What do you get for the ‘tween who has everything? How about Hello Kitty exposed? It’s scientific and artistic.

(Nod and a wink to Encyclopedia Hanasiana.)

Email is owed. Oh, is it owed. I’m getting right on this. I do worry that my chronic tardiness in responding may give people the wrong, wrong, wrong impression that I feel anything less than delirious when you email me. Seriously, it makes my day. More, please.

However, production of all kinds has slowed for the moment as the housecat has temporarily taken the upper hand over the ibook in the Three Years’ Lap War. I’m stretching to type this. (And so many uncontested surfaces available–but who wants those? Not cats, that’s for damn sure.) But as soon as the tide turns, I’m yours. The email will flow.

Sansho dayu (Sansho the Bailiff) is Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film about a family torn brutally asunder by politics in medieval Japan. Not having seen very much classic Japanese cinema at all before, I’m unequipped to say anything very informed about it. The movie is about a strange and distant past; it was made in an era that’s obviously less distant but, in terms of film history at least, something of a middle age. Furthermore, it takes place in what is for me a faraway, unknown country. So my sense of distance from what I was seeing was doubled or tripled, and it was sometimes hard to sort through the several varieties of foreignness at work. Like reading one of Walter Scott’s historical novels, watching the movie sometimes felt like looking through two pairs of glasses. Aesthetically speaking, this amounted to something of a gift: watching most historical films, I find it hard to let go of my awareness of the filmmakers’ efforts at verisimilitude, but with Sansho the Bailiff I had to remind myself periodically that what I was seeing was not recorded six hundred years ago.

The family in the story is doomed by the egalitarian ideas of the husband and father, a provincial governor sent into exile in the film’s opening scenes. Without knowing something about Japanese history (i.e., more than I know), it’s hard to say whether the enlightened views on human rights and human dignity the main character inherits from his exiled father are historically plausible, or are more likely Mizoguchi’s own twentieth-century values projected on his characters. But although these historical questions remained alive for me throughout, the real heart of the film is the smaller-scale family drama–which, perhaps paradoxically, is animated by values that look far more ancient from our perspective–and the serenely beautiful photography. According to David Thomson, the director’s trademark and major contribution to the art is his way of telling intimate stories through visual means:

The use of the camera to convey emotional ideas or intelligent feelings is the definition of cinema derived from Mizoguchi’s films. He is supreme in the realization of internal states in external views.

Thomson goes on to quote Jacques Rivette, director of perhaps the film with the most vise-like grip on my imagination, on Mizoguchi’s supremacy over other Japanese masters:

You can compare only what is comparable and that which aims high enough. Mizoguchi, alone, imposes a feeling of a unique world and language, is answerable only to himself. If Mizoguchi captivates us, it is because he never sets out deliberately to do so and never takes sides with the spectator.

Thomson also uses a particularly nice metaphor to explain why one should jump at any chance to see Mizoguchi’s work on the big screen, as I was fortunate enough to see Sansho:

Despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water.

Wait, did I say that was a “nice” metaphor? It’s fabulous.

Eager to soak up informed perspectives on Mizoguchi after seeing Sansho, I also looked at an essay by Donald Richie, who offered excellent biographical information and quotations from the director himself. Two of these strike me as especially noteworthy. The first will sound familiar to U.S. filmgoers, and collapses some of the distance between movie-making in Japan in the 1950s and in Hollywood today:

I made my first film in 1921 [sic; actually 1922] and have been working at my craft for thirty years now. If I reflect on what I’ve done I see a long series of arguments and compromises with capitalists (they are called producers today) in an effort to make films which I myself might like. I’ve often been forced to accept work that I knew I wouldn’t be successful with…This has happened over and over again. I’m not telling you all this to excuse myself–the same thing happens to filmmakers all over the world.

And, finally:

You want me to speak about my art? That’s impossible. A filmmaker has nothing to say which is worth saying.

I don’t think that’s false modesty. I think that’s a nice way of saying “Just watch my damn films.” And we all should watch his, whenever possible.

I have the whole day off, starting now and ending Wednesday morning when the alarm clock detonates. No plays, no deadlines, no appointments, no performances, no dates, no nothing.

I was discussing my upcoming day off with the Bass Player, my fellow workaholic, and we agreed that whatever the phrase “a day off” may mean, it definitely does not mean thinking of useful stuff to do today that I could in point of fact do tomorrow.

