THE TUTELAR OF THE PLACE
She that loves place, time, demarcation, hearth, kin, enclosure,
site, differentiated cult, though she is but one mother of us all:
one earth brings us all forth, one womb receives us all, yet to each
she is other, named of some name other...
... other sons, beyond
hill, over strath, or never so neighbouring by nigh field or near
crannog up stream. What co-tidal line can plot if nigrin or flax-
head marching their wattles be cognate or german of common totem?
Tellus of the myriad names answers to but one name: From this
tump she answers Jac o’ the Tump only if he call Great-Jill-of-the-
tump-that-bare-me, not if he cry by some new fangle moder of
far gentes over the flud, fer-goddes name from anaphora of far
folk wont woo her; she’s a rare one for locality. Or, gently she
bends her head from far-height when tongue-strings chime the
name she whispered on known-site, as between sister and brother
at the time of beginnings ... when the wrapped bands are cast and
the worst mewling is over, after the weaning and before the august
initiations, in the years of becoming.
When she and he ’twixt door-stone and fire-stane prefigure and
puppet on narrow floor-stone the world-masque on wide world-
door.
When she, attentively changes her doll-shift, lets pretend with
solemnity as rocking the womb-gift.
When he chivvies house-pet with his toy hasta, makes believe
the cat o’ the wold falls to the pitiless bronze.
Man-travail and woman-war here we
see enacted are.
When she and he beside the settle, he and she
between the trestle-struts, mime the bitter dance to come.
Cheek by chin at the childer-crock where the quick tears drop
and the quick laughter dries the tears, within the rim of the shared
curd-cup each fore-reads the world-storm.
Till the spoil-sport gammers sigh:
Now come on now little
children, come on now it’s past the hour. Sun’s to roost, brood’s
in pent, dusk-star tops mound, lupa sniffs the lode-damps for
stragglers late to byre.
Come now it’s time to come now for tarry awhile and slow
cot’s best for yearlings
crib’s best for babes
here’s a rush to light you to bed
here’s a fleece to cover your head
against the world-storm
brother by sister
under one brethyn
kith of the kin warmed at the one hearth-flame
(of the seed of far-gaffer? fair gammer’s wer-gifts?)
cribbed in garth that the garth-Jill wards.
Though she inclines with attention from far fair-height outside
all boundaries, beyond the known and kindly nomenclatures,
where all names are one name, where all stones of demarcation
dance and interchange, troia the skipping mountains, nod
recognitions.
As when on known-site ritual frolics keep bucolic interval
at eves and divisions when they mark the inflexions of the year
and conjugate with trope and turn the season’s syntax, with
beating feet, with wands and pentagons to spell out the
Trisagion.
Who laud and magnify with made, mutable and beggarly
elements the unmade immutable begettings and precessions of fair-
height, with halting sequences and unresolved rhythms, search-
ingly, with what’s to hand, under the inconstant lights that hover
world-flats, that bright by fit and start the tangle of world-
wood, rifting the dark drifts for the wanderers that wind the world-
meander, who seek hidden grammar to give back anathema its
first benignity.
Gathering all things in, twining each bruised stem to the swaying
trellis of the dance, the dance about the sawn lode-stake on the
hill where the hidden stillness is at the core of struggle, the dance
around the green lode-tree on far fair-height where the secret
guerdons hang and the bright prizes nod, where sits the queen
im Rosenbage eating the honey-cake, where the king sits, counting-
out his man-geld, rhyming the audits of all the world-holdings.
Where the marauder leaps the wall and the wall dances to the
marauder’s leaping, where the plunging wolf-spear and the wolf’s
pierced diaphragm sing the same song ...
Yet, when she stoops to hear you children cry
from the scattered and single habitations
or from the nucleated holdings
from tower’d castra
paved civitas
treble-ramped caer
or wattled tref
stockaded gorod or
trenched barh
from which ever child-crib within whatever enclosure
demarked by a dynast or staked by consent
wherever in which of the wide world-ridings
you must not call her but by that name
which accords to the morphology of that place.
Now pray now little children for us all now, pray our gammer’s
prayer according to our disciplina given to us
within our labyrinth on our dark mountain.
Say now little children:
Sweet Jill of our hill hear us
bring slow bones safe at the lode-ford
keep lupa’s bite without our wattles
make her bark keep children good
save us all from dux of far folk
save us from the men who plan.
Now sleep on, little children, sleep on now, while I tell out the
greater suffrages, not yet for young heads to understand:
Queen of the differentiated sites, administratrix of the demarca-
tions, let our cry come unto you.
In all times of imperium save us when the
mercatores come save us
from the guile of the negotiatores save us from the missi,
from the agents
who think no shame
by inquest to audit what is shameful to tell
deliver us.
When they check their capitularies in their curias
confuse their reckonings.
When they narrowly assess the trefydd
by hide and rod
by pentan and vent
by impost and fee on beast-head
and roof-tree
and number the souls of men
notch their tallies false
disorder what they have collated.
When they proscribe the diverse uses and impose the
rootless uniformities, pray for us.
When they sit in Consilium
to liquidate the holy diversities
mother of particular perfections
queen of otherness
mistress of asymmetry
patroness of things counter, parti, pied, several
protectress of things known and handled
help of things familiar and small
wardress of the secret crevices
of things wrapped and hidden
mediatrix of all the deposits margravine of the troia
empress of the labyrinth
receive our prayers.
When they escheat to the Ram
in the Ram’s curia
the seisin where the naiad sings
above where the forked rod bends
or where the dark outcrop
tells on the hidden seam
pray for the green valley.
When they come with writs of oyer and terminer
to hear the false and
determine the evil
according to the advices of the Ram’s magnates who serve the
Ram’s wife, who write in the Ram’s book of Death.
In the bland megalopolitan light
where no shadow is by day or by night
be our shadow.
