A Wife in Every Room
In Bringing Up Baby , Cary Grant became the first person to use the word Gay (in its modern sense) in a Hollywood movie. One might hypothesize that by 1938, the film censors were starting to become more permissive about the subtext that was regularly being slipped into films of the era. One would be completely wrong to thusly hypothesize ( to hypothesize thusly ; excuse me). Film censorship in the late 1930s was just as draconian as ever: a year earlier they had insisted that a shot of a gravestone be cut from a film because the character in question had committed suicide, and it was "inappropriate" to show her receiving a proper burial. The word gay had only slipped through in Bringing Up Baby because no one at the Hays Office knew what it meant in that context. (I won't tell them if you don't.) Cary Grant certainly knew what it meant, and it's very interesting that he was the one who got to introduce the word to American film audiences. Because Cary Grant, th
This Thursday's film is actually a re-run. We screened it about two months ago, but thanks to a series of unconnected misadventures, many people were unable to attend. As a public service, we will be showing it once again on the 19th of May.
Under normal circumstances, I would say that this Thursday's film is possibly the most esoteric I have yet shown (not least because it isn't actually a film at all) but since I have already shown it once before, I guess it's getting to be quite mainstream.
Antigone was written by the Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles in the year 441 BC, and is one of the three so-called "Theban Plays". These plays recount the story of King Oedipus of Thebes, and the first of these plays (Oedipus Rex) is the one that has become instantly recognisable to everyone and their mother (if you get my drift).
Antigone is the third play of the trilogy (although it was actually written first; never mind) and deals with events following the death of Oedipus, when his daughter Antigone comes into conflict with Creon, the new king of Thebes.
As with most Greek drama, the story follows an inexorable course of doom and destruction that leaves every relevant character miserable and dead (not necessarily in that order).
As I say, Sophocles' play was written in 441 BC.
2385 years later, the French playwright Jean Anouilh premiered his own version of Antigone, re-worked and adapted to the present day (1944, before you reach for your calculator).
Although the story follows the original quite closely, there is little doubt that Anouilh was constructing a metaphor for France under Nazi occupation (arguably worse: a puppet government that supported and collaborated with the Nazis).
The version of Antigone I plan to screen on Thursday is an American television performance from 1974 with Geneviève Bujold, Fritz Weaver and Stacy Keach. I'm sorry to say that the video quality is not as good as one might like, but the performance is so good that I feel it's worth putting up with a fuzzy image on this occasion.
I screened this film for the first time on the 3rd of March; one week after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, and I noted at the time that Anouilh's take on the story is (unfortunately) just as relevant now as it was in 1944. It gives me no joy to add that his play is just as relevant on the 19th of May as it was on the 3rd of March.
If anything, the play's relevance has increased this month. Russia has invaded a neighbouring country and committed any number of human rights atrocities, but now, at least, they have been excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest. I would say that qualifies as a gesture of defiance that is exactly as effective as Antigone's defiance of Creon.
We will be screening Antigone at the usual time of 7.30 at the Victoria Park Baptist Church on Thursday, the 19th of May. I hope to see you there!