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La revolución por el tejado – Autobiografía (PDF)

Lucio, el anarquista irreductible – Bernard Thomas (PDF)

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Es war einmal in Berlin…

Entwicklung des Tourismus in Berlin

Berlin, Berlin, wie fahren nach Berlin! Die deutsche Hauptstadt ist für Besucher aus aller Welt so attraktiv wie nie zuvor. Im ersten Halbjahr 2013 reisten 5,3 Millionen Gäste an die Spree. Das ist ein Plus von fünf Prozent im Vergleich zum Vorjahreszeitraum, wie das Amt für Statistik und die Marketinggesellschaft Visit Berlin mitteilten.

Noch größer war der Zuwachs bei den Übernachtungen. Deren Zahl stieg um 9,2 Prozent auf 12,4 Millionen. Berlin schlägt München und Hamburg damit erneut ganz deutlich. In Europa liegt Berlin nach früheren Angaben an dritter Stelle hinter London und Paris.

München zählte nach jüngsten offiziellen Angaben im ersten Halbjahr mehr als 2,9 Millionen Gäste und über 5,9 Millionen Übernachtungen, in Hamburg waren es 2,76 Millionen Gäste und 5,34 Millionen Übernachtungen.

«In jeder einzelnen Minute kommen statistisch gesehen 20 Gäste in unsere Stadt», sagte Berlins Regierender Bürgermeister Klaus Wowereit (SPD) bei der Vorstellung der Halbjahresbilanz. In diesem Jahr werde es wieder einen Besucherrekord geben. «Wir rechnen mit 26 Millionen Übernachtungen.» Im vergangenen Jahr wurden 24,9 Millionen gezählt. Vor 20 Jahren – nicht lange nach dem Mauerfall – waren es erst 7,5 Millionen und vor 10 Jahren 11,4 Millionen.

Quelle: http://www.spiegel.de/reise/staedte/besucherboom-berlin-verzeichnet-fuenf-prozent-mehr-touristen-a-918247.html

Berlin belegte bereits zu den Mauerzeiten von 1961 bis 1989 einen gewissen Sonderstatus unter den deutschen Städten, und die Besichtigung des damaligen sog. „Antifaschistische Schutzwalls“ war – zumindest von West-Berlin aus gesehen – ein fester Programmpunkt für Schulklassen, Kegelvereine und ausländische Delegationen auf Berlin-Besuch. Den überragenden touristischen Stellenwert jedoch, den die Stadt mittlerweile inne hat, konnten nach dem Fall ihres wohl weltweit bekanntesten Bauwerks im November `89 weder deren Bewohner noch die Berliner Touristikbranche auch nur im Entferntesten erahnen.

Berlin heute gilt als „in, hip, angesagt, up to date, toll, spitze, amazing, exciting, mola mucho“, jedes Jahr zieht es mehr Besucher und Gäste in die fast schon global als Hort von Kreativität und Experimentierfreude gefeierte Stadt. Nicht wenige, die als Touristen kamen, bleiben länger als geplant oder auch gleich für immer bzw. für einige Jahre. Speziell jüngere Besucher schätzen die vielerorts noch vergleichsweise günstigen Preise in der deutschen Hauptstadt. Auch wenn sich immer mehr alteingesessene Berliner zunehmend und auch zu Recht über steigende Mieten beklagen, ist die sich langsam aber sicher wieder zur Metropole an der Spree entwickelnde Stadt gerade in Bezug auf Wohnkosten zumeist immer noch sehr viel erschwinglicher als etwa London, Paris oder auch New York. Nicht nur das tobende Leben in der Stadt macht den Reiz, sondern Berlin bietet auch ein attraktives Umland. Seen, Weiden und Wälder schaffen ein ansprechendes Ambiente um in eine  Berlin Ferienwohnung einzukehren.

Quelle: http://www.berliner-stadtplan24.com/allgemein/die-rasante-entwicklung-des-tourismus-in-berlin/

Zur Geschichte der Berliner Mauer

Rund 2,7 Mio. Menschen hatten zwischen 1949 und 1961 die DDR und Ost-Berlin verlassen: ein Flüchtlingsstrom, der etwa zur Hälfte aus jungen Leuten unter 25 Jahren bestand und die SED-Führung vor immer größere Schwierigkeiten stellte. Täglich passierten rund eine halbe Million Menschen in beide Richtungen die Sektorengrenzen in Berlin und konnten so die Lebensbedingungen vergleichen. Allein 1960 gingen etwa 200.000 Menschen dauerhaft in den Westen. Die DDR stand kurz vor dem gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Zusammenbruch.

Noch am 15. Juni 1961 erklärte der DDR-Staatsratsvorsitzende Walter Ulbricht, niemand habe die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten [Film 0,81 MB]. Am 12. August 1961 gab der Ministerrat der DDR bekannt: «Zur Unterbindung der feindlichen Tätigkeit der revanchistischen und militaristischen Kräfte Westdeutschlands und West-Berlins wird eine solche Kontrolle an der Grenze der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik einschließlich der Grenze zu den Westsektoren von Groß-Berlin eingeführt, wie sie an den Grenzen jedes souveränen Staates üblich ist.» Dass sich diese Maßnahme in erster Linie gegen die eigene Bevölkerung richtete, der in Zukunft der Grenzübertritt untersagt war, erwähnte der Ministerrat nicht.

In den frühen Morgenstunden des 13. August 1961 [Film 5,80 MB] wurden an der Grenze des sowjetischen Sektors zu West-Berlin provisorische Absperrungen errichtet und an den Verbindungsstraßen das Pflaster aufgerissen. Einheiten der Volkspolizei, der Transportpolizei sowie der sogenannten Betriebskampfgruppen unterbanden jeglichen Verkehr an der Sektorengrenze. Wohl nicht ohne Hintersinn hatte die SED-Führung einen Ferien-Sonntag im Hochsommer für ihre Aktion ausgewählt.

In den nächsten Tagen und Wochen wurden die Stacheldrahtverhaue an der Grenze zu West-Berlin von Ost-Berliner Bauarbeitern unter scharfer Bewachung durch DDR-Grenzposten mit einer Mauer aus Betonplatten und Hohlblocksteinen ersetzt. Wohnhäusern, wie z.B. in der Bernauer Straße, in der die Gehwege zum Bezirk Wedding (West-Berlin), die südliche Häuserzeile aber zum Bezirk Mitte (Ost-Berlin) gehörten, wurden in die Grenzbefestigung einbezogen: Kurzerhand ließ die DDR-Regierung Hauseingänge und Erdgeschoss-Fenster zumauern. Die Bewohner konnten ihre Wohnungen nur noch von der Hofseite betreten, die in Ost-Berlin lag. Bereits im Jahr 1961 kam es zu zahlreichen Zwangsräumungen – nicht nur in der Bernauer Straße, sondern auch in anderen Grenzbereichen.

Durch den Mauerbau wurden von einem Tag auf den anderen Straßen, Plätze und Wohnquartiere geteilt und der Nahverkehr unterbrochen. Am Abend des 13. August sagte der Regierende Bürgermeister Willy Brandt vor dem Abgeordnetenhaus: «(…) Der Senat von Berlin erhebt vor aller Welt Anklage gegen die widerrechtlichen und unmenschlichen Maßnahmen der Spalter Deutschlands, der Bedrücker Ost-Berlins und der Bedroher West-Berlins (…)».

Am 25. Oktober 1961 standen sich amerikanische und sowjetische Panzer am «Ausländerübergang» Friedrichstraße (CheckpointCharlie) gegenüber: DDR-Grenzposten hatten zuvor versucht, Repräsentanten der Westalliierten bei Einfahrt in den sowjetischen Sektor zu kontrollieren. Dieses Vorgehen verstieß in den Augen der Amerikaner gegen das alliierte Recht auf ungehinderte Bewegungsfreiheit in der ganzen Stadt. 16 Stunden standen sich so, nur wenige Meter voneinander entfernt, die beiden Atommächte direkt gegenüber. Für die Zeitgenossen ein Moment allerhöchster Kriegsgefahr. Einen Tag später erfolgt auf beiden Seiten der Rückzug. Durch eine diplomatische Initiative von US-Präsident Kennedy hatte der sowjetische Staats- und Parteichef Chruschtschow für diesmal den Vier-Mächte Status von ganz Berlin bestätigt.

In der Folgezeit wurden die Sperranlagen weiter aus- und umgebaut und das Kontrollsystem an der Grenze perfektioniert. Die innerstädtische Mauer, die Ost- von West-Berlin trennte, hatte eine Länge von 43,1 Kilometern. Der Teil der Sperranlagen, der die übrige DDR an der Grenze zu West-Berlin abriegelte, war 111,9 Kilometer lang. Weit über 100.000 Bürger der DDR versuchten zwischen 1961 und 1988 über die innerdeutsche Grenze oder über die Berliner Mauer zu fliehen. Weit mehr als 600 Menschen wurden von Grenzsoldaten der DDR erschossen oder starben bei Fluchtversuchen; allein an der Berliner Mauer gab es zwischen 1961 und 1989 mindestens 136 Tote.

Quelle: http://www.berlin.de/mauer/geschichte/index.de.html

Filme mit Bezug zu Berlin:

Phil Jutzi – Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1931)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

Win Wenders – Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)

Tom Tykwer – Lola rennt (1998)

Wolfgang Becker – Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

Franziska Meyer Price – Berlin, Berlin – Der Film (2020)

Burhan Qurbani – Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020)

Lieder über Berlin:

Nina Hagen – Berlin (1992)

Liedtext:

Wir tanzen und verfuehren
Wir singen und beruehren
Wir herrschen und betruegen
Wir kriechen und wir luegen
We’re loving and romancing
We’re singing and we’re dancing
We beat it when we need it
We’re lying and keep smiling
Wir leben bis wir schweben
Wir hoffen und wir beten
Wir trinken und wir essen
Wir lachen und vergessen
Was die Leute reden ist wie der Wind
Es rauscht and mir vorbei
Wir brauchen Worte, die Verbindung schaffen
Von vorurteilen frei
Berlin!!
Berlin!!
Ich liebe die Stimmung
L’atmosphere c’est tres bizarre
Right over here
Chez toi at the «Tempodrom»
At the «Tunnel» and the «Q»
Over here
Avec un rendez-vous
Toujour retour c’est la vie
Ma oui oui oui oui oui oui oui
C’est la vie!
We all gotta choose
If we gonna win or if we gonna lose
We all gotta choose
If we gonna win or if we gonna lose
Berlin!!
Berlin!!
Osten, Westen werden hell,
Ja die grosse Stadt ist schnell!
Send me a postcard if you please
C’est royale, c’est manifique
Osten, Westen werden hell,
Ja die grosse Stadt is schnell!
Send me a postcard if you please
C’est royale, c’est manifique
Berlin!!
Berlin!!
We all gotta choose
If we gonna win or if we gonna lose
We all gotta choose
If we gonna win or if we gonna lose

Quelle: http://www.vmusic.com.au/lyrics/nina-hagen/berlin-lyrics-1531965.aspx

Rosenstolz – Tag in Berlin (November) (2002)

Liedtext:

Was hast du mit mir gemacht
dass ich endlich wieder lach
was hast du mir bloß getan
das ich wieder leben kann

Tausend Stunden saß ich hier
tausend Stunden nur mit dir
Deine Augen viel zu blau
tief versunken, endlos schlau

Wenn es Tag wird in berlin
sind die Augen endlos grün
War das Blau auch noch so schön
ich muss weiter, ich muss gehn

Was hast du mir bloß gesagt
das ich nicht mer so viel frag
Was ist bloß mit mir geschen
kann dein Blau der Augen sehn

Tausend jahre war ich krank
tausend Jahre nur verbannt
Deine Seele viel zu gut
kam geflogen, gab mir Mut

Wenn es Tag wird in berlin
sind die Augen wieder grün
War das Blau auch noch so schän
ich muss weiter, ich muss gehn

Hab zum Morgen dich geküsst
weil das Blau geblieben ist
Wenn wir uns einst Wiedersehn
kanns auch Tag sein in Berlin

Quelle: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/rosenstolz/tag-in-berlin-november-23da045b.html

«Das ist Berlin»: Die Hymne für die Stadt

[Strophe 1]
CSD, Charité, Rummelsburg an der Spree
Inseln ohne Meer, tausend Seen, Kennzeichen B
Flieger brauch ich nicht für Venedig oder Bangkok
Doch Istanbul ist drin wenn ich mich auf mein Rad hock
Nächte sind wie Tage hier nur ein bisschen dunkler
Wir lieben die Freiheit, doch spielen im Käfig
Fußball und Ping Pong, New York ist King
Was ist Berlin?
Natürlich King Kong
Egal ob Atze oder Göre, ob Lady oder Gentleman
Jeder Topf sein Deckel und Töpfchen auf sein Deckelchen
Ja das ist Berlin

[Refrain]
Wenn man sich schön macht auch wenns hässlich ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Und wenn Stefan plötzlich Steffi ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Wenn man nicht aus Deutschland kommt und trotzdem echt Berliner ist
Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin

[Strophe 2]
In Köln warst du Streber, in Hamburg Klassenbester
In Berlin lernst du chillen im 100. Semester
In Mitte heißen Kidz Paula und Mira
Hinten In Marzahn spielt Britney mit Shakira
Party ist für Jugend da und das ist hier true
Wie lange die dauert bestimmst alleine du
Groß, klein, dick und dünn
Analog und digital
Woah, in Berlin hast du die Wahl
Alles geht ins Prinzenbad ob Harzer oder Scheich
Vor Berliner Bademeistern sind wir alle gleich
Das ist Berlin

[Refrain]
Wenn man sich schön macht auch wenns hässlich ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Und wenn Stefan plötzlich Steffi ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Wenn man nicht aus Deutschland kommt und trotzdem echt Berliner ist
Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin

[Strophe 3]
In Görli Kreisen Tüten, Cotti kreisen Blüten
Der Pitbull’n ganz lieber
Sein Herrchen Autoschieber
Hallöchen, Tschüssi, Sonne, Mond und Sterni
Berlin ohne Spätis ist wie Bert ohne Ernie

[Refrain]
Wenn man sich schön macht auch wenns hässlich ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Und wenn Stefan plötzlich Steffi ist
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Wenn es alles gibt und du dich fragst wie das zusammen passt
Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin
Oh oh oh oh oh das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin
Wenn es alles gibt und du dich fragst wie das zusammen passt
Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin
Berlin Berlin Berlin

 

Quelle: https://genius.com/Endlich-august-das-ist-berlin-lyrics

Brando – «Berlin an der Spree»

Du bist der Hustle von New York, du bist Paris zur Renaissance
Du wirkst so primitiv doch schmiedest kulturelles Gold
Du bist randvoll mit Action die dich andauernd verändert
Du urbanes Paradies – egal, wie man dich dreht und wendet
In deinen Mauern steckt Geschichte von Weltkriegen und Ländern
Jede noch so harte Krise hast du irgendwie gehandelt
DDR-Nostalgie, gepaart mit Fashion Week und Haute Couture
Herz der Rebellion, 1. Mai, verschließ die Tür
Bist Widersprüchlichkeit – du demonstrierst, du streikst
Du warst Kommune 1 – du warst stets am Puls der Zeit
Und weil nichts bleibt wie es bleibt – Konvergenz von Politik
Einst wich das Berliner Stadtschloss dem Palast der Republik
Elektronische Kultur – Berlin Calling in die Welt
Bist immer knapp bei Kasse – brauchst immer dringend Geld
Ein Leben für den Punk, bist das Kreuzberger Raclette
Bist der Darkroom aus’m Berghain im Quartier 206
Du duftest so speziell, dein Geruch macht leute witziger
Friedrichshain riecht wie San Francisco in den 70ern
Du bist wie du bist, die Stadt unter den Städten
Du bist arty Peoples Mekka, Berlin Mitte ist Manhattan
Wunderschöne Silhouette … des Sündenbabylons
Kudamm ist der Broadway und Kreuzberg die Bronx
Doch dich gibt es nicht umsonst, zollst ‘n hohen Preis
Du saugst alles in dir auf, ob die Welt das je begreift?
Max Schmelings Nummer 1 im Lunapark Halensee
Warst Bar 25 Romantik an der Spree
Karaokechor im Mauerpark Vergnügungskomitee
Du bist Ost und West, du bist Drum’n’Base und Ingwertee
Du bist der Herthakahn, der Fernsehturm dein Flaggenmast
Hattest schon die Welt zu Gast – bei dir im Admiralspalast
Bist die Weltstadt der Kultur und Sinfonie von Großstadt
Deine Partitur – so legendär wie Mozart
Bist die verlockende Botschaft in den Tiefen des Morasts
Schere, Stein, Papier oder Oberbaumer Brückenschlacht
Auch wenn du selten lachst – kommst mit jedem klar
Der EasyJet-Tourismus – kommt bald auch aus Afrika
Egal wo sie auch herkommen, hast sie alle hart gemacht
X Generationen um Jahre um den Schlaf gebracht
Hauptstadt – Regierungssitz – spielst politisch Schach
Bist 24 Stunden wach, die Lichter tanzen in der Nacht
Wer kann schon widerstehen, wenn Berlinskaya lacht
Hast so vieles zu entdecken, Heimatkunde ist mein Lieblingsfach
Egal, was ich schon weiß – du machst mich nur neugieriger
Inhaliere stapelweise allerfeinste Berolinika
Ich hab es akzeptiert, mein Herz schlägt immer hier
Du bist die Liebe meines Lebens, ganz egal, was auch passiert
Wie ein blinder Passagier, die Motte in das Licht
Und für mich – gibt’s für immer nur noch dich
Bin immer wieder überrascht, wie vielen Sprachen du sprichst
Zeig dein wahres Gesicht heute Nacht im nackten Abendlicht
Dein roughes Tempo – chaotischer als Bangkok
Dein schäbiger Charme der sie weltweit alle anlockt
Ach mensch Berlin, schon dein Name ist gewaltig
Bist eine Blüte, die sich jede Nacht entfaltet
Deine Häuser wie Kalligrafie – verwittert und gealtert
Postmoderner Stil – historisch umgestaltet
Vom Herz alternativ und mit Liebe kontrovers
Bist Hauptstadt deutscher Ordnung, aber Ordnung is’ ein Scherz
Bist niemals leicht erklärt, dermaßen konträr
Du bist einerseits so hart, doch dein Logo ist ein Teddybär
Bist das Kunstaushängeschild der ganzen Bundesrepublik
Und jeder kleine Fleck der von mir unbesungen blieb
Bist Boxhagener Platz, Monbijou und Mauerpark
Sitzt mit abgefuckten Chucks im Metropolenaufsichtsrat
Dein Ruf hallt um die Welt, irgendwie bist du das neue Rom
Warst schon immer eigen, immer anders, immer unkonform
Zirkusattraktionen, denkst in andren Dimensionen
Anti aus Prinzip, schwimmst gegen, anstatt mit dem Strom
Arabische Cafés und die Heimat deutscher Türken
Deine schroffe Schönheit – verteilt auf 12 Bezirke
Das alte Scheunenviertel wie Soho und Tribeca
Kreuzberger Kneipen, verstreut an jeder Ecke
Du bist Karl Marx-, Frankfurter- und Landsberger-Allee
Hast das breit sein fast erfunden und im Sommer sogar Schnee
Auch wenn du das hier hörst, heißt es nicht, dass du’s verstehst
Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln – Berlin an der Spree

Quelle: https://genius.com/Brando-berlin-an-der-spree-lyrics

Kaiserbase – Berlin, Du Bist So Wunderbar (2003)

Liedtext:

Berlin! Du bist so wunderbar (4x)

Aus Berlin (2x)

Berlin! Du bist so wunderbar (3x)

Ich steh an meiner Ecke und ich sing
Mein kleines Liedchen über dich Berlin
Noch einmal
Ey watn los los
der Berliner Dialekt […]
wir von unserer Ecke haben großen Durst
wir wollen flousen aufm […]
kein Gepose auf unsrem Schoße
hinten Hände aus den Taschen rein uns los
wir essen Ferkel(?) und wir bleiben auf dem Kurs
bei allen Frauen dieser Welt- da kein Sturz
Wir machens kurz

Berlin! Du bist so wunderbar (3x)

Big up!
Berliner Jungen gegen die Mauer im Kopf
Berliner Jungen passen nicht in euern Kopf
Köpf mich an und wir kommen in buzz
[..]
Potz blitz!
Wir haben alles in der Stadt das ist kein Witz
Die Berliner Luft entgeht so nicht Berliner Kids
Passendes Stück. Dabei ist, wer vorne sitzt
[…]
Ich frag: was ist der Unterschied
von unsrer Art zu Leben und der der Community
Es ist doch jeden Tag dasselbe Lied
Wir checken Rythm für Beat
Denn das ist, was uns liegt
Ihr werdet sehn wie viel Wind wir säen
Sagt bitte nicht ihr könnt es nicht verstehn
Wir sind erwacht und wir werden uns sehn
Was uns sowieso gehört, es werden Stürme wehen

Quelle: http://www.tekstowo.pl/piosenka,kaiserbase,berlin_du_bist_so_wunderbar.html

The dramatic black and white silence

Why Buster Keaton is today’s most influential actor

Buster Keaton was something of an enigma to his own era. The silent-film star launched himself between rooftops, battled storms and sand dunes, boarded moving vehicles – and frequently trailed behind them, perfectly horizontal and as suspended as our disbelief – all in the name of comedy, and all while seeming unfazed. Film historian Peter Kramer, in his essay The Makings of a Comic Star, contends that Keaton’s «deadpan performance was seen as a highly inappropriate response to the task of creating characters which were rounded and believable». His unrelenting imperturbability was misinterpreted as a lack of emotional expression, or perhaps acting skill.

Nowadays we applaud performances that exhibit this level of restraint, wowed by microscopic gestures that hint at subtext, but refuse to spell it out. As Slate’s movie critic and author Dana Stevens points out in Camera Man, a new biography-meets-cultural-history about Buster Keaton and the birth of the 20th Century, «[Keaton] was ahead of his time in many ways». It is exactly this prescience and timelessness that makes Buster Keaton a figure ripe for reference in contemporary performance. His type of minimalism, stoicism and lyricism transcended the 20th Century, and can be seen on-screen now perhaps more than ever.

Stevens cites Keaton’s «self-contained stillness» as his «secret weapon», and we can see its weaponisation in the opening sequence of The Cameraman (1928) in which Buster aspires to be a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl. As an excited crowd gathers, yelling and gesticulating, to celebrate and capture the marriage of two famous individuals, Buster is caught in the melee and squashed against the woman who will claim his heart. He is a picture of enraptured calm amid the clamour.

That calmness or stoicism, despite deep inner turmoil, is something that can also be located in Oscar Isaac’s critically-acclaimed performance in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Speaking to Scott Feinberg on the Awards Chatter podcast, Isaac reveals that the starting point for his singer-songwriter character Llewyn in The Coen Brothers’ folk music odyssey was indeed Buster Keaton. «I thought that was a great inspiration for me», says Isaac, who wanted to tap into what he calls a «comedy of resilience» and to adopt a facial expression that «doesn’t really change but has a melancholy to it». And so Isaac subtracted smiling from his arsenal of expressions to birth a character who is frustrated with the world and everyone in it.

But stillness isn’t blankness. As both Keaton and Isaac convey, a limited palette can still paint many colours. There is one scene in Inside Llewyn Davis during which Isaac’s sardonic melancholia feels particularly Keatonesque – although the entire sequence where he carries a cat onto the subway, his face glazed in faint irritation, before having to lurch after said feline on a crowded carriage, could be a silent comedy – and that’s the car ride with John Goodman’s Roland Turner. Llewyn rides up front with beat poet and valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) and Goodman’s cocky, cane-toting jazz musician reclines in the backseat. Upon snoring himself awake he begins to prod Llewyn with both questions and cane. When he discovers that Llewyn is a Welsh name, and launches into a long and uninteresting story, Isaac’s face remains placid. But there is a perceptible smirk, a lick of the lips and a glance out the window that says: «this guy is unbelievable». Down the road and more deeply exasperated, Llewyn reveals that he’s a solo act «now» because his partner Mike «threw himself off the George Washington Bridge». There is barely a glimmer of grief, just a stony stare into the middle distance as Isaac’s big brown eyes concentrate on the road ahead, but still betray the sadness within.

