by Edward Hopper

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Seamus Heaney

The Film Noir ( not a genre but rather the mood, style, point of view or tone of a film) , developped in the USA during the 1940s. It was a style of black and white movies that lasted until about 1960, with the last film of the noir period, Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles in 1958. In 1945 Gallimard publishers started releasing their translations of British and American crime novels in the série noire. In 1946, and echoing the Gallimard label, two French critics wrote the earliest essays to identify the American film noir. A new type of film had emerged, very different from the usual studio product, although they weren’t widely known by that name in the USA until the 1970s.

    Noirs were rooted in German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s, such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) or Fritz Lang’s M (1931). These films were noted for their stark camera angles and movements, chiaroscuro lighting and shadowy, high-contrast images – all elements of later film noir. In addition, the French sound films of the 30s, such as director Julien Duvivier’s Pepe Le Moko (1937), also contributed to noirs development.

    Plots and themes were often taken from adaptations of American best-selling pulp novels and crime fiction by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett and also influenced by the gangster movies of the 1930s. As a result, the earliest film noirs were detective thrillers.

    Very often, a film noir story was developed around a cynical, hard-hearted, disillusioned male character who encountered a beautiful but promiscuous, amoral, double-dealing and seductive femme fatale . She would use her feminine wiles and sexuality to manipulate him into becoming the fall guy – often following a murder. After a betrayal or double-cross, she was frequently destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero’s ( or anti-hero’s) life.
    Storylines were often elliptical, non-linear and twisting. Narratives were frequently complex, maze-like and typically told with foreboding background music, flashbacks, witty, razor-sharp dialogue, and/or reflective and confessional, first-person voice-over narration. Amnesia suffered by the protagonist was a common plot device, as was the downfall of an innocent who fell victim to temptation or was framed.

    Films noirs were marked visually by expressionistic lighting, deep-focus or depth of field camera work, disorienting visual schemes, jarring editing or juxtaposition of elements, ominous shadows, skewed camera angles (usually vertical or diagonal rather than horizontal), circling cigarette smoke, existential sensibilities, and unbalanced or moody compositions.

    Settings were often interiors with low-key (or single-source) lighting, venetian-blinded windows and rooms, and dark, claustrophobic, gloomy appearances. Exteriors were often urban night scenes with deep shadows, wet asphalt, dark alleyways, rain-slicked or mean streets, flashing neon lights, and low key lighting. Story locations were often in murky and dark streets, dimly-lit and low-rent apartments and hotel rooms of big cities, or abandoned warehouses.

    The first detective movie to use the shadowy, nihilistic noir style in a definitive way was The Maltese Falcon directed by John Huston 1n 1941 , from a 1929 book by Dashiell Hammett. It was famous for Humphrey Bogart’s cool, laconic private eye hero Sam Spade in pursuit of crooks greedy for a jewel-encrusted statue, and Mary Astor as the deceptive femme fatale.

    Film noir features are still widely found in recent movies, although their golden period has long passed.

There aren’t many authors dedicating themselves to the superior art of the tragedy nowadays , Aristotle never read a novel and it’s a good thing he isn’t around anymore or he would be rather disapointed. Plot isn’t what it used to be, and even if it has partly recovered from the blows it suffered by authors  like Beckett, Joyce, Proust or Bellow , it will never go back to those days when plot and thought weren’t on opposite sides.

According to Tom Bradley, in the twentieth century ” Plot was generally the province of trash literature, while Character, Diction and Thought were reserved for the serious stuff. This rift did not exist in the nineteenth century, when the best novelists tended also to be the most popular. Dickens was the prime novelistic technician and psychologist of his day”.

The word popular is a key one, trash does sell well, which doesn’t mean all bestsellers are trash, far from that. But it takes a very alert reader to negociate their way around a bookstore nowadays. Any little novel by an obscure author is said to have sold millions, the prefaces welcome any newcomer with expressions like ” a great writer, the work of genius” and the glossy covers do the rest, fooling the common reader who will feel lost among all those volumes that are being published faster than impartial information can be gathered. Trash literature can come in ridiculous products meant for a specific target public (Danielle Steele is one of the best examples) or in luxurious ones passing for an intellectual tour de force , exquisite and full of cultural references ( The daVinci Code being the emblematic title). Forgive me , all Mr Brown’s fans, but it is trash, even if of good quality. Remember how skillfully he pulls the Opus Dei out of the fire? I can’t blame him, he was writing a fiction novel, not a pamphlet, but I was disappointed with the twist.

