LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN gives a salutary reminder of modern nuclear brinkmanship
The atmosphere might appear closer to post-World War 2, but The War Game[i] is more relevant in 2026 than ever. This searingly brilliant film takes only 45 minutes to say everything everyone should know or bear to imagine about the consequences as well as the insane overkill and economic waste of nuclear weaponry. It should be compulsory viewing in all schools, colleges and universities. Politicians, despots (Trump, Putin etcetera) and grasping billionaires[ii] (why does humanity permit them to retain their spoils?[iii]) should be forced to watch it. It’s only by sheer luck that nuclear war has not occurred . . . The details of The War Game may have dated, yet the statistics now, will only be worse. What was said in 1965 remains essentially unchanged.
At 00:43:46: “On almost the entire subject of thermo-nuclear weapons, on the problems of their possession and the effects of their use, there is now practically a total silence in the press, in official publications and on television. There is hope in any unresolved and unpredictable situation. But is there a real hope to be found in this silence? The world’s stockpile of thermo-nuclear weapons has doubled in the last five years and now is the equivalent of almost 20 tons of high explosive to every man, woman and child on the planet.”
Leaflets distributed[iv] in The War Game – were echoed by the woeful Protect & Survive pamphlets notoriously published in 1980[v]
Although the nuclear overkill has decreased from its Cold War peak, considering that the global population has increased from 3.3 billion in 1965 to about 8.3 billion now, the figure remains absurdly high, with the world’s arsenal containing enough destructive power to destroy human civilization many times over[vi]. Detonating approximately 400 atomic bombs would wipe out humanity[vii], and yet there are estimated to be 9,604. Enough to eradicate humanity 24 times over.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
St David’s Cathedral. Image: Alan Thomas, Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON enjoys the sounds of the classical continuum
In Director, Ken Russell’s famous 1962 Monitor film about the life of Edward Elgar and narrated so memorably by Huw Wheldon (a patrician voice clinging on in what was a changing era), the point was made that the English composer’s life encompassed three facets: “the romantic, the drum-beating patriot, and religious visionary”.
Certainly, the religious element – Elgar was a Roman Catholic – is hugely significant in his work, as his most famous oratorio, the Cardinal Newman setting, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), testifies. Six years later, now knighted and perhaps the nation’s most famous and recognised composer, Sir Edward turned again to religious themes, but this time a piece about the earliest days of the Christian church, with a libretto selected and woven together by his own hand from both the Old and New Testaments. Whereas The Dream of Gerontius began with a hushed orchestral introduction – as if the mist of incense is beginning to clear in the shadows of a Worcestershire rural Catholic Church – The Kingdom opens with a “rushing wind”, a tremendous, revelatory symphonic call-to-arms, before subsiding into one of Elgar’s most moving passages, almost out-Nimrodding Nimrod: surveying the lands of the Bible, the morning of Pentecost, Solomon’s Porch – all seen through the hazy summer skies of the Malvern Hills.
Revelatory, too, is the May 1957 recording of the piece, set down for posterity by the SOMM label – and, thanks to Elgar expert and sound-technician, Lani Spahr, presented in astonishingly-detailed, audio-restoration glory. I do not use the latter term lightly: for here we have the pre-eminent Elgar conductor of his age, perhaps of all time, Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Festival Hall, at the helm of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with the voices of (in those halcyon days of regional and London choruses) the much-acclaimed Croydon Philharmonic Society. The soloists, too, are names that dominated the concert stages and recording studios of the 1950s to early 1970s: Heather Harper, Helen Watts, William Herbert and Gordon Clinton. But aside from the Elgar and Boult interest, another important element exists with this recording, and that is the capturing of a sound-of-voice, tone-of-voice and diction which, over the last 60-odd years, has almost been lost. The best way in which I can describe the sensation is by comparing the voice, of say, Kenneth More or indeed, Huw Wheldon, to an actor or announcer of today. SOMM’s new CD is a vital piece of social history, too.
The fill-up work on this two-CD set, the Enigma Variations, is another remarkable archive performance: Sir Adrian Boult again, but this time abroad – in Holland, in that year of peril, 1940. Conducting Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra (now, Royal Concertgebouw) we are reminded of a time when Elgar was played more frequently in continental Europe than he is now. Needless to say, the Dutch orchestra is on fine form as one of the greatest ensembles of its time – an excellence continued, post-war by Van Beinum and Haitink, and which, of course, lives on in our own time under new generations of musicians. But when Boult stood before those players, just months before Holland was overrun by Nazi Germany, the combination of music, emotion, world events all seemed to make a potent brew. We are so fortunate to be able to dip into the Europe of 86 years ago and to hear – and imagine – what must have been in people’s hearts. Another truly superb addition to SOMM’s (and the world’s) music library.
The anguish of totalitarianism, this time of the Soviet era, is brought into focus by another of SOMM’s productions, the Symphonic Diptych, Anna, Op. 171 by David Matthews (b. 1943). Anna – an opera, with libretto by the philosopher and writer, the late Sir Roger Scruton, tells an anguished story of Peter and Anna, whose father (during the years of the Iron Curtain) was imprisoned for assisting anti-Communist dissidents. Anna meets a young man, Miro, with whom she falls in love, but it is later revealed that his own past, spent cooperating with the authorities, was responsible for their father’s death. The tragedy unfolds, but the composer brings us not operatic extracts or the full drama, but instead, a symphonic compression of this modern saga – an intensive, half-an-hour ‘symphony’ in its own right, Mahlerian in its emotions, but more pared down, more intimate, more of a philosophical conversation between the music and the listener.
Performed by the Ulster Orchestra under Jac Van Steen and recorded two years ago in Belfast, this is the brightest of modern recordings, showing the rich tone of the Northern Ireland players, especially the pinpoint, sharp yet subtle brass and woodwind instruments, captured with both balance, forthrightness and radiance by SOMM’s director, Siva Oke, and Recording Engineer Richard Campbell – with mixing and mastering by Alastair McMillan. The team at the recording console also bring us a change of mood and tempo, in the form of the David Matthews Flute Concerto, given a mesmerising, air-borne, joyful and fabulously detailed rendition by soloist, Emma Halnan – acclaimed several years ago at the English Music Festival for her performance of Malcolm Arnold’s Flute Sonata.
Another contemporary composer, Nimrod Borenstein (b. 1969), is currently bringing his exacting, intense, but fluid and compelling conducting style to the English Chamber Orchestra, in a new Mandolin Concerto performed by Alon Sariel. Borenstein rejects the leaden, de-Natured, tortured landscape of much old-hat, self-consciously anti-tonal ‘music’. In conversation, the conductor-composer talks in a torrent of intellectual passion about Mendelssohn and Mozart, so it is easy to see the inspiration behind his own exciting, classically based, thoroughly tuneful compositions. SOMM’s discography embraces not just the old masters, but a genre of contemporary music that has something to say and which belongs to the continuum.
Finally, live music, courtesy of the enterprising, classical-opera and folk-filled Fishguard Festival of Music in West Wales, in their grand opening concert at St. David’s Cathedral on the south-western tip of Cambria. In a countryside alive not just with Festival fever, but wrapped up in preparations and bunting for August’s Eisteddfod, it seemed completely right that the opening works celebrated folk tradition – in this case, the movements, Sarka, and From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields by Bedrich Smetana. Czech conductor, Tomas Hanus, drew both intense and delicate playing from the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera – the players clearly enjoying the experience of performing as a symphony orchestra ‘on stage’, rather than an ensemble half-hidden beneath flooring occupied by singers and scenery. Sarka is an alarming tale of a deadly female warrior army of legend, in which the orchestral pace is sometimes strident and alarming, yet in the contrasting woods and fields of Bohemia, Smetana invites us to wander dreamily in meadows (which some two decades later, Mahler would consecrate to Pan).
A more spectral rural atmosphere, this time in England, was evoked in George Butterworth’s Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad, sung by the prize-winning young baritone, Steffan Lloyd Owen – whose voice took me back to concerts and recitals by the famous Cornish baritone, Benjamin Luxon, an artist prominent in the 1970s and 1980s who recorded the cycle, but with piano accompaniment. In the St. David’s performance, perhaps a slightly slower tempo might have been in order, as occasionally (such as in the song, Look Not in My Eyes) I found the clarity of the words a little indistinct. But nevertheless, the interpretation unearthed all the treasures of Butterworth’s and A.E. Housman’s native soil – romance, lost love, the passing of youth, the sacrifice of a generation (the composer was killed on the Western Front in 1916), the memory of the town fair, good chaps and friends, the cherry tree, and the ploughed field.
A delightful interval was spent in the grounds of the cathedral, watching jackdaws find their nests and nooks in the great building’s tower, and listening to the mid-evening swifts, scything and “scree-screeing” through the drowsy, warm air. The interval bell summoned the capacity audience back to the final work, the Symphony No. 4 by Brahms, written in the Austrian countryside of Styria in 1884-85 (1885 being the year Butterworth was born). Brahms’s Fourth is often considered, especially in its opening and final movements, a tragic, autumnal, even wintry work, casting a spell of solitude and introspection. Yet all such thoughts are banished in the headlong, joyful rush of the Allegro giocoso third movement – the WNO musicians filling the cathedral with a head-spinning, summer energy. After the applause had died down, the orchestra paid its own tribute to Tomas Hanus, now leaving the company for pastures new. A moving encore from Songs my Mother Taught Me by Dvorak seemed the perfect end to this well-thought-out programme of heavy high summer.
WILLIAM MARKLEY remembers an original and politically unclassifiable writer
Many of us in the USA believe that our country has lost much of the strength and virtue which it once had. We see an America that isn’t working the way it should. And we know that corruption, incompetence, and division are on the rise. I was born in 1962. For anyone my age or older, it should be clear that the nation has culturally and socially declined in our lifetimes. The roots of this decline stretch back far into the twentieth century.
In the 1990s, historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch presented a diagnosis of what had gone wrong. While he is right in many of his conclusions, and accurately describes much of what happened, I believe that he misses some of the reasons for America’s decline. But despite any shortcomings, he is well worth reading.
Lasch sadly died too young, in 1994, at the age of sixty-one. In his last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, which was published the year after his death, he warned that Americans in higher social positions had developed a contempt for their own nation, and for fellow citizens. These so-called “elites” isolated themselves from the rest of us, praised themselves as more enlightened “Citizens of the World,” and merged into the group that is today called the globalists. They especially despised middle- and working-class Americans.
In his introduction to Revolt of the Elites, Lasch noted several concerns that non-elite Americans had at the time, including the loss of industry and associated jobs, threats to the middle class, rising crime, and declining cities. [1] Sound familiar? It should. And remember, Lasch wrote this in 1994. America still has many good people, but the qualities that made America healthy are still under threat. We, today, could add to Lasch’s list of concerns: uncontrolled immigration, Woke, declining education, family breakdown, social disorder, institutional corruption, an upper class that is hoarding more and more of America’s wealth, and last but not least, a demoralizing war on beauty.
Since Lasch’s day, Americans have also been dissatisfied with the state of politics and government. Neither major American political party has adequately addressed our urgent problems. Lasch ascribes this to the increased isolation of American elites. This isolation has ensured that powerful people don’t suffer from the results of their many failed policies. [2] This has been a relatively recent development in American history. It’s very important for us to understand that, as a group, our elites were not always as unmoored and hostile to the rest of us as they are now. Lasch describes how the wealthy in America once commonly had a strong sense of noblesse oblige—a belief that they were responsible for acting generously, benevolently and honorably towards people in other, less fortunate classes. As a result, “Libraries, museums, parks, orchestras, universities, hospitals, and other civic amenities stood as so many monuments to upper-class munificence.” [3]
Carnegie Library in Xenia, Ohio. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of many public libraries in small and large cities
The new “elites,” for want of a better word, are a very different breed. They partially developed out of a system of “mobility of capital and the emergence of a global market.” This economic system arose in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The new elites also have taken advantage of a recently-developed system of educational credentials, acquired from approved schools such as the Ivy League universities. This credentialism that has become so consequential is associated with so-called Progressive ideology, which gained a foothold in America by the early twentieth century. Among the new elites, noblesse oblige has disappeared. These successors to the Henry Fords of old include business and NGO managers, media figures, government bureaucrats, the education establishment, tech leaders and workers, and others who “produce and manipulate information.” They are not nearly as closely tied to local communities and the nation as a whole as the earlier elites were. They are the “Anywheres” which David Goodhart described, as opposed to the “Somewheres” who are still conservative and rooted in a place. Lasch notes, “It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all. Patriotism, certainly, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues. ‘Multiculturalism,’ on the other hand, suits them to perfection.” [4] This new class has tried to change the meaning of the word “democracy” for its own benefit, and to favour certain social classes which have supposedly been treated unfairly. According to Lasch, for the new elites, democracy means a “therapeutic state” which promotes “self-esteem.” [5]
In Revolt of the Elites, Lasch expressed appreciation for the American Founding Fathers, and the civic and social life of America that flourished well into the nineteenth century. Our Civil War was a terrible rupture, of course. But although antebellum politicians obviously failed to find a peaceful resolution before that war erupted at Fort Sumter, many of them had tried diligently, using political channels that worked well in earlier decades, and would again work well after the war, until the new elites rose to domination.
Lasch carefully studied and understood the earlier, sometimes novel American ideas of democracy. He appreciated how the American republic and its democratic elements, based on the founding documents, rule of law, and separation of powers, provided ways for people of all social classes to thrive and earn respect. Nineteenth century Americans tended to have a very different understanding of American democracy than the ideologues who refer to “our democracy” today. While Federalists and Whigs warned of the dangers of the mob, those who approved of the expansion of democracy stressed the need for a cohesive society with wide, active participation, and warned of the dangers that would arise from a widening gap between the rich and the poor. They emphasized the value of a high proportion of men participating in a trade or owning and managing property, which would foster qualities necessary for a healthy democracy, such as self-reliance and responsibility:
Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state. Not that democracy should be equated with rugged individualism. Self-reliance does not mean self-sufficiency. Self-governing communities, not individuals, are the basic units of democratic society. [6]
While individualism was often emphasized in America, it was balanced, from America’s beginnings, by the activities of religious and other voluntary organizations, which provided assistance to those in need, strengthened social bonds, and promoted cultural pursuits. The decline of these organizations is now attested by many empty churches, and countless other empty, crumbling buildings in small towns and cities, which once housed thriving community groups such as the Grange, the Odd Fellows, and the Lyceum.