That stare undeniably shares heritage with Keaton. In the book The Look of Buster Keaton, French film critic Robert Benayoun offers a series of insightful essays alongside strikingly rendered images of Keaton’s face, in which his solemnity is on full display. Benayoun posits that «the aim of every close-up» in a Keaton film was to «confront us with [his] gaze. When Buster stares at some unexpected obstacle, in the offscreen space overhead, his gaze makes that obstacle, surprise or danger, or marvel visible… Keaton was the comedian of deliberate attention, intense and dynamic reflection; we can see him thinking» – just as we can see Llewyn contemplating Mike in that car.

Isaac isn’t alone in exhibiting this trend towards minimalist acting, or what Shonni Enelow, an academic and author called «recessive aesthetics» in a 2016 article for Film Comment. Compared to Method performances, which functioned within a framework of «tension and release» and generated performances that were «feverish, agitated [and] on the edge of eruption», a remote performance is marked by tiny expressions, contained intensity and «a refusal of big reactions or loud moments». Enelow points to Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, Rooney Mara in Carol and Michael B Jordan in Fruitvale Station, and offers up a reading of their «emotional withdrawal in these performances as a response to a violent or chaotic environment».

Keaton might have done it for laughs more than integrity, but he too saw the value in responding to unpredictable and dangerous events with a stoic shrug or exhalation. This minimalism is also surely part of the reason he’s endured. Critic and film historian Imogen Sara Smith points out that «the coolness and subtlety of his style [is] very cinematic in terms of recognising that the camera can pick up very, very small effects». That contemporary acting has become much more internalised and naturalised could be «the reason why he translates more [than other stars of his era] in terms of style of performance», posits Smith.

This recessive melancholy is equally visible in Awkwafina’s performance in Lulu Wang’s 2019 tragicomedy The Farewell. As The New Yorker observed, «[Awkwafina] gives a master class in hangdoggery«, as Chinese-born, US-raised Billi, who returns to Changchun after discovering that her grandma Nai-Nai has weeks to live. After Billi’s family decide not to tell Nai-Nai she’s dying, she is forced into a mode of repression. The contrivance of that composure can be seen in the fact that prior to and upon learning of Nai-Nai’s fate she is humorous, sassy and indignant. The shock of this news is etched all over her face, which doesn’t go unnoticed by her mother: «Look at you, you can’t hide your emotions». For the sake of her grandma, she learns how. As such, it differs from Keaton and Isaac’s mode of performance which is grounded in immutability.

However, Billi’s alienation in a culture that is both hers and not hers chimes with the way Keaton is often seen to be performing social conventions. Billi’s Uncle Haibin explains, «We’re not telling Nai-Nai because it’s our duty to carry this emotional burden for her», and he chastises Billi and her father’s westernised desire to tell the truth. Billi finds herself having to adapt to eastern values, no matter how uncomfortable they make her. Likewise, Keaton frequently played into the «innocent abroad» archetype; naive in the ways of life and love. In Sherlock Jr (1924) he studies a manual How To Be a Detective, shadows a man and in doing so replicates his walk, and finally, when he gets a moment alone with his love interest in the projection room of a cinema, must look towards the actors on screen to figure out how to kiss her. There is an awareness of performance in Keaton’s persona and Sherlock Jr is just one instance where you see him modifying it according to what might be expected of him.

Similarly, Awkwafina moves between performance styles according to what is required of Billi, and there are moments of emotional release where she pivots into Method acting, as when Billi admits to her mother that as a child she was often «confused and scared because [her parents] never told [her] what was going on». But then she recedes and gives herself over to «hangdoggery». Keaton too gave a masterclass in that.

A less disputed element of Keaton’s performance style was his sheer athleticism or what Stevens describes as his «signature kineticism». Which brings me on to Adam Driver. I could point to his thoughtful repose in Paterson, his slapstick humour in Marriage Story or his deadpan delivery in The Dead Don’t Die as indicative of a Keaton-ness. However it was in last year’s macabre rock opera Annette, directed by Leos Carax, that Driver demonstrated a «full-bodied enthusiasm and physicality», as Little White Lies’ Hannah Strong put it, that more forcefully summoned the spirit of Keaton.

That skittish, unpredictable physicality is first apparent in Driver’s Henry McHenry, an aggressively macho comedian with a reputation for «mildly offensive» jokes, when he stalks on to stage (having just eaten a banana) to rapturous applause. Before long he has burst into song and is leaping and frolicking about with what IndieWire called «balletic precision», in a manner that resembles both Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang (1986) and Keaton in Grand Slam Opera (a low-budget short he co-wrote and starred in for Educational Pictures in 1936). 

Lucidity and precision

«The other thing that’s really distinctive about [Keaton],» explains Smith, «is this lucidity and precision». Although he was not a formally trained dancer, his acrobatics are full of the kind of rigour, lyricism and rhythm that any dancer would kill for. «Every little movement that he makes with his face or his body is very clear, but in a way that doesn’t feel mechanical,» continues Smith. «He had incredible control over everything he did.» It is unsurprising then, that there are several actor-dancers (including Lavant) who also simulate Keaton with their level of control.

The first person who comes to mind is Miranda July, who The New Yorker once described as having «the steely fragility of Buster Keaton», and who performs an abstract dance sequence in her 2011 sophomore feature The Future. The performance – made up of precise and sometimes melancholic bodily contortions  – shares a lineage with the American dance company Pilobolus (I cannot claim to be the first to notice this) who take their name from a fungus that «propels itself with extraordinary strength, speed and accuracy».

The second person is Ariane Labed, a Greek-French actress for whom dance is a recurring feature: she was cast as a synchronised swimmer in the 2020 TV series Trigonometry, had the best moves in The Lobster’s silent disco, and schools us in the art of synchronised gesture during Attenberg’s semi-dance sequences. The director of the latter film, Athina Rachel Tsangari, unsurprisingly singled Keaton out, in an interview with Culture Whisper, as an inspiring «composer of human movement».

In Annette, there is a pivotal scene onboard a ship in which the narrative reaches an emotional crescendo. There is a storm brewing, and a drunken Henry (Driver) attempts to waltz with his wife Ann (played by Marion Cotillard) across the stern. Driver’s body now mirrors Keaton’s in its perpetual motion. Despite their difference in stature they are both industrious and powerful, and more than just the specificity of their movement, its effect is such that you are never quite sure what will happen next, or what they’re capable of. Moreover, they exert their physicality in a way that displays a tendency towards possessiveness and machismo. In The Cameraman (1928), Keaton kicks another man into a swimming pool for talking to his date. This anticipates a scene in which Henry wrestles a man known only as The Accompanist into his pool, having had suspicions that he posed a threat to the titular baby Annette.

The other aspect of physicality that Keaton and Driver share is their sex appeal. Returning to the words of Benayoun, he observes a sense of «the sublime in Keaton… He’s glamorous. He’s gorgeous. [He has a] sculptural sexiness». Not to gush too freely, but Driver is another such sublime specimen; a figure of extreme masculinity and muscularity. And what could be more glamorous than Henry McHenry riding his motorcycle, before kissing Ann with his helmet still on? Keaton and Driver have a commanding presence in common, and when they are on screen, you simply cannot take your eyes off them.

Keaton’s performance style is known for its deadpan execution. No matter the ridiculousness of the gag – he liked a banana skin as much as any comedian – his face remains a picture of steadfast seriousness. As Smith points out, it is this contrast between his «deadpan serenity [and] his body constantly [being] subjected to all these indignities [that is] the essence of him as a performer».

Filmmaker and comedian Richard Ayoade frequently channels Keatons deadpan-ness, and often cites him as a point of reference when working with actors. In a 2014 interview, Ayoade reveals that he had Jesse Eisenberg watch Buster Keaton’s films before starring in his sophomore feature The Double, feeling that they could demonstrate a «sense of someone acknowledging that everything bad that happens to them shouldn’t come as a surprise».

Deadpan delivery and that lack of surprise are also notable in Donald Glover’s acting. In Atlanta, the Emmy-winning comedy TV series about two cousins trying to work their way up in Georgia’s music industry, Glover (who created and co-writes the show) stars as Earn Marks, an aspiring talent manager who approaches life with a stone-cold sobriety. «Van’s dating other people, she’s going to kick me out of the house [and] I’m also broke,» sighs Earn in the pilot episode, as he explains his current situation with his baby’s mother to a colleague, with a subdued weariness.

​Earn’s expressionlessness doesn’t mean that he’s devoid of emotion; when he hears his cousin Paper Boi’s new track on the radio – having got it into the hands of a producer – he breaks out into a genuine smile. Rather, it serves to underscore the absurdity of modern existence. He is no longer outraged or surprised when setbacks come his way. In the pilot, the biggest reaction he can muster when a white acquaintance drops «the n word» twice in conversation is mild offence. No matter what happens, be it a man on a bus feeding Earn a nutella sandwich or a pet alligator strolling out of his Uncle Willy’s house, there is a level of apathy to Earn’s deadpan response because on some level, he’s seen it all before. And like Keaton, he’s just trying to survive.

Keaton’s films have likewise been considered a response to the absurdity of modern existence. His characters endlessly invite and contend with calamity, existing in a world where structures – both mechanical and architectural – are in a constant state of precarity, and where the elements themselves (he is perpetually battling wind and rain) have turned against him. In the 1920 two-reel comedy One Week, Keaton and his new wife attempt to build a DIY house. They fail miserably. As Dana Stevens notes in Camera Man, «the resulting structure makes the cabinet of Dr Caligari look Grecian in its symmetry». After a freight train crashes through the building, they stick a «For Sale» sign in the rubble, and head for new pastures. You could just as easily see Keaton describing this character as homeless but «not real homeless» as when Earn defends his peripatetic living situation.

That said, there are of course other authors of this deadpan mode of expression who may well have influenced performers such as Glover. As Tina Post – an assistant professor at the University of Chicago specialising in racial performativity and deadpan aesthetics – asserts «the term [deadpan] precedes Buster Keaton or is coterminous with his rise». Post also points out that «the way that Keaton couples a blank expression with a bodily endurability is very much in line with American constructions of blackness.» Post is quick to point out that expanding the definition or lineage of deadpan isn’t a condemnation of Keaton himself, but rather a consideration of «the ways performatives move through American culture». Much as in the way the 20th Century’s benighted use of blackface has evolved to allow for its memorable subversion, or rather inversion, in the Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta.

This chimes with the way Keaton himself has migrated through screen culture, ever accessible and influential, with aspects of his performance style being adopted, reacted to and modified in order to suit a range of bodies, genres and purposes. There is still no-one quite like Keaton: the tension and contradiction in his comedy is as unique now as it was in the 1920s. However, it feels safe to say that the restraint as well as the commitment present in these acclaimed, 21st-Century performances owe a debt to a filmmaker and performer who figured out not just how to take a camera apart and put it back together again, but what it was capable of capturing and expressing.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220121-why-buster-keaton-is-todays-most-influential-actor

What Made Buster Keaton’s Comedy So Modern?

Critics like to create causes. If a pair of new Grover Cleveland biographies appears, we say that, with the prospect of a President returning to win a second term after having been defeated at the end of his first, who else would interest us more than the only President who has? In reality, the biographers started their work back when, and now is when the biographies just happen to be ready. And so it is with the appearance of two significant new books about the silent-film comedian Buster Keaton. We start to search for his contemporary relevance—the influence of silent-comedy short subjects on TikTok?—when the reason is that two good writers began writing on the subject a while ago, and now their books are here.

The truth is that Keaton’s prominence has receded, probably irretrievably, from where it stood half a century ago—a time when, if you were passionate about movies, you wore either the white rose of Keaton or the red rose of Chaplin and quarrelled fiercely with anyone on the other side. In Bertolucci’s wonderful movie about the Paris revolt of May, 1968, “The Dreamers,” two student radicals, French and American, nearly come to blows over the relative merits of Charlie and Buster: “Keaton is a real filmmaker. Chaplin, all he cares about is his own performance, his own ego!” “That’s bullshit!” “That’s not bullshit!” Meanwhile, Janis Joplin growls on the stereo behind them.

In a weird way, the terms of the quarrel derived from the German Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing’s search for the “essence” of each art form: poetry does time, sculpture does space, and so on. To the Keaton lovers, Chaplin was staginess, and therefore sentimentality, while Keaton was cinema—he moved like the moving pictures. Chaplin’s set pieces could easily fit onto a music-hall stage: the dance of the dinner rolls in “The Gold Rush” and the boxing match in “City Lights” were both born there imaginatively, and could have been transposed there. But Keaton’s set pieces could be made only with a camera. When he employs a vast and empty Yankee Stadium as a background for the private pantomime of a ballgame, in “The Cameraman,” or when he plays every part in a vaudeville theatre (including the testy society wives, the orchestra members, and the stagehands), in “The Play House,” these things could not even be imagined without the movies to imagine them in. The Keaton who created the shipboard bits in “The Navigator” or the dream scene in “Sherlock Jr.” was a true filmmaker rather than a film-taker, a molder of moving sequences rather than someone who pointed the camera at a stage set. (One could make similar claims for the superior cinematic instincts of Harold Lloyd, who tended to get dragged into these arguments in much the same way that the Kinks get dragged into arguments about the Beatles and the Stones—though Lloyd, like Ray Davies, was such a specialized taste that he could only extend, not end, an argument over the virtues of the other two.)

Take the long sequence toward the end of “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928), in which Keaton, playing an effete, Boston-educated heir who rejoins his father, a short-tempered Southern steamboat captain, gets caught in a cyclone that pulverizes a small town. The episode is breathtaking in its audacity and poetry, an unexampled work of pure special-effects ballet. The houses explode, in a thousand shards of wood, as Keaton wanders among them. The moment when the façade of a house falls on Keaton, who is saved by a well-placed attic window, has been “memed” as the very image of a narrow escape. But it is merely an incident in a longer sequence that begins when the roof and walls of a hospital building are whisked away like a magician’s napkin; then a much bigger house falls on Keaton, who, accepting it neutrally, grabs a tree trunk and holds tight as it flies across town and into the river. Nothing like it had ever been seen in a theatre, or even imagined in a book, so specific are its syntax and realization to moving pictures.

How are we to share these glories in 2022? Fortunately, Cohen Films has produced mint-quality restorations of all the great movies, and Peter Bogdanovich’s last work, the 2018 documentary “The Great Buster,” is a terrific anthology of highlights. Even more fortunately, those two new books, each excellent in its way, are weirdly complementary in their completeness. James Curtis’s “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life” (Knopf) is an immense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-week, account of Keaton as an artist and a man. Every detail of his life and work is here, starting with his birth, in 1895, as Curtis painstakingly clarifies which of two potential midwives attended to the matter. (Mrs. Theresa Ullrich rather than Mrs. Barbara Haen, for the record.) His perpetually touring and performing parents, Joe and Myra, had been on the road when it happened, in the one-horse town of Piqua, Kansas. Curtis takes us through the progress of the brutal comedy act that Joe Keaton raised his son to star in; things were so hard at the turn of the century that at one point Harry Houdini, with whom the three Keatons shared a show, had to pretend to be the kind of psychic he despised in order to draw the rubes into the theatre. We even hear about gags that Buster Keaton helped invent for Abbott and Costello in his later, seemingly fallow, years.

Dana Stevens, in “Camera Man” (Atria), takes an original and, in a way, more distanced approach to Keaton. In place of a standard social history of silent comedy, much less a standard biography, Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects. It’s a new kind of history, making more of overlapping horizontal “frames” than of direct chronological history, and Stevens does it extraordinarily well.

Some of these pairings, to be sure, are more graceful than others. The comedienne Mabel Normand appears for the somewhat remote reason that Chaplin refused, early in his career, to be directed by her, a fact that’s taken as an index of the misogyny that reigned in the world of silent comedy. (The truth is that Chaplin, a once-in-a-century talent, routinely bullied anyone who tried to tell him what to do.) On the other hand, a chapter on Robert Sherwood and Keaton is genuinely illuminating. Sherwood, now forgotten despite four Pulitzers and an Oscar, was one of those writers whose lives reveal more about their time than do the lives of those writers gifted enough to exist outside their time. The author of well-made, well-meaning plays advancing progressive causes—he ended up as one of F.D.R.’s chief speechwriters—he championed Keaton, notably in the pages of Life, with acute discernment, a reminder that the categories of popular culture and serious art were remarkably permeable in the twenties. Just as Hart Crane was writing poetry about Chaplin when Chaplin was still only very partly formed, Sherwood recognized Keaton’s greatness almost before it seemed completely manifest. Writing about Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton in the early twenties, he maintained that their efforts “approximate art more closely than anything else that the movies have offered.” Sherwood even wrote a feature for Keaton, which, like James Agee’s attempt at writing a movie for Chaplin, proved unmakeable. Sherwood’s script got Keaton marooned high up in a skyscraper but couldn’t find a way of getting him down. When Keaton and Sherwood saw each other in later years, Sherwood promised to get him down, but never did.

Keaton seems to have been one of those comic geniuses who, when not working, never felt entirely alive. He fulfilled the Flaubertian idea of the artist as someone whose whole existence is poured into his art: the word “dull” crops up often as people remember him. Curtis is particularly good on the early years. Joseph Frank Keaton spent his youth in his parents’ knockabout vaudeville act; by the time he was eight, it basically consisted of his father, Joe, picking him up and throwing him against the set wall. Joe would announce, “It just breaks a father’s heart to be rough,” and he’d hurl Buster—already called this because of his stoicism—across the stage. “Once, during a matinee performance,” Curtis recounts, “he innocently slammed the boy into scenery that had a brick wall directly behind it.” That “innocently” is doing a lot of work, but all this brutality certainly conveyed a basic tenet of comedy: treating raw physical acts, like a kick in the pants, in a cerebral way is funny. “I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles,” Keaton later recalled. “It was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.”

A quick mind impersonating the Slow Thinker: that was key to his comic invention. The slowness was a sign of a cautious, calculating inner life. Detachment in the face of disorder remained his touchstone. Of course, stoicism is one of the easier virtues to aspire to when your father has actually put a handle on your pants in order to ease the act of throwing you across a vaudeville proscenium, and it’s easy to see the brutality as the wound that drew the bow of art. But in this case the wound was the art; Keaton minded less the rough play than his increasingly drunken father’s refusal to let him out of the act long enough to go to school. He seems to have had exactly one day of public education.

In New York, the Keatons found themselves at war with city reformers who were evidently more passionate about keeping children off the vaudeville stage than about keeping them out of the sweatshop; arrests and court appearances ensued. After that, the family largely avoided New York, often retreating to the backwoods resort town of Muskegon, Michigan, the nearest thing young Buster ever had to a home. It was only when Joe started drinking too hard and got sloppy onstage that, in 1917, the fastidious Buster left him and went out on his own. It was the abuse of the art form that seemed to offend him.

In those days, young comedians were being swept off the stage and into the movies more or less the same way that garage bands were swept out of high-school gyms and into recording studios in the nineteen-sixties. Keaton fell in with Joseph Schenck, then a novice movie producer, who paired him with Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle in the equivalent of the John Belushi–Dan Aykroyd teaming, a “natural” comedian with a technical one. The partnership was an immediate success, starting with the two-reel short “The Butcher Boy” (1917), and was only briefly interrupted when Keaton was drafted and spent part of 1918 in France, having a good time serving in the Great War.

Keaton often credited Arbuckle with showing him how movies worked. But Schenck’s role was just as important. Anita Loos recalled him as someone who brings “forth the aroma of a special sort of smoked sturgeon that came from Barney Greengrass’s delicatessen”; and he and his brother, Nick, who later ran M-G-M, were cynosures among the generation of Russian Jews who dominated Hollywood for the next half century. Joseph Schenck was married to the film star Norma Talmadge; many dry-eyed observers thought that he was the trophy, and that Talmadge married him to keep the producer in her pocket.

Keaton’s early entry into the movies, after his almost complete isolation from a normal childhood, meant that he was really at home only within the world of his own invention. One gets the impression that he mainly lived for the choreography of movie moments, or “gags,” as they were unpretentiously called, though they were rather like Balanchine’s work, with scene and movement and story pressed together in one swoop of action. Keaton was not a reader, unlike Chaplin, who fell on Roget’s Thesaurus with the appetite of his own Tramp eating the shoe. Sex was of absent-minded importance for Keaton; his marriage to Norma Talmadge’s sister Natalie, in 1921, was apparently ceremonial and, after two children were born, celibate, at her mother’s insistence. Nor was he a family man; after they divorced, he hated losing custody of his kids, but it isn’t clear if he saw them much when he had them.

Around 1921, when false charges of rape and murder devastated Arbuckle’s career, Keaton was sympathetic, and then smoothly moved on, making solo movies. “He lives inside the camera,” as Arbuckle observed. Being anti-sentimental to the point of seeming coldhearted was at the core of his art. “In our early successes, we had to get sympathy to make any story stand up,” he said once, in a rare moment of reflection. “But the one thing that I made sure—that I didn’t ask for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me, that was up to them. I didn’t ask for it in action.” Life dished it out, and Keaton’s character just had to take it.

Critics have drawn a connection between the Arbuckle scandal and Keaton’s short comedy “Cops” (1922), made between Arbuckle’s trials, in which Keaton, having been caught accidentally tossing an anarchist bomb, is chased across Los Angeles by hundreds of police officers. This is the kind of conjecture that shows little understanding of the way that artists work, rather like the belief that Picasso’s barbed-wire portraits of Dora Maar, in the nineteen-forties, are protests against the Occupation, rather than a product of his own obsessive imagery. “Cops” is not about false accusation; it’s about the massed comic power of regimented men in motion, uniform action in every sense. Pure artists like Keaton work from their own obsessions, with editorials attached awkwardly afterward.

His first feature, no surprise, was a movie about a movie, an ambitious parody of D. W. Griffith’s legendary epic “Intolerance” (1916), in which Keaton’s sister-in-law Constance Talmadge had appeared. His “Three Ages,” seven years later, stowed together three parallel stories—one Stone Age, one Roman, and one modern—and mocked both Griffith’s cosmic ambitions and his cross-century editing scheme. The caveman comedy is the same as all caveman comedies (Keaton has a calling card inscribed on a stone, etc.), but the Roman sequences are done with even more panache than Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I.” Soon, Keaton was earning a thousand dollars a week, and becoming so rich that he, the boy who never had a home, built his wife a wildly extravagant faux Italian villa.

Dana Stevens takes up the really big question: What made Keaton’s solo work seem so modern? Just as “Cops” can be fairly called Kafkaesque in its juxtaposition of the unfairly pursued hero and the implacable faceless forces of authority, there are moments throughout “Sherlock Jr.” (1924) when Keaton achieves the Surrealist ambition to realize dreams as living action. Sequences like the one in which Keaton seems to step directly into the movie-house screen, and leaps from scene to scene within the projection in perfectly edited non sequiturs, make the Surrealist cinema of Buñuel and Maya Deren seem studied and gelatinous.

Stevens argues that Keaton’s art was informed by the same social revolutions as the European avant-garde: “The pervasive sense of anxiety and dislocation, of the need to reinvent the world from the ground up, that groups like the Surrealists or the Bloomsbury authors sought to express in images and words, the human mop-turned-filmmaker expressed in the comic movement of his body.” But Keaton also looks surreal because the Surrealists were feeding off the same sources as Keaton was, in circus and vaudeville and the music hall and stage magic. The Cubists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists all had the sense that, as bourgeois pieties had grown increasingly meaningless, the only grammar from which one could construct a credible art was that of farce. So those clowns and comic artists who held down the tradition of burlesque and nonsense comedy were, willy-nilly, the modernist’s dream brothers.

And then, in a modernist way, Keaton’s movies very often are about the movies, which was a natural outgrowth of his single-minded absorption in his chosen medium. In “Sherlock Jr.,” he plays a dreamy projectionist who falls into his own films, and in “The Cameraman” (1928) the joke is that Keaton’s character accidentally makes newsreels filled with camera tricks, double exposures, speeded-up time, and backward movement. Even that great cyclone scene in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” is meant not to provide an illusion of reality but to show off the possibilities of artifice.

Keaton’s subject, in a larger sense, is the growth of technology and the American effort to tame it. There is scarcely a classic Keaton film of the twenties that doesn’t involve his facing, with affection or respect more often than terror, one or another modern machine: the movie camera, the submarine, the open roadster. Throughout “The Navigator” (1924), he looks uncannily like Wilbur Wright in the Lartigue portrait. Keaton seems, in the combined integrity and opportunism of his persona, to explain how those alarming machines emerge from an older American culture of tinkerers and bicycle repairmen.

