Photos: Classiq Journal
”I discipline my illustrations as is,
but they must be absolutely clear for children.
A flower must be a flower, the sun must be the sun.
It can be stylised, it can be the image of a thing,
but it must be clear, simple, and at once understood.”
Ludwig Bemelmans
Viewing
Opening Night, 1977
John Cassavetes
It is one of the best films about an actor’s life and work. There have been other great movies about the world of theater or film – All about Eve (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), Birdman (2014) – but John Cassavetes’ Opening Night lays bare the drama of an actor and the all-consuming act of acting like no other.
Myrtle Gordon (superbly played by Gena Rowlands) is a star actress in the prime of life, performing in out-of-town previews of a new play in which, for the first time, she will play an older woman. Ben Gazzara plays the director, Joan Blondell is the playwright, and Cassavetes himself plays the leading man. Myrtle wreaks psychodramatic improvisations upon the text, she gets drunk, chain-smokes, sows chaos among her colleagues because nobody knows why she acts this way. We do not easily identify with Myrtle either and that’s exactly what Cassavetes wanted to prevent. Cassavetes’ films are about life, emotions, feelings. But life is not simple. This is a harrowing and profound film that makes you think. “You have to fight knowing, because once you know something, it’s hard to be open and creative; it’s a form of passivity – something to guard against,” the director said.
The entire film has a loose, fluid shooting style, it’s like you can not really tell whether what you see is Cassavetes and the actors backstage rehearsing and improvising or the actual movie – this was a director who always took the risk of being an original. But in the last scene, when Myrtle comes in late, drunk, for the opening night of the play, Cassavetes and all his players appear to have genuinely improvised it (something the filmmaker often did), in front of a theatre full of extras playing the audience. It is a brilliant all-the-world’s-a-stage effect.
Myrtle is alone, she’s on her own, she has no family, no responsibility than her own, and is in desperate fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. That’s her whole life, being an actress. “I have no family, no kids. This is my life. This is it for me,” she says desperately at one point. And she goes to extreme lengths to keep that vulnerability. And she hangs on to it, she hangs onto her ideas. She knows that the only measure of her success, and of her life, is what she can create and express on stage. And that if she can not do that, she’s lost. She’s very honest to herself, she doesn’t go along with the crowd, she doesn’t want to accept someone else’s point of view, she wants to find her own answers. And she goes after them unapologetically. That she succeeds in the end, that she redeems her role, is very moving and hopeful. “An actor is a very loyal person to life, a person who fights against all odds to make something work and doesn’t want to be fed a lot of lies,” said John Cassavetes. I think every person should apply this to their own life. The only measure of someone’s success is being authentic and true to oneself.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973
Sam Peckinpah
There is something about summer and the beginning of autumn that makes me listen to Bob Dylan, almost exclusively, including his soundtrack for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Sam Peckinpah’s western (and by that I mean the 1988 Turner Preview Edition) marked Dylan’s first dramatic role, playing frontier drifter Alias, an associate of the gunfighter Billy the Kid (a role written specially for him after he persuaded Rudy Wurlitzer, the scriptwriter, to include him in the film because of his fascination with the myth of the “Kid”), and his first soundtrack album, a score that perfectly reflects the film’s melancholic infusion. The times were indeed “a changin’”, as Dylan sings, and so are Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn as the film progresses. But the most heart-wrenching scene is when Slim Pickens as Sheriff Baker, having been shot by the Kid, finds enough strength to walk by the river where he sits down on a rock, quietly, wordless, his hand over his wound and waiting to die, as his wife watches helplessly – Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is the only narrative needed. When the music so perfectly matches the scene, the emotions flooding you cross the boundaries of film in unknown ways.
La lumière d’en face (The Light Across the Street), 1955
Georges Lacombe
A film noir in the tradition of Le dernier tournant, 1939, Pierre Chenal’s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, fueled by the sensuality of Brigitte Bardot, one year before she would star in Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu créa la Femme, when she would take her place in the sun.
