Instances of the colour yellow #3

The yellow house at Arles, where Van Gogh and Cezanne worked side by side from October to December 1888.

The Real Star of "The Third Man:" Harry Lime's Vienna.

From the moment of its conception, the 1949 box office hit “The Third Man,” was always going to be far more than a simple masterpiece of film noir. With the impressive triumvirate of Alexander Korda, Carol Reed and Graham Greene collaborating on the screen play and direction, Selznick’s production, Karas’ music and the unforgettable performances of Orson Wells, Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten, set against the complex and entropic landscape of the bombed-shattered Vienna, the film’s powerful mis-en-scene becomes the vehicle for a tale of moral corruption, disillusionment and the stasis of an ancient and noble city awaiting its rebirth.

It was Korda’s idea to base a film in occupied Vienna, where Greene was sent to adapt an existing screen play early in 1948. He was shocked by the physical destruction and brutal segregation of the city into zones under four ruling powers but even more so by the determined emergence of life, robustly and persistently from among the ashes. Vienna had suffered a decade of terror and privation: occupied by the Germans in 1938 and relieved by the Red Army in April 1945, the remaining population had endured four months of lawlessness before Western troops arrived late that August. The English film’s introduction, voiced by Carol Reed, reminded the audience of the city’s recent glory, defined by “its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm;” a nostalgic, pre-lapsian idyll that had almost become a guilty secret to be harboured among the ruins. For the indigenous Viennese characters, it is a real and recent bereavement, of baroque architecture and statues pock-marked by bullets and bombs; centuries of grandeur lie at their feet, while their minds are preoccupied with the need to survive, largely by black-market trading. The American narration, however, delivered by Joseph Cotten, heightened the level of threat in the city and the dangers inevitable in this thriving underworld, adding “they could get anything if people wanted it enough…” and including the warning that amateurs “don’t last long, not really.” English audiences never saw the image of a dead body floating among ice floes down the Danube, as it was considered too shocking.

Perhaps more so than its innocent citizens, Vienna itself is the film’s main casualty of war. Views of deserted streets, ruins and piles of uncleared rubble are heightened by chiaroscuro, expressionistic shots and the tilted wide-angled camera lens of a world thrown off-kilter. Even its reputation of “easy charm” had become “bogus,” lost among “undignified ruins;” a hostile, difficult landscape, its topography deceptively hidden under “great glaciers of snow and ice.” The famous blue Danube, with all its waltzing conotations has become “a grey flat muddy river,” the old pleasure park “smashed and desolate and full of weeds.” In the darkness, new arrival Holly Martins passes the wrecked symbols of civilisation and religion; the “half-destroyed Diana baths” and “enormous wounded spire” of the Cathedral. With its cultural and historical identity shattered almost beyond recognition, it comes as little surprise to the audience that the city is also morally fractured; the familiar is twisted and dislocated; friends are not to be trusted and appearances are frequently deceptive.

 The city’s austerity is all too evident; besides the ruins, the continual cold is emphasised; Martins complains of the Josefstadt Theatre being “even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat” and pictures actors going home to “coffee without sugar” and a “roll without butter:” Actress Anna Schmidt explains how the Americans sometimes throw tea instead of flowers, after a performance: Martins can’t buy a drink with his military money; a landlady is wrapped in a duvet and gratefully accepts the gift of a few cigarettes. The racketeer Dr Winkel’s waiting room reminds Martins of an antique shop; in Greene’s later novella, it reads like a reliquary of the old Imperial city: the ancient crucifixes, cardinals’ chairs, saints’ relics, statuettes and golden casket containing a shard of the “true cross” suggest an alternative preserved Vienna to that of the introductory montage and subsequent mis-en-scene. Another facet of the city emerges, part of a concealed culture that parallels Winkel’s dishonesty.