Keaton’s greatest work was made in the five years between “Three Ages” (1923) and “The Cameraman.” “The General” (1926), the first of Keaton’s features to enter the National Film Registry, was—surprisingly, to those who think of it as Keaton’s acknowledged masterpiece—a critical flop. A carefully plotted Civil War tale, more adventure story than comic spoof, it shared the typical fate of such passion projects: at first a baffling failure, for which everyone blames the artist, and which does him or her immense professional damage, it then gets rediscovered when the passion is all that’s evident and the financial perils of the project don’t matter anymore. Nobody questioned Keaton’s decision to make it, since the movies he had made in the same system had all been profitable. But businessmen, understandably, hate trusting artists and waiting for the product, and are always looking for an excuse to impose a discipline the artists lack. It takes only one bomb to bring the accountants down on the head of the comedian. Stevens, comparing the film to Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” writes, “The General was less a cause than a symptom of the end of a certain way of making movies. The independent production model that for ten years had allowed Buster the freedom to make exactly the movies he wanted . . . was collapsing under its own weight.” The thing that baffled its detractors (even Sherwood didn’t like it) and, at first, repelled audiences was the thing that seems to us now daring and audacious: the seamless mixture of Keaton’s comedy with its soberly realistic rendering of the period. No American movie gives such a memorable evocation of the Civil War landscape, all smoky Southern mornings and austere encampments—a real triumph of art, since it was shot in Oregon. Many of the images, like one of a short-barrelled cannon rolling alone on the railroad, put one in mind of Winslow Homer.

Two years later, in a studio sleight of hand so sneaky that Curtis spends a page and a half figuring out what the hell happened, Keaton became the subject of a baseball-style trade, in which Joe Schenck had Keaton transferred from United Artists to his brother Nick, at M-G-M. That gave M-G-M a cleanup-hitter comedian—United Artists already had Chaplin—while making sure that, post-“General,” Keaton would be more closely supervised by M-G-M’s boy genius, Irving Thalberg. Chaplin tried to warn Keaton off M-G-M. “Don’t let them do it to you, Buster,” he said. “It’s not that they haven’t smart showmen there. They have some of the country’s best. But there are too many of them, and they’ll all try to tell you how to make your comedies.” Keaton’s passivity made him reluctant to heed the warning, and off he went, Schenck to Schenck.

The mostly disastrous years that Keaton spent at M-G-M are the real subject of Stevens’s chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thalberg will always have his defenders, but once one gets past the “quality” films he sponsored, it becomes clear what a con artist he was. He sold one observer after another—including Fitzgerald, who took him as the model for his idealized “last tycoon,” Monroe Stahr—on the subtlety of his intellect, while everything he did revealed him to be the most ruthless kind of commercial-minded cynic. Thalberg robbed the Marx Brothers of their anarchy and Keaton of his elegance, turning him, as Stevens complains, into a mere stock rube figure. The Thalberg system tended to work well for an artist just once—as in both the Marxes’ and Keaton’s first films for M-G-M, “A Night at the Opera” and “The Cameraman.” But Thalberg didn’t grasp what had actually worked: the expensive style of the production, pitting the Marxes against the pomposity of opera, and placing Keaton against a full-scale location shoot in New York City. What Thalberg thought worked was schlock imposed on genius: big production numbers for the Marxes and unrequited-love rube comedy for Keaton. In many subsequent movies, at M-G-M and elsewhere, his character was named Elmer (and once even Elmer Gantry), to typify him as a backwoods yokel.

The M-G-M comedies did decently at the box office, but Keaton, an artist injured by the persistent insults to his artistic intelligence, started to drink hard, and soon the drinking drowned out that intelligence. The actress Louise Brooks recalls him driving drunk to the studio, where he silently destroyed a room full of glass bookshelves with a baseball bat. She sensed his message: “I am ruined, I am trapped.” In 1933, he was fired by Louis B. Mayer, essentially for being too smashed, on and off the set, to work. Keaton’s M-G-M experience, despite various efforts by Thalberg and others to keep his career alive as a gag writer, ruined his art. The next decades are truly painful to read about, as Keaton went in and out of hospitals and clinics, falling off the wagon and then sobering up again. His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt Kelly, recalls that “nobody really wanted to put him under control because he was a lot of fun.” What we perhaps miss, in accounts of the boozers of yore, is an adequate sense of how much fun they all thought they were having. Drunks of that period could not be shaken from the conviction that they were having a good time until they were hauled off to the hospital.

As Curtis establishes, when Keaton did dry out, by the nineteen-fifties, he had much better later years than the public image suggests. That image persists; a recent, impassioned French documentary titled “Buster Keaton: The Genius Destroyed by Hollywood” maintains that “in just a few years he went from being a worldwide star to a washed-up artist with no future.” Curtis makes it clear that this assertion is wildly exaggerated. Keaton did as well as could have been hoped. But the notion that sound killed off the silent comedians is one of those ideas which, seeming too simple to be true, are simply true. Chaplin endured because he had money and independence, but even he made only two more comedies in the thirties; Harry Langdon was ruined and Harold Lloyd kept his money and withdrew.

Keaton did have to undergo a certain amount of whatever-happened-to humiliation; he is one of Gloria Swanson’s bridge party of silent has-beens in “Sunset Boulevard.” In tribute after tribute, he was condescendingly associated with custard-pie-throwing comedies of a kind he had almost never made. But he was properly valued in France, had successful seasons at the Medrano Circus, and worked ceaselessly as a gag man, even inventing an entire routine for Lucille Ball that became part of the pilot for “I Love Lucy.”

His most famous late appearance was alongside Chaplin in “Limelight” (1952), Chaplin’s last interesting movie, in which they play two down-on-their-luck vaudevillians. Claire Bloom, who played the ingénue, recalls that, in twenty-one days of shooting, Keaton spoke to her exactly once, when showing her a tourist-type photograph of a beautiful Beverly Hills house. He told her that it had once been his home, then fell silent. This seems sad, but Curtis also evokes him watching the camerawork and helping direct Chaplin: “It’s okay, Charlie. You’re right in the center of the shot. Yeah, you’re fine, Charlie. It’s perfect.” Even when he was too frail to run or move much, as in the 1966 film “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” made a year before his death, and directed by his idolater Richard Lester, his face was a beacon not merely of endurance but of a kind of lost American integrity, the integrity of the engineer and the artisan and the old-style vaudeville performer.

Two kinds of American comedy made themselves felt in the first half of the twentieth century: the comedy of invasion and the comedy of resistance. The first was the immigrant comedy of energy, enterprise, mischief, and mayhem. The Marx Brothers are supreme here, but Chaplin, who, although an immigrant of the Cockney rather than the Cossacks-fleeing variety, could play the Jewish arrival brilliantly, and the immigrant-comedy vein runs right up to Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko, swindling the simpleton officers at the Army base. In response comes the comedy of old-American resistance to all that explosive energy, struggling to hold on to order and decency and gallantry. It’s exemplified by W. C. Fields’s efforts to sleep on his sleeping porch in “It’s a Gift,” while the neighborhood around him refuses to quiet down. The division extends even to the written humor of the period, with S. J. Perelman the cynical navigator and commercial participant in the endless ocean of American vulgarity, and James Thurber wistfully watching from Manhattan as the old values of the republic pass away in Columbus.

Keaton is the stoical hero of the comedy of resistance, the uncomplaining man of character who sees the world of order dissolving around him and endures it as best he can. (In “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” it’s the nostalgic world of the river steamboat; in “The General,” it is, for good or ill, the Old South.) Keaton’s characters have character. They never do anything remotely conniving. And the one thing Keaton never does is mug. There are moments in all his best features, in fact, that anticipate the kind of Method acting that didn’t come into fashion for another generation, as when he impassively slips to the ground beside the girl in the beginning of “The Cameraman,” registering the act of falling in love by the tiniest of increments. The best thing in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” might be a bit of acting so subtle that one wonders whether people got it at the time. Under suspicion of sexual instability—“If you say what you’re thinking I’ll strangle you!” the title card has the captain saying bluntly to a friend, after watching his son caper with his ukulele—Bill, Jr., is compelled by his father to throw away his Frenchified beret, and try on a sequence of American hats. Keaton doesn’t attempt, as Chaplin might have, to adopt a distinct persona in each hat but actually does what we do in front of a clothing-store mirror: he wears his trying-on face, testing a daring expression, sampling the aesthetic effect of each hat for the sake of his vanity while trying not to offend his father by seeming too much the hat aesthete. Somehow he is both preening and hiding. It’s an amazing moment of pure performance, and every bit as “cinematic”—showing what extreme closeups can do—as the big special-effects sequences.

“Though there is a hurricane eternally raging about him, and though he is often fully caught up in it, Keaton’s constant drift is toward the quiet at the hurricane’s eye,” the critic Walter Kerr observed of Keaton. What remains most in one’s memory after an immersion in Keaton are the quiet, uncanny shots of him in seclusion, his sensitive face registering his own inwardness. In this way, maybe there is some relevance in a Keaton revival today. Critics may invent their causes, but sometimes a good critical book, or two, can create a cause that counts. Chaplin is a theatrical master and needs a theatre to make his mark. His movies play much, much better with an audience present. Keaton can be a solitary entertainment, seen with as much delight on a computer screen as in a movie palace—rather as our taste for the great humanist sacrament of the symphony depends in some part on having open concert halls, while chamber music has whispered right throughout the pandemic. Keaton is the chamber-music master of comedy, with the counterpoint clear and unmuddied by extraneous emotion. It may be that our new claustrophobia is mirrored in his old comedy. The hospital has blown away, and that house has fallen on us all. 

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/what-made-buster-keatons-comedy-so-modern-biography-james-curtis-dana-stevens

Let us all unite!

10 Enduring Facts About Charlie Chaplin

Best known for his tragicomic character «The Little Tramp,» Charlie Chaplin revolutionized cinema, both during the silent era and the talkies. Almost a century later, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Kid, and The Great Dictator are still considered essential cinematic works. His writing, producing, directing, acting, and scoring of his own films received just as much attention as his controversial personal life. The London-born Chaplin had a penchant for marrying teenage women, and ended up fathering 11 children. Though his outspoken political views would eventually force him out of America for good in 1952, Chaplin’s Hollywood legacy still burns brightly. Here are 10 facts about the legendary filmmaker, who was born on this day in 1889.

1. HE COLLABORATED WITH A FEMALE FILMMAKER (WHICH WAS A RARITY IN THOSE DAYS).

Mabel Normand was a silent film actress as well as a writer, producer, and director—which was unusual for the mid-1900s. She starred in 12 films with Charlie Chaplin, including 1914’s Mabel’s Strange Predicament, which marked the onscreen debut of Chaplin’s The Tramp character (though Mabel’s Strange Predicament was filmed first and technically was his first Tramp appearance, it was released two days after Kid Auto Races at Venice, the actual film debut of the character). She also directed Chaplin in 1914’s Caught in a Cabaret and the pair co-directed and starred in Her Friend the Bandit, which was released the same year.

2. HE CO-FOUNDED A BIG-TIME MOVIE STUDIO.

In 1919, Chaplin and fellow filmmakers Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists as a means to finance their own movies so that they could retain creative control. The first film released under the new studio was 1919’s His Majesty, the American, starring Fairbanks. The studio took off and eventually branched out to build a chain of movie theaters. But in 1955, with movie attendance at a new low, Chaplin sold his shares. UA released the first James Bond movie in 1963. Today, MGM is UA’s parent company.

3. HE COMPOSED THE MUSIC FOR MANY OF HIS FILMS.

Beginning with 1931’s City Lights, Chaplin composed scores for his films’ soundtracks. His song “Smile,” used in Modern Times, became a classic. In 1954, Nat King Cole’s version—now with lyrics—peaked at number 10 on the Billboard charts. Michael Jackson also recorded a cover. Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar in 1973 for composing the theme to his 1952 film Limelight(the film wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972).

4. HE WAS A PERFECTIONIST.

There was a reason Chaplin did everything himself: perfectionism. When he worked on his short film The Immigrant, Chaplin shot 40,000 feet of film, which was a lot for a 20-minute short. Chaplin cast actress Virginia Cherrill in City Lights to say just two words, “Flower, sir,” but he forced her to repeat them for 342 takes. “He knew exactly what he wanted and he would have preferred not to have any other actors in his films—he even tried making a film once where he was the only person in it,” Hooman Mehran, author of Chaplin’s Limelight and the Music Hall Tradition, told CNN.

5. HE WAS EMBROILED IN A NASTY—AND GROUNDBREAKING—PATERNITY SUIT.

In the 1940s, actress Joan Berry was allegedly having an affair with Chaplin. At one point, he invited Berry to travel from L.A. to New York City. While in New York, she spent time with Chaplin and claimed that the director “made her available to other individuals for immoral purposes.” This violated the Mann Act, in which a person isn’t allowed to cross state lines for depraved behavior.

When, in 1943, Berry gave birth to a daughter, she stated that Chaplin was the father—a charge he adamantly denied. Though blood tests confirmed that Chaplin was not the father, because the tests weren’t admissible in California courts, he had to endure two separate trials. Despite the blood evidence saying otherwise, the jury concluded that Chaplin was the father. Not only was his reputation ruined, but he also had to pay child support. On the bright side, the ruling helped reform state paternity laws.

6. HE ACCEPTED HIS 1972 HONORARY OSCAR IN PERSON.

In 1952, because of his alleged Communist politics, the U.S. denied Chaplin re-entry to the United States after he traveled to London for the premiere of his film Limelight. Incensed, he moved his family to Switzerland and vowed he’d never return to Hollywood. But 20 years later, possibly to make up for his exile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored the 82-year-old Chaplin with an honorary Oscar (his second of three). Chaplin attended the ceremony and received an enthusiastic standing ovation. When he finally spoke, he said, “Thank you for the honor of inviting me here. You’re all wonderful, sweet people.”

7. A RUSSIAN NAMED A MINOR PLANET AFTER HIM.

In 1981, Russian astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina, who has discovered more than 100 minor planets, named one of them after the legendary director: 3623 Chaplin.

8. THERE’S AN ANNUAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN FILM FESTIVAL.

In the 1960s, Chaplin and his family enjoyed spending summers in the village of Waterville, located on the Ring of Kerry in Ireland. In 2011 the town founded the Charlie Chaplin Comedy Film Festival, which is held each August. (A bronze statue of him resides in town.) The festival features a short film competition with categories like Chaplins of the Future. Last year the fest tried to break the Guinness World Record of the largest gathering of people dressed as Chaplin.

9. HIS FORMER HOME IN SWITZERLAND WAS CONVERTED INTO A MUSEUM.

On April 16, 2016—what would’ve been his 127th birthday—Chaplin’s World, a museum dedicated to the filmmaker’s life and work, opened in his former home in Switzerland. The museum has welcomed around 300,000 visitors in its first year. Visitors can see his home, the Manoir de Ban, at Corsier-sur-Vevey, by Lake Geneva. The estate also houses a studio where his movies are screened, wax figures, recreations of some of his film set pieces, and a restaurant named The Tramp.

10. THIEVES GRAVE-ROBBED CHAPLIN’S BODY AND HELD IT FOR RANSOM.

Even in death, Chaplin created controversy. Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977 and was interred near his home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. Almost three months after his death, on March 2, 1978, his widow, Oona Chaplin, received a call from the police saying, “somebody dug up the grave and he’s gone,” Eugene Chaplin told The Independent.

The thieves demanded $600,000 to return the body. Oona tapped the phone lines, which led authorities to the two men, Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev. They confessed to the crime and showed the police Chaplin’s body, which they buried in a cornfield near his original gravesite. The men went to jail, but not before writing “I’m sorry” letters to Oona, who forgave them.

Source: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94491/10-enduring-facts-about-charlie-chaplin

The Great Dictator: The film that dared to laugh at Hitler

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It’s hardly surprising that Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was banned in Germany, and in every country occupied by Germany, in 1940. A film that mocked Adolf Hitler was never going to be the Nazi High Command’s first choice of Friday night entertainment. The more surprising thing, from today’s perspective, is that Chaplin was warned that it might not be shown in Britain or the US, either. Britain’s appeasement policy kept going until March 1939, and the US didn’t enter World War Two until December 1941, a year after The Great Dictator was released, so when Chaplin was scripting and shooting the film – his first proper talkie – colleagues at the studio he co-owned were afraid that no government would let it be seen.

«I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists,» he wrote in his autobiography. «They had been advised… that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring it would never be shown in England or America.»

But Chaplin wouldn’t be dissuaded. He knew that The Great Dictator was worth making, and, sure enough, it was a box office smash: 1941’s second biggest hit in the US. On the 80th anniversary of the film’s release, Chaplin’s prescience is even more startling. The Great Dictator is a masterpiece that isn’t just a delightful comedy and a grim agitprop drama, but a spookily accurate insight into Hitler’s psychology. «He was a visionary,» said Costa-Gavras, the Greek-French doyen of political cinema, in a making-of documentary. «He saw the future while the leaders of the world couldn’t see it, and remained on Hitler’s side.»

What’s even more remarkable is that Chaplin didn’t just capture Hitler, but every dictator who has followed in his goose steps. «It resonated at the time, and it continues to resonate,» says Simon Louvish, the author of Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey. If you want to see a crystalline reflection of the 21st Century’s despots, you’ll find it in a film that came out 80 years ago.

A serious message

By the time Chaplin made The Great Dictator, he had long despised the Nazis, and vice versa. A German propaganda film denounced him as one of «the foreign Jews who come to Germany» – never mind that he wasn’t Jewish – while the US press nicknamed him «The 20th-Century Moses» because he funded the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees. When he started work on the film initially titled «The Dictator», he was «a man on a mission», says Louvish. «Some of his contemporaries, like Laurel and Hardy, just wanted to make funny movies and make money. But Chaplin was very serious about what he wanted to say. The Great Dictator wasn’t just a film. It really was something that was required.»

Still, Chaplin was motivated by more than humanitarianism. He was also fascinated by his uncanny connections to Hitler, who was born in the same week as he was in April 1889. A comic song about the Führer, recorded by Tommy Handley in 1939, was entitled «Who Is That Man…? (Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin)». An editorial in The Spectator magazine, marking the men’s 50th birthdays, explored the theme in more depth: «Providence was in an ironical mood when… it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other… The date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr Chaplin) they wear might have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius. For genius each of them undeniably possesses. Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the ‘little man’ in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.»

It was Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British producer, who suggested that Chaplin should capitalise on the similarity, but it was obvious that an entire film of the former «Little Tramp» as a frothing tyrant would be too much for audiences to take, and so Chaplin opted to play two roles. He would be Adenoid Hynkel, the autocratic ruler of Tomainia, and he would be a humble, amnesiac, unnamed «Jewish Barber». An opening caption announces: «Any Resemblance Between Hynkel the Dictator and the Jewish Barber is Purely Co-Incidental.»

Inevitably, this coincidental resemblance results in the two men being mistaken for one another, but not until the film’s climax. The Barber is hustled onto a stage where his doppelganger was due to make a speech, and Chaplin delivers a sincere five-minute plea for decency and brotherhood that either spoils the film (in the view of the Pulitzer-winning critic Roger Ebert) or elevates it further still: «More than machinery, we need humanity! More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness!» For most of the running time, though, Chaplin cuts between the two characters’ separate storylines, so that we can never forget either the victims of Nazi persecution or the man responsible for it. In the ghetto, the gentle Barber romances a defiant washerwoman, Hannah, who is played by Chaplin’s wife at the time, Paulette Godard. (The scene in which Storm Troopers pelt Hannah with the tomatoes they have just stolen from a grocer’s shop is the most infuriating portrait of cowardly bullying imaginable.) Meanwhile, in his palace, Hynkel – aka the Phooey rather than the Führer – frets about how to outmanoeuvre his Mussolini-like rival, Benzino Napaloni.

Both strands are so bold that they make most big-screen satire seem feeble in comparison. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, which came out in 1942, the word «Jew» is never spoken. Chaplin isn’t so coy. Central to the ghetto scenes is the fact that «Jew» has been daubed on all of the windows in capital letters. When the Barber tries to wipe off the paint, he is chased by Storm Troopers in sequences that recall Buster Keaton dodging crowds of policemen in Cops. But in this case, one such sequence concludes with the Storm Troopers throwing a noose around the Barber’s neck and hanging him from a lamp post. He is saved at the last second, but still, the speed with which Chaplin flips between slapstick and horror is breathtaking. It’s also worth noting that the Storm Troopers don’t have German accents – or even upper-crust English accents, as so many Nazis would in later Hollywood films. Most of them sound American.

In Hynkel’s palace, the comedy is lighter and more farcical. Chaplin sketches a caricature of European political shenanigans in the zany tradition of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. (Jack Oakie’s Napaloni is the kind of hearty Italian wise guy played by Chico Marx.) The dictator’s crimes aren’t ignored: on a whim, Hynkel orders 3000 protesters to be executed. But Chaplin concentrates on the character’s vanity, stupidity and childishness. In one throwaway visual gag, the towering filing cabinet behind his desk is shown to have no drawers at all, but several concealed mirrors instead. When Napaloni pays a state visit from the neighbouring country of Bacteria, the two men compete to have the higher chair while they are being shaved, and to have the more flattering position when they are being photographed.

The message is that Hynkel is not a brilliant strategist or a mighty leader. He is an overgrown adolescent – as demonstrated in the sublime set piece in which he dances with an inflatable globe, dreaming of being «emperor of the world». He is an insecure buffoon who bluffs, cheats, obsesses over his public image, manhandles his secretaries, revels in the luxury of his extravagant quarters, and reverses his own key policies in order to buy himself more time in power. «To me, the funniest thing in the world is to ridicule impostors,» wrote Chaplin in his autobiography, «and it would be hard to find a bigger impostor than Hitler.»

Hynkel’s anti-Semitic rants (consisting of cod-German punctuated by shouts of «Juden») are terrifying, but there is no conviction behind them, just a desperate need to distract the Tomainians from his economic failures. As his urbane sidekick and Goebbels substitute, Garbitsch (Henry Daniell), says: «Violence against the Jews might take the public’s mind off its stomach.»

The film has been accused of trivialising Nazi atrocities. Chaplin himself said, in his autobiography, «Had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.» But he isn’t just making fun of Hitler – as Mel Brooks did in The Producers in 1967 – he is making an astute point about the fragile egos of male world leaders.

Think of today’s dictators and would-be dictators, in any country, and you can spot all the juvenile qualities that Chaplin identified: the fetish for photo opportunities, the lavish lifestyles, the policy flip-flops and the crackpot schemes, the self-aggrandising parades and the chests full of medals: Billy Gilbert’s Herring, ie. Göring, has so many medals pinned to his uniform that Hynkel has to turn him sideways to find room for the latest addition. Hitler was at the peak of his power when The Great Dictator was being made, but Chaplin had already recognised that, as with every subsequent dictator, his villainy was bound up with his immaturity.

According to biographer Jürgen Trimborn, much of the film was inspired by a screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s pro-Hitler documentary, Triumph of the Will, at the New York Museum of Modern Art. While other viewers were appalled, Chaplin roared with laughter at the ridiculous spectacle. This attitude sustained him when he was urged to abandon The Great Dictator. «I was determined to go ahead,» he wrote in his autobiography, «for Hitler must be laughed at.»

Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210204-the-great-dictator-the-film-that-dared-to-laugh-at-hitler

What Charlie Chaplin Got Right About Satirizing Hitler

The Great Dictator—Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler—began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France. The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air—this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home.

It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler—even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movie stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies; feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as «a disgusting Jewish acrobat.» Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. But he was frequently rumored to be. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany—hence their hatred.

Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie’s two central roles. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country.

The Great Dictator is a classic for a reason. It’s startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it’s renowned as well as for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the melange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.

The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feel like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?) and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but nor is it so simple as a funhouse treatment of the coming war, all punchline and distortion.

It’s all a bit richer than that, which might be why The Great Dictator is on my mind this week, as we greet the release of Taiki Waititi’sJojo Rabbit, a movie in which Waititi himself plays Adolf Hitler, not quite in the flesh, but rather as imagined by a little Nazi boy who’s fashioned him into an imaginary friend. I’m not crazy about Waititi’s movie, which is less a satire than a vehicle for unchallenged moral goodness in the face of only barely-confronted evil. But it does, like Chaplin’s film, nosedive into the same problems of representation and comedy that have plagued movies since early in Hitler’s reign. Should we satirize genocidal maniacs? Can we laugh at that? And if so, can the line we usually toe between comedic pleasure and moral outrage—a mix that comes easily to comedy, in the best of cases—withstand something so inconceivable a mass atrocity?