A former Odd Fellows Hall, in rural Ohio
The role of “experts”
Along with globalized economics, Lasch assigns blame for America’s decline on the rise of “experts,” and an unquestioning trust in “science” to solve all problems. This process accelerated in the late-nineteenth century, as American intellectuals looked to Europe for new ideas. Among the results in government were a professionalized bureaucracy, which continually grew and changed in unforeseen directions, and a growing reliance on educated experts for developing policies. This new system of the American “Progressives” showed its fallibility by the 1930s, with policies that prolonged the Great Depression. “The Best and the Brightest” also showed their short-sightedness in the 1960s, with the development of the welfare state, the direction of the Vietnam War, and other policies which ruined American cities. As we saw later with Covid in 2020, and the “climate change” hysteria of the last few decades, scientists and other experts have continued to be wrong in many cases. True science knows its limits, and always encourages professional argument and rational criticism. In order to offer convincing evidence, it must show that the results of a scientific experiment can be duplicated. This is very different from today’s “scientism” delusion, which is prevalent among many persons who believe that they are well-educated. Another difference from the days before the “Progressive Era” is that, in recent years, many in the expert classes have not been anchored in the Christian, Western morality which served America so well. Traditional Christian, Western morality taught that there are limits to the understanding and capability of science and knowledge. Without this, a blinding arrogance has developed among the new elites. And Lasch emphasized that this arrogance is very different from the pride of earlier aristocrats, which was based on “the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor.” Knightly ideals and qualities are a thing of the past. [7]
Lasch also criticizes the ideal of a “meritocracy.” He argues that, paradoxically, this tends to encourage an upper class to become more entrenched, rather than providing truly fluid social mobility. This happens by allowing capable persons from lower classes to rise who, in the process, develop allegiance or obligation to the established upper class. And the lower classes lose effective leaders. I’m not sure that I am completely convinced by Lasch’s argument here, but it is food for thought. Lasch does provide plenty of evidence for what Charles Haywood describes, in another review of Revolt of the Elites: “Until quite recently, in fact, the American ideal was not rising up through the class structure, but succeeding within one’s own community and frame.” [8] Lasch also specified that this ideal insisted upon opportunities for full citizenship, and for participating and mixing with others in the broad society. [9]
A Young Carpenter, ca. 1850 (Chrysler Museum of Art)
The republican system which America’s founders and their adherents established provided the means for many humble people to live productive lives. It didn’t necessarily enable everyone to become a tycoon or to get rich quick, but it did offer a share of social respect to any citizen who acted responsibly. Nineteenth-century workers, farmers and craftsmen considered this kind of respect to be their due. They weren’t interested in a social revolution that would overthrow the wealthy. Compared with the rest of the world, a high proportion of working-class and middle-class persons participated in the civil aspects of the American system. Those in other classes also benefited from this system.
Lasch rightly lamented the loss of these civil aspects of America. He claims that the rise of wage labor and large corporations, along with the dwindling of more independent workers, were among the reasons for this change. There was also the growth of the new, more isolated elite classes who lacked solidarity with the less wealthy. Among the Progressives of the early twentieth century, an attitude arose that “most political questions were too complex” for the public. [10] In more recent decades, prominent politicians have denounced the supposedly benighted “deplorables” and “bitter clingers” of the middle and working classes – those who have earned responsibility and respect but are shut out from the workings of the current system, and sometimes even denied full freedoms in a system of anarcho-tyranny.
The decline of journalism and debate
From 1830 to 1900, political participation was much higher in America than today. And there was a thriving press which contributed mightily to public debates, unlike our later mainstream media. Newspapers were “fiercely partisan,” as Lasch described. Many papers tended to advocate for one political party or another. Some refused to be in the thrall of any party. Many cities and towns offered multiple papers which offered views in opposition to each other. Despite the recent development of the so-called “Information Age,” Lasch claims frankly that by the late twentieth century, voters tended to be much less well-informed than before. This was a result of a discouraging of open debate that developed, and a transformation of journalists into a more credentialed “profession.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans eagerly attended political speeches and debates. These occurred frequently throughout the country, and focused on topics of local, state, and national importance. The series of Lincoln-Douglas debates was just one famous example. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas spoke very frankly compared with today’s politicians, who are surrounded by consultants and PR managers. Those earlier debates often occurred directly between the opposing politicians, without journalists intruding as intermediaries, as we usually see today. Such journalists tend to assert their own agendas into the debate, often disregarding public concerns. [11] Lasch highlighted the necessity of “sustained public debate” as a remedy for the avalanche of “junk mail” media to which we have been subjected since the late twentieth century. [12]
Let’s also remember the whining by American deep-state apologists during the past decade about what they called misinformation and disinformation. Of course false information exists, but this recent effort was a coordinated targeting of information that was truthful and did not fit the narrative of the regime. This effort was completely opposed to what Lasch called “sustained public debate.” It was a contempt for the public, exhibited by Biden administration officials and several members of the media. They actively tried to shut down free discussion online. Both major parties have been guilty of media manipulation, but the aforementioned campaign was an especially aggressive example, using government agencies to impose censorship.
This didn’t only happen in the USA. During Covid-19 in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern insisted that the only true source of information for the public would be the government. “We will continue to be your single source of truth,” she stated. And she emphasized, “Otherwise, dismiss anything else.” This was during a time when, throughout the West, we were repeatedly misled and lied to by government officials and media. During her reign, Ardern and her government inflicted a drastic lockdown on New Zealand, which included human rights violations and significant economic damage. She admitted openly that there would be “two classes of people” in the country, the vaccinated and unvaccinated. We are steadily learning how very harmful the lockdowns and other Covid policies were to our societies. As one alternative media figure put it, this was “weaponized, phony niceness.” It was also totalitarian and rooted in unreality. [13]
This leads me to a positive note. One thing has improved in my lifetime: the opening up of political discussion beyond the limits that were strictly enforced for decades by the mainstream media and their controllers. The Internet has allowed much more free discussion – a very welcome widening of the Overton Window. Elon Musk’s X has played a role in this, along with the ability for anyone – such as your humble author – to post their musings on a variety of Internet platforms. It’s a bit like a return to the wild and woolly days of nineteenth-century newspapers, although not quite. It certainly has allowed for more sources of information. Thoughtful, substantial arguments for a variety of perspectives can be found, when one ignores the vituperation, lies and vast amounts of other noise.
Race relations and cities
Revolt of the Elites offers a good, succinct summary of what went wrong with race relations in the 1960s. Lasch highlights how communities were destroyed by radical civil rights activism and related government actions. Much of this was also caused by social engineering that was pushed by the new elites. Lasch might have retained some naïveté about the civil rights movement, yet he saw through the platitudes of extreme activists who demanded equality at all costs, equality of results, and more. He specifically blames social engineering for
“a rapid deterioration of race relations….busing, affirmative action, and open housing threatened the ethnic solidarity of neighborhoods and drove lower-middle-class whites into opposition. In the face of their resistance, liberals ‘reacted with self-righteous indignation,’ in [Jim] Sleeper’s words. Black militants encouraged racial polarization and demanded a new politics of ‘collective grievance and entitlement’…Liberals and other leftists also insisted on lowering or removing standards in schools and other institutions, claiming that standards were racist. White leftists praised black culture for having “an expressive, sexually liberated way of life free of bourgeois inhibitions.” [14]
In recent years, Christopher Caldwell has added to Lasch’s analysis by describing the harmful effects of civil rights legislation on our legal system and society in general, including its subversion of our constitution. [15] While the civil rights movement was active, many white Americans understandably wanted fairness for all, but much of what happened with civil rights was something different.
Social engineering had other dire impacts. One of the most striking signs of America’s decline is the current state of its cities, which were profoundly harmed by government policy and the influence of powerful private foundations. As suggested above, this was a set of “misguided policies intended to break up ethnic neighborhoods that allegedly [stood] in the way of racial integration.” Revolt of the Elites doesn’t mention it much, but increasing urban crime also played a large role in forcing whites to migrate to the suburbs. I can remember from my own lifetime when our cities were safer than they are today. Commentators such as Thomas Sowell have documented this decline.
There have been slums and a degree of urban crime for millennia. But American cities generally went from thriving social and cultural centers to, in many cases, places that many normal citizens try to avoid. Lasch does mention how the tax base of cities was eroded by white flight and the loss of industry, and he emphasizes the very valuable role that city neighborhoods once played in the lives of humble citizens. Much of that neighborhood cohesiveness is gone. [16] In my own city, neighborhoods that once were safe and tended to have cohesive Polish, Italian or German populations are now dangerous wastelands.
Decline of personal character
One theme which continues to run through Lasch’s book is the nature of respect and self-respect. We’ve already looked at how American workers, farmers, and craftsmen claimed the opportunity to earn a respectable place in society. This is of course related to self-respect. Lasch goes against the grain of many recent intellectuals by insisting that respect and self-respect must be earned through moral achievement and character. I’ll venture to say that almost all Americans would have agreed with Lasch about this, before modern psychological and teaching theories took effect. [17]
In his chapter, “The Abolition of Shame,” Lasch explores in detail some psychological theories of human shame, and some strategies recommended by psychologists for coping with it. Lasch reveals his concern about a very destructive development: how shamelessness has become widely predominant in our culture. [18] This growing attitude resulted from the increased influence of politicized psychiatrists and psychologists, and the declining influence of Christianity. Lasch reviews how Freudian revisionists in the 1930s began to insist that American society as a whole was in need of psychiatric treatment. With some variation, this general approach of attempting to transform our society has continued to be very influential. [19] Related to the attack by psychologists on human shame was a large push in the 1990s to promote “self-esteem.” Lasch describes how the recently deceased feminist Gloria Steinem got involved in an effort to mix liberal politics with psychotherapy. Steinem’s ideas were implemented as policy in some states. [20]
Higher education, culture, society, and trust
In a chapter on higher education, Lasch bent over backwards trying to be even-handed, in answering concerns about political correctness. He believed that the biggest problem in academia was the growing influence of corporations. That has certainly been a destructive force, eroding the traditional academic model. But while Lasch also criticized far-left ideologues who were becoming very influential in faculty departments, he underestimated the extent of the PC problem, and how pervasively it would subvert and eventually dominate higher education. Since the 1980s, far-left ideology has taken over vast swathes of college faculties and administrations throughout the country. Not only has this resulted in a widespread emphasis on leftist indoctrination of students, but it has also contributed to the lowering of academic standards, and has promoted policies such as DEI. As many other commentators have noticed, the woke tail wagged the corporate dog in many cases. Very significantly, far-left ideas that became prominent in higher education have been embraced throughout the primary and secondary educational systems, and in Human Resources departments, all across America.
Lasch also does not discuss some major influences on American culture and society in the twentieth century such as Alfred Kinsey’s books on sexual behaviour, the 1950 collaborative book The Authoritarian Personality, and Herbert Marcuse and other figures of the New Left. Lasch was very troubled by the breakdown of the traditional family, but in my opinion he did not explore this as thoroughly as he should in Revolt of the Elites – although he did explore threats to the Western nuclear family in another book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged.
He also did not delve as much into the loss of social trust as I would have liked. America, along with other Western nations, once had a relatively high-trust society. In many places, we could leave our doors unlocked all the time. We could prop up our unlocked bicycles outside a store, while we went shopping. At a farm stand, we could deposit money in an untended box, to pay for farm produce. And parents could allow their children to play outside unsupervised, without much worry. Such elements of a high-trust society are disappearing. Much of this is a result of increased cultural diversity, which inevitably lowers trust, as the liberal social scientist Robert Putnam finally admitted. Lasch touched on some of the problems of diversity, and mentioned that the market and the welfare state tend to weaken “ties of trust,” [21] but he did not focus on this process.
Cleveland shoppers, 1940 (Ohio History Connection)
Other perspectives
Historian Claes Ryn agreed with Lasch to an extent. In a 2023 interview he said, “The most telling illustration of America’s fraught condition is the inability or refusal of our dominant, trend-setting elites to recognize and act on reality.” He also agreed that there was a major transformation of America in the twentieth century. [22] Yet, back in 1993, anticipating the populism that Lasch favored in Revolt of the Elites, Ryn offered the following warning….
“…[I]t would be a great mistake, especially in our disoriented era, to look to ‘the people’ for sources of purity and social unity. Populism is only another form of escape from the real problem, which is that Western civilization as a whole is disintegrating at the moral center. The people in general may today be less obviously corrupt than the elites in some respects, but that is not because of some natural propensity to virtue greater than that of elites. The mass is just slower to change and lags behind the more daring and creative elites. The people seem culturally conservative today only in comparison with more adventurous leaders. If the mass of common men have such sound instincts, who is digesting all those television programs, movies, records, musicals, and novels? Who is paying all those college and university faculty and electing and reelecting all those congressmen?… John Adams was more representative of early American political thought than Jefferson when he said that the people can be as tyrannical as any king.” [23]
While I agree somewhat with Lasch that “Populism is the authentic voice of democracy,” [24] Ryn expresses some important truths here. It’s undeniable that today’s masses have fallen under the spell of bread and circuses. The whole nature of “the People” has changed since the American founding. John Adams, in 1798, made another applicable remark: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [25]
In the 1960s an American scholar, Eugene Rose, studied the decline of the West. He found that our culture, society, and politics had become ill with a deep-seated Nihilism. Having read widely in history, philosophy and religion, Rose believed that elements of this civilizational illness were unprecedented, such as the extent of religious unbelief combined with an unhealthy restlessness, which had grown to “a scale so vast as to be almost universal.” Rose found that: “Toward the end of the nineteenth century increasing numbers of quite ordinary men had begun that restless search – so much a part of our own contemporary scenes – to find a substitute for the God Who was dead in their hearts.” [26]
Rose described four stages of Nihilism that have been especially active in the West since the French Revolution. He called these stages Liberalism, Realism, Vitalism, and the Nihilism of Destruction. They have worked together in a dialectical way, opposing but also embracing each other, to propel the West further into decline and destruction. The cause of these nihilistic developments is the denial of absolute truth.
As he was examining the West’s decline, Eugene Rose found solace and personal healing in the Russian Orthodox Church, and he became a monk. He was given the title of Father Seraphim Rose, and his writings have become influential since his early death in 1982. Christopher Lasch probably would have agreed with at least some of Rose’s diagnosis. For me, Rose provides a more complete and satisfying analysis, but Lasch’s work adds a lot of very important details, specific to developments in America.
Father Seraphim Rose (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
I was surprised that Lasch did not cite James Burnham in Revolt of the Elites. Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West (1964), which examined and sharply criticized America’s emerging, increasingly dominant managerial classes of the 20th century. Burnham became influential in some American intellectual circles, and his diagnoses are still frequently studied. But, we can’t have everything. Lasch gave us some important, clear insights into how the powers-that-be in America have steered us wrong.
An independent mind
My wife grew up in another country, and I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve told her, “It wasn’t always like this!” I resist looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but it’s undeniable that we have lost a tremendous amount that was good in America. Zoomers today are often understandably shocked when viewing photographs and documentary film footage of Americans in the past. They see evidence of a safer, more cohesive society, with well-dressed people of all classes showing self-respect and respect for others. Our past wasn’t a utopia, but it offered much that was healthy and good. Lasch would understand.