 Incidental locations reinforce the pervasive malady of the urban landscape: ruins, dark rooms, alleys, abandoned cars, cemeteries and sewers frame anti-hero Harry Lime’s supposed and real death. Greene uses the Central cemetery as a reminder of the futility of life and the endurance of death; in the city, transient and difficult existence is only a prelude for the real life, echoing composer Gustav Mahler’s statement that you have to be dead in Vienna before they’ll let you live. Modern transport parodies a captive audience; for a mile, the trams run beside “an apparently endless chain of gravestones waiting for owners and wreaths waiting for mourners.” It is difficult for Martins to locate Lime’s grave, due to the snow’s “grotesque comedy” and the division of land by the four powers. As his search progresses, the area becomes more menacing; “graves lay like wolves under the trees,” the graveyard stretches through a forest, giving the feeling that beyond the misleading city lights, an ever-present darkness lies in wait. During the hunt for Lime, Major Calloway ironically reminds novelist Martins “death’s at the bottom of everything” and warns him to “leave it to the professionals.”

Lime’s supposed funeral is the film’s first indication of his existence below ground. His affiliation with sewers and catacombs, identifies him as a product of the city’s darkness: since his childhood association with Martins, he has undergone a rebirth and is as much part of the fabric of the changed landscape as the crumbling architecture. His adoption of the city’s wrecked topography is opportunistic; he rejects the shattered streets for subterranean access, appears in outline against the ruined skyline above the cafe like a baroque statue and haunts the urban margins like a ghost. Lime is “silent and motionless in the dark street,” which Martins almost believes to be “an illusion caused by shadow,” barely human. Perhaps the film’s most iconic images are Lime’s first and last: the chiaroscuro effects of his face lit from an opposite window and the poignant fingers curling up through the grate in their death-throes.

The film’s tense sequences in the sewers, absent of music, magnifies the sounds of running feet, barking dogs and rushing water, to nightmarish proportions. Sinister shadows rise up against the walls, the tilted camera lens and the mocking mouth-like tunnels create an expressionistic surreal world, a physical and moral labyrinth in which Lime has trapped himself. Angles and expectations are challenged; the maze has become complex and multi-dimensional, echoing the audiences’ mixed feelings towards the charismatic Lime but the outcome is inevitable. Martins’ final disillusionment identifies Lime intimately with his location; he is an “animal who creeps into the dark to die,” “he wants to die at home and the darkness is never home to us.” Yet Martins still offers a glimpse of humanity, attempting to include Lime in the “us,” but his death in the sewer, unable to reach the light and possible salvation, sets him apart from Holly and the Major and also from his victim, the valiant Sergeant Paine, whose unnecessary death finally turns the audience’s remaining sympathies.

Lime’s motivation is complex, almost Faustian. It is significant that his reunion with Martins takes place among the ruins of the funfair; a child’s game gone wrong, with its “bones sticking crudely through the snow.” The altered perspective, above the city rooftops appears initially to lend Lime a sense of superiority, a metaphor for his own conceit as he dismisses the “toy landscape” below. He is intimately connected with, altered by and part of, his adopted city.  Equally, Holly Martins’ noble, if misled, quest for the truth about Lime’s faked death and his chivalric protection of Anna Schmidt, are juxtaposed against the seamy underside of Viennese life. He can entertain the seeming opposites of pure-minded naïve idealism and a taste for the visceral, his mind always turns “towards women…after two drinks,” and fuelled by memories of “girls” he has known in Amsterdam and Paris, is drawn to Anna as “the only girl he knew in Vienna.” Later, at Maxim’s, where scenes of scantily-clad dancers were cut from the final film, Martins is musing on a girl he’d known in Dublin, his mind revolving “in circles – from sentiment to lust and back again from belief to cynicism.” Calloway’s narrative is full of Martins’ drunken exploits, established early, when he attempts to punch the Major but the policeman’s contempt of the “smoky” clubs behind “sham Eastern facades”, hung with “semi-nude photos” is offset by a grudging retrospective sympathy. Although Martins is a nuisance, Calloway’s gently patronising tone allows the audience to tolerate his naïve hopes, even pity him like Anna; “if you are in love yourself, it never occurs to you that the girl doesn’t know.” With youthful enthusiasm, Martins tries to experience all the corruption Vienna can offer but his drinking and womanising appears tame when set alongside the penicillin racket and murders committed by Lime. Martins is always on the outside; he sees the veneer of the city and dabbles his toes in it before he makes his escape.

