close up - Monoskop

THK CONTRIBUTION or H.D. 113
slight modifications (if your youth happens to be a maiden) of its last party frock. A
judicious arrangement of a simple headband, for example, may transform Mary Jones
into an Isthmian Calliope or young Tom Smith into Thessalian Diomed.
This is partly what I mean by 'restraint', an artistic restraint that does not previsualise
a Helen, an Andromeda, an Iphegenia, a Diomed, or a young Hercules as
antiquated stage or ballet types done up in henna-ed wigs. Types approaching the most
perfect of the pre-fifth century vase paintings and the most luminous of pre-Periclean
sculpture are to be found, I am certain, among the unexploited. I have no quarrel with
the professional as professional but with the professional in one art pretending to know
everything about another art of whose very existence he is ignorant. Scholars should
be brought in on this. Walls should arise if, for example, Troy-walls must arise, that
are either exact in technical detail or else that are suggested merely, as I have earlier
indicated by a few great stones. And so on. It is preconceived ideas that destroy all
approach to real illumination. What do you know of beauty, of life, of reality should be
the first questions that a manager or producer asks his scenic artist. Not what was your
job in New York, Chicago, Brixton, or Hollywood. So with the costumier. Begin at the
beginning. Don't begin in the muddled middle. Our classic ladies of the screen are so
often reminiscent of the spirit that led the Bernhardts and the Duses of the period to
appear in crinoline when playing Phaedra. We want to do away with the crinolined
Phaedras of this latter day and get back to stark reality.
That is where the beauty of the human body as the human body should have some
sort of innings, but will it? Simplicity, restraint, formalisation are all Greek attributes,
Hellenic restraint and Hellenic naturalisation that never saw the human body frankly
other than the body of its deity. God made man, we are taught from our earliest days,
in his own image. Well, let's up then and teach our teachers, our great-aunts who
heard us our catechism that we do believe in God and do believe in beauty. Get away
from all this broncho-chest-muscle business. Why can't some girl or boy just walk
on, in a fleecy peplum if you want but somehow just be the thing, do the thing with
no exaggeration of sentiment such as we were treated to by Diotima in that nightmare
(to me) Heilegeberge (Wrath Of The Gods). Mountains are classic, the sea, sand, and
the really charming grace and agility of Tom Jones when he leaps on a crowded City
bus. Haven't you yourself noticed it? Untrained yet unsullied movement should merge
with professional power and tact. The screen is the medium par excellence of
movement - of trees, of water, of people, of bird wings. Flowers open by magic and
magic spreads cloud forms, all in themselves 'classic'. Though, on the other hand,
the most ornate back parlour crowded with gimcracks can represent 'restraint' if the
mind presenting it has its own intense restrained unit of idea. Take Greed as an
example of the classic mind at work upon ornate exaggeration of detail in a sordid
modern tenement atmosphere.
Here is my point and my contradiction; the over elaborate tenement detail of Greed
struck a far more classic note than those sentimental German slow-ups of Diotima
doing bare-foot dancing on an uncomfortable slab of sea rock. The classic then, coming
down to dots, is a point of view and 'restraint' is a classic virtue which means simply
tact and intuition and a sense of the Tightness and the fitness of things in their interrelation.
Diotima dancing on the mountains was so simply silly. With all its over