Tag: Paul Robeson

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Du a Gwyn: Shades and Shadows of Life in Wales

Well, I am used to it. That is, I used to be. Seeing images of my surroundings on the big screen is rather a common experience if you live in the cinematographically well-mapped center of New York City. Moving from Gotham to Cymru (that is, Wales) seemed to push my life effectively off the map I had gone by in the shaping of my existence ever since I first set eyes on the Big Apple. I have been reluctant to discard the old plan in exchange for a new atlas, one that matches my present environs, one that might help me to position instead of dislocating myself. This journal has been largely a mode of escape, a vehicle of expression designed to transport me from a place in which I have not yet found a voice. Just from what am I trying to get away, though? And how much longer can I get away with using a chart of my own making, drawn, as it were, with my eyes closed to the world?

You might say that moving from and vowing never to return to what is supposedly my home (my native Germany), whether to Manhattan (where I lived for about fifteen years) or to Wales (where I have been residing nearly three years now), is a continual rehearsal of my sense of displacement as a gay person, as someone not quite at home in any society, as someone suspicious of the very concept of home. As an expatriate, I have made the experience of being born an outsider a matter of choice.

I have been reminded of my estrangement—and the unease of longing and not belonging—while attending Fflics, the aforementioned festival of classic films representing Welsh life or a Wales imagined elsewhere. How queer, for instance, to feel alienated by The Corn Is Green (1945), a Hollywood movie based on a play by gay actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams and starring gay icon Bette Davis. Here is a studio version of Wales that bears little resemblance to any Cymru past or present, a film that now strikes me as disingenuous and calculating as the strumpet portrayed by Joan Lorring.

Three years ago, I would not have been able to tell that the accents in Corn are as phony as the painted backdrops. However willing I am to suspend disbelief, I cannot go so far as to suppress my new knowledge and experience for the sake of entering into a world that commercially exploits foreignness without embracing it. Williams’s own struggle to come to terms with his marginality is deproblematized, his secret code obliterated. What remains is the missionary message that it takes someone ignorant of your origins to assist in what amounts to a purge, to prompt and prod you into becoming someone you ought to be according to superimposed standards.

An extreme form of such reconditioning is presented in The Silent Village (1943), a propagandist documentary imagining the invasion of a Welsh (and linguistically entirely non-English) community by the Nazis, whose first act is to prohibit the use of the Welsh language. Meeting with silent resistance, then active revolt, the fascist invaders effectively take the town off the map, killing its men and razing its homes in retaliation of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official.

It is a remarkably restrained, unsentimental and unhysterical recreation of the Lidice massacre, acted out by ordinary folk in a Welsh mining town not unlike Lidice. While the town of Cwmgiedd was being turned into a symbol, it lost none of its character during or as a result of the location shoot, the iconography of its everyday being carefully rendered. Verisimilitude turned to reality, pastness to present, when one of the Welsh villagers, a schoolboy back in 1943, spoke after the screening of the film about the town’s non-hostile takeover by the British film crew.

Utter hokum by comparison is Graham Cutts’s The Rat (1925), a pseudo-Parisian melodrama reveling in its own irrelevance. Gay Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello plays a tormented object of heterosexual desire, an apache who comes to value the love of his gal pal over the glamorous world that enslaves him even as he seeks to conquer it. Penned by Novello himself (under the telling pseudonym “David L’Estrange”), The Rat invites decoding; but even if the code can be cracked, the film remains impersonal, sheltered as it is by its own artifice.

Rather more personally relevant to my experience is the image of the stranger in Proud Valley (1940) starring Paul Robeson as a black American introducing himself into a Welsh coal-mining community. “Why, damn and blast it,” one of the miners protests, “aren’t we all black down it that pit?”

As I learned reading Cadewch i Paul Robeson Ganu!, a fascinating account of Robeson’s ties to Wales, the actor-singer-activist found here a “cymuned o’r un anian,” a kindred community. “There is no place in the world I like more than Wales,” he once exclaimed. He expressed his solidarity with the Welsh miners, whom he first encountered and aided in 1929, singing for them (via transatlantic exchange) even when he was barred from international travel after his passport was confiscated by the US government.

