well to say how clever and artistic the French are, how true to life, what subtle actors they have, what an honest sense of the earth, what forthrightness in dealing the bawdy side of life. The French can afford these things, we cannot. To the Italians they are permitted, to us they are denied. Even the English possess a freedom we lack. How much did Brief Encounter cost? It would have cost at least a million and a half in Hollywood; in order to get that money back, and the distribution costs on top of the negative costs, it would have had to contain innumerable crowd-pleasing ingredients, the very lack of which is what makes it a good picture.

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strong>Since the Academy is not an international tribunal of film art it should stop pretending to be one. If foreign pictures have no practical chance whatsoever of winning a major award they should not be nominated. At the very beginning of the performance in 1947 a special Oscar was awarded to Laurence Olivier for Henry V, although it was among those nominated as best picture of the year. There could be no more obvious way of saying it was not going to win. A couple of minor technical awards and a couple of minor writing awards were also given to foreign pictures, but nothing that ran into important coin, just side meat. Whether these awards were deserved is beside the point, which is that they were minor awards and were intended to be minor awards, and that there was no possibility whatsoever of any foreign-made picture winning a major award.

To outsiders it might appear that something devious went on here. To

If the actors and actresses like the silly show, and I'm not sure at all the best of them do, they at least know how to look elegant in a strong light, and how to make with the wide-eyed and oh, so humble little speeches as if they believed them. If the big producers like it, and I'm quite sure they do because it contains the only ingredients they really understand—promotion values and the additional grosses that go with them—the producers at least know what they are fighting for. But if the quiet, earnest, and slightly cynical people who really make motion pictures like it, and I'm quite sure they don't, well, after all, it comes only once a year, and it's no worse than a lot of the sleazy vaudeville they have to push out of the way to get their work done.

Of course that's not quite the point either. The head of a large studio once said privately that in his candid opinion the motion picture business was 25 per cent honest business and the other 75 per cent pure conniving. He didn't say anything about art, although he may have heard of it. But that is the real point, isn't it?—whether these annual Awards, regardless of the grotesque ritual which accompanies them, really represent anything at all of artistic importance to the motion picture medium, anything clear and honest that remains after the lights are dimmed, the minks are put away, and the aspirin is swallowed? I don't think they do. I think they are just theater and not even good theater. As for the personal prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it may with luck last long enough for your agent to get your contract rewritten and your price jacked up another notch. But over the years and in the hearts of men of good will? I hardly think so.

Once upon a time a once very successful Hollywood lady decided (or was forced) to sell her lovely furnishings at auction, together with her lovely home. On the day before she moved out she was showing a party of her friends through the house for a private view. One of them noticed that the lady was using her two golden Oscars as doorstops. It seemed they were just about the right weight, and she had sort of forgotten they were gold.

part of the program also. I found my sympathies engaged by the lesser ingredients of picture-making, some of which have been enumerated above. I was intrigued by the efficiently quick on-and-off that was given to these minnows of the picture business; by their nervous attempts via the microphone to give most of the credit for their work to some stuffed shirt in a corner office; by the fact that technical developments which may mean many millions of dollars to the industry, and may on occasion influence the whole procedure of picture-making, are just not worth explaining to the audience at all; by the casual, cavalier treatment given to film-editing and to camera work, two of the essential arts of film-making, almost and sometimes quite equal to direction, and much more important than all but the very best acting; intrigued most of all perhaps by the formal tribute which is invariably made to the importance of the writer, without whom, my dear, dear friends, nothing could be done at all, but who is for all that merely the climax of the unimportant part of the program.

Best Years of Our Lives was even the best Hollywood motion picture of 1946. It depends on what you mean by best. It had a first-class director, some fine actors, and the most appealing sympathy gag in years. It probably had as much all-around distinction as Hollywood is presently capable of. That it had the kind of class and simple art possessed by Open City or the stalwart and magnificent impact of Henry V only an idiot would claim. In a sense it did not have art at all. It had that kind of sentimentality which is almost but not quite humanity, and that kind of adeptness which is almost but not quite style. And it had them in large doses, which always helps.

those who know Hollywood, all that went on was the secure knowledge and awareness that the Oscars exist for and by Hollywood, their purpose is to maintain the supremacy of Hollywood, their standards and problems are the standards and problems of Hollywood, and their phoniness is the phoniness of Hollywood. But the Academy cannot, without appearing ridiculous, maintain a pose of internationalism by tossing a few minor baubles to the foreigners while carefully keeping all the top-drawer jewelry for itself. As a writer I resent that writing awards should be among these baubles, and as a member of the Motion Picture Academy I resent its trying to put itself in a position which its annual performance before the public shows it quite unfit to occupy.

will be voted in. It is against this background of success-worship that the voting is done, with the incidental music supplied by a stream of advertising in the trade papers (which even intelligent people read in Hollywood) designed to put all other pictures than those advertised out of your head at balloting time. The psychological effect is very great on minds conditioned to thinking of merit solely in terms of box office and ballyhoo. The members of the Academy live in this atmosphere, and they are enormously suggestible people, as are all workers in Hollywood. If they are contracted to studios, they are made to feel that it is a matter of group patriotism to vote for the products of their own lot. They are informally advised not to waste their votes, not to plump for something that can't win, especially something made on another lot.