Tchao Pantin (So Long, Stooge), 1983
Claude Berri
Claude Berri’s career is, to say the least, not very open to the policier. Tchao Pantin was a departure from his ouvre. He went dark, beyond conventions. It was filmed almost entirely at night, in neighborhoods that were very popular at the time, the 11th and 18th arrondisments, and Belleville, with a gas station acting as one of the characters, its neon lighting reinforcing the dark atmosphere of the film. Lambert (Coluche), who works there nights, befriends a young small-time pusher (Richard Anconina), their friendship changing track abruptly when the latter is caught up by his actions, which will trigger Lambert’s own dark past. With the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s hard to come across this kind of sincere, raw, decent films anymore.
Reading
I could look and look and look at a Ludwig Bemelmans illustration, especially the many small, drawn moments coming together to create a narrative. Like a child who sits still and observes, takes it all in and creates his own universe; it’s wonderful to watch a kid, unrushed, attentive at the world, curious. Bemelmans’ drawing skills were vast, he experimented with different formats and techniques, created the widely acclaimed children’s books Madeleine, illustrated for The New Yorker, Town and Country, and Holiday magazine, painted the mural on the walls of the bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City, one of my favourite of his works. But one of his greatest gifts was that he was a raconteur, a storyteller who recorded life as it went on all around him. The book Ludwig Bemelmans, is part of the fantastic series The Illustrators, having none other than Quentin Blake as consultant.
A cover that makes you buy the book, and with good reason: Dorothea Lange: Seeing People. In the 1930s, the portrait photographer took to the streets of San Francisco to show in her pictures the desolation developing in the city during the Depression. “It was a way of her to see the world.” The cover of the book shows a weathered hand holding a weathered cowboy hat. “A hat is more than a covering against sun and wind,” Lange said. “It is a badge of service.” The working man’s hat, or the cowboy’s hat, has held a fascination for other photographers as well, as photographer Laura Wilson writes in her book (for a more in-depth conversation about Laura’s work, here is my interview with the photographer).
Selvedge programme manager Catherine Harris talks about her lifelong companions, clothes, weaving through her memories like vibrant threads. In my conversation with Polly Leonard, the founder of Selvedge magazine, she also shared a few great reading recommendations worth having a look at.
Listening
The soundtrack: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
The album: Acoustic Hymns Vol. 1, Richard Ashcroft
The podcast: The Caro Podcast, with Natalie Jones. The episode featuring Caroline Strecker, a personal favourite and an extraordinary maker – she is the founder of repurposed leatherwork brand Rag of Colts, is incredibly inspiring and up-lifting.
Making
Matthew Wigglesworth is a British artist living on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. His art was what first made me buy the magazine Waves & Woods – he was the guest-artist for that issue, which holds beautiful memories of a summer well lived – which has since become one of my favourite print publications. Matthew’s illustrations are like a celebration of the sea, nature and the beauty of each day.
Ludwig Bemelmans mural on the wall of the bar of the Carlyle Hotel, New York City | Collage of illustrated letters on hotel writing paper written by Ludwig Bemelmans to his young daughter, Barbara, c.1940s (from the book “The illustrators: Ludwig Bemelmans”
Exploring
The city of Los Angeles through film. I am honord to be a contributing writer to this wonderful book: World Film Locations: Los Angeles, Vol.2 Movie scenes, essays and location maps exploring the city through film. The book pairs incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills, demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness, as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.
The book, edited by Gabriel Solomons, Jared Cowan and Fabrice Ziolkowski, and published by Intellect Books and Chicago University Press, will be available this November in Europe and in December in the US. More details here. As always, I am incredibly grateful to Gabriel Solomons, my editor at The Big Picture magazine and Beneficial Shock, for the opportunity to write about cinema from a new perspective.
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Racquet’s Rennae Stubbs tennis podcast. Gone to Timbuktu with Sophy Roberts. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene Journal, Racquet, and Waves & Woods in print.
”World Film Locations: Los Angeles, Vol. 2” will be released in November 2024 (more details here)
