Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/02/20

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

Sunday, August 2, 2020

Body and Soul (Oscar Micheaux, 1925)

Paul Robeson, Julia Theresa Russell, and Mercedes Gilbert in Body and Soul

Cast: Paul Robeson, Mercedes Gilbert, Julia Theresa Russell, Marshall Rogers, Lawrence Chenault, Lillian Johnson, Madame Robinson, Chester A. Alexander, Walter Cornick. Screenplay: Oscar Micheaux. No other credited crew.

The melodramatic imagination that crafts stories out of feelings and emotions is a precious thing, giving us an insight into the hidden lives of human beings uninflected by ideology. But the manners and behavior that grow out of these emotions change with the times, so what stirs the emotions of one generation seems ludicrous to the next, leading to an undervaluing and neglect of melodrama as an art form. Add to this a general intellectual mistrust of and contempt for appeals to the emotions, and it's easy to see why so much of the cinematic past that stemmed from this imagination has vanished, the victim of a kind of sanctioned neglect. And a special victim of this neglect would have to be the so-called "race movie," aimed almost exclusively at Black audiences. All of which makes the survival of even a deeply flawed film like Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul so remarkable. Even in its carefully restored form, it has narrative gaps and character inconsistencies that suggest still-missing pieces. But it also preserves the essence of what Black audiences of the time thought and felt about themselves, along with portrayals of the desperation of poverty, the intense and sometimes blinding religiosity, and the indomitable hope. We can fault Body and Soul for its too-facile "it was all a dream" resolution, but we should also value it for endorsing the necessity of dream as an antidote for crushing despair. Watching it 95 years later, it's easy to be distracted by its antiquity, by the title cards written in a dialect that offends us, by the florid acting -- Paul Robeson apparently later tried to hide the fact that this was his first film, even though his is certainly the most impressive performance in it. Call the film naïve if you will, but see it as its first audiences saw it, as a validation of their hopes and fears, and it can be an intensely moving experience.