Being the Ricardos

  Aaron Sorkin’s title packs everything in: Being the Ricardos. It’s not the Arnazes but the Ricardos. They’re not just playing their fictional creations but being them. This film is about our need to posit an aspiration beyond our reality and the tragic gulf that remains between them — even (or especially) when we appear to have achieved it. That works on both the personal and cultural levels.

On their first intimacy this Lucy tells Desi that her one compelling desire is for a “home.” When she and Desi achieve their phenomenal TV success she finds her only effective “home” is the studio set. Only there can Lucy enjoy power, exercise control, work out happy endings.  Outside the studio she and Desi live essentially separate lives. 

In the last studio scene Lucy freezes at Desi’s catch-line, “Honey, I’m home.” She realizes that her “home,” her dreamed success, is an illusion. Her “home,” marriage and achievement are artifices. As she can no longer deny Desi’s infidelities, they end their collaboration and marriage. That sombrely realizes — in reverse — the infidelity theme of the “Guess who” (i.e., which lover) scene opener that Lucy keeps trying to replace.

These Lucy and Desi clearly love each other. Their ardor is as real off-camera as the Mertzes’ mutual loathing. But Lucy is driven by her need for fulfilment and Desi by the Cuban machismo that compels his meaningless affairs. 

Lucille Ball is an icon of woman’s independence and self-assertion. Here Sorkin uses that rep to stress the dominance of male authority in America. His 1950s America exposes the roots of our America in two political veins.

One is obviously the dominance of male authority. Even that Force of Nature Lucille  Ball (she several times says) runs every decision through her husband. She has to believe his denials of infidelity. She has to stand up for his honour more than her own. She rejects a young colleague’s articulate feminism and suppresses and restrains the actress playing Ethel, reducing her to cliche.

The second political theme is American suppression. Desi loves America because it gave him refuge from the Cuban dictatorship. He believes the pretence to freedom, of thought and expression. But that promised freedom is as illusory as Lucy’s successful “home.” The network censors them. In an unwitting confession of its own sterility, it bans the word  “pregnant” even when Lucy/Lucille is/are. 

More broadly, this is the America of the Red Scare. HUAC requires the eight-year-old Rusty Hamer of The Danny Thomas Show sign the pledge of allegiance — and this William Frawley would beat him up if he didn’t. This is a harshly conformist America.

Disaster looms in the allegation Lucille Ball was once a communist. Here Desi saves the day by stepping out from his wife’s shadow and directing his own scene. He stages — on the pre-performance studio set — a live endorsement by J. Edgar Hoover. But at the same time, Lucy finds proof of his adultery. His salvation of her image coincides with the end of her credulous delusion about their marriage.  

This is a remarkably rich and polished fiction that transcends its period of both setting and creation. It doesn’t matter that this Lucy doesn’t look like Lucille; she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman either. Or that Xavier Bardem isn’t Cuban and a great singer. This drama aspires to be more than a reminder of a popular couple. In anatomizing its characters’ political climate it incisively exposes the dangers in ours.   

Shtisel Season 3: The Last Shot

Ruchami dies.

***

Granted, she appears to live. Writers Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky know better than to drop an inescapably sad ending on a TV drama. TV is supposed to make the viewer feel good, reassured, in that comfortable stupor the passive apparently prefer. As do the advertisers.

My contention that she died provoked surprising anger. My arguments on Facebook’s “Shtisel Discussion Group” were met with some interest, less acceptance and a general reflex of rejection. Of course everyone wants her to live. How dare I kill her off!

The harshest response came from the then-director of the Shtisel Official website. Refusing to run my argument, she published a statement that Ruchami and her baby are definitely alive — an odd claim to make for any fictional characters. Indeed the widespread sense that these fictional characters are real people proved many viewers to be engaged with Shtisel on the level Malka is with her soap opera. The site director claimed the authority of the producers and the actress who played Ruchami. They say she lives therefore she lives. 

Of course, they are not the creators of this drama — the writers are. The writers constructed every detail. When the site director stated she had that information “from the writers” I called her on that. Again, she did not run my statement but said she’d withdrawn that claim. Still, she left her readers with that “information.” I was expelled from the group.

Of course, I have it from the writers that Ruchami died. No, neither told me. Even if I had that “inside” info from them I would not be ruled by it. For analyzing a work of art is not like solving a math problem. There is no “right answer” in the back of a book. Or what someone (even I) tells you.

Not even if it’s from the artist. As D.H. Lawrence reminded us, “Trust the art, not the artist.” For once an artist releases a work its meaning is out there for all to explore, define and respond to. There may well be depths and connections of which the artist herself may be unaware. The life is in the work. Any reading will be only as strong as the evidence from it supports. When I say “I have it from the writers” i mean I have it from the writing. The work is what they intended.

What they intended was a possibly ambiguous closure to the now three-season drama. There was the initial effect: the family gathers happily around Ruchami’s hospital bed, celebrating the baby, and Ruchami smiles and winks — at us. We can infer that against massive odds — 1,000 to one — Ruchami survived the delivery. Possibly because of her prayers, Hanina’s prayers and most graphically, Lippe’s prayers. That’s a happy ending — standard for standard TV fare. But that reflex conclusion flies in the face of almost everything that has come before.

For Shtisel is far from standard TV fare. It moves beyond the conventional domestic drama and aspires to a modern version of Classical Tragedy. Instead of the assuring pleasures of a comedy it plumbs the emotional depths of — in Ruchami — a modern tragic hero. I’ll explain how I get there. But for now note that it was my claim that Shtisel is such a profound, complex work — arguably unique in contemporary television — that disqualified me from the website supposedly created to support it.

One more prefatory thought. If one narrative strategy has distinguished Shtisel from its rivals it’s the faith in the spiritual life beyond our mundane one. That’s what the Haredi constant blessings and rituals reaffirm. The drama gives the varieties of spiritual existence the same material reality as its characters’ “real life.” We get dreams, artistic visions, re-livings of the past, visits from the dead. Even a conflation of life with TV : climactically, at the end of Season Two, when Malka — in the coma caused by son Shulem’s banning of her TV — watches her hospital room “real life” on a TV set in Heaven with her dead husband. The medium that Orthodox Shulem bans on earth is acceptable up there.  

