{"id":4868,"date":"2009-07-17T06:49:08","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T15:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/?p=4868"},"modified":"2009-07-17T06:59:40","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T15:29:40","slug":"art-and-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/art-and-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Art and war"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two films that were made with war as unusual backdrops for their narratives were\u00c2\u00a0Joseph Losey’s<\/a>\u00c2\u00a01948 ‘Boy with Green Hair’<\/a><\/em>, and ten years later, an adaptation of Joyce Cary’s 1944 book,\u00c2\u00a0‘<\/em>The Horse’s Mouth’.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I first saw ‘The Boy with Green Hair’<\/em> <\/a>as a child and it impressed me for its individualist and political stance. Where I grew up, conformity was not especially the norm, but diversity of ethnicities and intellectualism was. So the kid wakes up one day with green hair, it wasn’t the tragedy of being left an orphan from war. ‘The realization about his parents and the work helping the orphans makes Peter turn very serious, and he is further troubled when he overhears the adults around him talking about the world preparing for another war.’<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em>Joseph Losey was a brilliant\u00c2\u00a0‘filmmaker in exile’<\/em> for most of his long career. He was a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee and fled to London to pursue his work in peace. This film was one of his more idealistic and fantastical pieces critiquing governmental (American, Russian, British, French and Chines) policies, ‘couched in terms of fantasy and fable.’<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The writer Dan Callahan<\/a> aptly describes the film’s main arc:\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘The Boy with Green Hair\u00c2\u00a0was an allegory about war and intolerance produced by Dore Schary, a cornball fellow who liked to make little \u00e2\u20ac\u0153message\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pictures. Many of Schary’s other productions have dated, but\u00c2\u00a0The Boy with Green Hair\u00c2\u00a0survives well, though it takes a bit too much on its shoulders. It’s an extreme attack on conformity, staunchly anti-war and anti-nuclear. Whilst Fritz Lang undoubtedly influenced his handling of mob scenes, Losey differs from Lang in his volatile identification with his characters. The scene that sticks in this respectable debut is the one where Dean Stockwell, such a touchingly serious child, is forced to give up his individuality, his green hair, in order to please the people of the small town he lives in. Though restrained, the scene is almost tragic, and Losey puts all of his energy behind it. Already he was showing his talent for emotional collisions that cut to the bone without caution.’<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00c2\u00a0Harvard Film Series<\/a> has a great offering of classic and current films.<\/p>\n

Another tour de force on individuality, Joyce Cary depicted his character Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth, as an anarchist, drawing on ‘pre-war bohemian life, and is notably sharp on the mundane realities of survival on the breadline, in the vein of Orwell’s social reportage.’<\/em> In fact, George Orwell recommended Cary’s earlier novels to the ‘Liberal Book Club’. Cary’s themes in most of his books centered on freedom and liberty, qualities being threatened during WWII.<\/p>\n

Directed by Ronald Neame, Alec Guinness\u00c2\u00a0portrays the lead character Jimson, loosely patterned by Cary after his friend the poet Dylan Thomas. \u00c2\u00a0Guinness constructs a prankster’s paradise for a wily painter who resorts to subterfuge and lies to feed his obsession; art as life. I read the book after seeing the film in the early 80’s and it remains a favorite, for both laughs and inspiration.<\/p>\n

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Bruce Eder, from a 2002 Criterion review:<\/p>\n

‘Here, unusually, the paintings really do matter. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not copies of well-known classics, as in most artist biopics\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthey were executed by John Bratby<\/a><\/em>, a leading member of the group of English provincial realists who came to be known, rather unfortunately, as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Kitchen Sink\u00e2\u20ac\u009d school. In truth, Bratby would be better described as an expressionist, in view of his vigorous sculpting of paint, even if his preferred subject matter was often domestic. But in\u00c2\u00a0The\u00c2\u00a0Horse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00c2\u00a0Mouth\u00c2\u00a0he lends his talent to the tradition of English artists, from William Blake to Stanley Spencer, who wanted to connect the visionary with the vulgar; this is surely what Bratby, Neame, and Guinness do magnificently in the film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s moments of epiphany. Gulley contemplating his sinewy impasto foot by candlelight, or first seeing the wall that will bear his mural masterpiece\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthese are rare moments when we actually\u00c2\u00a0feel\u00c2\u00a0something of the artist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s imagination. And in terms of the film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s prescience it is worth noting that Bratby temporarily gave up painting and wrote a novel called ‘Breakdown’ in 1960, because his work had become unfashionable as American Abstract Expressionism swept the world. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tempting to feel that life here was imitating art.’<\/em><\/p>\n

Brad Leithauser<\/a> says: ‘His is not the calculated stoicism or liberated detachment of the born philosopher.\u00c2\u00a0Rather, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the sangfroid of someone who must check his emotions because their fervor continually threatens to undo him.\u00c2\u00a0Gulley is forever having to squelch his rage. His is the simmering calm of a man who feels a fire roaring underneath him.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

… it seems the one burning hottest and longest\u00c2\u00a0is a conviction that he is destined, as an uncompromisingly\u00c2\u00a0innovative artist, to remain an unappreciated soul in his lifetime. Although he shrugs off his neglect with a witty mordancy (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Walls have been my salvation…. Walls and losing my\u00c2\u00a0teeth young, which prevented me from biting bus conductors\u00c2\u00a0and other idealists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), he carries within him, as he wanders the\u00c2\u00a0streets of London, an affronted notion of his own civic inconsequence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Joyce Cary once wrote of his most famous creation,\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jimson, as an original artist, is always going over the top into\u00c2\u00a0No Man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Land, and knows that he will probably get nothing\u00c2\u00a0for his pains and enterprise but a bee-swarm of bullets, death\u00c2\u00a0in frustration, and an unmarked grave. He makes a joke of life\u00c2\u00a0because he dare not take it seriously.’<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Criterion Collection<\/a>, an offshoot of Janus Films, \u00c2\u00a0distributes consumer versions of classic and contemporary films.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two films that were made with war as unusual backdrops for their narratives were\u00c2\u00a0Joseph Losey’s\u00c2\u00a01948 ‘Boy with Green Hair’, and ten years later, an adaptation of Joyce Cary’s 1944 book,\u00c2\u00a0‘The Horse’s Mouth’. I first saw ‘The Boy with Green Hair’ … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[665,27,668,667,518,666,662,663,661,664],"class_list":["post-4868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-meanderings","tag-alec-guinness","tag-art","tag-bruce-eder","tag-dan-callahan","tag-freedom","tag-individuality","tag-joseph-losey","tag-joyce-cary","tag-the-boy-with-green-hair","tag-the-horses-mouth"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4868"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4902,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4868\/revisions\/4902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furiousdreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}