Jean Cocteau: Le Sang d'un poète / The Blood of a Poet

                                                                                                                                              

A nifty little film, less than an hour long: Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète / Le sang d'un poète* / The Blood of a Poet (1930; premiered in France in 1932). I checked out the Criterion Collection version because it restores six minutes as a sort of "director's cut." *(In some cases, Sang [blood] is in caps for emphasis, but in others, not.)

Le Sang d'un poète employs an eclectic mix of techniques, making it a hybrid sound-and-silent film, theatre, visual art, mythlike, dreamlike, and, by all but official name, surreal. What we see on the screen is poetry in motion from a poet's imagination, and a poetic response to external stimuli. As a backdrop, there's the myth of Orpheus and his lyre -- again.   

                                                                                                                                                       

The film gives us a rare glimpse of Lee Miller (1907-1977) in motion, albeit fairly slow motion. (Indeed, in a few of the more lagging silent parts of the film that didn't include Miller in the frame, I felt free to speed the tempo up to 2012 levels). You can see here why she was treated as a Muse by Man Ray, yet also understand why she would move on from that role, too. Within fifteen years, she'd become an accomplished photographer and war correspondent, and at the end of World War II would be in Munich sitting in one of Hitler's abandoned bathtubs for a superbly iconic shot. In Le Sang d'un poète, she plays an armless statue and a mysterious card player, among other things. Costumes for the film were designed by Coco Chanel (1883-1971).

                                                                                                                                                          

Also of note is a Guardian Angel played by Féral Benga (1906–1957) of Dakar, Senegal, a stylized Mexican firing squad and a peephole into "the mystery of China" that involves opium. There is a reclining hermaphrodite in one room, a man in drag on a balcony in the center of a cluster of aristocratic types, and also a kid wrapped in what appears to be chains who flies up to a ceiling to escape harrassment and stays there, making faces.

 

There are statues that come to life, a passageway through a looking glass mirror (above), a demanding mouth in one of the poet's hands (much to his horror), hurled snowballs, what appears to be a silver cylinder flying through a room (think David Lynch), painted masks, glowing eyes, moving pictures and a cow apparently decorated with maps being led by Lee Miller. And that's not all, folks!

Today's Rune: Partnership.   

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Biographie eines Blicks / The Impassioned Eye

Heinz Bütler’s documentary Henri Cartier-Bresson: Biographie eines Blicks / The Impassioned Eye (2003; DVD 2006) takes a non-linear look at the 20th photographer-artist, who makes several "gimlet-eyed" quips. Judging from this film, Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was still mischievous right to the end. It'd be helpful to read at least a summary of his life before watching this, I think.

My notes follow. Most of the phrases come from Cartier-Bresson himself, as translated into English in the original.  

“What patience – that’s what you need. Actually it’s impatience.”

2^nd asst. to Jean Renoir – he showed up and gave Renoir some photos, asked for a job – and Renoir gave him one

Interaction of people with their surroundings

To be a good photographer you just to have live, then life will give you pictures . . .

You have to take pictures because it fills you with life . . .

That’s photography – you have to seize the moment . . . that’s the joy of taking pictures

People in settings

Music and outings, roaming, ever roaming

Simple observation – look

Another photographer says: “a single instant can reveal all the ambiguity of the visible"

Isabelle Huppert – a great photo has a musical feel to
it . . . it’s a little like theatre, in fact . . . I think he’s telling us about himself when he’s telling us about the world

Mexico, China, India, Harlem, Mississippi, civil rights

Arthur Miller: America is a place of extremes

There’s a natural geometry in what we see . . . You feel, you see, the surprised eye responds

Do you see the pigs? They’re interested in everything . . .

Isabelle: He was everywhere

Henri:  eye, mind and heart had to be aligned

Patterns – geometry is the foundation

On Calder: I liked him a lot . . . you couldn’t understand a word he was saying . . .