Instead, it means:

– Sleeping late.

– Sitting in my small but elegantly appointed living room, listening to CDs I’m never going to review and/or reading a book purely for my pleasure.

– Not writing anything.

– Taking an unscheduled stroll to nowhere (but only if I feel like it).

– Looking at and meditating on the Teachout Museum, asking myself which piece I like best right this minute.

– Not writing anything.

– Dining at Good Enough to Eat and hoping my favorite waitress is on duty.

In light of all these caveats, allow me to repeat my recent set of instructions to the readers of “About Last Night”: if I post anything more today, don’t read it.

You may, however, send me a testy e-mail telling me to log off at once (or words to that effect).

Later. I’ve got a rendezvous with the sandman.

P.S. Did I mention not writing anything?

Here’s a paragraph I wrote last year, apropos of Robert Benton’s film version
of The Human Stain:

I’ve seen any number of first-rate movies made out of novels I’ve never read. To Have and Have Not, In a Lonely Place, The Night of the Hunter, Vertigo, True Grit: all are important to me in their varied ways, and I’m sure the books on which they were based are worth reading, too. (Well, maybe not To Have and Have Not.) So why haven’t I checked out the originals? Because the films are so satisfying in their own right that I feel no need to know their sources. From time to time I’ve made a point of doing so, and usually been disappointed–James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, for instance, aren’t nearly as effective on the page as on the screen.

I recalled these words the other day as I read a posting on Lance Mannion‘s blog. Mannion is a fan of Charles Portis’ True Grit, the novel on which the 1969 movie is based, and he posted this scene from the book, an encounter between Rooster Cogburn, a federal marshal, and Lucky Ned Pepper, the bandit he’s been chasing:

Lucky Ned Pepper said, “Well, Rooster, will you give us the road? We have business elsewhere!”

Rooster said, “Harold, I want you and your brother to stand clear! I have no interest in you today! Stand clear and you will not be hurt!”

Harold Permalee’s answer was to crow like a rooster, and the “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” brought a hearty laugh from his brother Farrell.

Lucky Ned Pepper said, “What is your intention? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?”

Rooster said, “I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience! Which will you have?”

Lucky Ned Pepper laughed. He said, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!”

Rooster said, “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!” and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits. It was a sight to see. He held the revolvers wide on either side of the head of his plunging steed. The four bandits accepted the challenge and they likewise pulled their arms and charged their ponies ahead.

It was some daring move on the part of the deputy marshall whose manliness and grit I had doubted. No grit? Rooster Cogburn? Not much!

This is the big scene in the film of True Grit–the one everybody remembers–and if you’ve seen it, you’ll realize that Marguerite Roberts, who wrote the screenplay, lifted the dialogue straight from the novel. I’m not saying it’s more effective on paper. Once you’ve seen it on the screen, with John Wayne and Robert Duvall staring one another down across a clearing, you can’t imagine it any other way. But it’s not the pictures you remember: it’s the words. And while Wayne and Duvall speak them with exquisite appropriateness, they wouldn’t have had anything to say had Portis not written those exact words in the first place.

Now, I’m not out to start the gazillionth argument so far this week on the auteur theory of filmmaking. That’s soooo Sixties (and Seventies and Eighties and Nineties). Instead, I have a different question to ask: ought a critic to be responsible for examining the source material of the films he reviews?

In one sense, of course, it doesn’t matter who wrote the words spoken by Wayne and Duvall in True Grit: the important thing is that they’re the right words. What I’m wondering is whether a critic can do his job properly without having direct knowledge of the extent to which a film adaptation of a pre-existing novel draws on its source.

I’m of two minds about this matter. In my review of The Human Stain, I went on to say:

Conversely, I almost always recoil with anticipated horror from movies based on great novels that I know and love, for the perfectly good reason that they aren’t necessary. I don’t need to see what the characters in The Portrait of a Lady or The Age of Innocence look like: I already know. As I’ve said before in this space, a great work of art is complete in and of itself, and can only be effectively translated into a different medium by being subjected to a radical imaginative transformation, the ultimate object of which is the creation of a new art work that can be fully experienced and appreciated without reference to its source. Anything short of that is a waste of time.

