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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ELIA KAZAN, AN ACTORS DIRECTOR

Director Elia Kazan, left, works with Marlon Brando on the 1954 movie "On the Waterfront." (Sony Repertory / December 20, 2004)

By Susan King

February 17, 2010

Elia Kazan was one of the consummate filmmakers of the 20th century, directing such classics as 1951's "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1954's "On the Waterfront" and 1955's "East of Eden." He won three Oscars, five Tony Awards and four Golden Globes.

Actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Patricia Neal, Terry Moore and Andy Griffith blossomed under his direction. The actors who worked with him adored -- and still adore -- him.

But not everybody adores him, because of his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, when he informed on eight of his friends from his Group Theatre days in the 1930s who, like him, had once belonged to the Communist Party.

When Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1999, four years before his death, the wounds from his testimony opened once again.

Film historian and Brooklyn College professor Foster Hirsch hopes people can put aside their political feelings toward Kazan to explore the brilliance of his talent.

"I think his films from the 1950s, the good ones, are the best-acted films I have ever seen," said Hirsch. "I don't think there is an expiration date on this great acting. 'Baby Doll' and 'On the Waterfront' are like the best-acted films ever made."

Both of those movies are included in the American Cinematheque's "Waterfronts and Streetcars: An Elia Kazan Retrospective," which begins Thursday and concludes Sunday evening at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

"He created virtually a new acting style, which was the style of the Method," Hirsch said of Kazan. "The Method allowed for the actors to create a great depth of psychological realism. It just went deeper than acting had done before."

Hirsch will be conducting discussions with actors from Kazan films at each program, which opens Thursday with 1957's dazzling "A Face in the Crowd," starring Griffith in his film debut as Lonesome Rhodes, an Arkansas derelict who becomes a TV sensation while crushing everyone around him. The second feature is the rarely seen 1960 drama "Wild River," with Montgomery Clift as a Tennessee Valley Authority representative who comes to a rural area to build a dam.

Neal, who co-stars in "A Face in the Crowd," is scheduled to be on hand to talk about the film. Kazan cast her (she portrays the small-town radio personality who discovers Rhodes) after directing her in a scene at the Actors Studio in New York.

"He was very good," Neal recalled. "He was an actor and he knew how we acted. He would come and talk to you privately. I liked him a lot."

Moore goes so far as to call him her best friend. The two became close when she played the feisty daughter of an Eastern Bloc circus manager in 1953's "Man on a Tightrope," which screens Friday, along with Kazan's Oscar-winning masterpiece "On the Waterfront," for which Brando won his first Oscar.

When Moore arrived to meet Kazan in New York for the audition, "I was just in jeans and a flight jacket. I went into the interview and all the other girls were all dressed up in their little cotton dresses. Kazan walked out into the ante room and said, 'You, come here.'

"We went out the door and we walked up and down the lot. He said, 'What can you do?' My agent had met me at the airport and told me the character rides horses and she's real mean. So I said, 'I can fly. I can break horses and I'm real mean.' "

Kazan hired her on the spot, Moore said. "He made you feel better than you thought you could be. I never had another director that ever touched him. I was spoiled for life."

Baker is expected at the Cinematheque on Saturday for the screening of "Baby Doll," for which she received an Oscar nomination for her seminal performance as a thumb-sucking child bride living in the South.

Kazan, said Baker, "would find out if your life was like the character or if there was a divergence between certain things in the character and you. He would say, 'Can't you find something in your life that was similar?' He was the best director with actors."

His last great film, 1963's "America America,' screens Sunday. The Oscar-nominated epic is based on the story of Kazan's uncle, a young Greek man living in Turkey, circa 1900, who becomes obsessed with coming to the United States. Not only is it his most personal film, but it was also Kazan's favorite.

Appearing at that screening will be cinematographer Haskell Wexler and actors Lou Antonio and Stathis Giallelis, the Greek actor who plays Kazan's uncle.

