Throughout the course of Salvador Dalí’s life and career it was increasingly hard to distinguish the artist from the showman-cum-self publicist and exhibitionist. Dalí was many things – artist, sculptor, photographer, clothing & object designer, film-maker, writer and poet … and in his later years a facilitator of fake copies of his own work!
Early on in his artistic apprenticeship Dalí began by taking the conventional path, studying the old masters (especially Raphael, Velázquez and Vermeer) which honed his ultra realistic technique. Dabbling initially in Fauvism (inspired by Matisse), he gravitated towards the iconoclastic Surrealists. The Surrealist movement’s insistence on the primacy of the unconscious as a precondition to creativity neatly fused with his own views which had been shaped by his readings of Freud. Typically though Dalí forged his own self-referential brand of Surrealism which he termed the paranoiac-critical method.
Dalí with fellow Surrealist Man Ray in 1934 ⤴
Dali visited America (New York) for the first time in 1934 where he was enthusiastically embraced as “the embodiment of Surrealism”[1]. After the Nazis invaded France in 1940 Dalí fled back to New York, where he sat out the war.
A mania for shock and outrage
The dandyish Dalí found America the ideal milieu in indulge in his predilection for shocking and scandalising the public. Numbered among the periodical, zany antics and pranks pulled by Dalí and his “collaborator-in-crime”, his much vilified Russian émigré wife Gala, were:
▹ attending a masquerade party with Gala dressed as the Lindbergh baby and he as the kidnapper (a grievous miscalculation by the Dalís as the heinous celebrity crime was still fresh in American minds, requiring the artist to afterwards beg forgiveness for the appalling taste of his stunt)
▹ attending a “Dalí Ball” in his honour wearing a glass case displaying a bra
▹ organising an event in a Manhattan bookshop in 1962 where he signed copies of his book in a hospital bed whilst he was wired up to a brain wave machine[2].
SD & Babou
Dalí delighted in over-the-top, exhibitionist displays of eccentricity. As he got older his shtick included prancing round with exotic wild animals on a leash (exotic animals have long been the accessory du jour for celebrities). He was well known for taking his pet South American ocelot with him on luxury cruises and to swanky restaurants. Photos also show him walking a giant anteater around the streets of New York on a lead as if it was the family dog.
Dalí’s ‘oddball’ gimmicks were all part of the artist’s “carefully cultivated image of a madman”[3]. The prevalence of photos of Dalí with chickens or other objects on his head, etc. points to the contrived nature of his eccentricity. Dalí’s appearances before the camera, unkempt hair, imperious piercing eyes and trademark extravagantly curled moustache, added to the image of an unhinged persona.
‘Temptation of St Anthony’ (see below)
Dalí’s enfant terrible behaviour (a condition that persisted his whole life!), whilst good for keeping him in the public eye and boosting sales, nonetheless alienated many in the art world. The Surrealists eventually disowned the Catalan artist for his egomaniacal antics and his blatant and shameless exhibitionism and commercialism. In 1939, Andre Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, gave Dalí the nickname Avida Dollars (an anagram of “Salvador Dalí”) which can be translated as “eager for dollars”[4].
Some observers have noted that the Surrealists’ reasons for rejecting Dalí had also to do with his increasingly apolitical position in the wake of the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s (going so far as to suggest that Dalí was soft on Nazism). Breton and other left-wing members of the movement, by contrast to Dalí, had used their Surrealist writing and art to attack the direction taken by Hitler and Mussolini. Later when Dalí happily returned to live in post-war Spain under the uncompromising dictatorship of Franco, he was further howled down by the Leftist artists sympathetic to communism[5].
⤴ Dali working on the set of Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’ (1945)
Spending long periods in America (and specifically Hollywood) from the late 1930s allowed Dalí to continue his interest and involvement in film. Even before first coming to America he was very much into cinema. In 2007 the Figueres-based Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, in conjunction with the Tate Modern, held an exhibition called ‘Dali and Film’ in London which details his long association with film[6]. In the late 1920s-early 1930s he had made two polemically radical films with Luis Bunuel, a later master director of the screen (Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or).
After coming in contact with Hollywood, Dalí, through his friendship with Harpo Marx, worked on writing of a screenplay for a Marx brothers movie to be called ‘Giraffes on Horseback Salad’ (planned scenes included gas mask-wearing giraffes and Chico in a deep-sea diving suit playing the piano bore the unmistakable Dalí touch). Plans for the movie were unfortunately scuttled after Groucho put the kibosh on it[7].
Dalí’s set from ‘Spellbound’
During the years he lived in America, Dalí worked with Hollywood luminaries of the calibre of Hitchcock and Disney. The Spanish artist, surprisingly for many in the US, became very good friends with Walt Disney. Walt and Sal collaborated on a short cartoon (Destino) but the project was not completed by them (possibly because Dalí’s ideas were “too explicit” for Disney). With Hitch, on Spellbound (a psychological crime thriller), Dalí created the artistic set for the dream sequence scene. He also later worked with director Vincente Minnelli on Father of the Bride creating some characteristic Dalí motifs[8].
At the Tate Modern exhibition back in 2007 one of the Dalí paintings that caught my attention for being somewhat incongruous was a rather conservative (for Dalí!) portrait of Hollywood movie mogul Jack L Warner*. I wasn’t aware at the time but apparently the powerful Warner Brothers studio head was also a friend of Dalí. A strange association I thought but his estranged, one-time friend Luis Bunuel in his autobiography opined that Dalí was always attracted to the company of multi-millionaires (so much so he became one! … Dalí left an estate worth around US$32m). Cecil B De Mille was another Hollywood establishment heavyweight that Dalí cultivated a friendship with.
A further surprise for me at the Tate ‘Dalí and Film’ exhibition was to see how small many of the Catalan’s artworks were. For example, Dalí’s 1931 work (above), the Persistence of Memory (AKA ‘Melting Clocks’), one of his most famous and most referenced paintings, stands at a mere 10″ x 13″, virtually a miniature!
Dalí was praised for his avant-garde work in the thirties and universally admired for his artistic technical virtuosity. But by the fifties and sixties most of that distinctive originality had dried up. Influential art critic Robert Hughes summarised Dali’s later oeuvre as “kitschy repetition of old motifs or vulgarly pompous piety on a Cinemascope scale”[9]. By this time Dalí’s unchecked commercialism had overshadowed all vestiges of his artistic integrity (he had stooped to doing TV ads for Lanvin Chocolates, designing logos for Chupa Chups, etc).