Remember the mound-kin, the kith of the tarrengone from this
mountain because of the exorbitance of the Ram ... remember
them in the rectangular tenements, in the houses of the engines
that fabricate the ingenuities of the Ram ... Mother of Flowers
save them then where no flower blows.
Though they shall not come again
because of the requirements of the Ram with respect to the world
plan, remember them where the dead forms multiply, where no
stamen leans, where the carried pollen falls to the adamant surfaces,
where is no crevice.
In all times of Gleichschaltung, in the days of the central economies,
set up the hedges of illusion round some remnant of us, twine the
wattles of mist, white-web a Gwydion-hedge
like fog on the bryniau
against the commissioners
and assessors bearing the writs of the Ram to square the world-
floor and number the tribes and write down the secret things and
take away the diversities by which we are, by which we call on
your name, sweet Jill of the demarcations
arc of differences
tower of individuation
queen of the minivers
laughing in the mantle of variety
belle of the mound
for Jac o’ the mound
our belle and donnabelle
on all the world-mountain.
In the December of our culture ward somewhere the secret seed,
under the mountain, under and between, between the grids of
the Ram’s survey when he squares the world-circle.
Sweet Mair devise a mazy-guard
in and out and round about
double-dance defences
countermure and echelon meanders round
the holy mound
fence within the fence
pile the dun ash for the bright seed
(within the curtained wood the canister
within the canister the budding rod)
troia in depth the shifting wattles of illusion for the ancilia for the
palladia for the kept memorials, because of the commissioners
of the Ram and the Ram’s decree concerning the utility of the
hidden things.
When the technicians manipulate the dead limbs of our culture
as though it yet had life, have mercy on us. Open unto us, let us
enter a second time within your stola-folds in those days -
ventricle and refuge both, hendref for world-winter, asylum from
world-storm. Womb of the Lamb the spoiler of the Ram.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight & Sound, Autumn 1977
'A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .' I read the opening title, over vast interstellar reaches of wide-screen space. 'I've seen the future and it works!' declares a happy teenager on his way out of the movie to a TV reporter in Los Angeles — oddly parroting what Lincoln Steffens said about Russia over fifty years ago, before Ford Motors gave the slogan a second lease of life.
'Another galaxy, another time,' begins the novel's prologue more noncommittally, carefully hedging all bets. But confusion between past and future, however useful to the tactics of George Lucas' Star Wars, seems almost secondary to the overriding insistence that whenever this giddy space opera is taking place, it can't possibly be anywhere quite so disagreeable as the present.
'Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film,' Lucas has said, 'I realised there was another relevance that is even more important — dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps — that you could still sit and dream about exotic lands and strange creatures.' Although garbage and killing are anything but absent from Star Wars, and stealing hubcaps is around in spirit if not in letter, Lucas' aspiration is easy enough to comprehend, even after the social interests of his THX 1138 and American Graffiti. The disconcerting thing for a good many critics about his latest box-office monolith is that it doesn't seem to mean anything other than what it unabashedly is: a well-crafted, dehumanised update of Flash Gordon with better production values, no ironic overtones and a battery of special effects.
Consider the plot, which any wellbehaved computer fed with the right amount of pulp could probably regurgitate: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), farm youth living with uncle and aunt on the remote planet Tatooine, son of a vanquished Jedi warrior of the Old Republic — an order overturned by the evil Galactic Empire, headed by former Jedi warrior Darth Vader and the malignant Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) — accidentally intercepts part of a sound-and-image message sent by beautiful Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), a rebel senator from planet Alderaan held captive by the Empire, to Ben 'Obi-Wan' Kenobi (Alec Guinness), legendary Jedi warrior now living as an outlaw in the Tatooine mountains ...
Following the squat robot who carries the message — R2-D2, who is usually accompanied by C-3PO, a tall vocal sidekick that mumbles like an Endish butler — Luke meets Kenobi who bequeaths him his father's light sabre and, after uncle and aunt are promptly killed in an Empire raid, enlists his aid in Leia's rescue. Meanwhile, he trains the youth in the mystical powers of the Force, a spiritual order which bestows extra-sensory talents. Hiring the hardened mercenary Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his non-human servant Chewbacca in the grubby Mos Eisley Spaceport to pilot them, Luke and Kenobi set off on a string of adventures, during which the latter is killed in a duel with Vader and Leia is freed. Luke then accompanies the rebel freedom fighters in an offensive against Death Star, the Empire's seemingly impregnable battle station, and single-handedly succeeds in blowing it to attractively bubbly, sparkling and satisfying smithereens.
All this is very clean and bloodless. Vader crunches a few audible bones; aunt and uncle are burned to black cinders in homage to The Searchers; Kenobi executes a smooth forearm amputation with his sabre in the Mos Eisley saloon, and meets his own sabre death by vanishing into thin air, to be absorbed within the Force; the rest is mainly fireworks and pinball machines. The smirking idealism of Luke, the sullen cynicism of Han, the shrewish irritability of Leia, the growls and whines of Chewbacca, the fussy chattering of C-3P0 and the electronic chirping of R2-132 are all set up as 'cute' objects of delighted audience ridicule. Hamill, Ford and Fisher are made to look like surfers at an s-f masquerade ball; Cushing, the only visibly human villain, comes off as a rather improbable blend of Ming the Merciless and Jean-Luc Godard, in physiognomy as well as emotional tone. And apart from the steadfast Alec Guinness, who is respectfully allowed to assume a vaguer and more benign flatness as archetypal father figure, nearly everyone else is a monster, whether lovable (domestic) or disgusting (threatening), with the borderline between human and non-human often indistinguishable. (The gibbering, scavenging Jawas on Tattooine are a striking case in point: brownrobed and black-gloved, their only visible features are firefly eyes.)
