Links and Elia Kazan
Sep. 30th, 2003 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI'm still being foiled as far as the Angel downloads are concerned, but if I have to wait till the Brits see the season in January (which in turn makes tapes available to me due to great friends recording the episodes), I'm in for a considerable period of frustration. The internet spoils us, it really does.
Meanwhile, l enjoyed some great Farscape fanfic. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
veritykindle kindly pointed out to me, kixxa wrote the John 'n Rygel story (or should that be John/Rygel?), which anyone else who is similarily devoted to the Dominar like yours truly can read here.. Also, Anna S. wrote a wonderful sensitive John pov set during Terra Firma, my favourite season 4 episode, which is here..
I remember watching the Oscars in the year Elia Kazan got his life achievement award. With half the audience remaining in their seats and refusing to applaud, it was probably the most controversial thing during the Academy Awards until Michael Moore. About the best and fairest obituary of Kazan I've read is this one, from the Guardian. An excerpt of interest for the friends of subtext:
But there is more to be said about Streetcar and its treatment of sexual violence. In Blanche DuBois, Williams had written a kind of gay surrogate character - a very refined, neurotic woman, hardly able to own up to her sexual identity. Kazan recognised this - and felt a little left out. He was a raging heterosexual, a man who needed some personal sexual identification in his work, and who often had passionate affairs with his actresses. And so he built Brando's Stanley into a sexual icon, a sweaty, rough Adonis from the working class, a guy in a torn t-shirt, someone who stirred a gay audience as much as the straight. A new sense of bisexuality had been revealed, and it came out of the fruitful jostling of two very different men, Williams and Kazan.
Imo, Thomson has a point about Williams identifying with Blanche ("I don't want realism, I want magic"), and Kazan with Stanley. Personally, what ticked me off about Kazan wasn't that he named names to the House of Unamerican Activities (btw, how come John Ashcroft hasn't reinstated that one yet?), because I live in a country where you had actors and directors who in varying degrees hobnobbed with the Nazis, which save for one or two exception ended ostracized none of them after the war, neither with the audience nor with their collegues. I mean, Leni Riefenstahl died the other week; Kazan's name-giving pales in comparison. No, my perhaps exaggarated grudge with him is due to the incredibly patronizing way he deals with actresses in his memoirs. Case in in point: Vivien Leigh. They disagreed about the interpretation of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Now, of course Kazan had directed the original American stage production, but Vivien Leigh had played the role over a hundred times in London by the time she arrived in Holllywood to shoot the movie. Not unnaturally, she had her own ideas about the role. Mr. Kazan, though, couldn't believe they were her own. He suspected she was secretely directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier.
Lastly,geekturnedvamp in her feedback to my latest effort asked for a song for a Bester vid. londonkds suggested Stars, Javert's credo from Les Miserables. This was one of those moments where I jumped in front of my screen and said "of course"! Can't believe I missed the parallels before. But this in turn lead to some really strange images of Bester and Garibaldi singing duets...
Meanwhile, l enjoyed some great Farscape fanfic. As
veritykindle kindly pointed out to me, kixxa wrote the John 'n Rygel story (or should that be John/Rygel?), which anyone else who is similarily devoted to the Dominar like yours truly can read here.. Also, Anna S. wrote a wonderful sensitive John pov set during Terra Firma, my favourite season 4 episode, which is here..I remember watching the Oscars in the year Elia Kazan got his life achievement award. With half the audience remaining in their seats and refusing to applaud, it was probably the most controversial thing during the Academy Awards until Michael Moore. About the best and fairest obituary of Kazan I've read is this one, from the Guardian. An excerpt of interest for the friends of subtext:
But there is more to be said about Streetcar and its treatment of sexual violence. In Blanche DuBois, Williams had written a kind of gay surrogate character - a very refined, neurotic woman, hardly able to own up to her sexual identity. Kazan recognised this - and felt a little left out. He was a raging heterosexual, a man who needed some personal sexual identification in his work, and who often had passionate affairs with his actresses. And so he built Brando's Stanley into a sexual icon, a sweaty, rough Adonis from the working class, a guy in a torn t-shirt, someone who stirred a gay audience as much as the straight. A new sense of bisexuality had been revealed, and it came out of the fruitful jostling of two very different men, Williams and Kazan.
Imo, Thomson has a point about Williams identifying with Blanche ("I don't want realism, I want magic"), and Kazan with Stanley. Personally, what ticked me off about Kazan wasn't that he named names to the House of Unamerican Activities (btw, how come John Ashcroft hasn't reinstated that one yet?), because I live in a country where you had actors and directors who in varying degrees hobnobbed with the Nazis, which save for one or two exception ended ostracized none of them after the war, neither with the audience nor with their collegues. I mean, Leni Riefenstahl died the other week; Kazan's name-giving pales in comparison. No, my perhaps exaggarated grudge with him is due to the incredibly patronizing way he deals with actresses in his memoirs. Case in in point: Vivien Leigh. They disagreed about the interpretation of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Now, of course Kazan had directed the original American stage production, but Vivien Leigh had played the role over a hundred times in London by the time she arrived in Holllywood to shoot the movie. Not unnaturally, she had her own ideas about the role. Mr. Kazan, though, couldn't believe they were her own. He suspected she was secretely directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier.
Lastly,
geekturnedvamp in her feedback to my latest effort asked for a song for a Bester vid. londonkds suggested Stars, Javert's credo from Les Miserables. This was one of those moments where I jumped in front of my screen and said "of course"! Can't believe I missed the parallels before. But this in turn lead to some really strange images of Bester and Garibaldi singing duets...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Stars
Date: 2003-09-30 05:53 am (UTC)There, out in the darkness,
A fugitive running.
Fallen from grace [...]
He knows his way in the dark,
But mine is the way of the corps...
Hey, someone should turn this into a filk song *g*
But filk isn't even necessary!
Date: 2003-09-30 10:29 am (UTC)Someone really has to do that vid.
Kazan
Date: 2003-09-30 01:17 pm (UTC)I have found your life journal via
Anyway, I want to thank you for posting the Kazan article from the Guardian & providing us with the background material from the autobiography; interesting details which I did not know about. Are his memories worth reading?
I agree with you that Kazan's achievements are not degraded by his political deeds (at least I read you that way); although, on the other hand, one might argue that his appearance before the tribunal was a betrayal not only of the people he worked with burt also of his artistic work.
Furthermore, maybe his work _is_ degraded by his view on women that you point to, and which is, in the end, recognizable in his movies.
But apart from what you have pointed out, I still think he was one of the great American directors (if only because of "On the Waterfront", which is imho an incredible good movie), but maybe he is not among the finest - artistically and morally speaking.
F.
Welcome!
Date: 2003-09-30 11:43 pm (UTC)His memoirs are interesting but make you - or rather, they made me - want to throw them at the wall a couple of times. You need charm to pull off a certain attitude in writing in order not to sound insufferable and while Kazan has passion both on and off screen, charm he never manages.
(As opposed to, say, Orson Welles in any given interview. It's not that Welles has less of an ego or less insecurities than Kazan. It's that he can charm you to find this endearing instead of infuriating.)
Kazan article
Date: 2003-10-01 07:00 am (UTC)Kathy
More about Tennessee Williams than about Eila Kazan
Date: 2003-10-02 11:59 am (UTC)I hope I could explain myself clearly.
Take care