Lasch leaned politically leftwards during much of his career, but in Revolt of the Elites he said many things which today’s leftists would label “far-right.” His general remedy for America was “to emphasize responsibility rather than rights,” to tame both capitalism and the welfare system, to strengthen community, and to prevent “a centralized state bureaucracy.” [27] He also urged a commitment to past and future generations, and quoted Horace Mann in this regard: “The successive generations of men, taken collectively, constitute one great commonwealth.” [28]
Earlier in his academic career, Lasch used some Marxist approaches in his thought and study. His “paleoconservative” academic friend Paul Gottfried claimed that he was devoted to “a non-mainstream form of socialism.” He had a
lifelong hatred of consumer capitalism…. His project was to find a religiously based communitarianism that could serve as an alternative to multinational capitalism. This communal identity would focus on service to one’s family and neighbors, and it would supposedly take everyone’s mind off consumption and the false idea of “Progress.” He also “personified an old-fashioned Presbyterian way of life. [29]
Lasch angered people on the Left and the Right. Pundits argue about where he really stood on the political spectrum. Anyway, as I’ve written elsewhere, you’re often not doing your job if you don’t make someone angry. Lasch was criticized for inconsistency, but I think that some of the anger directed against him was because he was good at bursting people’s bubbles. Original, independent thinkers like him aren’t completely cast in an ideological mold.
In his scholarship, Lasch studied many thinkers who are not commonly cited by either the Left or the Right today. He examined the ideas of some who were widely known during their lifetimes, such as William Henry Channing, Horace Mann, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson. He also offered the perspectives of many others who have been less known, including Robert Rantoul, Jr., Charles Ingersoll, David Ramsay, R. H. Tawney, and Michael Young. All of them still have useful, interesting things to say to us – and I hope I’ve shown that Lasch does also.
NOTES
[1] Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995, p.3
[15] Caldwell, Christopher, The Age of Entitlement, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020
[16] Revolt of the Elites, pp. 8-9, 98-99, 118-19
[17] Ibid., pp. 89, 105, 206-7
[18] Ibid., pp. 204
[19] Ibid., p. 207
[20] Ibid., 208-10
[21] Ibid., p. 102
[22] Ryn, Claes, in “”The Failure of Conservatism and the Road Not Taken” — A conversation with Claes Ryn,” Michael Vlahos Channel, YouTube, May 8, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVlF6lCqxI
WILLIAM MARKLEY was born and raised in Ohio, in the United States, and currently lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He has worked in librarianship, government, and the corporate sector, and is currently a caregiver for elderly and disabled clients. He is an old-fashioned American anglophile, and an amateur historian, who has written on local history topics, and conducted oral history projects. He has a Substack at https://williammarkley.substack.com/
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD asks what we should make of Harry Houdini, who died a hundred years ago
Considerable ink has been spilled – much of it fruitlessly – in an attempt to portray Houdini’s signature escape act as somehow symbolising the peculiar desire of the common man at around the turn of the 20th century to slip the yoke of his servitude to society’s ruling caste. According to this reading, the magician’s feats of self-liberation from the restraints of handcuffs, chains and prison cells resonated powerfully with working-class immigrants to the United States, like himself, who felt trapped by economic and social barriers in their daily lives. His escapes thus stand as potent symbols of self-determination, hope and above all of resistance to authority figures, from policemen to wealthy elites. Like his near-contemporary Charlie Chaplin in his Tramp persona, Houdini was a universal ‘little man’ with whom ordinary people around the world could identify. Implicit in both individuals’ performance is the proposition that life may be hard, but that one must never surrender or despair, thus anticipating the spirit of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ exhortation of some eighty years later, if not the sort of self-obsessed individual riddled with internet-induced narcissism sadly prevalent in all walks of life today; the reader may have examples of his or her own acquaintance.
I have to say I remain unconvinced by what could be called the sociological explanation of Houdini’s continuing appeal. It’s almost always a mistake to try and retrofit a particular historical figure, or for that matter to assemble random historical facts, into a neatly unified pattern that few people would have recognised at the time. Whether in their claim that Britain overnight became a socialist utopia with the advent of the welfare state in 1945, or that the country abruptly succumbed to a sort of priapic frenzy characterised by the sight of bare-thighed young women swaggering around Carnaby Street in their Mary Quant miniskirts to a backdrop of herbally-tinged joss sticks and the wafted strains of the Grateful Dead in the so-called Summer of Love 22 years later, social historians are always keen to identify what seem to them to be the transformative shifts in our collective life. Such judgements are generally only feasible with the aid of hindsight. Few people confronted with the individual pieces of the jigsaw can picture the completed puzzle, and by the same token we can surely treat with scepticism the idea that many potential audience members of around the years 1900-26 elected to leave their homes and board the trolleycar for their local opera house or civic auditorium in order to watch Houdini in action because of his supposed allegorical insights into their culture.
What he did offer, of course, was pure entertainment: a beleaguered but indomitable spirit at work, along with a peerless sense of showmanship. Like every truly successful public performer, Houdini was well versed in the props of his profession, which in his case included a thudding, Jaws-like accompanying musical repertoire, in which he often personally participated, to signal the unfolding drama of the occasion. But the instrument he really played best was his audience. Scantily-clad female or garishly-uniformed male assistants abounded on stage as the actual escape acts progressed, darting hither and thither like shoals of tropical fish. Anyone familiar with the numbing combination of blinding lights and amplified music redolent of today’s rock concert need only think of that same experience, but with the added spectacle of actual life-threatening peril, to get some of the flavour.
Nor was Houdini ever exactly a martyr to false modesty, or backward when it came to separating the public from its money. When the prolonged shock of the Great War turned popular taste away from escapology and toward the occult promise of reuniting the bereaved with their lost loved ones, he again shrewdly read the runes and incorporated a spiritualist component into his programme, first in the form of a straightforward demonstration of the supernatural, and then of debunking those he saw as its obvious charlatans. He had known too many of the latter in their former guises as fellow vaudeville performers to take their purported newfound psychic powers seriously. In time, there were also excursions into the worlds of books and of cinema. When in 1919 Houdini mass-produced his autograph for sale on a publicity still that apparently showed him clinging for dear life to the wing of a biplane as part of a barnstorming film called The Grim Game, he added the inscription: ‘About 4000 feet in the air!’ This was a slight exaggeration, as the photo in question had been taken on the ground.
Just for the record, Houdini was not in fact born in the small American midwestern town of Appleton, Wisconsin, on 6 April 1874. The date and place were almost universally accepted during his lifetime, and perhaps lay a suitably false early trail for a career dedicated to the art of illusion. Houdini wasn’t even his real name, of course. He was born Erik Weisz on 24 March 1874 in the family home in the Rákosárok district of Budapest, to the fitfully employed Mayer Weisz and his wife Cecilia. The family emigrated to the United States at intervals in the later 1870s, for some reason settling in the obscure mill town of Appleton before moving to the comparative bright lights of Milwaukee. Mayer Weisz seems to have been only marginally more materially successful in his new life than in his old one. The records show that the family was soon forced to appeal to the Milwaukee Hebrew Relief Society for coal to see them through the winter.
The future Houdini (he took his name from the pioneering French magician Eugène Robert-Houdin) was one of those constantly hyperactive children, with a taut, muscular physique, a fidgety energy, and the burning conviction, he later recalled, ‘that, in America, with hard work and determination, a man can get anything.’ Legend insists that he opened his first lock at the age of six while in pursuit of a piece of pie secured in his mother’s kitchen cupboard. It’s known that one afternoon in October 1883, when he was nine, he earned 35 cents by making his debut as a trapeze artist called ‘The Prince of the Air’ in a Milwaukee circus, and that he later gave a series of impromptu performances around town in which he demonstrated his ability to bend over backward and pick up a pin from the floor with his teeth, among other feats of agility. We also know that, as a young man, he both engaged in a course of rigorous physical training, and made a study of the-then limited variety of standard-issue padlocks and other restraints on the market. All this led up to the moment in March 1897 when he presented himself at a police station in suburban Boston and challenged the amused desk-sergeant to slap his best pair of handcuffs on him. The reports of what happened next vary, but all parties agree on the essential fact that Houdini retired to a corner and returned between one and five minutes later, a free man. Having had the foresight to invite the press, he could not have asked for better coverage than that which appeared in the following morning’s Boston Advertiser. ‘The King of Handcuffs’, it called him.
How did he do it? Alongside practice, dexterity, brute physical force – and the artful concealment of a tiny steel lock pick on his person – there are still elements of the performance that defy any rational explanation. No less a judge than Arthur Conan Doyle never quite knew what to make of Houdini’s act when he first witnessed it on the London stage in April 1920. Three months later, the creator of the world’s most famously rational detective publicly announced that this ‘God-given performer’ possessed a ‘dematerialising and reconstructing force [that] could separate the molecules’ of any solid object toward which it was directed. Houdini himself at first tolerated such whimsy, but knew that his most famous escapes owed their success to more material agencies. Over time, the two men’s differing views on the occult would strain their friendship to its breaking point. In June 1922, Houdini and Conan Doyle attended a séance at the beachfront Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, at which Doyle’s wife Jean – a medium who claimed to be adept at the art of automatic writing – scribbled out a fifteen-page message supposedly from Houdini’s beloved mother Cecilia, who had died nine years earlier. As a bulletin from the afterlife it was only partly convincing. Although Houdini again held his tongue at the time, he privately concluded that Jean was not a true psychic. His Jewish mother would never have drawn the sign of the cross atop each page of a letter to her son; nor did it strike him as likely that she would have chosen to communicate in somewhat florid, Edwardian English, a language she had never spoken.
It’s been said that, in time, this growing spirit of mutual hostility ultimately led to Houdini’s death, which was supposedly brought about when a series of muscular young men in the pay of the spiritualist camp followed him about while he undertook a theatrical engagement in Montreal, and that one of their number, a local postgraduate student by the name of Jocelyn Whitehead, quoting the magician’s own boast that he could withstand any blow without pain, suddenly struck him with sufficient force to rupture his already inflamed appendix, and in turn to induce a fatal case of peritonitis.
Whatever the precise cause, it seems fair to say that nothing in Houdini’s life became him like the leaving it. Eventually confined at Grace Hospital in Detroit, he suffered grievously during his final week. Despite this, he roused himself sufficiently to fire off a series of encouraging cables to friends and admirers around the world, including one that remarked evenly ‘I am not feeling at my best just now’, but insisting, ‘I will get over this waviness in no time.’ As his condition worsened, however, he gave his wife Bess elaborate instructions as to how to attempt to contact him in the afterlife, and finally looked up to quietly tell his younger brother Theo, ‘I guess I’m all through fighting.’ They were his last words. Houdini died later that day of what the doctors called ‘Diffuse peritonitis [with] complications’, much the same condition that had carried off another immigrant entertainer who had spectacularly made his name in America, Rudolph Valentino, just ten weeks earlier. Seeming to fulfill at least one part of a recent curse brought down upon him from the stage of a well-attended spiritualist rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Houdini’s own time of death was recorded as 1.26pm on Sunday 31 October, 1926 – Halloween.
Bess Houdini duly followed instructions and made repeated efforts to reach her late husband from beyond the grave, but finally abandoned the struggle exactly a decade later. ‘Ten years is long enough to wait for any man,’ she remarked. Her conclusion on the matter will likely not stop the ranks of the curious or obsessed in their own attempted outreach to Houdini’s spirit on the centenary of his death that falls this October. Voices may be heard, and chains somehow appropriately rattle, in various candlelit rooms around the world. On one level, one can see the appeal of the whole enterprise, even it’s really to do more than endlessly repeat what Bess Houdini and others have done before, a sort of occult version of Groundhog Day. Such people may believe the true essence of Houdini’s spirit to lie in some posthumous message delivered in a darkened séance room, but I say it actually resides in the always peerless and often enjoyably mysterious entertainment he selflessly provided during his 52 years of life.
RUPERT LOYDELL reflects on political games and post-apocalyptic futures
These are some of the films I remember from my teens and start of my twenties. In my mind they were released closer together but searching for the release dates online today I can see that is not true. However far apart they were, they are linked together by a kind of stylised, cartoon-like violence that mostly avoided the horrific, and only occasionally made use of pathos.
I am not going to engage with the debate about whether violent films make us more violent and desensitize us, nor am I going to visit the argument about whether children know that cartoon violence is different from actual violence. If you want that kind of thing there are plenty of academic articles and books that engage with media and communications theory, psychology and critically dissect cinema tropes, motifs and individual films – not to mention lots of online unsubstantiated opinions and rants. Be my guest.
No, I want to think about why these three films have remained films which I frequently enjoy rewatching, despite (or possibly because of) the onscreen violence.
The first, Rollerball, imagines a world where everything has been bought. Everything is owned by giant corporations, everything is seen as a commodity, be that sex, property, audiences and, of course, sport. War (contrary to the actual capitalisation of wars) is not profitable; instead, there is a televised sport where each corporation’s teams play each other on a banked circuit, chasing a steel ball before capturing it and getting it into a kind of basket or hole at the top of the bank. Oh, and everyone is dressed like American Football players on roller skates, except for a couple of guys who ride motorbikes, which can also be used to tow the skaters.
Confused? It doesn’t matter. This film is actually about an individual (Jonathan E., played by James Caan) holding out against the state and/or big business. The game of Rollerball is a futuristic version (I say futuristic, but the film is set in 2018!) of the Roman gladiatorial circus, designed to distract and pacify the population; it is watched live by millions of people on TV and also in person. There are not meant to be standout individual players, and when Jonathan becomes recognised and idolised the corporations ask him to resign.
Jonathan, of course, refuses, so the corporations start changing the rules and the game becomes more and more deadly. Players no longer get injured, they get killed; motorbikes are used as weapons, and explode and burn; Jonathan’s friends and teammates mostly end up dead. Jonathan is not happy about this, but he will not run away. In the final game of the film, with all rules cancelled in favour of ‘anything goes’, he is the last man standing and slowly gathers his wounded self together to start skating a victory lap as the crowd chants his name.
It is not a subtle film, although for a while it was used in economics and political studies classes to show one possible outcome of neoliberalist capitalism and business monopolies. Beautifully stylised and choreographed, it makes use of a computer-style font specifically designed for the film on the players’ jerseys and films the games in an immersive way. Although there are scenes away from the game arena, carefully highlighting the teams’ camaraderie and also the wealth and degeneracy of corporation executives as they and their friends casually use fire guns to burn down trees, the film is about the game.
The game provides an endless background noise of roller skate wheels on wood, accompanied by the revving of motorbikes and the thunk of gloved fists on opposition bodies, but there is also a clever use of classical and background music, the latter composed by André Previn. Most of the time the music is accompaniment rather than featured, but the exception is the film’s use of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, which blasts out as introductory music and again during the closing credits.
Music is much more important in The Warriors, where a small Coney Island gang are trying to make it back home after an assassination of another gang leader, Cyrus, who was presiding over a huge gathering of all the New York gangs in the Bronx. Cyrus pointed out that there were far more gang members than policemen if they chose to work together, but is shot by the psychopathic Luther, who then points out The Warriors and says that they shot Luther. The summit and gangs’ truce are over, and The Warriors are at the wrong end of New York City.
I didn’t go to New York until 1980, so one of the great things about the film was seeing New York in all its grubby, run-down glory, just like the reality I would encounter a year on. New York City was bankrupt, dirty, violent and dangerous. It was also full of energy, music, art and attitude, 24 hours a day. It wasn’t, however, full of gangs in fancy dress, which The Warriors is.
