Pocket notebook sighting: Foreign Correspondent

My affection for Foreign Correspondent (1940) is at least partly a matter of its being my first Alfred Hitchcock film, or one of the first. (Thanks, television.) Foreign Correspondent might not be a great Hitchcock film, but it’s a good one. It has strong overtones of The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938): war clouds, episodic boy-meets-girl plot (Joel McCrea, Laraine Day), an unnamed foreign power, double agents, an endangered oldster. Herbert Marshall and George Sanders are the most distinguished of the players, the later as Scott ffolliott (the capital F was removed to honor of a beheaded ancestor). ffolliott gets the film’s best line: “Cancel my rumba lesson.” Foreign Correspondent also has something relatively unusual for a Hitchcock film: compelling special effects. This notebook though is not one of them.


[Click for a larger view. But you’ll have to watch to figure it out.]

Two things I thought about while watching the film the other night:

Once war breaks out, the film leaves the oldster Van Meer (Albert Basserman) behind. There’s no happy reunion, as there is with Mrs. Froy (Dame May Whitty) in The Lady Vanishes). Van Meer’s day — when war might have been averted — is past.

The tactics that the enemy uses, and which the film depicts as barbarous — bright light, loud music, sleep deprivation — were to become the stuff of American military interrogation.

Foreign Correspondent is available from the Criterion Collection, beautifully restored, with lots of extras.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

Domestic comedy

[While watching The Kennel Murder Case (1933). ]

“Did you see that dress she’s not wearing?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“No One Was Like Vermeer”

My friend Stefan Hagemann alerted me to a song relevant to today’s post: Jonathan Richman’s “No One Was Like Vermeer.”

“Vermeer was eerie, Vermeer was strange. / He had a more modern color range”: I love it. Thanks, Stefan.

A guest-post by Stefan Hagemann
How to answer a professor

Tim’s not Vermeer

One’s abilities are also one’s limitations: to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Tim Jenison, the hero of Tim’s Vermeer (2013) is a technologist, the co-founder of a company that produces software for visual imaging. When Jenison looks at a Vermeer, he sees a special effect, a reproduction of the real: he even refers to Vermeer’s paintings as photographs and likens them to video images. This documentary, the work of Jenison’s friends Penn Jillette and Teller (the latter directed), tracks Jenison’s effort to crack the secret of Vermeer’s paintings (the use of optics) and recreate The Music Lesson by staging its scene and painting with the use of lenses and mirrors. Thus the film’s title.

But Tim’s not Vermeer (as he would readily acknowledge), and Tim’s painting is not a Vermeer. As seen on DVD, Tim’s not-Vermeer appears to be a doggedly literal and lifeless facsimile.¹ It seems likely that Vermeer’s paintings owe something to optics. But a painting is not merely a transcription, a reproduction of the real by mechanical means. Vermeer may be, as Jillette suggests, the greatest artist “of all time.” But why? Because his paintings look like photographs? The idea of art that runs through Tim’s Vermeer is sadly naïve.

I like what William Carlos Williams says in Spring and All (1923), a book of twenty-seven poems and a prose commentary on matters of imagination and representation:

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

Art is not a transcript, not a copy, Williams says, again and again, in a various ways. His prose has a curious relevance to optics-based art: reversing the instruction that Hamlet gives the Players — “to hold as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” Williams insists that Shakespeare “holds no mirror up to nature” in his work. The power of imagination, rather, “is to give created forms reality.”

“Plagiarism after nature”: that’s what Jenison seems to think Vermeer is all about. What’s missing is a consideration of the artist’s imagination. The Music Lesson is, after all, a composition of Vermeer’s making, not something that he happened upon and transcribed. What elements went into the composition? What’s compelling about it? What might it suggest to a viewer whose interest in art goes beyond how-did-he-do-that?

What my relatively unlearned eye sees in The Music Lesson: an arrangement of planes, contrasts of light and dark, a variety of textures, a deeply quiet scene (despite the music-making) that has much to do with decorum and intimacy. The figures in the painting are alone and not alone: an artist’s easel is visible in the mirror. I am pretty sure that if I were to travel back in time to Delft, I would not see anything resembling this painting — except this painting.

An excellent site for learning more about Johannes Vermeer: Essential Vermeer. Here is that site’s page for The Music Lesson. For Vermeer and optics, start at this page: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura. And for a large version of The Music Lesson, try this one.

¹ In truth, a facsimile of a facsimile. Jenison received permission to view the painting (part of the Royal Collection of Great Britain), but he worked from reproductions.

Whitney, yecch

This exhibition will be the artist’s first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building with a single artist’s work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new building in the Meatpacking District in 2015.

The Whitney Museum now hosts Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, a gesture that says much about art and money and fame. As the Museum explains, Koons has “transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market.” Well, yes — and what a sad farewell for the Whitney.

Getty Publications Virtual Library

The J. Paul Getty Museum makes its backlist publications available to read online or download as free PDFs: Getty Publications Virtual Library. That’s generosity.

My big catch: Judith Keller’s Walker Evans: Catalogue of the Collection (1995).

[In my mind, I’m still in California.]

Re: corrupted files

For readers arriving from Boing Boing: please read this post, and this one. And think twice before sending a corrupted file to any instructor.

Watts House Project sign

[Art by Tina Villadolid, 2010. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

When I saw this produce-crate-art-inspired sign, I had to take a picture.

The Watts House Project is “an artist-driven neighborhood redevelopment organization” that seeks to “promote and enhance the quality of residential life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.” This sign by Tina Villadolid hangs outside the Platform, the WHP’s base of operations, across the street from the Watts Towers:

Tina visited the Platform back in the fall of 2009 and wanted to make a hand-painted sign that would speak to the artistic legacy of the Watts Towers neighborhood and WHP’s vision. She searched the grounds and found an old piece of slightly warped plywood, weathered by many seasons of the elements. She packed it in the back of her car and half a year later returned with a painting that marked the Platform as a site for neighborhood change.

“I chose the dahlia as the main image when I discovered that not only is it the national flower of Mexico, but that when Christopher Columbus brought the dahlia to Europe it became wildly popular in the Italian ornamental gardens of the renaissance. I thought it was a great link between Simon Rodia and the neighborhood he immigrated to. Also, the dahlia symbolizes dignity and splendor, which I thought was perfect.”

Related posts
Watts tiles
Watts Towers

[Nuestro Pueblo (our town) was Simon Rodia’s name for the Towers.]

Watts Towers

[Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

In a post about things to do in Los Angeles, I wrote, “Realize that photographs won’t capture the startling beauty of the Towers, which rise out of all proportion on a narrow dead-end street of one-story houses. Take photographs anyway.” Thus this post.

A related post
Watts tiles

Watts tiles

[Details of the Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

During working hours, Simon Rodia was a tile setter. And at home too. These photographs represent the tiniest fraction of the work that went into the making of the Watts Towers.

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Things to do in Los Angeles
Watts Towers