Kazan's secret, said Giallelis, was that he made actors feel comfortable. "He also taught you," he added. "Every day I was learning and he told me he was learning too. He was always very open to people's suggestions. He would tell me, 'I want this to come out in this scene.' I was quite free to do what I wanted to do. If he didn't like it, he would tell me, 'This isn't quite what I wanted.' He gave me a lot of freedom, but he had a lot of control. He knew what he wanted from each actor."

susan.king@latimes.com

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

"AN OUNCE OF BEHAVIOR IS WORTH A POUND OF WORDS" - SANFORD MEISNER

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Teacher as Student

Teacher as Student Journal

SANFORD MEISNER MASTER CLASS TWO DVD SET
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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

SUNDANCE CHANNEL STARTS SCRIPTED PROGRAMMING

SUNDANCE CHANNEL STARTS SCRIPTED PROGRAMMING

DOMINIQUE DELEON: SPECIAL BOY FILMS

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

THE OMO PEOPLE

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

ON THE ARCHETYPLE: C. G. JUNG'S "RED BOOK" EXHIBITION

NEW YORK TIMES
December 12, 2009
Exhibition Review | 'The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology'
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Jung’s Inner Universe, Writ Large

We know the archetype; we cherish the myth. The hero, like the world around him, is in a state of crisis. And in seeking to restore himself and the shattered cosmos, he valiantly passes through a vale of despair, descending into darkness. He risks his life and psyche in perilous encounters with dreams or dragons and finally emerges into the light, spiritually transformed, ushering in a new age.

That restoration may be like Odysseus’ epic journey home or like the return of the Israelites to Canaan. It may be like Siegfried braving his way to the side of the sleeping Brünnhilde or like ... well, perhaps like the journey that Carl G. Jung tried to outline in a private chronicle he kept for 16 years that until recently had scarcely been seen by anyone outside the extended family of his descendants. It’s an elaborately designed scripture, filled with his fantasies and surreal imaginings, known as “The Red Book.”

The title is not a metaphorical allusion to blood’s primal coloration nor does it require elaborate symbolic explication. The book really is red, and you can see it until mid-February, lying open in a glass case in an exhibition mounted in its honor at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea: “The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology.”

Jung, who by the time he began work on this tome had already broken with Freud and was developing his mythically suffused conception of the human psyche, made certain that the book’s significance would not be overlooked by future acolytes. Bound in crimson leather, it is an enormous folio, more than 600 pages, bearing the formal title “Liber Novus” (“New Book”). Jung gave it all the trappings of antique authority and stentorian consequence, presenting it as a Newer New Testament.

He wrote it out himself, using a runic Latin and German calligraphy. Its opening portion, which begins with quotations from Isaiah and the Gospel according to John, is inked onto parchment, each section beginning with an initial illuminated as if by a medieval scribe with a taste for eyes, castles and scarabs.

The book’s accounts of Jung’s visions, fantasies and dreams are also punctuated with his paintings (some of which are on display in the exhibition), images executed during the years of World War I and the decade after that now appear as uncanny anticipations of New Age folk art of the late 20th century. They display abstract, symmetrical floral designs Jung came to identify as mandalas, along with almost childlike renderings of flames, trees, dragons and snakes, all in striking, bold colors.

But what is particularly strange about this book is not its pretense or pomposity but its talismanic power. It was stashed away in a cabinet for decades by the family, then jealously withheld from scholarly view because of its supposedly revealing nature. Since being brought into the open, partly through the efforts of the historian and Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani (who is also curator of this exhibition), it has become a sensation.

A meticulously reproduced facsimile, published in October by W. W. Norton & Company, with detailed footnotes and commentary by Mr. Shamdasani (who also contributed to the volume’s accompanying translation), “The Red Book,” costing $195, is in its fifth printing.

