Jacket 21 — February 2003 | # 21 Contents | Homepage | Catalog | |
A Poet at (and of) the Movies
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Wishing to celebrate this very distinguished twentieth century ‘Art of Memory,’ I was inhibited at first by the notion that ‘this is not my subject’ — only to remember very quickly that the movies are everybody’s subject. It is possible, however, that Geoffrey O’Brien’s upbringing made them — together with a panoply of images from our time’s popular culture — into his subject more than anyone else’s. Again and again, the author’s childhood becomes an arena of nostalgia deepening into elegy, the place from which a series of variations on the subject of hard past/ soft and frangible present can be generated. |
There are some twenty-eight pieces in the book written over a period of 16 years (1985–2001) for such periodicals as the New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Film Comment, American Heritage, etc. Not one is without distinction. There are studies of individual actors; Welles’s definition of himself through metamorphosis and his ‘total absorption in technical invention’ as the only way open to such a personality; Brando’s art of acting ‘which could be read above all as an art of inducing unease;’ as a proposal of ‘a different way for men to be;’ as a myth ‘consonant with the more or less contemporary myths adhering to Jazz and Action Painting and Modern Dance and Coffee House Poetry’ — or Cary Grant, Dana Andrews, the Marx Brothers inter alia. The essay ‘Groucho and his Brothers’ showing the lone survival of Groucho whose ‘lot is total intelligence without an ounce of charity’ out of a comic art defined as ‘experimental science.... breathtaking because of a moment-by moment control and rapport that distills years of trial and error’, the brothers repeatedly saving themselves ‘by leaping from one declining medium to another’ — vaudeville, Broadway musical, movies, television... |
Jacket 21 — February 2003
Contents page This material is copyright © Nathaniel Tarn
and Jacket magazine 2003 |