It is the costumes and make up, along with the funky soundtrack and naturalistic filming, that makes The Warriors work. The film is episodic in nature, each episode containing a chase or fight or romantic encounter, each accompanied by an appropriate track, be that pumping synthesizer music for running, romantic pop for emotions, or Joe Walsh’s ‘In the City’ for the uplifting heroic credits where the remaining survivors of the gang’s long trek home walk into the distance along the beach. The film also makes good use of lyrics to reinforce the tension and offer narrative commentary, particularly with the songs ‘Nowhere to Run’ and ‘You’re Movin’ too Slow’. At times the music is played by a radio DJ who also keeps those gangs listening cryptically updated about The Warriors’ run for home.
The DJ has a sultry voice and red lips, which is pretty much all we see of her. She is a sexy presence throughout, as is Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) who following a street standoff defects from a rather pathetic gang, The Orphans, to join The Warriors. She has her eye on Swan (Michael Beck) and by the end there is clearly something going on.
It’s not a film about lurve though; it’s about male bonding, choreographed fighting skills and the constant arrival of yet another gang. The Warriors include a stupid macho tough guy, who gets caught by an undercover cop – a clever, observant kid – a couple of would-be leaders; and an amazing number of athletes and weapons specialists, be that swinging a baseball bat or manufacturing Molotov cocktails out of nothing.
The Warriors wear leather vests (waistcoats) with their gang colours on the back, but other gangs each have their own uniform: baseball outfits and face paint, top hats and white mime face with a red and black ensemble, denim dungarees and roller skates, silk jujitsu outfits, or leather jackets and caps. There’s also a skinhead gang who drive round in an old school bus, and a lesbian girl gang who try to seduce three of The Warriors who are oblivious to their seductresses’ sexuality.
Of course, in the end The Warriors make it home, only to find Luther and other members of The Rogues waiting for them. Swan suggests Luther and he fight one to one, but Luther is having none of it, so Swan throws a knife into his hand, then cuts a lock of Luther’s hair from him while he whines for forgiveness. He needs to do this as The Gramercy Riffs, the huge gang which Cyrus was leader of, have realised that The Warriors are innocent and have come looking for Luther, who is not a happy bunny. It is at this point The Warriors walk off into the sunset, Mercy and Swan hand in hand…
Nobody in Mad Max 2 (known as The Road Warrior in some territories) is very happy either. They all live in a post-apocalyptic desert world where fuel is scarce, vehicles are cannibalised for parts and clothing is a kind of D.I.Y. goth/sci-fi/biker hybrid. Mel Gibson plays Max, who is alone apart from his dog and a well-worn turbocharged cop car. Early on he observes a battle between a small walled town and a deranged gang of Hell’s Angels and soon ends up helping the town’s citizens escape to somewhere else with a tanker full of gas.
The escape is, of course, an excuse for an epic chase sequence, with exploding vehicles, impossible jumps between vehicles, shouting, shooting and stunts. There’s also a gyrocopter, sand storms, violent threats and sexual abuse, along with a feral kid and some far-fetched characters and cars. In the end Max remains standing in the desert whilst a voiceover informs viewers that the narrator “never saw the Road Warrior again”.
I remember my mate and I standing up at the end of this film to put on our leather jackets and pick up our motorbike helmets, only to have several hundred people in the audience stare at us, unable it seemed, to differentiate between reality and feature film.
Of course, having seen Mad Max 2, we decided to play catch-up and watch Mad Max (1979). This turned out to be a very different type of film, providing a grim back story to what would become a whole series of Mad Max capers. In the first film, Max is a highway patrolman, with a souped-up police car and several colleagues, who cruise the long, straight desert roads, trying to stop trouble brewing, particularly dealing with a biker gang who not only terrorise people but seem to cause semi-mystical apparitions of a crow.
It’s a clumsy device at best, but is indicative of the whole film, which has clearly not been completely thought through and has been filmed on the cheap. There are a few motorbikes, a couple of cop cars, lots of images of the Australian outback and not much else. Most of the violence, including the murder of Max’s wife and child, happens offscreen but it is still horrific, and the ending, where Max exacts his revenge on a biker, is even more horrific and nasty.
The film does, of course, explain why Max is like he is in Mad Max 2 but George Miller, who directed both films, clearly knew which side his bread was buttered on. However, instead of trusting the vehicular capers and dynamics of the sequel, he signed up Tina Turner for 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, dressed her in chain mail and put her in charge of Bartertown, a makeshift settlement run on methane from pigs, and policed by a bunch of bully boys.
Bartertown also has its own kind of gladiatorial arena, a weird dome where those fighting are strung up on elastic and have to bounce their way to any weapons provided and to their opponents. Max, of course, ends up in there (it might even be more than once, I can’t remember) and also manages to be mistaken by another community – this time young people and kids living around an oasis – as a mythical and possibly resurrected Captain Walker, the pilot who crashed the plane they were travelling on.
Miller not only drew on William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies but also decided to steal speech, language and elements of the plot of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker wholesale, and to let Tina Turner sing the theme tune. Despite the film’s utopian ending, which sees the lost tribe from the oasis now safely ensconced in the ruins of a city, it seemed to be the final Mad Max film of a loose trilogy.
2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road proved that wrong, though. It reinvented the post-apocalyptic world Max lives in, replaced Mel Gibson with Tom Hardy, and was basically a long chase sequence followed by another one back to where the film started. I saw it at the cinema with my friend Pete (who had not seen any of the Mad Max movies) and remember him outside saying ‘What was that?’ Shellshocked wasn’t the word; gobsmacked probably was. Impressive vehicles, great make-up & costumes, spectacular explosions, a gaggle of female concubines rescued, a ridiculous and not-scary baddy, some weird but also funny acolytes, lots of gymnastics & pole-vaulting and some terrific action sequences and scenery. What more could anyone possibly want?
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Isabel Ortiz said that “Mad Max: Fury Road does not look like an animated movie” but went on to add “And yet, despite the oozing corporeality of the film’s protagonists, many critics have commented on its resemblance to a cartoon.” In an argument that could apply to all three of my films, Ortiz states that
Fury Road is notable for transferring not only the rule-bound integrity of the cartoon genre onto fleshy heroes and heroines, but also the physics and bodily elasticity. Just as the animated body can stretch and recoil to absorb the impact of dizzying attacks, in Miller’s film human forms are endowed with the plasticity of cartoon characters.
Like Tom & Jerry, or other cartoon characters, these films are notable for their visual wit, pace and entertainment value, constant speed and dynamic, not to mention their impossibly indestructible heroes. And best of all, they are fun.
NOTES
• Avoid the appalling 2002 remake of Rollerball
• Details and a download of the Rollerball 1975 font, designed by Anthony Robinson, can be found here
• The WarriorsMovie Site is online here. It includes news, deleted scenes, a list of all the gangs, location sites and more
• Isabel Ortiz’s ‘The Cartoon Bodies of “Mad Max: Fury Road”’ can be read in full here
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Many years ago, when I was a bit younger[i] than the boy, Willie, who trespasses in the marshy woods at 00:17:14[ii] in X the Unknown (1956) and at 00:18:45 meets the (unseen to us) monster (that’s what comes of playing outside when you should be in bed!), the old Welsh Headmaster (who doubled as maths teacher at the local council school), accused me (again) of being “BORN AWK-ARD”. Whether I was questioning the relevance of maths beyond basic shopping calculations, deliberately misunderstanding some unappealing formula or persisting with wanting to know why X meant whatever, his strong adherence to Chapel teachings, cautions of hellfire and damnation and his hieratic manner of speech, undoubtedly magnified his allegation. At some level, I knew he was right. But whether awkwardness arises from nature or nurture . . . remains, like X, not quite knowable.
Perhaps because the older guard of teachers at Elmhurst Junior had pre-war roots and elements of a military attitude residual in the base of their skulls, it is easy to connect the Geiger-counter training that opens X the Unknown (its army personnel divided into bigwigs and disposable rabble – or officers and ranks, if you prefer) with the partly black and white school world of the late 1960s. But this world was definitely in transition, and it seems obvious now that the aging headmaster’s awareness of the upcoming generation of teachers (relatively approachable[iii] and dyed by more colourful, Education Through Art[iv] attitudes) pushed him to an obdurateness as long-standing as I now like to believe my awkwardness was whimsical. His frequent, rising claim in school assemblies that God could see us everywhere, might have amused the younger staff, but it angered me. To see this supposed creator as a voyeur or master spy (or in today’s terms, a kind of disembodied CCTV system) was not encouraging. In combination with my natural “awk-ardness”, the Headmaster’s ire (no doubt also triggered by his distrust of late 60s values) only made me come to view his God (or any god) as a kind of Orwellian Big Brother. By extension, as time went on and other would-be authority figures (clothed in seemingly harmless, wishy-washy cardigans or behind pipes[v] or toothy grins[vi]), took to the stage, I came to view not just politicians but the majority of science and technology, in fact, the entire “white heat of this scientific revolution”[vii] as (predominantly, but not exclusively) part of the paternalistic control system driving society (with plenty of heat but not much light) largely in the wrong direction.
00:25:23 – the devastation of several MeccanoTM sets . . .
Sure enough, in X the Unknown, poor Willie dies of radiation burns, and soon afterwards, his grieving father makes the clear and generally valid distinction (00:31:20): “You’re a Scientist not a Doctor. You don’t care for the sick, you meddle with things that kill . . . letting off bombs you can’t control. You’re not safe! You’re a murderer!” After being subjected to this understandable rant, Dr Adam Royston, (Dean Jagger) walking dejectedly away down a corridor, at 00:31:20 reflects lamely to Inspector McGill (Leo McKern) : “we all try to create not destroy”.
In X the Unknown, Jagger’s character seems a friendly, mild figure, absent-minded in the way professors are often stereotypically humanised. Unfortunately, in reality, whenever science discovers something that can be exploited for war or profit, scientists tend to get pushed aside, their work misrepresented, twisted or ransacked. Alternatively, as the common trope of fiction would have it, they become ambitious or power-crazed.
By contrast, in X the Unknown, Dean Jagger’s Dr Adam Royston, is very sympathetic and shows no sign of megalomania. Since Jagger was also considered amenable in person, it came as a surprise to discover that he held virulently McCarthyite, anti-communist opinions and became adamant that Losey[viii], (who under his blacklist alias of Joseph Walton had begun the pre-production and initial shooting), should be replaced. To cover the later, highly acclaimed[ix], director’s departure, poor health was blamed[x]. He was replaced by a reluctant Leslie Norman[xi].
Post-war idealism may have camouflaged the hubristic dead-end of nuclear power in optimistic science-fiction shapes and colours[xii], offering naïve or deceitful sentiments[xiii] and never-to-be-achieved economic benefits[xiv], yet underlyingly, all the monsters remain, boiling away deep underground – as turns out to be literally the case depicted in X the Unknown. In an internet post about the film from October 2023[xv], Colin McGuigan notes: “While I wouldn’t quite categorize it as an early Eco-thriller, it does raise questions about our symbiotic relationship with the planet itself.”
Considered “vulgar and shocking”[xvi] on its release in 1956, I didn’t remember X the Unknown as a exceptional film, but it was a memorable one, one which tapped into an almost universal distrust of rampant science and technology: science as a kind of witchcraft or Pandora’s Box; science which cannot control the forces it releases. Sadly, applied to nuclear power and weapons, and now more insidiously in the fields of mobile devices, the internet and A.I., this theme of toys or tools out of control, is obviously becoming the massive writing on the wall for all of us. Writing which it seems society is too unimaginative to notice or consider and too exhausted to heed.
In the other ‘X’ film I well-remember, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, (1963), Doctor Xavier (Ray Milland – whose salary justifiably consumed much of the budget) is irritated that the human eye can see only 10% of the light spectrum[xvii]. Determined to force more from the retina or brain, before long, a lab monkey is sacrificed – Xavier’s miracle compound dripped into the poor creature’s eyes. What does he really want to see? Next, Xavier is, more fairly, experimenting on himself . . . but why not stick to one eye? – then perhaps he might have had the ‘best’ of both worlds?
Extremely effective as both an attack on (un)scientific meddling and a parable about hubris[xviii], in prismatic Spectorama[xix], X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, fractionally anticipated psychedelia and the wider use of LSD. While some of its attitudes have dated, it begins with serious (if absurd) intent, before inevitably lapsing into mild exploitation and action, but returns to a once-shocking denouement in a desert preacher’s tent. Here, rather than staggering up to confess his sins, Xavier says: “I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses. Farther than time itself. And beyond the darkness . . . a light that glows, changes . . . and in the centre of the universe . . . the eye that sees us all.” So, after reminding us perhaps of that voyeur God, in an emotionally ecstatic U.S. version of my old Welsh headmaster, the preacher paraphrases Matthew 5:29: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Dr Xavier does just that, the image freezing on his black empty sockets[xx].
In contrast to Zabriskie Point (1970)[xxi] as there may be less to say about these two relatively conventional films, am I persisting out of “awk-ardness”? A friend joked that my fervour for digression will eventually lead me to write something less than a page long accompanied by a encylopedia of references and notes . . . which is an interesting challenge. But escalating attention (obsession?) detail (pedantry?) and subtlety (obscurity or whimsicality?) through notes, forking or parallel pathways, is hardly new. Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is an indelible monument to a fascinating and complex addiction . . . while in the not-quite-opposite Beckettian[xxii] world of saying a lot about very little, arises perhaps, Don DeLillo’s novella, Point Omega, (2010) in which a character at the beginning and end is obsessed by Douglas Gordon’s real art installation entitled 24 Hour Psycho[xxiii]. Showing at the Museum of Modern art in New York during the summer of 2006, Hitchcock’s notorious film was slowed down to play once every 24hours. Appropriation or homage? Valid conceptual generator of attention, or gimmick?
Even if the supposedly Scottish wasteland[xxiv] adjoining the Atomic Energy Establishment of Lochmouth or the gaping fissure of X The Unknown, would make excellent settings for Waiting for Godot, it seems unlikely that the 1956 film could be mistaken for anything either as potentially complex or inspiring as Moby Dick or as potentially gimmicky as 24 Hour Psycho. But wait! Maybe it could help humanity on an altogether different level? Think of the synopsis! An older lifeforce bursts from the centre of the Earth in the form of a growing, glowing radioactive porridge, to eat particularly anything radioactive. Come back heartless lava – all is forgiven! – save those living on the earth’s crust from their nuclear dead-end nightmare . . . revive our naïve post-war scientist-hero fantasies worthy of cutaways, children’s cereal-boxes and sci-fi annuals . . .
The imaginary Atomic Energy Establishment of Lochmouth at 00:07:20
Close imaginative or speculative observation, observation straining or stretching consciousnessness or attention in the manner of ‘slow cinema’[xxv] (or such as could be stimulated by, for example, the process of watching Psycho slowed to run once every 24 hours), perhaps replicates in essence the hopeful idea behind the opening stanza of Blake’s Auguries of Innoncence[xxvi]: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.”
