There is another way we can give painting a break in our classrooms--by class discussion of a film as good as Lust for Life, a biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Audio-Visual Guide (Maplewood, N.J.) has prepared a photoplay study unit. Clearing House (Fairleigh Dickinson U., Teaneck, N.J.) prints Ellen Kennedy's essay on the film in its November issue. This film surprised me. I expected Kirk Douglas to look like a "Champion" who had given up the ring for an easel. But to his strong physical resemblance to the painter he added a thoroughly believable and sensitive performance.
There is a good deal of art history in Norman Corwin's scenario. We see Paul Gauguin's arrogance clash with Van Gogh's stubborn beliefs as they discuss the methods and purposes of modern painting. There is a brief glimpse of the exhibition out of which came the enraged bourgeois epithet, "impressionism."
And Seurat and other impressionists explain what they're about. There is a Van Gogh volume in the Pocket Library of Great Art (Att. Mr. John Ware, Pocket Books, 630 Fifth Avenue, NYC, 50); perhaps a senior class could read this book after having seen and discussed the film. Arthur Knight considered this film and Bus Stop in the Saturday Review (September 15, 1956) in a superior essay, "Speaking of Artists."
Knight believes that Marilyn Monroe deserves that appellation for her really touching performance in Bus Stop. He writes that she effectively "dis- pels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality, a shapely body with tremulous lips and come-hither blue eyes." And don't take only Knight's and my word for it. Have Bosley Crowther's (New York Times, Sunday Drama Section, September 9, 1956) and William K. Zinsser's (Herald Tribune, same date) hosannahs to the new Monroe mimeographed for your students for a class analysis of the new movie when it comes to the local theatres.
For mature students, a most fascinating outside assignment would be a comparison of Inge's stage play (Bantam, 250) and George Axelrod's very deft movie translation. My essay, "Two Bus Stops: A Round Trip Between Broadway and Hollywood," will make this comparison in December Clearing House. Excellent historical background for all cinema criticism is Frank Getlein's "The Movies As Art," Commonweal (September 14, 1956).
Teaching ideas for War and Peace: A five-page unit in October Literary Cavalcade (33 W. 42nd Street, NYC) plus a handsome Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph cover on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow; College English (October 1956); Newsweek (July 30, 1956); Life (August 20, 1956).
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As usual the Prophet is on the run, but can't pass up commenting.
A senior class would benifit from viewing Savage Messiah (1972)
November 9, 1972
Screen: Ken Russell's 'Savage Messiah,' Biography of a Sculptor,
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
This film would be closer to the current class focusing away from Impressionism to Vorticism, an enbodiment of the clash between mechanized and electric world.
A follow up would old Ezra's (Pound) bio of Gaudier concluding with the horrible WWI and the insights of the High Moderens (Lewis, Pound,Eliot,and Joyce) and their early optimism to the their eventual pessimism ( and correctly so) of the dystopian Magentic
City of ADS as in "Counting Sheep".
Ken Russel presents his film in code!
(review by By VINCENT CANBY
Published: November 9, 1972)
"I want to take the 'mystique' away from art and show that success is usually 5 per cent inspiration and 95 per cent perspiration and hard slog"—Ken Russell, the director of "Savage Messiah," quoted in studio publicity material.
Publicity brochures aren't notable for their accuracy, and I wouldn't bet that Ken Russell actually made that statement, but whoever did had certainly seen "Savage Messiah," Mr. Russell's film biography of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French sculptor who died in the trenches of World War I at the age of 24. "Savage Messiah" is, first and foremost, a hard slog movie.
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