‘L’elephant-giraffe’ (1965) ⤴
Controversy continued to dog Dalí into his seventies and eighties. As he got older and frailer he became embroiled in forgery scandals. He resorted to signing thousands of blank canvases (possibly he was coerced into this by the manipulative Gala and other ‘hangers-ons’ close to him in their haste to cash in on the famed Dalí name). To this day fakes and frauds of Dalí’s paintings and lithographs (some with real signatures) proliferate around the world with countless numbers of unsuspecting buyers finding themselves lumbered with inauthentic Dalís.
Burning giraffe + women with drawers AKA “Femme-coccyx” (tail bone woman)
PostScript: The Dalí style
Dalí’s art is characteristically laden with ideography, much of it religious (eg, several on Gala as Madonna, one coupling her with Dalí as a monk, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus); often his landscapes are populated by bizarre animal symbols (eg, burning giraffes; elephants and horses with extremely long but thin (stilt-like) legs (The Temptation of St Anthony). Some works border on the pornographic (eg, a dismembered nude girl being sodomised by rhinoceros horns!?!) and there is a onanistic element to some of his paintings (eg, The Great Masturbator). Violent human dismemberment is another recurrent theme (eg, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans). He also enjoyed experimenting with optical effects in his works, like superimposing faces onto landscapes (eg, Paranoiac Visage.)
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* Dalí also did a painting of Warner’s wife, although Mrs Jack Warner is a bit more edgy work than the portrait of her husband.
[1] Dalí & Film, An exhibition of the artist at the Tate Modern (London), 1 June – 9 September 2007 (text by Matthew Gale)
[2] S Meisler, ‘The Surrealist World of Salvador Dalí’, Smithsonian Magazine, Apr 2005
[3] Sara Cochran, quoted in G Goodale, ‘In Hollywood, Dalí’s films are reappraised”, Christian Science Monitor, 2 Nov 2007, www.csmonitor.com. Dalí seems to have possessed that Hamlet-like quality of ‘madness’ – “I am but mad north-north-west … I know a hawk from a handsaw”.
[4] M Vallen, ‘Salvador Dalí – Avida Dollars’, Feb 2005, www.art-for-a-change.com
[5] ibid.
[6] ‘Dali & Film’, op.cit.
[7] R Kennedy, ‘Mr Surrealist goes to Tinseltown’,New York Times, 29 June 2008, www.mobile.nytimes.com
[8] ibid.
[9] R Hughes, ‘Homage to Catalonia’, The Guardian, 13 Mar 2004
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Adil Rashid, currently displaying his bowling wares in the Big Bash League, recently took a five-wicket haul on test debut for England in the UAE. Nothing too sensational there you might say … except that he was the first English leg break bowler to bag a ‘Michelle’ (thank you Kerry O’Keefe!), five wickets in an innings, in a cricket test for 56 years! Its not that the English haven’t had any decent ‘leggies’ in that time – Robin Hobbs, Ian Salisbury, Chris Schofield, Scott Borthwick, have all been ‘capped’ for England – but when they have given them a go in the international arena they have done so ever so briefly, such is the closed mindset of the English establishment when it comes to leg-spinners!
England and Australia have diametrically opposed thought processes when it comes to assessing the value of leg-spinners. Everyone in Australia (and India) remembers Shane Warne’s test debut, 150-1 v India, grist for Ravi Shastri’s mill in 1992. And it didn’t get better in a hurry for Warne, after his first four tests he had taken precisely four wickets! But the Australian selectors, seeing the promise, persisted with Warne – and the rest was (leg spinning) history. The English authorities by contrast are neither brave or bold when it comes to encouraging and nurturing their young leggies, and it remains to be seen if England will persist with Rashid for longer than they have with other promising wrist spinners in the near past.
England invented the leg break and the ‘Bosie’ (the googly) and it is certainly not true that the country and its conditions are incompatible with good leg-spin bowling. Pakistan leggie Mustaq Ahmed in his legendary stint with Sussex took 478 wickets in five seasons of English country cricket (he remains the most recent bowler to take 100 wickets in an English FC season). Sussex won its first ever County Championship in 2003 and went on to win three in five years on the back of ‘Mushy’s’ persistent, penetrative leg breaks and wrong-uns! Indian leg-spinner Anil Kumble was similarly successful in his one (1995) season with Northamptonshire, topping the championship bowling list with 105 dismissals.
Tich in action° ° ° °As to home-grown leggies, going deep into the history, England produced, among others, the most phenomenal, overachieving leg-spinner ever to grace an English ground! Alfred Percy Freeman, as his nickname (‘Tich’) implies, was tiny, 5’2″ (158 centimetres in the new language). Freeman achieved phenomenal success with Kent in the English County Championship in the inter-war years (see below). The attitude of the English selectors to Tich’s “class of his own” performances, emphasises what was to become the characteristic “head in the sand” reaction, a reluctance to embrace leg break bowling and give it a decent tryout.
In the historical record books of First class (FC) and English county cricket the nonpareil AP Freeman’s career include the following highlights:
:~ 3,776 wickets at 18.42 in FC career in 592 matches (6.38 wkts per match, strike rate: 40.9, economy rate 2.69) – second highest all-time wicket-taker to the great Wilfred Rhodes who took 4,204 wickets in 1,110 matches (ie, in 518 more matches)
:~ 304 wickets @ 18.05 in the 1928 English FC season – the highest of all-time & the only bowler to snare 300 in a single season (he also holds number 2 spot with 298 wkts @ 15.26 in 1933)
:~ in all FC matches: Five wickets in an innings, 386 times, & ten wickets in a match, 140 times! The next closest “five for” in an innings tally achieved in FC cricket is 287 instances (Rhodes), 99 in arrears of Tich. The next closest bowler for number of “ten fors” in matches made 91 (Charlie Parker)
:~ The only bowler to take 10 wkts in an innings thrice, the only bowler to take 17 wickets or more twice in a match
:~ Almost half of his 3,776 wkts were unassisted – the batsmen were either bowled, caught & bowled, LBW or hit-wicket
With such startling figures, leg-spinner or not, the selectors couldn’t ignore Tich forever. He was selected in an MCC ‘A’ tour to New Zealand in which he excelled on NZ pitches, followed by a full test tour to Australia in 1924-25 in which he made his debut at age 36. A combination of good, hard Australian wickets and the fact that Australian batsmen were brought up on a diet of leg spin meant that Freeman made very heavy weather of the series. Thereafter the national selectors choose the leg-spinner very irregularly. He did very well against South Africa and the West Indies, but was not considered for the tests against the Australians on either the 1926 or 1930 tours of the UK, despite getting a six for and a five for in the county games for Kent against the tourists. The selectors demonstrated a remarkable lack of perception in not showing a sustained faith in Freeman’s obvious talent and not backing him in tests, especially in English conditions. As things turned out, his record in tests suggest the magnitude of their error in judgement:
In just 12 tests, 66 wkts. ave: 25.86, strike rate: 56.5 BB: 71-7. Five wkts in inns: 5 times, Ten wkts in match: 3 times.
