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ARTS SCENE
G. Arnold, Bread and Circus editor

NEWS, the New and Emerging Writers Series, is set to host “Focus on Fiction” for the second in their engaging series of programs that introduce emerging writers in the Boston area. Join them on Wednesday, May 30, to hear an exciting line-up of writers share their work. The event will begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Regent Theatre screening room in Arlington, Massachusetts.

“Focus on Fiction” readers will include:

• Erin Dionne, featured in BREVITY & ECHO: An Anthology of Short-Short Fiction (not to mention editor of Bread and Circus)
• Robyn Bradley, winner of The Center for Arts (Natick, Massachusetts) 2007 Annual Short Story Contest
• Christine Junge, an MFA candidate at Lesley University
• A.E. Akillian, an MFA graduate of Lesley University
• Vito Salm, local author

“Focus on Fiction” will be held at The Regent Theatre screening room, 7 Medford Street, Arlington, MA 02474. Admission is free.

A reception will follow at The Book Rack, 13 Medford Street, Arlington, MA 02474.

Read more details at the NEWS web-site. The event is sponsored by The Book Rack bookstore in Arlington (781-646-2665).

Film notebook

By G. Arnold, Co-editor and contributing writer

Thirty years ago this week, Star Wars hit American movie theaters. The film didn’t elicit much enthusiasm from its own studio during production, but the George Lucas fable soon became a sensation. Audiences waited in long lines, and many came back for second, third, and even more viewings. It was not only the biggest hit of 1977, Star Wars became a cultural phenomenon. It’s a cult movie on a mass scale, generating enthusiasm that, for some, extends to the present day.

But what about other popular films released that year? Was 1977 a good vintage for directors? You be the judge. Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of some other movies from 1977. Not necessarily a run-down of the highest grossing films, this eclectic list shows the wide range of movies that attracted audiences of the day.

1. Airport 1977—This much can be said: Without the Airport movies, later movie spoofs such as Airplane! (1980) would have had less material to satirize. Veteran actor Jack Lemmon plays the captain of a private 747 jetliner that’s filled with art treasures. The plane spends much of the film underwater. Here’s the praise that the industry paper Variety could muster: “The story’s formula banality is credible most of the time.”
2. Annie Hall – Director-comedian Woody Allen was hugely popular with movie critics and with his target audiences, which tended to be composed of educated (some might say snobby), East Coast (okay, more like New York-oriented) cultural liberals. This semi-autobiographical tale contains Allen’s famous encounter with an escaped lobster.
3. Saturday Night Fever – This disco-flavored look at urban nightlife features music by the Bee Gees and other disco acts of the day. It also revealed, somewhat surprisingly to some, that lead actor John Travolta could make a successful transition from television (he was Vinnie Barbarino in the situation comedy Welcome Back, Kotter) to the big screen.
4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind – His pal George Lucas made huge waves with Star Wars in the spring of 1977, and later that year Steven Spielberg introduced his own entry into the sci-fi genre. The BBC’s review observes that the movie “is saturated with imagery that fascinates, terrifies, and utterly consumes the viewer with the desire to discover the secret that’s eating away at the on-screen characters.” It’s a vintage Spielberg movie, pure Hollywood in many ways, but also quite entertaining.
5. Looking for Mr. Goodbar – This somber movie intends to show audiences a picture of hidden life in the 1970s. The all-star cast features Richard Gere, Diane Keaton, Tom Berenger, Tuesday Weld, Levar Burton, and Brian Dennehy. In the story, Diane Keaton’s straight-laced character, a teacher of deaf students, decides to use her free evenings for cruising bars in search of sex and drugs. It all seemed quite serious and edgy when it premiered, but today the ending rings more of Hollywood’s earlier days than the liberated 70s.
6. High Anxiety – Comic Mel Brooks rode to box office glory with his classic Western send-up, Blazing Saddles (1974). In High Anxiety, he aimed his sights at the movies of director Alfred Hitchcock, known as the “master of suspense.” Brooks plays the new director of Psychoneurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous. And yes, this is the movie that introduces audiences to the forbidding Nurse Diesel (Cloris Leachman).
7. Oh, God! – This vehicle for the aged George Burns paired the popular comedian with singer John Denver, who had entertained (some folks used a less kind word) radio audiences with such hits as “Rocky Mountain High,” now the second official state song of Colorado. (The first is “Where the Columbines Grow.”) In the story, the Almighty (Burns) chooses a grocery clerk (Denver) to be his modern messenger to humanity. Who are we to argue with the Almighty?
8. Smokey and the Bandit — Burt Reynolds, the 1970s icon, stars as a bootlegger, but the real story here, as wisely noted by Variety, involves “many different ways to crash cars.”
9. The Deep – Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bissett star as a couple vacationing in Bermuda when they cross paths with treasure hunters of the kind who do not make television specials for National Geographic. Novelist and screenwriter Peter Benchley had already hit pay-dirt with Jaws a few years earlier, and here he tries to keep his menace-and-water theme going, with rather uneven results.
10. The Spy Who Loved Me – The James Bond franchise kept chugging along in the 1970s, though by then Bond movies didn’t so much simply contain spoof elements as have them as their central feature. Many people’s least favorite Bond, British actor Roger Moore, stars in the title role. Barbara Bach, wife of Beatle Ringo Starr, appears as his opposite number, a Soviet agent with whom Bond has to “cooperate.” The title song, “Nobody Does It Better,” and musical score were nominated for an Academy Award, as was the art direction. The rest of the movie? Well…not so much.