In the beginning…. First episode, first scene (I,1). Normally a story begins by establishing the physical setting. The first season opened with a dream, the deli deep freeze of Akiva’s dead mother Dvora. Season Two opened with Shulem’s dream of comatose mother Malka. Season Three opens with Akiva’s visit from dead Libbi. There is no clue that Libbi is dead until art dealer Kaufman’s introduction. All these levels of spirituality are treated with the same realistic tone. As a consequence, we  have to pause at every scene to consider which reality applies. 

And so to that last shot.

***

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. The scene then turns bright as the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival. But the shot feels perhaps a little too cheery, indeed jarringly bright. Ruchami in particular looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles and winks at us. In real life we don’t smile and wink at someone in a different-reality audience out there. Her breaking the Fourth Wall shatters the realism. This is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scenes to the preceding uniting of the dead Shtisels with the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to the scene, the three men talking. The music comes on with the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene.

The Singer quote establishes what the earlier seasons’ spiritual scenes have already demonstrated,  since I,i — that the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. We carry them within us. The music gives Ruchami’s last shot the same reality as the visiting dead. She’s visiting from the dead — as indeed all the earlier mothers here have done. 

Curiously, almost everyone online loves the Singer quote and the visible reunion with the dead— but forget it by the next scene.        

Earlier scenes support this reading. After hints that Ruchami’s condition requires a surrogate birth, the Episode 7 flashbacks make the previous dangerous pregnancy seem current with the present one. In both, the doctors say Ruchami must terminate the birth because of the 1,000 to one odds against her survival. The Torah prioritizes the mother’s life over the child’s, but Ruchami demands to continue. 

On the first pregnancy the infant is delivered dead. At his burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

In her second pregnancy she generously forgoes the surrogacy, despite the rabbi’s permission, out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. She lies to him and to Giti, preserving the illusion of surrogacy, so she can risk her life. She already proved a dab hand at situational ethics when — just after promising Yos’ale she’ll never lie to him again — she lied about her anti-Lippe posters.

When Hanina consults the Torah he takes his lesson from the rhyming odds. If 999 declare someone guilty and one innocent, the judgment goes to the innocent. This is  questionable advice. Determining innocence is not as drastic as risking life. Oddly, he’s persuaded to — Ruchami’s — gamble when he sees the old rabbi who’d suffered a serious accident. His prayers worked insofar as he survived but he’s in a severely reduced state, unable to continue his passion for Torah study. That prompts Hanina to drop his plan to marshal Ruchami’s parents against her plan.   

For Ruchami the long odds don’t matter. Rather than bet against them she accepts them. She prepares to die. When she wrote her “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to” (III,2) she described the piercing black hole she felt inside: “This hole inside me is shaped like you.” The absent daughter was already a presence, as Ruchami’s absence will be. The paradox harkens back to Ruchami’s first touching line in I,1. As Lippe leaves for his Argentinian post Giti is tellingly silent, but Ruchami says “I miss you already.” He’s already absent while present.  Ruchami as parent will be present though absent later. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” As the last dinner scene reminds us, motherhood doesn’t end at death. We see Dvora handing Akiva some challah. She has escaped the freeze that launched the drama.

When Hanina plays those tapes Ruchami, asleep beside him, seems already to be speaking from the dead. In any other drama this supernaturalism in a family drama might seem incongruousl. But in Shtisel her faith in a helpful afterlife coheres with the drama’s dominant theme of spiritual coexistences. 

Ruchami is not placing her faith in a miracle. She’s risking her life aware of its cost. Indeed any likelihood of a miracle may be undercut by the scene where Lippe, running to the hospital, prays for her survival. He begs God to take him instead. As if to reward him, when he falls he’s bathed in a celestial light. Aah, we may infer, “She’s safe. He’s going to Heaven so we’ll have her here.” But alas, the lights are from the truck he has stalled. So much for miracles.

That smile and wink express Ruchami’s triumph and satisfaction. She succeeded by sacrificing herself, correcting the privilege forced on her for the previous failed birth. She gets to “redo” that unfortunate earlier scene (which in a lower key Shira Levy wishes for her first meeting with Yosa’le). Now, if our reflex acceptance of her survival seems a happy ending, surely this ending provides a more profound satisfaction. How much more heroic a mother’s sacrifice for her child when she willingly pays with her own life. Accepting that high price for her commitment makes her a Tragic Hero of our time.

At least, this makes Ruchami a more ideal abstraction of Motherhood than Akiva’s painting at the end of Season 2, which drew Shulem into a lunatic violation of his wife’s desires one more time. In the guise of defending her honour he spoils her favourite son’s best painting. Worse, to buy it he sells the burial spot she on her deathbed begged for, so they would be  together in eternity. Shulem’s reconciliation with Akiva — and his response to Nuchem owning that prized burial spot — are ignored in this season. Except, perhaps, for Shulem’s marital advice to Akiva: “I’ve forgotten about [Dvora] completely.”

According the drama’s climax to Ruchami provides a radical shift away from the Shulem-Akiva axis on which the first two seasons pivoted. They played out Akiva’s and Shulem’s different responses to Dvora’s death. The shift of focus to Ruchami advances the next generation, in which women assume more authority. Hence the development of Yosa’le’s romance. Akiva’s conclusion with Racheli functions as a model for Hannahleh’s motherless future. 

We have watched Ruchami grow up, stretching the allowable limits to a proper end. She “nurses” her infant brother, explores secular literature (Anna Karenina, Middlemarch), and even — taboo — pretends to be a man (like George Eliot) when she writes her brothers letters putatively from Lippe. On his return she takes active measures to undermine him, but eventually hears him out and accepts him.  Her courage, character and maturity culminate in her willing sacrifice.   

Finally, consider the overall structure of the drama. Season 1 opens with Akiva’s dream of dead mother Dvora, and ends with Malka’s (equally “unreal” or “even more real”) view from Heaven. Season 2 starts with Shulem’s dream of comatose Malka’s advice and climaxes with his attack on Dvora’s memory (in its own way unmoored from reality). The Libbi-Akiva ending scene is a soothing epilogue. Season 3 starts with the dead Libbi’s very realistic scenes with Akiva and their baby. To cohere with this structure Season 3 also ends on a spiritual reality. All three seasons start with a mother speaking from beyond life-consciousness. One and three end with a dead mother; the middle season finds Shulem mad for acting against the will, values, spirit of his dead wife, i.e., failing in her absence,

In my Shtisel Discussion Group on Facebook several proponents of her survival declared themselves in “the life camp.” My alternative is not “the death camp.” Within the cosmos of this drama I am in “the afterlife camp.” The writers have made that reality a pervasive force in the drama. What’s radical in Ruchami’s faith is that she actually believes — and embraces — the spiritual afterlife that earthbound believers only mouth. However ardently. 

