E&I's 15th anniversary: 10 favorite posts from the past 5 years

Eve (Barbara Stanwyck) tempts Charles (Henry Fonda) in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, from one of my favorite posts from the past 5 years. Image source: Hollywood Soapbox

This post is the 511th published on Exotic and Irrational Entertainment, and marks E&I's 15th anniversary (the very first post, on Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist, John Ford's The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, was published on July 22, 2007).

E&I began as a way for me to explore my "indefensible obsessions": literature, primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries, and especially by women authors; opera, primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries; and Indian movies, primarily those produced by the mainstream commercial Hindi film industry known as Bollywood. Although in the five years since my 10th anniversary post I've lost touch with current developments in Indian cinema, my other obsessions have certainly continued unabated (and have been joined by a few others).

So in honor of the 15th anniversary of E&I, here is a list of 10 of my favorite posts (or post series) from the past 5 years:

Books:

Angela Carter: A post on Edmund Gordon's biography The Invention of Angela Carter, plus four posts devoted to the best of her fiction, including the evocative The Magic Toyshop and the uncanny tales of The Bloody Chamber. (September–October 2018)

Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel: Du Maurier's fiction has always been popular, but has long been viewed with unwarranted condescension by many literary critics. My Cousin Rachel (like "The Birds" and Rebecca) is another of her masterpieces of growing dread and inexorable fate. Margaret Forster's groundbreaking biography of Du Maurier, the first to reveal the extent of Daphne's same-sex attractions, was one of my favorite books of 2021. (April 2021, October 2021)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: The 19th-century Brazilian author, the grandson of slaves, is amazingly modern in his subjects and style. I wrote posts on recent translations of his brilliant Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in which a dead man looks back on his inconsequential life with ironic humor, and on his wistful final masterwork, Counselor Ayres' Memorial, in which an older man observes a young widow's struggles to remain in mourning as she is inexorably drawn back to life and love. (March 2018 and July 2020)

Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks: Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant is not as well-known today as her contemporaries Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, but she can be equally acute about the strategies that determined, ambitious women in her era had to pursue in order to achieve their aims. In Miss Marjoribanks, the title character (pronounced "Marchbanks") wants to transform the moribund society of the town of Carlingford and inject some youth and life; her matchmaking is so successful that she almost runs out of eligible bachelors for herself. (August 2020)

Opera:

The mysteries of Dido and Aeneas: The greatest opera in English, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, is surrounded by mysteries. We don't have all the music: the scores that exist are incomplete copies that don't agree with one another, made for performances that occurred decades after Purcell's death in 1695. We don't know the date of the first performance, or who sang which roles: there is only a single surviving copy of Nahum Tate's libretto from the first (or at least a very early) performance "by young gentlewomen" at a Chelsea boarding-school. In this post I discuss new evidence that has emerged in the last 15 years or so that may enable us to provide at least partial answers to some of the major questions that remain about this opera. (March 2018)

Vittoria Tesi: The first Black prima donna: Vittoria Tesi, the first Black or biracial prima donna, is an extraordinary and ground-breaking figure. She was a star singer who performed on equal terms with other superlative singers of the mid-18th century. And yet I've been listening to Baroque opera for nearly 30 years and can't recall having heard her name before. This post series attempted to bring together all the documented information about Tesi, including some amazing descriptions and images of extravagant Baroque opera spectacles in which she participated. I included arias from the roles she peformed, and identified (for the first time, to my knowledge) a possible image of her father as a young servant in the Medici household. (March–May 2022)

The operas of Antonio Salieri: In the play and film Amadeus, the composer Antonio Salieri is portrayed as "the patron saint of mediocrity," so envious of Mozart's talent that he finally poisons him. One of the many problems with this image is that during Mozart's lifetime Salieri was by far the more successful composer, and Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte drew inspiration from Salieri's work in creating their own. In my post on Salieri's La grotta di Trofonio (The cave of Trofonio) I show that it influenced Mozart's Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte (All women are the same), while in the post on Salieri's La scuola de' gelosi (The school of jealousy) I show that it helped shape Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) as well as Così. The third Salieri opera that I've written about, the one-act Prima la musica, poi le parole (First the music, then the words), was actually a joint production with Mozart, who wrote his own one-act opera, Der Schauspieldirektor (The impresario) to be performed the same evening. In my post on La scuola I wrote, "Salieri may not have been Mozart, but being Salieri was more than sufficient." (December 2018, March 2021, July 2021)

Film:

René Clair: Between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, years spanning the transition between silent and sound films, French director René Clair directed a series of now-classic comedies. Entr'acte (1924) and The Italian Straw Hat (1927) exploit the visual possibilities of film to tell a series of running jokes. In Sous les toits des Paris (Under the roofs of Paris, 1930), the protagonist is a sheet-music peddler whose code of class loyalty leads to a prison term for a crime he didn't commit. Clair's visual inventiveness and working-class sympathies perhaps reached their highest expression in the gentle humor and humanistic ideals of À nous la liberté! (Give us freedom!, 1931), in which an escaped prisoner becomes a wealthy industrial magnate, only to be reminded of his principles by an encounter with his former cellmate. (September–December 2017)

Ester Krumbachová: A survey of three films written and designed by Krumbachová, a central figure in the Czech New Wave cinema of the 1960s: the surreally feminist Daisies (1966), the bitterly funny and morally chilling A Report on the Party and Guests (1967), and the dreamlike Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). A few years after the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring, Krumbachová was blacklisted for a decade, but these films remain as a testament to the courage and creativity of Krumbachová and her colleagues. (November 2018)

Preston Sturges: Between 1940 and 1944 seven comedies written and directed by Preston Sturges were released by Paramount Studios. There's not a dud among them, and some are among the best comedies ever produced in Hollywood. In my view Sturges' peak achievement is The Lady Eve (1941), with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, but others might vote for Sullivan's Travels (1942), with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, or the rueful Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), with Eddie Bracken and Ella Raines. (May 2021)

Over the past decade and a half this blog has received (to my astonishment) 657,000 page views. This is a particularly gratifying surprise given that my average post is probably close to two thousand words long, and some far exceed that total. My deepest thanks to everyone who has stopped by E&I since 2007 to read my thoughts and share their own. While I can't guarantee that I'll be continuing for another 15 years, I have no plans to stop writing anytime soon. Take that as fair warning!

Favorites of 2010-2019: Movies and TV

Cartoon by E. Black (caption slightly modified). Image source: New Yorker

It's been ten years since I began posting my year-end lists of the favorite movies, TV, music, live performances and books I experienced in the previous 12 months. Over the past decade I listed 35 narrative films from countries other than India, 27 films from India, 15 documentaries, 18 TV series, 49 recordings, 57 live performances, 39 works of fiction, and 32 works of non-fiction.

While I tend to be more interested in planning my next adventure than in reviewing past pleasures, I've gone back through all of the favorites lists of the past decade to nominate my favorites of the favorites, 2010-19.

One friend calls my lists "idiosyncratic." I'm sure it was meant kindly, but in fact it's the entire point. These are not intended to be "best-of" lists, nor are they driven by the commercial considerations that motivate most year-end listmaking. The movies, music, books, etc., that make my favorites lists are simply those I found most personally engaging in the previous year, whenever the works themselves were produced. They can be a universally acclaimed masterpiece, a hidden gem, or just something that perfectly matched my mood at the time. Your tastes may (and probably will, and probably should) vary.

NARRATIVE FILMS

Fully half of my ten favorite narrative films seen in the past decade are in languages other than English (and as usual Indian films are in their own category), and eight were produced more than half a century ago. Just missing the list: Her (2013), Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), and Today's Special (2009). Apologies to Jean Arthur, René Clair and Ernst Lubitsch, who were limited to one film apiece: otherwise Too Many Husbands (1940), Sous les toits de Paris (1930), and One Hour With You (1932) would also have been included.

À nous la liberté (Give us freedom! 1931): René Clair's great comic masterpiece, in which two free spirits try to escape the conformist, coercive worlds of prison, work and school.

Trouble in Paradise (1932): "The Lubitsch touch"—witty, sophisticated comedy—is brought to a peak of perfection in this classic pre-Code romantic triangle.

Libeled Lady (1936): Speaking of witty and sophisticated comedy, it's delivered here with sparkling timing by a quartet of glamorous stars: Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell and a luminous Myrna Loy.

Remember the Night (1940): Four years before they appeared as the fatally attracted couple in Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck co-starred in this compelling Preston Sturges-penned Christmas noir.

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941): One of the best of Jean Arthur's comedies (which is saying a great deal), The Devil and Miss Jones offers heartfelt emotion and a pointed social message.

Tokyo Story (Tōkyō Monogatari, 1953): Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece of restraint in which details of the characters' lives and emotions are slowly unveiled, as in a great novel.

A Report on the Party and Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966): A party that everyone is forced to attend becomes a barbed analogy for political life under Communism in this brilliant parable by Czech New Wave filmmaker Ester Krumbachová.

