Syracuse prof is pop culture ambassador
By JOCELYN NOVECK, AP National Writer
Last week was pretty slow in the world of pop culture news. But the media sought out Robert Thompson just the same.
The Syracuse University professor was quoted on the image of motherhood on TV. On the phenomenon of animal shows on cable. The danger of Hollywood trilogies. Rosie O'Donnell's future. The hipness of being a nerd.
Such exposure is nothing unusual for Thompson, a font of pop culture knowledge like few others. There may well be an expert somewhere who has a more wide-ranging, obsessive knowledge of this highly amorphous subject. But if so, they're keeping quiet about it.
And it would be hard for the amiable, 47-year-old Thompson to keep quiet at this point, even if he wanted to. Because reporters from all over the world would keep calling — to get his witty analysis of Katie Couric's debut on CBS, of vintage furniture, of the growth of barbecue culture. He's been called, half-jokingly, the most quoted man in America. That's not exactly true; we do have a president. But on certain days, when the pop culture firmament is busy, well, just Google his name.
"I've seen Bob get 60, 70, 80 media calls in one day," says the man who hired him at Syracuse, David Rubin, dean of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. "I've seen him in a hallway on his cell phone for hours. You could go so far as to say Bob is the most quoted academic in the United States."
So often has Thompson been quoted, over 17 years at Syracuse, that some news organizations (including The Associated Press) have lately tried consciously NOT to quote him.
But nobody said we couldn't write ABOUT him. So while Syracuse, the seat of Onondaga County, about 250 miles from New York City, would hardly seem a mecca of pop culture, it seems a worthwhile journey to meet one of the only men on the planet capable of riffing rhapsodically, on cue, about the history of the aluminum lawn chair.
___
The first thing you notice in Thompson's office are the TV sets. Not because three in one office is so unusual — though this office does seem rather spacious for an academic, not to mention the view — but because of what's playing. Not CNN or Fox News, but an episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" on TV Land.
TV is Thompson's passion; his office shelves are lined with old VHS tapes filled with countless hours of shows. A short walk away is the lecture hall where he teaches his spring undergraduate class. On this, the last day of the semester, Thompson has three hours to wrap up the history of television.
He whips into action, starting with the early '50s and Lucy and Desi. Before you can say "Hill Street Blues" he's up to the '80s — the second "Golden Age" of television — by way of "Quincy" and "Barnaby Jones." At the turn of the century, Thompson argues, television is at its all-time best, with HBO the crown jewel. "The Larry Sanders Show." "Oz." "Sex and the City." "The Sopranos." "Rome." And so on.
He turns to reality TV, which, in a typically sweeping yet concise Thompson-ism, he calls "the most interesting new way to tell a story since the invention of the novel." It began in Britain, he explains, and then "the virus jumped over the Atlantic and spread."
"Survivor" is dissected. So is "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?" and "Temptation Island." Have you ever noticed how conservative "The Bachelor" is, he muses, with all these girls waiting for a kiss? Stephanie from South Carolina has recently been rejected by bachelor Andy, he notes. Yes, he does watch all this stuff.
Now he broaches the "single biggest event in all of TV history" — coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks. He plays a good hour of CNN from that awful morning, reminding the students, most of whom were about 14 then, how it felt to watch the twin towers collapse on live TV. When he later plays segments of an MTV documentary on pop culture post-9/11, no one flinches when one of its featured commentators turns out to be Thompson. The students are used to it.
The class ends with society's current fixation on YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site. And one lesson from that, he notes, is how our collective attention span has shrunk. We can't watch a YouTube clip that's more than a few minutes long. To prove it, he plays a tedious clip of someone's pet cat playing the piano. "Seven minutes," another Thompson-ism goes, "is the new 'War and Peace.'"
___
Back in his office later that evening, Thompson explains the genesis of his interest in pop culture. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago, where he initially planned to be an art history professor. But on Sunday nights, when the dorms didn't serve food, he would eat takeout in front of the TV. He found that he chose "CHiPs," with Erik Estrada, over PBS, and became fascinated with the question: "Why do smart people watch dumb TV?"
He did his thesis on Dante's "Divine Comedy," but came to believe that "art could be something that came out of a TV set." That led to a broader interest in popular culture. "I realized that to understand TV you needed to understand the network radio era. And vaudeville. And the circus. And comic strips. Every year I would binge on something."
He did his masters and doctorate at Northwestern, and arrived in 1990 at Syracuse, where he now heads the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. Over the years, reaction from traditional academics to his chosen field has become much less hostile, he says. "Now, there isn't a university that doesn't have a course on the history of rock 'n' roll," he notes.
Thompson, who's written or edited six books of his own, gets up each day at five to read; he consumes three new books a week, not to mention uncounted hours of TV. (He also has a family that he spends time with.) He's constantly becoming enamored with new areas of pop culture.
A couple years ago, for example, he realized he didn't know enough about Shakespeare — a pop culture figure of his time, after all. He decided to watch all existing plays on VHS or DVD. In three months he watched 113 plays and read 25 books on the bard. "I was crazed," he says contentedly.
Then there's his interest in the webbed aluminum lawn chair. "They're really taken for granted," he says. He's happy to explain how the phenomenon began with extra metal from wartime scrap drives, combined with explosive growth in America's suburbs.
Right now, Thompson's focusing his pop-culture lens on ancient times. "I'm interested in the celebrity culture of ancient Rome," he says. "Back then, as now, it was who you knew that got you into parties."
It dovetails with a broader Thompson thesis: So many things that we think are new, really aren't. "American Idol," you say? Nothing new, he replies. Remember Ted Mack's "Original Amateur Hour?"
____
It's not just the breadth of Thompson's interests that make him so quotable. It's his accessibility — he returns phone calls promptly — and the un-academic way he speaks: in snappy sentences that are easy to digest. "I don't speak in clauses," he acknowledges. "I believe in periods." Some might actually say he speaks in soundbites — the media gossip site Jossip.com has in fact drily called him "Mr. Soundbite," and Thompson himself notes he's been called a "quote whore." But reporters point out that he thinks hard to come up with something different and interesting.
"Unlike many people in his position, he almost always finds an angle or perspective that I hadn't thought about," says AP Television Writer David Bauder.
Angela Nelson, a professor at Bowling Green State University, says Thompson is "performing a great service for the discipline. Television in particular has been seen to be trivial, and his paying attention to it and preserving it is good for the culture." Nelson is the head of her university's Popular Culture department — the only full department in the country devoted to the subject, established in the 1970s. (Most pop culture courses are nestled in other departments like English, communications, or sociology.)
Thompson has been quoted so often, at least one reporter has told him of a "moratorium" at their newspaper on quoting him. One can see why editors would notice. At The New York Times alone, an archive search shows Thompson quoted more than 40 times in the last four years, by writers in a wide range of areas. At the AP, he's been quoted close to 20 times in the past year.
"These days, answers are so predictable, crafted and cliche," says journalism teacher Roy Clark, of the Poynter Institute in Florida. "Somebody who thinks on their feet, relies on a well of knowledge and is curious about the world at large can be an invaluable resource." Clark, who notes he's unfamiliar with Thompson, adds: "As long as it doesn't turn journalists into lazybones."
Thompson says he's weary of the most-quoted-guy label, but Rubin, his dean, says: "Bob is very proud of his status. He's just got a certain modesty about him." He adds that Thompson is not at all hierarchical: If a school paper calls before a major news organization, they'll get the return call first.
As a teacher, Thompson is said to be generous with his time, though he's known as a tough grader — something that can disappoint a student hoping to get an easy ride in a pop culture class. "He really has a lot of time for his students," says Carolyn Davis, a doctoral student in media studies who assisted Thompson this semester. "People will come in just to talk, and he'll order lunch."
In any case, the university loves his star status. "My job is to keep Bob happy," says Rubin.
Thompson says he learns from the give-and-take with the media. Besides, it's a teacher's job to preach what he knows — and Thompson feels Americans need a basic working knowledge of their own pop culture.
"To understand the history of this nation," he says, leaving you with one last Thompson-ism, "you have to understand its presidents and its wars.
"But you also need to understand its lawn ornaments and its cheeseburgers."
Monday, May 14, 2007
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Sample Profile 1
A Beautiful Find
Nov. 16, 2003
By Tommy Tomlinson
The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
QUESTION ONE: You decide you want to solve a math problem that’s so hard, no one’s come close in 25 years. How do you begin?
John Swallow began four and a half years ago, 6,000 miles from home, staring out the window of a bus.
He's the guy you want next to you on the bus seat. Friendly but quiet. You might not remember him later, unless you glanced over when he'd just thought of something, and you saw his left eyebrow rise over the rim of his glasses.
Swallow started writing computer code when he was 7. He aced college calculus when he was 13. He entered grad school at Yale when he was 19. But here he was at 28, in Haifa, Israel, with a problem that clogged his mind like kitchen sludge.
Swallow teaches at Davidson College. He went to Israel on a working sabbatical to trade ideas with a professor named Jack Sonn. Swallow and Sonn are two of maybe 100 people in the world who are experts in their particular side street of math.
They study algebra at its highest levels. They work with sets of numbers called Brauer groups, named for a Jewish mathematician who left Germany when Hitler took over. They apply ideas based on Galois theory, named for a 19th-century French mathematician who died in a duel.
The work has practical uses, such as cryptography - the making and breaking of codes. But to Swallow, it combines the things he loves about math: the beautiful patterns in numbers, and the challenge of seeing how far his skill and imagination can stretch.
In Israel, Swallow and Sonn spent a semester warming up with some minor theorems. Then one day Sonn suggested a problem that other experts in their field had thought of back in the '70s. Many mathematicians worked on it into the '80s - Sonn among them - but no one ever came up with an answer.
In every branch of math there are problems no one has ever solved. They are numerical shipwrecks. If you dive deep enough you could find treasure. But you might spend years and come out with nothing.
The problem Sonn suggested involves analyzing two Brauer groups - huge algebraic structures, whole fields of numbers - and trying to show that they're the same.
The numbers in Brauer groups aren't just the ones you use to balance the checkbook. They're irrational numbers (like the square root of 2) that can't be reduced to a fraction. They're even imaginary numbers (like the square root of -1) that don't show up on a calculator.
Swallow came to think of his problem as comparing two forests. They look exactly alike. The heights of the trees match. But to prove that they're identical, you have to get down to every needle and every hunk of bark.
He had never worked on a problem that required so many techniques, so many new ideas, so much brainpower.
For months he sat in Sonn's office every afternoon, the two of them staring at the blackboard, sometimes for so long that Sonn would doze off.
At night Swallow rode home on a city bus. The other passengers chatted in Hebrew or Arabic, languages he didn't understand. Swallow thought about all the rest he didn't understand, the equations on the blackboard, the numbers skittering out of reach.
He wondered if he had come this far only to find something he had never run into: a problem that was stronger than his mind.
QUESTION TWO: You're struggling to solve a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. You also have a normal life. How do you balance the world inside your head with the one outside?
Cameron Swallow calls it "the math-problem expression." She describes it as "an abstracted gazing into the middle distance."
She first saw it in her husband half their lives ago. They met in choir practice at the University of the South in Tennessee. She was a freshman at 17. He was already a sophomore at 16.
They both loved math and music and English literature. They had long romantic talks about quadratic equations. He had enough credits to graduate early, but he stayed an extra year - partly to finish off a double major, partly to be with her. They got married in 1991, when John was at Yale.
In 1994 they came to Davidson. Soon they had a daughter, Ruth, and then another, Sophie. The talk shifted to whose turn it was to change diapers and when to buy the minivan. John became, as Cameron puts it, the Kitchen Spouse. He makes a mean Reuben sandwich in the Crock-Pot.
In Israel their kids were still small, so John and Cameron had time to talk about the math problem. But he and Sonn weren't getting far. They had spent six months digging and hadn't hit anything solid. And it was time for the Swallows to go back to Davidson.
Swallow resumed his regular life - teaching during the day, spending time with family at night. He worked on the problem in spare hours, between classes and church services and oil changes. He filled sheets of paper with equations next to phone numbers for the DMV.
Sonn had gone on to other projects. Swallow worked by himself for months. But he kept getting stuck. He thought of it like trying to lay carpet that was too small for the room. Every time he got one corner to fit, another would pop loose.
He worried that he had lost his confidence, lost his aggressiveness, lost his faith.
He put down the problem for nearly a year.
He taught, traveled, read to his daughters. He got in touch with a Canadian collaborator. They worked on a smaller problem that they wrapped up in a few months.
When they were done Swallow went back to the folder in his file cabinet, the one marked `Current' Research.
It was filled with copied pages from textbooks, scribbles on graph paper, half-finished thoughts on index cards. The Brauer groups, those two huge fields of numbers, ran all over the pages. He was sure they were the same. But he had to prove it.
He read the notes over and dug in again.
He spread out his work on a table at Summit Coffee across from the Davidson campus. He tried out theories in his head as he drove back from family visits, Cameron and the kids asleep in the minivan, a band called String Cheese Incident playing on the stereo.
Sometimes he forgot what he'd already done and repeated the mistakes he and Sonn made in Israel. Sometimes he worked for days and ended up back at the same wrong place.
But then he thought about the smaller problem he'd already finished. He realized that some of that work overlapped.
He still wasn't getting far. He wasn't even doing enough to call his progress slow and steady. Slow and unsteady, maybe.
Still, after two and a half years, the stubborn numbers in Swallow's head began to shift a little.
His eyebrow rose.
QUESTION THREE: You've spent countless hours trying to solve a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. What will it take to finally break through?
The speaker was boring. Worse yet, he was boring in French.
By now it was July 2001. Swallow had come to Lille, France, north of Paris, for a math conference. He knows French. But this guy at the front of the lecture hall was talking so fast that Swallow couldn't understand half the words, and didn't care about the rest.
Eventually he gave up. He reached over and pulled out his notes on the problem he and Jack Sonn had been working on.
All of a sudden a fresh thought flashed in his mind.
He grabbed a pen and wrote one word.
Suppose:
He followed that word with a string of equations that set new limits on the number fields.
Maybe if he put just a few restrictions on the problem, narrowed the scope just a bit, it would work. He went back to the idea of trying to lay a carpet that's too small for the room. Maybe the answer was to make the room a little smaller.
For the next couple of days he did calculations in every spare moment. The numbers were lining up, making graceful curves on his worksheets. But there were still places where the numbers strayed.
One morning Swallow skipped the conference and went looking for coffee. He ended up in a shopping center and found a table in a restaurant called Quick - a European version of McDonald's.
He doesn't remember much about the scene around him. The steam coming off the coffee. A woman pushing a baby stroller.
Then, another flash.
All along he had struggled with a few key places where the two number fields could have been different. If they were the same, he could apply an equation to both fields and the two sides would add up to zero. But one side always came up with the wrong result.
This time Swallow tried a new technique, something he'd never thought of before that moment in the fast-food joint in France.
It was as if he had been trying to train a dog for months, and the dog finally came.
Lots of dogs. Whole fields of them.
The numbers lined up and sat still.
Swallow applied an equation to both Brauer groups. Did the calculations.
They added up to zero.
Perfect balance.
He had made it down to the needle and the bark. The forests were the same.
Swallow still had to try his new thoughts on other parts of the problem. He still had to recheck his calculations. He still had to trust himself.
He went back to Davidson. His wife noticed the old "math-problem expression." Swallow ran through the steps of his solution over and over until he felt sure.