In the very limited opportunities afforded Freeman to represent his country, 66 wickets in tests at an average of 5.5 per match is more than respectable as returns go. In any form and at any level of the game, he was an out-and-out wicket-taking machine!
What accounts for the diminutive, right-arm Kent leggie’s exceptionality? Firstly, he was unswervingly consistent as a bowler … and he improved with age. In the eight seasons after he turned 40 in 1928, he took 2,090 wickets at 17.86, making him the leading wicket-taker in county cricket eight years in a row! Glenn McGrath has been described as ‘metronomic’ as a bowler, but it was Tich Freeman first who whirled them down with unerring accuracy like an automaton for 20 plus years. He commanded fantastic control of line and length. Although Tich was small, he was strong of hand and he had seemingly endless reserves of stamina, going on and on and on at the bowling crease. Freeman loved nothing more than to bowl and bowl and bowl. And he just hated being taken off. Regularly he would open the bowling in county games and bowl right through the innings!
Tich Freeman’s standard bowling strategy was one of relentlessly attacking the stumps. The line of his leg break (his “go-to” ball) was directed towards making the right-handed batsman play at the ball, rather than being able to just let it spin by harmlessly. He had an unorthodox leg-spinner’s grip and tended to not overuse the googly, but had an extremely hard-to-pick top-spinner.
Some cricket pundits, in contrasting Freeman to later generations of bowlers, have tried to explain away or diminish his extraordinary success by predictably referring to the poor state of uncovered wickets in his day. Or to the fact that he sent down such a sheer weight of numbers of balls in his career. It is undeniable that bad wickets were an advantage for bowlers in that era, but in response I would ask what was it, given the even playing field prevailing, that made Freeman so much more successful than his contemporary counterparts? This comparison accentuates the point: in that English season when he took 304 wickets, the entire Derbyshire team in the Championship by comparison took just 324 wickets! The next closest individual county bowler to his 304 victims in 1928 managed only 190 wickets.
And while it was true that Freeman bowled a hell of a lot of balls in FC cricket, 154 thousand plus, the point remains that at the same time he maintained an outstanding career strike rate, less than 41, which is right up there with the very best of bowlers. Tich Freeman was a seriously great English wrist spinner whose fame was largely restricted to his home county of Kent. But for the timidness and blinkered vision of the national selectors in truncating his test career, Freeman’s bowling feats could be as well celebrated and lionised internationally as they are today among the Kent faithful and in pockets of the county cricket fraternity.
In the 1953 film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr Hulot’s Holiday), Jacques Tati introduced the character of Monsieur Hulot to the world of cinema-goers. Over the next 18 years in a sequence of four widely spread out movies, Tati reprised Hulot who became the emblematic face and profile, if not the (audible) voice, of the idiosyncratic Parisian’s cinema. In the features made by Tati between 1953 and 1971 Hulot was the central figure and yet at the same time he was peripheral to the ‘action’ of the story, “the man nobody quite sees” as Roger Ebert described him [R Ebert, ‘Mr. Hulot’s Holiday’, www.rogerebert.com]. No one notices that is, until something goes “pear-shaped” as a consequence of Hulot’s habitual clumsiness (mime-clown Tati’s characteristic slapstick shtick).
▪ • ▪ ‘Mr Hulot’s Holiday’
▪ • ▪
Physically M Hulot cuts a tall, distinctive figure, a sort of “prancing, myopic giraffe” (a reference to his characteristic springy, long-striding gait) as one collaborator notes [Peter Lennon, ‘My holiday with Monsieur Hulot’, The Guardian (23-Jul-2003, www.theguardian.com/]. Another critic calls him “a gangling, spider-limbed gent”. Stanley Kaufmann describes Hulot as “a creature of silhouettes” [S Kaufmann, ‘The Second Mr.Hulot’, New Republic 139(23),1958]. The elongated Hulot silhouette was put to good use in the various film posters for the Hulot movies. Hulot’s standard beige/grey garb, the fedora hat and long-stem pipe, tired-looking long trenchcoat, long pants (not quite long enough to reach his ankles) and umbrella, were all well suited to the dark outline of Tati’s characteristic form. The personality of Hulot is avuncular, benign, friendly, forever curious, but he is also uber-gauche and prone to misadventures.
• • •
Perpetually observing humankind
The storyline of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is, as always with Tati, a simple one. M Hulot visits a resort in the north-west coast to get a taste for himself of the new, post-war passion for spending summer at the seaside. He wanders round with no particular object in mind, just checking out the cavalcade of human ‘wildlife’ that is drawn to the beach resort. There is no plot to speak of, just a series of amusing, whimsical escapades, eg, a ping-pong game in which we see only the figure of Hulot running flat-chat from one side to the other frantically trying to return the ball. The location for Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday was the French seaside town of Saint-Marc-sur-Mer which today has a bronze statue of the man who put it on the tourist map (depicting Hulot in typical stance, tilting forward, observing the human interactions on the beach).
▪ • ▪ ‘Mon Oncle’: Hulot’s ‘penthouse’ loft
▪ • ▪
▪ • ▪ ‘Min Onkel’ (Danish poster)▪ • ▪
Mon OncleMon Oncle (My Uncle) (1958) was the second in the M Hulot series, this time Tati’s disapproving and eagle-eyed attention was directed towards the modern suburban home and mania for consumerism of the Parisian middle classes, willing participants in a Conga line of sheer mindless acquisitiveness. The story has Hulot, living in the city and unemployed, visiting his sister and her family (the Arpels) in the new suburbs on the outskirts of Paris. Hulot spends his days looking after his young nephew Gèrard. Villa Arpel, their ultra-mod house and garden is a geometric monstrosity, designed with an obsessiveness bordering on the pathological! All aspects of the villa are fully automated, everything is push button remote controlled—gates, doors, “weird fish” water fountain, everything precisely mechanised.
Hulot’s sister wants him to adopt their chic lifestyle so she gets him a job at her husband’s company (called Plastak). The venture proves comically disastrous with Hulot falling foul of a ubiquitous and seemingly endless red hose and entangles himself in a caper to try to dispose of it. The plastics factory, like the Arpels’ antiseptic home, is a soulless and sterile environment.