Why an ambivalent ending? Throughout Shtisel the writers have preferred a circumspect presentation of an issue rather than forcing us into one perspective. For example, we get no hints on when Ruchami and Hanina consummate their marriage. Nor on the resumption of Giti’s marital rights upon Lippe’s return. We’re pretty certain the Rebbetzin committed suicide — with Malka’s anti-Torah help — but no further mention of it is made. That saves us from having to make a moral judgment. Indeed there is a clear argument that Malka killed herself — following the Eskimo model Shulem mistakenly abuses in I,1 — but it’s not stated unequivocally either. We can infer whichever position suits our morality. So too regarding Ruchami’s suicidal maternity. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. In honour of covid. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of many faiths to accept the restrictions imposed by secular authorities for the public good. There have been protests, riots, closures — and many deaths and much more suffering as a result. That even beyond the offending communities. In this climate, basing a happy ending on prayer, on divine intervention, on the expectation of a miracle — is sadly dangerous. Giving Ruchami the heroic death she undertook is the most responsible as well as the happiest ending.    

***

I have written two books analyzing the themes and structure of each episode of Shtisel. Reading Shtisel covers the first two seasons. After Shtisel examines Season 3 and also the more political Israeli TV series the writers presented in the interim, Autonomies. Both books  are available from lulu.com. This discussion is a more extensive version than in my book, where I also presumed Ruchami to have died in childbirth. 

Ahed's Knee

The opening scene is a miniature of this powerful film’s strategy. An abstract image turns into the subjective view of (what turns out to be) a woman motorcycling to audition for a film role. But that unbroken movement turns out to be an outside perspective upon her. 

The ensuing narrative presents a left-wing Jewish filmmaker’s outrage at the repressiveness and cruelty of the Israeli government. The film ultimately detaches from that character’s rage and finds him self-destructive.

Most obviously, the director character Yud rails against Israeli censorship. The state won’t allow criticism or controversy, he insists. But this film itself — supported, financed, unimpeded by the Israeli government — destroys that claim. In that region Israel is the only state that would allow such commentary in the arts or on political platforms.

In his misplaced indignation Yud would destroy the career of the young culture officer who has been taking care of him. Her name, Yahalon (or Diamond) evokes her value and beauty, that he in his unfounded indignation would destroy. His name, Yud, the 10th letter in the Hebrew alphabet, denotes “god,” the creative power a director has over the film he’s making — but is hubristically doomed if he tries to assert it in real life.   

That this Yud does, disastrously, not just with Yahalon but in the anecdote he tells about  his having staged a mass suicide to test a new recruit. Over the course of the narrative the tormentor becomes the tormented. 

Yud’s rant against the Israeli government will find ready agreement among the Israeli and diaspora far-left and among the global sector that finds anti-Zionism a handy veil for their antisemitism. Whether they admit the film’s radical undermining of that position is another matter.

Yud suffers the PTSD of conflicted Israeli everyday life, not necessarily deriving from his Sinai service. He entered the army idealistically, hoping to become a warrior. He emerged coarsened, broken and extremist. Constantly under existential threat, Israelis live in intense polarization. 

Yud emerges as a case of arrested development. His imperviousness to Yahalon’s appeal may connect to his obsessive attention to his dying mother, to whom he obsessively sends messages. The death of his screenwriter mother may grow out of director Nadav Lapid’s own mother having died shortly after editing his Golden Bear feature Synonyms.  

So, too, the theme of an idealist turning sour recalls Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher and Policeman as well as Synonyms. Yud’s tirade ends in his helpless weeping. He’s exhausted by his own compulsive righteousness. 

Lapid provides a hopeful balance in the young girl, Yahalon's sister, who consoles Yud: “Don’t be angry. You are good.” (The girl's name is Hebrew for Narcissus,so she comes by her positivism naturally.) And “Do good and you will feel good.” Redemption lies in the recovery of humane connections, not in raging self-righteousness — at either end of the political spectrum.  Perhaps we can also take the girl's wording as addressed to a self-hating Jew. As in Synonyms, Lapid here may be dramatizing how a Jew can turn his criticism of the Jewish state into self-hatred. Thus so many Jews rail against Israel in defence of the movement intent upon destroying her.  

Yud survived the army and succeeded as a film director. But his rage disabled his changing with the times. Hence the references to his community’s loss of its excellent red pepper industry, destroyed by climate change and competition from Spain. The Israelis’ life under constant threat — from both outside and within — finds its humanity similarly at risk.

Typically, Israeli’s Left cinema anatomizes the nation’s mind and policy without openly defining the primary cause. Israel’s conduct is condemned without acknowledging the existential threat that provokes it. Lapid detaches from the far Left anger, though his irony may not stand up to the power of his central character’s rhetoric. 

The title? The actress of that opening shot is auditioning to play the Israeli demonstrator against the government who -- one official charges -- should be punished by the shattering of her knee. When Yud's attack upon bureaucracy leads him to destroy the meeting's organizer he over-reacts as viciously as the official who called for that punishment. When the narrative shifts completely from that project to its director character’s own disintegration the film equates the two violent extremes in Israeli politics, Left and Right. The joint isn’t jumping; it’s crumbling -- from within.

         The title also evokes Eric Rohmer's 1970 classic, Claire's Knee. One of the director's "Moral tales", the film details a man's whimsical fascination with a girl's knee. As Lapid abandons the knee plot to focus on Yud's obsessive, selfish and destructive politics the title allusion emphasizes his increasing distance from the civility, rationalism and life-force in the Rohmer film. 

 

No Time to Die

No Time to Die.

We/hero haven’t the time to die. We’re in a rush, to save humanity itself from a toxic threat (Think covid on steroids, plus blood-spurting). But under that threat, we will die in no time at all. Or this is not the time to die. No, it is time to die. For legends as for mortals.

A valedictory air hangs over this film, that concludes the Daniel Craig Bond-age. Retired from the Service, our James struggles to secure his new passion against the shadow of the old. Not just his past love-life but — it turns out — the new one’s  personal past.

An early festival celebrates the burning of old memories. We advance by respectfully setting aside those old hauntings. He and his current love both join in. At least, try. 

