Pyrenees Journal II: Spellbound

photograph by Hallie Cohen

What was more brilliant Alfred Hitchcock choosing to use Salvador Dali to create the dream sequences in Spellbound or Dali’s creation of these iconic sequences himself? The sequences if you recall are exemplifications of surrealist technique which is not surprising since the very structure of surrealism with its interests in humor, aggression and sexuality derive from the most primal elements of all dream life. And yes the dream in the movie helped to solve the crime. If you visit the Dali Theater-Museum in Figueres you will see amongst other things a citation of Dali’s book about Millet’s  “The Angelus." The three figures in Millet’s painting a peasant, his wife and child receive shall we say an unconventional interpretation. They’re father and daughter praying for absolution from the sin of incest. Dali was a believer in extreme subjectivity and he could be deemed a proto-deconstructivist to the extent that he believed that everybody will have their own interpretations of art and reality. He called his theory the "paranoiac critical method." Derrida was a Dali clone it turns out. For example, a nude of his beloved wife Gala hangs, in the central atrium of the museum You see the real Gala in his museum, but it’s like a hologram. If you attempt to photograph it an image of Abraham Lincoln appears. In one sense it’s just recycled impressionism. But the effect is like that produced by double and triple entendres in literature. Dali, as many of the works in the Theatre-Museum reveal, was a master of illusion. He was both the patient and doctor in a life long self-analysis and in fact tried (unsuccessfully) to interest Freud in his work. His self-portrait (which faces a famous portrait he did of Picasso) shows a face with hanging skin interspersed with crutches. Underneath that is a piece of bacon and a fly. perhaps one of the flies who escaped from “The Persistence of Memory”--where time literally flies. Perhaps Dali was saying he was as fragile and easily consumed as a piece of bacon. But memory is the constant   Dali might have resisted contemporary neuroscientific investigations into the reconsolidation of memory.  From the outside the museum looks like Disney World and in fact Dali’s 7 minute animation created with Disney is on exhibit too (Dali also shared an interest in cryogenics with Walt Disney). There are huge eggs on the roof, reflecting Dali’s obsession with birth, funeral bread exemplifying his fear of death and female Oscar statues which attest to his fascination with transexuality. Is it a monument like the museum Picasso created for himself in Barcelona or a playground? But that is the point. He was a clown who famously sported Velasquez’s moustache. His Velasquez sculpture with Las Meninas emblazoned on the artist’s forehead appears in another gallery and it’s interesting to note when you visit the Picasso museum in Barcelona that there’s an youthful copy of Velasquez’s portrait of Phillip IV with the famed Dali moustache or is it the other way around? And wouldn’t that be Dali’s point?

The Bitter Tea of General Yen Inaugurates Stanwyck Retrospective at Film Forum

Is all romance a Shavian phenomenon? It’s interesting that Shaw never consummated his marriage since he seems to know so much about the mysterious compromise between instinct and consciousness that makes for the cocktail of romantic love. Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen inaugurated the Barbara Stanwyck retrospective at Film Forum and seeing it you sometimes think you're watching Major Barbara. Megan Davis (Stanwyck) may not be a Salvation Army cadet, but she sounds like Major Barbara in her zeal to change the world and General Yen (Nils Asther) could be the resident spokesman for realpolitik, Untershaft. Edward Paramore’s script is rife with Shavianisms. “Isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than to let them starve slowly,” Yen tells the idealistic Davis as she looks out of her boudoir at the firing squad. And later he says “I’m going to convert a missionary.” But the movie is more complex than that. Underneath his realist veneer, Yen is the true romantic willing to give up everything for love. Yen also has a bit of the pre-Socratic in him, when he declaims, “we never really die, we only change” and “life, even at its best, is hardly endurable.” There’s a dream sequence in the film which competes with what Dali created for Hitchcock in Spellbound, as the man Megan despises comes to her in both as a devil and a God. Within the context of the film’s ideological conundrums the view of colonialism is actually more sophisticated than you’ll find in a more modern treatment of the theme, say in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Capra makes it clear that the Western drive to civilize the hordes of Chinese is only a superficial humanism predicated on a total inability to understand the complexities of the culture. The Bitter Tea of General Yen could be taught in one of those courses which deals with the failure to import Western style democracy to either the Far or Middle East or to put it another way Edward Said’s Orientalism is what Barbara Stanwyck’s character is suffering from. But the real subject of Film Forum’s festival is Stanwyck and in the final scene in the love crypt, replete with its Wagnerian potion, she is dazzling and enigmatic both, entering in her bejeweled gown and offering herself up to a love that can never be.