Trash literature raises no questions, gives no answers. It has no social, political or psychological issues , it’s conservative and never provocative ( no, sex and nudity aren’t provocative, ideas are). Those books are published because there is a public for them, they are promoted like cars or holiday packages and if interest or enthusiasm lower, they’ll just disappear. My suggestion  is go back to the classics, that will help you spot quality when you see it. You can always read trash, I do it too by the pool or on planes, the important thing is to keep a distance and remember that’s just entertainment but entertaining isn’t the only aim of literature, it should never be.

A View of Lake Garda at Desenzano, by Harald Slott-Moller

When you start on your journey to Ithaca

then pray that the road is long,

full of adventure, full of knowledge.

Do not fear the Lestrygonians

and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.

You will never meet such as these on your path,

if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine

emotion touches your body and your spirit.

You will never meet the Lestrygonians,

the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,

if you do not carry them within your soul,

if your soul does not raise them before you.

Then pray that the road is long.

That the summer mornings are many,

that you will enter ports seen for the first time

with such pleasure, with such joy!

Stop at Phoenician markets,

and purchase fine merchandise,

mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,

and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,

buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;

visit hosts of Egyptian cities,

to learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.

To arrive there is your ultimate goal.

But do not hurry the voyage at all.

It is better to let it last for long years;

and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,

rich with all that you gained on the way,

not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would never have taken the road.

But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.

With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,

you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

(Konstantinos Kavafis)

 

It feels  like Spring , but everywhere they’re putting up Christmas decorations, even my street is getting its share of glittering reindeer and shining lamps of all colours. After much experimenting with backgrounds and colours I’ve decided to go with the season spirit too. The painting is by Renoir, Skaters at the Bois de Boulogne.

 These walls,’ said he, ‘were once the seat of luxury and vice. They exhibited a singular instance of the retribution of Heaven, and were from that period forsaken, and abandoned to decay.’ His words excited my curiosity, and I enquired further concerning their meaning.(Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance )

Gothic literature. which has long been considered a minor genre , has had a tremendous influence not only in literary works but also in the cinema . Gothic is sometimes said to have started in 1764 ( the year of the publication of The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole), although historically it dates back to the Graveyard Poets of the first half of the 18th century, pre-Romantic poets characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, ’skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms’ .Gothic fiction can be found throughout literature of the 20th century, in authors like Daphne du Maurier, Joyce Carol Oats, Anne Rice and some works of Stephen King.

 The name Gothic comes from the architecture of the Medieval period, which became popular again in the 19th century as a reaction to classical architectureAround 1820 the first phase of Gothic fiction began to fade ( after the greatest success of the period, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published) only to give way to Victorian Gothic, with Elizabeth Gaskell’s tales employing some of the most common themes in Gothic fiction, and the Brontë sisters’ novels like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre introducing us to Byronic anti heroes like Heathcliffe or the madwoman in the attic, although the name most commonly associated with the genre is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe , who revisited Ann Radcliffe’s tales and gave the themes a new dimension. .

Originally a reaction to the age of reason, order, and politics of Eighteenth century England, the development of the Gothic genre had a profound impact on the budding Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Shelley. The astounding features and use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural , profoundly influenced the style and material of the emerging Romanticism, in such way that for some people they are the same movement. The late 19th century saw a revival of the genre, with writers like Oscar Wilde ( The Picture of Dorian Gray), Robert Louis Stevenson ( Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ) and Henry James ( The Turn of the Screw) and , of course, Bram Stoker who reshaped the genre and pushed the vampire and werewolves to where our imagination still keeps them , in central and western Europe, his Dracula being influenced by Sheridan le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla. Before Stoker, Germany and Italy, sometimes Spain too, were the ideal settings for the ghosts and ruins, haunted castles and graveyards where innocent travellers and virgins could be scared to death ( although , as we know, the castles weren’t in Germany but in the soul). Madness, hereditary curses, decay , mystery and death are all abundantly used by Gothic literature, as well as melodrama and dangerous villains, maniacs and madwomen, the ground for so much literary production and chills in long nights when we were both scared and yet unable to put down the book.