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Thursday, 24 July 2008
What Would Jesus Buy?
If on its first release you missed the Morgan Spurlock-produced,
Rob VanAlkemade-directed What Would Jesus Buy?, a 2007
documentary about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, you
can now find it at better video stores everywhere (as well as through amazon.com). The film chronicles a nationwide tour
that Billy, church director Savitri Durkee and the choir itself made
through America the year before – a mission to inform consumers
through guerilla satire about the extent to which corporate America had
undermined the spiritual basis of the Christmas holiday, as well as the
idea of community itself, with a new gospel of consumerism.
If you're converted, the film will preach to you already, but Spurlock
and VanAlkemade have also made a concerted effort to provide some
historical background on the rise of credit industry practices that still
pose a profound threat to the health of American economic life (as this front-page article in last Sunday's New York
Times indicates). At the center of the film however are the Rev
and his choir as they invade the Mall of America and Walmart headquarters
in California to bring enlightenment to Christmas shoppers. It's almost
always very funny, and Billy is a potent, charismatic personality, but we
also get a glimpse of a few intimate moments of private exhaustion and
self-doubt, as well as a bus crash that injured several church
members and had the potential to devastate the tour, before a celebratory
finish at Disneyland in Anaheim on Christmas Day.
Purchase it at amazon.com today. Or, if that's a little too ironic
for you, you can always add it to your Netflix queue, like I did, or borrow it from your local library. I wrote about Billy's
performance at the Spiegeltent for the New York Times in 2006.
Posted at 8.33 am in /Videos
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Monday, 05 May 2008
Play by Samuel Beckett
According to Ruby Cohn, Samuel Beckett's 1963, 15-minute
Play was the first of his own theatre pieces that he personally
directed, stepping in for the unreliable Jean-Marie Serreau to
oversee rehearsals for a 1964 Paris production (French title:
Comédie). As Cohn notes, it's a key dramatic text in Beckett's
body of work. Abandoned now are the vaudevillian gestures of Waiting
for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy
Days; for the final 25 years of his career, Beckett would work in more
seemingly hermetic lyrical forms, disdaining not only vaudeville but also
the gestures to conventional theatrical time. No longer was Beckett
concerned with the length of his pieces (whether a play would go a full
evening, or as half of an evening of one-act plays). Beckett had
written to director Alan Schneider that Endgame's intended
reception depended on "the power of the text to claw." Beckett
increasingly saw burlesque and comedy as a manicure upon those nails, and
although the later plays and prose have their comic moments, they can no
longer be mistaken for poignant (not with the old woman's curse "Fuck
life" in Rockaby or the unsuccessful torturers of What
Where), or hysterically funny. (I wonder sometimes about this need to turn Beckett into some kind of
hail-fellow-well-met who'd be delightful to share a few
drinks with at a local pub, or to think that the trio of Play is
some version of an existential Three Stooges, as if he never really
intended the darker implications of his work. To each his own, of course,
and I find the stones of Molloy's pockets and the Lynch family of
Watt funny too, but not rolling-on-the-ground,
screaming-with-laughter funny.) Instead, they resemble more the
fictions after The Unnamable, reaching a nadir of blackness with
How It Is before the gentler but still torturous remembrances of
Company.
Play, as its title indicates, is ironically self-conscious
as to its form (the story itself is a melodrama about adultery), and it
was, to date, the most technically ambitious and demanding of Beckett's
career. Anthony Minghella's film adaptation, too, is profoundly
self-conscious as to its medium, and because Roy Walker's production
design and Hauke Richter's art direction helpfully locate the setting in a
gray expanse reminiscent of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's
Inferno and Purgatorio, they are justifiable if unnecessary
graftings onto what is a very plain theatrical vision.
I disagree with Cohn, though, when she asserts, "For all the brilliance
of performers who have to subdue their theatricality, only readers can
appreciate Beckett's dramatic skill in Play. ... Play is not
only to be looked at and listened to, but it is also to be read." Of
course this play, as well as Not I, makes extreme demands upon both
performer and audience when it comes to the communicability of the text,
but this demand is a necessary and sufficient part of the theatrical
experience here, however helpful a familiarity with the text might be. The
demand is a component of the work's urgency. Gone are the pratfalls,
falling trousers and banana peels of Beckett's middle career plays and
novels. We're left now with the use of a can opener (and not the electric or rotary-style can opener
either) in performance of an anal rape (How It Is) and the impulse
to human expression itself as a device of torture (Not I).
Semi-paralyzed bodies that do not or cannot move cannot comically
fall; instead they embody souls for whom the fall into damnation is far
from comic.
More on Samuel Beckett here.
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Monday, 07 April 2008
Movie of the Week
Back in the day (more precisely 1976), I was led to think of the
theatre as a career when I saw John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson on
Broadway in Peter Hall's production of No Man's Land by Harold
Pinter. That was 32 years ago now. Perhaps sentimentally I continue to
think of it as one of Pinter's most meditative, elegaic plays. And you
certainly can't beat that cast.
Theatre is ephemeral and over the years the memory has faded somewhat,
though the power of the work continued to claw. Fortunately memory can get
a poke in the side too. Below is a video of the 90-minute BBC television
version of the play, recorded in 1976 with the original cast. The image
and sound are a little hazy, but no more so than my memory:
Over the weekend I updated my own Web site, with new
material on the biography and news
pages.
Posted at 8.28 am in /Videos
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Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Videos
Three short videos today, comparative rarities. First, there's this
1949 interview from American radio with the composer Arnold
Schönberg, who discusses his paintings, his music and his
influences:
Also on music, and as a final in memoriam for Karlheinz
Stockhausen, below is an English-language profile of the composer,
with a
few seconds of Stockhausen in rehearsal and an interview with the almost
comically uncomfortable artist (watch as he bolts from the set at the end
of the piece):
Finally, German dramatist and poet Heiner Müller reads his poem
"The Odor of Soap" in the following clip from the 1993 film I Was
Hamlet, directed and photographed by Dominik Barbier:
Clips courtesy YouTube.
Posted at 8.55 am in /Videos
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