The concluding cemetery scene has an absolute finality and cinematic neatness that echoes the film’s opening; Martins is now completely alone; Anna disinterested, Lime really dead and Calloway’s job done. Greene and producer Carol Reed disagreed over the ending; the novella allows Martins to walk away with Anna and begin a new “story” but the bleak, cynical conclusion of the film leans more towards the interpretation of Martins as self-delusional hypocrite rather than loyal friend and romantic lead: it is more convincing and satisfying when Anna stays loyal to her image of Lime, despite his villainy, rather than accept the compromise of his second-rate friend. Martins’ drawn-out wait as she approaches through the avenue of trees is impressively sustained and leads the audience to expect Martins’ future to lie away from Vienna, not within it.

Bequeathing her Worldly Goods

 Domestic recycling in the wills of Tudor and Stuart women.

Wills are often controversial, regardless of their historical moment.  As death approached, Tudor and Stuart women took stock of their goods and went about dividing them up among their relatives and friends. Some of their bequests can seem surprising today; not many people in the twenty-first century would think of passing on their bed, pillows or sheets, but considering that for many, this would have been the most expensive item in the house, this act of generosity gains considerable significance. Whole books have been spun out of Shakespeare’s legacy to his wife of his second best bed, playing on the emotional connotations of being “second-best” rather than simply reflecting the accessibility, ownership and disposability of the item.

Women’s wills of the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth centuries continued a long standing tradition of passing down the tools of their trades; those household items that helped structure the day for the vast majority were used and used again. In a patriarchal world where the main viable social status for women was achieved through marriage, a “career” for the Tudor and Stuart housewife largely meant washing, cooking and childrearing. Household objects such as cooking utensils, cutlery, bed linen and clothing were not as readily available or disposable as they are today but they were often more durable. Many women’s homes were filled with inherited items and the “life” of a solid pewter saucepan might span many generations.

Following the usual arrangements for burial and the payment of debts, beds were the most common first item on a woman’s list. Composing her will in February 1629, Joane Nickoll, widow of a Shoemaker in Essex left her “joined (double) bedstead” with the “featherbed thereon,” two bolsters, one pillow, one blanket and one covering to her married daughter, Mary Barnes. One can only imagine the subsequent reshuffle in the Barnes household, as the various beds were reassigned, in the light of this good fortune. Joane also had furniture to give, which was rare for the time; she left two cupboards, three chests, one box, one table and a number of stools; from her mother’s kitchen, Mary received two pots, one gridiron, one spit and three kettles.

In 1621, the widow Christian Lamberd of Prittlewell left her “joined bed that standeth in the new loft” to her married son, along with a featherbed, two bolsters, two pillows, blankets and a coverlet but to his wife, she left money in order to have a ring made. In 1622, it was Alice Bird’s grandchild Frances Parker who received the featherbed currently from her parlour “upon the trundle” and the one in her kitchen, which were probably pull-out beds used for servants as well as her joined bed from over the brewhouse, also a “blew birded coverlet” (probably embroidered), fine white sheets and a casting sheet, which had been left in the hands of another local widow to pass on. A similarly lengthy and generous bequeath went to her other married grandchild also named Alice Bird.

