Disney's "Fantasia" turns 75

A journalist from a German news service asked me a couple of questions about the 75th anniversary of Fantasia.  My answers never made it to the article, which had to be filed before my responses landed on the reporter's electronic desk, on November 10, 2015.   

-       Given the climate of the time, what drove Disney and Stokowski to make something as experimental as Fantasia - no narrative arc, unrelated segments, classical music?

-       If the world wasn't ready for Fantasia when it was released, what changed to bring the film into the modern canon?

Disney acts out a scene for Stokowski (right)

The collaboration of Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski, both master showmen of high profile, and passionate about sound technology, led to what was initially conceived as a ‘concert feature’, around Mickey Mouse, the protagonist of a fairy tale set to the music of French composer Paul Dukas, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897).  Disney saw the project first as an experiment in animated technique going boldly beyond the Silly Symphonies and Snow White, a phenomenal popular and critical success in 1937, and then as a means to popularize classical music.

Fantasia was also conceived as a prestige picture, a way of realizing the artistic possibilities of the medium. For that purpose, the German avant-garde painter Oskar Fischinger was brought in to design the opening sequence.  The film was conceived as a musical fantasia - a free development of a given theme – linking a series of eight unrelated segments set to classic pieces by Beethoven, Stravinsky, Bach and Mussorgsky, Dukas, Ponchielli and Tchaikovsky, restructured and reinstrumentalized.

The film premiered on November 13, 1940, in the Broadway Theatre in New York, with a running time of 130 minutes. 

Fantasia elicited violently mixed reviews, and did poorly at the box-office.  Audiences expected a Disney film to be more like Snow White and Pinocchio, and many critics decried the ‘defilement’ of classical music. For others, it provided a new standard for what was termed the ‘harmony of sight and sound’.

By marrying mass entertainment to experimental visual techniques and classical music, including the 20^th century avant-garde, Fantasia was ahead of its time in bridging the gap between popular culture and highbrow art. This distinction has now collapsed: the Ride of the Valkyries sets the tempo for helicopters carpet bombing the Vietnam jungle in Apocalypse Now, and Beethoven is used by Kubrick to foreground the violence of A Clockwork Orange.

75 years after it premiered, Fantasia has secured a place as an undisputed work of art. It is a fitting example of André Malraux’s observation that film is an industry that sometimes disguises itself as art.

Fantasia is a delight to watch, at any age, any time - yesterday, today and tomorrow.  The dainty pirouettes of ostriches and hippopotamus, poking fun at high art at the expense of Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours, never fail to delight the students learning to appreciate the marriage of sound and visuals. And the film is still a great way to show how sentimentality and modernism can be beautifully rendered on the screen.

Documentary portrait: "Dorothy Day, Don't Call Me a Saint"

"In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints."

Pope Francis addressing U.S. Congress, September 24, 2015

Women in Cinema and Television, one of the student clubs at Cal State Northridge, had arranged for a screening of Claudia Larson’s documentary Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me a Saint (2006) a few months ago when Pope Francis mentioned her and Thomas Merton, the contemplative Trappist monk, for their “commitment to social justice, the rights of persons … the capacity for dialogue and openness to God.”

Director Claudia Larson came to the CSUN Cinematheque on October 19 to screen her first “and only film, fifteen years in the making, as she noted in conversation with the students afterwards.  It is a superb and engaging portrait of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the Greenwich Village leftist writer and activist who converted to Catholicism and co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s. Her work and legacy continue to make an impact until today. The Pope’s address to Congress aligns Day’s combination of social activism and deep religious faith, with Francis insistence on looking after whom he calls the ‘discarded’, the ‘forgotten’, ‘the people in the periphery’, seeing in all of them, all the time, the face of Christ.

 The force of Dorothy Day’s personality shines through a documentary that compresses 83 years in less than an hour. The focus is primarily on her work and charisma as seen through the lens of her daughter, friends and colleagues; her many writings, voiced by Rosemary Forsyth; personal and archival materials, including newsreels, television footage and a wealth of photographs. The last shot of the film is the black-and-white photo Richard Avedon took of her in the 1960s, an intense creased face that beckons us to action.  There is no narrator guiding the story, and the chronology of events is not foregrounded.  The result is a polyphony of voices and images, tied by a beautiful score by the director herself, that approach the protagonist as a human being who made the works of mercy the center of her life.