Isabelle: a moment of truth

Henri: Portraits are the most difficult. Everything is fleeting . . . (example of brief flashing smile on Coco Chanel’s face before she went hard as nails again)

Take care of your [camera] eye

Truman Capote

This moment that comes out of movement

Get close enough to feel something but [remain] detached enough not to get too involved

There’s no law – no rule

Reading Rimbaud as POW during WW2, perennially escaped prisoner in his psyche (and he did finally escape)

Someone notes: he had an innate feeling for politics and international events

Miller: fundamentally a tragic vision

You never know what you’re getting into

Drawing, other art forms into his 90s

Looks at a painting in a museum – he asks, what can you do after this? Get good and drunk

Martine Franck (1938-2012) – her legs attracted his camera eye, among other things

Surrealists, interaction over the years

Memory is so strange. Proust had a lot to say about that

Everything lives on . . .

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Lee Miller: Through the Mirror

"She worked hard for her luck." So observes, aptly, Lee Miller's fellow photographer and running buddy David Scherman in Sylvain Roumette's Lee Miller: Through the Looking Glass (1995). This documentary, running less than an hour, left me wanting to learn much more even than I'd previously read about Miller (1907-1977), who worked at both ends of a camera and with the likes of Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, as well as, during the Second World War, Scherman. During her stint as a war photojournalist, she took shots in and around Dachau and Munich in 1945, and was photographed by Scherman in Hitler's abandoned bathtub as the Third Reich collapsed. 

Fascinating film, thanks in large part to the interest, preservation efforts and observations of Anthony Penrose, Lee Miller's and Roland Penrose's son. 

Here's where to go to see much more -- the Lee Miller Archives: http://www.leemiller.co.uk/

Today's Rune: Harvest.  

Fellow Travelers: The Photographers

Kellie Jones, Lorna Simpson (Phaidon Contemporary Artists, 2002).

Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (2005).

Susan Goldman Rubin, Margaret Bourke White: Her Pictures Were Her Life (1999).

Anthony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller (1988).

Cindy Sherman: The Early Works, 1975-1977. Catalogue Raisonné (2012). Das Frühwerk.

Five über-cool photographers. I dig them all! 

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Luis Buñuel: The Young One / La joven (1960)

With Luis Buñuel's The Young One / La joven (1960), take Gilligan's Island (1964-1967) and mix it with In the Heat of the Night (1965 novel and 1967 movie); or maybe take To Kill a Mockingbird (1960 novel and 1962 movie) and blend it with Robinson Crusoe (1719 novel and 1954 Buñuel movie) . . . and that may give you some idea of this film, which is loosely based on "Travelin' Man," a 1957 Peter Matthiessen story.

Still mulling this one over. The main actors: Bernie Hamilton (some may know him as Captain Dobey from Starsky & Hutch), Zachary Scott, Key Meersman, Crahan Denton and Claudio Brook. 

The setting: a small island off the coast of segregated South Carolina. Ewie (Meersman) attends to a couple of shacks, a colony of bees, a flock of hens and a scrawny pet deer tied to a rail. Her boozing grandfather (Pee-Wee) has just died, leaving her with Miller, the island's gruff game warden and huntsman who almost immediately covets her. Traver (Hamilton), a clarinet player from the North, has arrived on the island by boat, fleeing a lynch mob. Jackson (Denton) arrives separately to inform Miller of some rich folks' plans to develop the island. That's quite a set up!  Conflict and action tumble forth through the scrim of race, gender, class and language.  An added kicker: both the principal men are American veterans of the WW2 Italian campaign. Add in a minister, the Reverend Mr. Fleetwood (Brook), and even a "golden key" baptism and presto, a compelling combination of mythology, primal energies and realism that may still make some people nervous fifty plus years later. 

Today's Rune: Signals.      