While he’s there, Hulot’s sister tries to match him up with her neighbour, a matrimonial project which is equally doomed to failure. The female neighbour is far too bourgeois in her tastes for Hulot, who is in any case a confirmed bachelor.
In Mon Oncle we are left in no doubt that Tati’s vision of the world sees modern technology as anathema to humanity! The Arpels live in an bland and ugly modernist style home with a pristine, sterile yard. The home’s arsenal of whiz-bang gadgets are not only coldly impersonal but Hulot discovers that their functional effectiveness is not up to scratch. The gate is practically entry-proof, the garage doors malfunction, the small parking space is totally inadequate for the Arpel’s very big, shiny American car, and so on.
▪ • ▪ A replica of ‘Villa Arpel’ in Paris ⟱ ▪ • ▪
Hulot brings his own brand of disorder to the house but this only serves to accentuate the original folly of the project. The Arpel house “designed to trumpet the ingenuity of engineering” succeeds merely at highlighting its lack of functionality and utter impracticality (witness the ridiculously serpentine front path) [Matt Zoller Seitz, ‘Mon Oncle’, 06-Jan-2004, Criterion,www.criterion.com].
Tati is a dab hand at noting all of the “modern inconveniences”(sic) of contemporary Western society. Mon Oncle is a sharp commentary on the way “modern life traps humanity within its contrivances” [James Quandt, ‘Scatterbrained Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] Mon Oncle, Tati’s obra maestra , won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1959.
• • • Hulot and ‘Barbara’ (American tourist in Paris)
• • •
Playtime
An idiosyncratic feature of Jacques Tati’s cinema is its unwavering critical focus on the unrelenting mania for all things modern. With Playtime, the focus turns again to the ultra-mod world—modernity in architecture, shop interiors, in everything—that has come to dominate modern cities like Paris. As always, the plot-line is coincidental, dialogue is incidental. The insouciant M Hulot wanders round the city visiting the airport and various buildings, in doing so he continually crosses paths with a group of gormless, wide-eyed American tourists. Hulot peers inside busy offices to expose dispiriting scenes of workers in their own depersonalised little boxes shut off from human interaction. Playtime is a flawed gem, like all of Tati’s films it has a slow, leisurely build-up but it suffers from being too long—originally around 155 minutes but cut to 124 minutes for commercial release in 1967—still too long and crying out for tighter editing. The film, by a long way the auteur’s most expensive, disappointed many upon its release, especially when viewed against the preceding Mon Oncle.
Although the persona of Hulot is the human thread that runs through Playtime, Tati deliberately does not allow the popular character to dominate proceedings (as tended to be the case in Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle) [Kent Jones,’Playtime’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] putting the focus back on ‘everybody’, ie, the observed cross-section of humanity. Tati eschews the use of close-up shots and the technique of the camera panning in for exactly the same reason. A sub-plot of Playtime follows American tourist ‘Barbara’ whose own meanderings always eventually lead her back to Hulot.
Trademark cute
There are many little gems in Playtime – the signature Tati sight gags like the blissfully unaware Hulot boarding a crowded bus grabbing on to what he thought was a handrail, immersing himself distractedly in his newspaper only to find himself again out on the footpath at the next stop because the mistaken handrail was actually the tall floor lamp of a fellow commuter who had alighted the bus with Hulot still holding on. Or the spiral neon arrow on the nightclub sign which guides the drunk straight back into the “Royal Garden” from which he has just departed … both of these sight gags are pure gold! Playtime represents the zenith, the highest expression, of Hulot’s distaste for the contemporary world of “mod cons” and gadgetry.
‘Playtime’: Hulot and those dehumanising work boxes! ⟱
So much of Tati’s film art is about messing with the impersonality of modernisation which he disapproves of, sabotaging it to bring the dehumanising folly of it into the spotlight, this is his narrative. As Ebert precisely describes it, Tati “discovers serendipity in a world of disappointment”, ‘Mon Oncle’, www.rogerebert.com]. In Play Time, “an obstreperous cityscape whose supposed modern conveniences conspire to trip, bewilder, and ensnare the hapless populace gets violently reshaped as a vast play area” [David Cairns, ‘Jacques Tati: Things Fall Together’, www.criterion.com]. The film, Tati’s first go at a big (wide-screen) movie, turned into something of an epic saga, being eight years in the making!§Play Time was the most expensive French film to that point ever made, in no small measure due to Tati’s insistence on constructing a horrendously expensive mini-city, a set of glass and steel, nicknamed Tativille. To finance the film Tati had to sell his own home and eventually the rights to all his films – a clear indication of Tati’s single-minded commitment to an artistic vision!
Tati’s fifth feature, Traffic (or Trafic in French) was the last to include M Hulot. Traffic’s plot and narrative is as threadbare as Playtime: Hulot is a car designer who invents a new automobile, a gadget-packed camper car, the film tracks Hulot’s attempts to transport it to Amsterdam for a motor show. The trip, as any trip would be involving M Hulot, is incident-laden. Hulot and his companions experience various vicissitudes including breakdowns, customs inspection hold-ups and a multiple car pile-up, in the end arriving at the destination too late for the auto show.
• • •
Finding the funny in life’s absurd
In the laughs department Traffic is a bit light on compared to the earlier Hulot pictures. But that said, Tati films do not create “belly” laughs, no real LOL moments, the humour generated by him is more of a gentler, subtler style of comedy, giving rise to a wry reflection on an amusing situation. There is one scene in Trafic though where the director draws comical comparisons with the Apollo 11 moon mission (happening concurrently with the making of Trafic) with two of the characters mimicking the low-gravity motion of astronauts.
‘Trafic’ (1971)
• • •
The Tatiesque film: a throwback to a lost cinema
The films of M Tati are not everybody’s cup of tea. They tend towards a polarising effect. Many decry the lack of pace and that it appears that ‘nothing’ is really happening. In Trafic, as in all of Tati’s features, he was criticised for the weakness of the dialogue. Tati would have been indifferent to this objection because it was inconsequential to what his (idiosyncratic) cinema was about – to him the visual had primacy, whether it be man versus road, man versus building, etc. [James Monaco, ‘Review of Trafic by Jacques Tati’, Cinéaste, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Summer 2009). As a child Jacques grew up on a diet of silent cinema, Keaton was his idol, but he devoured the work of Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, all the great silent comics. His strain of comedy harked back to that era. As Kaufmann noted, Tati in the postwar period was “the only performer attempting to recapture the immensely more imaginative and abstract comedy of silent days” [Kaufmann, op.cit].