It is a “kindred community” like this to which I have yet to gain access; it is this sense of being embraced and found valuable that I have yet to experience here. I realize that, for this to happen, Wales and Welsh have to become a more integral part of my existence as I am sharing it in this journal. So, after following a haunted and hunting Ivor Novello (as a suspicious foreigner and loner) into the London fog shrouding The Phantom Fiend (1932), the underappreciated talkie take on Hitchcock’s Lodger, I am discovering the actor anew in a Welsh setting established in speech and song by Cliff Gordon’s radio comedy “Choir Practice: A Storm in a Welsh Teacup” (produced in 1946) and subsequently adapted for the screen as Valley of Song (1953), another one of the films shown as part of the Fflics festival. Here, at least, the idiom rings true . . .

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Next Stop, Proud Valley

How odd, I thought, when I heard myself saying that, instead of screening our customary late night movie, I would retire early because . . . I had a film to catch. The Fflics festival (announced a few weeks ago) got underway today here in Wales and we have tickets for three of the screenings tomorrow. The first film on our agenda, Proud Valley (1940), starring Paul Robeson, will be shown at 10 AM. Robeson’s Welsh connections were still unknown to me when first I posted his picture here; but I have been looking forward to an occasion to explore this bond of brotherhood for quite some time now.

At noon, we are going to emerge from the mineshafts of Proud Valley (also known as The Tunnel) to take in the propaganda film The Silent Village (1943), a recreation of the aforementioned Lidice massacre on Welsh soil. I am equipped with Eduard Stehlík’s account of the 1942 raid on the Czech village, a book I discovered a few weeks ago on a tour of the Jewish Quarter in Prague.

What follows is a detour to Hollywood with Bette Davis as a teacher in a Welsh mining town in The Corn Is Green (1945), based on a play by Welsh actor-dramatist Emlyn Williams. I wonder whether I will be able to spot radio actors John Dehner and Rhoda Williams (whom I once met during an old-time radio convention in Newark) in a cast that is all over the map and as authentic as the one headed by Olivia de Havilland in the 12 June 1950 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of Corn, in which Ms. Williams may also be heard.

In between these courses of acetate treats we might just manage to grab a bite to eat and perhaps get a chance to chat with our friend, silent movie composer and radio playwright Neil Brand, who will accompany Maurice Elvey’s long-lost Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) at the festival on Saturday evening.

As much as I am looking forward to a day at the pictures, I hope the antemeridian screenings won’t render my cinematic experience an academic one, let alone a series of barely suppressed yawns. Then again, I can count on Mr. Robeson to stir me with his rendition of “Deep River” . . .

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How Screened Was My Valley: A Festival of Fflics

Well, this is right up my valley, I thought, when I first heard about Fflics: Wales Screen Classics. That was back in 2005; but this month, the festival is finally getting underway here in Aberystwyth. We went into town this afternoon for the official launch; and whatever promotional boost I might give this event I am only too glad to provide, especially since it brings our friend, the silent screen composer Neil Brand, back into town to provide his musical accompaniment to a long-lost epic whose rediscovery (in the mid-1990s) film historian Kevin Brownlow termed “the find of the century.”

The four-day, thirty events spanning festival opens, rather safely and predictably, with a Hollywood behemoth, the Academy Award winning How Green Was My Valley (1941), based on the international bestseller by Richard Llewellyn. Also on the bill is the Bette Davis vehicle The Corn Is Green (1945), adapted from a stage drama by the aforementioned Welsh playwright Emlyn Night Must Fall Williams.

Williams features prominently in the festival’s offerings, whether as writer, actor, or director. He can be seen in King Vidor’s The Citadel (1938) and Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down (1939), two mining disaster movies I watched earlier this year, but in his only directorial effort, The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), in which he costars opposite Edith Evans and Richard Burton in his first screen role.

Unlike in the case of Dolwyn, the story of a village threatened to expire in a watery grave to make room for a reservoir, the Welsh connections are tentative, at times. Apart from those fanciful and historically questionable portraits of life in 20th-century Wales produced in Hollywood and England, any film written, inspired by or starring those born, raised or having been creatively active here seems to have qualified. Dead of Night (1945), for instance, happens to star Welshman Mervyn Johns and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) is portrayed by Welsh character actor Roger Livesey (among whose supporting cast members numbers the leading lady saluted in my previous entry).

Entirely justified, and much appreciated, is the spotlight on Welsh matinee idol Ivor Novello, who can be seen in The Rat (1925), with Neil Brand at the piano, and the French production of The Call of the Blood (1920; pictured). Unequivocal Wales Screen Classics, too, are films like Y Chwarelwr (1935), the first feature length Welsh language sound drama, and Proud Valley (1940), starring the great Paul Robeson (pictured and mentioned here), who first came to Wales back in the late 1920s and remained closely connected to its people and culture, despite being denied the privilege of international travel by the US State Department in 1950s.