In the fall of '01 he sent Jack Sonn a draft of the solution. For the next six months they e-mailed back and forth, challenging each other's ideas, getting stuck and starting over. Swallow had to refine his work, make the path to the answer more clear.
The revisions took more than a year.
In November 2002, Swallow sent Sonn a draft that contained all the changes. Sonn spent two months looking them over.
And then Sonn e-mailed back with the words Swallow had waited to hear for almost exactly four years:
"Looks good."
QUESTION FOUR: You think you've solved a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. How do you know when you're done?
At the highest levels, every math problem is solved twice: once in private, once in public.
Swallow and Sonn agreed that they'd found the answer. But now the math world would get to check their work.
They typed up a formal version of the proof: "Brauer Groups of Genus Zero Extensions of Number Fields." It ran 22 pages.
Swallow sent copies to several other experts. He and Sonn posted their work on Web sites devoted to new research papers.
Based on the feedback, they made a few small fixes. Then they got the proof ready for the final step - submitting it to one of the academic journals.
The journals are the hockey goalies of math. If they think a paper is worthy, they send it to referees - other mathematicians who go over every detail. The referees are anonymous. If they agree with the proof, most mathematicians consider the problem solved.
Most journals get more submissions than they can publish. One journal decided not to look at Sonn and Swallow's proof. They sent their work to a second journal. It was now February 2003. Swallow thought it might be another year before they heard back.
Swallow picks up his office mail at the college union. In summer he goes by every couple of days. In early August he found a letter. It was from an editor of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication.
One referee suggested two tiny changes. The other didn't suggest any.
It had been four years and seven months since they started. Now they were officially finished.
Swallow sent Jack Sonn an e-mail. He said it was time for a drink.
BONUS QUESTION: You've solved a math problem that was so hard, no one else came close for 25 years. What did you learn?
The first breath of fall is blowing across Main Street in Davidson. The folks behind the counter at Summit Coffee learned long ago what John Swallow wants. Regular latte if it's the morning, decaf latte if it's the afternoon.
They know what he wants to drink, they might know what he does for a living, but they don't know what he has accomplished. Not many people do - his family, a few other faculty members, maybe 50 mathematicians worldwide.
The problem he solved won't win any of the big math prizes or make it into Newsweek. It's not even necessarily the kind of thing that would earn him a raise.
But there are rewards.
He'll move up in the eyes of those who study top-level algebra. People will ask him to speak at conferences, publish papers, collaborate on new ideas. He's already got a textbook due in December.
He knows now that figuring out the mysteries of giant number fields isn't that different from working out the problems of everyday life. You break them down into small steps. You leave them alone now and then so you can come back fresh. Mainly, you trust what your instincts tell you.
These days Swallow is in charge of figuring out supper and hustling the kids to the car pool. Cameron has gone back to work; she teaches algebra at Smith Language Academy, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg magnet school. Ruth is 7, and Sophie's 5. They're ahead of their age groups in math.
Swallow is due for another sabbatical in 2005. He's thinking about taking the family to France. He's had good luck in France.
Meanwhile he daydreams about the next big problem, wonders what mental turn he'll have to take to solve it.
"There are lots of good ideas, but at first they are only ideas," he says. "They have this feeling of novelty and newness. But until you sit down and hack it out, look at the details, you're never sure what you've got. The idea can be beautiful. But only the work can make it beautiful."
And his left eyebrow rises up.
Nov. 16, 2003
By Tommy Tomlinson
The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
QUESTION ONE: You decide you want to solve a math problem that’s so hard, no one’s come close in 25 years. How do you begin?
John Swallow began four and a half years ago, 6,000 miles from home, staring out the window of a bus.
He's the guy you want next to you on the bus seat. Friendly but quiet. You might not remember him later, unless you glanced over when he'd just thought of something, and you saw his left eyebrow rise over the rim of his glasses.
Swallow started writing computer code when he was 7. He aced college calculus when he was 13. He entered grad school at Yale when he was 19. But here he was at 28, in Haifa, Israel, with a problem that clogged his mind like kitchen sludge.
Swallow teaches at Davidson College. He went to Israel on a working sabbatical to trade ideas with a professor named Jack Sonn. Swallow and Sonn are two of maybe 100 people in the world who are experts in their particular side street of math.
They study algebra at its highest levels. They work with sets of numbers called Brauer groups, named for a Jewish mathematician who left Germany when Hitler took over. They apply ideas based on Galois theory, named for a 19th-century French mathematician who died in a duel.
The work has practical uses, such as cryptography - the making and breaking of codes. But to Swallow, it combines the things he loves about math: the beautiful patterns in numbers, and the challenge of seeing how far his skill and imagination can stretch.
In Israel, Swallow and Sonn spent a semester warming up with some minor theorems. Then one day Sonn suggested a problem that other experts in their field had thought of back in the '70s. Many mathematicians worked on it into the '80s - Sonn among them - but no one ever came up with an answer.
In every branch of math there are problems no one has ever solved. They are numerical shipwrecks. If you dive deep enough you could find treasure. But you might spend years and come out with nothing.
The problem Sonn suggested involves analyzing two Brauer groups - huge algebraic structures, whole fields of numbers - and trying to show that they're the same.
The numbers in Brauer groups aren't just the ones you use to balance the checkbook. They're irrational numbers (like the square root of 2) that can't be reduced to a fraction. They're even imaginary numbers (like the square root of -1) that don't show up on a calculator.
Swallow came to think of his problem as comparing two forests. They look exactly alike. The heights of the trees match. But to prove that they're identical, you have to get down to every needle and every hunk of bark.
He had never worked on a problem that required so many techniques, so many new ideas, so much brainpower.
For months he sat in Sonn's office every afternoon, the two of them staring at the blackboard, sometimes for so long that Sonn would doze off.
At night Swallow rode home on a city bus. The other passengers chatted in Hebrew or Arabic, languages he didn't understand. Swallow thought about all the rest he didn't understand, the equations on the blackboard, the numbers skittering out of reach.
He wondered if he had come this far only to find something he had never run into: a problem that was stronger than his mind.
QUESTION TWO: You're struggling to solve a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. You also have a normal life. How do you balance the world inside your head with the one outside?
Cameron Swallow calls it "the math-problem expression." She describes it as "an abstracted gazing into the middle distance."
She first saw it in her husband half their lives ago. They met in choir practice at the University of the South in Tennessee. She was a freshman at 17. He was already a sophomore at 16.
They both loved math and music and English literature. They had long romantic talks about quadratic equations. He had enough credits to graduate early, but he stayed an extra year - partly to finish off a double major, partly to be with her. They got married in 1991, when John was at Yale.
In 1994 they came to Davidson. Soon they had a daughter, Ruth, and then another, Sophie. The talk shifted to whose turn it was to change diapers and when to buy the minivan. John became, as Cameron puts it, the Kitchen Spouse. He makes a mean Reuben sandwich in the Crock-Pot.
In Israel their kids were still small, so John and Cameron had time to talk about the math problem. But he and Sonn weren't getting far. They had spent six months digging and hadn't hit anything solid. And it was time for the Swallows to go back to Davidson.
Swallow resumed his regular life - teaching during the day, spending time with family at night. He worked on the problem in spare hours, between classes and church services and oil changes. He filled sheets of paper with equations next to phone numbers for the DMV.
Sonn had gone on to other projects. Swallow worked by himself for months. But he kept getting stuck. He thought of it like trying to lay carpet that was too small for the room. Every time he got one corner to fit, another would pop loose.
He worried that he had lost his confidence, lost his aggressiveness, lost his faith.
He put down the problem for nearly a year.
He taught, traveled, read to his daughters. He got in touch with a Canadian collaborator. They worked on a smaller problem that they wrapped up in a few months.
When they were done Swallow went back to the folder in his file cabinet, the one marked `Current' Research.
It was filled with copied pages from textbooks, scribbles on graph paper, half-finished thoughts on index cards. The Brauer groups, those two huge fields of numbers, ran all over the pages. He was sure they were the same. But he had to prove it.
He read the notes over and dug in again.
He spread out his work on a table at Summit Coffee across from the Davidson campus. He tried out theories in his head as he drove back from family visits, Cameron and the kids asleep in the minivan, a band called String Cheese Incident playing on the stereo.
Sometimes he forgot what he'd already done and repeated the mistakes he and Sonn made in Israel. Sometimes he worked for days and ended up back at the same wrong place.
But then he thought about the smaller problem he'd already finished. He realized that some of that work overlapped.
He still wasn't getting far. He wasn't even doing enough to call his progress slow and steady. Slow and unsteady, maybe.
Still, after two and a half years, the stubborn numbers in Swallow's head began to shift a little.
His eyebrow rose.
QUESTION THREE: You've spent countless hours trying to solve a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. What will it take to finally break through?
The speaker was boring. Worse yet, he was boring in French.
By now it was July 2001. Swallow had come to Lille, France, north of Paris, for a math conference. He knows French. But this guy at the front of the lecture hall was talking so fast that Swallow couldn't understand half the words, and didn't care about the rest.
Eventually he gave up. He reached over and pulled out his notes on the problem he and Jack Sonn had been working on.
All of a sudden a fresh thought flashed in his mind.
He grabbed a pen and wrote one word.
Suppose:
He followed that word with a string of equations that set new limits on the number fields.
Maybe if he put just a few restrictions on the problem, narrowed the scope just a bit, it would work. He went back to the idea of trying to lay a carpet that's too small for the room. Maybe the answer was to make the room a little smaller.
For the next couple of days he did calculations in every spare moment. The numbers were lining up, making graceful curves on his worksheets. But there were still places where the numbers strayed.
One morning Swallow skipped the conference and went looking for coffee. He ended up in a shopping center and found a table in a restaurant called Quick - a European version of McDonald's.
He doesn't remember much about the scene around him. The steam coming off the coffee. A woman pushing a baby stroller.
Then, another flash.
All along he had struggled with a few key places where the two number fields could have been different. If they were the same, he could apply an equation to both fields and the two sides would add up to zero. But one side always came up with the wrong result.
This time Swallow tried a new technique, something he'd never thought of before that moment in the fast-food joint in France.
It was as if he had been trying to train a dog for months, and the dog finally came.
Lots of dogs. Whole fields of them.
The numbers lined up and sat still.
Swallow applied an equation to both Brauer groups. Did the calculations.
They added up to zero.
Perfect balance.
He had made it down to the needle and the bark. The forests were the same.
Swallow still had to try his new thoughts on other parts of the problem. He still had to recheck his calculations. He still had to trust himself.
He went back to Davidson. His wife noticed the old "math-problem expression." Swallow ran through the steps of his solution over and over until he felt sure.
In the fall of '01 he sent Jack Sonn a draft of the solution. For the next six months they e-mailed back and forth, challenging each other's ideas, getting stuck and starting over. Swallow had to refine his work, make the path to the answer more clear.
The revisions took more than a year.
In November 2002, Swallow sent Sonn a draft that contained all the changes. Sonn spent two months looking them over.
And then Sonn e-mailed back with the words Swallow had waited to hear for almost exactly four years:
"Looks good."
QUESTION FOUR: You think you've solved a math problem that's so hard, no one's come close in 25 years. How do you know when you're done?
At the highest levels, every math problem is solved twice: once in private, once in public.
Swallow and Sonn agreed that they'd found the answer. But now the math world would get to check their work.
They typed up a formal version of the proof: "Brauer Groups of Genus Zero Extensions of Number Fields." It ran 22 pages.
Swallow sent copies to several other experts. He and Sonn posted their work on Web sites devoted to new research papers.
Based on the feedback, they made a few small fixes. Then they got the proof ready for the final step - submitting it to one of the academic journals.
The journals are the hockey goalies of math. If they think a paper is worthy, they send it to referees - other mathematicians who go over every detail. The referees are anonymous. If they agree with the proof, most mathematicians consider the problem solved.
Most journals get more submissions than they can publish. One journal decided not to look at Sonn and Swallow's proof. They sent their work to a second journal. It was now February 2003. Swallow thought it might be another year before they heard back.
Swallow picks up his office mail at the college union. In summer he goes by every couple of days. In early August he found a letter. It was from an editor of Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been accepted for publication.
One referee suggested two tiny changes. The other didn't suggest any.
It had been four years and seven months since they started. Now they were officially finished.
Swallow sent Jack Sonn an e-mail. He said it was time for a drink.
BONUS QUESTION: You've solved a math problem that was so hard, no one else came close for 25 years. What did you learn?
The first breath of fall is blowing across Main Street in Davidson. The folks behind the counter at Summit Coffee learned long ago what John Swallow wants. Regular latte if it's the morning, decaf latte if it's the afternoon.
They know what he wants to drink, they might know what he does for a living, but they don't know what he has accomplished. Not many people do - his family, a few other faculty members, maybe 50 mathematicians worldwide.
The problem he solved won't win any of the big math prizes or make it into Newsweek. It's not even necessarily the kind of thing that would earn him a raise.
But there are rewards.
He'll move up in the eyes of those who study top-level algebra. People will ask him to speak at conferences, publish papers, collaborate on new ideas. He's already got a textbook due in December.
He knows now that figuring out the mysteries of giant number fields isn't that different from working out the problems of everyday life. You break them down into small steps. You leave them alone now and then so you can come back fresh. Mainly, you trust what your instincts tell you.
These days Swallow is in charge of figuring out supper and hustling the kids to the car pool. Cameron has gone back to work; she teaches algebra at Smith Language Academy, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg magnet school. Ruth is 7, and Sophie's 5. They're ahead of their age groups in math.
Swallow is due for another sabbatical in 2005. He's thinking about taking the family to France. He's had good luck in France.
Meanwhile he daydreams about the next big problem, wonders what mental turn he'll have to take to solve it.
"There are lots of good ideas, but at first they are only ideas," he says. "They have this feeling of novelty and newness. But until you sit down and hack it out, look at the details, you're never sure what you've got. The idea can be beautiful. But only the work can make it beautiful."
And his left eyebrow rises up.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Tips for Interviewing
1) Ask open-ended questions (questions that do not have an easy yes or no or short answer).
2) Find out about your interview subject beforehand. Get acquainted with someone who knows them well.
3) Ask follow-up questions.
4) Describe the scene or atmosphere when you interview them.
5) Take careful notes.
More tips...
By Joe Hamelin
Press-Enterprise
* Always use a tape recorder. Explain to the subject, if need be, that no one will hear it but you.
* Take notes, too. Tape recorders sometimes malfunction.
* Do your homework. A subject will warm to you when realizing you've taken the trouble to be informed.
* If you can, find someplace quiet where you won't be interrupted and steer the subject there.
* Save the tough questions for the latter part of the interview.
* Try not to ask questions that can be answered with a "yes" or "no."
* Don't be nervous. The athlete can't hurt you. But you can hurt the athlete. He or she is the one who should be nervous, and probably is.
* If you are totally out of your element, ask for help. Admit that you normally cover softball and have never written a piece on rowing. Almost always, the subject will be only too happy to help.
* Try to have a "conversation" when possible, instead of just asking questions.
* Unless you have an agenda, have three to four questions prepared to get things rolling. Then follow where the subject wants to take you.
2) Find out about your interview subject beforehand. Get acquainted with someone who knows them well.
3) Ask follow-up questions.
4) Describe the scene or atmosphere when you interview them.
5) Take careful notes.
More tips...
By Joe Hamelin
Press-Enterprise
* Always use a tape recorder. Explain to the subject, if need be, that no one will hear it but you.