Bond’s current beauty is one Madeleine Swann — a double-barrelled summons to Proustian recollections of things past. 

But Madeleine proves suspect when Bond is bombed during his visit to his dead love Vesper’s grave. Did Madeleine set him up?  Is she the enemy, i.e., the reverse of Pussy Galore, the enemy Bond converted to Us Good by his sexual-cum-moral prowess? 

Relax, she herself is victim of the evil Specter she has struggled to survive since her own childhood trauma and loss. 

Not that retirement has softened the old warrior. Bond here is as physically sound (i.e., unbelievable) as ever. For all his advanced gadgetry, his various escapes and exertions show him more of a Wiley Coyote than a warrior. They start with him surviving a direct hit from a bomb — and grow from there. There is much running and jumping and little standing still. And if no man is an island, it will take the obliteration of one to get him.  

Bond’s enemy here is himself a cartoon figure, even in name: Lyutsifer Safin. A double-barrelled allusion himself, he’s a warped/misspelled Lucifer Satan. With spellcheck so neutralized, what hope Civilization? He makes the resurrected Lecter-like enemy Blofeld seem saintly.  

Bond enjoys a formal resurrection himself when the currently-designated 007 offers to restore his number. If Bond’s wake turns woke with the possibility this black woman might take over the genre, she proves way less effective than the beautiful young white Paloma. Superman may have sired a gay superson but the Bond family business is likelier to pass to a white gal.

And guess to whom? As the film opens on the burning of memories, it ends on the  start of a story. Madeleine is telling her stoic infant daughter: “Once upon a time there was a man. His name was Bond. James Bond.” This kid has survived a catastrophe even worse than the one her mother did. She bore up —personfully — herself. When Paloma outshines the 007-temp she may be clearing the way for James Bond’s longtime lover’s daughter. As Mom admits, the gal has James’s eyes. Yathink….?   

    This blue eyed savior evokes another classic. That is the real classic: Renoir's Le grand illusion. As the two comradely foes strike out to their likely tragic ends, the generals' frozen humanity is countered by the French farmer: Marie has blue eyes. theimage treasures human connection over the cold hands of political war.

The Marx Brothers -- an artistic construct

The Marx Brothers were a prominent US comedy act from 1905 to 1949. They moved their act from vaudeville to films in 1929, going on to make 12 features, mainly surrealist parodies of popular genres. Groucho managed a solo afterlife on TV, where their films still enjoy the immortality of the rerun.

Audiences loved the films’ unprecedented wildnessas they deflated social conventions. In that sprit we suspend any moral judgment of their uniformly self-serving and larcenous conduct. 

Their films grew more sophisticated and witty, especially when S.J. Perelman joined their writing team. When Martin Esslin defined the Theatre of the Absurd he included the brothers as an early exemplar. The collective could equally have served Colin Wilson’s definition of The Outsider.

The Marxes usually feel Jewish, as in Captain Spaulding’s lyric aside: “Did someone call me schnorrer”? But their Italian stage names broaden their meaning to The Immigrant. The Marx Brothers make comedy out of the immigrant’s ambivalent experience of their new America.   

Their meaning can be read from several spectra. Perhaps the most telling range is their different use of language. Groucho’s fluency shows him the most assimilated. But he overflows the cliches he deploys, with his brash insults. In his asides to the audience he refuses to stay within his role, even as — or because he has — made it into the new world.

For he often plays a character of substance and station  — a however shyster lawyer, a famous explorer, a college president. But he refuses to conform to that respectability, to play the game. Instead he destroys decorum with his insulting candour and unrestrained chatter. His courtship of Margaret Dumont is a verbal assault on a social monument. Hence his classic: “I would never join any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

Chico’s speech is pure immigrant, with his American/Italian English. As the scripts grew wittier his malapropisms grow insightful. His “A circus got plenty relephants” could summarize the brothers’ film canon, to which indeed the circus is plenty relevant in its three-ring mix of genre plot, romance and comedy. As kindred aliens, Chico often serves to translate Harpo to Groucho.

Harpo famously doesn’t speak (hence/contra the title of his memoir). He is thus a pre-civilized force. With the most expressive face, he shows the widest gamut of extreme emotions, from glee to rage. Instinctively dishonest, he is the most honest in his emotions. He is the least socialized.

So too the spectrum of appearance. Groucho honestly flaunts his falsehood with his shoe-polish moustache. His suit is a variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp: the baggy pants, the incongruous dinner jacket. Both suits express social aspiration. The firmly immigrant Chico wears a constant cap and a tight jacket, always buttoned, emblems of constraint. 

But Harpo is again that pre-civilized force. His clothes are the looser antithesis to Chico’s, especially his abundant overcoat with preternatural pockets. From them — and his pants — he can pull any object he happens to need — even a blowtorch in full blaze. 

So too the characters’ movement. Groucho’s slinking, crouching walk is an image of subversion, of an undermining. The feral Harpo’s reflexive girl-chasing make his unbridled energy seem demonic. Harpo would be the pure, unsocialized Id — but his saving grace is his warmth and delicacy, 

And his angelic harp playing. This contrasts to Groucho’s verbal music — the satiric songs he croaks — which extends his irreverence. Chico’s piano-playing is characterized by his fingering — as idiosyncratic as his language —especially when he shoots a note with his pistol finger. That encapsulates the brothers’ aggression against all convention. 

Taken together, the three brothers define a range of Outsiderhood in America. This is confirmed by the brief tenure of brother Zeppo. He was reputedly the funniest brother. In their vaudeville years he would fill in for whoever couldn’t make it. But he was too clearly the successful American, too good-looking, with too good a singing voice, to suit their Outsider spectrum. He was replaced by other B-actors.

The Marx Brothers’ influence goes far beyond the sprouting of other comedy Brother acts, from the Ritz and Smothers to the Smith. From the Marx headwater flows the century of Jewish Outsider critics of America and the larger culture, especially through parody: Mickey Katz, Alan Sherman, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman — and on to Mad Magazine and SNL. Ironically, as the Marxes find comedy in the outsider perspective on America they helped America become — at least in self-aware laughter — a little Jewish.   

  

Night Raiders

  Finally, “Canadian apocalypse” is no longer a contradiction in terms. 

Legendarily “nice” Canadians at last have a narrative feature film that exposes our  dystopian present. 

More specifically, it pretends to a near-term dystopian future that amplifies our really dystopian past. 