War and Peace (Voyna i mir, 1967): Epic in every sense, Sergei Bondarchuk's four-film adaptation of Tolstoy's great novel sets the characters' private dramas of sacrifice, betrayal, and reconciliation against the public catastrophe of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Frantz (2016): Based on Ernst Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby (1932), François Ozon's Frantz follows the deepening emotional connection between a German war widow and the French soldier wracked with guilt over his role in her husband's death.

Julieta (2016): In deciding the final entry for this list, I thought about which film I'd be most eager to rewatch. It was no contest. As with most Pedro Almodóvar movies, Julieta (based on Alice Munro short stories) is less about the twists and turns of the plot than about a series of emotion-packed moments rendered with the hyper-real acuity of a dream.

DOCUMENTARIES

Out of my 15 favorite documentaries first seen in 2010 or after I've selected five. Just missing inclusion were three performing arts documentaries, Every Little Step (2008), First Position (2011), and Pina (2011).

Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind (2003): Susan Lacy's documentary traces Joni Mitchell's life and work from her mid-1960s beginnings singing as Joni Anderson in Calgary coffeehouses, through her 1970s heyday and her subsequent fall from pop music favor. Even if you think you aren't interested in Mitchell or her music, her determination to explore her own path in the face of what seem at times to be insurmountable difficulties is compelling.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013) tells the fascinating and wildly improbable story of John Maloof's discovery of Maier's photographic archive at a storage space auction, his attempts to trace her identity and history, and his bringing her work to well-deservedfame. And it is filled with Maier's striking and sometimes unsettling photographs.

I Am Not Your Negro (2016): Drawn primarily from James Baldwin's writings on the 1960s civil rights movement, Raoul Peck's documentary speaks just as urgently to the present moment. Essential viewing.

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years (2016): In a matter of months in 1963 and 1964, to their own disbelief, the Beatles went from playing basement bars to sold-out stadiums filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans. It's an amazing story that never gets old, and Ron Howard lets us watch events unfold through footage shot at the time. Pure pleasure.

Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018): This documentary captures Joan Jett's onstage energy, her fierce integrity (which has survived four and a half decades in the music industry), and her delightfully raspy speaking and singing voice. A must for fans; if you aren't one, watch this movie and you will be.

TV SERIES

Unsurprisingly all of my favorites-of-favorites TV series are related to literary works. Just missing inclusion on the list were The Barchester Chronicles (1982), Daniel Deronda (2002), and Victoria (2016).

Middlemarch (1994): Adapted by Andrew Davies, this BBC series features virtually every major incident in George Eliot's great novel of marital disillusion, a wonderful cast (including E & I favorite Rufus Sewell), and of course fabulous costumes and locations.

Wives and Daughters (1999): Another Andrew Davies adaptation, this time of Elizabeth Gaskell's best novel. Molly Gibson (the ethereal Justine Waddell) is a young woman who must deal with her unpleasant new stepmother (Francesca Annis) and her beautiful but emotionally manipulative new stepsister (Keeley Hawes). The cast also includes Michael Gambon, Barbara Flynn, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and Rosamund Pike.

Slings & Arrows (2003-2006) follows the fortunes of a theater company that bears a striking (but surely coincidental!) resemblance to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Each season centers on the production of a different Shakespeare play: Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. But the other productions of the festival and the barely controlled backstage chaos provide an authentic backdrop for the mainstage drama.

Cranford and Return to Cranford (2007-2009): These Heidi Thomas-scripted Elizabeth Gaskell adaptations focus on the inhabitants of the fictional town of Cranford, and the challenges to their traditions posed by new social, political and economic changes. Dame Judi Dench heads an ensemble cast of excellent British actors such as Imelda Staunton, Barbara Flynn, Claudie Blakely, Lesley Manville, Jim Carter, Michael Gambon, and the serenely radiant Julia Sawalha.

Lark Rise To Candleford (2008-2011) is the story of a young rural woman (Olivia Hallinan) learning to make her way in the wider world; the contrast between hamlet and town offers a microcosm of the social, political, economic and technological changes occurring in England in the late 19th century.

Other Favorites of 2010-2019:

• Bollywood and beyond
• Music
• Live performances 
• Books

Rene Clair's early films part 4

À nous la liberté (Give us freedom! 1931)

In a 1931 essay entitled "The Talkies Talk Too Much," René Clair wrote,

I am dreaming of the conflict between the visions of a man's soul and the mechanization of life which daily grows more potent. I visualize a dreamer, a romantic, a vagabond, and I want to set him in my film against a background of tremendous mechanism. [1]

In À nous la liberté, the dreamer, the romantic, the vagabond is Emile (Henri Marchand). When we first meet him he is in prison, sharing a cell with Louis (Raymond Cordy). Prison life is regimented, surveilled. The men are marched everywhere in lockstep while stern guards observe their every move.

