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A Walk with Love and Death
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For a long time I have been eager to revisit this John
Huston film, which, viewed on TV, made a deep impression on me near the
beginning of my teenage cinephilia in the mid 1970s. Beyond an overall agreeable
mood, a mingling of romanticism and melancholia well keyed to adolescence
(mine, and in some sense the characters’), there were two moments that
especially affected me back then. One is a shot that I have retained a crystal-clear
and perfectly accurate recollection of, as if the frames had imprinted
themselves on my unconscious; the other is a passage that I hadn’t retained at
all, but which returned to me with all the emotion I must have originally felt
when seeing it.
The shot I completely recall is superb in any context
– it takes pride of place in the imaginary cinémathèque or histoire du cinéma of my mind! The young hero, Heron of Fois (Assi
Dayan, here credited as Assaf), has just sat down in the grass to write
(probably “versify”) in his journal. He looks around. Cut to a dog; the camera
pans screen-left with its rapid movement, and then screen-right, arriving a
little further along from the initial starting position, in order to reveal the
standing figure of Claudia (a teenage Anjelica Huston). She materialises as if
in Heron’s dream – as indeed, she has already appeared for a moment, staring at
his reclining figure from a balustrade above as he awoke (in a castle) from his
recurring dream of the glittering sea he longs to reach. When Claudia reads Heron’s
poem, this entire configuration of Lady, dream and dreamer will be clinched, to
serve further duty at later points. Here as all throughout, the DeLuxe Color
used by DOP Edward Scaife (who worked with Huston often in the ‘60s) exudes a
warm glow – another material attribute that stayed burnt into the sensory
circuits of my young brain.
Every reviewer of the time seems to have recognised
that Huston’s rendering of Dutch writer Hans Koningsberger’s popular 1961 novel
was less about the Middle Ages than about the 1960s, and specifically the
post-’68 climate – the casting of the two leads, not entirely purged of their “modern
youth” mannerisms, declares as much at the outset.
The first (off-screen) plot event is of Heron “the student”
walking away for good from his classes; he seeks freedom, love, the sea,
release from all dogmas and doctrines … Alas, during this Hundred Year’s War
raging between the British and the French, new dogmas and doctrines of weird
and wonderful kinds emerge, just like the proliferation of nascent New Age
cults ushered in by the Age of Aquarius: a blind guru preaches a bizarre code
of mortification, while travelling players hunker down with their hedonism, the
various religions harden their creeds, and dodgy salesmen on the road try to
sell fake spiritual relics … Even a nobleman Dad, played by Huston himself,
decides to switch sides to join the peasants. (It’s fun to watch Huston’s
decisive gaze-shifts designed to anchor the découpage – a general craft skill for which he receives insufficient due.)
As to the love story, the main philosophical concern
is the distinction between Pure and Earthly Love. Claudia, at first, holds out
for the supremacy of the former, but eventually comes around to the delights of
the latter (which Heron, as he proudly boasts to the unseeing guru, has already
tasted). The discreet long shots of glistening DeLuxe naked bodies, rendered
even smaller on the TV screen, doubtless worked their suggestive magic on me as
a kid. It’s the sensuality of a certain soft-focus, romantic era of quasi-art
cinema, firmly stamped onto my then-impressionable sensibility: Franco
Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968 –
for which Anjelica H. had been considered for the lead part), Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan (1967) … all films that attracted
the “hippie” finger-point from critics. For the musical accompaniment in that
network, you can choose between Nino Rota (Zeffirelli), Georges Delerue (Huston)
and Mozart (Widerberg); for my personal remix, there’s also Crosby, Stills
& Nash’s medieval-ish “Guinnevere” (1969, on the first vinyl record, an EP,
that I ever bought as a kid), recycled by Alex Garland in an episode of the
dreamy-multiversal TV series Devs (2020).
However, when it comes to those aforementioned
“peasants” – code for 1960s revolutionary workers – the film unambiguously
takes a reactionary side. This uprising of the people, known historically as
the Jacquerie, is depicted as mindlessly violent and animalistic: indeed, Huston
returns several times, in visuals and dialogue, to the metaphor of hovering,
gathering and devouring crows. So much for the workers! Which is not to say
that soldiers or other officials behave any better; the only alternative to the
bestial contagion of violence posited here is the Love & Peace code
embodied by our young hero and heroine. In his damning May-June 1971 Cahiers du cinéma review (no. 229),
Pascal Kané referred to the “bland timidity of its hippie-ish progressivism”
(just as Edgardo Cozarinsky derided Elvira
Madigan for breathing the “hippie mid-‘60s”, with the adventures of its
“drop-out” characters inviting “several contemporary readings effortlessly”).
On other levels, I feel that Kané’s account misses the
mark entirely. He criticises the film, in relatively classical terms, for
lacking a “genuine work of inscription”, i.e., any dynamic dramatisation of its
themes and conflicts. Each person who passes by the camera (often literally so,
in parade) is an emblem of some value-system, lifestyle or social position – a
mode that Kané finds altogether too “readable” and schematic, reaching for an
“absolute transparency of the carried message”.