The specific target is the cultural genocide that the Canadian federal government, abetted by the Catholic church, attempted upon our indigenous population. That is a real horror, for which the native Canadians continue to pay, while the church finds devious ways not to. 

The government spews promises and backtracks. The Prime Minister declared a National Reconciliation Day, then for that event spurned native invitations, opting for a family holiday in the mountains instead.

In writer-director Ms Danis Goulet’s effective thriller, an impersonal police state separates native children from their parents and weaponizes them to keep order. 

But here native mythology triumphs over high-tech weaponry. A battalion of precision-firing drones turn into a horde of mosquitoes that serve the heroine’s daughter’s will. Thus the native elder’s opening vision triumphs over the supposedly superior white man’s science.

Wishful though the end might be, the film presents a fair extrapolation of Canada’s First Nations’ experience. At least the persecution part, the attempted genocide. The central mother/daughter relationship wins out, in contrast to another one, in which a woman’s son has been brainwashed to the point of killing her. 

The natives initially thought their predicted saviour “from the North” was the mother. When it turns out to be the daughter instead, the film tacitly places its faith in the future generations to campaign for and to achieve a justice and humanity so far denied them. Broadening the context, a distant cry of "I can't breathe" evokes the George Floyd incident.

The film has been wildly misrepresented. It lacks the imaginary projected science to qualify as “sci fi” and the supernatural to be a “horror.” Basically, it’s an impassioned First Nations political film disguised as thriller. If it heartens and mobilizes the First Nations it will have worked. 

Ironically, many Canadian small-L liberals who are rightly infuriated by the Canadian government’s abuse of its native children have no problem avidly supporting the Palestinians even as they make their own pre-teen children soldiers, shields, martyrs, confident that the world will blame Israel for their deaths. The Left does. 

Even as the Palestinians set random fire to Israeli forests Canada’s Green Party almost broke up in its eagerness to support them. Politics is rarely rational on either side.   

 

The Many Saints of Newark

  Let sleeping gods lie, someone might have advised David Chase. His brilliant Sopranos series so towers over the American cultural landscape that any sequel, prequel or interstitial parallel could only fall short of expectations. 

Too bad, because Chase must have some brilliant feature films inside that we would be privileged to visit. He needs only the courage to break new ground. His Not Fade Away (2012) was far better than credited. 

The current prequel likely frustrates everyone’s expectations. Too bad, because in itself it’s a very good Family family film. Trouble is, the echoes of the series inhibit our engagement with this film. We look for anticipations of the story we know — which Chase sets us up to do. That compromises our regard for the present structure. 

Still, this is an engaging drama about the American dream and its compromises. As Ray Liotta (trailing clouds of Goodfellas glory) plays both Dickie Moltisanti and his jailed twin brother, he embodies the twin poles of violent corruption and spiritual regeneration  — but both are murderers. That’s America’s primordial stain.

The newly Buddhist Moltisanti brother apart, the closest to any moral code here is the priest at the wedding, a pallid simp paid token apologies in simulated respect.

When Dickie’s new stepmother — soon to become his goomba — is imported from Italy she personifies the lost values of the American Dream. She comes to the promise of freedom only to find herself maritally enslaved and mortally violated.

Her drowning grows out of this film’s major addition to the Sopranos lore: the cost to America of its racism. The TV series touched on African American crime only in passing, with a compromised African American community leader. The film expands upon that, harping on the Italians’ disdain for the Blacks, which leads to Dickie killing his contaminated beloved. This is the BLM inflection of the saga. 

The film opens on the family cemetery and closes where the TV show starts -- on that hypnotic Journey song. In the body the most thematic pop lyrics are the — of course Sinatra — song that asks whatever happened to Christmas, whatever happened to you? 

That is, whatever happened to America and its global promise of freedom and democracy? In this drama what happened was America’s refusal to abandon its murderous white supremacism. The plantation mentality turned slavery into the nation’s suicide.  

For a crash course on the TV drama to prepare for this feature, look for my episode by episode analysis, The Sopranos on the Couch: Ultimate Edition (out of print but available on Abebooks) and The Sopranos: Season 7 (lulu.com). That’s a lot quicker than running all the shows — though less fun.

Norman McLaren: The Narrative and Contemplative Modes (reprint)

 Norman McLaren: The Narrative and Contemplative Modes 

"I try not to be just an experimenter," Norman McLaren has often said. Yet, most assessments of McLaren's work deal principally with his technical innovations- synthetic music, electronic and optional sound tracks, cameraless film-making, pixillation. Precisely because of his brilliance as an experimental film-maker, McLaren's devices have been discussed to the exclusion of his ideas. Except for such obviously didac- tic works as Neighbors and A Chairy Tale. the themes of McLaren's work have been neglected; how he works seems to have generated more interest than what he is trying to express. This regrettable bias persists even in Maynard Collins' recent book on McLaren, published by the Canadian Film lnstitute.1 

Of course, the brief, packed entertainments which McLaren has pro- duced over the years do have meaning. A varied thematic consistency underlies the variety of his experimental effects. Briefly, it seems to me that much of McLaren's work is creatively concerned with the distinc- tion between the narrative impulse and the contemplative. Two different frames of mind are expressed here. To the narrative impulse, the world is composed of tractable material which responds to the author's con- trol. The storyteller asserts himself over his material, shaping it to ex- press his vision. But in the contemplative stance, the author does not presume to shape the image of his world. Rather he takes delight in 

recording (often with awe and humility) the material as he finds it. The critical tradition that has focused exclusively upon McLaren's machinery would limit his work to the contemplative type. But often McLaren works within the context of traditional narration, with all the aggressive shaping that the type implies. 

This distinction might perhaps be best demonstrated by comparing the two ballet films that he made within a five-year period. Pas de Deux (1967) is a narrative that uses the form of ballet. In contrast, Ballet 

Adagio (1972) is a contemplation of ballet, and its implications as a metaphor for human achievement and aspiration. 

Pas de Deux is considered McLaren's masterpiece both for its technical wizardry and for its aesthetic impact. Margaret Mercier and Vincent Warren of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens dance a pas de deux. to some haunting, melancholy Roumanian music on the Pan-pipes, adapted by Maurice Blackburn. McLaren exposes individual frames of the dancers up to eleven times for a stunning, sensual effect of multiple imagery. 