The deliberate silliness of all this — like the intricate silliness that has always been part of Disney's stock-in-trade — leaves the audience free to react from a safe voyeuristic distance, enjoying 'pure' sensations that are unencumbered by any moral or emotional investments. Indeed, the cursory treatment of 'romantic interest' (with Leia still prevaricating at the end between both male leads via bored winks) leaves the way open for a very different sort of titillation. In the exhilarating space battles, with their odourless ecstasies of annihilation, and the various space-gun skirmishes, with their fancy dismemberings and eliminations, this essentially becomes an occasion for sexual release devoid of any partner. Like the remote control TV channel selectors that children love to play with, and the mechanical shooting games found in arcades, Star Wars offers solitary, narcissistic pleasures more than communal or romantic myths to keep its audience cheering.
Admittedly, Westerns, samurai sagas, Arthurian legends, Disney bestiaries, DeMille spectaculars and World War II epics have been borrowed from as liberally as earlier s-f. The climactic Death Star attack is modelled directly after a compilation of air battle clips from over fifty war films, and even the final procession of Luke, Han and Chewbacca down a long aisle to receive their medals has been identified by Arthur Lubow as a conscious 'restaging of the march of Hitler, Hirmnler and Lutze to the Nuremberg monument' in Triumph of the Will. But the point of this approach is to make all the myths it plunders equally trivial and 'usable' as nostalgic plot fodder, even if most of the emotions are absent. One would probably have to go back to the 1940s, as Lucas did, to find such a guiltless celebration of unlimited warfare, but one needs to escape history entirely in order to set up oppositions of good and bad-reflected in black and white patternings of costume and decor-as unambiguous. On the level of racial ideology, this knowing mindlessness is even shrewder. While the original 1936 Flash Gordon serial could allude to the 'Yellow Peril' directly through Ming the Merciless without any sort of embarrassment, the styling of the Jawas as stingy Jewish merchants — 'Munchkin Shylocks', in Richard Corliss' apt phrase — is much more oblique and subtle; one might even have to see the relationship of 'Jawa' to the Hebrew 'Yaweh' in order to catch the clue.
Following the fashion set by 2001 in some aspects of its design — robots programmed to be more 'personable' than any of the actors, in-depth trajectories of slab-like missiles entering the lower foreground of shots and sliding away diagonally (including the three long paragraphs preceding the action) — Star Wars postulates itself as the anti-200I in nearly every other respect, and not only because fantasy is systematically substituted for technology. If Kubrick's central subject was intelligence, Lucas' is predicated on blind instinct: Luke's initiation into the Force, like the spectator's into the film, is basically a matter of surrendering to conditioned reflexes and letting the cosmic mise en scène take over. And where 2001's sense of spectacle was contemplative, Star Wars' is near-Pavlovian in its careful measurements of give and take, making it impossible on a practical level to isolate many of the special effects from the editing.
Working on the assumption that the enchantment of any creature, landscape, gadget or set decreases in ratio to the length of time it's on the screen — a withholding premise already evident in the Krel episodes of Forbidden Planet and the brief, last-minute glimpses of a perishing city in This Island Earth — the movie is constructed like a teasing comic strip storyboard. Nothing incidental or scenic is allowed to retard the rapidly paced narrative, but is merely packed along en route (like the twin moons of Tatooine, or the binoculars Luke uses while scouting for R2-132). A rare exception is made for diverse beasties in the inventive Mos Eisley Western saloon sequence, where spectacle momentarily triumphs over event.
Less imaginative in its other-worldly architecture than The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T — an all but forgotten Stanley Kramer production of the 1950s which, unlike Star Wars, incorporated an escape from an unbearable present in its plot — Lucas' smorgasbord of styles is often more a matter of quantity than quality, as in the dense profusion of red laser beams which periodically streak across the screen. An effort is made, however, to make some of the locations (the scrapheap inside the Jawas' Sandcrawler, Mos Eisley, Han's pirate starship) untidy enough to seem lived in. Sound, including the nearly continuous music, serves the elliptical pacing throughout: intimations of Tarkin's imminent torture of Leia are limited to a brief shot of a syringe and the loud sliding shut of a door; the beast that pulls Luke down into the slimy muck of a shrinking garbage bin is more heard than seen; and the whistling sounds of the attacking rebel starships work a lot better as drama than as science.
For a film so devoid of any dialectic, one is tempted to speculate what its absolute antithesis might be. Would the recent films of Grand Moff Godard — low-budget, experimental, pleasurable to the mind rather than to the reflexes — be far off the mark? Yet if any parallel can be found between the film world and Lucas' Manichean universe, it is the blitzkrieg of media fanfare celebrating Star Wars and its countless spin-off industries — not the trifling efforts to get Godard's films seen or acknowledged anywhere — that corresponds to the Empire's efforts to snuff out every form of resistance. And the consortium that is currently contriving to inundate everyone's mind with a few profitable monoliths and assign the rebel forces of cinema to cheerful oblivion is not merely a group of big business men, but a movement composed of critics, editors and media programmers and broadcasters-all of whom collaborate with other consumers in making Star Wars (which is already threatening to topple Jaws as the all-time money-maker) more than a simple movie, but an appreciable dent in the landscape.
What has any of this to do with esoteric items like Numéro Deux and Ici et Ailleurs, whose more fragile transactions might as well be occurring on another planet ? Simply the fact that both are concerned with advancing knowledge in the here and now, and this is generally taken to be such a distasteful activity that even defenders of such films generally feel compelled to describe their experiences as ones of necessary 'unpleasure'. The mere title of an earlier Godard film, Le Gai Savoir, already sounds anachronistic within the present climate. Who but a sick person, runs the implied argument, could take pleasure in a documentary shot of Palestinian soldiers in Ici et Ailleurs, followed by a title saying that 'Nearly all these actors are dead'? Better to take a calculated step backward in knowledge, sever communal and historical ties, hoot at heroes and villains alike, blow up invisible, imaginary enemies from a safe video distance and enjoy it all as good, clean, healthy funmarking time until the next real opportunities for automatic, xenophobic destruction arrive. This is the 'relevance' of Star Wars that a Lucas finds 'more important'; and several million filmgoers are heartily agreeing.