The first half of the film is the weaving of interviews, mostly from the 1990s, to compose a mosaic of Day as a figure of strong presence in the public square for over forty years. In contrast, the second part offers an intimate portrait of Day as a young bohemian in the New York of the 20s, a member of the New York left during the Depression, a single mother, and since 1927 a fervent Catholic convert, who lived the Gospel radically.

It is the task of a different documentary to explore and explain the paradox hinted throughout this film: Day begins as a radical leftist and ends up a committed Catholic, loyal to the teachings of the Church. How did she do it?  In today’s polarized political environment such a journey seems inexplicable.  Larson meets this challenge with expediency, the reading from Day’s 1952 memoir The Long Loneliness.  By founding the Catholic Worker newspaper with Peter Maurin and opening the first houses of hospitality for the homeless and the hungry, Day writes that she channeled her social vocation while searching for intimacy with God.

Using Cole Porter’s Night and Day as a tune without lyrics, emblematic of the thirties, I think that Larson is pointing to the duality that shapes Day’s engagement with the world: a sensitive and artistic nature attuned to glimpses of truth and beauty, put at the service of work, back-breaking work, among the dispossessed, in a life lived in voluntary poverty.

After the screening the director recounted how the film got off the ground.  She knew of the Dorothy Day story since 1991 but was unclear about the format it should take, perhaps a book, or an oral history.  She was a photographer, not a filmmaker. Slowly and mysteriously Dorothy Day guided her steps, and for the next four years she began to shoot interviews and amass archival materials. Around 1995, and thanks to a grant from the Hilton Foundation, she knew the work would be a documentary.  She spent the next eleven years working on it, a labor of love, with setbacks and unexpected twists and turns.  She realized the practical wisdom of Day’s advice about accomplishing any endeavor:  ”Just begin and detach from outcomes”. In 2006, the documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. 

Larson is now preparing to write a book about the backstage of the film, so that she can send – as she ruefully noted – Dorothy to college, that is Marquette University, the Jesuit institution in Wisconsin that holds the Dorothy Day Archive, where Larson will deposit her materials.

The companion to the film is an interactive website, dorothydaydoc.com, where the visitor can further explore the remarkable life of a woman who responded to a profound calling to help others based on the teaching of Christ.

Thanks to Claudia Larson, Dorothy Day -  ‘a saint for our times’ as the Archbishop of New York called her - graced the Armer screening room last Monday evening. And anyone there could feel that she had been really there with us.

Heroes, old and new: "The Assassin", "Karski" and "Bridge of Spies", screened in Los Angeles

All the roads lead to Rome. That is, one way or the other, filmmakers come to Los Angeles as in a pilgrimage. What could be more interesting than viewing the latest work of three disparate directors and hear them talk about the challenges and joys of bringing their films from idea to screen – all in three consecutive days?

It all began with Hou Hsiao-Hsien at the UCLA film school, on Thursday, October 15.It was part of the Taiwanese filmmaker’s whirlwind tour of New York and Los Angeles, to promote the release of his (phenomenal) martial arts film The Assassin, Hou’s first picture in eight years, and Taiwan’s submission for best foreign film in 2015.

 Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, one of the sponsors of the event, introduced the film as an example of Hou’s deftly weaving of humanism and lyricism in the recreation of China past and present. I was enchanted by the film’s fragmented and tactile exploration of how an enigmatic killer becomes humanized by seeing her designated victims as parents of children and metaphorically, overseers of larger communities. It’s one individual’s journey to an understanding of shared humanity. The intricacies of Chinese history ten centuries ago may elude this viewer, but the “transcendental style in film” once discussed by Paul Schrader shines through silk screens, wuxia swordplay, elegant pictorialism and unhurried long takes. What percolates in The Assassin is a sense of beauty that ties nature with the everyday – a similar effect, I thought, to the one created by Yoji Yamada in his samurai trilogy of the early 2000s.  In this rejection of violence as a political methodology, Hou goes beyond the boundaries of China, historical and contemporary, while asserting that the individual, a subject with moral autonomy, matters.

