The Furniture: "Martin Eden" and Designing Outside of History

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Jack London was befuddled by the reception of Martin Eden. He intended the novel to be a sharp critique of individualism and was surprised when the public took his protagonist as something of a libertarian hero. Though as J. Hoberman points out in his extremely perceptive reading, the novel is more of a “tragic celebration” than a bitter condemnation. And perhaps the “misreading” of an antihero is always inevitable, the unintended seduction of an unexpected contingent of the audience.

This tension has followed Martin Eden into the 21st century. Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation moves the story from California to Italy and places it outside of time, replenishing some of the aesthetic mystery that is inevitably lost when a novel is cast, shot and projected onto a screen. The production design helps, contributing to the atmosphere at both high and low registers. 

Martin Eden begins, in part, as a love story. Martin (Luca Marinelli) is a sailor who falls for Elena Orisini (Jessica Cressy), the daughter of a wealthy liberal family...

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The Furniture: All the World's a Circus in "Topkapi"

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Last week’s column on Suddenly, Last Summer was a bonus sidebar to our ongoing Montgomery Clift retrospective. Today, I offer a diversion from our wall-to-wall Monty programming, in the form of a tribute to someone else’s centennial: Melina Mercouri. None of this film star's movies were nominated for Best Production Design at the Oscars, but I adore her anyway. And one of her films, made at the peak of her fame, is a perfect fit: Topkapi (1964)

Mercouri’s brand, so to speak, was one of obstinate vitality. In Stella, her film debut, she played a nightclub singer who simply refuses to be married, even at the expense of love. Her character in Never on Sunday, for which she received her only Oscar nomination, insists upon her own chipper versions of the Greek classics. Medea, who didn’t really murder her children, gets her husband back and they all go to the seashore. Mercouri’s signature vivacity is always at odds with her surroundings, defying the rules of both tragedy and society.

But the visual climax of this attitude comes in Topkapi, for which the entire world seems to have been refashioned to fit the expectations of Mercouri’s persona. She even introduces it, casting the world as a funfair even before the opening credits...

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How had I never seen... "Doctor Zhivago"?

Every once in a while we ask Team Experience members to finally get around to a famous film they've been meaning to watch forever. Here's Christopher James...

I hate to say it, but when does one put on a three hour epic? The time never quite seems right, especially in a pre-quarantine world. That’s why David Lean’s epic extravaganzas had long been blind spots in my filmography. Both The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia become instant personal favorites after finally watching them for the first time in the past five years. Yet, somehow Doctor Zhivago (1965) always seemed just a bridge, or perilous train ride, too far. When I would think of it, I would picture the sets and costumes from stills. But was it worth sitting through over three hours of a movie just for, in the words of Aretha Franklin, “gowns, beautiful gowns”? Luckily, the epic is way more than just its trappings. As Team Experience gushed a few years back, there are so many memorable scenes and subplots in this involving romantic quartet.

To compliment Doctor Zhivago appropriately, one must go down each Oscar craft category one by one. It’s a technically stunning achievement that is beautiful, towering and simultaneously warm and cold all in the same breath...

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The Furniture: Suddenly, Last Summer and the Dawn of Creation

As a special side dish to our ongoing Montgomery Clift Centennial celebration, The Furniture (our series on Production Design) is looking at one of his most fascinating pictures...

by Daniel Walber

Saint Sebastian had to be martyred twice. Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) tells his story with a certain vicious pride, lending her own Sebastian a supernatural authority. The saint was shot full of arrows but survived, miracuously, only to be beaten to death with cudgels. The first death has been depicted by countless artists, a hauntingly beautiful and frequently homoerotic image. The second, meanwhile, is unspeakably violent and ugly. It’s almost forgotten, a brutal footnote to a transcendent aesthetic.

Mrs. Venable’s Sebastian, however, gets it in reverse. As is revealed at the end of Suddenly, Last Summer, he was torn limb from limb under the white hot sun of Cabeza de Lobo. And for what crime? In accordance with the aging Hays Code, it appears to be his homosexuality. But beneath this ultra-thin surface lingers something much darker...

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Oscar Predictions: Cinematography, Production Design, Editing

by Nathaniel R

we're in mourning that we won't get to see DUNE this year...

You've probably heard that Dune is no longer a 2020 picture and will now arrive in the final quarter of 2021. This necessitated yet another revision just as we'd finished nearly all of the Oscar charts -- our work is never done! The biggest impact is in the visual categories. These should be interesting to follow this year in the absence of the kind of big budget spectacle films that often dominated visual categories. Does this mean voters will get more creative and search out further afield Production Design possibilities like, say, Shirley, or First Cow or I'm Thinking of Ending Things or more lax and just nominate their favourite Best Picture candidates in every visual category even if those pictures are mostly contained in one location (hi One Night in Miami, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) or out on the open road in a beaten down van (hi Nomadland)... 

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