That much I’ll stand by. But then I added:

Somewhere in between these extremes lie those films based on “important” novels that aren’t any good. I suspect Philip Roth’s The Human Stain belongs in this category, but I don’t know because I haven’t read it, and don’t plan to. I’m one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike: all leave me cold as last month’s fish. My guess, however, is that Robert Benton and Nicholas Meyer, the director and screenwriter of The Human Stain, have made a good-faith effort to preserve the essence of Philip Roth’s novel–and that this is why the movie doesn’t work….

Looking back on this passage, it now strikes me as more than a little bit irresponsible for me to have made such a wild guess instead of reading the book. On the other hand, full-time film reviewers (of which I’m not one) rarely have sufficient time to do the research that would allow them to intelligently compare film adaptations to their sources. The classics, yes–we all at least pretend to have read them–and it’s also taken for granted that film-to-source comparisons will be made in the case of Gone With the Wind-type blockbusters, if only because the first thing everybody wants to know about such films is how faithful the screen version is to the original book. But when it comes to old movies adapted from obscure novels, who bothers? I think I remember Sarah mentioning somewhere that she’d read In a Lonely Place, but I can’t say I know anyone who’s read all of The Night of the Hunter.

Again, though, does it really matter? Film, after all, is a radically collaborative process in which creative responsibility can only be assigned tentatively and on a case-by-case basis. This is something that all but the most rabid auteuristes accept as a given–but it’s also one of the reasons why most of us prose-oriented types have a sneaking suspicion that film is by definition a lesser art form than the novel. We like the idea that every word of a novel is personally written by the person who signs it (even though we also know that an anonymous editor may well have played a more or less substantial part in its creation), just as the billionaires among us will happily pay more for a Rembrandt than a studio-of-Rembrandt, even though the collaboratively produced painting might be better in aesthetic quality (or physical condition) than the bonafide solo effort.

In short, most of us stubbornly persist in believing in aesthetic heroes, a belief which I think goes a long way toward explaining why the auteur theory caught on. It goes against human nature to accept the attributional ambiguity inherent in the process of making films, in the same way that you’d think less of, say, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony were some musicologist to discover that it had been orchestrated by a student of the composer. Is that logical? Not really. It’s the work that matters, not the attribution–yet there’s a difference between knowing that to be true and feeling it in your bones. It takes a special kind of confidence to buy an unsigned painting without a provenance, based solely on the evidence of your eye. Most of us aren’t nearly so sure of ourselves. We like to see that signature in the lower right-hand corner.

As for me, I’m delighted to find out that Charles Portis wrote the words that John Wayne and Robert Duvall spoke in the climactic scene of True Grit, and I’m more inclined as a result to read his novel than I was last week. Even so, I reluctantly confess that I’m even more inclined to pull the DVD off the shelf and watch the movie yet again, and maybe even show it to one of my women friends who’s never before seen a Western and insists they can’t possibly be any good. Were there world enough and time….

UPDATE: Lance Mannion responds, interestingly.

The sun’s gone dim, and

The moon’s turned black;

For I loved him, and

He didn’t love back.

Dorothy Parker, “Two-Volume Novel”

“Avoid any girl who you think looks even hotter when she is miserable. You will destroy each other.”

Manhattan Transfer, “The Emotionally Unavailable Alcoholic’s Guide to Holiday Romance”

In addition to sleeping for ten hours on Friday, doing the same on Saturday, seeing two plays, unwrapping the latest addition to the Teachout Museum (about which more later), and dining with Maccers (who is, as I’d been told, the last word in peachy), I spent the weekend updating the “Teachout in Commentary,” “Second City,” “Teachout Elsewhere” and “TT-OGIC Top Five” modules of the right-hand column. Take a look and see what’s new.

I’ve got a piece-for-money to write this morning and yet another play to review tonight, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be hearing more from me as the day wears on. (Nor does it mean that you will.)

I was talking with a bass-playing friend of mine about how much classical music meant to us, and it occurred to me after we parted to draw up a purely personal list of favorite works about which I have especially strong feelings. Here it is, with the caveat that I make no overarching claims for the significance of this list. I don’t think these are necessarily the greatest or most beautiful pieces of music ever written, but they are–right now–the pieces I love best and can’t imagine living without. Each one is linked to a CD version that I especially like:

– Bach Chorale Prelude “Schm