After the screening, Hou recounted to the audience his long-standing interest in the history and literature of the Tang dynasty, which he got to explore in college. He felt it was now or never to make his first wuxia film, working from thoroughly researched sources to stage a story, set in the 9^th century, that looked and ‘felt’ the time period. He shot in celluloid, using natural light, guiding the acting and delivery of the actors to evoke a bygone but real era, grounded in the portrait of emotions and the subjective. As if it needed explanation, the director said that his personal philosophy is ‘do not kill. T he photo taken by my friend and colleague Vivian Umino captures a thoughtful director talking to attentive film students.  An afternoon to remember.

The following day, Friday, October 16, the CSUN Cinematheque hosted an event organized by the Polish Film Festival of Los Angeles.  The film screened was Karski (2014), written and directed by Magdalena Lazarkiewicz, the sister of Agnieszka Holland, seen in the photo on the left.

Made on a small budget for Polish television, Karski is a gem of a film, a blend of fiction and documentary like Warsaw Uprising (2014, directed by Jan Komasa) equally powerful and refreshing in its use of archival material.  It tells the story of Jan Karski, the hero of the Polish Underground in WWII, who brought a first-hand account of the Holocaust to the governments of Great Britain and the United States. 

Jan Karski was also the subject of Claude Lanzmann’s The Karski Report, of 2010, which the director of Shoah put together from materials compiled but not used in his landmark documentary series of 1985. He gives an interesting profile of Karski, then a professor of political science at Georgetown university, in his memoir The Patagonian Hare  (2012). 

Lazarkiewicz’film devised a fictional frame: two young directors, formerly a couple, have been commissioned to make a television documentary on Jan Karski, and are trying to figure out the way to do it. Inside this plot device unfold two distinctive documentary strands:  archival materials on the Polish war hero, and the reenactments of key scenes with an actor playing Karski as an underground emissary: interrogation by brutal Nazi officer, meetings with Polish Jewish leaders and a visit to the Warsaw ghetto, laced with heart-breaking archival footage.  The narrative advances by jumping back and forth from the fictional frame to the documentary threads in surprisingly effective ways. The film changes the color palette, aspect ratio and camera style, and foregrounds self-reflexive techniques. 

 Very quickly we realize we are in 8 ½ territory – a film about the making of a film, where one mirrors the other in its gestation and development. But we are also treated to a Polish Citizen Kane – explicitly alluded to, with self-deprecating humor: Who is Karski?  To this is tacked a historical question, with moral urgency: How relevant are Karski and his message today?  This provides the bridge to connect WWII Polish matters to the political landscape of the country today, marked by the reemergence of nationalism.  Important films about the Holocaust are referenced as well, like Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List and Agnieszka Holland’s recent In Darkness.  This self-reflexive work cannot be encapsulated by a single term: it is neither a documentary nor a fiction film, or even their unproblematic intersection, as Bill Nichols studies in Introduction to Documentary.

Magdalena Lazarkiewicz, a blonde petite like her sister, engaged in a lively conversation with the film students about the formal challenges presented by the subject matter.  She acknowledged a great admiration for Jan Karski, voicing this through the female director in the film. The lack of budget pushed Lazarkiewicz and a close group of collaborators – including her son who scored it  - to make do with three locations, spurring their creativity.  The constraints of Karski-the-film (and those suffered by the actual historical character in German-occupied Poland) mirror those of the filmmaker (even though, as she noted to a curious student, the film was tightly scripted, allowing for dialogue improvisations only during the rehearsal period).

The ending of Karski is particularly moving: after a sequence of violence against squatters in the fictional framing device, that convincingly mixes newsreel footage with a verité-style staging of the action, we see the real Jan Karski in Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem.  He proudly proclaims his identity, shaped by the storms of the twentieth century in Europe: “Jan Karski … a Catholic, a Pole, an American, from now on also an Israeli. Gloria, gloria in excelsis Deo.