But the film basically tells a story. In the beginning (i.e., pre-credits) is The Note. From the darkness emerges the rim-lit black-costumed figure of a woman, lying on her back. She rises, as if awakening to first consciousness. She sees her reflection as if in water and thus becomes aware of her own body. She tries it out, admiring her limbs and their substance. Then she strikes a pose. In the first of McLaren's superim- positions, the girl detaches herself from her body, steps out of her pose and examines it. Then she steps back from her position as self-examiner and examines that image. From her first awareness of her self as body, she has grown to an awareness of her self as an image. 

The next stage in her increasing self-awareness occurs when she pro- jects an image of herself which she then proceeds to fill. Her first projec- tion appears on the right side of the screen, framed by her arms on the left as she crouches, as if she were reaching into the darkness for a self to realize. From self-consciousness she moves to self-conception, then to self-direction. These changes in the quality of her experience are attend- ed by a refinement in the music; the full orchestra is sharpened down to the Pan-pipes. 

Then the lady dances with her own image. This sequence suggests that the first stage of her harmony is narcissistic (or even onanistic, if one recalls McLaren's playful 1944 drawing of a "Chair for One or Two (Sex if two, masturbation if one)").2 The image of identical selves danc- ing together is unsettling, especially when the illusion of symmetry is violated by the eventual crossing of limbs. 

Now a man enters on the left foreground and watches her dance with herself. As he enters from the front, from the position of the film's au- dience, as it were, he is a reminder of community, of human otherness. With his appearance, the woman must choose between dancing with herself and dancing with the other. Thrice she retreats from the image of herself, and thrice from the man. 

Ultimately, however, the man's attraction prevails. In a process of courtship he approaches her, follows her, and eventually kneels before her. At that point she splits into a series of selves which he spins around him. The self-image with which she had earlier danced was detached from her; here she has a multiplicity of selves that are connected. The man has discovered in her a fluid and lively unity. Through him, her previous choice between selves has become a composition of many shades of self in continuity. where formerly there had been division. 

The multiple exposure of their dance sustains numerous interpreta- tions. For example. the flurry of their limbs may suggest wings. Or it may suggest the tingle of the lovers' skins to each other's touch, for their flesh is made to seem layered with feeling and responsiveness. McLaren's drawings, "Longing" and "Memory of the Kiss," are based on analogous imagery.J Or the technique may suggest the suspension of time by the lovers' emotion and sensation, for the overlay of image enables the past experience to persist. Moments climax, as each position is shown to be the sum of the moments which led up to it. When the multiple limbs gather into one, there is a deep peace which suggests the emotional charge that even a moment of stasis can bear. 

For a brief instant of separation the dancers/ lovers leave the screen black, to return in a climactic reunion. Where the girl earlier reached for herself, now the lovers reach across the dark screen to each other. They seem to pour into each other. When he spins her around again there is a vertical dimension as well as the circular. It is an image of - one is reluctant to say. for fear of violating the high feeling of the scene - a screw, as the woman makes a spiraling descent in the man's arms. Certainly the fluidity of the lovers' movements suggests the blending of their bodies. The fil.m ends on the image of the tender and dominant man, a head taller than his lady. 

A note of fullest and simplest harmony concludes the film, both visually and musically. The dance between two images of the same self was a false appearance of harmony; the dance between the two separate characters is true concord. The point of the film is that the unity of separates is richer than the separation of unity. The one is complement, the other duplication. Or, the one is fulfilling, the other fragmenting. 

The phrase pas de deux. of course, is a ballet term for "dance between two." But it can also mean, literally, "not of two." This is the paradox at the heart of the film. The dance of the two female figures early in the film is not of two but of one, a delusion of harmony and of self- fulfilment. The dance of the two lovers at the end is not of two but of one, for they are lovers. 

In Pas de Deux. then, McLaren told a little story. It had a moral: love, like the dance, like film, like any art, like life, fulfills the self by bringing it into an enrichening harmony with another. Of course. thegenius of this work is that its moral is done without having been taught; it need not be spoken or directly brought to the viewer's shallow awareness. 

Ballet Adagio is the opposite kind of film. There is no story-line, just the dance of David and Anna Marie Holmes in an adaptation of Spring Water. Nor is there any of the striking technique that characterized Pas de Deux. Indeed it is as if McLaren were deliberately minimizing his own artistry in Ballet Adagio to concentrate our attention on the dance itself. What stylistic intervention he makes serves that function. The camera remains in a level. frontal perspective, occasionally moving for- ward or back to vary its distance from the dance but not to ruffle our perspective. McLaren shot the ten-minute film at one-quarter the normal speed. As a result, the viewer notices the smallest element in each movement by the dancers, rather than absorbing the effect of the move-ment as a whole. The hair and muscles and individual steps are strikingly individuated. Instead of telling a story, the technique serves to anatomize the performance. Here the ballet is the subject, not the language, of McLaren's communication. 

The results of this stark anatomy are striking. For one thing, much of the film is actually comical, given the grotesqueness of some of the mo- tions when so slowed down for our scrutiny. And yet there remains the over-riding sense of the beauty of the dance. 

Two basic paradoxes emerge from this film. One is the beauty that can result from the ludicrous flesh of man, with his bulging muscles and immutable bulk. For to have the delicacy of the dancer one needs pro- nounced sinews and firmly visible muscles. The film demonstrates that one must cultivate the flesh in order to transcend it, to dance beyond it. The second paradox is the vision of art as an extremely rigorous discipline, in contrast to the essential fluidity of human nature. So much of the dancer seems to be sprawling out of control - the strands of hair, the individual gestures. Yet the overall effect of the dance is to express the most concentrated degree of control, just as the effect of the ludicrous motions was beauty. The organ accompaniment seems to sanctify this transformation of man by his art and by his discipline. In the last image of the film, the woman seems to be flying off, but of course, she is carried by the quite earthbound male. The last image sustains the paradox of the artist’s transcendence. 

A survey of McLaren's other works will confirm the distinction drawn between the two ballet films: sometimes he tells a story, and sometimes he serves his subject with a more passive contemplation. 

A Chairy Tale (1957) is clearly a narrative. A man (Claude Jutra) enters reading a book and attempts to sit on a plain white kitchen chair. The chair repulses him. At first he treats it as if it were a child; he plays hop-scotch with it. That failing, he tries to impress it by striking a military pose, again to no avail. He eventually wins the chair by address- ing it! her as an equal, by embracing her in the ardour of a Latin- American dance. Even then, he may not sit on the chair until the chair has sat on him. 