* Take notes, too. Tape recorders sometimes malfunction.
* Do your homework. A subject will warm to you when realizing you've taken the trouble to be informed.
* If you can, find someplace quiet where you won't be interrupted and steer the subject there.
* Save the tough questions for the latter part of the interview.
* Try not to ask questions that can be answered with a "yes" or "no."
* Don't be nervous. The athlete can't hurt you. But you can hurt the athlete. He or she is the one who should be nervous, and probably is.
* If you are totally out of your element, ask for help. Admit that you normally cover softball and have never written a piece on rowing. Almost always, the subject will be only too happy to help.
* Try to have a "conversation" when possible, instead of just asking questions.
* Unless you have an agenda, have three to four questions prepared to get things rolling. Then follow where the subject wants to take you.
Fresh Air Transcript
National Public Radio, December 1996
Terry Gross, host
GROSS: Today we have an interview with Kenneth Branagh about his film adaptation of "Hamlet," in which he stars as the prince of Denmark.
Branagh has also directed film adaptations of Shakespeare's "Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing" and he co-starred in the recent film of "Othello." His Hamlet features English and American actors: Derek Jacoby as Claudius; Julie Christie as Gertrude: Kate Winslett, Ophelia; Robin Williams, Osrick; Jack Lemmon, Marcellus; and Billy Crystal is a gravedigger.
For listeners who've never read Hamlet or seen a production or who have just forgotten, tell us the basic story and in just, you know, plot terms.
BRANAGH: Sure. I'm not sure, you know, that lots of people do know the story of Hamlet, to be perfectly honest. And I certainly approached this film with that in mind. Hamlet is the heir to the Danish throne. His father has died -- poisoned by a serpent in his garden. This happens one month previous to the beginning of the play.
And we meet Hamlet when his mother Gertrude has remarried his uncle. This is one month after his father's death. Hamlet is unhappy about this -- bitterly angry that she should have married so quickly.
He is visited by the ghost of his dead father, who tells him that he was murdered and that he was murdered by his uncle and that Hamlet must revenge him.
So Hamlet's problem for the rest of the play is that he, the heir to the throne, has to kill the king -- the reigning monarch -- in order to avenge his father's death. And all the rest of what occurs in the play springs from that one central dilemma for Hamlet.
GROSS: Do you feel like you've brought a new overall vision to this production of Hamlet -- a different interpretation than you've seen in the past?
BRANAGH: I think the way we have produced our vision I hope is different and original. With things like Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, I think it's hard to claim any originality. I feel as though everything' s probably been done by minds much greater than mine, but we at least in choosing, for instance, to set it in a kind of impressionistic 19th century, in a much more colorful way than is perhaps usually done. Hamlet seems to be perceived as a very dark and Gothic play where all the characters are sort of predisposed to be manic-depressives.
GROSS: That's right.
BRANAGH: I don't believe that from reading the text. Nothing, nothing about what's said in the play gives the idea that under different circumstances, I -- not at a time when the king is just killed -- would they be anything other than very alive and curious and bright. I think that central sort of change of thought is the, if you like, originality of our view.
GROSS: This Hamlet is -- your production is four hours long and you use the whole text and even, I think, a couple of additions. Whereas when Olivier did his movie version of Hamlet, he cut out a lot of the minor characters -- a lot of the subplots, and shortened it to about half the length.
BRANAGH: Yes.
GROSS: With your production, why did you want to keep everything in, knowing how difficult it is to sell a movie that's four hours long?
BRANAGH: My experience of playing this play in the theater in several productions, including one that was at the full-length, was that the story was easier to follow. Even if people haven't seen or even heard of Hamlet, there is a misty kind of memory of a fellow in black, you know, and holding a skull and being a bit depressed.
GROSS: That's right.
BRANAGH: So they've got some idea of what to expect, and yet they get intimidated by it and they think it will be somebody being very morose and intellectual. Of course, he's a very bright and intelligent man, but there's a story there that is very thrilling.
It has basic elements that Shakespeare's contemporaries used in this genre: the revenge melodrama. If there was a film equivalent, maybe it would be the thriller.
As a form, Shakespeare uses madness, revenge, suicide, the visitation of a ghost, the possibility of incest -- these are all kind of crowd- pleasing, page-turning -- rather, you know, low elements, he might say.
But alongside that, there's a story of many different things: a family crisis; story about miscommunication in a family with which we can all identify, I think. It would be tough if your mother remarried your uncle inside a month of your father's death. That's a tough issue.
But they also are a royal family, so what they do -- the impact of their personal problems is felt across a whole nation. And so you have the end of a dynasty, if you like.
You see a whole world in transition, and you see the very personal problems of people who are in situations that we might find ourselves in, but they have the extra dramatic quality of being watched -- they' re under the microscope.
They're people in positions of power whose every move is scrutinized, rather like our own political leaders today; our own royal families today.
And I think that that mixture of something very epic, dealing with the fate of nations and war and politics and something very, very familiar and intimate and domestic and personal is what makes the long version not only easier to follow, but more gripping.
GROSS: We're all taught in English classes that Shakespearian tragedies are about a great person of heroic proportion who is brought down by a fatal flaw. And in Hamlet, well the fatal flaw some people say "oh, it's his depression; it's his indecision." I had a feeling it was like really self-absorption. You know, watching your Hamlet, I'm thinking: well, Hamlet is so -- just oblivious to how he's destroying Ophelia and how he's treating her; and the way he's tearing apart his mother; and how he's dealing with her remarriage. And he's even oblivious to what this is doing to his kingdom. He's self-absorbed.
BRANAGH: Well, I think that that, for me, makes him very, very recognizable and human.
GROSS: Very contemporary.
BRANAGH: Very contemporary -- self-absorption of individuals this end of the century is pretty astonishing, especially post-Freud and post-all the sort of psychoanalysis that we have as part of our sort of daily bread and butter. It's on television; it's in self-help books in libraries. We're all somehow trying to find ourselves.
Now Hamlet is certainly doing that. In doing the long version, of course, what you get are moments of revelation, including I think a crucial one, which is at the end of the first half of our picture, where Hamlet goes out onto the plain in Norway and sees Fortenbras -- also a young man, also a prince, also just lost his father, also got his uncle on the throne -- who, as distinct from Hamlet, is happy to send off a group of 20,000 men to fight for a piece of Poland which is simply a sort of political expedient, because he thinks it's right.
Hamlet can't do that, and it puts his problems in perspective.
He has to go back. He has to face his own problems. At that point, of course, Hamlet has become a murderer -- the self-absorption you so rightly mention has also produced someone who ends up killing the prime minister -- a fact which has been hushed up, but makes Denmark a hotbed of scandal, intrigue, and revolution.
Laertes comes back -- the dead father's son to avenge him. And I think in the long version, you get a sense of Hamlet traveling to a point in his life where perhaps he is seeing a little more outwardly, instead of inwardly. He is learning to forgive a little; be a little more tolerant.
For me, I suppose that's what the story's about -- that there's a point at which it's quite healthy to be looking at yourself; and there' s a point at which it perhaps tips over into something unhelpful.
GROSS: I wonder if you like the character of Hamlet? If you think of him as someone you want to -- that you would identify with and admire? Or somebody who is so flawed in some ways that you -- you have real problems with him?
BRANAGH: I do like him. I like him because he is flawed. I like him because of his fallibility. I think that his heroism, if you like, springs from his human frailty. This is a man who is often very cruel, as we mentioned before. He's brutal in his treatment of both Ophelia and Gertrude -- people that he loves.
But my experience of life, such as it is, is that the people are most cruel to those that they love. One of the reasons, I suppose, in the tragic, inevitable scheme of things that Hamlet has to die, is that we know that he has done some things which just, you know, in the grand scheme of things, can't be forgiven.
But he has essentially tried to face up to his problems, I believe -- has tried to work them out. But it's his very complexity -- his contrariness; his contradictory qualities; a man who can appreciate so keenly his friendship with Horatio and the importance of friendship; who can be so loving with Ophelia, on one hand, and then so terrifyingly aggressive with her -- this is somebody I think who is remarkably human and yeah, I think he's somebody I'd like to spend time with.
GROSS: One of the many famous lines that comes from Hamlet is about being cruel to be kind. And he says this to -- I forget whether it' s Gertrude or Ophelia...
BRANAGH: He says it to Gertrude.
GROSS: ... and you know, I just -- this is the first time I found myself wondering: is Hamlet so kind of gifted with words that he can rationalize whatever he's doing?
BRANAGH: He, to some extent, may well be a prisoner of a very strong intellect. And when he says that to her, he has just murdered the prime minister, who's lying in a pool of blood in her bedroom.
Their lives have changed forever from that point. The prime minister' s been killed. The world will change.
GROSS: This is Polonius.
BRANAGH: Yeah.
GROSS: And it's an amazing scene, really -- yeah, he's just -- he sees this figure lurking behind the curtain and kills him, thinking it's probably going to be the king...
BRANAGH: Yeah.
GROSS: ... but it's actually Polonius, who's got his own problems, but Hamlet wouldn't have wanted to kill him. And he's lying there in this big pool of blood, and Gertrude and Hamlet are just, like, talking and talking and trying to work things out -- just kind of oblivious to the fact that there's this bleeding corpse a couple of feet away.
BRANAGH: Well, they're having the conversation, if you like, that they should have had at the beginning of the film when Hamlet really wants to say to her: "how could you be so insensitive as to marry my uncle within one month of my father's death?" So they need to say things that go above and beyond their sensitivity to the fact that they've just killed somebody.
GROSS: My guest is Kenneth Branagh. We'll talk more after a break.
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There are so many lines from Hamlet that are famous. Run through some of them.
BRANAGH: Well, we have the -- probably the most famous line in English literature: "To be or not to be? That is the question." You mentioned "cruel to be kind," "neither a borrower nor a lender be," "to thine own self be true." You've got "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio." I always used to think it was "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well." GROSS: Me too.
BRANAGH: Yeah, and that was the kind of thing that I picked up as a kid off the television, 'cause there were all these cliches about Hamlet. So it's full of them. It's absolutely full of them, as Shakespeare is, but Hamlet in particular is full of quotes that have absolutely worked their way into the language.
GROSS: Give me a sense of one of these quotes that is kind of really worn out when it's used as, like, common wisdom or a great quote out of context -- but really works in context and has a genuinely interesting meaning in context.
BRANAGH: Well, I'll tell you a funny example of it, which is to refer to a line that you mentioned earlier on: "I must be cruel" -- the line in the text is -- "I must be cruel only to be kind" which colloquially becomes "you have to be cruel to be kind" or whatever.
I had boils on my knee when I was about seven or eight years old, and my mother used to squeeze them with hot and could poultice. She claimed there was no other way to deal with this. I've since taken her to task about it.
But that was the line she used to come out with, you know -- "I must be cruel to be kind" as she squeezed these boils and I was seven or eight years in Belfast.
Now that line, you know, in context, is, I have to say, nothing to do with squeezing boils and is -- does express some of what you rightly mention is this -- a certain kind of self-righteousness that Hamlet has from time to time, which is not a very appealing quality, but which is also part of being a human being in a very traumatic situation.
GROSS: Tell me about approaching the "to be or not to be" soliloquy -- the most famous of all soliloquies, perhaps leading with the most famous line in all of theater. What did you think about in order to make that sound meaningful, and not like "oh yeah, those lines -- I know those lines."
BRANAGH: Well, I 'spose there were lots of things to consider.
I had played it in the theater many times, and found it difficult.
You come on sometimes -- I'd seen actors do it, actually -- rushing on, say the line very quickly, hoping to get this famous passage out of the way. The audience feels rather cheated then, and I used to come on -- on one production and say it slowly.
But I found that the entire audience whispered it under their breath with me, and had I stopped in the middle of the line, it would have been completed by the rest of the audience. I felt like I should have a child with a bouncing ball behind me.
So I think you've got to -- in film at least, you were -- you didn' t have an enormous audience there. And in fact, in the way we shot it, which was with Hamlet looking into a mirror, it meant that in this vast state hall set full of mirrored doors, there was only myself and the camera operator. So that at least gave me a feeling of isolation. We couldn't have anybody else in the room because they would have been reflected.
You have to try and say it as truthfully and honestly as possible. One of the things about that speech that I think sometimes gets forgotten is that Hamlet has been sent for prior to this.
Sometimes, the actor's so concerned with the famousness of the speech that he comes on with that in mind, and in fact, it's quite useful as an actor to come on with some sense of "hello, where is everybody?" -- of possibly being watched. So that that quality -- the slight paranoid thing -- runs under the speech as well.
You try and say this truthfully as possible, and as if the lines had never been said before. For me, having done it a lot before, I'd got a lot of my neuroses out of the way and I also felt: do it in a mirror with Hamlet literally talking to himself and with the suspicion, which we as the film audience know to be true, that Claudius is actually watching him on the other side of what we find out is a two-way mirror -- was something that was very helpful to me.
Our atmosphere in the court was one of suspicion and spying and intrigue -- hidden doors and two-way mirrors -- and there was something that put a little sort of nervous thing under the speech, which was very helpful.
GROSS: Can I ask you to choose one of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and just talk about how you approached it in your line readings - - where to breathe; what words to accent; what words to just -- what to really, kind of, bring more to the surface; what to just kind of play down and make more subtle; how to make it sound conversational as opposed to a speech?
BRANAGH: Well, each one's different, and in each case before you approach the speech, you look at what's available to you in terms of printed editions of the text and whether you believe there's a consistency to the way the speech appears to have been punctuated.
Often, that's not the case. Some editions will give you a comma at the end of the line, instead of a full stop; or give you a full stop in the middle of the line. There'll be a different reading.
Some people are very scrupulous about Shakespeare's punctuation, and some people like to be very cavalier with it. Derek Jacoby and I often disagree about this. Derek's a great -- feels that because nobody was there to check that you can throw it all away.
And one of the things that he loves to do is to make sure that each line is said differently, particularly -- I mean, for instance, specific example. When Hamlet sees Ophelia at the end of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, he says: "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered" -- "orisons" being prayers or prayer books.
Now, you can say the line straight: "Nymphet, in thy orisons in your prayers be all my sins remembered." Or you can say: "Nymph, in thy orisons? Your -- at your prayers are all my sins remembered?" Those kind of decisions you make, line by line, on a soliloquy.
And you often look for words that repeat themselves. I sometimes do an exercise of looking down the end-line -- the end word of each speech, each line, and seeing whether there is a recurring pattern there.
Also, you have to work out whether there's a single idea or a single metaphor sustained all the way through the speech, so that, you know, there are endless metaphors sometimes occupying 10, 15 lines to do with whatever -- weather; the sea; mountains; intricate metaphors about insects and images to do with how that affects politics and things.
And so you kind of work it like that. And then, one of the things I tried to do with this, in each case, was to do all of that kind of work and especially if it's rhyming -- you have to be aware of that, and yet touch it lightly.
It's very important to be aware of literally the sound of it.
Sometimes when you are stuck interpretively, you need to go through it and just sort of, as it were, taste the consonants. There are a lot of middle consonants and end consonants.
But as soon as you hit a little more sharply, to give definition to it, provides a kind of music that gives you an intuitive sense of what the meaning is.
So I think you throw all of that at it, and then soliloquy to soliloquy you try and say it as truthfully as possible in that moment, forgetting it -- forgetting all of that technical preparatory work, so that the final obligation to the audience is to be as real as possible in that moment; with all technical preparation forgotten about -- utterly in service to the idea of being truthful.