▪ • ▪ Situational humour ▪ • ▪
Entering the cinema from a background as a mime in music-hall also grounded Tati in the art of the visual and the physical. Tati’s films are not strictly silent pictures in that there is (minimal) low-level dialogue. Sounds do play a role but as background, complimentary but subordinate to the visual, the situation humour that was the essence of silent comedies. Stylistically, dialogue in a Tati movie is a device for sound effect [Jonathan Romney, ‘Jacques Tati’s Playtime: Life-affirming comedy’, The Guardian (25-Oct-2014), www.theguardian.com/film]. It never distracts from the central preoccupation of his cinema, observation of the interaction of human nature with the environment.
Life in boxes: Absurdity of modernity (‘Playtime’j
At the time of Tati’s death (1982) he was working on a project for a new Monsieur Hulot film entitled ‘Confusion’ – with its theme to be the obsession of western society with television and visual images. As James Monaco observes, it would be fascinating to have seen what Tati would have made of today’s virtual world, the internet, social networking media and digital devices [Monaco, op.cit.].
▪ • ▪ François (centre) in L’École des Facteurs (‘School for Postmen’), a 1947 short which prefigured Tati’s feature film debut ▪ • ▪
‘Jour de féte’ (1949)
Footnote: Proto-Hulot
Before there was Hulot, there was François. François was the eccentric comic creation in Tati’s first feature, Jour de Fête (The Big Day) (1949). The storyline has François, an over-zealous and maladroit postman (a kind of public servant precursor to M Hulot), who watches a US postal training film and tries to replicate its efficiency in his provincial post office operation. The results however go disastrously haywire. Introducing the theme Tati would return to again and again, the director satirises contemporary society’s slavish devotion to technological progress, especially it’s over-eagerness to adopt every new innovation from America [‘Jacques Tati Facts’, www.biography.yourdictionary.com].
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§ a consequence in part of Tati’s directorial style on set which might best be described as monumentally indecisive
Before there was motion pictures, radio or television in Australia, variety theatre and vaudeville flourished as the form of public entertainment. In the first half of the 20th century two performers in the absolute vanguard of Australian vaudeville comedy were George Wallace and Roy Rene. Both these standout comedy stars of the Australasian theatre, at their career high-point, were extremely well paid. Each had his own distinctive style and persona, as well as particular strengths and weaknesses in the differing modes of comic performance attempted.
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Roy Rene (born of part-Dutch ancestry, Harry Van Der Sluice) was a rival of sorts for Wallace in the interwar musical comedy theatre. Rene’s stage persona of ‘Mo’ and his successful partnership with Nat Phillips as “Stiffy and Mo” was the inspiration for Wallace to form “Dinks and Onkus”. Like Wallace, Rene started in ‘panto’ at 14 as “Boy Roy” in a Sydney production of Sinbad the Sailor. Rene’s popularity grew in musical comedy reviews all around Australia and NZ in the 1920s and 1930s. His theatrical career however was marked by tempestuous relationships with colleagues and proprietors. He broke up and then reunited with Phillips, and moved (sometimes sacked) from one theatre company to another (Princess Theatre, the National Amphitheatre, Fuller’s, Tivoli, Theatre Royal, etc) from one side of the continent to the other and on to New Zealand throughout his career.
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].
At the height of his career the wider public loved Mo’s humour and feted him as a great clown. The typically unrestrained expressions used by Rene in skits became the vogue, so much so that they entered the Australian lexicon. The numerous ‘Mo-isms’ that still colour the linguistic landscape of Australia include such perennial gems as “strike me lucky!”, ” you beaut!”, “strewth”, “cop that, young Harry”, “you little trimmer!”, “don’t come the raw prawn with me” and “fair suck of the sav” [‘Roy Rene’, www.skwirk.com].
Rene as a live performer was a forerunner of what a later generation would euphemistically call “working blue”. His work, especially in the Stiffy and Mo skits was punctuated with risqué humour and vulgar double entendre. One of their most celebrated routines had Mo, chalk in hand, saying to the “straight guy” Stiffy: “why is that whenever I write F you see K” (the audience apparently never got it at the time). How far Roy could be characterised as a “blue comic” is a moot point. A show biz contemporary of his, Bill Moloney in his autobiography, Memoirs of an Abominable Showman, cautions that this was more in the public’s perception than anything actually evident in Mo’s sketches. Moreover, in the light of the unfettered ‘blueness’ of later comics like Lenny Bruce and Rodney Rude, Mo’s ribald smuttiness comes across as very pale by comparison.
Roy as Mo struck a chord with the public partially perhaps because he was seen as being so far from being a hero, more of an everyman, and also because they saw him in the context of the Depression as a battler, an underdog barking back at his so-called ‘betters’ [ibid.]. At the peak of his fame a measure of his popularity were the stacks of unaddressed mail he received from his fans. Letters would somehow find their way to Roy Rene’s home or office with only the iconic, black and white image of Mo’s face scribbled where the address should appear on the envelope!
Inevitably the popularity of Mo led to attempts to establish Roy Rene as a film star. Strike Me Lucky! (1934) directed by Ken G Hall was not successful either critically or at the box office. The medium did not suit Rene who needed the spontaneity of performing before a live audience to feed off and sparkle at his best. The repetition of takes during scenes in movies was also to his distaste [Lesley Speed, ‘Strike Me Lucky: Social Difference and Consumer Culture in Roy Rene’s Only Film’ (Screening Australia), www.tlweb.latrobe.edu.au].
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
Because they possessed very different comedic styles, it is hard to detect any influences Rene and Wallace may have had on each other. Rene, hitting the boards a good decade before the younger man, led to him becoming the bigger star in the late 1910s to mid 1920s. The differences in style and content were quite pronounced: Rene’s speech drew on the broad Australian vernacular, he had an urban type of comedy influenced by the traditions of American Jewish (Yiddish) comedy. Roy/Mo was both raunchy and in-your-face in a way the simpler, more laid-back George/Onkus never was. Wallace was more influenced by the traditions and stories of the Australian bush (his adolescent years were largely spent working in the Queensland bush as a cane-cutter, horseman, dairy farming and the like). One critic has identified the influence of Charlie Chaplin on Wallace’s comedy in aspects like the use of athletic slapstick and the choice of costumes [Byrnes, op.cit.].