On one level, this film is a parable about courtship and seduction ("A Chary Tail," "A Cherry Tale," etc.). But the chair is always still a chair. McLaren's technique of pixillation accords equal and continuous life to man and to object, as if to say that there is spirit and vitality in all things, if we but attend to them. In this sense it is the man who is the virgin, experiencing his first insight into fuller life. Ravi Shankar's score from Scheherezade support the romantic allegory but also recalls the in- structive woman of its title. 

On the other hand, Rhythmetic (1956), McLaren's previous film, is a meditation upon the finitude of human power and the infinity of man's surrounding. In his parade of numerals McLaren personalizes the digits. For example, 3 marches like a guardsman, 4 epitomizes stability and sobriety, and 1 -w ell, 1 is the start of it all. He has humble origins in the alphabet; he is an "i" with a flea. Alone of the numbers, 1 has the respectability of the alphabet behind him so he may be something of a fallen angel. For language is a system of conventions that makes no claim to physical existence, until a Lyly or a concrete poet goes to work on it, that is! But numbers presume to embody a world beyond their own existence. The numbers' quantification assumes an authority beyond the signifying function of the alphabet. So Rhythmetic portrays man's futile attempt through numbers to impose a sense of order on his chaotic and massive world. 

The numbers march out to pose with their equation marks as a truthful statement of being. Their first collective assertion has the unstable shape of a diamond. Not until the end do the numbers achieve a stable shape, and for that they must call upon the alphabet to spell out "The End." The life of the film records disorder; only the conclusion can provide order. 

The villain of the piece is zero. Zero is the void which the numbers strive to avoid by asserting their existence, by declaring an equation. But zero refuses to go where ordered or to stay where he must for the others' statement to be true, for their fabricated world to remain stable. Zero invalidates the other numbers' pretense to order, to control, to a stable existence. To put zero back in his place, the "equals" sign is continually summoned, like two constables required to enforce equality. But the spirit of the void is not to be so easily controlled. The numbers march out their statement but zero continues to thwart them. Even when under arrest by the "equals," zero has the last laugh, for the o and the = form the cosine of calculus. Under arrest, zero refers to a higher order of mathematics (or existence) than that of the numbers who are trying to reduce him to conformity. Similarly, two zeroes join to form the sign of infinity, which further diminishes the universe of numbers 1 to 9. Finally, such is the power of zero that all the figures in his column contact his contagious wildness and incorrigibility; the other figures within the pattern show no personality. In the context of infinity and void, all human attempts at order and control are trivial. At the same time, the plucky spirit of zero makes Rhythmetic one of McLaren's key statements about the indomitable quality of the human spirit in the face of conformist pressures. 

Canon (1964) is a similar meditation, ostensibly about the structure of a musical form, but also about the tension between order and chaos, between regimentation and individuality. First, alphabet blocks per- form a pattern of movement, then humans do, then a cat and but- terflies. Again, "canon" is a musical term, but it also refers to the laws and regulations that restrict human conduct. In the world of canons, man, cat and butterfly are restricted to the motions of alphabet blocks, though man in his stubbornness and ingenuity may contrive to play variations within the forms imposed upon him (e.g., doing the number backwards, or upside down). The film is one of the great, playful expressions of the ironic spirit, that which says "No" in a silent subversion, thunder being forbidden. 

Like his ballet films, too, McLaren's two "Phantasies" are of opposite types. In A Little Phantasy o f a 19th Century Painting (1946) McLaren records a free-ranging process of association with a Gothic painting by Arnold Boecklin. It is as if a still picture were being brought to life. The basic image is the branch, variously embodied as plant life (growth), as a crack (disintegration), as fire (destroying or regenerating), as lightning (firing but illuminating), or as the webbed wings of a bird (the free, animating fancy). In any case, the branch motif makes it clear that this film is an exercise of the imaginative response to the picture. For example, a pillar grows out of some ruins, glows, then cracks into branch-like veins. Or a coffin bursts into flames which become an eagle. Even the images of death and disintegration express the creative power of man's associational mind. This film is one of McLaren's contemplations; the subject is man's imagination. 

But in Phantasy (1952) there is a definite narrative line in the metamorphoses that record the processes of creation, regeneration and free-ranging fancy. A cross changes into a brain which becomes an egg- shaped cluster of feathers and flowers, from which is hatched a skyscape. Where the earlier "Phantasy" was a response to a painting. and a meditation on the process by which it evokes responses, this "Phantasy" is a narrative, albeit with the same theme, the fertility of man's fantasy. 

Distinguishing between McLarens' narrative and meditative modes is most difficult where his technique and theme involve metamorphosis. In the first Phantasy. for example. his decision to metamorphose his shapes instead of using cuts or dissolves asserts a continuing life between the painting and the viewer's being. Similarly, Hen Hop (1942) might be considered a meditation on the continuity between egg and chicken, as the two shapes pass in and out of each other; in broader terms, we are invited to contemplate the individual's responsibilities to the fertility cycle. 

As usual, McLaren's technique expresses the spiritual unity between dissimilar things. The chicken is the once and future egg. But Hen Hop is also a story about a hen who refuses to mate. The first stage is a dance between two words, "on" and "no'', which are a sexual proposition and its rejection. The 'o' changes into an egg, which two chicken-feet pass as they search for a body. 

There follows a dance between two pink (female?) and two black (male?) legs. in which the pink reject the black. Eventually the egg turns into a V. which in turn changes into "Save." At this level, Hen Hop is a commercial for war-bonds. But as Eisenstein proved in The General Line. there is nothing like a bawdy parable to fire up community spirit and patriotism. So in a tale about a spinster hen, McLaren conducts a debate between the white of virginity and the red of experience, between the spinster's "saving herself' and her communal responsibility to be generous in her use. A simple commercial explodes into witty paradox. Private saving is found inferior to generous communal savings. The square dance accompaniment makes no mention of partners, one must note, but it does spur the ladies on to relate to their "corners," their unattached neighbors, in the spirit of avoiding isolation ("Hurry up girls or you'll never get around").McLaren's musical visualizations frequently take the form of bawdy or romantic parables, as the artist luxuriates in the fertility of his creation. For instance, in Loops (1940) the first red loop changes into a heart. then a triangle, then a square. An egg-shape courts the loop, dances with it, even enters it before it sprouts a child. The last frame has two small squares, a heart, and a column - as a kind of geometrical family living happily ever after. 

