A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947)


Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson, Sabu, Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, Esmond Knight, Eddie Whaley Jr. Screenplay: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, based on a novel by Rumer Godden. Cinematography: Jack Cardiff. Production design: Alfred Junge. Film editing: Reginald Mills. Music: Brian Easdale.

This much-loved film has so far escaped condemnation for its "orientalism," the brown-face performances of Jean Simmons, May Hallatt, and Esmond Knight, and its treatment in general of the Indian characters as mysterious and alien. And perhaps it's better to concentrate on the erotic instead of the exotic in Black Narcissus, to enjoy its stunning, Oscar-winning cinematography and production design. Who can forget the vertiginous moments at the precipice where the bell was rung -- even though those moments were sheer camera-trickery, accomplished in the Pinewood Studios with matte paintings? Or the erotic charge every time David Farrar walks shirtless among the nuns and Kathleen Byron gives him the eye?
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