Wallace and Rene were gigantic figures in the first half of 20th century Australian variety entertainment, both were quintessentially Australian, both had exemplary timing in their comic delivery. The two plied the same trade but stylistically and temperamentally they were very different vaudeville comics. The two comedians did ultimately have one curious connexion: both men died in the same small Sydney suburb of Kensington, six years apart.
‘Mo Mac’ with another great master of comedy, Stan Laurel
Postscript: I have not included Jim Gerald within the purview of this survey. ‘Diabolo’ Gerald, the rubbery-faced clown, a contemporary of Rene and Wallace, was a theatrical performer who rightly deserves a place in the trio of 20th century Australian vaudeville comic greats. Gerald however differs from the other two Australia-focused comedians. He was more international in outlook, sourcing a large amount of his material during trips abroad, and working overseas extensively, eg, touring South Africa, Asia, North America; as part of the AIF Entertainment Unit in the Middle East and the Mediterranean during WWII; plus starring in a series of cinematic shorts in Hollywood during the silent era.
Hogsback, 18 kilometres from Alice in South Africa’s Eastern Province, is just about the coldest place I’ve been to in sub-Saharan Africa, barring the mountainous Malealea region of Lesotho. In fact it is one of the few places in South Africa where it actually snows!
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)⋄The topography of Hogsback is characterised by dense forests, an extended mountain range (the Amathole Mountains), lush, verdant hiking trails (a veritable hiker’s nirvana) and teeming rivers, magnificent waterfalls such as the Madonna and Child Falls and the 39 Steps Falls, the Arboretum (a garden comprising a wide selection of international trees including a grove of Californian Redwoods over 100-years-old).
⋄In the period since JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books became famous, many acquainted with this part of Eastern Cape have drawn attention to the physical similarity of Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth with the town of Hogsback. Director Peter Jackson could as well have chosen Hogsback for the setting of “The Rings” series of movie epics had he not been a native of a country (New Zealand) with a landscape equally evocative of Middle Earth.
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
⋄Myth-making about the Master Mythologist:
Despite this inconvenient fact, it hasn’t stopped the local tourist industry from milking the supposed nexus at every turn! ‘Lords of the Rings’ themes pervade the town and its surrounds, driven obviously by an effort to exploit the enhanced fame of Lord of the Rings. Tolkienesque references are scattered throughout Hogsback in the names of lodgings, shops and outdoor activities – Rivendell, Gandalf’s Rest, Merrell Hobbit Trail Runs, The Shire, Lothlórien, The Rings Hardware and Bottle Shop, Hog and Hobbit, Away with the Fairies Backpackers, River Running, Camelot Cottages, etc, etc. The association can probably be traced back in 1947 with the establishment of Hobbiton-on-Hogsback, an outdoor recreation and education centre for disadvantaged kids just off the R345 as you come into the Hogsback township. The “fantasy and fairies” theme is underscored in the numerous pieces of town sculptures depicting these motifs.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!⋄Accordingly it is quite feasible that, at the very least, these glowing accounts of the mystical, magic-like countryside provided background material for the physical world of The Lord of the Rings trilogy published in 1954/55. The parallels existing present a strong case to say that the description of the Mirkwood forest in the Rings cycle may conceivably have been inspired from Tolkien having read the war-time accounts of the place provided by his son.
IF you didn’t know it was there, you would drive right past it. In a quiet back street in the Illawarra beachside village of Thirroul … No. 3 Craig Street. For two or so months in 1922, this inconspicuous bungalow with the jokey, alt-spelt name ‘Wyewurk’❂ was home to one of the 20th century’s greatest English-language writers, DH Lawrence. That Bert Lawrence resided briefly in a far-flung part of the world like Thirroul NSW was not exceptional in itself. In the course of his “stop-go” global peregrinations Lawrence lived in over 300 addresses across the world! What gives it import and binds the great writer to this country was that he used this sojourn in the Illawarra to write all but the final chapter of his 421-page novel about Australia, Kangaroo.
⍙ “Valley of the Cabbage Tree Palms”
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After the 1914-18 War DH Lawrence (DHL), opted for a life of voluntary exile, eventually journeying to Australia with his German wife Frieda, the latest destination in a globe-trotting quest by the writer for a peculiar degree of spiritual fulfilment. They stayed two weeks in Perth⊞, before sailing on to Sydney. Lawrence’s initial plan was to live in Sydney for an extended time, however a day trip up to Narrabeen Lakes apparently convinced him that Sydney was decidedly not to his taste. The people with their displays of unbridled, rampant democracy, he found jarring to his sensibilities. He discovered little to enthuse about in the town…in the novel he describes pre-Harbour Bridge Sydney as “loused over with small promiscuous bungalows around which lay an aura of rusty tinned cans” (its fortunate that DHL didn’t pursue a career as a real estate agent on Sydney’s foreshore suburbs). He also rather extremely went so far as to wish that something akin to a tsunami would engulf the city. The Lawrences escaped from Sydney finding refuge in a small, coal-mining settlement 70km south. That Lawrence found a haven from the suburbia of Sydney in a (then) coalmine-littered Thirroul is a choice irony, given his hatred of coalmining, the vocation of his father back in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire.
⍙ The “Pale sea of green glass” at the front of Wyewurk
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Descriptions abound in Kangaroo of the bungalow in which they lived, and of Thirroul more widely. Lawrence evocatively depicts the beach directly below ‘Wyewurk’—which he gives the name “Coo-ee” in the novel—as “the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning … full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells … strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock floor, all wet and sea-savage”. In the thinly-autobiographical novel Lawrence calls Thirroul ‘Mullumbimby’ – presumably he came upon the name ‘Mullumbimby’ on a state map as it’s the name of an actual town in the “hippie hinterland” of north coast NSW. The bungalow Wyewurk/Coo-ee is delineated thus: “The house inside was dark, with its deep verandahs like dark eyelids half closed … overlooking the huge rhythmic Pacific.”
The hastily written and skimpily revised novel Kangaroo itself is not valued highly in the overall oeuvre of DHL by critics or academe, eg, “Kangaroo is little more than an egregious failure” [Macdonald Daly, 1997 Penguin edition of Kangaroo; “a generic gallimaufry with a primarily pastoral focus”, Joseph Lenehan Davis, ‘Place, pastoral and the politics of the personal: a semi genre-based exploration of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo‘, PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1992]. What the novel has attracted recent commentary for revolves around the thesis advanced by Robert Darroch and others – its depiction of a secret right-wing army in Australia which was allegedly planning a coup d’état. Lawrence in Kangaroo seems to have anticipated the advent in the late twenties and early thirties of semi-fascist groups in Australia such the Old Guard and the New Guard.