Blake’s lines may seem purely hypothetical to those who live within the claustrophobic confines of our technocracked, supposedly rational society, or within the accepted codes or fantasies of ‘progress’. But to anyone open to the fuller world – anyone who doesn’t have Doctor Xavier’s expectant demands – such transcendent escalation often occurs quite naturally. Even the artist Graham Sutherland’s less exacting echoes of Blake, seeing landscapes in miniature on a Pembrokeshire beach, can have an almost visionary effect on those not used to regularly thinking in such a way.
Going back to the idea of artists falling from art’s vital tightrope into formula and gimmick, more than a few ‘successful’ artists have founded lucrative careers upon stunts and repetition – I won’t name names – but this complacence, despite a concomitant facility which inevitably grows over the years, is not worthy of respect once detached from some wider or deeper quest. Although it may be unfashionable to say that art, music, writing, film and so on should be about enlightenment, I will say it anyway.
X the Unknown is an effective black and white entertainment, but apart from considering fears of the time, does it have any aspects of enlightenment about it? Unease even dread, fills many of its frames. Elemental mystery evoked in ways which we may be used to but remain unsettling: the misty woods and fear through a child’s eyes. Hammer’s usual paranoid music, insidious, unearthly, is likewise always potent. It scratches at the nuclear trick in a way that is wholly justified, since the essence of nuclear research was always about destruction. The idea of free power (ha ha) only stemmed from the loop of annihilation it still freely offers.
Windscale in 1956, the year X the Unknown was released and a year before the disastrous fire[xxvii]
Lochmouth may be imaginary but Windscale unfortunately was not, and the fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in UK history. On the International Nuclear Event Scale, it remains one of the worst in the world, in severity ranked at level 5 out of 7. That is when the whole nuclear fantasy should have been terminated.
Despite undercurrents of dissent, X the Unknown probably had little choice but to show the scientists, ultimately, as heroes, leaving the military personel, managers and ministry men to smoulder the torch of that beloved film type, the stock idiot. One officer, comments at 00:48:08, that the “trouble with some of these scientific types is that they can’t see the easy way out of anything. It’s got to be complicated if it’s going to work.” The classic military way of course, is to blast and raze the fissure with high explosves and flame-thowers and then concrete it all up! Leslie Banks as Colonel Holland in Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room (1949) might have been a blimpish caricature intended partly humorously, but underlyingly he was both shrewd and honest.
Predictably, Spider (Anthony Newley), Haggis (Ian MacNaughton) and Private Lansing (Marty Hopkirk of the white suit/Kenneth Cope) all become victims to the as yet unseen monster from the centre of the earth. By his petulant comments and irritation at being bypassed as boss of his “nuclear pile”, manager John Elliott (Edward Chapman) seems, at 00:42:50, to be the next victim in line . . . but miraculously survives, shortly to become the recurring martinet, Mr Grimsdale or equivalent, in five Norman Wisdom comedies[xxviii].
Learning of the approach of the radioactive sludge intent on scoffing the energy source at the dubious establishment, the cast and crew are all frantic to get the cobalt pile, a great big block, presumably radioactive, loaded onto an open flatbed truck. No precautions taken. Radioactivity is fine. Just keep a little distance and brush your hands off. Meanwhile for some baffling reason all the village flock are herded into the church by their vicar – as if the monotonous mass which can melt through solid blocks of lead is going to be put off by a couple of oaken doors or the animosity of a voyeur God who sees eveything. Naturally, a small girl child is left outside and soon runs chuckling and friendly towards the sparkling bread dough pouring over the churchyard wall. Rescued in the nick of time by the vicar, she seems unharmed despite her proximity.
Soon though, the expanding dough is heading towards the “experimental nuclear station”. Darn things are all over the place – even now. Costly misdirections still cooking 70 years later – I chanced upon one back in June just north east of Preston[xxix]. This blot on the landscape one has been “making nuclear fuels since the mid-1940s. The site is notable for being the first nuclear plant in the world to produce Magnox fuel for a commercial power station”.[xxx]
Springfields nuclear fuel production installation, Salwick, Preston, 26th June 2026
The final section of X the Unknown, involes lots of moving about of vehicles and unspecified equipment to recreate Dr. Royston’s unpredictable MeccanoTM experiment. As with the recent epic blockbuster Project Hail Mary (2026), the need for urgency vaults every hurdle, and Wallace and Gromit save the day. Or have they? “You should be proud. It has worked” X says to Y, before another unexpected explosion follows. Royston/Jagger looks baffled and the camera backtracks, implying space for a sequel.
In the excellent 2003 commentary recorded by Marcus Hearn and Jimmy Sangster (1927-2011), Sangster says that the anti-nuclear aspects were accidental, or rather that they were exploiting a common fear of the time. Meanwhile, at the BBFC or censorship office, John Trevelyan was reportedly concerned about X the Unknown’s “dangerous cocktail of sex and horror”. The tryst between radiographer and nurse in the Radiation Room could be seen as an example of this – their potential lust swiftly curtailed by the unsentimental monster at 00:34:00. I’m not sure why the victims of the monster don’t simply run away, like Willie does at the beginning, not that it did him any good. It might be difficult in confined spaces such as the Radiation Room, but some of the soldiers seem inordinately stupid, repeatedly firing their guns into what must have appeared to them as a kind of lava. Primary producer for Hammer, Anthony Hines, told the censorship board that the monster wouldn’t look as nasty as the script described, since they were intending to represent it with “chocolate mousse”.
One censor complained that X the Unknown was “scientific hokum and sadism in equal parts; a wretched exploitation of the X certificate”. The script was also described as “the work of an insane but precocious schoolboy!” which writer, Jimmy Sangster, on the commentary, doesn’t seem to mind at all for what he calls his “B and a half movie”. The fairly low budget is illustrated when Dr Royston visits a local church to question Willie’s schoolfriend about what they were doing on the night Willie received his radiation burns. To set the scene, the establishing shot used (below) was taken from Whisky Galore! (1949)[xxxi].
“X the Unknown” wrote Monthly Film Bulletin: “intriguingly suggests a new addition to the science fiction repertoire of Things, but after a series of prolonged climaxes, with its potential victims staring directly into the camera and shaking with fright, the ‘Unknown’ finally emerges as a type of rolling rubber mattress, disappointingly unhorrific in content and appearance.”
* * * * * * *
Perhaps it is only fitting in the days of obvious climate change, of psychopathic omnicidal world leaders, of narcissistic megalomaniac billionaires, of futile weathercasting and forlornly relativist cultural opinion, that the idea of a canon of film has more than somewhat self-destructed. For a decade or two, I maintained a constantly shifting top 100 of films, films largely chosen for their searching depth and quality but also allowing, overall, for enjoyment and entertainment as well as hopeful and inspirational[xxxii] elements. This was a kind of desert island list, indebted therefore to Roy Plomley’s[xxxiii] radio program[xxxiv], imagining 100 films that would stand being watched and watched again if you were shipwrecked but somehow had a projector and 100 films – or a massive TV, DVD player and 100 DVDs (the whole concept would be seriously diminished if the delivery system were smaller). Although I would probably stand by at least half of the films which made it into the more stable top ten[xxxv] of this 100, I began to abandon the overall idea when I realised that I had over 200 films in my top 100.
List-making remains a societal disease; can it have fundamental positives? Despite its prolific passion for lists, the film magazine, Sight and Sound, remains great, thanks perhaps to Mike Williams – an editor with principles. In a world steeply dumbing down, are lists a commercial necessity? One recent specimen: “21st-Century Sci-Fi Cinema,”[xxxvi] chose a film from each year since 2000. Across the page from 2001’s exceptional Donnie Darko (2001), was Sam Wrigley’s choice (presumably, Sam was born “awk-ard”) I.K.U. (2000) a film I struggled to track down and which proved to be of almost no value whatever (though it’s not much worse than Titane, 2021, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes). Apex of all these short-attention span lists is the once-a-decade “Sight and Sound Greatest Films of all Time”[xxxvii]. Yes, the title is ludicrous. It reminds me of playing a very loose version of cricket with my children around the turn of the Millenium in rural, middle-of-nowhere, North Devon. Increasing in absurdity, The Supreme Universe Cricket Cup, eventually involved 124 invented teams. Some of these merely named the team: e.g. Flash [Gordon] and the Showoffs – a particularly reckless mob who in swashbuckling style tried to turn every ball into a 6 over the house or trees. Other teams were serious and well-characterised. My son’s Star Wars squad, featured carefully inscribed players, all of whom played or failed to play as Star Wars fans (him) might expect (although Yoda was not the best, being too calm and inclined to sitting). I can’t remember how often Darth Vader got into an argument with Han Solo, or whether team loyalty superseded Good and Evil . . . or rather Light and Dark? Perhaps Darth eventually formed a breakaway team to challenge the light side of the Force? I’m not even sure which teams made it to the final – though I have an entire scoresheet somewhere. Possibly, it was Star Wars versus The Artist, Writers and Characters (featuring all-rounders Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Herman Melville, Emma Peel and Wolf Solent with Cecil Collins and Orson Welles bowling off breaks – not difficult in a lumpy garden) . . .
For all their atmosphere and entertainment value, neither X the Unknown, nor X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, would have made my top 100, though they are no better or worse than Sight and Sound’s current “Greatest Film of All Time” Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. (1975). Largely a depressing tableau of interiors – Jeanne Dielman’s unmoving camera provides mesmerizing but tedious focus, observing like a coldly voyeuristic god! A cross between slow cinema’s occasionally valid lean towards transcendence and a kitchen sink (or living-room settee) realism of dreary daily routines, obsessively, neurotically, carried out . . . ultimately, this is a film about futility. For Jeanne Dielman, everything has a place. Dispiriting rather than inspiring, it is intensely claustrophobic. By the long overdue end, you feel like killing yourself. A suddenly fashionable or unfairly despised token of a film, it seems plucked arbitrarily from Chantal Akerman’s valuable oeuvre. It is not her best work and as Andreas Babiolakis points out in his useful filmography[xxxviii], winning the poll did it no favours. Try, Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles (1994) or Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974). Or take a look instead at the superior Riddles of the Sphinx[xxxix] written and directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Woollen.
Jeanne Dielman’s air of joylessness is crushing. “My youth was but a gloomy storm” reads out Jeanne’s 25-year-old son, quoting Baudelaire – and even this brief line conveys a sudden wild cloudscape to dismiss the robotic routine Jeanne Dielman presents. What a relief when the camera or the characters go outside!
The only brief joy for Jeanne appears to be remembering the end of the war . . . and the son never rebels against her rules or routine. At 01:05:16 we are briefly outdoors again: any light, any air, is like an oasis in the desert! Naturally, the period atmosphere is now worth looking at, with an un-poshed-up Brussels, the sometimes slightly misty yet translucent winter streets, the proper cars . . . instead of existing as a film, Jeanne Dielman might work well as a chain of still images of dated rooms, streets and stores.
Jeanne shops, cleans and rearranges to a pattern . . . yet does manage, once in a while to smile: in the wool shop (01:29:56), in a café at Giselle (01:30:47) which she misses on her next visit – clearly discomforted by having to sit in a different seat (03:01:46). By this point however, she is starting to visibly crack, albeit in a more measured way than Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (1965).
Somehow, even the perfunctory prostitution Jeanne practices, seems part of a general process – which of course may be one of the film’s points: the way we prostitute ourselves to futile modes of life. The way we try to evade alarms and surprises. That respectability is a farce . . .
Occasionally, even the less illuminated sections of Andrei Tarkovsky, can suffer from a form of Jeanne Dielman disease – a drawn-out atmosphere that (charitably) aims to alienate or mind-numb us via demoralising thought into a search for positivity or meaning. Desperate for import, eventually we grow weary, fall into a different zone, or manufacture meaning for ourselves. Which is fine under different circumstances, but Jeanne Dielman can make you long for a mindless Euro-spy thriller[xl] or a Morecambe and Wise feature film such as: The Intelligence Men (1965) or That Riviera Touch (1966)! Jeanne’s mind-suicide of repression can’t last; her life of quiet desperation begins to crumble towards the 3-hour mark as she starts to fumble and drop things . . .
Her suffocation under the final man (above) resembles how you feel all the way through the film – and it ends in a strike for freedom which fails . . . But perhaps I am forcing my own desire for Jeanne to E S C A P E upon the film? “Jeanne Dielman’s defences had snapped and I wanted to demonstrate that with the strongest sign of her oppression: prostitution… Jeanne Dielman kills to regain her order” Akerman herself said[xli]. Perhaps Jeanne’s repressive order is as close as she can get to the concept of freedom – which may only be a concept anyway, however we interpret or attempt to live or avoid it?
Even if Jeanne Dielman doesn’t justify this much attention as a film (rather than as “the first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of the cinema”[xlii]) Chantal Akerman was undoubtably a worthwhile artist and the film must work on other levels to be so highly rated. Perhaps viewers identify with it as a kind of psychological case history? Is it unfair to know or remember that aspects of Jeanne’s behaviour were based upon Akerman’s mother’s daily routines and that her mother was an Auschwitz survivor? This cannot help but affect both viewer and critic, making Jeanne a martyr by association. A more concise and intense film to which Jeanne Dielman could be very loosely related is Dušan Makavejev’s Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni Slucaj ili Tragedija Sluzbenice P.T.T.) of 1967. But Eva Ras (as Izabela, telefonistkinja or switchboard operator) seems very much alive although dead, while Delphine Seyrig (as Jeanne) is obliged to play dead whilst alive . . .
In the end, however, my intolerance towards Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, could be partly physiological. Owing to the tunnels and ventilation shafts the workers have to crawl through in Under Night Streets (1958)[xliii], one of my previously favourite BTF films has become difficult to tolerate. It triggers my claustrophobia. Jeanne Dielman is similarly stifling. Watching it is like being buried alive . . .
I only have to pass under the shadow of a tree in some inconsequential suburb to feel a sudden desire to watch and ponder Vertigo[xliv] again. Yet Vertigo’s overall enigma surpasses its individual scenes and my memory (or mis-memory) of the profoundest passages can be so essential and heightened, that sometimes the actual filmitself can be a distraction. Many films have this effect, but Jeanne Dielman does not. In fact, you would have to pay me to watch Jeanne Dielman for a fourth time. Rather than being hauntingly tragic, what Jeanne Dielman perhaps does best, is reflect the increasingly robotised captivity of society – a society far more closely circumscribed by technology now than it was in 1975. Forget rampant lava or psychedelic eye drops, it’s the tools that have taken over. The tools and their android oligarchy of selfish owners. These are the real monsters.
[i] At 13 or 14, the actor, Michael Brooke (1942-2014) was older than he looked in the film
[ii] All the timings from X The Unknown come from my 2005 Hammer DVD
[iii] Though one teacher did lift me up by my ears (not off the ground, and I probably deserved it) while another used to make wrongdoers do handstands against a wall all through playtimes
[ix] Particularly after the release of The Servant in 1963
[x]bfi.org.uk/features/why-i-love-x-unknown by Vic Pratt: “American star Dean Jagger was signed up to star, and blacklisted Joseph Losey – who would go on to shoot The Damned (1961), another seriously spooky sci-fi film – was enlisted to direct, but there was further trouble ahead. Losey left the production somewhat abruptly – supposedly with pneumonia, but, according to [Jimmy] Sangster, removed from the project owing to star Dean Jagger’s reluctance to work with a ‘red’ director.”
