ABlog

By coincidence, my DVD viewing in the past week--let us admit it, the recently purchased DVD player, aka television set but I have purposely left it sans antenna for broadcast reception, has become the opium of this household--encompassed two strikingly similar romantic views of the handsome white male European artist-intellectual....images as irritatingly fatuous and far removed from the reality of any art-lives I've ever bumped up against as the portrait I've long cherished as the epitome of Hollywood nonsense on the subject, the Lillian Hellman character in the film "Julia," who throws her typewriter out a window in a fit of artistic pique.


In Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, released in 2006 and set in the 1980's, the hero is an East German playwright who has somehow produced work of merit while staying on the good side of the authorities; he undergoes surveillance by an anonymous Organization Man who lives a life of quiet desperation in the employ of the Stasi, the notorious secret police of the GDR. In Antonioni's La Notte, made in 1961 with a contemporary setting, the (anti?) hero, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a successful novelist whose intellectual legitimacy may be inferred from his floor-to-ceiling booklined study and that fact that he can casually refer to his best friend's "article about Adorno." Both characters are handsome, tortured, make questionable ethical choices, wrestle with their relationship to whatever "system" they happen to be living under; each possesses, as appendage and bedmate, a gorgeous, sexy, miserable woman whose own intellectual aspirations can hardly conceal the fact that her main purpose is to adorn the life of her man. Both characters are shown extensively in glamorous, sophisticated surroundings--book launches, opening night triumphs, parties featuring the intelligentsia and/or the ruling class. Neither is depicted doing a lick of work (except when the East German struggles with a few lines of a newspaper piece that will criticize the regime, which he heroically composes on a smuggled typewriter lest the typeface be traced). Both are eventually showered with the goodies of capitalism, which only La Notte appears to regard with some irony. (Giovanni, the Mastroianni character, is offered a hack job writing propaganda for a wealthy entrepreneur; the East German makes a smooth transition out of Really Existing Socialism when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he publishes a book that is prominently featured in the windows of the local Barnes and Noble equivalent.) Especially notable to me is the glamor with which The Lives of Others manages to endow what one might expect to be depicted as a drab existence in the GDR--simply because it is lived by an Artist. (The Stasi guy's life is indeed drab, complete with an all-function-no-fun apartment and servicing by a prostitute who sets up her appointments at half-hour intervals.) Are we to infer that the playwright was really a free market type at heart all along?

Sorry to be so crabby. I was stunned by the goregousness of La Notte, could have looked at Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti, not to mention the alarmingly objectified beautiful Black nightclub dancer, for another ten hours or so. But why do filmmakers, who presumably are themselves Artists, have so much trouble depicting a Life in Art as more than an elegant (and distinctly macho) pose?