So, these are the sort of movies that were popular with the stalwart audiences of the Carter years. Like most movies, maybe, these tell us more about the life and times of their era than may have been apparent at the time. Are they still entertaining? Some are worth a look. Others, however, make us ask, “What were they thinking?”

What do you think?

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G. Arnold is co-editor of Bread and Circus. He is author of the books Conspiracy Theory in Film, Television, and Politics (forthcoming, Praeger 200 and The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam (McFarland 2006). Contact him here.

Odds Bodkins: Reflections on God’s Body, or Lack Thereof

By Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, contributing writer

This semester, I’m teaching two sections of Art History Survey One—what I like to call “Caves to Cathedrals.” Of late, my lectures have been teeming with references to historical conceptions of whether or not God, Christ, the angels and saints should be depicted with naturalistic bodies. As Joseph Campbell and others have rightly pointed out, in surveying the major world religions (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) one can find elements of both: the ephemeral, or immaterial (Neo-Platonic), school of thought and its opposite, the more material (Aristotelian) school. In other words, some philosophers frame God as a divine mystery—invisible and seen only through a murky, worldly veil. Conversely, others believe that God is part and parcel of every living being on Earth, that our divine souls are truly manifest in our humble, yet sanctified bodies.

In the classroom, reaction to this philosophical and artistic dialectic has been interesting. Mostly, students are excited that they can make sense of the duality of highly abstracted imagery of divinity on the one hand, and its antipode, corporeal realism, on the other. Some even seem to have used this age-old question to embrace their “inner art historian.”

On a recent exam, for example, one student referred to a stern, abstracted Byzantine image of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as “divine judge”) against a golden, heavenly field as “his ass up there looking down on us.”

Perhaps like most academics, my knee-jerk reaction was to think, “Whoa! How crass!” Then, it occurred to me that while admittedly the response was completely un-Byzantine in its sentiment, the very corporeal metaphor for God or Jesus just might have some legs in another context—the context of Western European sacred parody.

Such happenstance is extremely useful to me as I’m concurrently busy preparing a paper proposal on “Holy Laughter”. Isn’t it funny when serendipity strikes? In my research for that project, I’ve been reading about the incarnation of Christ as a truly bodily event—a celebration of “God as mud” as it were. Instead of thinking of the holy as something intangible, as the Eastern Orthodox Church fathers did—or the whole of the Protestant Reformation, for that matter—some medieval Western European philosophers, and most common folk historically have thought of our humble selves as worthy of the description, “just a bit lower than the angels.” After all, to them the mystery of the incarnation in Christianity requires that one come to grips with God made flesh. And, imagine what fun it would be to consider a supreme being clothed in humanity with all of its physical functions and limitations. What a philosophical conundrum! What an opportunity for festive humor concerning the lower bodily strata!

As many scholars (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Harvey Cox and M. Conrad Hyers) have written, Medieval Period bawdy festivity and parodic inversion of divinity were heartily embraced as part of the human quest to understand past, present and future, to grapple with change and to find his place in the cosmic order. Such play and release of energy required the temporary inversion of high and low social and cultural strata, much like the true expression of communitas as described by the anthropologist Victor Turner. According to Turner, communitas is the very spirit of community demonstrated by equality, solidarity and togetherness. Communitas is most acute in periods of inversion and change, as in a rite of passage, one that brings common understanding and transient humility.

These rites of passage have been likened to the ancient tradition of carnivalesque feast days in the Catholic Church—for example, the feasts of Epiphany and Easter when earthly kings are toppled in favor of poor babes, or physical death is overcome by a miraculous physical resurrection. (Deeply resonant themes, incidentally, shared by many world religions both East and West as enumerated by Joseph Campbell in The Mythic Image.) These inversions made God substantive and present to each and every person, be they noble, priest, merchant or peasant.

Implicit in these parodic, sacred celebrations are the shared dualities of human existence each person must come to know: hunger and satiety, wealth and squalor, power and powerlessness, birth and death. These are distinctly human concerns. Indeed, it seems human beings have constructed ritual and festivity to make sense of the impenetrable, the unknowable and the unfair. And, yet, many cultural leaders have tried to disassociate from the physical, from revelry and excess, especially our Puritan forefathers to whom we owe much of our current distaste for fun and release.

In his recent book God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything (2007), Christopher Hitchens has hitched his own wagon to a flippant, broadly dismissive, secularist viewpoint. As a monolithic whole, he categorizes “religion” as wish-fulfillment, imposed sexual repression, maximal servitude and solipsism, and a deliberate misrepresentation of the origins of man and the universe. As I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t always so. His picture of “religion” as a grand larceny of personal freedoms and intellect is a short view, mostly informed by post-Enlightenment thought.

Like most Post-Modernists, Hitchens has thrown out history and spirituality without plumbing the valuable resources of traditional festivity and comic ritual; in past generations such parodic festivity served to remind us of what we share—who we are and where we come from, and how we might properly proceed.
Only since the iconoclastic Enlightenment movement came on the scene in Western Europe have human beings have found reason to ponder whether or not “God is dead.” If humanity cannot begin to belly-laugh at its pathological seriousness, so, it would seem, are we.

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Kimberlee A. Cloutier-Blazzard, Ph. D., is an Independent Scholar of Art History, Specializing in Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Click here to send her email.