It’s been a good year, writing-wise. Time for a break.
The holidays are a great time to get up from my desk and get out of the house. What else is going on out there?
For one thing there is the mind-blowing Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney. No dusty- museum-experience-of-my-childhood here.
This is a “…spirited, sense-surround show…” that is “a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance…
it serves as a kind of audiovisual backdrop to many dozens of objects — paintings, sculptures, collages, prints — rich in imaginative variety, diverse in content…
Basically, it’s an evocation of Ailey, and his dance, through the lens of African American visual art, which is a record and reflection of the Black culture that shaped him, and that he helped shape.” (New York Times)
Then there is the Frank Capra tribute at Film Forum; the delightful Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was a great place to start.
Capra made multiple films with screenwriter Robert Riskin, who was a master storyteller. I am a huge fan of what I call the Boom, You’re In! method, wherein you are rapidly plunged into the conflict of the story, leaving you no time to become disengaged by, for example, a meandering pace.
I was lucky enough to study dramatic structure with the great Joe Stockdale, at SUNY Purchase, and our first assignment was reading Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he gives the reader the framework of storytelling: Setting, Rising Action, Conflict, Crisis, and Denouement.
What is fascinating about watching the films of the Depression is how quickly you discover, say, the setting and rising action of a movie like Mr. Deeds. In the first two minutes you know the setting – the Italian countryside – and the rising action – a speeding car goes off a cliff, killing the American mogul inside. Newspaper headlines flash as a search ensues for said mogul’s heir. By the time we get to the third and fourth scenes we know the press and the lawyers are involved -- everyone wants in – and, before you know it, the heir has been discovered, a modest man and the mogul’s nephew, played by none other than Gary Cooper.
The Italian countryside served as setting for Capra’s own origin story – he was born in poverty in Palermo to parents who neither read nor wrote – and took him to the U.S. and eventually Hollywood, where, in one of his first jobs, he mucked out the studio stables. The documentary, Frank Capra: Mr. America, also showing at Film Forum, does an amazing job of capturing the complexity of Capra’s immigrant rags-to-riches story, without “Capra-corning” it.
Read my essay on studying with Stockdale here.