Journey to the End of the Night

Today, besides Memorial Day for the war dead, there are many birthdays to honor. Given the climate of the times, I'll briefly showcase Louis-Ferdinand Céline (b. Destouches, 5/27/1894–7/1/1961). When I teach the Great War and the 1920s every so often, students are assigned Journey to the End of the Night (1934) / Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), Céline's seminal autobiographical novel set during WWI and the 1920s, and ranging from France to Africa, New York City to Detroit, and finally back again to France. To me, it is a key work of art. Céline observes and questions everything, yet soldiers on despite a very dark outlook. The novel remains vibrant and relevant; after all, not much has essentially changed in human behavior, despite scientific and technological changes since its publication. The question is: how does a person build and maintain a meaningful, satisfying life in this world?

Journey to the End of the Night has had a tremendous impact on other writers. Charles Bukowski reportedly declared it the best book written in the past 2,000 years. Existentialists like Sartre and Camus loved it, Henry Miller absorbed it, the Beats read it, and any writer skeptical of the Iraq War and the so-called "War on Terror" would probably like it, too -- or at least those who enjoy following a dispeptic iconoclastic anti-hero on his picaresque way though life, griping and carping all the way.

The sequel is Death on the Installment Plan (1938) / Mort à crédit (1936).


At some point I'll write more about the Detroit section of Journey, Céline's main character Bardamu's work at the Ford factory and romance with a prostitute.

Birthdays: Amelia Bloomer, Wild Bill Hickok, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Destouches), Dashiell Hammett, Vincent Price, John Cheever, Christopher Lee, John Barth, Harlan Ellison, Lee Meriwether, Siouxsie Sioux (Susan Janet Ballion).

The Time of the Assassins

When William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac were boys, Henry Miller was living in Paris, sleeping with Anaïs Nin, and writing Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1934). As the rest of these American characters slowly kicked into gear, Miller left Europe and its Nazi menace, returned to his native United States, and then painted and wrote many more books, including The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), one of my favorite of his many skewerings of modern America.

Henry Miller doesn't quite fit into any categories. He wrote about whatever he felt compelled to write about, blending fiction, memoir, visual art, poésie and musings much like many of today's bloggers.

Married five times and doing mostly whatever he wanted to, it's no wonder one of his biographies is called The Happiest Man Alive (Mary V. Dearborn, 1991).

In addition to enjoying himself along the way, Miller and his work broke new ground in American letters and law. Though Tropic of Cancer had been published in France in the 1930s, it had been treated in the USA as underground literature; when Grove Press published it in 1961, it became a cause célèbre pitting obscenity laws vs. artistic value. In this case, literature won and Puritanism lost.

1964 loosened up the publishing industry and worked in tandem with the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and, subsequently the women's rights movement, the environmental movement, and the gay rights movement. I'm sure the editors of Playboy, etc., didn't cry over the results, either.

What Miller shared with Hank Bukowski was belief in himself and his abilities. Or as a Ukrainian friend of mine put it a couple of years ago about what other people thought of her or her writing, "Could give-shit." Or put yet another way: Write on. In the long run a wise philosophy, indeed.



Today's Rune: Growth.

Viva Henry Valentine Miller (12/26/1891-6/7/1980)!

UFOria

John Binder's UForia is a fun little movie. It's another one from the film cycle of the late 70s and early 80s, questioning, musing, and amusing, before addlepated Ronald Reagan declared it was "Morning in America" again, and people believed him. Anything, I guess, was better than Jimmy Carter-diagnosed "malaise." Which may be one reason why UFOria wasn't released in 1981 when it was supposed to be. It took another four years to see its way to American movie screens, and even then on a small scale. As far as I can tell, it was just released in Germany for the first time in 2006, and has yet to be released on DVD. Yet it really is worth seeing.

What UFOria gives its audience is an ensemble of well-rendered character performances by Cindy Williams, Harry Dean Stanton, Fred Ward, and supporting cast. The setting is the milieu of the late 70s American West, a mix of desperation, hope, UFO sitings, New Age wackiness, free enterprise, and petty swindling. As Ward's Sheldon character says once, "gang's all here." And they are.