 An unexpected contrast and complement to Karski was the showing of Bridge of Spies, Spielberg’s foray into the Cold War era, at the Samuel Goldwyn theatre of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on Saturday, October 18.  The director, the writer Matt Charman, and the production and costume designers came in after the film to discuss it with a young writer from Entertainment Weekly, who was well prepared and kept things moving until 11pm.  From the front row we could see Spielberg, in jacket, tie and athletic shoes, sporting an Apple watch, warmly discussing the film with his collaborators. 

Like Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich and Lincoln, Bridge of Spies tells the  story of an individuals who stands up for what is right, against all odds, following his conscience.  He is not, however, a simple, uncomplicated hero. He is made of the stuff of Western heroes magnificently explored by Ford and Hawks, with whom Spielberg has been carrying a conversation for many years. Tom Hanks is James Donovan, the Irish-American lawyer from Brooklyn that reluctantly agrees to defend Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy played by Mark Rylance (how not to be nominated for his performance of a lonely but steely man who has seen it all?).  A former counselor at the Nuremberg trials, Donovan believes in American exceptionalism, standing up for due process and the law.  What makes the descendants of disparate nationalities Americans, he argues, is the “rule book” called the Constitution.  With this patriotic message in place, Donovan becomes a modern John Wayne  - ‘some things a man just can’t get around’. Donovan is a reluctant hero who comes to admire the resolve of the spy.  And like in Schindler’s List , there is an increasing perception of humanity in the antagonist, however opaque his motivations remain.

The opening sequence is a lesson for our film students: Rudolf Abel is shown three times, simultaneously: himself, his reflection on a mirror and as the subject of the portrait he is touching up.  Voilà the question, asked in purely visual terms: what is a spy? 

The most gripping scenes take place in Berlin, in the spectacular reconstruction of the building of the Wall – which began in summer 1961, but moved here to a bitter winter. The sets were reconstructed in Poland, and the cold seems for real, and so does the cold of Tom Hanks, who like E.T. says time and again that he wants to go home. The drama of the Cold War on individuals and families is played out dramatically – recalling Aristotle’s observation that poetry is more truthful that history.  The brief wordless moment when Donovan observes people shot trying to climb the wall towards the West is mirrored in the last scene when kids playing in Brooklyn, seen from the subway, jumping over fences, undisturbed.

The film takes a turn towards the absurd with the deft intervention of the Coen brothers in the screenplay:  their brush strokes bring in, updated, the zany comedy of Billy Wilder’s Eins Zwei Drei  - referenced in the marquee of a theater in the reconstructed Checkpoint Charlie - especially in the scenes involving the separate negotiations between Donovan, the Soviets and the East Germans.  Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is present in that same marquee, and also in the absurd and sharp dialogue of the Berlin scenes.  Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, another spy thriller, is shyly in the shadows, as is The Spy who Came in from the Cold, two classic Cold War era films that unfold in Berlin.

he film takes a turn towards the absurd with the deft intervention of the Coen brothers in the screenplay:

Spielberg and the young British writer who pitched him the story and was hired to write the screenplay discussed the research and casting process.  Particularly touching was the involvement of Donovan’s son in rounding the profile of a hero whom the writer discovered as a footnote in WWII and Cold War era books.  Spielberg brought into the conversation his own father, who fought also fought in the war and was fond of saying to a young Steven growing up in Phoenix in the 1960s: “We are going to win this war [the Cold War] because we have a better conversation”.  When the director mentioned that Spielberg senior was turning 99 next month, the audience clapped warmly. 

Looking for common threads this past weekend, one comes to mind very quickly: these three films, the result of different sensibilities and cultures, have in common an inquiry about the nature of heroism, and the many connections that tie the historical context of these heroes – a woman in the 9^th century, two men in the 20^th - to the present times. All three, with various styles and narrative strategies, show us heroes that come to their mission as a result of curve balls. And it is all done with the milk of human kindness.

The weekend turned out to be one where unexpectedly all kinds of film connections were made.  Perhaps it would be better to say, like Flannery O’Connor, that ‘everything that rises must converge’.