Bobi Jones, Planet, 1970 (?)
I write English like a dead language. This is probably will-power.
When I write Welsh, however, it is not by choice. There is nothing voluntary about that medium. Confronted with the muse, (to adopt the usual cliché) I find that it stuffs the Welsh language down my throat.
Language is so totalitarian. How else would many of the most interesting writers in Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sanskrit have chosen to write in a second language, even in a "dead" language ? I suspect that Beckett in his second language, like Conrad in his third, experienced this same compulsion of discovery and chose the path of least resistance.
I am not the first to notice this totalitarianism. When imperialist England submerged Wales, the first and last blow at destruction was at the language. Conquer that, and conquer all. A Welshman might henceforth feel a superficial equality in other spheres, but regarding his own country he was permanently condemned. Even inferiority in the economy would now be accepted because the language had inferior status. This was the norm for centuries, the mentality of slant towards London. The language was to be the economy, was politics, was industry, was science : when the language rolled over, they all rolled over.
The key to our dull dark cell was found a long time ago ; but the door was not properly opened until about 1936. And Welshmen very slowly and hesitantly, some fearfullY, even terrified, began to creep out into the open air : many still cowered in the cupboard. Others slept.
The same thing has been happening over most of the world. Those inbreeding, monoglot, parochial people next door are amazed when they visit the five continents and discover the incomprehensible people everywhere who have been excited by their roots. Why don't they grow up and speak English ? Why not die "internationalists" ?
Suddenly, everywhere, we are no longer foreigners standing before our own past. We belong to our land, and are responsible, psychologically and culturally responsible for it before the whole world.
To be born into this is naturally an inspiring experience, as it involves one in the greatest constructive cultural movement on this globe in this century. In scores of countries there has been a strong affirmation. It is true that there are here and there some very important areas of decadence ; but culturally or socially, there has been in many places a positive bid for life. This cultural and psychological movement is something we are very conscious of in Wales, and it is paralleled with a movement towards or into the language.
This affirmation has been my main artistic interest, and its linking through and within the Welsh language in my work is a part of its character. The affirmation, naturally, has reservations : all of us who recognise original sin as an axle point in the human predicament can understand that empty optimism about the language and the universal civilisation it symbolises and enshrines would be pointless. The dangers for the language are a part of the dangers of living in the third third of the twentieth century. But in moving away from the decadence of our culture towards a renewed vigour, one finds that the old-fashioned Anglo-Welsh masochism, for instance, peels off, and Wales is no longer just a sordid boghouse at the bottom of a coal-tip. Welsh history is no longer just depression. Gradually, the inferiority we felt about Welsh nationhood and identity no longer exists, and the language can wash over the sores. Gradually, the immense parochialism of the "Englishman", with his negation of all that the world stands for, is replaced by a realisation of the essential variety within the unity.
As a dogmatic Calvinist, the accidents of life never seem very convincing to me. In my own person history, there may appear, on the surface, to be an element of the accidental, and my first real encounter with the Welsh language was all just an unfortunate mistake, and should not properly have happened. So too, I suspect with the whole society. No doubt those neutralist historians, who discuss history as a series of undirected events, could make out a solid case for this absolutely incongruous movement towards the language as being just an understandable disturbance in the genes of the community. But I would plump for election.
We were a shy band, on a September morning in 1940, standing before a grand old gentleman from Lancashire, Mr J.0. Cheetham. It was his lot to divide us into three streams, two to take Spanish, one to take Welsh. French was - well, compulsory is not the word - a "natural" subject, like English and the air we breathed.
There were ninety of us, and he asked those who wished to "do" Welsh to stand forward. Some five quivering schoolboys ventured a step. The rest of us stood our ground, certain that Spanish would be intensely useful for our commercial weekend trips to South America later on. And would we not have chosen Timbuktuish, if such a language existed, rather than degrade ourselves to do that indeed-to-goodness stuff ?
But the headmaster had his job to do. and needed a "stream" : at a push, twenty-five might do, but certainly not five. It was wartime,' and volunteering was in the air. "Tell me, my boy", said he, turning on a fat blushing specimen in the middle of the front row, "Why don't you want to do Welsh ?"
"I know enough, sir".
Had I not done it in the elementary ?
"Well, tell me, my boy. What's 'good morning' in Welsh ?
This was one of those phrases that had somehow slipped the syllabus of the elementary. The blush reached my knees.
"Tell me, my boy. What's 'good night'?"
This too had slipped attention.: The blush rattled to the floor.
"Don't you think you'd better reconsider your decision ?"
The vision had come.
I was converted. On that sad September day my fate was sealed, and unknown to myself I now slid into the clutches of one who must be amongst the most brilliant Welsh teachers Wales has ever employed - W. G. Elvet Thomas. Quite by accident, of course.
The rot set in.
It is impossible for me to analyse the quality of his teaching, but I have always supposed that the main secret of his gift was that he used the language as an introduction to the whole versatility and contemporary energy of Wales. Language was not just a means of communication, and certainly not a school subject. It was the expression of a complete national life and was linked to place-names, the Urdd, mountains and history, poetry and songs, dances and drama and the Eisteddfod, altars, and lots of enthralling Welsh characters and anecdotes.
My ambitions were, naturally, in Africa at the time. And so they continued into my first year in College. I had, at the bright shining age of nine, decided to be a missionary, and kept my path direct all the way to the University : I thought that I could conveniently shed my Welsh after the first College session, and raise my sights to broader horizons.