The handing down of household objects is indicative of the tradition of mutual support that thrived among some women through mutual necessity. The female subculture of domesticity was not any form of proto-Feminism but rather a shared sympathy for the similarities in their lives. Women supported each other practically and emotionally at key moments such as childbirth, illness, death, marriage and conflict. Court Assize records state how they took each other in during times of dearth and loss, helped in delivering the babies of strangers, sheltered abandoned and mistreated wives and even physically intervened in cases of domestic violence. They would have shared a common culture of recipes, remedies, advice, support, medicinal herbs and the artefacts of their existence: small wonder that their wills are vehicles for recycling those pots and pans that, far from being trivial, marked the cornerstones of their lives.

In 1603, Thomasin Deysey left her sister Agnes Cock four pewter platters but it was her servant Thomas Munt to whom she gave a flockbed with cover and bolster. Thomasin’s stepdaughter Grace received three pewter platters whilst the rest of her worldly goods were left to be sold in order to pay her debts.  Alice Bird of Chelmsford endowed her grandchildren with an array of kitchen items, including a great cauldron with iron hinges, the newest of the two lesser brass pots, two brass possets, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a pewter chamber pot, plates and pans. To the daughters of her son-in-law, Joan Raven of Little Waltham gave one pair of candlesticks, two platters and two platters in 1591; such gifts might contribute to a young woman’s ability to marry and set up a household of her own.

Clothing might seem a strangely intimate thing to bequeath to friends or neighbours. Obviously hand-me-downs in families were common and special items might be given as gifts but the majority of legacies in wills are for regular, daily clothing, that the recipient may well have seen the owner wearing. There were no mass-produced garments at the time; new clothes were cut and sewn by hand, woven or knitted by those intending to wear them but this would not have been frequent. The average “wardrobe” (as a collective noun, rather than piece of furniture,) of four hundred years ago would have been tiny in comparisons with today. Clothes were expensive and time-consuming to produce; costly fabrics and dyes were accessible by a small elite but even those at the top found it hard to keep up. Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley often found himself deep in debt through keeping up the appearances necessary to his rank, until he was given the Earldom of Leicester, on this day, 29 September, in 1564.

In 1578, Margaret Rand of Ashden left her two daughters “all her best apparel,” presumably for them to fight over between themselves; similarly in 1570, Agnes Rothe of Wix left her four daughter her “raiment” as well as a pewter platter and saucer each. The widow Trott of Tilbury left to her daughter Sara one “red stuffe petticoat” and one Holland smock and her daughter Mary “one cloth gown and one clothe petticoat, to make her apparell withal.” To her sister-in-law Agnes she left one “handkercher stitched without” and to her brother and brother-in-law, she gave money to buy a pair of gloves as a remembrance of her. In 1603, Thomasin Deysey left Jude Wilbure her “first gown” and Elizabeth Irelande a red petticoat and white cotton waistcoat.

Clearly, these examples barely touch the surface of a wide culture of domestic bequests that indicate an understanding of the cyclical nature of life; women passed on the metaphorical baton to the next generation of wives and mothers by endowing them with the apparatus of the bedroom and kitchen. Inscribed in the nicks and dents of each saucepan, in the tears and mending of petticoats, were the experiences of a marginal and largely illiterate group, whose stories were barely otherwise told.

Three extraordinary, dead women

Writer Sophie Brzeska, artist Ida Nettleship and model Fernande Olivier, who spent their lives with famous men. 

Taken from a multiple biography currently in progress

                                 Sophie, painted by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in 1913

When Sophie Brezska was born in 1873, Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was fourteen years old but by the time of Fernande Olivier’s death in 1966, mankind was only three years away from setting foot on the moon. The world changed beyond recognition during the lives of their generation. Their maturation was concurrent with the suffrage movement and whilst none engaged directly with the more political activities of their contemporaries, their lives reveal continual conflict between more conservative, traditional values and new codes of conduct and experimentation. Nor was their challenge to gender stereotypes constant. Each experienced specific moments when changing social and moral expectations informed their decision making and resulted in deliberate acts of defiance, which although frequently motivated by personal desire, expose a complex interrelation of individual and context. What seems most strikingly and inescapably time-specific, was the power of men to define and limit their artistic achievement: their success being as durable as contemporary masculine understanding and generosity. Sophie lived briefly with the tragic Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier, linking her name with his; Ida was married to the rakish and fecund Augustus John while Fernande was Picasso's first love. Each had ambitions of their own yet little of their work survives.