That Chaplin’s movie succeeds where Waititi’s fails is a fair enough point, but comparing most comedians’ work to Chaplin’s more often than not results in an unfair fight. What matters are the things we can all still learn from Chaplin’s work, down to the fact that it so completely and unabashedly honors and toys with the public’s sense of who he is. This wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a movie if the Jewish barber hadn’t so readily recalled the Little Tramp. But because of this familiarity, The Great Dictator feels much the way movies like Modern Times did: like a story about the travails of an every-man who’s suddenly, with no preparation, launched headlong into machinery too great, too complex, too utterly beyond him, for it not to result in comic hi-jinks.

That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. He sees «Jew» written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there, and starts to wash it away. This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked «Ghetto,» where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him.

The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet—at times almost literally—of alliances and petty tasks. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. You can’t help but laugh. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realize that this is precisely what a dictator wants. It’s a guileless and child-like vision, from his perspective, of his own power.

The Great Dictator’s famous climax finds these two men merging, somewhat, into one. It’s a rousing speech ostensibly delivered by the Jewish barber, who (for reasons best left to the movie to explain) has been confused for Hynkel by the Nazis and is called upon to speak to the masses. And then he opens his mouth—and the man that emerges is Chaplin himself, creeping beyond the boundaries of character, satire, or even the artificial construct of a «movie,» as such.

The speech makes a case for humanity in the face of grave evil. «We think too much and feel too little,» Chaplin says. «More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.» You’ll recognize this theme—»more than machinery we need humanity»—throughout Chaplin’s work, and it rings especially true here. Chaplin emerges, fully human, as himself, breaking free of the film’s satirical trappings, to deliver one from the heart.

It’s a scene that plays well on its own, as a standalone speech. For a long while, it was hard to find a version online that hadn’t been modified with dramatic «movie speech» music by way of Hans Zimmer. Youtube comments imply a recent upswing in activity, of people finding the speech anew in the Trump era, and that makes sense. But the scene plays even more strangely, more powerfully, in context, where it’s less easily lent to meme-able political messaging, where it has to brush up against everything else in the movie that’s come before.

It’s startling, frankly. The Great Dictator’s tone to this point never feels so earnest. How could it, what with its balletic Hitler and its foreign dictatorships with names like Bacteria. From the vantage of 1940, Chaplin couldn’t quite see where the war would take us, and it remains the case that some of the film plays oddly—but all the more insightfully for it—today. What’s clear from its final moments, to say nothing of much of the rest, is the power in this tension. Insofar as it can sense but not see the future, you could say that The Great Dictator is a film made in a cloud of relative ignorance. Yet look at how much it says, how far it goes. It makes it hard to make excuses for films made since, which often have the benefit of hindsight yet little of substance to say about what they see in the rear view. We know more, much more, about Hitler today than we did in 1940. Why should we let anyone get away with saying less?

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/satirzing-hitler-charlie-chaplin-great-dictator

The Final Speech from The Great Dictator

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Final speech from The Great Dictator Copyright © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved

Source: https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-the-final-speech-from-the-great-dictator-

Survive!

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

eBook of The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

Is Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis Based On A True Story?

It might be a work of fiction, but real-life events and survival stories inspired the Tom Hanks survival drama Cast Away – so, is Cast Away a true story adaptation? While it may not be inspired by one particular individual, the film is based on many real-life experiences. The movie was written by William Boyles Jr., and directed by Back To The Future‘s Robert Zemeckis. It follows a FedEx executive, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), after he’s stranded on a deserted island in the middle of the South Pacific by a plane crash. Isolated for four years, Noland struggles to survive and stay sane, with his only company being Wilson, a volleyball that was part of the plane’s cargo that has a face painted using Noland’s own bloody handprint.

Noland braved the elements and managed to survive for years, eventually being able to return home. While researching and writing the script for Cast Away, Broyles consulted professional survival experts before taking the significant step of deliberately isolating himself on an island in the Gulf of California, intending to put himself in the shoes of his main character. Broyles’ experiences on the island informed many of the critical moments portrayed in Cast Away.

Broyles discussed his time in isolation and how it later inspired the screenplay in an interview with The Austin Chronicle. Broyles speared and ate stingrays on the island, drank coconut juice, built a tent out of bamboo and palm leaves, and struggled to make his own fire. Recalling his loneliness during his days on the island, Broyles explained how the experience gave him an understanding of “what it means to be truly alone.” When Broyles found a deserted volleyball on the beach one day, he named it Wilson, which served as inspiration for Noland’s only friend during his four years on the island. While the experiences were forged from reality, is Cast Away a true story in the wider narrative sense?

Is Cast Away Based On A True Story?

Cast Away was initially inspired by Robinson Crusoe, and Elvis actor Tom Hanks had the idea to do a modern-day version of Daniel Defoe’s classic adventure story. Hanks told The Hollywood Reporter that he was inspired by a news article about FedEx. “I realized that 747s filled with packages fly across the Pacific three times a day,” said Hanks. He wondered, “what happens if (the plane) goes down?” This question sparked the idea that would evolve into Cast Away. Like Defoe’s historical fiction, Cast Away was inspired by the lives of real-world explorers. Alexander Selkirk is thought to have been the biggest inspiration behind Defoe’s novel, and he was a Scottish castaway who spent four years on a Pacific island in the early 1700s. After being rescued by an English expedition in 1709, Edward Cooke, who was part of the rescue team, wrote about Selkirk in his book, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World.

So, technically speaking, is Cast Away a true story? Sort of. A range of other real-life castaways inspired some of literature’s most famous stories, including Spanish sailor Pedro Serrano, who was reportedly shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Nicaragua in the first half of the 16th century. Ada Blackjack was another, sometimes referred to as a «female Crusoe» – she was a seamstress who became stranded on an island near Siberia in 1921 but was only rescued two years later. These explorers and others like them helped to inspire Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland and his experiences in his island location in Cast Away.

Source: https://screenrant.com/cast-away-movie-true-story-real-inspirations-explained/

Is Cast Away a true story? The real-life tales of survival that inspired the Tom Hanks movie

What is Cast Away about?

Tom Hanks stars in the movie as a FedEx worker Chuck Noland, who washes up on a desert island after his plane crash lands.

As he adapts to life alone in the uninhabited spot, he uses what he has around him to stay alive for the next four years.

Key moments include him turning a volleyball into a “friend” he calls Wilson, which becomes the only thing Hanks’ character can talk to.

While the film is primarily centred on Hanks, whose performance won him a Golden Globe award, other cast members include Helen Hunt, Paul Sanchez and Nick Searcy.

It was directed by Robert Zemeckis.

How did the film’s makers research Cast Away?

In the creation of the film, screenwriter William Broyles Jr spent a few days alone on an isolated beach near Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, to get an idea of what it was like.

According to reports in The Austin Chronicle from 2000, the experience taught Broyles more about what it really means to be lonely.

“I realized it wasn’t just a physical challenge. It was going to be an emotional, spiritual one as well,” he told the publication

While there, he made himself find his own food, water, which included breaking open coconuts and eating speared stingrays, and building shelter made of bamboo and palm leaves.

It was during this time, that he also came up with the idea for Wilson the volleyball companion, as a ball washed up on the beach he was staying on and he began to talk to it. The name was Wilson was simply the brand of the ball.

Is is based on a true story?

While the exact story of Cast Away is not thought to be a true story, there are several real-life accounts of people who spent time on uninhabited lands that may have provided inspiration.

Among the most famous is the story of Alexander Selkirk, who is known by some as a real-life Robinson Crusoe, inspiring the Daniel Defoe novel.

Selkirk travelled around the South Pacific in the early 1700s, taking part in buccaneering pursuits.

He chose to be left on the uninhabited Juan Fernández archipelago near Chile, as he feared the ship he had travelled on was too dangerous to continue the journey.

He took a few items with him from the ship, including a knife, bedding and a Bible, and was left to hunt for his own food which included lobsters and feral goats.

The story goes, that he was forced from the shores of the island further inland after masses of sea lions came to the beaches for mating season.

It was not an easy existence, and his time on the deserted land was full of loneliness and remorse, as well as physical challenges such as attacks from rats – though feral cats proved useful in keeping the rodents at bay.

He built huts out of materials he found on the islands, made his own clothes from animal skins and chased prey.

He was eventually rescued in 1709, four years after his arrival, when a ship came by and took him aboard.

He later spent more time at sea, continuing his privateering voyages and returned to London for some time, where his story became well known.

Accounts of Selkirk’s experiences were later published in newspaper articles of the times and in books by his former shipmate Edward Cooke and the leader of the expedition on the ship that had rescued him, Woodes Rogers.

What other real life castaways were there?

There were several more real life castaways over the years, some of whom had ended up in isolation by force, and others of their own accord.

They include Ada Blackjack who was stranded on Wrangel Island near Siberia in 1921 after a mission aboard a ship where she was a seamstress, went wrong.

Unlike Tom Hanks in the film, she was left trying to survive in cold climates, with just a cat who had been aboard the ship for company.

The animals in the area included seals, arctic foxes and polar bears, which would have been all she had to hunt after rations from the ship ran out.

She was eventually rescued in 1923 and became known in some accounts as the female Robinson Crusoe.

Another castaway was a French woman Marguerite de La Rocque, who in 1542 was made to stay on an island near Quebec, Île des Démons, after her uncle caught her sleeping with a man aboard their ship and left them both on the uninhabited land.

According to The Mirror, their time on the island was not a happy one, as while there, the young woman became pregnant but both her child and her partner died.

She was eventually rescued by a boat and returned to France, after roughly two years.

Other people who experienced life as castaways in various ways and may have provided some inspiration for the film, include Tom Neale, a New Zealand bushcraft and survival enthusiast who spent much of his life in the Cook Islands, and a total of 16 years – in three sessions – living alone on the island of Anchorage in the Suwarrow atoll, which was the basis of his popular autobiography An Island To Oneself; Leendert Hasenbosch who was an employee of the Dutch East India Company marooned on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean as a punishment for sodomy and Narcisse Pelletier, born in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the Vendée who was a French sailor. Pelletier was abandoned in 1858 at the age of 14 on the Cape York Peninsula, in Australia, during the dry season.

Source: https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/cast-away-true-story-real-life-tales-survival-inspiration-tom-hanks-movie-netflix-944044

Robinson Crusoe by Jules Ahoi

Robinson Crusoe by Jules Ahoi

Golden leaves falling from the trees
Covering the streets
I’m walking with my restless feet
Empty seats, fancy deficiency
There’s so much I need

Fucking wish to being overseas
Wish your head is lying on my knees
Remembering a summer breeze
Fucking wish to being overseas
Wish your head is lying on my knees
Like it used to be

And then I dream about
Being Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last
And our love will last
And then I dream about
Being Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last
And our love will last
And our love will last

Like the storms and the spray of the sea
Like the roots of the highest trees
Like apologies and it will grow
Like the strongest of all the seeds
And it will feed our mouth
And breath in a summer breeze
Our hearts in a steady beat ‘Cause how could I sleep
While the storm chops down all the trees
Tell me, what are you doing to me?
Tell me, what are you doing to me?

And then I dream about
Being Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last
And our love will last
And then I dream about
Being Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last
And our love will last
And our love will last

Like Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last
And our love will last
And then I dream about
Being Robinson Crusoe
I hide away on my single raft
And then I dream about
It will be exactly the same thing that you do
And we could stay on a lonely island
As long as our love will last

Message in a Bottle by The Police

Message in a Bottle by The Police

ust a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah

Message in a bottle, yeah

A year has passed since I wrote my note
I should have known this right from the start
Only hope can keep me together
Love can mend your life
Or love can break your heart

I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah

Message in a bottle, yeah
Oh, message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah

Walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I’m not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home

I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my

I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, oh
Message in a bottle, yeah

Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
Sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S

I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S

I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S

Elementary!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Doctor Behind The Detective

Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in English literature, was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was a chronic alcoholic, while his mother, Mary, passed her gift for storytelling to her son.  Arthur recalled his mother’s habit of “sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper” as she reached the climax of a tale.  Her stories overshadowed the hardships of a home with little money and an erratic father.  “In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all,” Arthur said, “the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.”

Any innocence that was salvaged from that childhood ended during Arthur’s early education.  Beginning at age nine, wealthier Doyle family members paid his way through the Jesuit boarding school Hodder Place, where he spent seven unhappy years in Stonyhurst, England, plagued by bigotry in academic subjects and the brutal corporal punishment common to such schools of the period.  His only relief came in corresponding with his mother and practicing sports, mainly cricket, at which he excelled.  He also discovered his own aptitude for storytelling during these years, drawing upon his innate sense of humor to delight younger students, who would crowd around to listen.

After graduating in 1876, Arthur returned to Scotland, determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps.  “Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard, for I was wild, full blooded and a trifle reckless.  But the situation called for energy and application so that one was bound to try to meet it.  My mother had been so splendid that I could not fail her,” he wrote years later.  The first necessary action was to co-sign the committal papers of his father, who was by then seriously demented, to a lunatic asylum.

Aside from Charles, the Doyle family held a prominent position in the world of art, and it would have been natural for Arthur to have immediately carried on in that tradition.  But he chose medicine instead, attending the University of Edinburgh to complete his training.  At the university he met several fellow students who would later become major British authors, including James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson.  But the man with the greatest influence over seventeen-year-old Arthur was a teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, who ultimately inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes.  One can clearly see the qualities Arthur most admired in Dr. Bell in the detective.  “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” he wrote the doctor. “…[R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”

Holmes would not appear for several years, but it was during medical school that Arthur began to write short stories.  The first piece, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, was reminiscent of his favorite authors, Edgar Alan Poe and Bret Harte, and was accepted for publication in Chamber’s Journal, an Edinburgh magazine.  The next story, The American Tale, was published the same year in London Society.  “It was in this year,” he wrote later, “that I first learned that shillings might be earned in other ways than by filling phials.”

At the age of twenty and in his third year of medical school, Arthur boarded the whaling boat Hope as the ship’s surgeon, traveling to the shores of Greenland for the crew’s seal and whale hunts.  “I went on board the whaler a big straggling youth. I came off a powerful well-grown man,” he reflected. The trip had “awakened the soul of a born wanderer.”  He returned to school in 1880, and while he struggled with his medical studies after his Arctic adventure, he nevertheless completed his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree a year later, officially becoming Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.

The new doctor opened his first private practice in Portsmouth.  Although it is said he only had £10 to his name when he began, by the end of three years he was starting to make a living for himself.  In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins, a “gentle and amiable” young woman.  In the midst of his medical practice and new marriage, he also spent time developing his writing career.  In 1886 he began A Tangled Skein, a novel featuring characters named Sheridan Hope and Ormond Stacker.  When it was published two years later in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, he had changed the title to A Study in Scarlet and now introduced readers to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.

Sherlock Holmes quickly became world famous, and so began a dichotomy in Conan Doyle’s life. He struggled between the commercial success of the Holmes stories and his preference for writing historical novels, poems, and plays, which he believed would bring him recognition as a serious author.  Another disparity arose between Conan Doyle’s brilliant use of logic and deduction, on one hand, and his fascination with the paranormal and spiritualism, a practice to which he became devoted later in life, on the other.

By the late 1880s, Conan Doyle was better known in the United States than in England.  But in 1889 the publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia came to London to create a British edition of the magazine.  He arranged a dinner with Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde.  The two writers got along famously. (“It was indeed a golden evening for me,” Conan Doyle wrote), and the publisher commissioned a short novel from Conan Doyle, which was published in 1890 in both England and the U.S.  This story, The Sign of Four, played a significant role in elevating the profile of Sherlock Holmes and his creator in literary history.

In order to write The Sign of the Four, however, the young author had to put aside an historical novel on which he had been working, The White Company.  As this was the type of literature he most enjoyed writing, he felt he would never find as much satisfaction in or accomplishment in the Holmes series.  “I was young and full of the first joy of life and action,” he remarked about writing The White Company, “and I think I got some of it into my pages.  When I wrote the last line, I remember that I cried: ‘Well, I’ll never beat that’ and threw the inky pen at the opposite wall.”

After a brief move to Austria, Conan Doyle relocated to London, opening an ophthalmology practice in Upper Wimpole Street.  Lacking any patients, however, he had plenty of time to contemplate the next step in his career.  He decided to write a series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes.  It turned out to be the most profitable decision of his life.  His agent made a deal with The Strand Magazine to publish the stories, and the visual likeness of Holmes was immortalized by illustrator Sidney Paget, who used his brother Walter as a model.  The artistic collaboration between Conan Doyle and Paget would last for many decades, branding both the persona and the image of Sherlock Holmes worldwide.

Conan Doyle’s medical career came to an end after a near-death bout of influenza in 1891, which helped to clarify his priorities.  “With a rush of joy” he chose to step away from his medical career.  “I remember in my delight taking the handkerchief which lay upon the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation,” he recalled.  “I should at last be my own master.”

Being his own master, however, involved making artistic choices that did not always meet with public approval.  Conan Doyle felt burdened by Sherlock Holmes.  In November 1891 he wrote to his mother,

“I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all.  He takes my mind from better things.”  In December 1893 he did the deed, killing off Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem by sending the detective and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, plummeting to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls.  The author was now free of the character that had eclipsed what he considered his better work.  But his mother had warned him, “You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly,” and indeed, twenty thousand readers expressed their disapproval by cancelling their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine.

The Hound of Baskervilles, serialized in The Strand Magazine beginning in 1901, was inspired by a stay on the Devonshire moors in southwest England.  The real-life Fox Tor Mires were supposedly the inspiration for the novel’s great Grimpen Mire, the prison at Dartmoor contributed to the idea of an escaped convict – Slasher Seldon – on the loose, and folklore lent the spectral hound to the story.  At some point, however, Conan Doyle realized his tale lacked a hero.  He’s quoted as having said, “Why should I invent such a character, when I already have him in the form of Sherlock Holmes?”  Since he had killed off Sherlock in The Final Problem, he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles as if it was a previously untold Holmes caper.  In subsequent Holmes stories Conan Doyle brought the detective back, explaining that he had not actually died along with Professor Moriarty but had arranged to be temporarily “dead” to evade his other dangerous enemies.

In his personal life, Conan Doyle was dealing with weighty issues.  Louisa had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the 1890s.  The prognosis was dire, but Conan Doyle was able to nurse her years beyond her doctors’ expectations.  He also, however, fell in love with another woman during that time.  When Louisa died in his arms in 1906, he had been involved in a clandestine, although platonic, courtship with Jean Elizabeth Leckie for nine years.  Conan Doyle fought a deep depression for several months after Louisa’s death, but roused himself by helping to exonerate a young man who had been accused of vicious crimes that the former doctor realized the man wasn’t capable of committing.  The next year, Jean Leckie became Lady Conan Doyle.

The young man was the first of several individuals on whose behalf Conan Doyle intervened in the courts.  He was deeply committed to justice and public service and used his instincts and training to further those causes.  Turned down for military service in both the Boer War and World War I due to his age, he nevertheless volunteered as a medical doctor in South Africa during the Boer War.  In 1902 he was knighted by King Edward VII for his service to the Crown.   He also twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, earning respectable votes but neither time winning the election.

Conan Doyle had five children – a daughter and a son with Louisa and two sons and a daughter with Jean – and lost five men in his family – his first son, brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews – in World War I.  After his marriage to Jean, the pace of his writing subsided considerably.  He did, however, give playwriting further attention.  1912’s The Speckled Band, was based on a well-known Holmes story.  It proved both a critical and commercial success on the stage, unlike some of his earlier plays.  Before too long, though, Conan Doyle decided to retire from theatrical work, “Not because it doesn’t interest me, but because it interests me too much.”

He may be best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger series, which began with The Lost World in 1912, was also highly successful and made a profound mark on the as-yet-unnamed “science fiction” genre. Increasingly, the celebrated author retreated into this world of science fiction, and also into spiritualism. He and his family traveled to three continents on psychic crusades.  He spent over £250,000 on his religious pursuits and wrote primarily about spiritualism for a period, until the financial toll drove him back to writing fiction.  First came three more Professor Challenger books, followed by a compilation of Sherlock Holmes adventures in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927.

Near the end of his life, Conan Doyle was diagnosed with angina pectoris, commonly caused by coronary heart disease.  Pushing himself to the end, he took one final psychic tour of northern Europe in late 1929, after which he was bedridden for the rest of his days.  He died on July 7, 1930, surrounded by his family, whispering his last words to Jean: “You are wonderful.”  The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, reads, “Steel True/Blade Straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician & Man of Letters.”  A statue honors him in Crowborough, East Sussex, England.  And back in Edinburgh, close to the house in which the beloved writer was born, stands a statue of Sherlock Holmes.

Source: https://www.centralsquaretheater.org/read-watch-listen/news-articles-multimedia/sir-arthur-conan-doyle-doctor-behind-detective/

11 Fascinating Facts About Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes, led a robust life worthy of the pages of his fiction. He embarked on daring journeys to the Arctic and the Alps, investigated crimes and—though his most famous character is the paragon of rational thinking—staunchly believed in fairies and spirits. Here are 11 facts about this fascinating, complicated author.

1. Arthur Conan Doyle grew up in poverty.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859, Conan Doyle was the second of seven surviving children. His father, the artist Charles Doyle, struggled with alcoholism and even stole from his children’s money boxes to fund his addiction. The family’s finances were chronically strained: “We lived in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography. Charles was ultimately committed to an asylum due to his erratic behavior [PDF].

Throughout this domestic turbulence, the author’s mother, Mary Foley Doyle, was a stabilizing force. Conan Doyle credited her with kindling his imagination and flair for storytelling. «In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories which she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life,” he recalled. “I am sure, looking back, that it was in attempting to emulate these stories of my childhood that I first began weaving dreams myself.»

2. Arthur Conan Doyle trained as a medical doctor.

When he was 17 years old, Conan Doyle began his studies at the University of Edinburgh’s medical school, graduating with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees in 1881. Four years later, he completed his thesis on tabes dorsalis, a degenerative neurological disease, and earned his M.D. He later traveled to Vienna to study ophthalmology [PDF].

Conan Doyle established a medical practice in the English city of Portsmouth, where he also wrote his first two Sherlock Holmes novels: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. Holmes was based in part on one of his professors at medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, known for his ability to deduce facts about his patients through close observation.

In 1891, Conan Doyle relocated to London to work as an ophthalmologist. The venture was not a resounding success; he would later joke that his rented offices had two waiting rooms: “I waited in the consulting room, and no one waited in the waiting room.” But that left Conan Doyle with ample time to devote to his budding literary career. He soon gave up medicine in favor of writing—a decision that he called “one of the great moments of exultation” in his life.

3. Arthur Conan Doyle traveled to the Arctic on a whaling expedition.

While in the midst of his medical studies, Conan Doyle accepted a position as a ship’s surgeon on a whaler headed to the Arctic Circle. A hardy young man with an adventurous spirit, he joined his shipmates in hunting seals, not at all deterred by his lack of experience on the ice and frequent tumbles into the freezing waters. Conan Doyle did have some qualms about the slaughter, writing that “those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the ice fields … did seem a horrible intrusion.” Nevertheless, he found the journey—particularly the whale hunts—exhilarating. “No man who has not experienced it,” Conan Doyle opined, “can imagine the intense excitement of whale fishing.”

4. Arthur Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock Holmes.

The popularity of Sherlock Holmes skyrocketed after Conan Doyle struck a deal with the Strand Magazine to publish a series of short stories featuring the mastermind detective. Readers would line up at newsagents on the days that new issues dropped, and Conan Doyle eventually became one of the highest-paid writers of his day. But he grew exasperated by the public’s love for Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle also wrote historical novels, plays, and poetry, and he felt that his detective fiction overshadowed these other, more serious works. “I have had such an overdose of [Holmes] that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day,» the author quipped.

In the 1893 story “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, sending him plunging to his death over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Fans were devastated; more than 20,000 of them canceled their subscriptions to the Strand in protest. Conan Doyle did not publish another Holmes story for eight years, ending his strike with The Hound of the Baskervilles, which takes place before Holmes’s death. In 1903, prompted by a tremendous offer from British and American publishers, Conan Doyle decided to resurrect his much-loved sleuth. Over the course of his career, he featured Holmes in 56 stories and four novels—now known to fans as the “Canon.”