However, another collision with the parish-pump occurred during the first term. This accident was in the shape of inspiring University teachers and a new type of ethos amongst Welsh-speaking students never before encountered. Even at that advanced stage in my education, although fully able to read Welsh, and write it less fluently, I was completely socially dumb, due to the artificial examination emphasis on written answers. Now, for the first time, I came in contact with the rollicking charm of the gwerin. A tidy anglophile from Cardiff became immersed in the warmth and gaiety of a rural culture hitherto hidden from him in the form of students, and in a teacher who was as intense about the Latin Element in Welsh as if it were the Day of judgement.
And it was my day of no return, to say the least.
For an adolescent involved in such a personal upheaval, there had to be a most disconcerting reorientation.
Dreaming in Welsh, lovemaking in Welsh, poems, stories, children, friends, a nation, the whole world : the relationship between peoples, this daily consciousness of international friction and its dangerous but golden possibilities, from the inside, no longer dead or academic or up in the gallery, but here down in the arena. Writing in Welsh means now to be in the middle of the great human struggle - not to have pulled out, not to be superior or neutral or to have one's eyes on the ends of the world as if they were not here ; it is to be sensitive to the tingling life of words to the rhythmic muscles of sentences, to the quiveringness of images, to the possession of great themes. It is to turn the soil in this part of the earth as it should really be turned.
For a middle-aged man I presume there must be a settling down too, although to settle down in the Welsh language today is rather like trying to snatch a nap on the tip of a volcano. But by now, for me, there are so many more cogent reasons for writing in Welsh : quiet ones, old ones, long ones. Welsh has been for many years my first language, and practically speaking, my only language. There is so little time to read any other languages, as the Welsh materials are endless and so tremendously versatile ; they are the windows of the whole world. Writing in English or any other foreign language is, for me, a discipline, necessary but almost tedious and irrelevant. I still can't help savouring the salty tang of a Welsh which will always be for me a new-old language. My ancient dynamite.
In his delightful essays, The Dragon has two tongues, Glyn Jones refers to himself as belonging to a generation or rather a series of generations that had moved away from the Welsh language, or as he says, "From Taf Carmarthenshire to Taf Glamorganshire, in fact". A few years previously I had brought out a little book of verse Rhwng Taf a Thaf (Between Taf and Taf), referring to the same two rivers but expressing a completely contrary experience. I suppose I belong to the opposite generation, maybe generations, younger than Glyn Jones ; but would agree wholeheartedly with him that a writer's "mother" tongue, in the literal sense, is not necessarily his best medium for his creative workbut "the language which captures his heart and imagination during the emotional and intellectual upheavals of adolescence, the language of his awakening, the language in which ideas-political, religious, aesthetic-and an understanding of personal and social relationships first dawn upon his mind". This is the language that writes him.
During each of the last three centuries, it is worth noting that there has been at least one poet in Wales creating in, his second language who must be amongst the two or three greatest poets of his age, namely Iolo Morganwg, Islwyn and Waldo Williams. They have written in true language of their hearts. For me, in a in much more minor way, the same has again been true. Why I write in Welsh is partly why I write at all : there is no longer any question to answer.
Beverly Walker, Sight & Sound, Winter 1970/71
As the director-as-superstar cult has tightened its grip on American cineastes, and the search is on for new heroes, the name Monte Hellman is beginning to pop up increasingly frequently in film magazines and periodicals.
Even though most readers of these publications have never seen a film by Hellman, they are embracing the mystique of the director and his two existentialist Westerns that no American distributor will buy. While making his first film in five years, Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman was the subject of major pieces in both Los Angeles newspapers, as well as the Sunday New York Times, the ultimate recognition in American journalism. The L. A. Times' bold headline, 'Monte Hellman and Hollywood's Best Kept Secret' startled that city's citizens, who had never heard of the man and certainly didn't think anything in their town could be a secret. The town was buzzing for days after the appearance of the article, in which Kevin Thomas called Hellman 'one of the most interesting directing talents to emerge in Hollywood in the past decade.'
Hellman is the latest of several American film-makers to have his initial reputation in France. His case is more unusual, however. in that the films upon which the current interest is based, The Shooting and Ride the Whirlwind, have never been released theatrically in their own country, although since they first attracted attention when shown out of competition at Cannes in 1966 one or the other of them has been screened at almost every international festival extant. (Most recently: Edinburgh in 1970)
The circumstances in which the films were made are as remarkable as the films themselves. Backed by Roger Corman and produced by Hellman and Jack Nicholson, the two films were made back-to-back in Utah in the summer of 1965. Costing 75,000 dollars apiece, they were made in three weeks each with a non-union crew of ten plus a couple of local wranglers to take care of the horses. The equipment consisted of two cameras, two reflectors, one beat-up station-wagon and a small utility truck. Neither of the trucks could go off the road, so all the equipment had to be carried to the locations by foot or on horseback. To make matters worse, the crust on the desert surface broke easily, making it necessary to change the set-up slightly after each take. The actors, friends of Hellman and Nicholson, had joined the project in a spirit of adventure which soon began to wear thin. The days were long and hot; nobody got much money. The Shooting was made first and nobody could quite understand the bizarre script. They had been coaxed to Utah to make a quick, low-budget Western, but this one wasn't quite like anything they'd seen before. Hellman and his art director parted company after the first film. He did not see one foot of film during shooting, creating a profound sense of unease m his cameraman, Gregory Sandor.
Hellman spent six months editing the films and then showed them to Roger Corman. It is not known what Corman thought of their artistic merits, but he surely must have realised what an odd pair he had on his hands. American International declined to put up the amount of money Corman was asking (reputedly 150,000 dollars) so the festival route was decided upon as a means of interesting other distributors.
