[Candice Luca Vivid Fantasy
Betty Neyhart
In his production notes to "The Glass Menagerie," which opened on Broadway in 1945, Tennessee Williams called his work a "memory play," and wrote that as such, it could "be presented with unusual freedom of convention."
Williams wrote that because of the "delicate" and "tenuous" nature of his material, "atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part." He urged potential directors to make use of all the tools available to them and not to simply present a "straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks."
"Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
Human beings have an array of senses that privilege certain natural phenomena, but our perception of the world is incomplete. Our vision is limited to a relatively narrow band of electromagnetic radiation in the range between 400 and 700 nanometers; our ears detect sounds only in the frequency range from about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Much of the world is invisible to us, the realm of ghosts and quarks.
What we remember is not what was; we conflate and elide and manufacture details and events that our minds accept as truth. On an emotional level, there is no difference between what we believe happened and what actually happened. For all our attempts at reconstruction, the past no longer exists.
Williams wanted to create what he called "a plastic theater" that took notice of this gap between reality and memory, a new style of drama that involved making precise and intentional choices in all the elements of staging (props, music, sound design, setting, lighting, visual effects) to intensify the action, dialogue and characters presented. He didn't have much use for critics who failed to respect "the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre ... the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design, which ... are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas."
It might be easier for a movie audience to accept surrealist or absurdist elements than a theater crowd; in a play, the actors are right there, trapped in a box with the audience. They are present, 3D and concrete, with no more authority to them than what is granted by the proscenium and stage. Actors in a theater setting are people, doing business before us, carrying on with their imaginary lives.
But the movies explode them, splashing their faces on a wall, far larger than life. A movie is an artificial hallucination, a dream made public. But movies also put us at a remove from the performers.
A movie is not people on a stage, pretending to be oblivious to the watchers in the dark. It is a play of light and shadows and sound confined to a bounded screen. A border exists that doesn't exist in theater, where an audience can impinge upon a play, actors might be distracted or impaired by disturbances in the house. It might also be that a crowd transfers energy to a production, that live theater provides for performer and observer a sense of connection unavailable to a moviegoer or Netflix chiller.
Barring technological problems, a movie plays out the same way every night. When James Holmes opened fire in that Aurora cinema during a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises," Batman stayed right where he was. He didn't hear the screams.
Since Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma" came out in 2018, we've seen a spate of these cinematic memory plays based on the childhood experiences of film directors. A lot of notable filmmakers have plumbed their own pasts. Think of Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," John Boorman's "Hope and Glory," Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants," George Lucas' "American Graffiti," Woody Allen's "Radio Days," Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" and Mike Mills' "20th Century Women."
The filmmaker is presenting us with an impressionistic memoir of experience, building in the now of cinema a vanished but remembered world. The details don't have to be perfect; they just have to feel right. So it doesn't matter that some of the record albums in Crowe's "Almost Famous" weren't released at the time they appear in the film. The reality of the "Almost Famous" universe isn't the same as the actual world.
They exist in the universe that Crowe creates when he imperfectly remembers 1973, in a nostalgic space outside of actual time. He's not going for what Tennessee Williams would call the "photographic" (something a lot of good photographers also try to avoid) but for a poetically true evocation of a time in his life.
In "The Fabelmans," released Nov. 11, Steven Spielberg explores how his upbringing in a devout Jewish family in the 1950s and '60s shaped his interest in filmmaking. In "Armageddon Time," released Oct. 28, auteur James Gray revisits a few months in his sixth-grade year. (In general I like Gray's films a lot. But on this one, I concur with my colleague and wife, Karen, whose succinct review of the film is "it's an edgier 'Leave It to Beaver.'")
Charlotte Wells' directorial debut, "Aftersun," one of the year's best-reviewed films, explores father-daughter dynamics through a collage of memories from the director's childhood vacations with her dad. ("Aftersun," which hasn't opened in Arkansas, is currently unavailable for streaming.) Sam Mendes' soon-to-be released "Empire of Light" had elements of a memory play.
Quentin Tarantino's 2019 opus "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" had many elements of the memory play, especially in the way it repurposed the details of Tarantino's Southern California childhood in service of what was essentially a wishful fantasy. (Is it a spoiler to say that in Tarantino's revision, Hollywood vanquished the Manson Family?)
"Hollywood" was especially interesting because, unlike these other films that focused on intimate personal stories or hewed closely to the agreed-upon historical facts, Tarantino took great liberties with what happened while shoring up his fantasy with vivid and specific details, such as the on-air air checks of actual AM disc jockeys Robert W. Morgan and "The Real" Don Steele.
It probably speaks to me more than some of these other films because my childhood was not dissimilar to Tarantino's. I've watched movies in the Bruin, the Westwood theater near UCLA where Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate watches herself (the real Sharon Tate) in "The Wrecking Crew," a movie in which Dean Martin plays a James Bond-like character named Matt Helm. (My father was a big Dean Martin fan, and took me to all the Matt Helm movies, even though they mighn't have been age appropriate.)
Hemingway once said if you know your subject well enough, you don't have to tell your readers as much. They will simply sense your authority. The more you know about the real histories Tarantino plays with in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," the more you understand what he's doing, how he's seeking to repair the fractured fairy tale that was the arc of the real Sharon Tate. The more you know, the deeper the film digs, the more it hurts.
On the other hand, Branagh's "Belfast" presents a story set in Northern Ireland in 1969 and 1970, at the onset of that 30-year period the Irish call, in their understated way, "the Troubles." I received the movie mostly in an almost academic way until Tex Ritter started singing "Do not forsake me, oh my darling."
The song is "The Ballad of High Noon," and was written for the 1952 Western "High Noon," which came out when my father was in high school. My dad used to sing that song all the time. It was one of a very few I ever heard him sing.
Buddy's Pa (Jamie Dornan) insists, "There is no our side and their side in this neighborhood." But this is a dangerous and probably foolish position to take, and the family's security is further compromised by Pa's having to regularly leave the family to work in England.
There are money troubles, and things between his mother and father that Buddy doesn't understand, and talk of moving away from the street where everyone has grown up. Maybe to Sydney or Vancouver. Maybe to London. Might as well be to the moon, little Buddy thinks.
One of the pleasures the family enjoys is a weekly trip to the movies, which take on color otherwise drained from the black-and-white film. The black-and-white "High Noon" is glimpsed on a TV screen; the soon-to-be emptied streets of Hadleyville echo with the barb-wire cordons of the mixed neighborhood in which "Belfast" is set.
Movies are good for more than simply exploring the ways we were and how we remember them; I don't know that there's a better medium for doing that. A filmmaker can get a lot of mileage out of a candy wrapper if it's the right candy wrapper, specific and rooted deeply in a time and place. What might take a novelist a page to explain can be conveyed in a brief close-up shot, the sort of thing no playwright could signal for without risking being called out for gimmickry.
A movie gives the storyteller control over how the audience enters the story; a good director forces our gaze to where it needs to be in the frame. What might feel silly in live theater might be unquestionably accepted in the dream worlds of cinema.
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