GROSS: What do you do -- like, the line that you mentioned before -- that Hamlet says to Ophelia about "in my orisons." Is that the word, "orisons?"
BRANAGH: "In the orisons" -- yeah.
GROSS: I mean, I wouldn't have know that means "prayer."
BRANAGH: Hmm.
GROSS: So, don't you feel like cuing the audience, like: "OK ladies and gentlemen, that word"...
BRANAGH: Well.
GROSS: "... means prayer." Or just having something -- there's so many words in Shakespeare that a contemporary audience -- an audience who wasn't filled with scholars -- wouldn't know. So how do you deal with those words so that there's some hint of what they mean, without...
BRANAGH: Well, in that instance, I think it...
GROSS: ... defining them.
BRANAGH: ... in that instance, you can be relatively simple in having her have a prayer book that she's looking at...
GROSS: Right.
BRANAGH: ... and have Hamlet in the way "in thy orisons" -- either with some sort of gesture towards it, so that the audience will pick up or intuit, if you like, a great deal of what is going on, even though they may not necessarily get the meaning of every line.
Like, there's a line in the full version -- the closet scenes -- you know, that scene where he says: "for in the fatness of these percy times" -- we used to have a lot of fun, actually, during -- talking -- because that suddenly appeared to us like a newspaper -- the Percy Times -- was a newspaper that ran through Elsinore -- but "in the fatness of these percy times" -- "percy" if I recall right, you know, meaning sort of overgrown, you know, ranc -- rancorous times, these corrupt times.
Well, you know, in the context of that scene, you just color the line with your own sense of what "in the fatness of these percy times." You know, the audience is going to get some sense that Hamlet's using the word "percy" with some ironic coloring, and in the context of other lines, they will understand.
I think it gives, if nothing else, it literally gives poetry. It gives music. It gives sounds -- the sound of the word sometimes having an impact on the ear and on the senses generally -- that wins an audience over and that is a sort of treat in itself, 'cause some of the sounds are very odd and very delicious.
And even though we may not literally understand it, I think that's fair enough. There's a great deal in the play that, I think, because it's a classic and has withstood 400 years of people throwing themselves at it, that resists definitiveness. There is mystery in there, and that mystery -- Hamlet says to Guildenstern "you would pluck out the heart of my mystery." No will pluck out the heart of Hamlet, the play's mystery.
But on the way, you can -- you can, if you serve, as we do in this one, the whole text up, I think that intuitively, the audience respond to it in a very mysterious way. And I think that that's a magical, magical thing which we underestimate because we so want to nail everything. What kind of Hamlet is it? What's his motivation?
What does it mean? Can I have it in three sentences please.
It's not possible, and that's very exciting.
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh. We'll hear more from him in the second half of our show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with more of our interview with Kenneth Branagh recorded in January after the release of his film adaptation of Hamlet. Now, your previous film was called "A Midwinter's Tale" and it was about a kind of rag-tag group of actors who were totally broke; they' re all utterly eccentric; and they're doing a production of Hamlet in this closed-down church in a rural area. This is a comedy.
I want to just play a bit of a very funny audition scene in which the director of the play is auditioning a very pretentious actor who wants to star in the role of Hamlet. Here it is.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "A MIDWINTER'S TALE") FIRST UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hamlet isn't just Hamlet. Oh, no, no.
Oh, no. No, Hamlet is me. Hamlet is Bosnia. Hamlet is this desk.
Hamlet is the air. Hamlet is my grandmother. Hamlet is everything you've ever thought about -- sex; about geology.
SECOND UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Geology.
FIRST ACTOR: In a very loose sense, of course.
SECOND ACTOR: Can you fence?
FIRST ACTOR: I adore to fence. I live to fence. In a sense, I fence to live.
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh, was that ever you? Were you ever -- doing it that much, about the meaning of Hamlet?
BRANAGH: I've been on either end of that kind of conversation, where people are -- sort of intellectualize their response to the play or -- I remember there was one occasion where I worked with a director who was talking to the court, who was standing around while in a production of Hamlet.
Claudius and Gertrude were walking in, and he said: "and what I'd like you to do, in a strange way, what I'd like you to do is to absent yourself from yourself and give yourself to nationhood." So -- a lot of heads turned around, and suddenly somebody piped up and said: "so you'd like us to bow." "Yes, bow. That's good." "Good."
GROSS [laughing]: I love this actor in it because he's so much trying to prove that he owns Hamlet, and I think everybody wants to -- it's such a kind of universal play. It's been done so many times over so many centuries, and everybody wants to prove, like, it's mine. I understand it better than you do.
BRANAGH: Yeah. And there are lots of things in it -- that you can pick up on words, characters. People can seize on things -- this particular actor, and it goes on to talk about his extraordinary research for the role of Hamlet. He said: "well, you know, normally I would have spent about nine months in Denmark to get this right -- get the feel of it; get the smell of it." And they say: "well, what did you do this time?" He said: "Well, I got this book on the Eiffel Tower, because Laertes visits Paris, and you know, I just wanted an image in my head." Actors get very funny about this kind of stuff.
GROSS: So what was it like for you the first time you did Hamlet? How old were you?
BRANAGH: I was 20 years old and I was at drama school. I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and -- in London -- and it was a panic-making experience 'cause it was very alarming to see these great sort of set-pieces be so close to each other. Now, that was a very cut version -- about two, two hours 20 minutes. But a lot of the sort of big famous bits still in.
And partly because of the cuts, but mostly 'cause this is the way it goes, they are very close to each other. You suddenly do the " rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, which is an extraordinary piece of writing in which the actor, I suppose, is required to strike 12.
You've got to give it all you've got, 'cause there he is trying to work himself up into a state where he can revenge his father. He' s trying to be like the actor you've just seen.
You finish that. You come off, and you come on immediately to "to be or not to be" -- a meditative, reflective speech which, in a sense, could be taken out of the play. It doesn't advance the plot at all. Again, naked, but in a very different way, 'cause you can't do all that ranting and raving. And it's the most famous speech ever written, probably.
And I found that all these things coming so close together meant that for me, the experience of the part, to begin with, was a sort of obstacle course.
I used to come off in the wings and ask to know where I was going to go back on again, because just getting through it, remembering it, and as Noel Coward would say "not bumping into the furniture" was quite a lot to take on board the first time.
GROSS: I imagine remembering it is pretty darn hard.
BRANAGH: Mm. It is, and of course, you don't always remember it in the right order. One of the other things Midwinter's Tale talked about were some of the famous, you know, paraphrases.
When Gertrude first talks to Hamlet in the court scene, she says: "Hamlet, cast off thy nighted color." And I was in a production with someone that Gertrude said: "Hamlet, cast off thy colored nighty." Then there are a whole series of characters in the play -- secret characters. There's a dog in the closet scene, or at least so actors would have you believe, because the ghost says to Hamlet: "but look, amazement on thy mother sits," so this little dog called "Amazement, " we believed, populates the play.
Then there are classic characters -- the Hamlet charwoman, Elsie Nore. Then there's...
GROSS: That's the name of the castle.
BRANAGH: Exactly. Somebody says: "they came with martial stork, across the plains." So "Marshall Stork" is another general who's in there. And also Horatio's girl friend, Felicity. At the end, Hamlet says to Horatio before, as Horatio's attempting to commit suicide, he says: "Absent thee from Felicity Awhile." Her second name is "Awhile." "Felicity Awhile" -- Horatio's girl friend. The hidden meaning in Hamlet.
GROSS: Well, the first time you did Hamlet, were there any hidden meanings that you saw that you thought: "well, I am going to bring this to the surface and I will show what Hamlet is really about."
BRANAGH: Well, one of the things I did that I lost over various productions of playing it, was a sense that he absolutely goes mad, live, in front of the audience, in the scene with Ophelia -- in the nunnery scene. He meets this woman who has been banned from seeing him. The pair of them, it seems, love each other very much, but he feels that she' s been unjust. She feels he's behaved irrationally.
Anyway, in the midst of this confused, almost adolescent, you know -- "will you be my boy friend?" "no." "will you be my girl friend?" "no" -- sane. He suddenly says: "where is your father?" And she says: "at home, my lord," which is a lie because she knows that her father is watching.
And I chose that moment in that very first production to do a great kind of spastic convulsion of heartbreak and madness, with eyes rolling and all sorts of nonsense that then left me pretty much nowhere to go for the rest of the play because I was mad in the middle of the third act, so I had two acts of being completely potty.
So I dropped that after a while. I still think it's quite a heartbreak. I just don't think that he goes as erratically mad as I did back in whenever it was -- 1980.
GROSS: What did you director tell you?
BRANAGH: Oh, director was a very cool guy. He said: "yeah, just go with it, man, you know. Just kind of see where it takes you, man, you know. It's quite interesting -- interesting choice."
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh, a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much.
BRANAGH: Thank you. My pleasure.
Terry Gross, host
GROSS: Today we have an interview with Kenneth Branagh about his film adaptation of "Hamlet," in which he stars as the prince of Denmark.
Branagh has also directed film adaptations of Shakespeare's "Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing" and he co-starred in the recent film of "Othello." His Hamlet features English and American actors: Derek Jacoby as Claudius; Julie Christie as Gertrude: Kate Winslett, Ophelia; Robin Williams, Osrick; Jack Lemmon, Marcellus; and Billy Crystal is a gravedigger.
For listeners who've never read Hamlet or seen a production or who have just forgotten, tell us the basic story and in just, you know, plot terms.
BRANAGH: Sure. I'm not sure, you know, that lots of people do know the story of Hamlet, to be perfectly honest. And I certainly approached this film with that in mind. Hamlet is the heir to the Danish throne. His father has died -- poisoned by a serpent in his garden. This happens one month previous to the beginning of the play.
And we meet Hamlet when his mother Gertrude has remarried his uncle. This is one month after his father's death. Hamlet is unhappy about this -- bitterly angry that she should have married so quickly.
He is visited by the ghost of his dead father, who tells him that he was murdered and that he was murdered by his uncle and that Hamlet must revenge him.
So Hamlet's problem for the rest of the play is that he, the heir to the throne, has to kill the king -- the reigning monarch -- in order to avenge his father's death. And all the rest of what occurs in the play springs from that one central dilemma for Hamlet.
GROSS: Do you feel like you've brought a new overall vision to this production of Hamlet -- a different interpretation than you've seen in the past?
BRANAGH: I think the way we have produced our vision I hope is different and original. With things like Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, I think it's hard to claim any originality. I feel as though everything' s probably been done by minds much greater than mine, but we at least in choosing, for instance, to set it in a kind of impressionistic 19th century, in a much more colorful way than is perhaps usually done. Hamlet seems to be perceived as a very dark and Gothic play where all the characters are sort of predisposed to be manic-depressives.
GROSS: That's right.
BRANAGH: I don't believe that from reading the text. Nothing, nothing about what's said in the play gives the idea that under different circumstances, I -- not at a time when the king is just killed -- would they be anything other than very alive and curious and bright. I think that central sort of change of thought is the, if you like, originality of our view.
GROSS: This Hamlet is -- your production is four hours long and you use the whole text and even, I think, a couple of additions. Whereas when Olivier did his movie version of Hamlet, he cut out a lot of the minor characters -- a lot of the subplots, and shortened it to about half the length.
BRANAGH: Yes.
GROSS: With your production, why did you want to keep everything in, knowing how difficult it is to sell a movie that's four hours long?
BRANAGH: My experience of playing this play in the theater in several productions, including one that was at the full-length, was that the story was easier to follow. Even if people haven't seen or even heard of Hamlet, there is a misty kind of memory of a fellow in black, you know, and holding a skull and being a bit depressed.
GROSS: That's right.
BRANAGH: So they've got some idea of what to expect, and yet they get intimidated by it and they think it will be somebody being very morose and intellectual. Of course, he's a very bright and intelligent man, but there's a story there that is very thrilling.
It has basic elements that Shakespeare's contemporaries used in this genre: the revenge melodrama. If there was a film equivalent, maybe it would be the thriller.
As a form, Shakespeare uses madness, revenge, suicide, the visitation of a ghost, the possibility of incest -- these are all kind of crowd- pleasing, page-turning -- rather, you know, low elements, he might say.
But alongside that, there's a story of many different things: a family crisis; story about miscommunication in a family with which we can all identify, I think. It would be tough if your mother remarried your uncle inside a month of your father's death. That's a tough issue.
But they also are a royal family, so what they do -- the impact of their personal problems is felt across a whole nation. And so you have the end of a dynasty, if you like.
You see a whole world in transition, and you see the very personal problems of people who are in situations that we might find ourselves in, but they have the extra dramatic quality of being watched -- they' re under the microscope.
They're people in positions of power whose every move is scrutinized, rather like our own political leaders today; our own royal families today.
And I think that that mixture of something very epic, dealing with the fate of nations and war and politics and something very, very familiar and intimate and domestic and personal is what makes the long version not only easier to follow, but more gripping.
GROSS: We're all taught in English classes that Shakespearian tragedies are about a great person of heroic proportion who is brought down by a fatal flaw. And in Hamlet, well the fatal flaw some people say "oh, it's his depression; it's his indecision." I had a feeling it was like really self-absorption. You know, watching your Hamlet, I'm thinking: well, Hamlet is so -- just oblivious to how he's destroying Ophelia and how he's treating her; and the way he's tearing apart his mother; and how he's dealing with her remarriage. And he's even oblivious to what this is doing to his kingdom. He's self-absorbed.
BRANAGH: Well, I think that that, for me, makes him very, very recognizable and human.
GROSS: Very contemporary.
BRANAGH: Very contemporary -- self-absorption of individuals this end of the century is pretty astonishing, especially post-Freud and post-all the sort of psychoanalysis that we have as part of our sort of daily bread and butter. It's on television; it's in self-help books in libraries. We're all somehow trying to find ourselves.
Now Hamlet is certainly doing that. In doing the long version, of course, what you get are moments of revelation, including I think a crucial one, which is at the end of the first half of our picture, where Hamlet goes out onto the plain in Norway and sees Fortenbras -- also a young man, also a prince, also just lost his father, also got his uncle on the throne -- who, as distinct from Hamlet, is happy to send off a group of 20,000 men to fight for a piece of Poland which is simply a sort of political expedient, because he thinks it's right.
Hamlet can't do that, and it puts his problems in perspective.
He has to go back. He has to face his own problems. At that point, of course, Hamlet has become a murderer -- the self-absorption you so rightly mention has also produced someone who ends up killing the prime minister -- a fact which has been hushed up, but makes Denmark a hotbed of scandal, intrigue, and revolution.
Laertes comes back -- the dead father's son to avenge him. And I think in the long version, you get a sense of Hamlet traveling to a point in his life where perhaps he is seeing a little more outwardly, instead of inwardly. He is learning to forgive a little; be a little more tolerant.
For me, I suppose that's what the story's about -- that there's a point at which it's quite healthy to be looking at yourself; and there' s a point at which it perhaps tips over into something unhelpful.
GROSS: I wonder if you like the character of Hamlet? If you think of him as someone you want to -- that you would identify with and admire? Or somebody who is so flawed in some ways that you -- you have real problems with him?
BRANAGH: I do like him. I like him because he is flawed. I like him because of his fallibility. I think that his heroism, if you like, springs from his human frailty. This is a man who is often very cruel, as we mentioned before. He's brutal in his treatment of both Ophelia and Gertrude -- people that he loves.