Arlene (Williams) has visions and dreams of a pending alien rendezvous, and feels her calling to be a latter day Noah. Sheldon falls in love with her, against his usual love-and-flee nature. Brother Bud (Stanton) is a small-time version of Ted Haggard, with an eye on making cash from revival shows and other enterprises. He's more old school than Haggard -- he likes the ladies and booze, not crystal meth and gay massages -- but they use the same swindling techniques. Bud is helped by Brother Roy (Alan Beckwith) and occasionally, by Sheldon. Brother Bud contemplates how he can exploit Arlene's growing popularity among fellow believers, and Sheldon has to deal with the conseqences of the resulting conflict of interests. Meanwhile, there's been a reported alien abduction -- are the UFOs really aliens about to land?

Uforia includes a fine secondary cast and a well-matched soundtrack that includes Waylon Jennings (Sheldon fancies himself a Waylon cowboy rambler type), Roger Miller ("When Worlds Collide" and "Euphoria," from which the title is derived), Brenda Lee and John Prine.

Today's Rune: Movement.

Eyes on the Skies (III).

The Hotel Chelsea

Along with Leonard Cohen, first we’ll take Manhattan. Set up headquarters at The Hotel Chelsea, otherwise known as The Chelsea Hotel.

For anyone who really loves the arts and wants easy access to a large culturally-packed chunk of the city at a reasonable price, it’s worth checking out their website. This is not a luxury hotel, but it is a working one, with long-term residents and reasonable amenities (like a refrigerator and coffee maker). I love it for its low-key ambience, excellent location and intense history, among other things.

Here’s a sampling of people who’ve stayed (and created) in The Chelsea time-space intersection:

Sarah Bernhardt; Mark Twain; Edgar Lee Masters; Hart Crane; Henri Chopin; Thomas Wolfe; Édith Piaf; Frida Kahlo; Diego Rivera; Dylan Thomas (until the end); Nelson Algren; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Julius Robert Oppenheimer; Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend); Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir; Willem de Kooning; Jasper Johns; Vladimir Nabokov; Arthur C. Clark (drafting 2001: A Space Odyssey); Stanley Kubrick; Shirley Clarke; Arthur Miller (After the Fall); Rebecca Miller; Tennessee Williams; Gore Vidal; Brenda Behan; Brion Gysin; William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch); Jack Kerouac (On the Road); Bob Dylan (Blonde on Blonde); Bob Neuwirth; Edie Sedgwick; Mary Woronov; Brigid Berlin; Nico; Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix; Grace Slick and The Jefferson Airplane; Leonard Cohen; Joni Mitchell (“Chelsea Morning”); Kris Kristofferson; Jane Fonda; Donald Sutherland; Dennis Hopper; John Cale; Sam Shepard; Patti Smith; Robert Mapplethorpe; Iggy and the Stooges (“We Will Fall” – Room 121); Sid Vicious; Nancy Spungen; Dee Dee Ramone; Grace Jones; Miloš Forman; Uma Thurman; Ethan Hawke (Chelsea Walls); Gaby Hoffman.

Though no comprehensive history of the place and its guests has yet been published, there's Chelsea Horror Hotel (2001) by Dee Dee Ramone and the upcoming Chelsea Hotel Manhattan by Joe Ambrose, to be made available on February 1, 2007 (cover pictured above).

Don’t confuse this Hotel Chelsea with the London version or with Elvis Costello’s bitingly great song, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea.”

I most certainly do want to go back to The Chelsea.

Hotel Chelsea
222 W 23rd St
New York NY 10011
Telephone: (212) 243-3700
Fax: (212) 675-5531

Today's Rune: Growth.

Bon voyage!