This modest show, in which the book is supplemented by displays of the author’s notes, sketches and paintings, is now scheduled to travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from April to June, and then to the Library of Congress in Washington.

The book really is a remarkable object, and not just because it so eccentrically insists on its own significance. It represents Jung’s thinking during a period when he was developing his notion of “archetype” and a “collective unconscious,” positing a substratum of the human mind that shapes language, image and myth across all cultures. And as he was developing his ideas about psychological therapy as a form of self-knowledge, he seemed to have been engaging in just such a self-analysis: the book provides a bewildering, seemingly uncensored path into Jung’s inner life. Mr. Shamdasani writes, “It is nothing less than the central book in his oeuvre.”

That is something students of Jung’s life and work can ponder as they try to put these gnomic tales into intellectual and biographical context. As Jung himself warned in an unfinished 1959 epilogue to this unfinished book, “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.” Perhaps even to the nonsuperficial observer.

The narrator is a stand-in for Jung; he splits into multiple parts, engaging in cryptic dialogue with alternative souls. He is often in the company of a being named Philemon, an old man with the horns of a bull, a creature, Jung said, who evolved out of the biblical character Elijah. Philemon is a “pagan” who carries with him “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration.”

Nearly every visitation has some such mix of exotico-mythico-primitivo coloration. One painting on display here shows a centipedesque dragon, its jaws opened to swallow a yellow ball.

Jung’s explanation: “The dragon wants to eat the sun, and the youth beseeches him not to. But he eats it nevertheless.” An inscription goes into more detail, naming figures in the story without explaining them: “Atmavictu,” “a youthful supporter,” “Telesphorus,” “evil spirit in some men.”

Confusion about the meaning of it all was apparently shared by Jung, who transcribed these visions and then reflected on them in streams of semiconsciousness, invoking death, sacrifice, love and acceptance, sounding at times like a Greek priestess moaning from the bowels of the earth. He wanders in the desert, he cries aloud, he eats the liver of a sacrificed girl, her head “a mash of blood with hair and whitish pieces of bone.”

The temptation, after numbingly turning these pages, is to react finally like the psychiatrist Spielvogel at the end of Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and say: “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” Maybe that was Jung’s reaction too, which is why he abandoned the project in 1930. He couldn’t even complete the epilogue, some 30 years later, breaking off in midsentence.

Now it may be, of course, that Jung was speaking profoundly in tongues, and that more devoted souls may stumble on the key to all these mythologies. Perhaps. Jung himself, after all, was engaged in more compelling systematic work about the primal forces of the psyche during this period (ideas that may have also influenced the late speculations of Freud). Yet right now the lure of the book comes not from within, but from without, not from what it deciphers, but from what it signals about our own mythological predilections.

Mr. Shamdasani argues that “the overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.” And as he points out, Jung undertook his strange project after a series of apocalyptic visions in 1913 and 1914 that he later believed were prophesies of an imminent world war. He looked out a window, he said, and “saw blood, rivers of blood.” Jung felt it within himself as well, the “menace of psychosis.”

And so he began this enterprise of self-examination, a ruthless overturning of the rational Western mind, submerging himself in a pilgrimage through the pagan land of his own psyche. This project was his belated answer to Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams,” which had also presented itself as the account of a heroic self-analytical descent into the maelstrom of the unconscious.

We are lured by that archetype still, even if it does not seem to shed the illumination Jung claimed. Go see this book and the exhibition, though, to glimpse an extraordinary relic of a particular way of thinking about the mind and its history. Then, cued by a 13th-century Tibetan mandala here that Jung owned, go upstairs and see the Rubin’s astonishing show of these ancient Tibetan designs, each enclosing an encyclopedic universe, encompassing desire, venality, wisdom, ecstasy and passion. Maybe “The Red Book” deserves a diagnosis: Jung had mandala envy.

“The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology” is on view through Feb. 15 at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, Chelsea; (212) 620-5000, rmanyc.org.

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"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."