II

13. The sky is the dead decaying body of God; the stars are glittering maggots.

27. God, taking pity on those who stop smoking, made the stars to look like so many cigarettes burning, the clouds to look like smoke, the sun to remind them of the striking of a match, and the moon in the shape of a filter tip.

I

It was the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It's an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartments and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It's all - it's all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.

The Night of the Hunter (1955) is, at moments, a bit what I would imagine a Flannery O’Connor story to be like in the cinematic form. There are other impressive and iconic Southern writers to fulfill the comparison, but I think Flannery suits best. Her work is so elegant, spare, and powerful that, although you can imagine other ways of telling the story, you cannot imagine it being told any better. In the same way, neither could the story at the heart of this film (a story with some of my ultimate beloved themes: religious delusion, the relationship between violence and eroticism, hypocrisy, and mirthfully hard truths) be delivered any more ravishingly than as it was by director Charles Laughton. Flannery has always had the miraculous confidence to slip the reader into the soul of a character who, in one way or another, has been underempathised with for most of their existence. It is certainly tempting to draw the comparison between Flannery and The Night of the Hunter along these lines: that somehow it all boils down to the emotion of empathy. However, it would, I think, be foolish to assume that the work of Flannery O’Connor was aimed at empathy in a simple-minded manner, as well as to think this is all that is happening in The Night of the Hunter. Paul Hammond, whose 1979 essay on the film was reprinted in the BFI programme notes, points to the role of empathy in the film:

“Like all Hollywood film, Hunter relies on our empathy. The camera sets us up alongside John and  

Pearl. Occasionally our identification with John is emphasised by a shot from his point of view, as 

when at the picnic where Powell courts Willa, John has his tie roughly straightened by his stepfather-

to-be. His fingers busy out of frame, Mitchum’s smirking face appears in close-up, bottom right, 

while on the hill behind him, already in his power so to speak, we see Pearl and her doll and Willa 

running towards Icey, who waits, arms outstretched, to congratulate the young woman on her choice 

of suitor. While an off-screen John is excluded, Mitchum is integrated into this gullible harem by 

Cortez’s deep-focus photography. Yet he is simultaneously alienated from it: light reflected from the 

river at his feet plays over his face and lends it a livid appearance that contradicts the Arcadian
            feeling of sunshine bathing the landscape at his back.” 

In order to respond to what Hammond has stated in the above excerpt, I want to discuss a film of an entirely different nature. Through avant-garde filmmaking, the American photographer Paul Strand further developed his ability to construct sequences out of heterogeneous material. The tension between romanticism and modernism is apparent in his 1921 film “Manhatta”, directed with Charles Sheeler. As Jan-Christopher Horak writes,

“Manhatta merely approaches closure, implying a narrative that allows for the subject’s inscription in the film’s final transcendental image. This harmonious subtext is mitigated by and in conflict with the film’s overall modernist design, its oblique and disorienting camera angles, its monolithic perspectives of urban architecture, and its dynamic juxtaposition of movement, light, and shadow. Manhatta is thus very much a heterogenous text, both modernist and anti-modernist, its conflicting discourses never quite resolving themselves, as indeed they are never resolved within the discourse of twentieth-century American art.” 

The ambiguity and the contradictions that Horak sees in Manhatta can also be seen in The Night of the Hunter. Perhaps not the specific type of tension (between romanticism and modernism) but there are others, such as the telling of a supremely dark, violent story through a child protagonist, as well as somewhat strict narrative structures, and the classical cutting they are given, that surrender to unsettlingly beautiful departures, as in the shot of Willa, murdered, anchored by rope yet dreamily suspended beneath the river. I do not think that The Night of the Hunter “relies” on either empathy or distanciation, as stated by Paul Hammond, who also suggests that the distanciation in the film occurs through a mixture of contrasting, and sometimes conflicting, cinematic styles. Rather, I think the heteregeneity (or contrast of styles) strengthens the film to the extent that it is possible for the audience to slip into John’s soul, as he faces the monumental failures and betrayals of the adults around him, just as a Flannery O’Connor story would do – a very powerful phenomenon that I want to say is not fully explained by the term of empathy. It is worrying that the audience should fixate on one element over another, as was apparently the case with Manhatta, which was nearly relegated to cinema-historical amnesia due to critics who managed only to appreciate one-half of the dichotomy as opposed to the rich meaning of the dichotomy itself. All that was oblique and fragmented in Manhatta naturally supported the anti-modernist reading, but the extreme angles, collapsed space, and static compositions also did their clever job of allowing the Whitmanesque themes to emerge with exceptional beauty. A complex work of art is more than an ideological project, a swift alignment of aesthetic design and emotion; a spirit is manifested. The Night of the Hunter is one of the most gorgeous films I have ever seen, and I will have more to say about it in time.

 Robert Mitchum as Preacher Powell, who charms the neighbors 

but puts a blade to a child's neck and is terrifyingly remorseless.

. . . flowers for a lady . . .

ix. Searching for the Breton women.

You must know him better than I do. I understand simpler things about him. For example, when Cesare was a very young child, he went to the dentist every three months. He was healthy, except for his bad teeth. His great-grandfather on his father’s side had the same bad teeth as a child, his parents said, adding that his great-grandfather did not have the fortune of modern dental care. His parents immigrated to America in favor of modernity without leaving their rural thoughts behind. Anything that they were unable to give a respectable explanation for was answered in such a way; that one was born with it, or that it was destined by something nebulous and uncontrollable. Cesare was never interested in myth, only in truth. At the dentist, he dreaded the specificity of the gleaming instruments beside his chair, arranged like slim predators on a table draped with a slightly spotted cloth. He found that if he asked questions about all of the instruments, their origin and application, he could find momentary peace. The dentist, a dumb man, found this amusing. While meticulously prodding his delicate young gums until they blushed, then oozed, the dentist addressed him as “Mr. Auditore” in a most patronizing tone. Cesare would leave with an indescribable ache in his mouth that prevented him from forming anything other than short, garbled sentences for the next few hours. The ache spread to his inner ears and neck and down to the stale lollipop dangling between his fingers.

It may also be interesting to know that Cesare grew up in a dry, hilly region. He became close to that dark, sumptuous, nearly feral landscape, observing it at night with great curiosity, sometimes slipping out of the house to take extended walks beyond their backyard, through the narrow alley of rocks and dirt, into paths of unworked soil. There was an astonishing amount of wilderness; so much uncultivated land, so close to the decency of houses. The moon never interested him much; though he acknowledged it was incredibly pretty most of the time, its luminosity never penetrated his heart. It was the sensation of winding through trails of dirt at night, alone, that attracted him. He was a little afraid when he saw no footprints on some of the trails, but the indifference of the air braced him.

LLSB (Long on Looks, Short on Brains) #2

 


Front.

Great lines. See how the front and the back add up to a picture of roulette. The jacket design is apparently by someone named Beverly Lebarrow, British 1967 edition. It says 63867 Waffenfabrik Mauser A.G. Obendorf N. Mauser's Patent on the gun.

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