5. Arthur Conan Doyle helped popularize Switzerland as a skiing destination.

In 1893, Conan Doyle’s first wife, Louisa, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The couple decided to head to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, hoping that the crisp, clear air would be beneficial to Louisa. Her health did improve, for a time, and Conan Doyle decided to take up skiing, a Norwegian sport that was new to Switzerland and virtually unknown in Britain. He wrote a humorous article in the Strand about his attempts to master skiing and his daring journey over the Furka Pass, which soars 8000 feet above sea level. The article was republished multiple times and drew attention to the Swiss Alps as a skiing destination. Today, a plaque in Davos honors Conan Doyle for “bringing this new sport and the attractions of the Swiss Alps in winter to the world.”

6. Arthur Conan Doyle believed it was possible to communicate with the dead.

Conan Doyle began exploring mystical ideas about spirits and the afterlife as a young doctor. In later life, he became one of the world’s most prominent advocates of Spiritualism, a movement rooted in the belief that the souls of the dead can communicate with the living, usually through a medium. Spiritualism took root in Britain during the Victorian era and continued to flourish in the years after WWI, when many families were eager to connect with lost loved ones. Conan Doyle’s own brother and son died during the influenza pandemic that swept the world in the wake of the Great War, and the author believed that they reached out to him during séances.

He wrote books on Spiritualism, debated the subject with skeptics and traveled the world delivering lectures on the Spiritualist cause, which he described as the “most important thing in the world, and the particular thing which the human race in its present state of development needs more than anything else.”

7. Arthur Conan Doyle also believed in fairies.

In 1920, a pair of startling photographs came to Conan Doyle’s attention. The images appeared to show two schoolgirls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, posing with fairies by a stream in the English village of Cottingley. After conducting what he believed to be a thorough investigation, Conan Doyle became convinced that the photographs were genuine, and wrote two articles and a book on the “Cottingley Fairies.” With a renowned author championing them, the photos became a sensation. Conan Doyle was widely ridiculed by those who believed the images were fake, but he remained steadfast; he hoped that the photographs would propel an incredulous public to “admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life” and, by extension, to accept the “spiritual message” that he worked tirelessly to promote.

In 1983, Wright and Griffiths finally confessed that the photographs were a hoax. The “fairies” were simply paper cutouts, copied from a children’s book, and propped up with hat pins. They had only meant to trick their parents; Wright later said that she and Griffiths were too embarrassed to admit the truth once their story was believed by the famous Conan Doyle.

8. Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle had a fraught friendship.

Conan Doyle met Harry Houdini in 1920, while the famed magician was visiting England. They bonded over Spiritualism; Houdini, though fairly certain that mediums were tricksters and frauds, was at that time willing to be convinced otherwise. For his part, Conan Doyle believed that Houdini possessed psychic powers.

When Conan Doyle traveled to America in 1922, the friends met up in Atlantic City. Houdini agreed to participate in a séance with Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean, who claimed she could channel the spirits of the dead. But Houdini quickly came to suspect that the séance was a sham. Jean filled multiple pages with automatic writing that she said came from Houdini’s deceased mother—though his mother could barely speak English. Houdini also found it curious that Jean’s automatic writing included the sign of a cross, considering that his mother was Jewish. The episode caused a rift between the friends, and they argued both privately and publicly over the legitimacy of medium cases.

9. Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted for his support of the Boer War.

Fueled by a sense of patriotism after the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Conan Doyle traveled to Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1900 to volunteer as a doctor in a field hospital. There he encountered a grim scene; Bloemfontein was in the grips of a typhoid epidemic, the hospital was overwhelmed with sick and dying patients, and sanitary conditions were abysmal [PDF]. But his conviction in the war did not flag, even as the conflict dragged on, became increasingly brutal, and began to lose support in Britain and beyond. Indignant over reports of British atrocities, Conan Doyle published a pamphlet defending his country’s actions in South Africa. He was knighted by King Edward VII in 1902, largely in honor of this influential work.

10. Arthur Conan Doyle came to the defense of two wrongfully accused men.

In 1903, a solicitor named George Edalji was found guilty of mutilating a horse and writing a series of menacing anonymous letters in a rural parish. The evidence against him was unconvincing—the letters had been sent to his own family, for one thing—and three years later he was released from prison, without a pardon. Edalji wrote to Conan Doyle, hoping the creator of Sherlock Holmes would help clear his name. Conan Doyle visited the scene of the crimes, met with Edalji, and was certain of his innocence.

He noted, among other things, that Edalji was so near-sighted that it would have been impossible for him to sneak across the countryside, attacking livestock in the dead of night. And he recognized that racial prejudice was likely at play; Edalji, whose father was of Parsee origin, “must assuredly have [seemed] a very queer man to the eyes of an English village,” the author wrote in an article arguing that Edalji had been wrongfully accused. Conan Doyle also sent a barrage of letters to the chief constable in charge of the case, proffering new evidence and theories of other suspects. Edalji was ultimately pardoned, but was not given financial compensation for the miscarriage of justice against him.

Conan Doyle also campaigned on behalf of Oscar Slater, a German-Jewish bookmaker who was convicted of murdering a wealthy woman in Glasgow. Though Slater had an alibi, police homed in on him as the culprit, and it would later emerge that key evidence was withheld during the trial. Conan Doyle was a vocal participant in the campaign advocating for Slater’s release from prison; in 1912, he published The Case of Oscar Slater, which highlighted grave flaws in the investigation and prosecution. His plea failed to sway the authorities, but Conan Doyle continued to pressure politicians and even pay for Slater’s legal fees. Slater was set free in 1927, having served more than 18 years in prison.

11. Family members celebrated at Arthur Conan Doyle’s funeral.

Conan Doyle died of a heart attack on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71. Three hundred people attended the funeral at his country home, and the atmosphere was uplifting, rather than somber. The mourners did not wear black and the blinds of the house were not drawn. “We know that it is only the natural body that we are committing to the ground,” his wife Jean told friends. On July 13, thousands of people packed into the Royal Albert Hall in London for a memorial service. During the ceremony, Estelle Roberts, one of Conan Doyle’s favorite mediums, gazed at a chair reserved for the writer and proclaimed: “He is here.”

Source: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/648500/arthur-conan-doyle-facts

Sherlock Holmes

eBook The complete Sherlock Holmes

Run, Run, Run

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER
by Alan Sillitoe, 1959

«The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,» by Alan Sillitoe, was first published in 1959. It is a first-person monologue spoken by a 17-year-old inmate of an English Borstal, or reform school. Smith, the only name this character receives, has received a two-year prison sentence for breaking into a local bakery, but he has discovered a way to improve the conditions of his stay in jail. The warden of the reformatory has his heart set on the winning of the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long-Distance Cross-Country Running (All England), and Smith, the fastest runner in the institution, needs to do nothing but train for the race. He can trade his daily chores for the mitigated freedom of early morning runs in the countryside around the reformatory.

Yet things are not quite as simple as they seem, and the nature of the monologue, crude and colloquial in language and tone, underlines the tremendous class distinction between what the narrator Smith terms the «in-laws» and the «out-laws.» People like the warden and his cronies speak Oxford English and support and perpetuate the system, while the residents of the Borstal are denizens of the working class who have nothing to lose. It might seem that Smith would have little choice or desire not to play along with the powers that be, but during his stay in prison he has developed his own personal and idiosyncratic sense of morality. For him, to win the race would be tacitly to accept the premises of a self-serving establishment, and his own sense of defiance and self-worth can only be maintained by his individual conception of honesty. As he says, «It’s a good life, I’m saying to myself, if you don’t give in to coppers and Borstal-bosses and the rest of them bastard faced in-laws.»

While it might appear that Sillitoe is simply delineating a social and economic struggle between the classes in postwar England, the situation is much more complicated. In Smith’s world of the underclass there is no such thing as solidarity and brotherhood. In a series of flashbacks that illuminate his early life and the robbery that got him into his immediate trouble, we find that he has always been alone. Smith and his pal Mike are clever enough to hide their loot so that the police will not catch on to two teenagers who have suddenly become relatively wealthy, but the boys are even more wary of their own neighbors, who will turn them in out of spite and jealousy. Loyalty is something that simply does not exist in these circumstances, and trust is a silly idea for fools. In the end a person can be true only to himself, a self that can make mistakes but will never let him down. Loneliness becomes a natural condition. As Smith says, «I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world.»

Smith’s experience with his family bears out his conclusions, for his father died a horrible death of stomach cancer after a lifetime of slaving in a factory, while his mother was constantly unfaithful to her husband. The death benefit of 500 pounds is quickly spent on clothes, cream cakes, a television set, and a new mattress for his mother and her «fancyman,» and things are immediately back where they began. Thievery is all the boy knows, and even the army can provide no outlet. As far as Smith is concerned, patriotism is another false idea concocted by the government to protect its own advantage, and life in the army is little different from life in prison. In declaring himself a robber and an outlaw, Smith is at least acknowledging the state of warfare that exists between people like him and the people in power, landowners and the politicians who look like fish gasping for breath when the sound is suddenly turned down in the middle of their speeches on television.

Powerless as he may be in an England that views him as only another cog in the economic machine that grinds out more comfort for the rich, Smith seizes on the moment to shake his fist in the faces of the «in-laws» as he turns toward home in the Borstal race. Though he is far ahead of his nearest competitor, he slows down and then stops before the finish line, allowing his rival enough time to catch up and to win the race. Smith’s gesture is meaningless to everyone but himself: «The governor at Borstal proved me right; he didn’t respect my honesty at all; not that I expected him to, or tried to explain it to him, but if he’s supposed to be educated then he should have more or less twigged it.» But, if nothing else, the long-distance runner has remained true to himself; he has not been duped into believing the false promises that would only enslave him even further. There is virtually no hope of social change in the bleak universe that Sillitoe has created, but there does remain comfort in the affirmation of the individual human spirit that will not be broken. If truth and honesty can exist anywhere, Sillitoe asserts, they survive in the ability to look squarely at oneself in the face of all the odds. Paradoxically, honesty may reside in recognizing and accepting the dishonesty of contemporary existence.

eBook The Longliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (movie)

Chariots of Fire (1981)

Chariots of Fire is a British film released in 1981. Written by Colin Welland and directed by Hugh Hudson, it is based on the true story of British athletes preparing for and competing in the 1924 Summer Olympics. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture.

Synopsis

The movie is based on the true story of two British athletes competing in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. Englishman Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), who is Jewish, overcomes anti-Semitism and class prejudice in order to compete against the «Flying Scotsman», Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), in the 100-meter race.

In 1919, Abrahams enters Cambridge University. He attempts and succeeds at the Trinity Great Court run, which involves running around the court before the clock finishes striking 12. Meanwhile, Liddell sees running as a way of glorifying God before traveling to China to work as a missionary. He represents Scotland against Ireland, and preaches a sermon on «Life as a race» afterwards.

At their first meeting, Liddell shakes Abrahams’ hand to wish him well, then beats him in a race. Abrahams takes it badly, but Sam Mussabini (Ian Holm), a professional trainer that he had approached earlier, offers to take him on to improve his technique. However, this attracts criticism from the college authorities.

Eric’s sister Jenny (Cheryl Campbell) worries he is too busy running to concern himself with their mission, but Eric tells her he feels inspired: «I believe that God made me for a purpose… (the mission), but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.»

Despite pressure from the Prince of Wales and the British Olympic committee, Liddell refuses to run a heat of the 100 meters at the Olympics because his Christian convictions prevent him from running on Sunday. Liddell is allowed to compete in the 400-meter race instead. Liddell at church on Sunday is seen quoting Isaiah 40, verse 31: ‘But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and be not weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.’

The story compares the similar athletic experiences of Abrahams and Liddell while portraying their vastly different characters and reactions to adversity. High accomplishment comes to those with high aspirations, high energy and the capacity for great effort. But the central motivation and ultimate results of their accomplishment depend on their character and personality. This is a true story about two very different British athletes who accomplish at the highest level in their field, yet are driven to these achievements by very different motives along very different paths.

Cambridge Champion

Englishman Harold Abrahams is the son of a wealthy Jewish financier in London. Highly sensitive to the anti-Semitic sentiments of the British upper class, he is determined to prove his worth and acceptability in everything he does. A runner of remarkable ability, in 1919 he enters Cambridge University and promptly completes a running feat which no one has been able to accomplish for 700 year. Abrahams’ passionate aspiration is to win a gold medal in the 100 meters at the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris.

While at Cambridge, Abrahams meets a lovely young singer Sybil Gordon and they soon fall in love. To her he confesses his heart’s turmoil. He has gone through life with a sense of helplessness, anger and humiliation because of the second-class treatment rendered to him as a Jew. To him running is a means of seeking revenge and conquering the social opposition. “I am going to take them on one by one and run them off their feet.” He strives to fit in and prove himself a loyal and capable Englishman. “So you love running?” Sybil asks him. “I am an addict. It’s more of a weapon. It’s a competition. You win because you are ruthless. … A weapon against being Jewish, I suppose. I’m semi-deprived. They lead me to water but won’t let me drink.”

Flying Scotsman

Eric Liddell is the son of deeply religious Scottish missionaries, born and raised along with his sister Jennie in China and recently returned to Europe. Eric is a born runner with tremendous speed and a natural love of the sport who becomes widely known as the «Flying Scotsman.» Committed to a missionary’s life like his parents, Eric is requested by his church leader to dedicate his remarkable athletic ability to the service of god. “Run in God’s name” and let the whole world know it is God’s inspiration that makes you a champion. He too is destined for the Paris Olympics for the glory for God.

The first time Abrahams sees Liddell run he is bedazzled. Eric collides with another runner, falls down during a 400-meter contest between Scotland and France and appears to be out of the race. Then miraculously he gets up, starts running again, makes up a 20-meter deficit and wins the race. This indicates just how great is the unexpressed human energy which can be released in the right circumstances. It took the accidental fall to bring out the true greatness of Eric’s potential. “I’ve never seen such commitment and drive in a runner,” Abrahams remarks. Even more remarkable is the obvious joy with which Liddell runs. He tells Jennie, “I believe god made me for a purpose – China. He also made me fast. When I’m running I feel his pleasure, not just fun. To win is to honor him.”

Contest

The amateur spirit of the Olympics is still respected in Europe and professionalism is shunned. But times are changing. Sam Mussabini, a brilliant professional running coach, is looking for talent to shape. Abrahams approaches Sam and tries to hire him as a personal coach. Sam replies that it is customary for the coach to choose a worthy student, not vice versa. Abrahams is willing to break the rules in order to accomplish. Sam knows that social rules may be broken, but there are rules for accomplishment that cannot. At their first meeting, Liddell shakes Abrahams’ hand to wish him well, then beats him. Abrahams is crushed by the defeat and cries out to Sybil. “I don’t run to take beatings. I run to win. If I can’t win I won’t run. Now what do I stand for?” After the race, Sam contacts Abrahams and offers to train him for the Olympics, assuring Harold that he can improve enough to match Eric. Even though the university authorities frown on his hiring a coach, Abrahams persists.

Conflict

On the boat sailing across the Channel to France, Liddell is informed that the preliminary heat for the 100 meters is to be run on a Sunday. He informs the British team leader that his religion prevents him from running on that day and he will have to forgo the race. “If I win, I win for God. To win on Sunday would be against God’s law.” Once in Paris, the team leader informs the rest of the British Olympic committee, which includes the crown prince, and they call Liddell and press him to relent. When he adamantly refuses, life responds and unexpectedly presents a solution. Lord Lindsay, another member of team who has just won a silver medal in another event, offers his place in the 400 meters to Liddell. Another member of the Committee explains how fortunate it is that they did not try to force Liddell to violate his conscience. He is “a true man of principle and a true athlete. His speed is a mere extension of his life, its force. We sought to separate his running from himself. For him it is God before King.” Whatever the mind fervently believes in – whether higher ideal or mere superstition – has the power to evoke a response from life. The power of Eric’s belief is equal to the power of all those of his community who share that belief.

Olympics

Abrahams faces Americans in the 100-meter final who are touted to include the fastest men on earth. He has already lost two races to the same competitors. Before the race he confesses to Sam, “I am 24 and I have never known contentment. I’m ever in pursuit and I don’t know what I’m chasing. I’ve known the fear of losing. Now I’m almost too frightened to win.” Abrahams goes on to win the event and emerge with the title of fastest man on earth. After the race he and Sam celebrate in private their shared personal accomplishment. He lived for another 54 years and was considered the grand icon of British athletics. Eric races in the 400 meter against equally tough competitors and wins his race as well. He mixes with the crowds in jubilant celebration. After the Olympics, he returned to China where he died during World War II.

Accomplishment

Who accomplished what and how? Driven by a complex and a fervent aspiration to win a respectable place in English society, Abrahams has achieved the greatest title in amateur athletics. The drive for social acceptability is a very powerful motive. He has leveraged the energy of that drive for achievement. He ran in the name of his country and under the banner of patriotism, but really he ran for himself. For him running was a labor in a life and death struggle for acceptance and respectability. It is doubtful whether even this remarkable accomplishment gave him the peace and fulfillment he was seeking. Liddell ran in the name of God and for the joy of self-giving to his God. His very act of running was a self-fulfilling joy. One believes in his concept of God and service, the other in his own inner potential. Both accomplish on the basis of their beliefs.

Source: https://humanscience.fandom.com/wiki/Chariots_of_Fire

The Real Life Inspiration Behind Forrest Gump (eBook ) – Forrest Gump (movie)

«Forrest Gump» famously inserted Tom Hanks into old archival footage, interweaving moments from real U.S. history with the fictional story of his character: A simple yet sincere man, sharing homespun wisdom on a park bench to different strangers while recounting the story of his ever-so-charmed life.

Director Robert Zemeckis and ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) employed digital compositing and other groundbreaking visual effects to give Forrest’s tale a true-to-life veneer. Thanks to the wonders of CGI they were able to rewrite history cinematically, having Forrest intersect with presidents and pivotal moments in American culture across three decades. 

The film won six Oscars and is endlessly quotable — but what you might not know is that the character of Forrest Gump was loosely inspired by three real men.

Sammy Lee Davis was the inspiration for Forrest’s war wound

As «Forrest Gump» was celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2019, USA Today spotlighted Sammy Lee Davis, a decorated Vietnam veteran, as one real-life inspiration for the character. Nicknamed «the real Forrest Gump,» Davis was at the film’s anniversary screening on the National Mall in Washington, DC. President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1968, and he’s at least famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

You can see footage of the Medal of Honor ceremony in «Forrest Gump» — though of course, it’s Hanks who shakes Johnson’s hand. Like Forrest Gump, Davis was shot in the buttocks and elsewhere in his back over thirty times, by friendly fire. The moment where Forrest shows the President his butt wound was invented for the film.

Winston Groom dedicated his novel to two other men

Screenwriter Eric Roth adapted Winston Groom’s novel, «Forrest Gump,» for the big screen. Groom, who passed away in 2020, dedicated the book to Jimbo Meador (pictured above) and George Radcliff, two of his childhood friends. Both men are private individuals, but Distractify notes that their «speech patterns are similar to Forrest’s.» Hanks originally sought to downplay Gump’s Southern accent but Zemeckis coached him to keep it and adhere to the source material.

The Bubba Gump Seafood Company is now a real restaurant chain, but it started out as a fictional business endeavor launched by Forrest and Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise). The idea for that stemmed from conversations that Groom had with Meador — appropriately, at lunch. He explained to Distractify:

«Although he never did any shrimp farming, [Meador] was always interested in it, and we used to talk about it a lot. Jimbo knows everything there is to know about shrimp. We used to have lunch about once a week, and it occurred to me after one of these conversations while I was writing Forrest, ‘What better thing to do than make Forrest a shrimp farmer?’ «

Meador also owned a river delta boat and had a seafood processing job, much like Forrest does in the movie. He reportedly shunned the public spotlight after he started getting copious interview requests from the likes of David Letterman.

The same goes for Radcliff, who only consented to an interview with Mobile Bay Magazine because the writer was someone he had known for a long time beforehand. Radcliff appears to have wholly or partly inspired the felicitous nature of Forrest’s journey through history. He once beat Paul McCartney at arm-wrestling, for instance, without knowing who «that little drunk English guy» was.

What’s interesting about Radcliff is that he was a scrapper, meaning he liked to fight. This might be part of what Groom meant when he told The New York Times that Zemeckis sanded the «rough edges» off his book character. He originally wanted John Goodman to play the role of Forrest Gump. That would have been a very different movie.

At the end of the day, «Forrest Gump» is still cut from a fictional cloth, but art does imitate life. To do a mad-lib bit of paraphrasing with Forrest himself, «[Movies are] like a box of [inspirations].»

Source: https://www.slashfilm.com/604990/the-real-life-inspiration-behind-forrest-gump/?utm_campaign=clip

Los Top One de la T.I.A.

Francisco Ibáñez, maestro del humor

Corrían los primeros días del año 1958 cuando vieron la luz, en las páginas de la revista Pulgarcito, dos estrambóticos personajes: un detective con un atuendo a lo Sherlock Holmes y su ayudante, un hombre larguirucho vestido de negro. Eran la versión primitiva de Mortadelo y Filemón, dos de los más queridos personajes del humor español a lo largo de más de 60 años.

Su creador, Francisco Ibáñez, llevaba ya unos años dedicándose al tebeo; palabra castiza que él afirma preferir en lugar de “cómic” y que remite a la longeva revista española TBO. Nacido el 15 de marzo de 1936 en Barcelona, desde pequeño fue un amante de las historietas y a los once años ya publicó algunas para la revista infantil Chicos. En 1952 empezó a compaginar su trabajo como botones en el Banco Español de Crédito con la publicación de historietas para diversas revistas y suplementos de periódicos barceloneses.

Tal fue su éxito que al cabo de pocos años ya ganaba más con sus publicaciones que con su trabajo en el banco, por lo que se volcó completamente en el dibujo. Aunque en sus primeros tiempos Ibáñez trabajó para diversas revistas, en 1958 empezó a dibujar en exclusiva para la editorial Bruguera, una prolífica relación que duraría casi 30 años y que terminaría en un agrio divorcio cuando en 1985 la casa se quedó con los derechos de publicación de sus personajes.

La gran familia de Ibáñez

Antes de su partida, sin embargo, daría vida en las revistas de esta editorial a sus personajes más famosos: el cegato Rompetechos, el botones Sacarino -inspirado en su propia experiencia en esta profesión y en el cómic belga Spirou-, los “chapuzas” Pepe Gotera y Otilio, los habitantes del loco bloque de pisos situado en el número 13 de la Rue del Percebe y, por supuesto, los que se convirtieron en sus “hijos” más famosos: Mortadelo y Filemón.

Fue en las páginas de la revista Pulgarcito cuando aparecieron por primera vez, aunque por aquel entonces se trataba de historietas cortas y los personajes aún no estaban del todo definidos. Pero a partir de 1969, con la publicación del álbum El sulfato atómico, las historias se hicieron más largas y los protagonistas adquirieron su característico aspecto y personalidad: Mortadelo torpe, despistado y un as de los disfraces; su “jefe” Filemón, más prudente pero víctima de las desgracias ocasionadas por la torpeza del primero; y un estrambótico elenco de secundarios como el Super -superintendente de la T.I.A., una agencia de inteligencia-, que siempre les envía a las misiones más impensables, o el loco profesor Bacterio, cuyos inventos siempre traen problemas.

Mortadelo y Filemón es de lejos la creación más exitosa de Ibáñez, a la que todavía se dedica en la actualidad, tras recuperar sus derechos en 1988 gracias a un acuerdo con Ediciones B, heredera de los títulos de Bruguera. Un éxito que no solo hay que atribuir a su humor y personajes, sino también a la capacidad de su autor por sacar temas de los eventos de la actualidad española y mundial. A lo largo de sus 63 años de vida Mortadelo y Filemón han participado en los mundiales de fútbol, en las Olimpíadas, en la Guerra Fría y en el nacimiento de la Unión Europea, entre otras aventuras; y políticos, artistas, personajes históricos e incluso el propio autor han sido parodiados en sus páginas.

A día de hoy, los torpes agentes secretos de la T.I.A. suman más de 200 aventuras y siguen con la misma vitalidad que en sus inicios, a pesar de todas las desdichas por las que han pasado. Su fama ha tendido a eclipsar al resto de la familia Ibáñez, aunque sus historias han seguido reeditándose a lo largo de los años. Mención especial merece 13, Rue del Percebe por su original concepto, que nos invita a cotillear en la intimidad de los vecinos de un bloque de pisos.