After Nicholson took the films to Cannes in 1966, the French rights were sold to a distributor who subsequently went bankrupt. The dupe negatives as well as the legal rights in France were tied up for nearly a year before the films finally opened there to critical acclaim. The Walter Reade organisation finally bought them for America and sold them direct to television. There has been conjecture as to why they were never released theatrically, but the fact is that the sale came through the company's West Coast television division, so it appears they never seriously intended to release them in Since that time, Hellman and a group of investors have bought back the 35mm. rights and are trying to negotiate a release.
The films are indeed remarkable, not only for production values which in view of how they were made make Hellman seem something of a wizard, but for an almost obsessive personal vision unusual in any American film and particularly a Western. Not really 'likeable', the films are startling and discomforting in their nihilism and oddly detached objectivity. Terse and pared to the bone, they offer none of the orthodox Western entertainment values. Action is minimal, rugged individualism is out, and nobody wins.
The Shooting was written by Adrien Joyce (who has since come to prominence with Five Easy Pieces) and features Warren Oates, Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins and the then unknown Jack Nicholson. Extremely complicated and quirky in its story development, it tens of a man, Gashade (Oates), who returns home to find a murder which involves his twin brother, Coigne -- now missing. Suddenly a woman appears on foot, out of nowhere, and hires Gashade to escort her to a distant town for an unknown purpose. Gashade reluctantly agrees ('I've got my reasons') but insists his simpleminded side-kick, Coley, accompany him. The trio set out in hostile, awkward silence, and are soon joined by Billy Spear (Nicholson), evidently the woman's hired gun and possibly her lover. In one of the film's most chilling moments, a perfectly realised visual evocation of its theme, the three men, on their horses, chase each other around and around in a circle until Spear kills Coley. In the film's final minutes, Gashade crushes Spear's gunhand in a brutal fight and goes after the woman, who has abandoned her horse and is following a trail of footprints up a hill. We briefly glimpse a figure at the top and realise that it is Coigne, Gashade's twin. Gunshots follow in which Coigne attempts to kill the woman -- or possibly his brother -- and the woman kills Coigne. The final image is of Billy Spear, dazed, his hand dangling uselessly by his side, walking towards the hill under the broiling sun. None of the questions are ever answered; and, finally, are irrelevant.
Written by jack Nicholson and starring himself, Cameron Mitchell and Millie Perkins, Ride the Whirlwind is a simpler film than The Shooting although thematically identical. Here we have a pair of ordinary cowboys (Nicholson and Mitchell) who inadvertently become implicated in a murder they did not commit, flee to avoid a vigilante hanging party, and eventually murder an innocent man to avoid being caught. One of them dies along the way and the other is seen riding off in a cloud of dust to nowhere.
The spare screenplay was based upon Nicholson's extensive research into diaries and records of the period, a bleak time when justice rested upon the presumptions of the largest number of people. The stylised, archaic dialogue, although sometimes a bit self-consciously spoken, adds to the feeling of authenticity which spreads through the film.
In each of the films, an immediate atmosphere of terror is stated with great economy. A freshly-dug grave is a premonition of coming violence. A quick shot of the moving wheels of a stagecoach over a rocky road brings us closer to a yet unknown confrontation. A tired horse's whinny reminds us that it, too, is made of flesh and blood. The lunar-like landscape, reminiscent of Antonioni but infinitely tougher, leaves a man exposed and vulnerable. Again and again, Hellman cuts to extreme close-ups, to reveal a glance, a sigh, weariness. We never learn more about the people than what we see -- but no matter. Hellman brings us right into their lives at that point in time and we are compelled to care about them.
Born in New York and raised in California, Heliman graduated from Stanford University in speech and drama and went on to do graduate work in cinema at UCLA. For the first several years after school he worked in theatre, directing the first West Coast production of Waiting for Godot. Roger Corman was impressed by the production and offered Hellman the chance to direct a movie. His first film, then, was Beast from Haunted Cave, made in 1959 and released by Corman's company, Film Group.
He spent the next couple of years doing second unit work for Corman, expanding films for television and directing almost half of The Terror. In 1963, after working as an assistant editor at Universal, he went to the Philippines to make two films for the producer Robert Lippert, Back Door to Hell, starring Jimmy Rodgers, and Flight to Fury, with Jack Nicholson, Dewey Martin and Faye Spain. Then came the Westerns, in 1965.
A number of abortive projects followed, and only now, five years later, has Hellman had the chance to direct again. He was brought to Two-Lane Blacktop by producer Michael S. Laughlin (The Whisperers, Joanna and the unreleased Christian Licorice Store). Cinema Center Films was to finance the film, part of a two-picture deal with Laughlin. The original story by Will Corry, about two men, one black and one white, who drive across country followed by a young girl, seemed to Hellman 'interesting but not fully realised'; a new script was written in four weeks by Rudolph Wurlitzer, a young Eastern intellectual best known for a strange book called Nog which enjoyed a considerable underground reputation.
In February 1970 Hellman took to the road to pick his locations and was a few weeks away from the start of shooting when Cinema Center abruptly cancelled the project. Major studios which Hellman approached were all impressed by the script but had their own ideas about casting and how to make it. Finally it was Ned Tanen, a young executive at Universal supervising a new slate of pictures for the studio (Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, Milos Forman's S.P.F.C. and Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife) who gave Hellman 850,000 dollars to make the picture his way. As with all Tanen's projects, the director has right to final cut.
Shooting began on August 13th in Los Angeles and continued for six weeks as the crew of thirty moved in a gypsy-like caravan through the southwest towards Memphis, Tennessee. Two-Lane Blacktop is now the story of four displaced people, three men and a girl, speeding across the United States in a superstock '55 Chevrolet and an orange Pontiac G.T.O. It stars singer-composer James Taylor, Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson (drummer with the Beach Boys) and newcomer Laurie Bird. The cameraman was Gregory Sandor, who also shot the Westerns.
This interview with Hellman was done a few days after he completed shooting.
Were you a frequent moviegoer as a child?
