Truth Thursday
I went to see "Midnight in Paris," the recent Woody Allen movie, for a second time last week.There are so many reasons that I am so drawn to this love letter to Paris in the 1920's – the city's utter beauty, heightened by the gorgeous cinematography, being the first. As one character says of this city of my dreams, "every street is its own special art."
The conceit for the movie is that a young, blonde, California screen writer has dreams of becoming a novelist, heads to Paris, and every night at midnight, winds up being hurdled back in time and hanging out with the his idols, the literati of the era – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (played by the great Kathy Bates), Cole Porter, even Djuna Barnes. In conversation heavily laced with alcohol, Hemingway muses about being brave and true.
There are smaller story lines featuring Picasso and the surrealists - Dali and Luis Bunuel. Man Ray shows up to drink Calvados. We encounter T.S. Eliot, and there is a great line about measuring out contemporary life with coke spoons. Josephine Baker shimmies in an early dance scene.There is a detective who for all the world is reminiscent of Sydney Greenstreet's Ferrari in "Casablanca." The modern day characters spend time contemplating both Rodin's sculptures and Monet's water lilies.
As a romantic, as a writer, as someone who has always thought of the 1920's as a golden era for its new freedoms, its sartorial coolness, its attitude and its intellectual and artistic output, this film is an aortic line to my heart. But I have been wondering about how it has become been such a hit with the more general public. Seeing it a second time has helped me understand.
A love story develops between Picasso's young mistress, Adriana, who has come to Paris to study fashion with Coco Chanel, and the Hollywood writer. She is the ultimate flapper, wearing her straight line, drop waist, sleeveless short dresses with flair and looking both innocent and seductive. Our young screen writer, Gil, who is in Paris with his boorish and decidedly unromantic fiancée, falls in love with her.
Together they walk and talk through the streets of Paris, and Adriana makes it clear that the 1920's are a big yawn, and that for her, the real Golden Era was Paris during the Belle Epoque -- the age of Maxims and the Can Can and Toulouse-Lautrec at the Folies Bergere. Through the magic of cinema, Gil and Adriana then find themselves transported back to that age, and Adriana is asked to stay (by Degas) to design the new costumes for the Paris Ballet.
And this, dear reader, is the heart of the story. This sense that previous generations, previous worlds, hold the key to our happiness. The gleam of a former era, no matter how tarnished it may have been in true life, holds such allure when our present day reality is so bitter and difficult. Today's financial meltdowns, world crises and intractable conflicts didn't exist when Hemingway was drinking heavily and writing about war and soldiers as being brave and true. Even a brutal war seems romantic in the soft light of Paris nearly 100 years ago.
One of the characters in the movie notes, "An artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote to everyday existence." The art of any era does just this – it brings us out ourselves and reminds us that our daily world, while our own reality, can be elevated if we close our eyes and squint.
The novel that Gil is writing is about a man who owns a memorabilia shop – a character, like those in the movie, who is trying to forget the present. But by the end, Gil realizes, when he loses Adriana to the Folies Bergere, that the present is a little unsatisfying "because life is unsatisfying." And he returns to present day Paris, where he has now decided to live, and walks away over the Pont Neuf with the young woman from the marché aux puces (flea market) who sells Cole Porter records.
Sigh.
We all are slogging through our present. Can you imagine, in 100 years, someone looking back with fond nostalgia at the 2010's? What would they point to in this decidedly non-innocent age as something to remember?
But I can believe it. I can remember feeling a sense of being part of something larger than myself in the days and the weeks after 9/11 – now almost 10 years ago. A sense of an era of lost hope, lost innocence, and a time when we as a nation were connected to each other in a profound way.
Today, almost any moment, any decade has the chance to be captured and regurgitated as something to be longed for.
The convocation of art and history has been much on my mind this summer, as I have spent the past few months immersed in a personal, family project. My grandfather, an early 20th century photographer, used gorgeous silver gelatin prints to capture the elegance and sleek beauty of that era. He lived and worked in New York City - the New York City of the 1920's and 1930's, forever captured by Edward Steichen with his iconic Flat Iron photographic series. I look back on that New York, and think what a marvelous place it must have been.
As new prints and negatives from his body of work have surfaced, I am as intrigued by the beauty and mysteries of the borders of my grandfather's life in that era as I am of the literati portrayed in the movie. What inspired him? How did he choose his subjects? What was he thinking as he shot each picture – who did he love, and why this picture, this portrait, at this moment?
As part of my research, I want to attempt to look at the world through his vantage point, and so I am venturing into a photography class to see if I can answer some of these questions, adding to my words a new tool to help me understand and parse that which is around me.
And this, in the end, I believe is what we are all searching for. New ways to see the world, to understand our existence in this moment, to take what has happened in the past and use it to make today more relevant, to put our surroundings in context -- using a lens of history, longing and art.
Photo by fictures via Flickr
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