A punto de cumplir 85 años y con más de 100 millones de álbumes vendidos, Francisco Ibáñez se ha convertido en uno de los historietistas españoles más prolíficos y reconocidos. Ha obtenido diversos reconocimientos, como la Medalla de Oro al mérito en las Bellas Artes en 2001, y su nombre ha sido propuesto como candidato al Premio Princesa de Asturias en las categorías de Artes o de Letras. A lo largo de casi 70 años de carrera profesional, ha sido tan prolífico como cualquier escritor y sus historias pueden considerarse a menudo un espejo de las bondades y miserias de la sociedad española: un espejo satírico y con un humor gamberro que no pasa de moda, pues como dice el autor, la vida sin humor “sencillamente no sería vida”.

Fuente: https://historia.nationalgeographic.com.es/a/francisco-ibanez-maestro-humor_16188

Ibáñez, el rey del tebeo

El padre de Mortadelo y Filemón ha dibujado unas 50.000 páginas de esta pareja de cómic que ha marcado a varias generaciones de españoles. Su obra es también una especie de crónica de un país teñida de ficción y realidad a partes iguales. Hoy sigue empuñando el rotulador, asegura, porque siente el cariño de la gente. Visitamos en su guarida a un veterano mago del humor.

Francisco Ibáñez lleva 56 de sus 78 años dando vida a Mortadelo y Filemón, de los que calcula que habrá dibujado unas 50.000 páginas. Así que cuando uno pulsa el timbre y espera a que le abran la puerta en este bloque corriente y moliente de un barrio corriente y moliente de Barcelona, no puede pensar en otras cosas que las relacionadas con el estajanovismo, la producción en cadena y las laboriosas hormigas. Lo primero que ve el visitante son unas gafas; detrás de ellas, un señor simpático, socarrón y vehemente, y detrás de él, estanterías reventadas de tebeos. Ah, y la mesa. La mesa de dibujo. La mesa de dibujo inclinada, junto a la ventana, poblada de plumillas, lápices, bolígrafos, trozos de papel y –aunque no se vean– mundos extraños y pobres diablos protagonistas de cosas que somos todos: la emoción, la tristeza, la impotencia, el dolor y el fulgor, gama/disparate.

Por ahí pululan, por este saloncito años setenta donde pasa sus tardes Francisco Ibáñez, los disfraces de Mortadelo y los mamporros de Filemón. Mortadelo, trasunto en viñetas de la vertiente picaresca de la vida, cruce de caminos entre el Quijote, el Lazarillo y el expolicía Torrente. Filemón, retrato matemático, cruel, de cierto españolito de cuando entonces, que sigue siendo el de ahora, animoso, resignado, victimista y con mala uva. Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información, paridos por la mano de Ibáñez en 1958 en el número 1.394 de la revista Pulgarcito, historieta hecha leyenda o, como tituló Antoni Guiral de forma certera su fantástico libro sobre la escuela Bruguera (1945-1963), Cuando los cómics se llamaban tebeos.

Francisco Ibáñez sigue ahí, asomado a la mesa, al dulce potro de tortura, dando a la imprenta páginas y más páginas y álbumes y más álbumes, el último de ellos Mortadelo y Filemón contra Jimmy el cachondo, versión papel de la película del mismo título dirigida por Javier Fesser y recientemente estrenada con el éxito de público que se le auguraba (la tercera, tras La gran historia de Mortadelo y Filemón, del propio Fesser, y Mortadelo y Filemón: misión, salvar la tierra, de Miguel Bardem). ¿Por qué seguir después de 56 años?

–¿Es que, si lo dejara, se aburriría?

–Pues… sí, desde luego a este paso parece que voy a acabar yo antes que los personajes, ¿no? No sé, hay momentos que ya… no sé, uno está cansado, y dices, ¿y para qué?, pero claro, entonces vuelves a ver que la cosa le gusta a la gente y entonces sigues.

Se llama la irresistible inercia del éxito popular, o quién sabe, la irresistible inercia a secas.

Bien lo sabe el padre de Mortadelo, y de Pepe Gotera, y del botones Sacarino, y de 13, Rue del Percebe, y sobre todo de Rompetechos –“mi favorito”, deja caer Ibáñez sin vacilar–, exponente supremo del eterno tebeo español, ese fenómeno de masas que balbucea a mediados de los cincuenta en cabeceras como La Risa o Paseo Infantil, que eclosiona y estalla en los primeros sesenta de la mano de los hermanos Francisco y Pantaleón Bruguera (el uno, republicano; el otro, franquista, ambos empresarios de corte paternalista y absolutamente seguros de lo que perseguían: edificar un imperio y aplastar a la competencia en el sector del tebeo) y que desemboca en el mismísimo hoy: Barcelona, 2014, Ibáñez dibujando, a punto de cumplir 79 años, a Jimmy el Cachondo, el profesor Bacterio, el Súper, Ofelia y nuestros inefables agentes secretos de la T.I.A.

En tiempos no ya de perenne metamorfosis sino de progresiva derrota de lo tangencial y lo analógico a manos de lo virtual y lo digital, bien puede decirse que nada o prácticamente nada ha cambiado para Francisco Ibáñez Talavera (Barcelona, 1936). Sus lapiceros, sus hojas de papel, sus tintas, su imaginación… Nada ha sido fácil en una vida dedicada a construir mundos imaginarios a golpe de viñeta: “Ahí sigo, igual que siempre, bueno, igual no, porque con el paso del tiempo… Mira, en la profesión mía, hacer cinco páginas a la semana es lo normal. Hacer 10 es una heroicidad. Hacer 15 ya es increíble. Y yo durante muchos años hice 20 páginas a la semana. De día, de noche, fines de semana, sin vacaciones, nada, nada, a dibujar todo el rato. La verdad es que en aquellos tiempos la editorial Bruguera nos tenía bastante esclavizados. Era sencillo: querían producir y producir, y producir masivamente, y así reventaban el mercado, reventaban la competencia, que no podía seguir aquel ritmo”.

Ha evitado, hasta donde ha sido posible, figurar en primera línea de fuego en la promoción de la película de Javier Fesser, “se lo ha tenido que comer casi todo el Fesser, el pobre”, comenta no sin que una risilla asome en sus ojos de niño grande. Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información (a los que en un principio iba a llamar Mister Cloro y Mister Yesca, agencia detectivesca, o Lentejo y Fideíno, detectives finos) son importantes, pero aún lo es más la familia y la salud. Alerta roja. Y así son hoy las mañanas de Ibáñez: “Por la mañana salgo un rato a pasear, por prescripción facultativa más que nada, porque me dijo el médico que estaba jodidillo y que eso de quedarme quieto todo el día en casa que no podía ser. Así que me puse con el deporte. Me apunté a una piscina de esas de barrio y oye, me hacía 40 piscinas, pero era aburridísimo. El caso es que cuando ya me creía un Mark Spitz, un día, en la calle de al lado, vi cómo una chiquita se hacía cuatro largos en el tiempo en que yo me hacía uno. Me desanimé y lo dejé. Y ahora salgo a caminar, tres cuartos de hora más o menos, y bien”.

Sin tontos registros de nostalgia, pero con mucho respeto y mucho cariño hacia una época y los nombres y apellidos que la habitaron (sus compañeros en Bruguera, Escobar, Peñarroya, Cifré, Vázquez, Raf…), aquel antiguo empleado del Banco Español de Crédito reconvertido en dibujante de chistes para gran cabreo y preocupación de su padre recuerda la vida de entonces. “A las ocho o nueve de la mañana ya me llamaban los de la editorial: ‘¡Ibáñez! ¿Cómo van esas páginas?’. Y cuando las tenía acabadas, pues nada, me metía la carpeta debajo del brazo y me acercaba a entregarlas, un poco como la modista que va a entregar el vestido que ha hecho durante la semana; me pagaban el trabajo de la semana anterior y listos. A veces aprovechaba para comer o tomar algo con algún otro compañero del trabajo que estuviera por allí y luego, hala, vuelta a casa, a volver a sentarte en el taburete y a seguir dibujando”.

–Es increíble el ritmo que llevó durante aquellos años sesenta y setenta, y es increíble que siga trabajando con esa intensidad. ¿No se sintió Francisco Ibáñez explotado, algo así como una vaca lechera a la que le exprimen las ubres sin descanso, o como la gallina de los huevos de oro a la que no se deja descansar?

–En Bruguera así fue, claramente, pero nunca me quejé, nunca dije que me estaban explotando, yo seguía allí sencillamente porque quería. Eso sí, Bruguera siempre se negó a que los autores tuviéramos los derechos de nuestros personajes, se negó en redondo. Los dueños pusieron cláusulas en los contratos que decían que aquellos personajes eran “herramientas de trabajo en poder de la editorial, que pagaba por ello a sus autores”. O sea, que nosotros no teníamos derecho absolutamente a nada. Te decían: “Oiga, Ibáñez, aquí se trata de producir, ¿eh?, y si no lo hace usted, pues lo hará otro, ya sabe”.

Era un tiempo en el que centenares de miles de niños españoles acometían, sin saberlo, su primera iniciación a la lectura desde las páginas de aquellas revistillas que costaban cinco pesetas, que se llamaban Tio Vivo, DDT, Pulgarcito o Din Dan, y que alcanzaban tiradas de 350.000 ejemplares… semanales. Luego vendrían Mortadelo Especial, Mortadelo Gigante, Súper Mortadelo…, había que estrujar a la gallina de los huevos de oro. Otros personajes de autores rivales, como Zipi y Zape, Anacleto, agente secreto, Las hermanas Gilda, Carpanta o Sir Tim O’Theo también triunfaban…, pero la comparación con Mortadelo y Filemón era inviable. Una era, definitivamente, ida. “Todo eso acabó, los tebeos han desaparecido. Hubo un tiempo en el que en los quioscos veías decenas de colecciones. En la historieta realista estaban El Capitán Relámpago, El Capitán Tormenta, El Capitán Trueno… ¡Cada fenómeno atmosférico tenía su propio capitán en forma de tebeo! Y en la cosa cómica, el Pulgarcito, el DDT, el Tio Vivo, el Din Dan, había una cantidad tremenda de títulos y personajes. Hoy no hay nada. Ha desaparecido todo. Sólo han quedado las revistas esas, ¿cómo les llaman? Románticas. De autores de tebeos sólo quedamos Jan, que hace el Superlópez, y yo. Pero de mi época, sólo yo, claro, no queda nadie, coño. Me he quedado solo. Es un poco triste”.

–Bueno, yo no diría que es el último superviviente de los tebeos clásicos; usted es más que eso, es el último superviviente de toda una época y de toda una forma de cultura popular. Usted hizo reír al franquismo, al antifranquismo, al tardofranquismo, al posfranquismo, a la Transición, a la democracia…

–¡Je, je, je! Sí, es un poco así, sí. Y la verdad es que guardo buenos recuerdos de aquellos primeros años, a pesar del franquismo; coño, hoy mucha gente dice: “Qué horror, qué mal está todo”. Pero yo les diría: “Joder, pues menos mal que no tuvisteis que vivir el franquismo, que aquello sí que…”. Pero da igual derecha que izquierda, yo he hecho reír igual a todos. Y también les he metido en las historietas, pero con cuidado, ¿eh?, sin intención de molestar.

–Y además, siempre tocando temas de actualidad. En ese sentido, ha sido usted en cierto modo un poco periodista, ¿no?

–Pues sí, pero estoy pensando que voy a dejar este sistema. Es que en un periódico, pum, pasa algo hoy y mañana ya sale publicado. Pero aquí no, a mí hacer un álbum me cuesta dos meses, entre que lo dibujas, lo entintas, lo mandas a imprimir, etcétera. Así que cuando eso sale a la calle, aquel suceso del que he hablado a lo mejor ya no interesa porque mientras tanto han ocurrido 28.000 cosas más. O directamente el personaje en cuestión se ha ido de este mundo. Una vez hice un álbum que, parodiando lo de El señor de los anillos, se tituló El señor de los ladrillos. El protagonista era un señor muy gordo que vivía en Andalucía y que tenía un equipo de fútbol y un caballo que se llamaba Imperioso…, y cuando estaba en las últimas páginas una mañana veo en el periódico que se ha muerto. ¡Hostia, que se ha muerto! Y ya no lo saqué, claro.

A punto de los 79 años –los cumplirá en marzo–, “a lo que uno aspira es a no molestar demasiado a los demás”, sostiene Francisco Ibáñez, que se esfuerza en quitar hierro a la cosa y en no salirse de madre con respecto a la trascendencia a su obra: “El trabajo mío nunca ha sido de crítica social, económica o política; nada de eso, para eso ya están los que hacen los chistes de los periódicos, que por cierto lo hacen magníficamente, aunque poco a poco también esa tradición va desapareciendo. Yo he hecho y hago historietas. Y les gustan. Los chisteros de la prensa hacen a la gente reflexionar sobre la realidad. Yo les hago evadirse de la realidad”.

Mucho más guionista que dibujante según su propia apreciación de sí mismo, hay algo que le llama la atención: la endémica escasez de buenos contadores de historias en un país que, asegura, en teoría está especialmente dotado para ello. “Hoy ya no hay buenos guionistas. Y me choca, coño, vivimos en un país de gente graciosa, tú vas a una reunión y siempre hay el típico tío con una memoria prodigiosa que te cuenta 48 chistes con una gracia que te despatarras de risa, pero yo no sé qué pasa que luego a la gente le das un lápiz y le pones delante de un papel y ¡pssssst! Y es una cosa general, yo creo que en el cine y en la televisión también pasa esto. Y en la literatura. Hay gente con un estilo literario tremendo…, pero un coñazo. Yo creo que Harold Bloom exagera cuando dice que desde Beckett no hay nada nuevo…, pero es verdad que yo ahora mismo no encuentro nada que me interese demasiado”. Y prosigue en su reivindicación a ultranza de los contadores de historias: “Yo nunca he sido un buen dibujante, ¿eh?, a veces me dicen: ‘Mira, Ibáñez, el dibujante’; y no, a lo sumo Ibáñez, el historietista. Hay gente que sí, que hace viñetas que podían colgarse en el Museo del Prado, o en el Louvre, o en la National Gallery, a mí se me cae la baba viendo lo que hacen. No es mi caso. Pero en cambio, a mí se me han dado siempre bien los guiones, contar historias. Y eso es muy dificilillo, ¿eh? Lo más importante en una historieta es el guion, es lo que atrapa al público. Tú puedes dibujar una página bestial, imponente, barroca, magnífica, pero si el guion no engancha, eso no funcionará. Lo que pasa es que después de 60 años… los temas se agotan. Antes cogías un lápiz y un bloc, te inventabas cuatro sketches y cuatro gags, los ligabas y tenías la historia. Ahora te pones delante del papel en blanco y te preguntas: ‘¿Y qué pongo?”.

Cuando toque corneta la evidencia del paso del tiempo y la llegada del descanso, a Ibáñez le quedarán sus criaturas, lo inventado, lo plasmado en papel y lápiz, tantas mañanas, tantas tardes y tantas noches a bordo del tablero de dibujo. Y más cosas, pero sobre todo una: sus lectores, los de antes y los de ahora, los de siempre, incluidos esos padres que compran tebeos a sus nenes para leerlos ellos. Recuerdos, homenajes al público: “Cuando empecé a hacer sesiones de firma de libros casi todos los que venían eran niños; ahora eso ha cambiado mucho, yo me atrevería a decir casi que vienen más adultos que niños, qué curioso, ¿verdad? Vienen médicos, abogados, arquitectos… y me cuentan cómo, algunos días de esos de nubarrones en la cabeza, se meten por la noche en la cama y cogen un albumito de los míos y acaban el día felices. Yo a veces pienso que a Mortadelo y Filemón los deberían vender en las farmacias, en tubitos, como somníferos”.

Se ve caer ya la tarde frente a la ventana de Francisco Ibáñez, por donde muere la Gran Vía y por donde Barcelona enciende sus luces. Debajo de su casa hay un bar de los de siempre y con lo de siempre, Los Porrillos, se llama, que ya es llamarse. Allí se acodará Ibáñez junto a Mortadelo y junto a Filemón Pi, el putilla y el eterno perdedor. A tomar algo y a preguntarse cosas. Cosas como por qué los vejestorios (o jovenzuelos) gerifaltes de la alta cultura nunca pudieron con los tebeos. “Ha habido siempre un desprecio total hacia los tebeos por parte de la alta cultura; yo me acuerdo de una vez que mi editor me hizo ir al Café Gijón a un encuentro de los autores más vendidos. Yo le dije: ‘No me jodas, ¿qué pinto yo en el Gijón, tú sabes qué autores estarán allí?’. Y bueno, bah, al final fui. Y todavía me acuerdo de ver cómo pasó delante de mí aquel autor de teatro, Buero Vallejo, y me miró como diciendo: ‘Pero ¿qué hace este desgraciao aquí?’. ¡Qué caras ponían al verme!”.

Pero oigan: que le quiten lo bailao, que levante el dedo el que haya vendido en este país más libros que Francisco Ibáñez. Que levante el dedo el que haya propiciado más nuevos lectores que él. Que se levante y se reivindique quien crea que ha llegado a más corazones que Mortadelo.

Fuente: https://elpais.com/elpais/2015/01/15/eps/1421344370_348305.html

Mortadelo y Filemón, espejo de España

Parte I. Su historia

Es probable que cuando Francisco Ibáñez llegó en 1958 a la Editorial Bruguera con sus ilustraciones bajo el brazo ya no tuviera pelo. El asunto de la calvicie siempre ha estado muy presente en la obra del maestro, tanto en sus personajes como en las recurrentes caricaturas de sí mismo con las que se parodia en algunas de sus historias. De modo que, desde siempre, así lo recuerdan (recordamos) sus seguidores: calvo como una pelota de playa. Contaba solo con 22 años cuando llamó a la puerta de la editorial, pero en el imaginario de sus fans, Ibáñez ya era entonces calvo. Sin duda.

Traía el dibujante un proyecto que consistía en tiras cómicas en blanco y negro de dos detectives bastante torpes. No tenía claro el nombre, así que Ibáñez le comentó al editor que barajaba tres posibilidades: ‘Mr. Cloro y Mr. Yesca, agencia detectivesca’; ‘Ocarino y Pernales, agentes especiales’ y ‘Lentejo y Fideíno, detectives finos’.  Al editor le gustaron las historias en una proporción inversa a los nombres, así que decidió inventar unos nuevos: Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información.

Nacían así, sin demasiada fanfarria, dos personajes que ya son historia moderna de España. No es una exageración. O sí, pero no importa.
Las primeras andanzas de Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información fueron publicadas en la revista infantil Pulgarcito, de Editorial Bruguera. En concreto –dato para fans-, la primera aventura de la historia de Mortadelo y Filemón se publicó el 20 de enero de 1958, en el número 1.394 de Pulgarcito. Su éxito, desde ese momento, fue progresivo y durante los diez años que duró la publicación, las ventas de la revista no dejaron de aumentar.

En aquella década Mortadelo y Filemón eran dos detectives que se encargaban de casos bastante nimios. Para muchos, en esta primera época, la historieta era una parodia de Sherlock Holmes y el doctor Watson, cuyas aventuras estaban muy de moda por entonces. Mortadelo era el único empleado de la agencia, inocente e ingenuo, y Filemón era el jefe, sin sentido del humor y con fijación en reñir a Mortadelo.

Las historias siempre terminaban con una torpeza de manual de Mortadelo y el enfado de Filemón, que a veces se traducía en una persecución para agredirle. En realidad, Filemón lleva agrediendo a Mortadelo más de cincuenta años y pese a ello este último sigue aceptando este tipo de abusos sin quejarse.

En aquella época Mortadelo vestía traje negro con levita (levita que se mantiene hasta la actualidad), con un bombín en la cabeza y un paraguas del que, originariamente, sacaba los disfraces. Filemón –desde el minuto uno, el jefe– usaba un sombrero de fieltro, chaqueta roja y pipa. Estos portes son una de las primeras muestras de genialidad de Ibáñez, ya que nadie vestía así en la España de 1958. El universo particular y único de Mortadelo y Filemón acababa de nacer y ya era reconocible, sobre todo sus detalles de fondo que siguen vigentes hasta hoy: un perro fumando, una araña mareada o un ratón borracho. Cosas en las que ninguno de los personajes repara nunca, porque forma parte de la normalidad de su mundo.

Mortadelo se disfraza desde la segunda historieta, un recurso que se antojará fundamental en las cientos de historias posteriores de los personajes. Se cuenta –aunque nunca fue confirmado por el autor– que la idea de que Mortadelo se disfrazase fue de Manuel Vázquez Gallego, historietista contemporáneo de Ibáñez y amigo del autor. Los disfraces del personaje se van perfeccionando y ganando en complejidad y llegan a alcanzar su culmen cuando Mortadelo se disfraza de universo en El disfraz, cosa falaz (1995).

En realidad, ¿qué hay después del disfraz de universo? ¿Del disfraz de todo, de toda la materia y no materia? Es más, ¿dónde quedaba el universo real, la realidad material una vez Mortadelo se ha disfrazado de ella? ¿Es un universo-disfraz paralelo o abarca en sí mismo la realidad haciendo que sea una suerte de metadisfraz que contiene todo lo demás? Sea como sea, todo un logro por parte de Mortadelo.

Tres años después de su primera publicación, los personajes pierden los sombreros. El dibujo se estiliza y en 1966 adquieren, prácticamente, su aspecto actual. Filemón (del que se conoce el apellido: Filemón Pi) se despoja de su americana y su nariz disminuye. No así la de Mortadelo, que se mantiene poderosa y actúa como soporte a sus extrañas gafas: unas gafas con unas patillas de unos 15 centímetros hacia afuera, de modo que las lentes quedan notablemente separadas del rostro, algo absurdo, inútil, pero que Mortadelo nunca se detiene a pensar ni se plantea arreglar.

En 1969 el éxito es tan meridiano, que Editorial Bruguera decide crear Gran Pulgarcito, una revista más grande y amplia donde las historias cortas de Mortadelo y Filemón se convierten en aventuras largas. La primera historia extensa es el inolvidable El sulfato atómico.

Cuenta con un dibujo detallado y un trazo cuidado que Ibáñez nunca volvería a usar con tanto esmero (si acaso en Valor y… ¡al toro!, en 1970, pero no al mismo nivel). En esta historia la existencia y realidad de Mortadelo y Filemón cambian: ya no son dos detectives en una agencia cutre, ahora son, por primera vez, agentes especiales de la T.I.A. (Agencia de Investigación Aeroterráquea), al servicio del superintendente Vicente (conocido como el Súper) y con el apoyo logístico del profesor Bacterio, un reputado y desastroso científico que dejó calvo crónico a Mortadelo con un crecepelo infalible.

La aventura narra la misión de los dos agentes en Tirania, una república militarizada que –se supone– está en Centroeuropa y cuyo dictador, el general Bruteztrausen, tiene como ambición nada menos que dominar el mundo. Para lograrlo, el general se sirve del sulfato atómico, un invento del profesor Bacterio que, se suponía, iba a servir para eliminar plagas de las cosechas, pero cuyo efecto verdadero (los inventos del profesor Bacterio siempre producen resultados inversos a los pretendidos) es el de agrandar a los insectos hasta el tamaño de un elefante. El Súper, indignado porque Bacterio se haya dejado robar el potingue, envía a Mortadelo y Filemón a recuperarlo. El final, claro, no se debe contar.

A El Sulfato atómico le van a seguir otros clásicos irrenunciables para fans, como Contra el gang del Chicharrón, Safari Callejero (ambas también de 1969); la mencionada Valor y… ¡al toro! y E’ (1970) o Chapeau el ‘esmirriau’, La caja de los diez cerrojos, Magín el mago y ¡A la caza del cuadro! en 1971. Casi todos ellos tienen una estructura similar, con una serie de capítulos cíclicos en los que van resolviendo la misión para al final dar al traste con todo, algo que desencadena la ira del Súper.

Llama la atención la descomunal envergadura de las misiones que les encargan a dos agentes evidentemente torpes (destronar a un dictador, enfrentarse a la mafia italiana, recorrer el mundo en busca de diez llaves escondidas….) y cómo estos se prestan a ejecutarlas sin ningún tipo de garantía para su integridad. Pero en esto ahondaremos enseguida.