Back in Black

Oh, man, I rolled back into town in a rented P.T. Cruiser just in time to teach about Mary Gaitskill and Alexie Sherman and the "elements of fiction." Great stuff, especially when you're not quite fully awake! I also teach Raymond Carver, though not to the extent that full-timers can and do. As far as "symbols" and all that appearing in a nearby blog,* all I can note is that I agree with the people who say most symbols come to life in an organic or holistic, perhaps subconscious way. I suppose there are some artists who deliberately create symbols and symbol systems, but I can't think of too many in the modern writing world. Nathaniel Hawthorne, maybe; in more recent times, maybe Vladimir Nabokov and a few other tortured authors -- I wouldn't be surprised with Mary Gaitskill, either, but there's a difference between images and imagery and symbols and tropes, isn't there? The darkly funny image of the "tiny, smiling Daddy" that gave Gaitskill a story title is an image, isn't it? Anyway, it's too esoteric and academic a subject to fight that one out with any gusto.

Instead, how about more music? I listened to quite a mix coming and going, mostly to stay awake and alert for eleven or twelve hour jaunts. Waylon Jennings live is always a treat! His "outlaw" style reminds me of Wichita-Lineman's thoughts about how mainstream country tends to bind up into sappy, easy (to some ears) listening formulas -- Waylon was rarely like that, even as he aged and slowed down some, and I'm glad there's Hank Williams III now fighting the good fight. I was really sad the day Waylon died, not much before June Carter and Johnny Cash. Got to see him play in North Carolina and he was fabulous. Love that deep voice, his what-you-see-is-what-you-get rambling man attitude. The time he and Johnny lived together must have been something else.

On the way back from New Britain, I stopped for fuel along I-80 near mile marker 185 and had to get out of the way of three Amish buggies -- followed by twelve motorcycles. For a minute I thought I'd stumbled across a remake of Easy Rider, the scene where one guy is shoeing a horse and the other is fixing his hog! Or that surreal bit in The Man Who Fell to Earth where the Bowie alien can see a horse and buggy in the past while driving on a modern road (something about being able to see through the time barrier). It was weird -- plus throw in a Civil War monument and lavish cemetery in the middle of nowhere and you have quite an interesting crossroads, a town with no name that I could see, though there was a St. Patrick's church across from the graveyard.

Life seems more precarious on the road than I'd normally like to think it is. At a stop in Ohio, a frazzled young woman ran up to me and asked what to do when she got to the next toll booth -- her ticket had flown out the window on the highway and she was worried they'd arrest her. Homeless people in small towns and big cities, chats with various people worried about the next merger or downsizing, the price of fuel and food and everything else, made clear the tenuous socio-economic status of many people out there, paycheck to paycheck at best and no paycheck at worst and often no health insurance or any other insurance, either. It all blended together with my little driving soundtrack, Roger Miller's "King of the Road," Johnny Cash and "Busted" and "rich folk probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars" and Johnny Lee Hooker's "No Shoes" (one of the most pitiful songs about a family's destitution I've ever heard) and his hilarious yet heartbeaking -- beacause so on the money -- song, "House Rent Boogie." My neighbors were apparently so unable to meet their bills, they packed up and took off for parts unknown just the other day right before I left. House rent and "electric bill" parties might make a comeback before we know it. Come to think of it, Stephen Graham Jones has an excellent story about an "abortion sale" in his recent Bleed Into Me collection, and I don't think he's making it up. Raymond Carver, of course, is another king of the down and out. I'm not one to rank stories or any other kind of art forms, but here are some of my faves (I love his poetry, too, found in All of Us):

What's in Alaska?
Are These Actual Miles?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
So Much Water So Close to Home
Vitamins
Where I'm Calling From
Feathers
Cathedral
Boxes
Intimacy
Menudo

As for Gordon Lish's role as editor and mentor, yadda yadda yadda. I'm an editor (i.e., I edit things), and I see the role as mostly like brushing off lint from a beautiful dress or a snappy suit. The writers and the poets -- they do the really hard part, the Bataan Death March, the delivery, the creation. Even with Lish, a coach-athlete comparison is going too far, I suspect. Either way, maybe we'll learn more when Maryann Buck Carver's What It Used to Be Like : A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver is on the shelves on or around July 11, 2006. Can't wait!