[xi]imdb.com/title/tt0049967/trivia/: “It has also been reported that Losey simply didn’t want to make the film and left the project, to be replaced by Norman, who also didn’t want to make the movie.”
[xii] A false picture that still clings on 70 years later – another corpse inadequately staked!
[xiii] See Atomic Achievement (1956) youtube.com/watch?v=ToVsb_AhrlMObserving the scientists and minions featured is like watching toddlers play with broken glass:
[xiv] Sheer awkwardness or pigheadedness continues to throw good money after bad despite there being no safe solution to the disposal of waste which remains dangerously hot and highly radioactive for thousands of years.
[xvi] Marcus Hearn’s words in an absorbing 2003 commentary to the film with Jimmy Sangster, the writer and production manager.
[xvii] For what it’s worth, this figure has since been scientifically reduced to less than 1%.
[xviii] It was a vivid memory of the end of X: The Man with the X Ray Eyes, that etched the biblical (mis)quote from Matthew 5:29 into my head: “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” internationaltimes.it/first-principles/
[xix] The Spectorama technique was employed by Cinematographer Floyd Crosby to suggest what Dr. Xavier sees as his vision expands the normal human spectrum.
[xx] In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King, noted rumours which claimed “the ending originally went further, with Milland crying out “I can still see” after gouging out his eyes. Corman has denied the existence of that ending but expressed enjoyment with the idea, saying “Now it’s interesting. Stephen King saw the picture and wrote a different ending, and I thought, ‘His ending is better than mine.'” See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X:_The_Man_with_the_X-ray_Eyes
[xxiv] This recurring location was actually filmed (as were other film and TV productions including episodes of Doctor Who) at Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Pits in Bucks which looks, in pictures, though not in the film, to be very similar to the Leighton Buzzard Sand Quarries which so inspired me from the 1970s: brazen-head.org/?s=zabriskie+point As the film was made in the winter, filming day for night was not considered possible since it requires bright sunlight, necessitating working at night in very cold January and February temperatures.
[xxviii]www.imdb.com/name/nm0152361/?ref_=tt_cst_t_2 Chapman also remains indelible as a church deacon in Powell and Pressburger’s Gone To Earth (1950), when at 00:31:46, after the vicar has said Grace: he declares: “I have not received tartlets… I am not thankful!”
[xxxi] As Peter Faizey noted here: www.reelstreets.com/films/x-the-unknown/ the church, Our Lady Star of the Sea, is on the Isle of Barra, Castlebay, Scotland. The other church used is St Michael’s Church, Bray, which apparently also appears in Paranoiac (1963), Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970).
[xxxii] Even the darkest (and best) film noir: Out of the Past, 1947, (my number 4 film since the late 1980s) has fleeting lights of hope.
[xxxv] Although I would “stand by” these films, there would probably be a hundred others I’d now wish to cram into the top ten, since much of the list predated my wider experience of European and world cinema – particularly of Italian and Japanese films. The Japanese New Wave (Nuberu bagu) is every bit as vital as the better-known French Nouvelle Vague
1) A Canterbury Tale (1944)
2) Solaris (1972)
3) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)
4) Out of the Past (U.K. title: Build My Gallows High (1947)
[xliv] Vertigo preceded Jeanne Dielman… as number one in the Greatest Films of all Time list. Naturally, the critical/appreciative paths around it are thoroughly trodden.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
It’s easy to have an escalated memory of certain films, books, music or paintings. In film, this can be particularly evanescent: an image or tone, a line of speech, the fleeting expression of one of the players – or in the case of the 2010 documentary, The Woodmans, (director: Scott Willis) – the expression or gestures of a non-fictional person, maybe self-conscious or recreating a memory, but not fully acting. The Woodmans was the intriguing film I first intended to write about . . . but its incidental display of privilege, wealth and relative success, eventually ground me down. Francesca – the photographer daughter – is the most notable member of the Woodmans family and although her work can be a shade formulaic, it is frequently mysterious and powerful, as seen here.
House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, by Francesca Woodman
After Francesca Woodman leaves the story by suicide in 1981, aged only 22, the other Woodmans are inevitably left with a haunting burden of grief . . . yet remain fortunate as artists – artists with a modicum of talent who could always have lived the art life whether or not they succeeded in sales terms. It is to their credit that they carried on trying hard. They believe in their work and its value, despite that it is often little more than decorative. In other words, second time around, the film did not live up to my empathetic and escalated memory of it. Or perhaps the chords which concealed its faults were no longer binding?
With Whirlpool[i] (1950, director: Otto Preminger) I got further, appropriately spiralling down into its enjoyable hogwash, notwithstanding the difficulty of accepting natural crime kingpin, Richard Conti, as a bowtie-wearing psychoanalyst! Cynical witticisms regularly illuminate the shadowy ruined coastline of Noir, and their serrated architecture can memorably survive long after many of the films’ enveloping, invasive tides have receded. Lines such as “a successful marriage is usually based on what a husband and a wife don’t know about each other” (00:11:32[ii]) are naturally amusing.
Regardless of how plausible or implausible the whole premise of Whirlpool is, especially self-hypnosis (once self-hypnotized against pain, surely, you’d also be hypnotised against a sense of caution and danger?) for me Whirlpool remained enmeshingly tense. It was entertaining as well, to spot the numerous parallels with the much more successful Laura (1944)[iii] – also directed by Preminger and starring Gene Tierney. But all this was not sufficiently enlightening[iv], and while I was very glad to see it again, it’s hard to violently disagree with some of its negative reviewers[v]. I needed to recall a film that could be inhabited. A film as commandingly hypnotic as Vertigo (1958) whose deepest scenes can distort and expand so much from memory or mistaken impression, that the actual film itself can become a distraction[vi]. Plot and sequence, characters and meaning . . . can all seem relatively irrelevant. In such a state, I no longer want the Hitchcock-directed, finished film, only the intensity or visual poetry beyond certain scenes. What stays cloaked just out of reach or can be sensed at the back of the head, is closer to the true source. Perhaps the best films, even much of the best art, draws on sublimated or unconscious archetypes or anomalies, and once these are activated or vaguely felt, the surfaces of the art itself can become an interference, a fading static? With Vertigo, I sometimes want a sense of time and anti-time, the texture of dark forests and the escape from them, the sweep of the high red bridge and a flight without it, the swell of waves (or studio tanks), the feel of old Spanish settlements, the tilt of the streets, distinctive coastal trees such as those at Cypress Point . .
Consequently, I remain very drawn to the idea, in Vertigo’s case, of the San Francisco area[vii], despite that in reality, the locations used are widely dispersed and their relationships with each other, as well as their physical appearance 68 years later, would likely be a disappointment[viii].
Recalling a film I could inhabit, a confusion occurred. Apparently, the Japanese title of The Snow Woman怪談雪女郎 (Kaidan Yukijorō) can be translated as Tales of the Snow Witch or Ghost Story of the Snow Woman, and I believe I originally watched the 1968 film under the title Woman of the Snow. Since the justifiably famous Kwaidan[ix], directed by Masaki Kobayashi and consisting of four ghost stories[x]was released four years earlier, and one of its stories was entitled Woman of the Snow, perhaps the later feature film, was at some point, retitled to avoid confusion? Both films, (the 1964 Kwaidan story, at 42 minutes, is about half the length of Tokuzō Tanaka’s 1968 feature), are adaptations of the same Japanese folktale made internationally popular in 1904 by Lafcadio Hearn’s collection, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Both films have an atmosphere, at sudden or creeping moments, of breaking through the rushing static of what we like to think of as “reality”. Both films relishthe fierce calligraphy of their titles, although with Kwaidan – the complete film – calligraphy becomes almost a character in itself – particularly in The Story of Mimi-nashi-Hōïchi or Hoichi the Earless[xi]. Calligraphy as a weapon. Calligraphy as a stockade.
Poetically concise, the production style and painterly studio backgrounds of Kwaidan’s Woman of the Snow episode (1964), are exquisitely abstracted yet also metaphysically challenging – conjuring a hyper-reality way beyond surrealism. On the other hand, The Snow Woman, of 1968, with the extra space of its longer story – increasing the tension between mortal and immortal, the vulnerability of the elemental in a corporeal world – probably attains a more haunting poignancy, a deeper sense of the tragic? Its Snow Woman feels more torn. Rewatching both films, I find the merits of each too considerable to want to elevate one above the other. They are both unmissable. Their more extreme moments possess a valiant character – the challenge of the wish, the contempt of the supernatural toward the human drone.
The Woman of the Snow episode, directed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1964, begins within Kwaidan at 00:39:55. Kwaidan’s style as a whole, its drama, lighting and score[xii] are theatrical as well as startlingly innovative. In contrast to The Snow Woman’s frequent use of real landscapes (notably in its opening mountain forest scenes) Kobayashi filmed inside an aircraft hangar, in which, art director Shigemasa Toda, and set decorator Dai Arakawa, created vivid symbolic skies, map-like symmetrical forests and a brimming river – its magical overflow sparkling like silver foil. At first these scenes are buried in drifts and flurries of snow, with only the red flag of the absent ferryman to alarm a wintry palette. This red of danger, signalling the margins of some fever zone, stays imprinted in the mind. Under whited-out or painted skies, impressionistic, clear or churning, from hopeful and spacious to claustrophobic and doomed, the lives of the characters become archetypal.
While in the more conventional 1968 film, the old man and his younger apprentice are master and student sculptors, in The Snow Woman they are merely woodcutters. Their highest ambition is to have a useful, contented life. Art doesn’t come into it – unless you count the later crafting of sturdy and attractive sandals. The Snow Woman has few quotidian scenes and little conversation to start with. Its scarce inhabitants live almost entirely in isolation. When the snowstorm overwhelms the two woodcutters as they return from the wilderness, they struggle into the ferryman’s deserted shanty. Its gapped planking reduces the blizzard’s fury. But there is no safety here at the centre or eye or crossroads of the storm. The Woman of the Snow enters . . . and when the old man perishes from the extra cold deployed by her ghostly form, Tatsuya Nakadai, as the younger man, speaks the horror with his eyes. He doesn’t protest against fate as the spirit turns her lethal gaze upon him to slowly approach his recumbent, terror-stricken form. All he can do is tilt his head away – as if this distances her from his wide unblinking gaze. Is it for the sake of his youth that the snow witch spares this “handsome boy”[xiii] – or does she know the future; is she attracted to him? Shuffling towards the door she fades through it . . . but not before extracting a promise which the longer film later echoes:, but here, it is that he mustn’t tell his mother what happened, rather than his parents, children or wife – as if the woman or spirit has some degree of omniscience.
Next morning the storm has abated. At 00:51:49 the ferryman arrives (above) and failing to get in the front door of his shack, enters another way. As mentioned before, the concise adaptation within Kwaidan eschews the sculpting vocation of the main character in the longer story and there any no evil billionaires or despicable Lords either, only a mother, curing her traumatized and half-frozen son with porridge. That all the blood was drained from the old woodcutter implies that the Woman of the Snow is some form of vampire – a hint later strengthened. But the old woman does not pursue with questions. Knowing she must work while her son, hollow and withdrawn in bed, recovers, she staggers away with a basket of sticks[xiv].
A year later and thankfully recovered, after a long day’s wood harvesting, on his stroll home against the westering skies the son meets a woman going to Yedo. The sky, red and orange, awaits the appearance of those earlier symbols, globes or the beginnings of eyes which could suggest the materialisation of spirits as if from whirlpools in the atmosphere. Despite the eerie music, the setting is serene. Nothing in this gentle yet accelerated alternative to modern dating, insinuates that Yuki[xv] might be the Woman of the Snow in disguise. They continue to walk through sunset-crimsoned woods and pools, as the painted skies turn from white and blue to yellow and black. Swirls like giant marbles, now begin to generate above the horizon. The young man invites Yuki to the lonely house where he lives with his mother. Another cinematic house to envy! Yuki shows no caution, presumably because she knows she cannot be endangered? Is this a planned seduction on her part? Could he resist if he wished? In the house, at 01:01:22, he is clearly stirred by the sight of the traveller washing her feet.
Soon, laughing chases through the rushes and reeds under roseate skies, unwind the formality of the potential lovers. In contradiction to the angry whirlpools of stormier skies, a jewel-like shape forms above nearby, like a sentient sun, to indicate the approach of a happy perfection. Under this glowing symbol, loving embraces follow naturally, with gently bared breasts among the grasses[xvi]. . . before cross dissolving to a baby being bathed. Two other children are soon present[xvii] – the Woman of the Snow has become a perfect wife and mother. Walking with her children, I wonder if the strange song the children voice at 01:03:46, in which “the priest was amazed and fell upside down”, is partially parallelled in the longer, 1968 film, by a scene in which evil Lord Jito, endorsing the established rival sculptor, Gyôkei, (who Jito has employed to usurp the younger sculptor’s commission), says of apprentice sculptor Yosaku at 00:40:23: “there is no way he will win, even if he stands on his head.” This bizarre comment may arise from mistranslation or subtitling, but as with the Snake and Tortoise/Turtle song used in the 1968 film (and brought up below), it creates a reflective pause in the narrative – at least during interrogatory viewings[xviii].
That the children grow older but their mother never ages, is emphasised by a humorous exchange with three village women – they and the ferryman are the only sign of any local community in the entire film. Yuki has taken her children to pay their respects at their grandmother’s grave. They pass the women, busy washing clothes, on their way home. “Most peasant women age early,” but despite giving birth three times, Yuki still looks like a girl. “That woman is a wonder!” the village washerwomen all agree[xix], taking it for granted that the dead grandmother is still able to see and appreciate her grandchildren, as well as their wonderful mother and happy lives.
Evening, and the children are all asleep in a side room. The young woodcutter is no artist but has crafted four pairs of sandals for his wife and children. Yuki admires her pair and returns to sewing. From his lower angle and with the light on her face, the woodman suddenly remembers across the years . . . the light becomes blue and icy and with the change comes, recognition? Then the light turns warm again and he seems about to laugh off his memory. Unfortunately, he rambles on . . . No don’t say it! But he doesn’t stop . . .
For the sake of her sleeping children, the Woman of the Snow forbears from carrying out her strict promise of murder, returning toward the giant eye, leaving a widower grieving over his four pairs of beautiful sandals. Sadly, he puts hers out in the snow. Since they disappear, perhaps there is hope that she might return? Yet the mood is tragic.