El éxito de las aventuras publicadas es tal, que la Editorial Bruguera decide crear en 1970 la revista Mortadelo y en 1971 arranca la colección Olé, tebeos de tapa blanda en el que se editan individualmente cada una de las historietas largas. Los lomos verdes de esta colección y sus portadas ya forman parte de la historia de cualquier treintañero que se precie.

En 1978 hace aparición otro clásico de la Transición: el Súper Humor, tomos de tapa dura en los que se editan dos o tres aventuras largas y que obligaban a pagar el alto peaje de leer a Zipi y Zape si se quería disfrutar de Mortadelo y Filemón.

Cuando arranca la década de los 80, los personajes de Ibáñez saborean la plenitud de su éxito. Incluso trascienden fronteras y se instalan en otros países europeos y latinoamericanos. Mort and Phil en Reino Unido, Paling and Ko en Holanda, Mortadelo e Salaminho en Brasil, Zriki Svargla & Sule Globus en Yugoslavia… y Clever & Smart en Alemania. El país germano fue el más receptivo de todos y el éxito de Mortadelo y Filemón allí fue –y es– casi tan grande como lo ha sido en España. De hecho, Ibáñez publicó en 1981 En Alemania, una aventura dedicada al país en la que los dos agentes recorren la geografía germana en una colección de parodias y estereotipos memorable: en Renania, Ibáñez retrata a los vecinos como unos austeros enfermizos.

El colmo es que Mortadelo y Filemón deben infiltrarse en el club del ahorro donde el tipo que les recibe les dice que solo lee las noches que hay relámpagos y moja el pan en la sombra del huevo frito. “Y solo soy conserje, oiga”. Los miembros del club se leen la mano porque no tienen libros, se sientan en el aire y al preguntarles a Mortadelo y Filemón si quieren tomar algo, se refieren a tomar el aire o tomar la tensión. Por cierto, en este álbum –aquel año– fueron censurados los chistes sobre el Muro de Berlín, al que Mortadelo y Filemón se acercaban por error y eran acribillados a balazos, bombas y granadas al grito de «¡Contraatacan los aliados desembarcados en Normandía!».

La idílica carrera de Ibáñez tropezó en 1985 cuando, tras un enfrentamiento con la Editorial Bruguera, pierde los derechos de sus personajes. El juicio duraría tres años durante los cuales Bruguera encargaría a otros dibujantes seguir realizando aventuras mortadelianas. Así, durante esa época, aparecen historias apócrifas, como A la caza del Chotta o La médium Paquita.

Sin saber exactamente lo que estaba pasando, somos muchos los niños de aquella época a los que algo nos olía mal, muy mal, en aquellas historias de trazo raro y humor desviado. El maestro regresó con sus derechos en 1988 y firmó un nuevo contrato con Ediciones B, del Grupo Zeta, con quien sigue ligado en la actualidad.

En esta nueva etapa Mortadelo y Filemón comienzan a vivir situaciones relacionadas con la actualidad. Sus historias ya no son atemporales y en lugares ficticios: ahora se desarrollan en lugares reales y con personajes que existen de verdad. En este resurgir se publican aventuras como El atasco de influencias, El nuevo cate o Dinosaurios. Para no pocos lectores, estos títulos suponen los últimos grandes clásicos mortadelianos.

En los 90 el estilo de trazo cambia, desaparecen las revistas y ya no existen historias que no estén pegadas a la actualidad. ¡Llegó el euro!, E’ o El carné al punto son la última hornada de historias que perdieron, en opinión de algunos, cierta parte de la esencia que caracterizaba a Mortadelo y Filemón. ¿En qué consiste o consistía esa esencia? Hablemos de ellos. Hablemos del universo paralelo en el que viven Mortadelo y Filemón.

Parte II. Su universo

Lo primero que hay que preguntarse es por qué Mortadelo y Filemón se prestan a llevar la vida que llevan. Dedican su vida a ser agentes encargados de realizar misiones de altísimo riesgo, en la mayoría de ellas se juegan la vida y atraviesan situaciones límite: reciben balazos, granadas, palizas, son atropellados, perseguidos, apresados y torturados. A cambio, reciben un miserable sueldo. Mortadelo y Filemón son pobres. Pobres de solemnidad. Visten siempre igual, compran camisas de quince pesetas y llevan agujeros en los calcetines. No tienen coche. Tampoco tienen casa: viven en una pensión. No siempre comen tres veces al día.

Con todo y con eso, se juegan la vida con encargos inhumanos propios de un boina verde. Por si fuera poco no tienen preparación: no saben pelear, no saben idiomas ni tienen ninguna habilidad especial más allá de la picaresca callejera que enseguida pasaremos a analizar. Y con eso y con todo se les exige lo máximo. Pero se les exige a golpes. Su jefe, el superintendente Vicente, les trata con despotismo. Él es millonario, tiene deportivos de lujo, casa de campo, fuma habanos y colecciona arte moderno. Y los trata a patadas. Les obliga a llevar a cabo sus misiones a la fuerza, apuntándoles con una escopeta o sometiéndoles a torturas (frotar su vientre con un erizo o hacerles ver varias horas seguidas El precio justo).

Mortadelo y Filemón, normalmente, se niegan e incluso huyen a la carrera tras escuchar las órdenes de su superior. Este no les abre un expediente o les echa por el desplante, simplemente encarga que los persigan y los traigan de vuelta. La relación laboral entre Mortadelo y Filemón y el Súper consiste en que este último les obliga a arriesgar su vida a la fuerza, sin recompensa económica y con medios precarios (jamás les proporciona un medio –como mucho les da unas suelas–, siempre tienen que desplazarse como polizones o en autobús de bajísima calidad) y estos terminan siempre aceptando.

Además, si la misión sale mal, el Súper intenta darles una paliza. Todo es esquizofrénico. En ningún momento Mortadelo o Filemón se paran y se plantean lo absurdo de su existencia. No tienen por qué aguantar golpes, miseria y sufrimiento a cambio de nada. Pero lo hacen. Ese es su universo. Su genial, hilarante y tremebundo universo.

La relación entre Mortadelo y Filemón también es asombrosa. Para empezar, se tratan de usted. Llevan décadas trabajando juntos, pero se tratan de usted. Hasta cuando se insultan: «Es usted un pollino» o se amenazan: «Le voy a agujerear el colodrillo». Nunca pierden las formas. En realidad, todo el mundo se trata de usted en el universo mortadeliano. Aunque se eleve la voz y el enfado, el usted se mantiene: «Oiga, eso usted a mí no me lo dice en la calle». Lo del trato de usted es de las pocas cosas que podemos contar de la vida privada de Mortadelo y Filemón.

Aunque en 1998 Ibáñez publicó Su vida privada, un álbum en el que se desvelan algunos detalles desconocidos hasta ese momento, la vida personal de ambos personajes es borrosa, a pesar de conocerlos desde hace más de cincuenta años. Sabemos que la familia de Mortadelo es de pueblo y la de Filemón urbanita. De hecho, en otro giro inexplicable, Filemón tiene relación con la alta sociedad: conoce a condes, duques y burgueses y sabe comportarse en sociedad. Eso, a pesar de que vive de una forma miserable sin que nadie de su entorno le eche un capote.

En 1971 Ibáñez había publicado La historia de Mortadelo y Filemón, pero de nuevo el retrato no es suficiente como para descubrir nada especial. Ese es parte de su encanto: que no está muy claro de dónde salen ni a dónde van estos personajes.

Su lugar de trabajo también es absurdo. ¿Qué es la TIA? ¿Una organización dependiente de qué? Sus agentes son torpes y miserablemente remunerados, pero en cambio la TIA recibe encargos directos del gobierno que les hacen tratar directamente con políticos extranjeros, mercenarios, ejércitos, mafias y supervisar eventos deportivos de primer orden. También les encargan misiones de escolta y hasta de sicarios. Más aún: existen organizaciones enemigas como la ABUELA o la SOBRINA, agencias con sede, perfecta organización y economía que viven –se supone– al margen de la ley. ¿De dónde salen estos entramados? ¿Cómo se financian?

Son respuestas que nunca obtendremos y son preguntas que los personajes jamás se plantean.

La dinámica de sus misiones es reconocible: Mortadelo arguye un plan, Filemón le escucha con emoción, lo ejecutan, fracasa y Filemón sufre terribles accidentes. Acto seguido, Filemón intenta dar una paliza a Mortadelo como represalia. Minutos después, Mortadelo vuelve a proponer otro plan y Filemón lo vuelve a aceptar. Nada ocurre después de las agresiones. Ni del Súper ni entre ellos.

Se dan puñetazos, se arrojan cosas, se tiran por la ventana y se dan todo tipo de golpes espantosos sin que haya absolutamente ningún tipo de rencor, enfado o recordatorio posterior. Golpearse forma parte de su comunicación no verbal normal.

La corrección política no existe: Ibáñez hace chistes con gays, obesas, negros, terroristas árabes, usureros judíos… nadie se libra. Ofelia, la secretaria de la TIA, es una mujer gorda, obsesionada con su imagen, pero esclava de su glotonería y que busca desesperadamente un novio. Un candidato recurrente es Mortadelo, por el que siente un amor-odio polarizado al límite. Mortadelo siempre la humilla. En una ocasión le ofrece un regalo. «Señorita Ofelia, le traigo un pajarito que es su viva imagen». Ofelia desconfía: «Um, ahí llega ese mendrugo calvo», pero enseguida cae rendida. «¿Sí?». «¿Una linda palomita blanca? ¿Un ave del paraíso?», pregunta emocionada. «No, una cotorra mollejuda del Afganistán». Y entonces Ofelia, ofendida, le lanza una plancha.

El universo al que pertenecen Mortadelo y Filemón es la España cañí llevada al extremo. La España todavía vigente de trampas, engaños, ignorancia, golferío y corrupción. Los deportistas españoles siempre ofrecen torrentes de excusas; en las fiestas de alta alcurnia, los invitados de la burguesía devoran caviar a dos manos y rajan sin piedad unos de otros. En El transformador metabólico (1979), la condesa se tropieza accidentalmente y acaba con el plato de caviar en la boca mientras cae con violencia hacia adelante. Dos señores de chaqué que contemplan la escena comentan: «Sí que trae hambre, la andoba».

La calidad de los productos nacionales es nefasta: las camisas son de trapo, el tabaco es Celtas sin filtro, los coches se estropean… Hay robos de gasolina, atracos, mecheros de contrabando de Andorra, inseguridad alarmante en las calles, cacos de manual y quinquis de toda la vida.

Para combatirlos está la policía que, por alguna razón, en la aventuras de Mortadelo y Filemón, van uniformados como bobbys ingleses y son llamados «gendarmes», a pesar de ser españoles. Es un misterio. Su comportamiento, en cambio, tiene poco de británico: la mayoría de policías aceptan sobornos, multan para hacer caja (mientras salivan y su nariz se torna aguileña) y recurren a la violencia a la mínima.

Los políticos, claro, no se libran. Son representados como torpes, vagos y extremadamente corruptos. Siempre llegan tarde a las cumbres mundiales, se quedan dormidos o meten la pata, como cuando el ministro debe anunciar que Barcelona es la sede elegida para los Juegos Olímpicos de 1992, pero se le traspapelan los documentos mientras se le caen las gafas y grita «¡Valdepera!».

En esta España de caricatura también se utiliza lo nacional para parodiar el atraso que vivía (y al fin y al cabo vive) España con respecto a otros países de su entorno. De ahí algunos importantes asuntos políticos que giran en el eje Washington-Berlín-Cuenca o reputados periódicos que lee el Súper como puede ser el Lugo Herald Tribune. Este atraso alcanza su culmen cuando Ibáñez traslada a sus agentes a un pueblo. Los pueblos de la España profunda son un escenario recurrente en las aventuras de Mortadelo y Filemón y en ellos la bruticie se muestra en plenitud. De hecho, el nombre de estas villas ya define a sus vecinos.

En Villacascajo de los Bestiajos, por ejemplo, los vecinos son una suerte de trogloditas que comparten cama con un caballo o agitan la vaca antes de ordeñarla para obtener mantequilla. La mejor caricatura al subdesarrollo rural aparece en Lo que el viento se dejó (1981), donde nada más entrar en el pueblo, Mortadelo y Filemón ven a un vecino haciendo grava a cabezazos contra las rocas.

El lenguaje también es único. Mortadelo, Filemón y todo el elenco de personajes que les rodean usan palabras que muchos de los lectores (muchos de nosotros) no habíamos oído antes ni en realidad hemos vuelto a escuchar. «Andoba, merluzo, rayos y centellas. Sapristi, corcho, sopla». La lista de vocablos que solo se usan en el universo mortadeliano es amplísima y su influencia en toda una generación, innegable.

Lo mismo pasa con los apodos de los villanos, ya sea Mike ‘El Trinchabueyes’ o Johny ‘Aplastayunques’, y los apellidos. Los apellidos mortadelianos son claves en la obra. Todos tienen que ver con la vida del que lo posee, aunque esta se haya definido con posterioridad, Así, el director de una importante compañía de tabacos se apellida Nicotínez, el inspector de Hacienda es Buítrez y dueño de la tienda de cactus se llama Agujeto Pinchúdez. Los agentes también responden a sus características a partir del apellido. El señor Numeríllez es el contable, Remúlez es el agente más fuerte y el agente Carbúrez es el encargado de mecánica. A veces se usa con ironía: Patricio Ardíllez es un agente anciano que no se sostiene en pie sin bastón.

Además de las palabras, las expresiones de Ibáñez vuelven a recurrir a la España profunda. Son constantes y los personajes no dejan de hacer alusiones a ese escenario de la España caricaturizada. A Mortadelo y Filemón les está succionando una turbina mientras tratan de huir y Mortadelo se queja: «¡Rayos! Esto chupa más que Hacienda!». Hay ejemplos a patadas: «Aquí dice que fumar da más disgusto que el RCD Espanyol», «es más débil que la cartera de un pensionista»… Nadie se libra.

Todas estas características van envueltas en un humor propio de Ibáñez y perfectamente identificable: el humor del tremendismo y la exageración. El humor de las caídas y golpes espantosos, de la torre de control diciendo al avión que no se puede aterrizar a ochocientos kilómetros por hora. En síntesis, el humor del llamado ‘fenómeno de la siguiente imagen’. Esto es, el personaje dice algo que prevé o cree que puede ocurrir y la siguiente imagen le muestra en la situación contraria llevada al extremo más bestia. «Saldré a dar una vuelta, que hace sol», dice Filemón sonriente en El huerto siniestro (1988). Y la siguiente viñeta muestra a Filemón bajo una inaudita tormenta de rayos y granizo.

La ‘siguiente imagen’ es un humor creado en España por Ibáñez y que ha influido mucho, muchísimo, en humoristas posteriores de todo ámbito. El señor que sale a la ventana a dar de comer a las palomas «porque es algo que me relaja, la tranquilidad de las palomas, su susurro, y viene muy bien para mi enfermedad grave de corazón». Y acto seguido un buitre loco sobre el que se aferra Filemón cae graznando desesperado sobre su ventana. Ibáñez siempre juega con las palabras y la exageración llevada al límite. Si un personaje busca un rato de silencio, le pasará un avión por encima. Si quiere cazar mariposas, será embestido por un rinoceronte.

Francisco Ibáñez siempre ha repetido que Mortadelo y Filemón no tienen mensaje. Que nada se esconde detrás de sus aventuras y que la intención única de sus historietas es hacer reír y olvidarse de todo lo demás.
La realidad es que, sea la intención del autor o no, las aventuras de Mortadelo y Filemón suponen uno de los retratos más esquizofrénicos e irreverentes que se ha hecho de la España postransición, evidentemente exagerado, pero que encierra una gran dosis de verdad.

Detrás de la caricatura llevada al límite, de las condiciones esclavistas de trabajo, de los políticos torpes y corruptos, los trapicheos de calle y el cutrerío generalizado, detrás de todo eso se encuentra un espejo en el que España refleja sus miserias y que todos reconocemos: reformas laborales, escándalos de corrupción, mafias y delincuentes asentados en España y un muy mejorable funcionamiento de las Administraciones. Una imagen de la que Ibáñez elige reírse. Tal vez sea ese el secreto de Mortadelo y Filemón: una forma de reírnos de nosotros mismos. Algo que, como todos sabemos, es infalible en el humor.

Fuente: https://www.yorokobu.es/mortadelo-y-filemon/

El armario del tiempo

El sulfato atómico

Magín, el mago

El Caso de los Gamberros

El balón catastrófico

Los superhéroes del Profesor Bacterio

El caso de los secuestradores

El caso de los sobornos

Testigo de cargo

Misión de perros

El caso de Billy El Horrendo

Los inventos del profesor Bacterio

El caso de los diamantes

 El caso de la Estatua de la Libertad

Safari callejero

¡Hay un traidor en la T.I.A.!

 La venganza de Ten-Go-Pis

La Brigada Bichera

El ansia del poder

La gallina de los huevos de oro

La elasticina

Casos aéreos

El otro «Yo» del Profesor Bacterio

La máquina de copiar gente

En busca del antídoto

¡Contrabando!

Los cachorros majaretas

La Gran Aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón

Mortadelo y Filemón contra Jimmy el cachondo

Meeting an Indian Actor at a Hollywood Party

Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers, original name Richard Henry Sellers, (born September 8, 1925, Southsea, England—died July 24, 1980, London), versatile English comic actor whose astonishing range of characters earned him international stardom at a time when rigid typecasting was usual.

Sellers was a descendant of legendary Portuguese-Jewish prizefighter Daniel Mendoza and the son of British vaudeville performers. After winning a talent contest, he planned to become a professional drummer, and as such he was hired to perform in Ralph Reader’s “gang shows”—concert units that toured British army bases during World War II. He developed his mimicry skills while serving in the Royal Air Force and ultimately abandoned the drums in favour of comedy, performing celebrity impressions during a six-week run at London’s Windmill Theatre. In 1951 he teamed with Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe to create The Goon Show, a radio comedy sketch series. Emerging as the star of the series with his repertoire of eccentric characters, Sellers also dominated the Goons’ film projects, including the short subject Let’s Go Crazy (1951) and the feature-length Down Among the Z Men (1952).

On his own, he played a handful of supporting film roles before his breakthrough appearance as a doltish crook in The Ladykillers (1955). Following the advice of that film’s star, Alec Guinness, Sellers strove to avoid playing the same character twice. He especially enjoyed disappearing into characters much older than himself (The Smallest Show on Earth, 1957; The Battle of the Sexes, 1959) and playing multiple roles (The Mouse That Roared, 1959). He did some of his best work for the Boulting Brothers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, notably his characterization of obstreperous union shop steward Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack (1959); it was also during this period that he made his feature directorial debut with Mr. Topaze (1961). Many British observers of the period dismissed Sellers as a glorified radio mimic, while Americans lauded him as a genius. One such American was director Stanley Kubrick, who cast Sellers as the treacherous Clare Quilty in Lolita (1962) and in three superbly defined roles in the brilliant “doomsday comedy” Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Sellers was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor for the latter film.

The role that earned him superstar status was the magnificently inept Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963) and A Shot in the Dark (1964), both directed by Blake Edwards. The success of these projects was marred by Sellers’s near-fatal heart attack in 1964. Upon his recovery, the quality of his films became wildly erratic, his mercurial offscreen temperament reflected by the unevenness of his cinematic output. Movies from this period included What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), Casino Royale (1967), I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968), and There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970). He would not truly hit his stride again until the mid-1970s, when he repeated the role of Inspector Clouseau in three profitable Pink Panther sequels.

In 1979 Sellers delivered what many consider his finest performance, as the simpleminded gardener Chance in Being There. This Oscar-nominated triumph was followed by one of his worst films, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980). Suffering a series of heart attacks, he died at age 54. His final “performance” in Trail of the Pink Panther (released posthumously in 1982) was a hodgepodge of outtakes from earlier films.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Sellers

10 Things You Might Not Know About Peter Sellers

We all know and love Peter Sellers for his iconic role as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau. On what would have been Sellers’ 93rd birthday, here are 10 surprising facts about the actor.

1. HIS FIRST CAREER IN SHOW BUSINESS WAS AS A DRUMMER.

At age 16, Sellers toured the U.K. with several jazz combos. Later, when gigs were harder to find, he branched out, printing up business cards that hinted at his future as a man of a thousand voices. They said: Peter Sellers, Drums and Impressions.

2. HE MADE TWO COMEDY ALBUMS BEFORE HIS FILM BREAKTHROUGH.

Before he made it in the movies, Peter Sellers recorded two solo comedy albums for EMI Parlophone that were produced by George Martin, who would go on to work with The Beatles.

3. HE AND SOPHIA LOREN TEAMED UP FOR AN ALBUM.

In 1960, Sellers recorded an album with Italian actress/sex goddess Sophia Loren, entitled Peter & Sophia. It yielded a novelty hit, “Goodness Gracious Me,” that went to number four on the U.K. pop charts.

4. SELLERS DUBBED BOGIE’S VOICE IN BEAT THE DEVIL.

During the filming of John Huston’s Beat The Devil (1953), lead actor Humphrey Bogart was in a serious car accident and had several teeth knocked out. When he was unable to provide some of his dialogue, Sellers was hired to dub his voice. It remains undetected in the movie to this day.

5. THERE WERE A LOT OF CONNECTIONS TO THE FAB FOUR IN SELLERS’ LIFE.

In addition to being good friends with both George Harrison and Ringo Starr, in 1965 Sellers made the pop charts again with a comic version of “A Hard Day’s Night,” recited as if he were Shakespeare’s Richard III. Further, during the making of The Beatles’ White Album, Ringo gave Peter a tape of rough mixes. Auctioned off after Sellers’ death, it became the source of one of the most sought-after Beatles bootlegs ever—usually called “The Peter Sellers Sessions.”

6. SELLERS TALKED TO GOD. AND GOD GAVE HIM SOME BAD ADVICE.

After a long day of grappling with a troublesome scene in one of the Pink Panther movies, Sellers phoned director Blake Edwards in the middle of the night. “I just talked to God!” the actor exclaimed. “And he told me how to do the scene.” The next day, on set, Edwards let Sellers demonstrate the divine intervention, and it was a disaster. Edwards said, “The next time you talk to God, tell him to stay out of show business!”

7. SELLERS HELPED THE PRODUCERS FIND DISTRIBUTION.

When Mel Brooks had difficulty finding a distributor for his first film, Sellers stepped in. He urged top producers to watch the movie, and took out full page ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “This is one of the greatest comedies that’s been made recently.” His championing of The Producers gave it the industry buzz that turned it into a hit. Ironically, the year before, Brooks had pitched Sellers on playing a lead role, but Sellers was supposedly too busy at the time shopping at Bloomingdale’s to really listen.

8. SELLERS WAS SUPERSTITIOUS ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS, ESPECIALLY COLORS.

Green gave Sellers “strange vibrations” and disturbed him. He never wore it, and refused to act with anyone wearing green. Purple was even worse. During the making of After The Fox, director Vittorio De Sica flew into a rage one day when a script girl showed up in a purple outfit. “It’s the color of death!” De Sica told Sellers, and Sellers was haunted by this for the rest of his life.

In later years, Sellers’ aversion to purple produced such volcanic tantrums that publicists would scour his proposed hotel rooms in search of the color, and if they found it, change the room.

9. HE BASED CHANCE THE GARDENER ON STAN LAUREL.

For his Oscar-nominated role as Chance The Gardener in Being There, Sellers based the tone and cadence of the character’s speaking voice on one of his comic idols: Stan Laurel.

10. HE HAD 15 HEART ATTACKS.

In 1980, Peter Sellers died from a massive heart attack. But it wasn’t his first—it was his fifteenth. He’d had one in 1977. And in 1964, during the filming of Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid, Sellers suffered a series of 13 heart attacks over a period of a few days. At one point he was pronounced dead for a minute and a half.

Source: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/28852/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-peter-sellers

10 Hilarious Peter Sellers Films That Had Audiences In Stitches

British cinema can sometimes be a bit niche in terms of its humor but someone as naturally talented as Peter Sellers was able to transcend cultural barriers and connect with audiences from all over. Most people recognize him as Inspector Jacque Clouseau but the man had a long, varied career, playing all types of characters over his decades-long career.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963)

Stanley Kubrick is renowned as one of the most prestigious American filmmakers of all time, and Dr. Strangelove stands as a seminal work of his. A big part of the film’s success, however, has to do with the performances of Peter Sellers. The man effortlessly depicted three distinct characters: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, United States President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove himself.