David Herbert and Frieda outside ‘Wyewurk’, 1922⍙
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In the isolated village of Thirroul—between the sea and the escarpment—DHL found an anonymity and ‘stillness’ that he had craved but had hitherto eluded him. The freedom, artistically, he found in Thirroul, enabled him to write over 3,000 words a day of his ‘great’ modern Australian novel [John Worthen, DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider] . Frieda and Bert left Thirroul and Australia in August 1922 for the US via Wellington, NZ. Settling near Taos in New Mexico, Lawrence completed the final chapter of Kangaroo and hastily edited the book. The serene native pueblos and western ranches of Taos were the next staging post in Lawrence’s lifelong “savage pilgrimage“, his descriptor of the relentless search for a more fulfilling lifestyle than that delivered by industrialised Western civilisation. Lawrence believed that “every continent has its own great spirit of place”. In the course of DHL’s terrestrial wanderings, both Taos and to a much lesser extent Thirroul embodied in their different ways aspects of the powerful life-spirit he was seeking.
⍙ ‘Lawrence wrestling with the Kangaroo on the veranda of Wyewurk’ by Garry Shead
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In the years after the Lawrences departed Australia Thirroul slowly extricated itself from its coalmining preoccupation. Largely, it has remained a sleepy holiday coastal town while building a thriving arts community for local artists and musicians. Wyewurk, bereft of the DHL aura, slumbered back into a cloak of invisibility. It continued to be owned by the Southwell family whilst a succession of renters occupied it. In the 1970s people (some local, some from further afield) started to take a renewed interest in the literary significance of the writer’s 1922 residence. Unfortunately for the growing public interest but hardly surprisingly, the occupants of Wyewurk at the time (a dentist and his wife) repeatedly denied visitors access to the house and grounds.
⍙ ‘Wyewurk’, the Craig Street bungalow
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This situation got worse from the perspective of the DH Lawrence “fan base” after a local real estate agent bought Wyewurk from the Southwells in 1984. The new owner categorically refused any access to the property at all. Lawrence scholars (who would later coalesce into the “Friends of Wyewurk” and also form the nucleus of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia) grouped together to lobby politicians resulting in an interim conservation order being placed on Wyewurk. Despite this the owner submitted plans with Wollongong Council to add a two-story extension to the bungalow (which if implemented would effectively “cape cod” it).
Thus began a protracted period of litigation, the outcome of which saw the Heritage Council of NSW reject the owners’ ‘Pavilion’ plan. The Wyewurk group rallied support for the preservation of Lawrence’s house in its original form from public figures like Patrick White, Manning Clark and Judith Wright, from various national and international DHL scholars, and the local community. Later, support was also forthcoming for its retention on architectural grounds after the architects’ council declared Wyewurk to be the oldest surviving example of the Californian bungalow style in NSW (possibly in Australia) [S Jobson, ‘How we battled to save Wyewurk’, Rananim, Nov 1995, 3(3)]
The Wyewurk saga dragged on for several years more with the community divided on the issue. With all the publicity about Lawrence’s house, the Sydney Morning Herald weighed in with a predictable LCD tag, referring to Wyewurk as “Lady Chatterley’s beach house” [SMH, 29 July 2003]. Submissions to the Commission of Inquiry followed including proposals to turn Wyewurk into a centre for arts activities, but none of this bore fruit. At one point the owner himself is believed to have approached Wollongong Council with a view to the Council purchasing the house. The Council, adopting a breathtakingly tunnel-visioned approach, rebuffed the proposal outright…it’s woeful lack of acuity signifying a real missed tourism opportunity! Despite the building’s literary and cultural significance, the Commissioner ultimately ruled that the owner be permitted to erect a one-story addition to Wyewurk. To everyone’s surprise, in the end the owner decided not to proceed with the approved changes to the bungalow![Jobson, ibid.]
⍙DH Lawrence Reserve
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Wyewurk today is still there in Craig Street, pretty much as it was (the exterior at least) in Bert Lawrence’s time, though more strongly fortified now – given its challenges a minor miracle of survival! The preservationists won, but since sightseers and Lawrence devotees are barred from viewing its lawns, verandahs and the jarrah wood table on which Kangaroo was crafted, it remains something of a Pyrrhic victory. Since the mid Eighties the estate agent/owner has done all he could to block the public’s view of the bungalow through fences, the planting of trees and dense shrubs, a garage and a marauding dog on the property ready to bark at inquisitive and unwelcome visitors. There are no plaques in front of the cottage proclaiming its connection to the great English novelist and poet. The only indication signalling that “Lawrence was here” is 35 metres away in a tiny reserve overlooking Lawrence’s “green glass” Pacific. In late 1998 the Council named the reserve in honour of DHL and installed a commemorative plaque.
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Footnote: the current inaccessibility of the bungalow to DH Lawrence enthusiasts and the ordinarily curious over the last few decades was not ever thus! After the Lawrences’ departure for America, the owners at the time, grasping the significance of their recent famous tenants, kept the house as a sort of shrine for the 20th century literary icon. They maintained the furniture that Frieda and Bert used during their stay, including the table on which Kangaroo was penned! They even kept a visitors’ book for the many literary “pilgrims” who undertook the trek to Craig Street [‘Wyewurk’, (built circa 1911) NSW Office of Environment & Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au].
⍙ Wyewurk with cute, friendly “dangerous dog” sign
Postscript: Lawrence’s visit and the publication of Kangaroo have exerted a profound influence on a number of Australian artists and other creative practitioners in the arts field. These include composer Peter Sculthorpe, Nobel laureate Patrick White, artists Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Garry Shead. Sydney artists Whiteley and Shead set up their easels in the backyard of the adjoining cottage to Wyewurk (with the similarly quaint name of ‘Wyewurrie’) in about 1973 and painted several Lawrence-themed pieces❈ including a diptych of the bungalow where Lawrence penned Kangaroo [Sandra Jobson Darroch, ‘Claws in the Arse’, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au].
꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙꧙❂ the ‘Wyewurk’ theme is extended to the house the Lawrences/Somers fleetingly stay at in Murdoch St Cremorne – which in the novel DHL called ‘Torestin’ (“to rest in”)
⊞ DHL penned a short story here while being simultaneously inspired and frightened by the WA bush
❈ the Shead paintings of DHL’s sojourn are memorably jocular ones, especially riotous is the one (see reproduction above) which depicts Lawrence frantically trying to ward off a frenzied attack from a large red non-metaphorical kangaroo on the back verandah of ‘Wyewurk’, while an unperturbed Frieda serenely admires the view
Throughout the course of Salvador Dalí’s life and career it was increasingly hard to distinguish the artist from the showman-cum-self publicist and exhibitionist. Dalí was many things – artist, sculptor, photographer, clothing & object designer, film-maker, writer and poet … and in his later years a facilitator of fake copies of his own work!