 Separated by the passage of a century and vocal women’s movements, it is easy now to talk about wasted opportunities and romanticise these women as heroines sacrificed to male success, but as artist Edna Clarke Hall put it in response to her critics, women’s responsibilities lie equally with their children and “…in the development of the powers in herself which are her true expression.” The early twentieth century does provide examples of women who became successful artists as well as raising children: Bloomsbury’s Vanessa Bell, poetess Frances Cornford, Ida’s friends Edna Clarke Hall and Gwen Smith all persisted despite complicated personal arrangements. Yet there were also a significant number of successful women who remained single, delayed marriage, or did not have children, featuring on the fringes of these three lives: artists Ursula Tyrwhitt, Dorothy Brett, Gwen John, Dora Carrington, Nina Hamnett and Marie Laurencin; writers Virginia Woolf, Julia Strachey, Gertrude Stein and Katherine Mansfield. Of course there are many others, but although equal success in the realms of domesticity and creativity was achievable, it was significantly more difficult for women of the early twentieth century. Sadly, the most consistent and significant factor was financial circumstance: they could not all afford rooms of their own.

                                A pregnant Ida in 1901, painted by Augustus John

 Possibly of the three, Ida came the closest to having what would now be considered the most successful if short lived “career”, studying at the Slade throughout her teenage years: a handful of Fernande’s pictures have been reproduced in biographies of Picasso and until recently, Sophie’s unpublished diaries and short stories languished in a Colchester library, where water damage made her French-Polish writing difficult to read: a 2008 translation and limited edition of her stories and autobiography went a long way to address this. Ironically, their posthumous existence has been allied to the fame of those who directly affected their output but it is significant that they have been remembered primarily as women and not artists or writers.

 The arena of relationships and gender expectations was difficult and complicated for Sophie, Ida and Fernande: all three rejected the marital ideals of their families in order to follow their hearts. Their quests for romance were not always successful though, as the men they encountered could be predatory and selfish, exploiting double standards of sexual behaviour even when professing themselves most in love. Nor did marriage guarantee security. Instead, these women sought to forge new family units and open relationships that allowed for greater sexual and personal freedom, although the idea often proved more fulfilling in theory than practice. The casual encounters and affairs of Sophie and Fernande were strikingly modern in comparison with the expectations of their upbringing and despite remaining faithful, Ida saw her marriage become a ménage. As such, the conditions and experiences of these three women’s lives identify them as representatives of a changing world.

                                    Fernande, painted by Kees Van Dongen

All three led tragic lives. Sophie's belief that Henri would be killed during the Great War, was proven in April 1915; after a peripatetic existence, teaching, writing and moving about to escape great poverty, she ended her days in a psychiatric hospital in 1925. After six years of marriage, Ida's youthful hopes were buried in drudgery and repeated childbearing; her final labour proved too much and she died in Paris in 1906, at the age of thirty. Fernande lived the longest, flitting between artists and lovers after she and Picasso split in 1912; again poverty oppressed her despite stints working for Paul Poiret and the writing of her memoirs in the 1930s; she died in 1966.

                                                            

Historical Wallpaper addiction

And while we're at it, let's also have this lovely Voysey bird paper, made in 1891.

Instances of the colour yellow #2

Yes, more delicious buttery yellows- a lovely delicate piece of Art Nouveau wallpaper this time, made in around 1900.

Instances of the colour yellow #1

A bit of shameless indulgence in my favourite colour

Wheat field with reaper and sun, Van Gogh 1889