Coming in off I-75, Detroit sparkled from a distance. I felt like gliding in on a magic carpet, but the P.T. Cruiser did just fine. Back on the ground, back in black, Ciao, Detroit!

(* www.michellespells.blogspot.com )

A Basket Full of Kisses for a Basket Full of Hugs

All of us but the most saintly probably have at least a touch of evil in us. But there is a threshold that most of us mercifully never reach. Such is not the case with the criminally insane psychopath. On Good Friday, authorities in a Purcell, Oklahoma apartment complex found the body of Jamie Rose Bolin, a ten-year old girl, in a bedroom closet rented by 26-year old Kevin Underwood. The man apparently intended to butcher and eat her as human shish kebab.

What makes a man in our society want to do this? What impelled Underwood to 1) want to do it; 2) think it was a good idea; 3) plan to do it; and 4) attempt to carry out the crime? Could anything be more heinous? Probably, but this is about as evil as it gets on an individual human scale. Obviously, Underwood must be removed from society and dealt with appropriately. Most adults would probably advocate for or acquiesce to the death penalty in this and similar cases.

Recently, I watched The Bad Seed (1956), which I’ve seen twice before over the years. Based on the William March (1893-1954) novel of the same name (first published in 1954) and the subsequent Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) play, the film explores the issues of what makes a person – of any age or either gender – evil. The answer is left to the audience, but a strong case is made for genetic moral deformity. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy (1900-1987), the action and character development closely follow the book and play (except for the ending, which was dictated by then-current film codes); many of the same actors worked in both show versions.

Rhoda Penmark (played brilliantly by Patty McCormack, who now incidentally acts as Liz Le Cerva, Adriana’s mother on The Sopranos – see “Long Term Parking,” 2004), is the Bad Seed. Through much of the movie, she frenetically plays Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune” on her piano. Only eight years old, she has already developed a full case of greedy and maniacal narcissism. Quite adept at charming adults, she is a budding psycopath who is willing to kill anyone in her way to get what she wants. She plays “princess” games with her father and family friends; particularly creepy is her little game of a basket full of kisses for a basket full of hugs. What makes this black and white film so effective despite its theatrical contrivances and stark shadows is the weird mix of subtle humor, pure evil, and the moral dilemmas of perplexed "normal" adults.

Without going into the whole plot, let’s just say that what Rhoda wants, Rhoda must have. When her father Kenneth, about to leave for a military assignment, promises to his wife Christine that he’ll call and write often, Rhoda, in a princess dress and pigtails, responds: “A special page for me?” Kenneth melts and assures her special pages and all his love. Husky voiced Christine seems haunted and troubled even before he leaves. “Oh, four weeks is a long, long time,” she says. Indeed, she is right.

Enter a large and darkly humorous dose of Freudian psychology in the guise of Monica Breedlove, the matronly upstairs neighbor and apartment owner who lives with her brother Emory. She is delighted and intrigued by Rhoda, noting above Christine’s objections that Rhoda plays by her own rules. Monica, amid and despite all her giddy and modern ideas about psychology, vitamins, and sleeping pills, dotes on the evil little princess. “I have a surprise for you,” she says. Rhoda immediately responds: “Presents?” Monica’s interaction with Christine and Rhoda is fascinating: she treats the mother like a child and the child like a young protege.

Enter Reginald Tasker, who studies the criminally insane. Eventually, he explains one theory of the genetic transmission of evil, in this case skipping one generation. “It’s as if these children were born blind,” he says. From early childhood, they are “bad seeds, and nothing can change them.”