Dalí with fellow Surrealist Man Ray in 1934 ⤴
A further surprise for me at the Tate ‘Dalí and Film’ exhibition was to see how small many of the Catalan’s artworks were. For example, Dalí’s 1931 work (above), the Persistence of Memory (AKA ‘Melting Clocks’), one of his most famous and most referenced paintings, stands at a mere 10″ x 13″, virtually a miniature!
‘L’elephant-giraffe’ (1965) ⤴
England and Australia have diametrically opposed thought processes when it comes to assessing the value of leg-spinners. Everyone in Australia (and India) remembers Shane Warne’s test debut, 150-1 v India, grist for Ravi Shastri’s mill in 1992. And it didn’t get better in a hurry for Warne, after his first four tests he had taken precisely four wickets! But the Australian selectors, seeing the promise, persisted with Warne – and the rest was (leg spinning) history. The English authorities by contrast are neither brave or bold when it comes to encouraging and nurturing their young leggies, and it remains to be seen if England will persist with Rashid for longer than they have with other promising wrist spinners in the near past.
Tich in action
With such startling figures, leg-spinner or not, the selectors couldn’t ignore Tich forever. He was selected in an MCC ‘A’ tour to New Zealand in which he excelled on NZ pitches, followed by a full test tour to Australia in 1924-25 in which he made his debut at age 36. A combination of good, hard Australian wickets and the fact that Australian batsmen were brought up on a diet of leg spin meant that Freeman made very heavy weather of the series. Thereafter the national selectors choose the leg-spinner very irregularly. He did very well against South Africa and the West Indies, but was not considered for the tests against the Australians on either the 1926 or 1930 tours of the UK, despite getting a six for and a five for in the county games for Kent against the tourists. The selectors demonstrated a remarkable lack of perception in not showing a sustained faith in Freeman’s obvious talent and not backing him in tests, especially in English conditions. As things turned out, his record in tests suggest the magnitude of their error in judgement:
Some cricket pundits, in contrasting Freeman to later generations of bowlers, have tried to explain away or diminish his extraordinary success by predictably referring to the poor state of uncovered wickets in his day. Or to the fact that he sent down such a sheer weight of numbers of balls in his career. It is undeniable that bad wickets were an advantage for bowlers in that era, but in response I would ask what was it, given the even playing field prevailing, that made Freeman so much more successful than his contemporary counterparts? This comparison accentuates the point: in that English season when he took 304 wickets, the entire Derbyshire team in the Championship by comparison took just 324 wickets! The next closest individual county bowler to his 304 victims in 1928 managed only 190 wickets.
▪ • ▪ ‘Mr Hulot’s Holiday’
While he’s there, Hulot’s sister tries to match him up with her neighbour, a matrimonial project which is equally doomed to failure. The female neighbour is far too bourgeois in her tastes for Hulot, who is in any case a confirmed bachelor.
▪ • ▪
Tati is a dab hand at noting all of the “modern inconveniences”(sic) of contemporary Western society. Mon Oncle is a sharp commentary on the way “modern life traps humanity within its contrivances” [James Quandt, ‘Scatterbrained Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] Mon Oncle, Tati’s obra maestra , won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 1959.
Although the persona of Hulot is the human thread that runs through Playtime, Tati deliberately does not allow the popular character to dominate proceedings (as tended to be the case in Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle) [Kent Jones,’Playtime’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, www.criterion.com] putting the focus back on ‘everybody’, ie, the observed cross-section of humanity. Tati eschews the use of close-up shots and the technique of the camera panning in for exactly the same reason. A sub-plot of Playtime follows American tourist ‘Barbara’ whose own meanderings always eventually lead her back to Hulot.
Trademark cute
There are many little gems in Playtime – the signature Tati sight gags like the blissfully unaware Hulot boarding a crowded bus grabbing on to what he thought was a handrail, immersing himself distractedly in his newspaper only to find himself again out on the footpath at the next stop because the mistaken handrail was actually the tall floor lamp of a fellow commuter who had alighted the bus with Hulot still holding on. Or the spiral neon arrow on the nightclub sign which guides the drunk straight back into the “Royal Garden” from which he has just departed … both of these sight gags are pure gold! Playtime represents the zenith, the highest expression, of Hulot’s distaste for the contemporary world of “mod cons” and gadgetry.
‘Trafic’ (1971)
Situational humour ▪ • ▪
Life in boxes: Absurdity of modernity (‘Playtime’j
▪ • ▪ François (centre) in L’École des Facteurs (‘School for Postmen’), a 1947 short which prefigured Tati’s feature film debut ▪ • ▪‘Jour de féte’ (1949)
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
Auckland village, above M&C Falls (ECP)
Even before “The Lord of the Rings” movie series some Hogsback locals did their best to capitalise on a handful of tenuous links with the celebrated Lord of the Rings author. The story goes, the ‘Rings’ books were inspired by the magical, enchanting physical form of Hogsback. The proponents of this theory point to the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa (in Bloemfontein, Free State). The thesis loses traction when probed more closely. The famous author and avid philologist left South Africa at the tender age of three, never to return and having not ever visited Hogsback.
The Tolkien Middle Earth connection is often emphasised in print, such as in the following: “The romance of Hogsback, is recognised by reading The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) which seems to capture the special atmosphere of the unspoilt Hogsback forests and of a time when peace will rule the world” [Trevor Webster, The Story of Hogsback, www.hogsback.com].
Talking to the staffer in the Hogsback Visitors Information Centre, she was unequivocally dismissive of the Tolkien LOTR nexus. So the lingering myth clearly wasn’t emanating from the likes of her! She also warned me against buying the primitive wooden toy horses and zebras in the street from members of the local Xhosa community. The street sellers, looking cold and dismal in the freezing conditions, were only asking R2 an animal, but the Visitors Centre lady explained that they are not properly gazed and sealed, making them a prohibited item to export out of RSA. Apparently a local artisan/sculptor had offered to glaze the artworks for the community at minimal cost so that they could charge more for the figurines, but his offer had not been taken up.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
The Hog’s back!
David Herbert and Frieda outside ‘Wyewurk’, 1922 ⍙
⍙ ‘Lawrence wrestling with the Kangaroo on the veranda of Wyewurk’ by Garry Shead