However, I find Huston’s stylistic approach to this
material more intriguing than that. It’s clear that he took seriously the idea
of evoking a “medieval
aesthetic” for the
project, and defined the parameters of that in filmic and narrative terms –
those artworks underneath the credits are not just there to set the period and
give a foretaste of its flavour. Whether he was aware of it not, Huston’s work
here connects with predecessors (such as Robert Bresson) and forecasts later films
by Éric Rohmer, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Dayan sometimes resembles, in look and
gesture, Ninetto Davoli!), Walerian Borowczyk and Eugène Green, among others. Hence
the pared-back minimalism of the shots and their arrangement, giving rise to
breathtaking moments like the one with the dog described above – and such
moments often constitute the vignette-content of an entire scene. Hence, too,
the systematic placement (which so annoyed Kané) of Heron as the eternal
witness, passively (for the most part) observing the pageant of the world and
its types in these Dark Times.
“Neutral, socially un-inserted and available on every
level” Heron may well be (as Kané protested), but it is hard to see how the
dreamlike, romantic fable, Pilgrim’s Progress aspect of the story could have
worked otherwise. Or how we could ever have reached the sublime ending in which
the lovers, suddenly finding themselves all alone at dawn in a vast monastery
(the monks and nuns have soundlessly fled in the night at the prospect of
terror, it seems), throw together a makeshift bed on the floor – before, in the
night (the vision out the window recalls the finale of Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet [1955]), knowing that their
death at the hands of “enemy” soldiers is imminent, and just waiting for it to
arrive (in a bookend gesture, again off-screen), without fear …
And here is the passage that I did not consciously
recall, but which swam back to me on a tidal wave of unconscious emotion. It is
a montage sequence 65 minutes in, a knitting-together of short scene-fragments
done in the fleet manner of François Truffaut (and it will be immediately
followed by an evident allusion, via the character of Robert of Loris [Anthony
Higgins], to the merry two guy/one gal trio of Jules et Jim [1962]). As in Truffaut, the montage hangs on a thread
of voices: they embark as a continuous conversation across discontinuous shots
(Citizen Kane breakfast-scene style)
but, at a certain, suppressed moment, switch to what seems like voice-over
soliloquy – which then turns out to be a different conversation in a different
place. And all that in just five shots!
Here they are: 1. At dusk, sitting on the grass,
Claudia notes the transience of earthly time; Heron replies that “We’re within
our own calendar”. 2. Distant shot of their naked bodies, forming an L shape.
Their discussion continues, and the bodies move to embrace. 3. Frolic shot
(more Truffaut influence!) in the outdoors, as a shift in sound ambience marks
a new voice-track. Heron recalls their first meeting and his immediate love for
Claudia, but admits he “hadn’t spoken the words”. 4. Interior medium-two-shot;
from their bare shoulders we infer their nakedness. The dialogue continues,
with Claudia exhorting him to at last “speak the words” of love. They both do. 5. A
Bressonian shot (worthy of Lancelot du
lac, 1974) of hands: Claudia offers hers to the centre of the image, he
places his atop hers, just before the shot ends end she swiftly places her
other hand on the pile. During this action, they speak (again off-screen, as in
shots 2 & 3); Heron asks whether she believes that they will reach the sea,
as in his dream:
C: I believe that we shall reach the sea or we shall die. Either way I
will have had my hour. [She kisses his hand]
H: And I, my freedom. [She places her other hand atop his]
Was it anticipated like this in Dale Wasserman’s
screenplay, or knit together anew from bits and pieces in the editing? Probably
the former (the effect of the accumulated repetition of earlier motifs – time,
freedom, etc. – is strikingly precise), but we’ll likely never know. Especially
as accompanied by Delerue’s plangent score (composed and orchestrated in a superb
mimicry of medieval music), the montage resembles nothing so much as the most
beautiful segments of The Soft Skin (1964) –
something I also saw on Australian TV, dubbed, around the same time – or, later
in film history, the great sequence of amorous encounter in Philippe Garrel’s Rue fontaine (1984).
Today, while reliving the emotion of such scenes every
time I watch them – their brevity and use of ellipsis is poetically stunning,
as they register the transience of things – I also marvel at the filmmaking
logistics involved: so much work across days or weeks on different, short
scenes in different locations, all to be ultimately strung together in a
breathless montage movement, over almost as soon it begins. Some mystery of
cinema is held there, for me at least.
Revelation from the opening credits: Argentinian
surrealist Leonor Fini (1907-1996) did the wonderful costume design! The second
of only two films to which she contributed, the other being the 1954 Romeo and Juliet. Oddest note from the
end credits: Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo (1936-2019), today sparking
renewed interest for his inclusion in Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, appears as one of the travelling players, right before
making his first feature Soleil Ô in
1970.
MORE Huston: Wise Blood © Adrian Martin 15 October 2020 |