There is much in the story about “breeding” (developed with irony and wit), which brings us to the apartment’s groundskeeper and handyman, Leroy Jessup. Monica Breedlove early on posits that Leroy “has the mind of an eight year old” – which makes him the perfect foil for Rhoda (he is one of the first to figure her out, as he is a bit touched himself). Leroy’s interactions with Rhoda are hilariously creepy.

The question remains open: how much are a person’s actions dictated by nature, and how much by nurture? And why, according to most empirical facts, are males more likely to commit atrocious acts than females? Even the method of killing usually differs according to gender, with males using extreme physical violence, females employing more subtle methods like poison. Interestingly, the same goes for methods of suicide. As Christine posits at one point: “Something to do with hormones, I suppose.”

The Bad Seed is a classic. Not quite as good in execution as Arsenic and Old Lace, the Frank Capra film (released in 1944) adapted from Joseph Kesslering’s play, or as clever as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), it nonetheless carries similar cultural freight and explores some of the same kinds of social mores juxtaposed against the criminally insane. I love how in The Bad Seed the audience can glimpse the social etiquette of the 1950s, when men knew to take their hats off indoors and hosts immediately offered drinks to their guests. It would be nice to see such etiquette and hospitality restored.

Meanwhile, be careful out there. There are a lot of crazies in the world, and evil is everywhere. In the words of Arthur Miller, attention must be paid.

Peace be with y'all. Knuckle up and guard your grills.

Cleaning up in Hitler's bathtub: a snapshot of Lee Miller

Here's another strong candidate for biopic movie treatment, and one could start anywhere. What a life! Lee Miller (April 23, 1907-July 27, 1977) managed to work among crazed and feverish artists in the 1920s and 1930s and as a war correspondent during the Second World War -- and still outlived such later-starting luminaries as Anne Sexton and Diane Arbus. Though her life was every bit as brilliant, unconventional, and dangerous as theirs, she must have had a stronger survival instinct -- or better luck.

In her twenties, she set off for Europe, modeled for Vogue, and plugged into the Surrealist movement, electrifying many of its key artists with her intelligence and striking good looks. She took up with Man Ray for about three years before going independent.

I recall thinking how cool Miller was in a documentary film of the period -- despite Man Ray's maniacal attempts to control her. There's something to the feminist charge that Man Ray seemed to enjoy creating violent images of women; indeed, women sometimes appear in his pictures as lacking certain body parts. Creepy, if aesthetically striking -- not unlike David Lynch's later recurrent visions. But let's make it clear: despite Man Ray's attempts to subdue her, Lee Miller was an exceptionally good photographer on her own, and will certainly be raised in stature over time.

Two recent books explore her life and work, and I recommend them both:

Richard Calvocoressi, Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (New York:
Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2002)

Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Miller split from Man Ray in 1932 and escaped to Manhattan; she married Aziz Eloui Bey, a wealthy Egyptian, in 1934 and left him in 1939. As the war loomed, she moved to London and lived in an open relationship with English art historian and poet-painter Roland Penrose, who agreed to let David Scherman, another boyfriend, live with them, too. Technically, she remained married to Bey until 1947.

Under contract with Vogue, Miller photographed life in England during the Blitz; then became war correspondent for Life and was on hand for the liberation of Paris and subsequent liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Scherman was with her when she took a bath in one of Hitler's bathtubs in Munich on April 30, 1945 -- the very day of Hitler's suicide in Berlin. A picture Scherman snapped of her in the tub adorns the back cover of Carolyn Burke's biography.

After the war, soon after legally divorcing her first husband, Miller married Roland Penrose and had a son with him in her early forties. She continued her influential career in photography through the 1960s.

Miller's photographs -- the ones I've seen -- concentrate on people and their faces. Shots of Nazis who've committed suicide near the end of the war are horrifyingly effective. Her self-portraits are lovely, and her portraits of artists as varied as Picasso, Bob Hope, and Dylan Thomas (leaning back on a chair, cigarette in hand) are excellent. Her wartime series include many incisive shots of "common people" in various contexts.

Remember Lee Miller! And adieu for now. . . . .