The quality of human ambition in The Snow Woman (1968), is something the shorter, more lyrically concise version of 1964, bypassed. In the longer version of the tale, the old wood carver Shigetomo, seems almost punished for his ambition: “My name will be known throughout the mountains of Mino,” he anticipates triumphantly. Conversely, his apprentice Yosaku is frequently undermined by a lack of self-belief. Beginning in real snowy landscapes, prospecting for the ideal tree for a temple commission, master and apprentice fall to their knees to give thanks when they discover a magnificent example – a tree so fine they believe it may even have a soul. As if the thought of felling such a tree to become mere material for religious carving is a crime, the weather abruptly changes. Winds howl and swirling snow snaps branches around them. They struggle on through the tempest. Fortunately, a rough shelter appears, but later, as the young man wakes from under his heaped straw, a ghost slides into their refuge (00:07:30) to kill the fire and summon ice in its place, snow from the stare of its eyes and spirit, frost from the percussive sounds[xx]. Without Kwaidan’s implication of vampirism, the old Shigetomo is simply chilled to death. The Snow Woman turns her attention towards the young apprentice Yosaku, creeping backwards on his elbows, only sparing him because “you are young and beautiful” (00:11:20). In exchange, he must promise never to tell even his dearest, what happened that night. The door of the shack opens of its own volition (00:12:37) before the Snow Woman glides back into the blizzard.
Moving on: in cheerful daylight the felled tree arrives in the village (00:14:54), with or without its soul, no longer exceptional. Propelled on rollers by a crowd of peasants and greeted rapturously by a crowd of villagers, the High Priest’s officials are delivering the section of trunk and request that Yosaku carry out the original commission, since his old master spoke highly of him and the High Priest believed in Shigetomo’s judgement. Feeling unworthy, Yosaku, persuaded by Shigetomo’s widow, reluctantly accepts.
That night, during a rainstorm a beautiful traveller – “young girl” in the widow of the old master sculptor’s eyes – shelters under the eaves of the Yosaku’s workshop (00:17:06). Invited indoors, in a mildly sensual way Yosaku’s surrogate mother supplies dry clothing while remarking on the traveller’s beauty. As the Snow Woman, Shiho Fujimura may be too terrifying for the word beautiful to arise, unless one admires haughty superiority and malevolent elemental force . . . but as Yuki, she is almost unrecognisable. In the Kwaidan story, you can see the similarity between spirit and woman. Here, on a first viewing, perhaps audiences where not expected to notice any connection? After several meaningful admiring glances between Yosaku and Yuki (only slightly distracted by her appreciation and confidence in his sculpting skills, and his dissatisfaction with them) at 00:22:30 they go together to gather herbs which Yuki knows would be good for the old wife’s recurring health problems. At 00:24:09 love reveals itself. Meanwhile, galloping thugs are approaching the village as children circle and lark on a log stack. The children’s reckless behaviour naturally predates the modern health and safety attitude towards timber stacks!
Haverthwaite, 20th June 2026
Thrown from his horse by the fright factor of rolling logs, Lord Jito is furious: “Fools! Children or not, I’ll have your heads”. Hurrying out to protect the children (00:24:38) the wood-carver’s old wife founds herself beaten by Lord Jito for her “impudence”. Returning to the village, Yosaku and Yuki rush to intervene, but it is too late. Nasty Lord Jito, clearly fancying Yuki at first sight, gallops off with the threat that they haven’t “heard the last of this”. Despite encouragements to “hang in there” (!! anachronistic subtitles at 00:22:27: what subtleties might we be missing?) before long the old wife succumbs to her beating[xxi] – using her dying moments to virtually oblige a marriage between Yosaku and Yuki. Although they don’t wish to impose upon each other, they are happy to follow this course.
It seems clear in both versions of the film, that the spirit of the snow has sought out the two young men spared, perhaps because like the Greek gods, the snow women are drawn to mortals by desire? Or for wanting to know what it feels like to be human, to bear children and be a mother? Is it also a vain attempt to escape their chilled immortality, at least for a lifetime? On their first night together, at 00:29:12, Yosaku asks “Yuki, why is your body so cold?”
Another powerful character with sundry titles now emerges to complete the cultural hierarchy. Witch doctor or priestess, she is later referred to, gender-specifically, in the subtitles as a “shamaness”. Cast listing meanwhile, describes her as a “Shrine Maiden”. Divining for the presence of evil at a sacred festival this shamaness immediately perceives Yuki’s supernatural origins – the zealous old hag’s flame darts at 00:30:47, act like ghost-seeking missiles. Maybe this is the point at which, on a first viewing, you are supposed to know with certainty that for all her love and sympathy, Yuki is the Snow Woman?
Five years later and snidey Lord Jito is back from the capital, Kyoto[xxii], interfering in local politics and trying to engineer for an experienced sculptor, Gyôkei, to replace Yosaku for the task of carving an inspiring Buddha for the temple. Having known the old master carver Shigetomo and heard him praise Yosaku, the patient High Priest still wants the unproven apprentice to do the work. Angrily, Jito forces a competition upon the religious authorities – the winner will be granted the commission. By this time Yosaku and Yuki have a young son, Tarô, yet Yuki has not aged in five years. When the family group chance upon Lord Jito (feudal or samurai equivalent of a contemptible billionaire or unscrupulous politician of now) and his corrupt entourage in the woods, Jito confides to a sidekick, (00:37:08) that he “scoured the capital for five years and found none to equal her.”
For a brief relaxed interval, after his classmates taunt Tarô for not knowing a strange song – apparently a traditional children’s rhyme about a turtle that takes over a snake’s yard to cause the disappearance of nine local people – Yosaku watches Yuki teaching it to him. Whether or not this song is thematically connected[xxiii] to the film, it creates an enigmatic frisson of the type which often encourages a fork or splitting point in the pathway of a narrative . . . a pause or glance toward something cloaked or just out of reach, something only sensed at the back of the mind.
At Gyôkei’s workshop, in the contemptuous dialogue between master sculptor and Jito, Jito declares that country people are “like frogs stuck in a well” (00:40:35) and goes on: “Trying to compete with you, he does not know his place.” But it’s not just that Jito considers Yosaku to have ideas above his station: “His wife is far too good for him too” (00:40:50). The plot thickens and when Jito’s henchman come to arrest Yosaku for the theft of the tree, their leader shortly offers the planned way out: Yuki should offer herself to Jito. Yuki is so disgusted that a fine of three ryō or gold coins is imposed – an impossible sum . . . yet Yuki says she will pay. Grudgingly, the gang leaves.
Yuki: “How can someone be so unscrupulous?”
Yosaku: “It’s Lord Jito we are talking about.”
To cure a local landowner’s child of a dangerous fever (00:45:33: “Ridiculous! How can a mere woman possibly cure him,” say the doctors who’ve given him up for dead), Yuki repeatedly and exhaustingly becomes the Snow Woman. She snows near the child and cures him with snow parcels, freezing the fever away.
Not only does she have compassion, the Snow Woman believes in art! Yosaku’s “wooden doll” sculpture looks perfect within limits (“I just can’t seem to finish her face”), but like so much “great” art, is somehow dead. Gyôkei’s golden version however, is truly and thoroughly dead. TheHigh Priest is not impressed – “It shines with gold. It is almost too bright for my eyes to bear!” (00:58:01). “Indeed, her beauty is overwhelming . . .” but “Look closely at her face. In her eyes, do you see the light of compassion?”
Despite the High Priest’s support, Yosaku remains unhappy with his work, he cannot get the eyes right and persuades a very unwilling Yuki to come and pray with him at another religious festival. Forced to run from the festival through the dark forest when she realises again that the Shrine Maiden can sense her presence, Yuki is abducted for Lord Jiro. In a nearby shed, Jiro is determined to have her. He lusts after her pale skin . . . pure like snow. “How I’ve longed to strip you bare” (01:03:47). But the rape goes no further than a bared shoulder.
When he tries to tear her kimono off, Yuki begins to change from frightened woman to invincible Snow Woman, (01:05:45): “All those who have seen my true form must die”. Jito grovels, pleads and freezes. She freezes all his assets and empties his accounts[xxiv], and when his minions discover his frozen corpse, they too are dealt with. Hurrah!
Back at home, Yosaku and Tarô find an exhausted Yuki, yet Yosaku is still concerned with finishing his statue – a picture of the true artist, sacrificing everyone and everything for Art! An ominous shadow clings to him though, preventing that final miraculous transformation of dead wood. But now the news of Lord Jito’s death is abroad and the Shrine Maiden turns up to accuse Yuki – as if the hag was in league with Jito: corrupt politics hand in glove with corrupt religion . . . surely not! The Shrine Maiden is obviously jealous of “a power beyond this realm” (01:10:09). Calling Yuki a “Monstrous demon!” she is determined to look for the scars of her flame darts. Yosaku finally helps repel the old woman and comforts Yuki: “No one could destroy our happiness.” Now he feels he’s been washed clean and remembers his Art. “I think I can finish the statue” . . . yet the dark shadow remains”. Suddenly, stirred by the accusations of the Shamaness, he remembers the night of the Snow Woman and overrides his promise never to tell anyone, not even his wife. NO DON’T SAY IT!
“I saw the terrifying Snow Woman. She killed my master.” (01:13:42) . . . “Yuki . . .”
“That . . . was me.”
“You?”
“After all this time you have spoken of it. It was all I asked of you. I told you never to speak of it. All these years I prayed you wouldn’t. Because I became your wife, I discovered human happiness . . . (01:14:33) . . . I hoped this happiness would never end . . .”
She becomes the Snow Woman and is about to kill Yosaku when Tarô cries in his sleep. Becoming a mother again for a while, she realises she must leave instead: “Please look after Tarô in my place. And please finish that wonderful statue of yours . . .”
In all this tragic farewell, Yosako is still distracted by his ART . . . and seeing the light of compassion in her face (01:18:22) – compassion for the child and for him – he knows now, how to finish the statue.
[iii] For a truly weird and distant echo of Laura, seek out Singapore Sling (O Anthropos Pou Agapise Ena Ptoma) 1990 1h 51m imdb.com/title/tt0100623/?ref_=fn_t_1 which despite a striking and luminous Noir atmosphere is laughably absurd – with Meredyth Herold coming across like Josie Lawrence in an X-rated Mastersons (radio) improvisation! bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007jsmr
[iv] From A Backwards Alphabet of Films – X: “Although it may be unfashionable to say that art, music, writing, film and so on, should be about enlightenment, I will say it anyway.”
[v] Such as David Vining, who in 2025 was unengaged by it: “I don’t think it’s a good thriller or mystery or drama. But, it has some charms along the way to make the film not a complete waste”: davidmvining.wordpress.com/2025/11/27/whirlpool/
[vi] As noted in A Backwards Alphabet of Films – X . . .
[xi] In this story, the blind musician Hōïchi is obliged to perform every night for the ghost court of the Heike clan. To prevent his being torn apart or carried off by spirits, the priest of the temple and his devoted assistant paint the Hannya-Shingyō (Heart Sutra), a holy text, over every part of Hōïchi’s body.
[xii] Toru Takemitsu’s uniquely and sometimes piercingly disquieting score combines traditional instruments such as the shakuhachi and the biwa with electronic manipulation and tape loops as well as a modified piano: screws, bolts, and soft materials placed on the strings to summon strange percussive effects and assorted unpredictable clangs.
[xiii] In the 1968 film the apprentice is also spared for his youth and beauty.
[xiv] Recently watching the film again, I thought of the cover of the album now known as Led Zeppelin IV, but as this is not helpful, I only include the passing thought to reference this intriguing blog post: wknc.org/2021/04/11/behind-the-cover-led-zeppelin-iv/
[xv] Both the Woman of the Snow and the Snow Woman are named Yuki – but who would expect Robin Hood to switch names with every new adaptation of his folk story?
[xvi] The Kwaidan segment (1964) appears more audacious in this way than The Snow Woman four years later. Surprisingly, both films were originally released under Japan’s ‘G’ rating (General Audiences), equivalent to a U certificate in the UK.
[xvii] The Snow Woman bears only one child as opposed to The Woman of the Snow’s three. In both cases it is the presence of a child or children which prevents the snow women from carrying out their promise to kill their husbands for “betraying” her secret. As they only reveal it to her, the severing of their happy lives together as well as the potential deaths involved, seems a shade severe as punishment – but I suppose marriages between mortal and supernatural beings have to end somewhere . . .
[xviii] To consider the implications of inversion in religious terms is probably fanciful as well as complex. On the one hand there is Peter requesting to be hung (crucified) upside down because he felt unworthy to die in the same way as Jesus. On the other, the inverted cross is linked to being in league with Satan. But Christianity’s influence in feudal Japan has been described as profound: japan-kyushu-tourist.com/history-of-japanese-christianity-2/
[xix] The odd thing about the tone of this encounter is that one can’t be sure it is entirely friendly. As the washerwomen all laugh at the end, are they being sarcastic to a degree? Or do they have some sense of division arising from a buried instinct that Yuki is not quite of the world. Yuki’s return comments could also be seen as partially ironic.
[xx] Akira Ifukube wrote the score for The Snow Woman. He and Toru Takemitsu – composer for Kwaidan – “stand as the two pillars of 20th-century Japanese classical and film music”. Both largely self-taught, the two were rivals and at times were very critical of each other: “Ifukube once famously proclaimed that “Music is not philosophy,” a direct jab at the highly conceptual, philosophical nature of Takemitsu’s avant-garde output”. “Takemitsu looked heavily toward Western modernism (Debussy, Messiaen, and John Cage) to create a style that balanced avant-garde abstraction with traditional Japanese instruments.” Quotes from Classical Music Forum.
[xxi] Informed of this far away, Lord Jito cares not a jot that the “old bag” has died, he is only feverish to find out about and entrap Yuki.
[xxii] Kyoto, centre of the Imperial Court, served as the capital of Japan from 794 until 1868.
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
(Monday). It is like coming home but not. New Fences, benches and fittings but same pink and orange dusk as the warm light disappears.
It is early in the season. So early that the pool is not ready for use and the grass is still rich green.
The effort to travel increases. What to select, what to leave behind, how to reassure myself that it will all be OK.
Family dynamics are weird, the ebb and flow of love and cynicism, rudeness and shared memories. We dip bread into oil for supper, with a glass of homemade wine. We should have asked for cheese.
(Tuesday)
At five o’clock it is cool but already bright. The windows are wide open and the air rushes in. Breakfast is late and makeshift: bread and oil again, melon slices, cups of tea.
We are going shopping at Hypercoop. It is not as fascinating or different as it once was but there is cheap wine and good olives, cheeses and bread. A big gluten-free section too.
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Everything is now still. The sun overhead is not moving, shadows are crisp and defined. I try painting through the shutters but the stripes of colour do not work. In a moment I will hook the shutters back whilst everybody else is asleep.
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Watching the sun go down. Blue, purple, grey. Flecks of orange, white. Trails of car lights across the valley. A dog barks, a bat flies by.
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That feeling of being abroad but not doing anything. Apart from the hear and the view you might as well be at home. I am waiting to go out, waiting to see art, to eat different food.
The heat increases, the doors and windows are shut. The house goes dark. We are heading out.
(Wednesday)
In the Arezzo museum, weatherworn statues and paintings no longer required for worship are arranged in empty rooms, numbers that refer you to a notice board.
Awkward English versions, rough cut stone and carved folds. Decontextualized crucifixes and empty reliquaries.
Cold tiles, polished wooden doors, grids of light from ancient windows.