But my experience of life, such as it is, is that the people are most cruel to those that they love. One of the reasons, I suppose, in the tragic, inevitable scheme of things that Hamlet has to die, is that we know that he has done some things which just, you know, in the grand scheme of things, can't be forgiven.
But he has essentially tried to face up to his problems, I believe -- has tried to work them out. But it's his very complexity -- his contrariness; his contradictory qualities; a man who can appreciate so keenly his friendship with Horatio and the importance of friendship; who can be so loving with Ophelia, on one hand, and then so terrifyingly aggressive with her -- this is somebody I think who is remarkably human and yeah, I think he's somebody I'd like to spend time with.
GROSS: One of the many famous lines that comes from Hamlet is about being cruel to be kind. And he says this to -- I forget whether it' s Gertrude or Ophelia...
BRANAGH: He says it to Gertrude.
GROSS: ... and you know, I just -- this is the first time I found myself wondering: is Hamlet so kind of gifted with words that he can rationalize whatever he's doing?
BRANAGH: He, to some extent, may well be a prisoner of a very strong intellect. And when he says that to her, he has just murdered the prime minister, who's lying in a pool of blood in her bedroom.
Their lives have changed forever from that point. The prime minister' s been killed. The world will change.
GROSS: This is Polonius.
BRANAGH: Yeah.
GROSS: And it's an amazing scene, really -- yeah, he's just -- he sees this figure lurking behind the curtain and kills him, thinking it's probably going to be the king...
BRANAGH: Yeah.
GROSS: ... but it's actually Polonius, who's got his own problems, but Hamlet wouldn't have wanted to kill him. And he's lying there in this big pool of blood, and Gertrude and Hamlet are just, like, talking and talking and trying to work things out -- just kind of oblivious to the fact that there's this bleeding corpse a couple of feet away.
BRANAGH: Well, they're having the conversation, if you like, that they should have had at the beginning of the film when Hamlet really wants to say to her: "how could you be so insensitive as to marry my uncle within one month of my father's death?" So they need to say things that go above and beyond their sensitivity to the fact that they've just killed somebody.
GROSS: My guest is Kenneth Branagh. We'll talk more after a break.
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There are so many lines from Hamlet that are famous. Run through some of them.
BRANAGH: Well, we have the -- probably the most famous line in English literature: "To be or not to be? That is the question." You mentioned "cruel to be kind," "neither a borrower nor a lender be," "to thine own self be true." You've got "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio." I always used to think it was "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well." GROSS: Me too.
BRANAGH: Yeah, and that was the kind of thing that I picked up as a kid off the television, 'cause there were all these cliches about Hamlet. So it's full of them. It's absolutely full of them, as Shakespeare is, but Hamlet in particular is full of quotes that have absolutely worked their way into the language.
GROSS: Give me a sense of one of these quotes that is kind of really worn out when it's used as, like, common wisdom or a great quote out of context -- but really works in context and has a genuinely interesting meaning in context.
BRANAGH: Well, I'll tell you a funny example of it, which is to refer to a line that you mentioned earlier on: "I must be cruel" -- the line in the text is -- "I must be cruel only to be kind" which colloquially becomes "you have to be cruel to be kind" or whatever.
I had boils on my knee when I was about seven or eight years old, and my mother used to squeeze them with hot and could poultice. She claimed there was no other way to deal with this. I've since taken her to task about it.
But that was the line she used to come out with, you know -- "I must be cruel to be kind" as she squeezed these boils and I was seven or eight years in Belfast.
Now that line, you know, in context, is, I have to say, nothing to do with squeezing boils and is -- does express some of what you rightly mention is this -- a certain kind of self-righteousness that Hamlet has from time to time, which is not a very appealing quality, but which is also part of being a human being in a very traumatic situation.
GROSS: Tell me about approaching the "to be or not to be" soliloquy -- the most famous of all soliloquies, perhaps leading with the most famous line in all of theater. What did you think about in order to make that sound meaningful, and not like "oh yeah, those lines -- I know those lines."
BRANAGH: Well, I 'spose there were lots of things to consider.
I had played it in the theater many times, and found it difficult.
You come on sometimes -- I'd seen actors do it, actually -- rushing on, say the line very quickly, hoping to get this famous passage out of the way. The audience feels rather cheated then, and I used to come on -- on one production and say it slowly.
But I found that the entire audience whispered it under their breath with me, and had I stopped in the middle of the line, it would have been completed by the rest of the audience. I felt like I should have a child with a bouncing ball behind me.
So I think you've got to -- in film at least, you were -- you didn' t have an enormous audience there. And in fact, in the way we shot it, which was with Hamlet looking into a mirror, it meant that in this vast state hall set full of mirrored doors, there was only myself and the camera operator. So that at least gave me a feeling of isolation. We couldn't have anybody else in the room because they would have been reflected.
You have to try and say it as truthfully and honestly as possible. One of the things about that speech that I think sometimes gets forgotten is that Hamlet has been sent for prior to this.
Sometimes, the actor's so concerned with the famousness of the speech that he comes on with that in mind, and in fact, it's quite useful as an actor to come on with some sense of "hello, where is everybody?" -- of possibly being watched. So that that quality -- the slight paranoid thing -- runs under the speech as well.
You try and say this truthfully as possible, and as if the lines had never been said before. For me, having done it a lot before, I'd got a lot of my neuroses out of the way and I also felt: do it in a mirror with Hamlet literally talking to himself and with the suspicion, which we as the film audience know to be true, that Claudius is actually watching him on the other side of what we find out is a two-way mirror -- was something that was very helpful to me.
Our atmosphere in the court was one of suspicion and spying and intrigue -- hidden doors and two-way mirrors -- and there was something that put a little sort of nervous thing under the speech, which was very helpful.
GROSS: Can I ask you to choose one of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and just talk about how you approached it in your line readings - - where to breathe; what words to accent; what words to just -- what to really, kind of, bring more to the surface; what to just kind of play down and make more subtle; how to make it sound conversational as opposed to a speech?
BRANAGH: Well, each one's different, and in each case before you approach the speech, you look at what's available to you in terms of printed editions of the text and whether you believe there's a consistency to the way the speech appears to have been punctuated.
Often, that's not the case. Some editions will give you a comma at the end of the line, instead of a full stop; or give you a full stop in the middle of the line. There'll be a different reading.
Some people are very scrupulous about Shakespeare's punctuation, and some people like to be very cavalier with it. Derek Jacoby and I often disagree about this. Derek's a great -- feels that because nobody was there to check that you can throw it all away.
And one of the things that he loves to do is to make sure that each line is said differently, particularly -- I mean, for instance, specific example. When Hamlet sees Ophelia at the end of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, he says: "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered" -- "orisons" being prayers or prayer books.
Now, you can say the line straight: "Nymphet, in thy orisons in your prayers be all my sins remembered." Or you can say: "Nymph, in thy orisons? Your -- at your prayers are all my sins remembered?" Those kind of decisions you make, line by line, on a soliloquy.
And you often look for words that repeat themselves. I sometimes do an exercise of looking down the end-line -- the end word of each speech, each line, and seeing whether there is a recurring pattern there.
Also, you have to work out whether there's a single idea or a single metaphor sustained all the way through the speech, so that, you know, there are endless metaphors sometimes occupying 10, 15 lines to do with whatever -- weather; the sea; mountains; intricate metaphors about insects and images to do with how that affects politics and things.
And so you kind of work it like that. And then, one of the things I tried to do with this, in each case, was to do all of that kind of work and especially if it's rhyming -- you have to be aware of that, and yet touch it lightly.
It's very important to be aware of literally the sound of it.
Sometimes when you are stuck interpretively, you need to go through it and just sort of, as it were, taste the consonants. There are a lot of middle consonants and end consonants.
But as soon as you hit a little more sharply, to give definition to it, provides a kind of music that gives you an intuitive sense of what the meaning is.
So I think you throw all of that at it, and then soliloquy to soliloquy you try and say it as truthfully as possible in that moment, forgetting it -- forgetting all of that technical preparatory work, so that the final obligation to the audience is to be as real as possible in that moment; with all technical preparation forgotten about -- utterly in service to the idea of being truthful.
GROSS: What do you do -- like, the line that you mentioned before -- that Hamlet says to Ophelia about "in my orisons." Is that the word, "orisons?"
BRANAGH: "In the orisons" -- yeah.
GROSS: I mean, I wouldn't have know that means "prayer."
BRANAGH: Hmm.
GROSS: So, don't you feel like cuing the audience, like: "OK ladies and gentlemen, that word"...
BRANAGH: Well.
GROSS: "... means prayer." Or just having something -- there's so many words in Shakespeare that a contemporary audience -- an audience who wasn't filled with scholars -- wouldn't know. So how do you deal with those words so that there's some hint of what they mean, without...
BRANAGH: Well, in that instance, I think it...
GROSS: ... defining them.
BRANAGH: ... in that instance, you can be relatively simple in having her have a prayer book that she's looking at...
GROSS: Right.
BRANAGH: ... and have Hamlet in the way "in thy orisons" -- either with some sort of gesture towards it, so that the audience will pick up or intuit, if you like, a great deal of what is going on, even though they may not necessarily get the meaning of every line.
Like, there's a line in the full version -- the closet scenes -- you know, that scene where he says: "for in the fatness of these percy times" -- we used to have a lot of fun, actually, during -- talking -- because that suddenly appeared to us like a newspaper -- the Percy Times -- was a newspaper that ran through Elsinore -- but "in the fatness of these percy times" -- "percy" if I recall right, you know, meaning sort of overgrown, you know, ranc -- rancorous times, these corrupt times.
Well, you know, in the context of that scene, you just color the line with your own sense of what "in the fatness of these percy times." You know, the audience is going to get some sense that Hamlet's using the word "percy" with some ironic coloring, and in the context of other lines, they will understand.
I think it gives, if nothing else, it literally gives poetry. It gives music. It gives sounds -- the sound of the word sometimes having an impact on the ear and on the senses generally -- that wins an audience over and that is a sort of treat in itself, 'cause some of the sounds are very odd and very delicious.
And even though we may not literally understand it, I think that's fair enough. There's a great deal in the play that, I think, because it's a classic and has withstood 400 years of people throwing themselves at it, that resists definitiveness. There is mystery in there, and that mystery -- Hamlet says to Guildenstern "you would pluck out the heart of my mystery." No will pluck out the heart of Hamlet, the play's mystery.
But on the way, you can -- you can, if you serve, as we do in this one, the whole text up, I think that intuitively, the audience respond to it in a very mysterious way. And I think that that's a magical, magical thing which we underestimate because we so want to nail everything. What kind of Hamlet is it? What's his motivation?
What does it mean? Can I have it in three sentences please.
It's not possible, and that's very exciting.
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh. We'll hear more from him in the second half of our show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with more of our interview with Kenneth Branagh recorded in January after the release of his film adaptation of Hamlet. Now, your previous film was called "A Midwinter's Tale" and it was about a kind of rag-tag group of actors who were totally broke; they' re all utterly eccentric; and they're doing a production of Hamlet in this closed-down church in a rural area. This is a comedy.
I want to just play a bit of a very funny audition scene in which the director of the play is auditioning a very pretentious actor who wants to star in the role of Hamlet. Here it is.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "A MIDWINTER'S TALE") FIRST UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Hamlet isn't just Hamlet. Oh, no, no.
Oh, no. No, Hamlet is me. Hamlet is Bosnia. Hamlet is this desk.
Hamlet is the air. Hamlet is my grandmother. Hamlet is everything you've ever thought about -- sex; about geology.
SECOND UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Geology.
FIRST ACTOR: In a very loose sense, of course.
SECOND ACTOR: Can you fence?
FIRST ACTOR: I adore to fence. I live to fence. In a sense, I fence to live.
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh, was that ever you? Were you ever -- doing it that much, about the meaning of Hamlet?
BRANAGH: I've been on either end of that kind of conversation, where people are -- sort of intellectualize their response to the play or -- I remember there was one occasion where I worked with a director who was talking to the court, who was standing around while in a production of Hamlet.
Claudius and Gertrude were walking in, and he said: "and what I'd like you to do, in a strange way, what I'd like you to do is to absent yourself from yourself and give yourself to nationhood." So -- a lot of heads turned around, and suddenly somebody piped up and said: "so you'd like us to bow." "Yes, bow. That's good." "Good."
GROSS [laughing]: I love this actor in it because he's so much trying to prove that he owns Hamlet, and I think everybody wants to -- it's such a kind of universal play. It's been done so many times over so many centuries, and everybody wants to prove, like, it's mine. I understand it better than you do.
BRANAGH: Yeah. And there are lots of things in it -- that you can pick up on words, characters. People can seize on things -- this particular actor, and it goes on to talk about his extraordinary research for the role of Hamlet. He said: "well, you know, normally I would have spent about nine months in Denmark to get this right -- get the feel of it; get the smell of it." And they say: "well, what did you do this time?" He said: "Well, I got this book on the Eiffel Tower, because Laertes visits Paris, and you know, I just wanted an image in my head." Actors get very funny about this kind of stuff.
GROSS: So what was it like for you the first time you did Hamlet? How old were you?
BRANAGH: I was 20 years old and I was at drama school. I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and -- in London -- and it was a panic-making experience 'cause it was very alarming to see these great sort of set-pieces be so close to each other. Now, that was a very cut version -- about two, two hours 20 minutes. But a lot of the sort of big famous bits still in.
And partly because of the cuts, but mostly 'cause this is the way it goes, they are very close to each other. You suddenly do the " rogue and peasant slave" soliloquy, which is an extraordinary piece of writing in which the actor, I suppose, is required to strike 12.
You've got to give it all you've got, 'cause there he is trying to work himself up into a state where he can revenge his father. He' s trying to be like the actor you've just seen.
You finish that. You come off, and you come on immediately to "to be or not to be" -- a meditative, reflective speech which, in a sense, could be taken out of the play. It doesn't advance the plot at all. Again, naked, but in a very different way, 'cause you can't do all that ranting and raving. And it's the most famous speech ever written, probably.
And I found that all these things coming so close together meant that for me, the experience of the part, to begin with, was a sort of obstacle course.
I used to come off in the wings and ask to know where I was going to go back on again, because just getting through it, remembering it, and as Noel Coward would say "not bumping into the furniture" was quite a lot to take on board the first time.
GROSS: I imagine remembering it is pretty darn hard.
BRANAGH: Mm. It is, and of course, you don't always remember it in the right order. One of the other things Midwinter's Tale talked about were some of the famous, you know, paraphrases.
When Gertrude first talks to Hamlet in the court scene, she says: "Hamlet, cast off thy nighted color." And I was in a production with someone that Gertrude said: "Hamlet, cast off thy colored nighty." Then there are a whole series of characters in the play -- secret characters. There's a dog in the closet scene, or at least so actors would have you believe, because the ghost says to Hamlet: "but look, amazement on thy mother sits," so this little dog called "Amazement, " we believed, populates the play.
Then there are classic characters -- the Hamlet charwoman, Elsie Nore. Then there's...
GROSS: That's the name of the castle.
BRANAGH: Exactly. Somebody says: "they came with martial stork, across the plains." So "Marshall Stork" is another general who's in there. And also Horatio's girl friend, Felicity. At the end, Hamlet says to Horatio before, as Horatio's attempting to commit suicide, he says: "Absent thee from Felicity Awhile." Her second name is "Awhile." "Felicity Awhile" -- Horatio's girl friend. The hidden meaning in Hamlet.