Drawing Surrealism

Dali’s “Study for ‘The Image Disappears,'” Museum Associates/LACMA by Michael Tropea

The writer of a paper entitled “Catricide, Matricide and Magic” (Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Volume 44, Number 2) makes the following comment, “For me, writing is a kind of rite where I strive for a high level of unknowingness. I imitate tribal rituals, building myself up into a state of delirium, burning fires late into the night, exorcising demons, and drawing energy from a war dance of my own creation. Magical thinking is one of the things an analyst might try to disabuse his patient of in the course of the work, but magic, to may mind, is at the heart of artistic production.” Put another way rationality is nice, but it leads to inhibition and artists and writers alike partake of a paradoxical process by which they attempt to produce thoughtful work in a state that avoids the pitfalls of thought. Drawing Surrealism, currently on exhibit at the Morgan Library demonstrates the numerous techniques that artists of the surrealist school used to disinhibit their imaginations. Apollinaire’s calligraphy “La mandolin, l’oillet and le bamboo,” (1915-17) shows how words can be constructed in an image while Dali’s “Study for ‘The Image Disappears'" (1938) uses an image, Vermeer’s “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window,”to turn the head of a woman into the eye of a bearded man in profile. Dali produced many of the dream sequences in Hitchcock’s Spellbound and this early drawing can still produce a nightmare like shock in the viewer. About automatic drawing, another in the pantheon of techniques employed by surrealist artists, including decalcomania (applying paper to another wet surface), frottage (rubbing), exquisite corpse (chance associating by a group) and collage, the curators quote Andre Masson as saying “the hand must be fast enough so that conscious though cannot intervene." As the current exhibition illustrates abstract expressionists like Rothko, Pollock and Kelly would be influenced by the liberties surrealists took with the pencil and pen as well as the brush. Lautreamont's famous description of a boy as “ beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” has often been used to define surrealism, though no such aggregation of images is evidenced in the current show.

A Dangerous Method

The Three Faces of Eve ((1957) starred Joanne Woodward playing a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder. In David and Lisa (1962) Keir Dullea played the part of an institutionalized teenager.  In Snake Pit (1948)Olivia De Havilland famously portrayed another patient suffering back in the days when mental institutions and penal colonies were indistinguishable. David Cronenberg goes back  to Cosmo Topper (Leo G. Carroll) in portraying the founder of psychoanalysis in A Dangerous Method.  Carroll as you may remember played the venal Dr. Murchison in Spellbound, but people associate him more with the 50’s television series, in which he really was a sweet old fellow, rather than the l945 Hitchcock movie. Actually the character of Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Freud (Viggo Mortensen) both seem to owe a debt to Leo G. Carroll with the once swashbuckling but eventually doddering Jung (Topper) having to deal with a manipulative psychopathic Freud (Murchison) who gets the upper hand in discussions by treating his one-time follower and in fact anyone who disagrees with him as a patient. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, the patient, who is treated by Jung both psychiatrically and sybaritically (as in treated to a good time which means giving her thrashing she likes) falls off the charts in her depiction of what we can suppose to be hysteria. Hysteria, an affliction that Freud recorded in many of his famous cases (Anna O is one of  the most famous) is reduced by Cronenberg’s to a rendering of something that might have afflicted one of the characters who drank too much and was about to vomit in say Animal House. It’s really a triumph of filmmaking when you can take a significant piece of the past and make it look like the Pleistocene era. But A Dangerous Method is not just a period piece, its success comes from taking major themes and discussions like that of libido, the death instinct and the ego and reducing them to the level of comic book balloons. Rather than hiring a whole cast of expensive actors, Cronenberg would have done better to deal with a seminal moment in psychoanalytic history by creating an animation with perhaps Batman as the dashing Aryan, Jung and say The Joker as Freud.

Perfect Nonsense

Mark Mitton is a meta-magician, a sorcerer’s apprentice. He is interested in how the mind makes patterns in a pre-conscious way. Magic is like mimesis—a revolution in the history of thinking. The magician, Mitton points out, must always understand what his subject is thinking. In this sense, his theme is epistemology. He teaches cause and effect to scientists and artists alike, and he is a figure in Manhattan’s nightlife, being a regular at Serge Becker’s exclusive club, The Box. Mitton wears a bow tie and suit and slicks his hair across his forehead like an English don. He’s a Haverford graduate who was born in Canada.

In one trick, he convinces the spectator a wine glass is falling through another, when it’s just a matter of timing and lowering. But is this a theory of mind, or a theory of the autonomic central nervous system? Consider the hypno-disk. During a recent performance at a Soho loft, he asked everyone to stare at an object that looks like one of the dream sequences designed by Salavador Dali for Spellbound, the classic Hitchcock film that also deals with illusion and reality. After staring into the twirling disc for thirty seconds, the audience was asked to turn their attention to Stuart Firestein, a biologist from Columbia who specializes in olfaction and has worked with Mitton in other performances that combine science and prestidigitation. Those in the audience who had never taken mushrooms or LSD experienced what seemed like a hallucination out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as their contracted eye muscles unwound and Firestein’s head appeared to explode—an unforgettable moment that would inevitably make its way into dreams.

There was another trick.  Mitton is very democratic and freely gives away selected secrets. Everyone got a bag. The sound of an imaginary ball falling, he revealed, can be created snapping fingers against the side of the bag. Mitton does for magic what Derrida did for literature. He deconstructs while remaining one step ahead of his patient, so that despite all reason, a large element of irrationality, and hence awe, still prevail. “It’s got to make perfect nonsense,” he said, invoking the famous quote about the structure of comedy.