Strict silence is enforced among the prisoners, whether at the workbench (where they are making children's toys—objects that symbolize innocence and freedom) or at the prison mess hall. It is a system intended to crush hope.

The workbench:

The prison mess:

But Emile and Louis have a plan: with smuggled implements they are cutting through the bars of their cell in a bid to escape. As Emile—standing on Louis's shoulders so that he can reach the window—is cutting through the bars, he cuts himself. Louis binds Emile's wound with his handkerchief. The prison scenes unfold without dialogue, but Clair portrays the almost tender relationship between Emile and Louis with visual economy.

When they make their break, Louis is able to heave himself over the prison's inner wall, but Emile is spotted and the alarm is sounded. Emile realizes that by the time he makes it over the inner wall to join Louis they will both be caught. He throws the rope to Louis with the cry "À nous la liberté!"; they both realize that Emile is sacrificing himself. Louis gets away; Emile is recaptured and returned to the prison (and, no doubt, a longer sentence).

On the outside, we follow Louis's progress in a series of dissolves that cover a few minutes of screen time and years of diegetic time. We see him transformed from a sidewalk record salesman into a phonograph shop proprietor, the owner of the "Palace of Records" (a vast emporium with a fleet of logoed delivery trucks and lackeys to light his cigarettes and open his limousine door), and finally into the boss of a huge phonograph factory employing armies of assembly-line workers.

The factory day is remarkably similar to that of the prison. Long lines of men in uniform, watched over by guards:

The assembly line:

The cafeteria:

A vagabond is lounging in a field near the factory, leaning on his elbow and loafing at his ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

His view is soon blocked by the boots and uniforms of two representatives of law and order. They have a message for him, one echoed by businessmen, politicians and schoolteachers:

School, work, and prison: institutions of confinement, coercion and enforced conformity.

The vagabond, of course, is Emile, who has finally been released from prison, and who must be helped by the two policemen to see that work means liberty.

Emile ultimately finds his way to a job in the phonograph factory, but his dreamy nature, suspicion of authority and inability to perform the repetitive work at speed bring cascading chaos to the regimented and Taylorized efficiency of the assembly line.

Emile is hauled before the boss for punishment. To his amazement, the boss is his old cellmate. Louis pretends not to recognize Emile; taking him to his private office, Louis tries threats and bribes to get rid of him. But when Louis notices that Emile's wrist has been cut, he binds the wound with his handkerchief, as he'd done in prison, and his fellow-feeling returns:

Emile reawakens Louis's conscience, and helps him to realize that being a big boss is also a form of imprisonment. Both men want to find a way to regain their freedom, but discover that it is not attainable without difficulties and sacrifice.

The rich man who is alternately cold and warm towards his vagabond companion may remind you of Chaplin's City Lights (1931), while the chaos on the assembly line may suggest Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). In fact, Clair's production company, Tobis Film, sued Chaplin over the similarities between Modern Times and Clair's film. Clair refused to participate in the suit; he admired Chaplin and was deeply embarrassed by the plagiarism accusations against him. It's also clear that if there were any borrowings, they went both ways. Chaplin, in fact, said that he had never seen Clair's film, while Clair stated in an interview with Le Soir that "I, myself, owe him very much; and besides, if he has borrowed a few ideas from me, he has done me a great honor." [2]

Clair would go on to write and direct two more films in France, Quatorze Juillet (Bastille Day, 1933) and Le dernier milliardaire (The Last Billionaire, 1934), neither of which I've had the opportunity to see. In the mid-1930s he moved to England and made two films with producer Alexander Korda, and as World War II loomed he travelled to America and directed films in Hollywood, including The Flame of New Orleans (1941, with Marlene Dietrich), I Married a Witch (1942, with Veronica Lake), and And Then There Were None (1945, with Roland Young). He returned to France after the war and continued to make films until the mid-1960s; he died in 1981 at age 82.

Perhaps Clair's wartime American period will be the subject of a future post. But À nous la liberté remains his great masterpiece, and essential viewing. It is available on DVD and via streaming through the Criterion Collection; the Criterion Collection DVD also includes Entr'acte, discussed in the first post in this series.

Other posts in this series:

The early films of Rene Clair part 3: Le Million (1931)
The early films of Rene Clair part 2: Sous les toits de Paris (1930)
The early films of Rene Clair part 1: Entr'acte (1924) and The Italian Straw Hat (1928)

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1. Quoted (with slight modification) in Celia McGerr, René Clair, Twayne Publishers, 1980, p. 101.
2. Quoted in Jeffrey Vance, Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, Abrams, 2003, p. 225.