GROSS: Well, the first time you did Hamlet, were there any hidden meanings that you saw that you thought: "well, I am going to bring this to the surface and I will show what Hamlet is really about."
BRANAGH: Well, one of the things I did that I lost over various productions of playing it, was a sense that he absolutely goes mad, live, in front of the audience, in the scene with Ophelia -- in the nunnery scene. He meets this woman who has been banned from seeing him. The pair of them, it seems, love each other very much, but he feels that she' s been unjust. She feels he's behaved irrationally.
Anyway, in the midst of this confused, almost adolescent, you know -- "will you be my boy friend?" "no." "will you be my girl friend?" "no" -- sane. He suddenly says: "where is your father?" And she says: "at home, my lord," which is a lie because she knows that her father is watching.
And I chose that moment in that very first production to do a great kind of spastic convulsion of heartbreak and madness, with eyes rolling and all sorts of nonsense that then left me pretty much nowhere to go for the rest of the play because I was mad in the middle of the third act, so I had two acts of being completely potty.
So I dropped that after a while. I still think it's quite a heartbreak. I just don't think that he goes as erratically mad as I did back in whenever it was -- 1980.
GROSS: What did you director tell you?
BRANAGH: Oh, director was a very cool guy. He said: "yeah, just go with it, man, you know. Just kind of see where it takes you, man, you know. It's quite interesting -- interesting choice."
GROSS: Kenneth Branagh, a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much.
BRANAGH: Thank you. My pleasure.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Movie Reviews
'Titanic' Sinks Again (Spectacularly)
By KENNETH TURAN
L.A. TIMES FILM CRITIC
Friday December 19, 1997
To the question of the day--what does $200 million buy?--the 3-hour-and-14-minute "Titanic" unhesitatingly answers: not enough.
Note that despite the hopes of skeptics, aghast at the largest film budget of modern times, money enough to run a full-dress presidential campaign or put a serious dent in illiteracy, the answer is not nothing. When you are willing to build a 775-foot, 90% scale model of the doomed ship and sink it in a 17-million-gallon tank specially constructed for the purpose, you are going to get a heck of a lot of production value for your money. Especially if your name is James Cameron.
More than that, at "Titanic's" two-hour mark, when most films have sense enough to be winding down, this behemoth does stir to a kind of life. With writer-director Cameron, a virtuoso at large-scale action-adventure extravaganzas serving as ringmaster, the detailing of the ship's agonies (compressed here from a real-life two hours and 40 minutes to a bit more than an hour) compels our interest absolutely.
But Cameron, there can be no doubt, is after more than oohs and aahs. He's already made "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2"; with "Titanic" he has his eye on "Doctor Zhivago" / "Lawrence of Arabia" territory. But while his intentions are clear, Cameron lacks the skills necessary to pull off his coup. Just as the hubris of headstrong shipbuilders who insisted that the Titanic was unsinkable led to an unparalleled maritime disaster, so Cameron's overweening pride has come unnecessarily close to capsizing this project.
For seeing "Titanic" almost makes you weep in frustration. Not because of the excessive budget, not even because it recalls the unnecessary loss of life in the real 1912 catastrophe, which saw more than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus passengers dying when an iceberg sliced the ship open like a can opener. What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only isn't it, it isn't even close.
Cameron has regularly come up with his own scripts in the past, but in a better world someone would have had the nerve to tell him or he would have realized himself that creating a moving and creditable love story is a different order of business from coming up with wisecracks for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Instead, what audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality. Worse than that, many of the characters, especially the feckless tycoon Cal Hockley (played by Billy Zane) and Kathy Bates' impersonation of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, are cliches of such purity they ought to be exhibited in film schools as examples of how not to write for the screen.
It is easy to forget, as you wait for the iceberg to arrive and shake things up, how excellent an idea it was to revisit for modern audiences the sinking of what was the largest moving object ever built. Numerous films have been made on the subject, with even the Third Reich taking a shot with a version that concluded, not surprisingly, that the sinking was "an eternal accusation against England's greed." As Steven Biel wrote in "Down With the Old Canoe," a fascinating cultural history of public reaction to the event, "The Titanic disaster begs for resolution--and always resists it."
*
One reason this version is so long is a modern framing story involving nautical treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Cameron veteran Bill Paxton), who is scouring the Titanic's wreck (it was located in 1985) for a fabulously expensive blue diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean" that was lost on board.
What Lovett turns up instead is a drawing of a nude young woman wearing the jewel. News of that find prompts a phone call from 101-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart), who says it's her in the drawing. Lovett flies Rose (whom Cameron modeled on artist Beatrice Wood) out to join his expedition. The bulk of "Titanic" is her recollection of what happened before, during and after that great ship went down.
Young Rose (now played by Kate Winslet) boarded the Titanic as a 17-year-old wearing a very large hat and metaphorical shackles. "To me it was a slave ship," she recalls, "taking me to America in chains." In plainer English she was being forced by her snooty mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater into a (gasp!) loveless marriage with Cal Hockley, an arrogant and wealthy snob for whom the phrase "perpetual sneer" was probably invented.
Rose may be a 17-year-old, but she knows a thing or two. She makes offhanded references to Freud, a wise gentleman no one else on board has heard of, and during an impromptu shopping spree she managed to buy works by Picasso, Degas and Monet despite Hockley's dismissive belief that they "won't amount to a thing." Clearly, this prodigy of taste and discernment deserves better than Mr. Perpetual Sneer, no matter how rich he is.
Enter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a madcap artist and cherubic scamp who wins his steerage ticket in a dockside card game. Jack is staggered by a glimpse of Rose, and though a conveniently placed Irish lad advises him "you'd as like have angels flying out of your arse as get next to the likes of her," he's not the kind of young man to give up easily.
Sure enough, despite the presence of 2,200 other passengers and crew, it's only Jack who's around to save the day when a distraught Rose considers suicide in a flattering evening gown. Despite the best efforts of mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) and Hockley's snarling valet Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner), Jack and Rose are irresistibly drawn to each other. She improves his manners (not hard to do), he teaches her how to spit like a man, and they spend quality time in photogenic locations like the ship's towering prow.
*
Both Winslet and DiCaprio are capable actors (though his brash brat routine is wearing thin) but they are victimized, as is everyone else, by dialogue that has the self-parodying ring of Young Romance comics. "You could just call me a tumbleweed blowing in the wind," Jack says, adding later, "sooner or later the fire I love about you is going to burn out." Most weighted down by this kind of blather are the fatuous Hockley, who has to say things like "you filth" and Bates' Molly Brown, a character so relentlessly folksy she'd be at home on "The Beverly Hillbillies."
Finally, after so much time has passed you fear the iceberg has slept through its wake-up call, disaster strikes the ship at 11:50 on the night of April 14. Cameron is truly in his element here, and "Titanic's" closing hour is jammed with the most stirring and impressive sights, from towering walls of water flooding a grand dining room to the enormous ship itself defying belief and going vertical in the water.
These kinds of complex and demanding sequences are handled with so much aplomb it's understandable that the director, who probably considers the script to be the easiest part of his job, not only wants to do it all but also thinks he can. Yet as Cameron sails his lonely craft toward greatness, he should realize he needs to bring a passenger with him. Preferably someone who can write.
Jaw-dropping spectacle fills 'Titanic'
By JEFF MILLAR
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle
As promised in all the publicity, Titanic is gigantic. It is alleged to be the most expensive movie ever made -- $200 million is bandied about -- and it earns the right to that claim.
See it, and you will think of the days when the studios unquivered the exclamation points and let you know that a really big movie was really big!
Cast of thousands!
Replica of doomed superliner built at almost the same scale in Baja California!
Takes two distributors to distribute it!
More than three hours long!
Famously obsessive director of the Terminator movies had carpeting duplicated in same the pattern by the same company that made the carpet for the real Titanic!
Well.
When I thought, "OK, I'm ready for the ship to hit the iceberg now," I looked at my watch and we were only a little over an hour into the movie.
When the ship does hit the berg, at the one-hour-and-45-minute point, we are immediately compensated for the padding in writer-director James Cameron's basic narrative -- a shipboard romance.
From there on out, Titanic is one jaw-dropping spectacle effect after another.
Cameron had the excellent idea of putting contemporary framing around the Titanic saga. He begins aboard a salvage ship that sends submersibles in search of a safe in one of the sunken ship's staterooms.
In it, the salvagers are confident, is a jewel that will make the Hope Diamond look like a Cracker Jack prize.
TV coverage of the salvage operation attracts 101-year-old Ruth Calvert (Gloria Stuart), a Titanic survivor who knows things about the diamond that only a few people would know.
She and her granddaughter are choppered out to the salvage ship. Her telling of her story to the salvagers flashes us back to the Titanic's setting out to sea on its first and last voyage in 1912.
In the story from the past, young Rose (Kate Winslet) has been badgered by her mother (Frances Fisher) to marry immensely wealthy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), as though Rose were a brood mare.
This young woman is of a sensibility ahead of her time -- she uses Cal's money to buy Monets and Picassos -- and is gathering the strength to throw herself overboard rather than live as Cal's wifey-poo when she is persuaded otherwise by handsome young Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Dawson is an American rolling stone who studied painting in Paris and won third-class passage on the Titanic in a card game only minutes before the ship sailed.
So begins the love story, which Cameron has well-marbled with quite charmingly corny romantic grand strokes. But it's when the Titanic kisses the iceberg that the filmmaker really hitches up his pants and gets to work.
Cameron's integration of digital special effects and principal photography is virtually seamless and hugely effective. At the same time, this guy knows that the story is not about a boat sinking: It's about people staring death in its face and either accepting it or fighting each other for the ever-decreasing area of dry deck.
As history shows, a few acted nobly. Far more acted like people who wanted to live every second they could live.
Cameron also is effective at little scenes, such as the one where Jack is invited to dine at Cal's table as a reward for "saving" Rose from going over the rail. The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) lends him her son's tux and quietly coaches him through the intricacies of a first-class-table meal.
The production design is luxurious and exhaustively detailed. I believe this movie did cost $200 million, because you can see it up there on the screen.
The best part is, Titanic will give you your money's worth.
The Missing Gun (2003)
Fans of non-Hong Kong Chinese cinema who are impatient from the long take, long shot style of Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), Jia Zhang Ke (Platform), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Flowers of Shanghai) should prepare themselves for The Missing Gun. It stars Jiang Wen, whose biggest role may be that in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, but he is also the director of the recent and much-acclaimed Devils on the Doorstep. The Missing Gun though is made by a brash, young newcomer, Lu Chuan, and for mainland Chinese movies, it’s a radical departure. No glum affair like Beijing Bicycle or exotica like Raise the Red Lantern is this, but rather a pumping, in-your-face style-fest. While Lu claims Francis Ford Coppola as a hero, his film is far closer to Trainspotting. The credit sequence has the camera careening down the streets of the provincial village setting in fast-motion accompanied by a head-banging music beat (by Felling Band). Different scenes sport jump cuts, a whirling camera, surreal imagery, and a playful use of space.
The story is similar to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. A cop, Ma Shan (Jiang), awakens after a night of drunken celebration to find his gun missing. His sister got married and he can’t remember what happened, how he got home or who took him. In China, where guns are extremely rare and gun ownership is strictly forbidden, the loss of a gun means possible dismissal and definite humiliation. Tracing his path backwards, he encounters stuttering Liu (Wei Xiaoping), a bricklayer turned noodle-seller, fellow war veteran Old Tree Ghost (Pan Yong), and old police friend Chen Ying (Ji Pei). They point him toward possible suspects, shady businessman Zhou Xiaogang (Shi Liang), who runs an illegal liquor factory, and Ma Shan’s old lover, Li Xiaomeng (Ning Jing, Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker), who has recently returned to town. The situation goes from bad to worse for Ma Shan when a murder victim turns up, shot with his gun.
A subplot involving Ma Shan’s troubled relationship to his wife Han Xiaoyun (Wu Yujuan) and son Ma Dong (Wang Xiaofan) provide the film with some needed poignancy. Han suspects Ma Shan of cheating on her with Li and accuses him of not being a father to Ma Dong. Yet the boy shows continued devotion to his father, saying he will find daddy’s gun in exchange for the promise of no more beatings.
Lu Chuan’s bravura style is assured for a first feature, if a bit too showy, but it is invigorating in the context of contemporary Chinese cinema. Lu milks much humor from Western influences – a ridiculous-sounding telephone ring, an Italian suit – and through the deadpan acting of Huang Fan and Li Haibin, who play Ma Shan’s sister and her new husband, respectively. For all the stylization, the heart of the film rests on the shoulders of Jiang Wen, who proves more than worthy of the task. His slow-burning intensity with moments of explosive emotion supplies an intriguing interior monologue with the character’s essential decency. If Jiang keeps this up, he’ll soon be as large a figure as Zhang Yimou on the Chinese cinematic landscape.
- George Wu
It Would Have Been Much Easier if He'd Just Misplaced His Keys
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Published: April 2, 2003, Wednesday
Lu Chuan's ''Missing Gun'' is a comic book noir, and its premise is more than workable: a police officer in a Chinese village can't find his gun, and in searching for it sifts through a slice of his recent past.
But the filmmaker's nervous technique mutes the story's impact. The movie, being shown tonight and tomorrow as part of the New Directors/New Films series, seems trapped in the netherworld between drama and comedy, getting by mostly on the performance of its lead and a few passable scenes. The action is unnecessarily heightened for a picture with such a modest setting, and the film suffers from an overload of distracting details and a lack of central logic.
Maybe the director wants us to experience what his anxious hero, Ma Shan (Jiang Wen), is going through. He's awakened from a sweaty sleep by his screaming wife; during his uneasy slumber he was flopping all over the bed. His body is bandaged in several spots, as if he had had to suppress a riot. We learn later that he got drunk at his sister's wedding, though the movie never goes back to explain all of the wounds he suffered.
Realizing that his gun is missing, Ma Shen immediately thinks his little boy has run off with it, a notion that infuriates his wife. The clamor in the house, and his dread over where his gun may have ended up, finally rouse him. His concentration is so scattered that it takes a couple of hours before it occurs to him to retrace his steps. And his memory is so erratic that what comes back to him most distinctly is his bad behavior rather than what might have happened to his pistol.
Eventually, he is afraid of the awful implications of his loss, since guns are hard to come by in his village. He is just as upset at the attendant loss of face, which seems almost as awful as the crimes that might be committed with his firearm. That is, until someone is murdered with it -- then embarrassment becomes secondary.
''The Missing Gun'' surfs much of Ma Shen's life as he tries to track down his lost weapon; it's compelling when we see how much of his existence is tied to this village, where both his personal and professional lives are bundled rather messily together. It's in these scenes, where the dividing lines are so sketchy that the cop has to get through his personal reactions before he can begin to make any procedural progress, that ''The Missing Gun'' takes on any weight. He's friendly with a man who proves to be a suspect, a man whose luscious girlfriend was once the love of the policeman's life.
Such scenes allow the picture's star to contour his performance to the film's demands. In the scenes with the wife, he's befuddled and cowed, though she bursts into tears like a girl out of some anime feature. And when the movie offers a brief glimpse of the differences in their child-rearing approaches, it offers telling bits of characterization; Ma Shen's wife goes ballistic over a poem their son wrote, which she finds almost pornographic, while he's amused by its sentiments.
