consumption

I normally avoid movie theaters, finding a big-screen TV and Netflix preferable to the ordeal that movie-going has become, but I was given passes to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (mille grazie to J and CF) so I headed on over to the Castro Theater, which is smaller than I thought it would be but just as bizarrely and extravagantly ornamented as I had hoped, to see Nazimova in Camille. The sets and costumes are by Natacha Rambova and are even more strikingly stylized than the notorious ones she did for Nazimova’s Salome, which were based on Aubrey Beardsley; the Deco fabulosity on view here (the time is updated to the 1920s) was all her own. Anything extravagant or stylized makes some people nervous, and the speakers introducing the film felt it necessary to caution us about what we were going to see. There were still some condescending chuckles from the audience, but that’s a hazard of seeing silent films, even at a Silent Film Festival. I don’t really understand this: acting styles were different in the early part of the twentieth century (more rhetorical, grander, more theatrical, if you will, than cinematic) and it doesn’t take too much expertise to see who is giving a good performance in that style and who is not. If you’ve grown up seeing Raphael Madonnas, would you burst out laughing at your first Byzantine icon? You might find it hard to adjust at first, but it’s just a different means of representation with its own standards. But people think it’s a sign of sophistication to laugh at silent movies. I don’t think much of “sophistication” for audiences anyway: the problem with sophistication is that it’s a series of accepted attitudes, and the need to stay current with what is considered sophisticated can keep you from seeing and feeling what is happening right in front of you. Nazimova does have an explosion of hair and bee-stung lips (not too odd for a courtesan), but she is also a great actress – just observe the regretful little shake back into her life she gives herself as she leaves her uncorrupted friend from the early days and goes back to her silly party. Let’s have some respect for the woman who studied with Stanislavsky and when in America not only insisted on performing Ibsen but made him big box office. Her Armand was Rudolph Valentino, just as Four Horsemen was making him a star, looking appropriately dreamy and sad. Nazimova’s Camille dies alone, imagining Armand, clutching the volume of Manon Lescaut he gave her. In my Camille mood I watched the Garbo version a week or so later and Robert Taylor’s Armand gives his Camille the same gift, one that I have to say seems remarkably tactless under the circumstances. I had forgotten what a magnificent actress Garbo is; her face is a poem and her eyes are epics and those should be enough, but she gives us more. It’s even worth putting up with the egregiously awful Lionel Barrymore (as Armand’s father) to watch her. In some ways this 1936 version is farther from our tastes than the 1921 film; I can picture a contemporary woman wearing Nazimova’s costumes, but not the absurd rounds of fluff that Adrian inflicted on Garbo (her pastoral costumes, featuring hoop skirts and yards of white lace, are particularly ridiculous, especially for a woman who was supposedly raised in the country with the cows and chickens). Robert Taylor also looks appropriately dreamy and sad and then jealous, but it’s all about Garbo. The only actor to come close, despite the best efforts of Laura Hope Crews as the aptly named Prudence, Camille’s greedy realpolitik procurer, is Henry Daniell as Baron de Varville. He’s not exactly likeable, but you respect his coldness and his strength. There’s a scene in which Camille gets him to pay her debts, and he knows it’s so she can leave him and go to the country with Armand, and he slaps her. It’s a very emotionally complex moment, and an impossible one in the movies these days, when hitting a woman signifies ultimate villainy just as much as did the twirling moustache of melodrama. (Not that I’m advocating slapping women, or anyone else, but the idea that you never hit a woman is based on the notion that all women are, by nature, smaller and weaker than all men; it’s a version of “pick on someone your own size.” Since women in movies these days, even period pieces, are all experts with sword and fist, it seems an odd relic that they’re supposed to be untouchable. I saw one movie in which the bad guy slapped the heroine and we were clearly meant to think this was the absolute worst, but since she had just cornered him with her skilled fencing, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t he fight back? There seems a basic confusion there.) And later on de Varville and Armand fight a duel, and I knew that if the movie were made these days the Baron’s aristocratic bravery would be stripped from him and he would have to be an abject coward on top of everything else. For all the post-Code censorship of movies, they were realistic about class and economics in a way that contemporary movies are not. This is not like the Raphael Madonna versus the Byzantine icon, because those are equally valuable means of representation and I’m talking about a willingness to face up to the hardness of life versus some deluded fantasy of entitlement. Somewhere after the tragic "Women’s Picture" we slipped into the smug self-delusion of the Chick Flick, and it’s not really to the credit of our ability to take in some of life’s complexity. The whole world and style of Camille may be too alien for us anyway unless preserved in the music of Verdi (somewhere Robertson Davies points out that nineteenth-century theatrical styles can still be seen, but only on the opera and ballet stages). Once I did see Camille performed live - when I was at Berkeley, Charles Ludlam played the famous courtesan in his Ridiculous Theater Company production, and that should tip you off that the play was so far out of the mainstream it was avant-garde. The performance was celebrated, and I sort of wish now that I had not left at intermission, which I have only done about four times in my life. I keep feeling I must have missed something. But it just seemed like a fat man in a dress, and not a particularly memorable one (man or dress) either. It wasn't done as camp extravaganza, but it wasn't quite done straight (pardon the expression) either. Maybe I'd have a different reaction now. Maybe not. Either way, I'm not going to have another chance, since that world too has gone into the theater scrapbooks.