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Rows of pillars, grey against cream. Badly lit paintings containing dwarves, rabbits, angels; the drowned and saved; Mary in her glory, Jesus as a child.
Pale memories of stories handed down as pictures, threatening lessons to be learned. Abuse of power. Hell awaits.
I cannot see. The varnish is gloss and cracked, the colours dark and chipped. Frescoes have been torn from walls and hung again in empty rooms.
Traffic and pedestrians pass by, we have the place to ourselves apart from the guard on her laptop and the old lady who knits. Both say hello, watch carefully as we look around the museum.
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worn paving stones
courtyard striations
layers of time
(Thursday)
Montevarchi, the local town, feels worn out. The weekly market has moved out of the centre to the park we used to frequent when the children were younger, and there are empty shops for sale. The newsagent’s kiosk has gone, the main square where we saw a Gypsy band perform and Patti Smith once played is desolate.
The fascist tower at the end of the main street glowers with power over nothing. The café we have been to before is closed but we did discover a chaotic secondhand shop full of dusty books, unwanted china and old postcards, some of which we bought.
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We are hanging around in San Giovanni Valdarno because Italians do not take time seriously. We are sitting in the square waiting for the museum to open. A backpacker is asleep in the ‘cave’ where miracles happened under the church, two men are mending phone lines, everyone else is at home.
The outdoor colours are sun-faded, it is cooler today. Earlier, the manageress of the restaurant we had lunch in, poured us glasses of limoncello by way of an apology for delays and a malfunctioning toilet door. She offered us more but we moved on.
Slowly, people appear. Shop shutters slide up, the museum guard pedals into view. Inside, the angel will still be telling Mary she is pregnant or about to be. Gold and white light. Intervention. Angelic appearance. Annunciation.
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The fact that one of Fra Angelico’s three Annunciation altarpieces is in this small town still seems like a secret, although each time we visit there are more people. Even so, I get a quarter of an hour to sit alone with the painting.
The angel is brighter than we remember. The Virgin is veiled, the dove projected down from Heaven.
Blue and reds: human and holy. The angel holds Mary in his gaze to tell her his news.
Adam and Eve flee Paradise, are sent into exile. Gabriel hovers uneasily over weightless colour.
Does everything mean something? Mean anything? Time is interrupted, past and future changed.
Stories persist.
Everything is symbolic, has a specific meaning but if you put all that aside you are left with an angel facing a woman. There is lots of gold, red and blue; the angel is clothed in pink.
The frame is newer than the painting, so there are strips of flat colour each side to make up for what might be missing. And much of the floor, along with the view from the window, is insubstantial, an abstract palette to help the perspective work.
Saturated colour, spirituality, theology, metaphor and symbolism. The remnants of a story that used to power the world.
(Friday)
This morning the sun is back. No mist, no rain, a breeze and a view all the way to the horizon becomes a day of waiting. For the others and for the forecast thunder and rain, which duly arrives late afternoon, causing tourists in Florence to shelter in cafés whilst locals stride on or unfurl small umbrellas. It is big, splodgy summer rain, the sort we do not often get in England.
The science/zoological/anatomical museum is as haphazard as it sounds. A floor of gorgeous minerals, a locked hall of skeletons, and a vast collection of preserved animals and drawings with views into other rooms full of waxwork body parts and medical dissections.
Schoolboys run through the displays as the guards get visibly irritated. The entrance courtyard is shaded and worn, paving stones cracked and polished in equal parts.
We drove, due to a train strike, and caught one of the new trams from a park-and-ride. The city is as busy as ever but we skirted the centre and crossed the river.
For lunch, salads and meat, special pesto with pistachios added, circles of grilled aubergine. The air conditioning provided a backbeat to the busker who could not sing, a pulse of cool air and engine noise, a relentless human hum.
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In Santo Spirito there is a Giotto or School of Giotto crucifix (depending which information board you read) above the altar, and a Donatello annunciation I have only every known in reproduction.
It is one of those vast empty churches built like a barn, which would be quiet but for the recorded command for Silence!, which is by far the loudest thing.
In the sacristy, a room at the side, hangs an early work by Michelangelo, only displayed because of its maker’s name. If you pay to visit you can also enter the cloisters.
(Saturday)
Fireflies or glowbugs in the bushes after dark. Like fairy lights or fairies themselves, like fading traces on the screens of old televisions shutting down. Pale fluorescent, green white light. There but not there, somewhere else.
‘You can see,’ says my daughter, ‘why people believe in magic creatures. I would if I had seen these when I was younger. Well, I believed in them anyway.’
An unexpected surprise, one of the week’s highlights. Soft interruptions blinking on and off in the warm night.
(Sunday)
In Arezzo’s main square, ‘Hotel California’ is being played on a squeaky violin; the drums and guitar never arrive. The restaurants which overcharge are overcrowded with no locals to be seen. It is hot again and now the music is popular classical although you can hear the diners’ chatter from where we stand.
Mid-afternoon, swifts diving and soaring. Dry heat, lazy lunch, warm wine and blurry vision. Crap versions of well-known songs. Tuscan towers and churches. Deep shadows and burnt stone. Sunshine and architecture as time travel.
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The church is now a museum and you cannot go in at all unless you pay. There is a glass panel behind the doorway which tends to reflect the light back, and most of the piazza has been cordoned off, although I found a shady corner where I could sit.
The posh café we visited only once remains closed. If you peer through the shutters the art deco chairs are still in place but there is more dust. The town has not changed for the better, is dirtier and emptier. Only the heat remains the same, even though it should be cooler now. Spring has become summer, summer may disappear or simply become a month or two of absolute heat.
The woman who stuck her fingers in her ears on the tram in Florence is now visiting Arezzo. There is also a squeaky dog in attendance, which sounds like a soft toy, not an actual animal. Earlier, I met Fred (short for Alfredo) outside the cathedral. He was somewhat hairy and did not squeak but barked.
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On the way back to the car there were sirens behind us, which turned out to be police motorbikes preceding and escorting a procession of classic cars up to the cathedral square, where speeches were made and prizes awarded. I sent photos to my cousin and told him how we all cheered when the oldest car just made it up the hill on its second attempt.
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Half a book I am struggling with left to read, only what is left in the cupboard to eat. A glass of wine left in the bottle.
Tonight, aerobatics by a pair of bats, a silent owl’s descent, and the gradual flickering arrival of fireflies again as dusk becomes night.
More bites and itching, a knocked-off blister top and a mosquito bite up my nose – these insects are keen!
(Monday)
The prickly pear plants in Gropina have been cut back but what seems to be the same dog guards the track they grow on.
The church lit by light bleeding through thin alabaster windows is cool and empty. It is devoid of any ornamentation apart from an ornate pulpit which seems to show Celtic figures, animals and patterns.
There is no concession to tourism beyond the same few postcards there have always been. The church simply waits, squat cracked grey, damp patches throughout.
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Our current fractious world needs – indeed, yearns – for more harmony, more togetherness, more joy. On the 20th of June, at All Saints Church in Maidstone, we had all those qualities in abundance. Our spirits were encouraged to soar in a concert by Maidstone Wind Symphony and The Maidstone Singers Extended Choir on a gloriously balmy evening.
A Buddhist meditation by David Maslanka opened the concert sensitively conducted by Roger Graham with the Maidstone Wind Symphony (all talented amateur musicians) drawing us into a state of calm reflection as the music drifted around this stunning grand church. This piece, entitled ‘Give Us This Day’, set the spiritual tone for the evening.
‘O Magnum Mysterium’ by Morton Lauridsen is a “quiet song of profound inner joy”. The Wind Symphony was led gently and precisely by Roger Graham through this popular piece.
The first half closed with the surging, uplifting ‘Alleluia Laudamus Te’ by Alfred Reed, raising spirits to the ornate gilded roof – a triumphant recitation leaving us in need of interval refreshment to feed the body after the soul had been sated.
And what a second half! Karl Jenkins’ ‘The Armed Man’ was sung with passion by The Maidstone Singers. The piece is almost a musical documentary which traces both the bravery of soldiers and the utter futility of war. The choir marching on the spot set the tone. It is not simply an anti-war diatribe. It is much more subtle and, therefore, persuasive. Jenkins composed the piece as he daily watched the unfolding genocide in Kosovo. This Muslim-majority now independent country no doubt inspired him to include ‘The Call to Prayers’. This was a particularly poignant moment as Adi Usmani took to the pulpit to sing the Call in Arabic. A Call to Prayers in an Anglican church – what better message of tolerance, mutual understanding could there be rather than blind, ignorant hatred? Fly a flag for that alone.
The ‘Kyrie eleison’ was sung with great feeling by the Maidstone Singers with all eyes on their conductor, Kathryn Ridgeway, who did seem to live every nuance, every twist and turn. Her direction of the percussionists as they created an ambience of hope and horror was masterful.
We are then with the soldiers (helped by war images projected on a screen) as they prepare to go over the top almost certainty to their deaths. This is the slow, brutal horror of All Quiet on the Western Front as in the film a twisted bloodied hand in the mud slowly stills of life.
The ‘Agnus Dei’ was sensitively sung with strident dignity and we are with the soldiers who have survived staring at their dead mates. Has there ever been a more beautifully composed cor anglais solo for the Benedictus? Jenkins was himself a skilled oboist (listen to Soft Machine Six) and this solo is played beautifully.
A panoply for peace closes ‘The Armed Man’ with Tennyson’s words “Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace”. As we all headed home in the warm evening air with hope renewed by this performance maybe we could see a new light in these dark times. Music matters more than ever. Thank you to all the performers.
The idea that the universe has an underlying sonic structure is as old as philosophy, and as perennial. Ancient observations of planetary orbits encouraged Pythagoras to hypothesize that just as the pitch of musical notes was determined by the rapidity of vibrations, so planets which orbited at different speeds must also make unique sounds, which harmonised as a majestic “music of the spheres”. Classical world-influenced Christian thinkers dreamed up trumpets toppling the walls of Jericho or signalling the End of Days, and the allegorical Instruments of St. Jerome, whose tuba had three mouthpieces, symbolising the Trinity, and four openings, to symbolize the Four Evangelists. Since its invention in the third century BC, the organ has been seen as much more than a machine – rather, with its air currents and complexity of construction, a metaphor of a breathing grand design.
Sir Thomas Browne called God “the First Composer” in Religio Medici, and saw music as key to universal understanding; he would have known the already old proverb “Music is the eye of the ear.” In 1921, 64 years-old Edward Elgar would write wistfully to his friend, the critic Sir Sidney Colin, “I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side, with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great.” The music of the spheres seems inseparable from the music for our ears.
But while music can express emotions not easily conveyable in words, it can have limitations of its own, because of the imperfections of the instruments we use to “fix” the music we hear in our heads. Even the most advanced instruments are really reminders of music rather than music in themselves. In this diverting and handsomely illustrated book – an offshoot of their project www.imaginaryinstruments.org – two American organologists examine how musical visionaries have always sought to supersede the shortcomings of the tools of their trade, and surpass previous sounds.
Instruments, according to the authors’ expansive definition, are not necessarily contrivances of metal, wood and catgut, but can be wholly conceptual – a “constellation of forms, at once material and intellectual.” A radio, to these authors, can be an instrument – so too a piece of software. Instruments may not even be intended to make what we would consider musical sounds, but can be used to convey visual and even olfactory ‘music’ – colours or odours obtained by pressing keys. Conventional organologists categorise instruments according to their primary sound-producing mechanisms – for example, idiophones have vibrating bodies, and aerophones vibrating air columns – to which these authors now add ‘fictophones’, instruments which either never existed or progressed no further than prototype, yet inspired actual instruments, or otherwise resound in our imaginations. This is a highly entertaining account of artistic playfulness from ancient times to today; it also constitutes a serious study of the natures and meanings of music.
Inventive musicians in all ages have sought to make instruments that are larger, louder, sweeter or more versatile, or that can render audible otherwise undetectable sounds. While many of these experimentations led to colourful dead ends, others eventually sparked off calculus, computing, medical audiology, recording and streaming, science-fiction, and psychological concepts like synaesthesia.
Renaissance anatomical discoveries encouraged musicians in search of amplification to try and replicate the inner ear in cochlear whorls of brass. The polymath Giambattista della Porta thought it possible to trap sounds in pipes to be listened to later, a reiteration of older traditions that sounds could be frozen in mid-air, or that one of the biblical Joseph’s exhalations had been preserved in a jar held at the Vatican. Leonardo filled notebooks with ideas for instruments from kettledrums with instantaneously tuneable skins to a concept of coaxing musical correspondences from different-sized waterfalls.
Isaac Newton analogised his colour spectrum with the musical scale, which encouraged experimenters to try and make music with colours. Voltaire was dismissive of the ‘optical harpsichords’ thus envisaged, but even he allowed there might be “hidden rapports”. The early twentieth century American artist Thomas Wilfred invented the ‘Clavilux’, a silent instrument where colours were conjured by keys – a service less to music as we think of it than to the emerging genre of ‘lumia’ or light art.
Even people could almost become instruments, as seen for example in the origin story of the Arabian oud – supposedly modelled on a dead boy’s bones by his grieving luthier father – or the Austrian author-composer Johann Beer’s 1701 satire Bellum musicum, in which the forces of musical conservatism are assailed by demotic ‘bunglers’ (village fiddlers and the like) led by an ‘ambassador’ whose body is confected of musical notations and parts of instruments. So, too, could animals – at least according to the sadistic invention known as the ‘cat piano’, in which cats were allegedly fastened in rows and made to issue different yowls by being jabbed with pins. Mercifully, the cat piano seems mostly myth, but Peter the Great of Russia really did commission one in 1716, which was apparently used occasionally as late as 1803.
The Greek Aeolian harp, in which music is made by the wind passing over untouched strings, is distant ancestor to the equally unhandled theremin (invented in 1928), whose ethereal tones in turn inspired the Moog synthesiser (invented in 1964). The prophetic ‘speaking heads’ of medieval legend prefigure today’s (and tomorrow’s) robots. In 1739, the German-Danish music theorist Johann Adolf Schiebe conceived of a musikalische wunder-Maschine – a device that could not only create music but appraise its artistic worth – a satire, but a forerunner of today’s AI music generators. The Panharmonicon “mechanical orchestra” invented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel inspired his friend Beethoven’s 1813 symphony Wellington’s Victory, and can be seen as an antecedent to today’s electronic keyboards.
Adolphe Sax envisaged gigantic steam-powered organs and an array of other impossible instruments, including a thirteen-bell trumpet, but he also gave us the saxophone. Francis Bacon’s 1526 utopian novel New Atlantis, in which his hero visits an island off Brazil where the inhabitants operate official sound-houses to “practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation” inspired Daphne Oram to co-found the BBC’s world-famous Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. Musical Prometheans still look backwards in order to look forwards, like Brian Eno whose insights into medieval bells are informing his ideas of the sounds of thousands of years hence, when bells may be built of very different materials and ring with radically different tones. Whatever that far off world might sound like, it seems certain some of us will always be straining our ears to hear yet farther.
This review first appeared in Café Americain, and is reproduced with permission
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