But none of these moments surface during the investigation, which seems to drive everyone into a hysterical froth; Ma Shen's commander is as big a proud diva as the constable's wife. And there's so much melodramatic flailing and posturing from the actors that overstylization is redundant. The busy direction is often too much at odds with the film and is unwarranted with an actor like Jiang Wen. The story, though, is interesting enough that we shouldn't have to wait too long for an American remake.
By KENNETH TURAN
L.A. TIMES FILM CRITIC
Friday December 19, 1997
To the question of the day--what does $200 million buy?--the 3-hour-and-14-minute "Titanic" unhesitatingly answers: not enough.
Note that despite the hopes of skeptics, aghast at the largest film budget of modern times, money enough to run a full-dress presidential campaign or put a serious dent in illiteracy, the answer is not nothing. When you are willing to build a 775-foot, 90% scale model of the doomed ship and sink it in a 17-million-gallon tank specially constructed for the purpose, you are going to get a heck of a lot of production value for your money. Especially if your name is James Cameron.
More than that, at "Titanic's" two-hour mark, when most films have sense enough to be winding down, this behemoth does stir to a kind of life. With writer-director Cameron, a virtuoso at large-scale action-adventure extravaganzas serving as ringmaster, the detailing of the ship's agonies (compressed here from a real-life two hours and 40 minutes to a bit more than an hour) compels our interest absolutely.
But Cameron, there can be no doubt, is after more than oohs and aahs. He's already made "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2"; with "Titanic" he has his eye on "Doctor Zhivago" / "Lawrence of Arabia" territory. But while his intentions are clear, Cameron lacks the skills necessary to pull off his coup. Just as the hubris of headstrong shipbuilders who insisted that the Titanic was unsinkable led to an unparalleled maritime disaster, so Cameron's overweening pride has come unnecessarily close to capsizing this project.
For seeing "Titanic" almost makes you weep in frustration. Not because of the excessive budget, not even because it recalls the unnecessary loss of life in the real 1912 catastrophe, which saw more than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus passengers dying when an iceberg sliced the ship open like a can opener. What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only isn't it, it isn't even close.
Cameron has regularly come up with his own scripts in the past, but in a better world someone would have had the nerve to tell him or he would have realized himself that creating a moving and creditable love story is a different order of business from coming up with wisecracks for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Instead, what audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality. Worse than that, many of the characters, especially the feckless tycoon Cal Hockley (played by Billy Zane) and Kathy Bates' impersonation of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, are cliches of such purity they ought to be exhibited in film schools as examples of how not to write for the screen.
It is easy to forget, as you wait for the iceberg to arrive and shake things up, how excellent an idea it was to revisit for modern audiences the sinking of what was the largest moving object ever built. Numerous films have been made on the subject, with even the Third Reich taking a shot with a version that concluded, not surprisingly, that the sinking was "an eternal accusation against England's greed." As Steven Biel wrote in "Down With the Old Canoe," a fascinating cultural history of public reaction to the event, "The Titanic disaster begs for resolution--and always resists it."
*
One reason this version is so long is a modern framing story involving nautical treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Cameron veteran Bill Paxton), who is scouring the Titanic's wreck (it was located in 1985) for a fabulously expensive blue diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean" that was lost on board.
What Lovett turns up instead is a drawing of a nude young woman wearing the jewel. News of that find prompts a phone call from 101-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart), who says it's her in the drawing. Lovett flies Rose (whom Cameron modeled on artist Beatrice Wood) out to join his expedition. The bulk of "Titanic" is her recollection of what happened before, during and after that great ship went down.
Young Rose (now played by Kate Winslet) boarded the Titanic as a 17-year-old wearing a very large hat and metaphorical shackles. "To me it was a slave ship," she recalls, "taking me to America in chains." In plainer English she was being forced by her snooty mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater into a (gasp!) loveless marriage with Cal Hockley, an arrogant and wealthy snob for whom the phrase "perpetual sneer" was probably invented.
Rose may be a 17-year-old, but she knows a thing or two. She makes offhanded references to Freud, a wise gentleman no one else on board has heard of, and during an impromptu shopping spree she managed to buy works by Picasso, Degas and Monet despite Hockley's dismissive belief that they "won't amount to a thing." Clearly, this prodigy of taste and discernment deserves better than Mr. Perpetual Sneer, no matter how rich he is.
Enter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a madcap artist and cherubic scamp who wins his steerage ticket in a dockside card game. Jack is staggered by a glimpse of Rose, and though a conveniently placed Irish lad advises him "you'd as like have angels flying out of your arse as get next to the likes of her," he's not the kind of young man to give up easily.
Sure enough, despite the presence of 2,200 other passengers and crew, it's only Jack who's around to save the day when a distraught Rose considers suicide in a flattering evening gown. Despite the best efforts of mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) and Hockley's snarling valet Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner), Jack and Rose are irresistibly drawn to each other. She improves his manners (not hard to do), he teaches her how to spit like a man, and they spend quality time in photogenic locations like the ship's towering prow.
*
Both Winslet and DiCaprio are capable actors (though his brash brat routine is wearing thin) but they are victimized, as is everyone else, by dialogue that has the self-parodying ring of Young Romance comics. "You could just call me a tumbleweed blowing in the wind," Jack says, adding later, "sooner or later the fire I love about you is going to burn out." Most weighted down by this kind of blather are the fatuous Hockley, who has to say things like "you filth" and Bates' Molly Brown, a character so relentlessly folksy she'd be at home on "The Beverly Hillbillies."
Finally, after so much time has passed you fear the iceberg has slept through its wake-up call, disaster strikes the ship at 11:50 on the night of April 14. Cameron is truly in his element here, and "Titanic's" closing hour is jammed with the most stirring and impressive sights, from towering walls of water flooding a grand dining room to the enormous ship itself defying belief and going vertical in the water.
These kinds of complex and demanding sequences are handled with so much aplomb it's understandable that the director, who probably considers the script to be the easiest part of his job, not only wants to do it all but also thinks he can. Yet as Cameron sails his lonely craft toward greatness, he should realize he needs to bring a passenger with him. Preferably someone who can write.
Jaw-dropping spectacle fills 'Titanic'
By JEFF MILLAR
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle
As promised in all the publicity, Titanic is gigantic. It is alleged to be the most expensive movie ever made -- $200 million is bandied about -- and it earns the right to that claim.
See it, and you will think of the days when the studios unquivered the exclamation points and let you know that a really big movie was really big!
Cast of thousands!
Replica of doomed superliner built at almost the same scale in Baja California!
Takes two distributors to distribute it!
More than three hours long!
Famously obsessive director of the Terminator movies had carpeting duplicated in same the pattern by the same company that made the carpet for the real Titanic!
Well.
When I thought, "OK, I'm ready for the ship to hit the iceberg now," I looked at my watch and we were only a little over an hour into the movie.
When the ship does hit the berg, at the one-hour-and-45-minute point, we are immediately compensated for the padding in writer-director James Cameron's basic narrative -- a shipboard romance.
From there on out, Titanic is one jaw-dropping spectacle effect after another.
Cameron had the excellent idea of putting contemporary framing around the Titanic saga. He begins aboard a salvage ship that sends submersibles in search of a safe in one of the sunken ship's staterooms.
In it, the salvagers are confident, is a jewel that will make the Hope Diamond look like a Cracker Jack prize.
TV coverage of the salvage operation attracts 101-year-old Ruth Calvert (Gloria Stuart), a Titanic survivor who knows things about the diamond that only a few people would know.
She and her granddaughter are choppered out to the salvage ship. Her telling of her story to the salvagers flashes us back to the Titanic's setting out to sea on its first and last voyage in 1912.
In the story from the past, young Rose (Kate Winslet) has been badgered by her mother (Frances Fisher) to marry immensely wealthy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), as though Rose were a brood mare.
This young woman is of a sensibility ahead of her time -- she uses Cal's money to buy Monets and Picassos -- and is gathering the strength to throw herself overboard rather than live as Cal's wifey-poo when she is persuaded otherwise by handsome young Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Dawson is an American rolling stone who studied painting in Paris and won third-class passage on the Titanic in a card game only minutes before the ship sailed.
So begins the love story, which Cameron has well-marbled with quite charmingly corny romantic grand strokes. But it's when the Titanic kisses the iceberg that the filmmaker really hitches up his pants and gets to work.
Cameron's integration of digital special effects and principal photography is virtually seamless and hugely effective. At the same time, this guy knows that the story is not about a boat sinking: It's about people staring death in its face and either accepting it or fighting each other for the ever-decreasing area of dry deck.
As history shows, a few acted nobly. Far more acted like people who wanted to live every second they could live.
Cameron also is effective at little scenes, such as the one where Jack is invited to dine at Cal's table as a reward for "saving" Rose from going over the rail. The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) lends him her son's tux and quietly coaches him through the intricacies of a first-class-table meal.
The production design is luxurious and exhaustively detailed. I believe this movie did cost $200 million, because you can see it up there on the screen.
The best part is, Titanic will give you your money's worth.
The Missing Gun (2003)
Fans of non-Hong Kong Chinese cinema who are impatient from the long take, long shot style of Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), Jia Zhang Ke (Platform), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Flowers of Shanghai) should prepare themselves for The Missing Gun. It stars Jiang Wen, whose biggest role may be that in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, but he is also the director of the recent and much-acclaimed Devils on the Doorstep. The Missing Gun though is made by a brash, young newcomer, Lu Chuan, and for mainland Chinese movies, it’s a radical departure. No glum affair like Beijing Bicycle or exotica like Raise the Red Lantern is this, but rather a pumping, in-your-face style-fest. While Lu claims Francis Ford Coppola as a hero, his film is far closer to Trainspotting. The credit sequence has the camera careening down the streets of the provincial village setting in fast-motion accompanied by a head-banging music beat (by Felling Band). Different scenes sport jump cuts, a whirling camera, surreal imagery, and a playful use of space.
The story is similar to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. A cop, Ma Shan (Jiang), awakens after a night of drunken celebration to find his gun missing. His sister got married and he can’t remember what happened, how he got home or who took him. In China, where guns are extremely rare and gun ownership is strictly forbidden, the loss of a gun means possible dismissal and definite humiliation. Tracing his path backwards, he encounters stuttering Liu (Wei Xiaoping), a bricklayer turned noodle-seller, fellow war veteran Old Tree Ghost (Pan Yong), and old police friend Chen Ying (Ji Pei). They point him toward possible suspects, shady businessman Zhou Xiaogang (Shi Liang), who runs an illegal liquor factory, and Ma Shan’s old lover, Li Xiaomeng (Ning Jing, Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker), who has recently returned to town. The situation goes from bad to worse for Ma Shan when a murder victim turns up, shot with his gun.
A subplot involving Ma Shan’s troubled relationship to his wife Han Xiaoyun (Wu Yujuan) and son Ma Dong (Wang Xiaofan) provide the film with some needed poignancy. Han suspects Ma Shan of cheating on her with Li and accuses him of not being a father to Ma Dong. Yet the boy shows continued devotion to his father, saying he will find daddy’s gun in exchange for the promise of no more beatings.
Lu Chuan’s bravura style is assured for a first feature, if a bit too showy, but it is invigorating in the context of contemporary Chinese cinema. Lu milks much humor from Western influences – a ridiculous-sounding telephone ring, an Italian suit – and through the deadpan acting of Huang Fan and Li Haibin, who play Ma Shan’s sister and her new husband, respectively. For all the stylization, the heart of the film rests on the shoulders of Jiang Wen, who proves more than worthy of the task. His slow-burning intensity with moments of explosive emotion supplies an intriguing interior monologue with the character’s essential decency. If Jiang keeps this up, he’ll soon be as large a figure as Zhang Yimou on the Chinese cinematic landscape.
- George Wu
It Would Have Been Much Easier if He'd Just Misplaced His Keys
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Published: April 2, 2003, Wednesday
Lu Chuan's ''Missing Gun'' is a comic book noir, and its premise is more than workable: a police officer in a Chinese village can't find his gun, and in searching for it sifts through a slice of his recent past.
But the filmmaker's nervous technique mutes the story's impact. The movie, being shown tonight and tomorrow as part of the New Directors/New Films series, seems trapped in the netherworld between drama and comedy, getting by mostly on the performance of its lead and a few passable scenes. The action is unnecessarily heightened for a picture with such a modest setting, and the film suffers from an overload of distracting details and a lack of central logic.
Maybe the director wants us to experience what his anxious hero, Ma Shan (Jiang Wen), is going through. He's awakened from a sweaty sleep by his screaming wife; during his uneasy slumber he was flopping all over the bed. His body is bandaged in several spots, as if he had had to suppress a riot. We learn later that he got drunk at his sister's wedding, though the movie never goes back to explain all of the wounds he suffered.
Realizing that his gun is missing, Ma Shen immediately thinks his little boy has run off with it, a notion that infuriates his wife. The clamor in the house, and his dread over where his gun may have ended up, finally rouse him. His concentration is so scattered that it takes a couple of hours before it occurs to him to retrace his steps. And his memory is so erratic that what comes back to him most distinctly is his bad behavior rather than what might have happened to his pistol.
Eventually, he is afraid of the awful implications of his loss, since guns are hard to come by in his village. He is just as upset at the attendant loss of face, which seems almost as awful as the crimes that might be committed with his firearm. That is, until someone is murdered with it -- then embarrassment becomes secondary.
''The Missing Gun'' surfs much of Ma Shen's life as he tries to track down his lost weapon; it's compelling when we see how much of his existence is tied to this village, where both his personal and professional lives are bundled rather messily together. It's in these scenes, where the dividing lines are so sketchy that the cop has to get through his personal reactions before he can begin to make any procedural progress, that ''The Missing Gun'' takes on any weight. He's friendly with a man who proves to be a suspect, a man whose luscious girlfriend was once the love of the policeman's life.
Such scenes allow the picture's star to contour his performance to the film's demands. In the scenes with the wife, he's befuddled and cowed, though she bursts into tears like a girl out of some anime feature. And when the movie offers a brief glimpse of the differences in their child-rearing approaches, it offers telling bits of characterization; Ma Shen's wife goes ballistic over a poem their son wrote, which she finds almost pornographic, while he's amused by its sentiments.
But none of these moments surface during the investigation, which seems to drive everyone into a hysterical froth; Ma Shen's commander is as big a proud diva as the constable's wife. And there's so much melodramatic flailing and posturing from the actors that overstylization is redundant. The busy direction is often too much at odds with the film and is unwarranted with an actor like Jiang Wen. The story, though, is interesting enough that we shouldn't have to wait too long for an American remake.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Terry Gross on Fresh Air
Please listen to Terry Gross' interview with singer Tom Petty by following the link below:
http://www.npr.org/templates/dmg/dmg_wmref.php?prgCode=FA&showDate=27-Jul-2006&segNum=1&mediaPref=WM&sauid=U801244061175217712515&getUnderwriting=1
You will need to use Windows Media Player to listen to the program.
http://www.npr.org/templates/dmg/dmg_wmref.php?prgCode=FA&showDate=27-Jul-2006&segNum=1&mediaPref=WM&sauid=U801244061175217712515&getUnderwriting=1
You will need to use Windows Media Player to listen to the program.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
"Fast Car" (Wed. class)
By Tracy Chapman
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Anyplace is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make something
But me myself I got nothing to prove
You got a fast car
And I got a plan to get us out of here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
We won't have to drive too far
Just 'cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
You see my old man's got a problem
He live with the bottle that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
I say his body's too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody's got to take care of him
So I quit school and that's what I did
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way
I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You got a fast car
And we go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a big house and live in the suburbs
You got a fast car
And I got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I'd always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me would find it
I got no plans I ain't going nowhere
So take your fast car and keep on driving
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
You leave tonight or live and die this way
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Anyplace is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make something
But me myself I got nothing to prove
You got a fast car
And I got a plan to get us out of here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
We won't have to drive too far
Just 'cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living
You see my old man's got a problem
He live with the bottle that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
I say his body's too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody's got to take care of him
So I quit school and that's what I did
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
We leave tonight or live and die this way
I remember we were driving driving in your car
The speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I had a feeling that I belonged
And I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You got a fast car
And we go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a big house and live in the suburbs
You got a fast car
And I got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I'd always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me would find it
I got no plans I ain't going nowhere
So take your fast car and keep on driving
You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
You leave tonight or live and die this way
A Report for an Academy (Thurs class)
By Franz Kafka
<>Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy!