Fflics also offers rare documentary footage of Buffalo Bill touring the North Wales seaside town of Rhyl back in 1903, introduces today’s audience to “Jerry the Troublesome Tyke,” the first animated shorts to come out of Wales back in the mid-1920s, and provides a fascinating example of British wartime propaganda with The Silent Village (1943), a restaging or reimagining on Welsh soil of the 1942 razing of the Czech village Lidice by the Nazis, with a pictorial account of which I came back from the Jewish Quarter of Prague a few weeks ago (and a poetic response to which I discussed here a couple of years earlier).

Proud Valley, The Rat, and The Silent Village apart, the highlight of the festival is, for me, the screening of the Life Story of David Lloyd George, a 1918 biographical drama, boasting a cast of ten thousand, that never reached the public and disappeared from view for over seven decades. Directed by the prolific Maurice Elvey (whose Hindle Wakes [1927] I briefly discussed here), it features Hitchcock partner and screenwriter Alma Reville in her only acting role. I shall have to report back . . .

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"The Island of Death," the Radioactive Sea, and the Legacy of U235

Well, I wasn’t aware of it when I moved here. Not that such knowledge would have prevented me from moving; but it might have made me more doubtful about my seemingly pristine environs—or about picking the catch of the day from the menu of a local restaurant. The Irish Sea, I mean, and the nuclear waste it contains. Research suggests that the Irish Sea, which separates Ireland from my present home of Wales, is the most radioactive body of salt water on this planet.

Growing up in cold-war Germany, I could conceive of nothing more terrifying than atomic power. My earliest nightmare, which continued to plague me in my pre-pubescence, was of a gigantic bomb. An enormous cannon ball of mass destruction, it was surrounded by a shadowy group of scientists whose proximity to this ominous orb had, to my childish mind, already proven them to be beyond trust and reason.

It was a tableau right out of Dr. Mabuse, or some such German spy-fi horror, reconstructed in the feverish imagination of a troubled child. I have never learned to love the bomb—and never doubted that splitting the atom was nothing short of abject, indefensible madness.

There is no need to conceive of scientists as fiendish or sinister to realize the destructive force of nuclear energy. Whatever the nature of their tamperings with nature, the madmen of melodrama, figures like H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau help us cope with our anxieties about scientific experimentation by rendering the unfathomable so grotesque as to classify it as something entirely unrealistic and thus safely distant in the realm of futuristic or fantastic fiction.

On this day, 28 April, in 1947, for instance, one of Moreau’s lesser cousins appeared on US radio’s long-running series of Sherlock Holmes adventures, luring a group of sideshow “freaks” on his remote “Island of Terror” to serve as the guinea pigs for his secret experiments, a study designed to show that the “glandular defects” of his subjects “produce psychological alterations.”

As Holmes endeavored to prove in this decidedly unexceptional piece of run-of-the-mill hokum, truth is “stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Truth is, however, that fanciful ideas may become physical fact, as the inquisitive minds of the few force man-made realities upon the suffering bodies of the many.

In the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, little was known as yet about the long-term effects of radiation, of the cancers and mutations to threaten future generations. Radio dramatist Norman Corwin was among the first to address the tremendous legacy of the Enola Gay and its deadly mission. “Do not smile, do not smile as though knowing better,” he admonished the nonchalant in “Set Your Clock at U235,” a monologue read on 29 October 1945 by Paul Robeson (pictured above, on the cover for a recording of another radio performance).

Corwin asked Americans the uncomfortable question of what was to become of their “dear-bought, blood-begotten, towering, and grave victory”:

The secrets of the earth have been peeled back, one by one, until the core is bare:

The latest recipe is private, in a guarded book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from Nagasaki:

The nations have heard of the fission of the atom and have seen the photographs: skies aboil with interlocking fury, mushrooms of uranium smoke ascending to where angels patrol uneasily.

Perhaps, Corwin had rather too much trust in mythological figures, in those “angels” on “patrol.” He believed—or at least suggested—that the “chemicking that could destroy us, together with our pots and pans and allies, can also do as bidden by us: outperform whole teams of genii: be servile to the meek: reform our wayward systems peacefully.”

The nuclear disasters of the 1970s and ‘80s should have convinced us that the genii do not feel in any way obliged to “do as bidden by us.” Here, science must be content for once to play itself out on paper. To keep those determined to doctor with or deal in that most lethal of Promethean sparks enchained on the rocks of common sense is our debt to future generations. It’s “elementary.”