I guess I went to my first movie at the age of four. They became part of my fantasy world ... I was more seriously interested in the theatre. I started acting in junior high school and went to Stanford on an NBC radio scholarship. 1 began to direct radio plays in my freshman year -- things like War of the Worlds -- and then to direct stage plays. I wanted to go into radio, but nobody was interested. They advised me to go out and direct theatre in some small town, and I had an offer from a stock company in northern California and went there.
What prompted you to go to the UCLA cinema school right after Stanford?
I'd always been interested in photography. I had built my own enlarger when I was about fourteen and I was always shooting pictures and printing them myself. I started shooting portraits and making money at it while I was still in high school. But I eventually got into films by accident. After three seasons of stock our company folded, and I came back to Hollywood and had to find work to support a new wife. I took a job cleaning out the film vaults at ABC for 55 dollars a week. It was a union job and that's how I got into the film editors union. I stayed at ABC for a few months and worked in film shipping and eventually began cutting commercials into shows.
Did you learn cutting at UCLA ?
I guess so, but it didn't matter. They can teach you in an hour. After ABC, I went to work on The Medic, a television show, as an apprentice editor. Somebody left and I was temporarily promoted to assistant editor. I stayed there awhile and then went to work at Ziv Studios, where I was coding dailies and all sorts of tedious things. I finally got fed up and left to start a theatre.
What about your first film, BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE?
Fools plunge in ... I just did it, and I probably made more mistakes than the average person who makes a first film. I didn't really have any help and I wouldn't take any help. I had to do it on my own. Once I made my first film I considered myself a film-maker. I lost all interest in the theatre and never went back. After Beast from Haunted Cave opened I got an agent and tried to find directing assignments, but nobody was interested until I got the offer from Robert Lippert to make two pictures.
Was FLIGHT TO FURY the beginning of your association with Jack Nicholson?
Before that, Jack and I had written a script called Epitaph: a semi-autobiographical thing about life on the fringes of Hollywood, a young actor knocking about, with a story about a couple of days in which a guy tries to raise money to get his girl an abortion. It would have been the first of the abortion movies ... that was still a taboo subject. Roger (Corman) had offered to back it, but we went to the Philippines first.
How did the Westerns come about?
I was finishing cutting on Flight to Fury, and we went to Roger one more time for money for Epitaph. He was afraid it was too downbeat: at that time there was a prejudice that you could make that kind of movie in Europe but not in America. But he said that if we wanted to make something commercial he would finance that. So we said 'What's commercial,' and he said, 'Well, a Western is commercial. My first movie was a Western and I still believe in Westerns.' So we said 'Okay'. Then he said, 'Well, if you're going to make one Western, you might as well make two.'
So we rented an office and decided that Jack would write one and we would get someone else to write another. Sevend friends submitted ideas. Adrien Joyce submitted a script that wasn't producable but was very interesting, and I had faith in her talent so we decided to go with her. She did some research and came up with a story by Jack London. It was about a couple of guys who were looking at a painting in a bar -- a moment of crisis in which somebody is shot -- and they were talking about how interesting it is to observe a scene like that and not know anything about what happened before or after ... and how much that's like life. One of the men says that something like that once happened to him. He was hired by a woman to take her across the snows and he never knew where they were going, or why, and finally at the end of several weeks they saw a man ahead of them in a sled. She told him to go faster. When they got close to the man she pulled out a gun and started to shoot at him. And killed him. Then she paid the driver off and he never saw her again.
And that was the start of THE SHOOTING. How involved were you in the development of both scripts?
I was with Jack every day but less involved with Adrien. Jack and I just sat in our office and he wrote the script. Once we had agreed on the basic structure of Adrien's story, she simply began writing, without really knowing who the characters would be or how it would develop. She would show me about 15 pages at a time and I would comment: she just wanted to know if she was going in the right direction. Jack also writes in an evolutionary sort of way, and I find that an exciting way to work. Jack is a very black person, very wry and funny but very cynical, and I'm sure that appeals to me.
How conscious were you when making the Westerns that they would be somewhat bizarre ?
I don't think we really thought anybody would ever see the films. We thought they would be a couple more Roger Corman movies that would play on the second half of a double bill somewhere. So any thoughts about doing something different were for our own personal satisfaction. We never thought that anybody would ever notice.
You have said that you set out to debunk certain myths ...
We hated the predictability of certain situations. For example, the scene where Jack takes Millie out to the barn (in Whirlwind). That's an obligatory scene-you expect some kind of sexual thing. Ours was totally non-sexual.
What have you been doing since the Westerns ?
I've done a lot of editing; I edited The Wild Angels and I worked as a dialogue director on The St. Valentine's Day Massacre with Roger. I was hired by Roger and AIP to direct Explosion, a film about a black sherrif in the South, but they became afraid of the subject matter and decided not to do it. And I was hired to do the move of MacBird
I find that a very strange choice on your part.
Well, I didn't go headlong into it, but I found a way to do it that I thought would be interesting. I went to San Francisco to write the screenplay with Barbara Garson. The studio didn't like our screenplay -- they wanted Bob Altman to do it. But Barbara wouldn't do it without me. The project had to be discarded when Bobby Kennedy was assinated.
What interested you in the original script for TWO-LANE BLACKTOP? And what did you think was missing?
The fact is that I've never been presented with a script I liked. Here I liked the idea of two guys travelling across the country in a '55 Chevy challenging guys to race. The rest of it was banal.
What intrigued you about Wurlitzer's writing?
I liked his sense of humour. He was extremely funny. I think all my scripts are funny.
Do you think your films are funny?
Yes, The Shooting set out to be a comedy... and I think it is.
Why did you decide not to let the actors read the script, and to give them dialogue pages only an the day of shooting? Warren Oates told me that you didn't work this way on the Westerns.