You show me the honour of calling upon me to submit a report to the Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.
<>In this sense, unfortunately, I cannot comply with your request. Almost five years separate me from my existence as an ape, a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid men, advice, applause, and orchestral music, but basically alone, since all those accompanying me held themselves back a long way from the barrier, in order to preserve the image. This achievement would have been impossible if I had stubbornly wished to hold onto my origin, onto the memories of my youth.
<>Giving up that obstinacy was, in fact, the highest command that I gave myself. I, a free ape, submitted myself to this yoke. In so doing, however, my memories for their part constantly closed themselves off against me. If people had wanted it, my journey back at first would have been possible through the entire gateway which heaven builds over the earth, but as my development was whipped onwards, the gate simultaneously grew lower and narrower all the time. I felt myself more comfortable and more enclosed in the world of human beings. The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. Today it is only a gentle breeze which cools my heels. And the distant hole through which it comes and through which I once came has become so small that, even if I had sufficient power and will to run back there, I would have to scrape the fur off my body in order to get through. Speaking frankly, as much as I like choosing metaphors for these things—speaking frankly: your experience as apes, gentlemen—to the extent that you have something of that sort behind you—cannot be more distant from you than mine is from me. But it tickles at the heels of everyone who walks here on earth, the small chimpanzee as well as the great Achilles.
In the narrowest sense, however, I can perhaps answer your question, nonetheless, and indeed I do so with great pleasure.
The first thing I learned was to give a handshake. The handshake displays candour. Today, when I stand at the highpoint of my career, may I add to that first handshake also my candid words. For the Academy it will not provide anything essentially new and will fall far short of what people have asked of me and what with the best will I cannot speak about—but nonetheless it should demonstrate the line by which someone who was an ape was forced into the world of men and which he has continued there. Yet I would certainly not permit myself to say even the trivial things which follow if I were not completely sure of myself and if my position on all the great music hall stages of the civilized world had not established itself unassailably.
I come from the Gold Coast. For an account of how I was captured I rely on the reports of strangers. A hunting expedition from the firm of Hagenback—incidentally, since then I have already emptied a number of bottles of good red wine with the leader of that expedition—lay hidden in the bushes by the shore when I ran down in the evening in the middle of a band of apes for a drink. Someone fired a shot. I was the only one struck. I received two hits.
One was in the cheek—that was superficial. But it left behind a large hairless red scar which earned me the name Red Peter—a revolting name, completely inappropriate, presumably something invented by an ape, as if the only difference between me and the recently deceased trained ape Peter, who was well known here and there, was the red patch on my cheek. But this is only by the way.
The second shot hit me below the hip. It was serious. It’s the reason that today I still limp a little. Recently I read in an article by one of the ten thousand gossipers who vent their opinions about me in the newspapers that my ape nature is not yet entirely repressed. The proof is that when visitors come I take pleasure in pulling off my trousers to show the entry wound caused by this shot. That fellow should have each finger of his writing hand shot off one by one. So far as I am concerned, I may pull my trousers down in front of anyone I like. People will not find there anything other than well cared for fur and the scar from—let us select here a precise word for a precise purpose, something that will not be misunderstood—the scar from a wicked shot. Everything is perfectly open; there is nothing to hide. When it comes to a question of the truth, every great mind discards the most subtle refinements of manners. However, if that writer were to pull down his trousers when he gets a visitor, that would certainly produce a different sight, and I’ll take it as a sign of reason that he does not do that. But then he should not bother me with his delicate sensibilities.
After those shots I woke up—and here my own memory gradually begins—in a cage between decks on the Hagenbeck steamship. It was no four-sided cage with bars, but only three walls fixed to a crate, so that the crate constituted the fourth wall. The whole thing was too low to stand upright and too narrow for sitting down. So I crouched with bent knees, which shook all the time, and since at first I probably did not wish to see anyone and to remain constantly in the darkness, I turned towards the crate, while the bars of the cage cut into the flesh on my back. People consider such confinement of wild animals beneficial in the very first period of time, and today I cannot deny, on the basis of my own experience, that in a human sense that is, in fact, the case.
But at that time I didn’t think about it. For the first time in my life I was without a way out—at least there was no direct way out. Right in front of me was the crate, its boards fitted closely together. Well, there was a hole running right through the boards. When I first discovered it, I welcomed it with a blissfully happy howl of ignorance. But this hole was not nearly big enough to stick my tail through, and all the power of an ape could not make it any bigger.
According to what I was told later, I am supposed to have made remarkably little noise. From that people concluded that either I must soon die or, if I succeeded in surviving the first critical period, I would be very capable of being trained. I survived this period. Muffled sobbing, painfully searching out fleas, wearily licking a coconut, banging my skull against the wall of the crate, sticking out my tongue when anyone came near—these were the first occupations in my new life. In all of them, however, there was only one feeling: no way out. Nowadays, of course, I can portray those ape-like feelings only with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them. But even if I can no longer attain the old truth of the ape, at least it lies in the direction I have described—of that there is no doubt.
Up until then I had had so many ways out, and now I no longer had one. I was tied down. If they had nailed me down, my freedom to move would not have been any less. And why? If you scratch raw the flesh between your toes, you won’t find the reason. If you press your back against the bars of the cage until it almost slices you in two, you won’t find the answer. I had no way out, but I had to come up with one for myself. For without that I could not live. Always in front of that crate wall—I would inevitably have died a miserable death. But according to Hagenbeck, apes belong at the crate wall—well, that meant I had to cease being an ape. A clear and beautiful train of thought, which I must have planned somehow with my belly, since apes think with their bellies.
I’m worried that people do not understand precisely what I mean by a way out. I use the word in its most common and fullest sense. I am deliberately not saying freedom. I do not mean this great feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, I perhaps recognized it, and I have met human beings who yearn for it. But as far as I am concerned, I did not demand freedom either then or today. Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime. In the variety shows, before my entrance, I have often watched a pair of artists busy on trapezes high up in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked back and forth, they jumped, they hung in each other’s arms, one held the other by clenching the hair with his teeth. “That, too, is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What a mockery of sacred nature! At such a sight, no structure would stand up to the laughter of the apes.
No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall.
Today I see clearly that without the greatest inner calm I would never have been able to get out. And in fact I probably owe everything that I have become to the calmness which came over me after the first days there on the ship. And, in turn, I owe that calmness to the people on the ship.
They are good people, in spite of everything. Today I still enjoy remembering the clang of their heavy steps, which used to echo then in my half sleep. They had the habit of tackling everything extremely slowly. If one of them wanted to rub his eyes, he raised his hand as if it were a hanging weight. Their jokes were gross but hearty. Their laughter was always mixed with a rasp which sounded dangerous but meant nothing. They always had something in their mouths to spit out, and they didn’t care where they spat. They always complained that my fleas sprung over onto them, but they were never seriously angry at me because of it. They even knew that fleas liked being in my fur and that fleas are jumpers. They learned to live with that. When they had no duties, sometimes a few of them sat down in a semi-circle around me. They didn’t speak much, but only made noises to each other and smoked their pipes, stretched out on the crates. They slapped their knees as soon as I made the slightest movement, and from time to time one of them would pick up a stick and tickle me where I liked it. If I were invited today to make a journey on that ship, I’d certainly decline the invitation, but it’s equally certain that the memories I could dwell on of the time there between the decks would not be totally hateful.
The calmness which I acquired in this circle of people prevented me above all from any attempt to escape. Looking at it nowadays, it seems to me as if I had at least sensed that I had to find a way out if I wanted to live, but that this way out could not be reached by escaping. I no longer know if escape was possible, but I think it was: for an ape it should always be possible to flee. With my present teeth I have to be careful even with the ordinary task of cracking a nut, but then I must have been able, over time, to succeed in chewing through the lock on the door. I didn’t do that. What would I have achieved by doing that? No sooner would I have stuck my head out, than they would have captured me again and locked me up in an even worse cage. Or I could have taken refuge unnoticed among the other animals—say, the boa constrictors opposite me—and breathed my last in their embraces. Or I could have managed to steal way up to the deck and jumped overboard. Then I’d have tossed back and forth for a while on the ocean and drowned. Acts of despair. I did not think things through in such a human way, but under the influence of my surroundings conducted myself as if I had worked things out.
I did not work things out, but I observed well in complete tranquility. I saw these men going back and forth, always the same faces, the same movements. Often it seemed to me as if there was only one man. So the man or these men went undisturbed. A lofty purpose dawned on me. No one promised me that if I could become like them the cage would be removed. Such promises, apparently impossible to fulfill, were not made. But if one makes the fulfillment good, then later the promises appear precisely there where one had looked for them earlier without success. Now, these men in themselves were nothing which attracted me very much. If I had been a follower of that freedom I just mentioned, I would certainly have preferred the ocean to the way out displayed in the dull gaze of these men. But in any case, I observed them for a long time before I even thought about such things—in fact, the accumulated observations first pushed me in the proper direction.
It was so easy to imitate these people. I could already spit on the first day. We used to spit in each other’s faces. The only difference was that I licked my face clean afterwards. They did not. Soon I was smoking a pipe, like an old man, and if I then pressed my thumb down into the bowl of the pipe, the entire area between decks cheered. Still, for a long time I did not understand the difference between an empty and a full pipe.
I had the greatest difficulty with the bottle of alcohol. The smell was torture to me. I forced myself with all my power, but weeks went by before I could overcome my reaction. Curiously enough, the people took this inner struggle more seriously than anything else about me. In my memories I don’t distinguish the people, but there was one who always came back, alone or with comrades, day and night, at different times. He’d stand with a bottle in front of me and give me instructions. He did not understand me. He wanted to solve the riddle of my being. He used to uncork the bottle slowly and then look at me, in order to test if I had understood. I confess that I always looked at him with wildly over-eager attentiveness. No human teacher has ever found in the entire world such a student of human beings.
After he’d uncorked the bottle, he’d raise it to his mouth. I’d gaze at him, right at his throat. He would nod, pleased with me, and set the bottle to his lips. Delighted with my gradual understanding, I’d squeal and scratch myself all over, wherever it was convenient. He was happy. He’d set the bottle to his mouth and take a swallow. Impatient and desperate to emulate him, I would defecate over myself in my cage—and that again gave him great satisfaction. Then, holding the bottle at arm’s length and bringing it up again with a swing, he’d drink it down with one gulp, exaggerating his backward bending as a way of instructing me. Exhausted with so much great effort, I could no longer follow and hung weakly onto the bars, while he ended the theoretical lesson by rubbing his belly and grinning.
Now the practical exercises first began. Was I not already too tired out by the theoretical part? Yes, indeed, far too weary. That’s part of my fate. Nonetheless, I’d grab the proffered bottle as well as I could and uncork it trembling. Once I’d managed to do that, new forces gradually take over. I lift the bottle—with hardly any difference between me and the original—put it to my lips—and throw it away in disgust, in disgust, although it is empty and filled only with the smell, throw it with disgust onto the floor. To the sorrow of my teacher, to my own greater sorrow. And I still do not console him or myself when, after throwing away the bottle, I do not forget to give my belly a splendid rub and to grin as I do so.
All too often, the lesson went that way. And to my teacher’s credit, he was not angry with me. Well, sometimes he held his burning pipe against my fur in some place or other which I could reach only with difficulty, until it began to burn. But then he would put it out himself with his huge good hand. He wasn’t angry with me. He realized that we were fighting on the same side against ape nature and that I had the more difficult part.
What a victory it was for him and for me, however, when one evening in front of a large circle of onlookers—perhaps it was a celebration, a gramophone was playing, and officer was wandering around among the people—when on this evening, at a moment when no one was watching, I grabbed a bottle of alcohol which had been inadvertently left standing in front of my cage, uncorked it just as I had been taught, amid the rising attention of the group, set it against my mouth and, without hesitating, with my mouth making no grimace, like an expert drinker, with my eyes rolling around, splashing the liquid in my throat, I really and truly drank the bottle empty, and then threw it away, no longer in despair, but like an artist. Well, I did forget to scratch my belly. But instead of that, because I couldn’t do anything else, because I had to, because my senses were roaring, I cried out a short and good “Hello!” breaking out into human sounds. And with this cry I sprang into the community of human beings, and I felt its echo—“Just listen. He’s talking!”—like a kiss on my entire sweat-soaked body.
I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for no other reason. And even in that victory little was achieved. My voice immediately failed me again. It first came back months later. My distaste for the bottle of alcohol became even stronger. But at least my direction was given to me once and for all.
When I was handed over in Hamburg to my first trainer, I soon realized the two possibilities open to me: the Zoological Garden or the Music Hall. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: use all your energy to get into the Music Hall. That is the way out. The Zoological Garden is only a new barred cage. If you go there, you’re lost.
And I learned, gentlemen. Alas, one learns when one has to. Once learns when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with a whip and tears oneself apart at the slightest resistance. My ape nature ran off, head over heels, out of me, so that in the process my first teacher himself almost became an ape and soon had to give up training and be carried off to a mental hospital. Fortunately he was soon discharged again.
But I went through many teachers—indeed, even several teachers at once. As I became more confident of my abilities and the general public followed my progress and my future began to brighten, I took on teachers myself, let them sit down in five interconnected rooms, and studied with them all simultaneously, by constantly leaping from one room into another.
And such progress! The penetrating effects of the rays of knowledge from all sides on my awaking brain! I don’t deny the fact—I was delighted with it. But I also confess that I did not overestimate it, not even then, even less today. With an effort which up to this point has never been repeated on earth, I have attained the average education of a European. That would perhaps not amount to much, but it is something insofar as it helped me out of the cage and created this special way out for me—the way out of human beings. There is an excellent German expression: to beat one’s way through the bushes. That I have done. I have beaten my way through the bushes. I had no other way, always assuming that freedom was not a choice.
If I review my development and its goal up to this point, I do not complain. I am even satisfied. With my hands in my trouser pockets, the bottle of wine on the table, I half lie and half sit in my rocking chair and gaze out the window. If I have a visitor, I welcome him as is appropriate. My impresario sits in the parlour. If I ring, he comes and listens to what I have to say. In the evening I almost always have a performance, and my success could hardly rise any higher. When I come home late from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it.
On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I wished to achieve. You shouldn’t say it wasn’t worth the effort. In any case, I don’t want any man’s judgment. I only want to expand knowledge. I simply report. Even to you, esteemed gentlemen of the Academy, I have only made a report.
(Translation by Ian Johnston, http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/reportforacademy.htm)
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