Sellers’ comedic genius emanates from each and every frame, even ad-libbing most of his lines, something notoriously difficult to do. Audiences and critics alike were blown away by Sellers and Dr. Strangelove remains one of his most beloved movies.

Being There (1979)

Known for his darkly comedic ruminations on life in the United States post-World War II, Hal Ashby directed Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardiner in 1979’s Being There, an introspective piece of satire. After his employer passes away, Gardiner is forced to move out of his estate and encounters the outside world for the first time. Viewers then see everything from his naive perspective.

A chance encounter with a wealthy business mogul changes the course of Chance’s life forever, even leading him to cross paths with the President of the United States. Being There is remembered fondly by viewers as a return to form for Sellers and even garnered him numerous awards recognition.

The Pink Panther (1963)

Inspector Jacques Clouseau is arguably the role for which Peter Sellers is most famous. His first appearance is in The Pink Panther, a film that, while not exactly displaying him front and center, acted as a vehicle for his comic prowess.

Most audiences remember this first Pink Panther as an ensemble piece but, from the beginning, it was clear that one particular character was stealing the show. The fact that Sellers was able to turn in an incredibly memorable performance despite the lackluster script and outshine his costars is a testament to his abilities as a comedic actor.

The Ladykillers (1955)

Before the 2004 Coen brothers remake, The Ladykillers was a 1955 black comedy crime caper. This was Sellers’ first real starring role in a major motion picture and set the stage for his future career.

In a cast full of eccentric oddball characters, including the likes of icons such as Sir Alec Guinness, Sellers played a more strait-laced character, yet still managed to hold his own and deliver a stellar performance. The Ladykillers is now fondly remembered as being a quintessential example of British comedy.

I’m All Right Jack (1959)

Peter Sellers once again shows his knack for satire in I’m All Right Jack, a razor sharp critique of the industrial boom in England during the 1950s. In it, he plays union leader Fred Kite, a complex character who is neither inherently good nor bad. Audiences and critics at the time were drawn to the sociopolitical commentary that hit a little bit too close to home.

Similar to his role in The Ladykillers, Sellers plays Fred Kite with sensitivity and subtlety, and his performance earned him his first of many BAFTA nominations (and first win) for Best Actor.

The Naked Truth (1957)

Released in the United States as Your Past Is Showing, The Naked Truth, as it was originally titled, features Peter Sellers in another early role; his character is a television show host named Sonny MacGregor who, along with three other individuals, decides to exact revenge on a blackmailer.

Sellers oozes talent and charisma, and his natural comedic chops shine through. The Naked Truth is unfortunately not very widely known outside of England but fans of Sellers and black comedies, in general, would be wise to put this one on their must-watch list.

After the F0x (1966)

This Italian-American crime comedy film is notable among Peter Sellers’ filmography for being one of his most divisive. After the Fox is an English-language Italian film, and the different cultural influences sometimes make it come off as disjointed.

With that being said, with the passage of time, many viewers have come to deeply appreciate it for its hilarious, self-reflexive parodies of avant-garde and pretentious European filmmakers. Sellers is particularly amusing as master of disguise Aldo Vanucci, a conman who pretends to be an Italian Neo-realist director in order to obtain highly coveted gold.

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

Some diehard Peter Sellers fans turn their head at The Return of the Pink Panther, claiming it does not live up to previous installments. However, most audiences still loved this follow-up in which Peter Sellers reprised his famous role as Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

The English actor decided to go over-the-top in his portrayal of the French police detective, playing him as inept and foolish. The pure, unadulterated slapstick comedy is what makes The Return of the Pink Panther so memorable and beloved for so many filmgoers.

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

Before he charmed audiences as Inspector Jacques Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers made waves playing multiple roles in the British satire The Mouse That Roared, based on the 1955 novel of the same name. Just like he would go on to do in Dr. Strangelove, Sellers depicted three distinct characters in this film: Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe.

The World of Henry Orient (1964)

Based on the novel of the same by Nora Johnson, The World of Henry Orient was a bit of a departure for Peter Sellers in terms of his acting. In it, he portrays an acclaimed concert pianist, having an extramarital affair and is constantly followed by two adolescents girls at the same time.

Hilarity and chaos ensue but this time around, Sellers turns in a much more subdued performance and plays off his fellow actors. The World of Henry Orient is now regarded as a comedy classic in Sellers’ filmography and was a hit with viewers and critics alike.

Source: https://screenrant.com/peter-sellers-funniest-hilarious-roles-movies/

The Ladykillers (1955)

The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956)

The Smallest Show on Earth (1957)

Tom Thumb (1958)

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

I’m All Right Jack (1959)

The Battle of the Sexes (1960)

The Millionairess (1960)

Mr. Topaze (1961)

Only Two Can Play (1962)

The Road to Hong Kong (1962)

Lolita (1962)

The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963)

The Pink Panther (1963)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

The World of Henry Orient (1964)

A Shot in the Dark (1964)

What’s New Pussycat (1965)

Caccia alla volpe (1966)

The Wrong Box (1966)

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

The Party (1968)

The Magic Christian (1969)

Hoffman (1970)

The Optimists of Nine Elms (1973)

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

Murder by Death (1976)

Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978)

Being There (1979)

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)

Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)

The Creature is Alive!

Five Fascinating Facts about Mary Shelley

1. Her most famous novel, Frankenstein, is widely considered the first science fiction novel. Brian Aldiss certainly thinks so. It’s worth mentioning here that two other leading science (fiction) writers, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, argued that the honour of ‘first science-fiction novel’ should go to a much earlier book: Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (‘The Dream’), first published in 1634. But Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (Wordsworth Classics) is considered the first work of what we can confidently label modern SF. It was published in 1818, when Shelley (1797-1851) was just 21, and came out of the famous ghost-story competition at Lake Geneva, which involved Shelley and her husband (the poet, Percy), Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician and travelling companion, John Polidori. Polidori’s contribution, The Vampyre (1819), claims the honour of the first vampire novel. One of Mary Shelley’s early influences was one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s poems: on 24 August 1806, Coleridge was visiting Mary’s father, William Godwin, and gave a reading of his poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner‘. Unbeknownst to the adults, a nine-year-old Mary Shelley had concealed herself behind the parlour sofa, and was transfixed by Coleridge’s poem.

2. The ultimate ‘message’ of her most famous book is often missed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may be one of the most misread novels in the whole of English literature. What is the book about? The dangers of playing God or the need to be good parents? Shelley herself came from a strong family but also an unconventional one: her mother was influential feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father the radical writer William Godwin. Mary’s mother died a few weeks after her daughter’s birth and Mary had an overly dependent, and sometimes strained, relationship with her father. Then there is her relationship with her husband, Percy Shelley, who is often seen as the model for Victor Frankenstein. (Curiously, Mary’s second novel, Mathilda (1820), would feature a father confessing incestuous desire for his daughter, followed by his death by drowning, thus prefiguring Percy Shelley’s death two years later. Wordsworth Classics recently brought out a cheap reprint of this story along with some other Mary Shelley works: Mathilda and Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics).)

3. As well as inventing modern SF with Frankenstein, Mary Shelley also wrote the first work of modern apocalyptic fiction. Mary Shelley’s favourite among her own books was a later novel, The Last Man (Wordsworth Classics), published in 1826. It tells of a future world where plague has killed off the human population – with, ultimately, one exception. There is, as the title suggests, only one human survivor, Lionel Verney. (There are in fact a number of other characters in the novel: Lionel only becomes the last man right at the end of the narrative.) The book is the progenitor of all later stories in this vein, such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

4. Shelley also wrote historical novels later in her career. In 1830, Mary Shelley published The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, about the fifteenth-century pretender to the throne during Henry VII’s reign. Mary was also a prolific writer of biographical and historical non-fiction, and wrote large portions of the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men, a ten-volume sequence in a much bigger 133-volume encyclopedia, the Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Shelley continued writing until she died in 1851, probably of a brain tumour, aged just 53.

5. Frankenstein was Shelley’s first novel, but not the first book she published. In 1817, a year before her most famous novel appeared, Mary Shelley and her husband Percy published History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni which … well, the title gives a pretty detailed account of its contents. But we’ll add that the volume also included Percy’s celebrated poem ‘Mont Blanc’, and that besides this the book was largely Mary’s work, meaning it should take the mantle as her first book.

Source: https://interestingliterature.com/2015/08/five-fascinating-facts-about-mary-shelley/

eBook of Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

10 Surprising Facts About Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

1. Frankenstein was written by a teenager.

Mary Shelley’s teenage years were eventful, to say the least. At age 16, she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Over the next two years, she gave birth to two children. In 1816, the couple traveled to Switzerland and visited Lord Byron at Villa Diodati. While there, 18-year-old Mary started Frankenstein. It was published in 1818, when she was 20 years old.

2. The novel came out of a ghost story competition.

The Shelleys visited Switzerland during the “year without a summer.” The eruption of Mount Tambora in modern Indonesia had caused severe climate abnormalities and a lot of rain. Stuck inside, the group read ghost stories from the book Fantasmagoriana. It was then that Lord Byron proposed that they have a competition to see who could come up with the best ghost story: Byron, Mary, Percy, or the physician John Polidori.

In the end, neither Byron nor Percy finished a ghost story, although Polidori later wrote The Vampyre—which influences vampire stories to this day—based on Byron’s offering.

3. Mary Shelley said she got the idea from a dream.

At first, Mary had writer’s block, unable to come up with a good idea for a ghost story. Then she had a waking dream—“I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think,” she said. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein [PDF], she described the vision as follows:

“I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life. … He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

Mary opened her eyes and realized she’d found her story. “What terrified me will terrify others,” she thought. She began working on it the next day.

4. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the shadow of tragedy.

Before she started Frankenstein, Mary gave birth to a daughter, who died just days later. (In fact, only one of Mary’s four children lived to adulthood.) Soon after the baby died, she wrote in her journal, “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived—I awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day.” This circumstance, as well as the suicide of her half-sister, must have contributed to the novel.

5. Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the monster.

In the novel, Victor Frankenstein is the scientist. The monster remains unnamed and is referred to as «monster,» «creature,» «dæmon,» and «it.» But if you’ve made the mistake of calling the monster Frankenstein, you’re not alone. As early as 1890 The Scots Observer complained that Frankenstein “presented the common pressman with one of his most beloved blunders”—confusing the two.

6. The novel shares its name with a castle.

Mary made up the name Frankenstein. However, Frankenstein is a German name that means Stone of the Franks. What’s more, historian Radu Florescu claimed that the Shelleys visited Castle Frankenstein on a journey up the Rhine River. While there, they must have learned about an unbalanced alchemist named Konrad Dippel, who used to live in the castle. He was trying to create an elixir, called Dippel’s Oil, which would make people live for over a hundred years. Like Victor Frankenstein, Dippel was rumored to dig up graves and experiment on the bodies. Not all historians are convinced there’s a link, however, pointing out that there’s no indication Frankenstein had a castle in the novel, and that Shelley never mentioned visiting the castle herself in any of her writing about her trip up the Rhine.

7. Many thought Percy Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was first published anonymously. It was dedicated to William Godwin, Mary’s father, and Percy Shelley wrote the preface. Because of these connections, many assumed that Percy Shelley was the author. This myth continued even after Frankenstein was reprinted in Mary’s name. In fact, some people are still arguing that Percy authored the book. While he edited the book and encouraged Mary to expand the story into a novel, actual authorship is a stretch.

8. Frankenstein was originally slammed by critics.

When Frankenstein came out in 1818, many critics bashed it. “What a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents,” John Croker, of the Quarterly Review, wrote. But gothic novels were all the rage, and Frankenstein soon gained readers. In 1823, a play titled «Presumption; or The Fate of Frankenstein» cemented the story’s popularity. In 1831, a new version of the book was published, this time under Mary’s name.

9. Frankenstein is widely considered the first science fiction novel.

With Frankenstein, Shelley was writing the first major science fiction novel, as well as inventing the concept of the “mad scientist” and helping establish what would become horror fiction. The influence of the book in popular culture is so huge that the term Frankenstein has entered common speech to mean something unnatural and horrendous.

Mary went on to write other science fiction, such as her short story Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman, about a man who has been frozen in ice, and her novel The Last Man, about a survivor in a world destroyed by plague, from the same year.

10. Thomas Edison adapted Frankenstein for film.

In 1910, Thomas Edison’s studio made a one-reel, 15-minute film of Frankenstein, one of the first horror movies ever made. It was thought lost until it was rediscovered in the 1980s. 

Source: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69171/10-monstrous-facts-about-frankenstein

Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley’s sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation. It is a Gothic novel in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche.

It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.

The celebrity story

Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the heart of what might be the greatest celebrity story of all time. Shelley was born in 1797. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was, according to that book’s introduction, “the first major feminist”.

Shelley’s father was William Godwin, political philosopher and founder of “philosophical anarchism” – he was anti-government in the moment that the great democracies of France and the United States were being born. When she was 16, Shelley eloped with radical poet Percy Shelley, whose Ozymandias (1818) is still regularly quoted (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).

Their relationship seems to epitomise the Romantic era itself. It was crossed with outside love interests, illegitimate children, suicides, debt, wondering and wandering. And it ultimately came to an early end in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned, his small boat lost in a storm off the Italian coast. The Shelleys also had a close association with the poet Lord Byron, and it is this association that brings us to Frankenstein.

In 1816 the Shelleys visited Switzerland, staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they were Byron’s neighbours. As Mary Shelley tells it, they had all been reading ghost stories, including Coleridge’s Christabel (Coleridge had visited her father at the family house when Shelley was young), when Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Thus 18-year-old Shelley began to write Frankenstein.

The myth of the monster

The popular imagination has taken Frankenstein and run with it. The monster “Frankenstein”, originally “Frankenstein’s monster”, is as integral to Western culture as the characters and tropes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

But while reasonable continuity remains between Carroll’s Alice and its subsequent reimaginings, much has been changed and lost in the translation from Shelley’s novel into the many versions that are rooted in the popular imagination.

There have been many varied adaptations, from Edward Scissorhands to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (see here for a top 20 list of Frankenstein films). But despite the variety, it’s hard not to think of the “monster” as a zombie-like implacable menace, as we see in the trailer to the 1931 movie, or a lumbering fool, as seen in the Herman Munster incarnation. Further, when we add the prefix “franken” it’s usually with disdain; consider “frankenfoods”, which refers to genetically modified foods, or “frankenhouses”, which describes contemporary architectural monstrosities or bad renovations.

However, in Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s creation is far from being two-dimensional or contemptible. To use the motto of the Tyrell corporation, which, in the 1982 movie Bladerunner, creates synthetic life, the creature strikes us as being “more human than human”. Indeed, despite their dissimilarities, the replicant Roy Batty in Bladerunner reproduces Frankenstein’s creature’s intense humanity.

Some key elements in the plot

The story of Victor Frankenstein is nested within the story of scientist-explorer Robert Walton. For both men, the quest for knowledge is mingled with fanatical ambition. The novel begins towards the end of the story, with Walton, who is trying to sail to the North Pole, rescuing Frankenstein from sea ice. Frankenstein is being led northwards by his creation towards a final confrontation.

The central moment in the novel is when Frankenstein brings his creation to life, only to be immediately repulsed by it:

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

Victor Frankenstein, like others in the novel, is appalled by the appearance of his creation. He flees the creature and it vanishes. After a hiatus of two years, the creature begins to murder people close to Frankenstein. And when Frankenstein reneges on his promise to create a female partner for his creature, it murders his closest friend and then, on Frankenstein’s wedding night, his wife.

More human than human

The real interest of the novel lies not in the murders or the pursuit, but in the creature’s accounts of what drove him to murder. After the creature murders Frankenstein’s little brother, William, Frankenstein seeks solace in the Alps – in sublime nature. There, the creature comes upon Frankenstein and eloquently and poignantly relates his story.

We learn that the creature spent a year secretly living in an outhouse attached to a hut occupied by the recently impoverished De Lacey family. As he became self-aware, the creature reflected that, “To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being.” But when he eventually attempted to reveal himself to the family to gain their companionship, he was brutally driven from them. The creature was filled with rage. He says, “I could … have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.” More human than human.

After Victor Frankenstein dies aboard Walton’s ship, Walton has a final encounter with the creature, as it looms over Frankenstein’s body. To the corpse, the creature says:

“Oh Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst.”

The creature goes on to make several grand and tragic pronouncements to Walton. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.” And shortly after, about the murder of Frankenstein’s wife, the creature says: “I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.”

These remarks encourage us to ponder some of the weightiest questions we can ask about the human condition:

What is it that drives humans to commit horrible acts? Are human hearts, like the creature’s, fashioned for ‘love and sympathy’, and when such things are withheld or taken from us, do we attempt to salve the wound by hurting others? And if so, what is the psychological mechanism that makes this occur?

And what is the relationship between free will and horrible acts? We cannot help but think that the creature remains innocent – that he is the slave, not the master. But then what about the rest of us?

The rule of law generally blames individuals for their crimes – and perhaps this is necessary for a society to function. Yet I suspect the rule of law misses something vital. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, considered such questions millennia ago. He asked:

What grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We use labels like ‘thief’ and ‘robber’… but what do these words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad.

Unintended consequences

Victor Frankenstein creates life only to abandon it. An unsympathetic interpretation of Christianity might see something similar in God’s relationship with humanity. Yet the novel itself does not easily support this reading; like much great art, its strength lies in its ambivalence and complexity. At one point, the creature says to Frankenstein: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” These and other remarks complicate any simplistic interpretation.

In fact, the ambivalence of the novel’s religious critique supports its primary concern: the problem of technology allowing humans to become God-like. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. In the Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire – a technology – from the gods and gives it to humanity, for which he is punished. In this myth and many other stories, technology and knowledge are double-edged. Adam and Eve eat the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and are ejected from paradise. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, humanity is born when the first tool is used – a tool that augments humanity’s ability to be violent.

The novel’s subtitle is referring to Kant’s 1755 essay, “The Modern Prometheus”. In this, Kant observes that:

There is such a thing as right taste in natural science, which knows how to distinguish the wild extravagances of unbridled curiosity from cautious judgements of reasonable credibility. From the Prometheus of recent times Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, down to the man who wants to extinguish the fire in the workshop of Vulcanus, all these endeavors result in the humiliating reminder that Man never can be anything more than a man.

Victor Frankenstein, who suffered from an unbridled curiosity, says something similar:

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind … If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.

And also: “Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

In sum: be careful what knowledge you pursue, and how you pursue it. Beware playing God.

Alas, history reveals the quixotic nature of Shelley and Kant’s warnings. There always seems to be a scientist somewhere whose dubious ambitions are given free rein. And beyond this, there is always the problem of the unintended consequences of our discoveries. Since Shelley’s time, we have created numerous things that we fear or loathe such as the atomic bomb, cigarettes and other drugs, chemicals such as DDT, and so on. And as our powers in the realms of genetics and artificial intelligence grow, we may yet create something that loathes us.

It all reminds me of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s relatively recent (2009) remark that, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

Source: https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520

Why Frankenstein is the story that defines our fears

“It’s alive! It’s alive!! It’s alive!!! – Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)

One night during the strangely cool and wet summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. “We will each write a ghost story,” Lord Byron announced to the others, who included Byron’s doctor John Polidori, Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

“I busied myself to think of a story,” Mary wrote. “One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror.” Her tale became a novel, published two years later as ‘Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus’, the story of a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying ‘creature’ in fear and disgust.

Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its two central tragedies – one of overreaching and the dangers of ‘playing God’, the other of parental abandonment and societal rejection – are as relevant today as ever.

Are there any characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the ‘creature’ and the overambitious or ‘mad scientist’, lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theatre and filmgoers as two of the lynchpins, not just of the horror genre, but of cinema itself.

Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison’s horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood’s Universal Pictures and Britain’s Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes. The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T’Pau: “It was a flight on the wings of a young girl’s dreams/ That flew too far away/ And we could make the monster live again…”

As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and the Empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix ‘Franken-’ thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem cell research and both to characterise and assuage fears about AI. In the two centuries since she wrote it, Mary’s tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett’s comedy song, Monster Mash, has truly been “a graveyard smash” that “caught on in a flash”.

‘Mysterious fears of our nature’

“All them scientists – they’re all alike. They say they’re working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!” – Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks, 1974).

Why was Mary’s vision of ‘science gone wrong’ so ripe a vessel to carry our fears? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term ‘science’ existed, a ‘scientist’ didn’t. Great change brings fear, as Fiona Sampson, author of a new biography of Mary Shelley tells BBC Culture: “With modernity – with the sense that humans are what there is, comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology.” Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from an outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what could happen if people – and in particular overreaching or unhinged scientists – went too far.

Several points of popular 19th Century intellectual discourse appear in the novel. We know from Mary Shelley’s writings that in that Villa Diodati tableau of 1816, Shelley and Byron discussed the ‘principle of life’. Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book’s 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted ‘galvanism’ as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani’s experiments using electric currents to make frogs’ legs twitch. Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly-dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary’s father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who himself had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of ‘overreaching’.

Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there’s little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific paraphernalia in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” The ‘science’ of the book is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide an immediate linguistic and visual reference point for moments of great change and fear.

Monster mash-up

But surely the reason we turn to Frankenstein when expressing an anxiety about science is down to the impression the ‘monster’ and ‘mad scientist’ have had on our collective brains. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:

“It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”

With his ‘yellow skin’, ‘watery eyes’, ‘shrivelled complexion’ and ‘straight black lips’ the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Frankenstein intended. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theatre and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play – and of course, a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling argues, “set the tone for future dramatisations”. They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements audiences would recognise today, including the comical lab assistant, the line “It lives!” and a bad-brained monster who doesn’t speak.

It’s a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood’s vision (James Whale’s 1931 film for Universal starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story’s longevity but obscured Shelley’s version of it. “Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations,” Frayling writes. “It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualisers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein.”

Making a myth

And so, a movie legend was born. Although Hollywood may have cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version of the story, it’s clear she also borrowed from historical myths to create her own. The subtitle of Frankenstein, ‘The Modern Prometheus’, namechecks the figure of ancient Greek and Latin mythology who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man (or makes a man out of clay) and represents the dangers of overreaching. But the other great myth of the novel is of God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the epigraph to Frankenstein: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?”. And it is above all the creature’s tragedy – and his humanity – that in his cinematic transformation into a mute but terrifying monster, has been forgotten.

Shelley gave him a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest’s Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature’s lament is haunting: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

If we think of the creature as a badly made and unattractive human, his tragedy deepens. His first, catastrophic rejection is by his creator (man, God),which Christopher Frayling calls “that post-partum moment”, and is often identified as a parental abandonment. If you consider that Mary Shelley had lost her mother Mary Wollstonecraft at her own birth, had just buried her baby girl and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – the relevance of birth (and death) makes even more sense. The baby/creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. As an allegory of our responsibility to children, outsiders, or those who don’t conform to conventional ideals of beauty, there isn’t a stronger one.

“The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein, as we’ve all taken risks, we’ve all had hubristic moments, and partly with the creature; they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves” Fiona Sampson says, “they both speak to us about being human. And that’s incredibly powerful.”

Some modern interpretations, such as Nick Dear’s 2011 play (directed by Danny Boyle for the National Theatre), have highlighted the question of who is the monster and who is the victim, with the lead actors Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternating roles each night. And in this shapeshifting context, it’s fitting that the creature is widely mistaken as ‘Frankenstein’, rather than his creator.

So could a new, cinematic version of Frankenstein be on the cards? One which brings together the creature’s humanity, the mirroring of man and monster and contemporary anxieties? Just like the Romantics, we edge towards a new modern age, but this time, of AI, which brings its own raft of fears and moral quandaries. A clutch of recent films and TV shows have channelled Frankenstein, exploring what it means to be human in the context of robotics and AI – Blade Runner, Ex Machina, AI, Her, Humans and Westworld among them. But there is one film director (rumoured to have been developing the story for a while) who might be able to recapture the creature’s lament as a parable for our time.

Collecting a Bafta for a different sci-fi monster fable, The Shape of Water, this year, Guillermo del Toro thanked Mary Shelley, because “she picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us”.

When the then-Mary Godwin thought up her chilling parable that summer of 1816, she couldn’t have imagined how far it would go to shape culture and society, science and fear, well into the 21st Century. “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? Two hundred years since its publication, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is no longer just a tale of “thrilling horror” but its own myth, sent out into the world.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180611-why-frankenstein-is-the-story-that-defined-our-fears