When my wife, Jackie, and I were working on Explosion, we began work with the actors that way. And they contributed a lot to the script. I wanted to leave myself open to that possibility here. I work with an actor or a writer the same way, which is really anonymously: I act as a catalyst, make them do all the work, but try to give them a lot of confidence so that they will feel free to say or do anything. On this film, I figured that if they knew what the written script was, the actors wouldn't be able to improvise.
But in fact almost no improvising took place.
That's right. It turned out that way.
The actors complained bitterly about not being allowed to read the script. Were you aware of this?
I knew fairly soon that they were uncomfortable. I wouldn't work that way again with someone like James (Taylor). He's very intellectual. so nothing would be lost in letting him read the script.
Another point of contention was that you insisted on going cross country when so much of the action takes place inside the two cars.
I thought it would be the only way of convincing the audience that we actually travelled across the country. That we would never get the feeling of covering that ground unless we actually did it. Beyond that, I knew it would affect the actors -- and it did, obviously. It affected everybody.
To what extent do you work as an editor while shooting?
I shoot as an editor only to the extent that I am limited by money and time. I say, well, I've got this part of the scene in this take, and this part in this one and so on. I may never get the performance on the set but I know I can build it in the cutting-room. If I were a more perfect director, I wouldn't have as much fun in the cutting-room.
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is going to be like the Westerns in the sense that it contains one man's view of things, and that is your view. How do you manage this?
I couldn't define what view of life I impose, but I do know, after the fact, that I have somehow managed to get several different writers to do scripts with a similar point of view. I don't know how conscious my objective ever is, but I think I have a feeling for the fulfilment aspects of films and what an audience should ideally get from a movie. For me, one of the most perfect movie stories is The Graduate. If I can get that perfect an empathetic situation into a film, then I'm happy. I know I have something basic that can't help but psychologically satisfy an audience. As well as myself.
What were you after in this film ?
I was interested in what has happened to love, for one thing. What contemporary attitudes towards love are as opposed to traditional attitudes, and how much romance is left in a non-romantic world ... I don't know how much is left in the world, but there's a lot left in our movie. We're in a world where love has been rejected, but people still have a nostalgia for it, and I think that's what we deal with in this film.
Are you a romantic?
I'm romantic in the sense that Camus was romantic. I ... feel a nostalgia for what cannot be.
Would you describe BLACKTOP as a love story? Who loves whom?
I always felt it was a love story. The girl loves the driver; the mechanic loves the girl and the driver, and he can't decide between them and can't accept his love for either. And the driver wants to love the girl, but can't.
I've always felt there was a profound absence of love in BLACKTOP ...
Well, I've expressed these things to Rudy, but I don't know if he wrote exactly that story ... Maybe audiences will see it differently, too. But I've always seen the driver as the same sort of character that Aznavour plays in Tirez sur le Pianiste. He appeals to me too. It's a guy who is so involved with his own existential dilemma, just dealing with himself as a person, that he throws away the thing he wants most, which is love. He can't deal with those needs in time, and that becomes his tragedy.
You don't think the cars, the roads, and the quintessential Americanness of the characters are significant ?
That's just a cultural appendage ... side effects. A way to augment the reality.
You haven't mentioned one of the two major characters, G. T. 0. (played by Warren Oates). What function does he serve ?
G.T.O. is time ... God, that sounds pretentious. Look, I'm evolving, I'm getting older. My films have to reflect this. G.T.O.'s function is as a reference to the process of time. A reminder of mortality. The idea of time is a double-edged element. The illusion and delusion of time ... Cars, roads, speed are one thing. G.T.O. sings 'Time Is On My Side'. Well, it's not. And the love thing is involved with him too. The temporal nature of love, or at least of sexual love. He has been through it. He's part of the generation gap.
There is a confusion in people's minds about what the essential elements of a movie are. We create 'genres' -- the road picture, the melodrama, the Western ... I don't think those are good categories. Certain movies are made over and over again, each through a different director's vision. The prototypes for Blacktop are Minnelli's The Clock, Lelouch's Un Homme et une Femme, Nichols' The Graduate, Wilder's The Apartment. They are all the same story, told against a different background.
A recurring pattern in your films is the use of games. Is this a deliberate device ?
It wasn't a conscious thing to begin with. Well, Jack and I talked about it in Flight to Fury. But in Beast from Haunted Cave there's a slot machine and there is a game of solitaire. In The Shooting there's the game of getting the buckshot into a hole. And in Blacktop we have the pin-ball machine and pool. I wanted those.
Those games are kind of heavy, aren't they ?
Well, yes, I guess so ... I love the oriental gambling game in Flight to Fury with cards -weird cards with strange pictures on them. A dealer with long, polished fingernails peels off one card at a time. As a little bit of the picture is revealed, people can begin to tell whether they've won or lost. It's really exciting.
Do those games sum up your view of things ? The pointlessness of life.
I don't know ... 1 think it's best expressed in Flight to Fury, when Jack is asked what is this preoccupation with games, and he says, I just like to play.
Maybe, but it seems to me you have a very black point of view. You present a world where there is no justice, or mercy or hope, and where a man's fate is completely dependent upon accidental things. Has anything in your own life contributed to this feeling?
I don't think that the kind of feelings I have come from personal fortunes or misfortunes: they really come from how you are affected by the world. It's there for everyone to see, and some people are more sensitive to certain aspects of it than other aspects.
What directors or films do you especially like? Who has influenced you?
At the time I began making films, the directors who influenced me most were John Huston and Carol Reed. If I had to list what I thought were the greatest films I'd ever seen, I'd say 8½ and Persona. But I dont think Fellini or Bergman influenced me: the influences took place earlier. As far as my taste in subject matter goes, my favourite film of all time is Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands. I'm really attracted to the black side of Huston and Reed: I guess every film I've made has been either The Maltese Falcon or Outcast of the Islands.