There are similar kinds of courtship in Boogie Doodle (1940) and Short and Suite (1959). In all these cases, McLaren seems to be contemplating the interplay between music and abstract shapes, but his cartoons are straining towards little erotic narratives. The parable is most obvious in B/inkety Blank (1954), where two etched birds brawl, threaten cannibalism, and eventually metamorphose into other states of being. A divided screen is eventually crossed by an egg-shape that brings the warring birds together in a kiss, then in two hearts which in turn become an egg and a flurry of feathers. Here McLaren establishes the generic antagonism in nature, but overrides it with his spirit of harmony and fertility. Both by its technique and its spirit, the film declares the birdness of worms and the warmness of birds. 

A corollary to his flowing images of metamorphosis can be found in the technique of pixillation in his Oscar-winning Neighbors (1952). Wholesale destruction ensues when two neighbors feud over possession of a flower growing between their properties. The pixillation gives the flower human attributes; it bows to the men when it arrives, it cowers under their blows. On the other hand, the men are further brutalized by McLaren's technique, by the roughness of their motions and by their horrifying conversion of face into mask. McLaren shrewdly resists individuating the men's characters, because his point is the essential brotherhood of man that wars violate.Thus radical differences between people are shown to conceal an even more basic kinship. One man reads a paper with the headline, "Peace Certain if No War"; the other, ostensibly of a different party, reads one headlined "War Certain if No Peace." 

At the end of the film, both men are dead and buried. The pickets around the graves part to admit new flowers to grow; boards form a cross on each of the graves. Thus in their burial the war-crated brutes are given Christian heroism and - in a touch of stinging irony - given the emblems (flowers) which they trampled to espouse. The irony recalls his 1943 drawing, "Liberty arms herself," where "I felt resentful at many of the things that were being done in the name of 'Liberty.· "4 

Neighbors is McLaren's most obvious narrative film. But its techniques of metamorphosis and pixillation give it a contemplative quality. In the brutish, unflowing motions of the characters one finds McLaren contemplating the nature of man's martial instincts. The worst of man can be evoked by the finest of values (e.g., love of a delicate flower). For war perverts the best in man. In A Chairy Tale McLaren reversed the negative for the scene where the man poses as a soldier to impress the chair. To McLaren, war is a reversal and a perversion of normal human nature. 

McLaren's most obvious contemplative works are the abstract visuals offered as responses to musical works. In Begone Dull Care (1949) Oscar Peterson's jazz score evokes a prodigal array of visual styles, which may serve as a history of art. from primitivism through to the minimal art of a beam playing across darkness. The topic of this film is its very synesthesia and the joy of its invention. In Dots (1940), Lines Vertical (1960), and Lines Horizontal (1962), McLaren provides meditations on movement, color, and optical illusions. But the Lines Vertical begin to seem like doors and the Lines Horizontal like horizons, both of which beckon the viewer's imagination to exult in the creative powers of his senses. 

Mosaic (1965) may seem like an op art combination of the Lines and Dots films, but this film is cast in an important narrative frame. It opens with a man whistling and casually juggling a white ball. As in A Chairy Tale, a thoughtless fellow is about to find his world teeming with unexpected and demanding liveliness. When he blows the ball into the air it assumes an independent career. It splits into expanding and contracting patterns of dots or balls. The body of the film is this fascinating scene of the changing balls. At the peak the balls seem to be an even grid, no longer individual balls, and they enjoy a variety of color that is in marked contrast to the dull black-and-white of the man's world. Eventually the ball settles down in its quiet unity and its neutral whiteness. The man returns, picks up the ball and starts off-screen with it, whistling and carefree again. But he explodes. He is replaced by "End." The suggestion is that his end came as punishment for not hav- ing recognized the power or the personality of the ball. 

This fable that frames Mosaic makes the two basic points of McLaren's work. First, man can be destroyed by the powers that he un- wittingly unleashes. This interpretation would take the ball as an emblem of military force, obviously an atomic explosive. But the ball can also be read like the chair in A Chairy Tale or the painting in Phantasy, as an item in our inanimate world that teems with imaginative and exploratory potential. In this reading the man's explosion would anticipate Tom's disappearance in the last shot of Antonioni's Blow Up: it is the end of the man because it marks the end of his sensory and moral commitment to life around him.

The different modes that we defined in the ballet films and in the two Phantasies occur together in Mosaic. The body of the film is the kind of abstract contemplation of form and movement for which McLaren is best known. But the narrative of the frame shows a more aggressive McLaren, an artist conscious of shaping his materials into a narrative line that will make his point about life and sensitivity. 

Norman McLaren's films alert us to the life in balls and chairs, the heaven in a grain of sand and the eternity in the three-minute traffic of his animation table. McLaren is entranced by life and rhythm. But for all its technical inventiveness and its aesthetic delight, McLaren's work is the expression of an articulate and committed humanist. Whether he tells a story or he contemplates shifting shapes and hues, McLaren's ob- jective is to reawaken his viewer's eye and heart. His universal following is due to the emotional and sensory impact of his films, but they are also amenable to the processes of critical analysis. Indeed, they are rich enough to demand such investigation. 

Finally, one might suggest that the tension here described between the narrative and the contemplative modes may be the most distinctly Canadian aspect of this transplanted Scot's work. For Canadian film has never been comfortable in the kind of assertive narrative myths that characterize American films. The Canadian tradition has emphasized documentaries instead of heroic fictions. And even in its best story films, the Canadian experience records awe at the vast setting, not the American's heady conquest of it. Joyce Weiland's The Far Shore disap- points its audience because it is so Canadian in its space and meditative tempo. And in Michael Snow's Wave Length. there is the deliberate decision to ignore the murder-mystery story, which seems briefly to happen in the foreground, in preference for the continuation of the contemplative thrust onward through the picture and to the still open space of the sea. But uniquely among Canadian artists, Norman McLaren is the exultant explorer and awed worshipper of inner space, where the mind's eye scans unfathomable riches. 

I Notes 

I. 

1. Norman McLaren, by Maynard Collins, Canadian Film Institute, Ottawa, 1976. The bibliography (possibly the most useful part of Collins's book) confirms the paucity of critical analysis of McLaren's work .
   
2. The Drawings ofNorman McLaren. Tundra Books. Montreal, 1975, p.10.
   
3. Ibid..pp.28,29.
   
4. Ibid.. p.17. 

Reprinted from The Dalhousie Review, Summer 1977, pp 277-86.