Depression vs. Comedy

As we reach the Easter Break (and the end of Act I of our current film series) this feels like a good opportunity to take stock of our current position.

As I'm sure you know by now, I have chosen to call this series Depression. Comedy.


The first reason for this is the obvious one: the films I am showing are all comedies released during the Great Depression. But what I hope is becoming clear by now is that these particular comedies were something more than simply accidents of timing.

These weren't merely funny films that happened to come out at a time when society was in crisis. These were exactly the films that everyone needed at that moment, and they gave their audiences a lifeline at a moment in history when everything was very dark indeed.


After our recent screening of Sullivan's Travels, it was pointed out to me that 1941 (the year of that film's release) was the same year in which Olivier Messiaen had composed his Quartet for the End of Time, written while he was in a Nazi prison camp. (Many thanks to Ken Ward for pointing this out, after coming to our film screening following a performance of the Messiaen quartet.)


My initial reaction was to chuckle at the coincidence of dates. Preston Sturges' wacky comedy about a Hollywood director suffering a mid-life crisis is a long way away from Messiaen's vision of the biblical apocalypse, written during an actual European apocalypse and scored for the handful of barely-functional instruments he and his fellow inmates had to hand.


But both works were, in their own separate ways, responses to a world in crisis. More than that, they were the means by which creative people could retain their humanity at a time when the world had taken everything else from them. Sturges and Messiaen (as well as Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Capra etc) were standing up and demonstrating that they wanted their lives to stand for something other than victimhood. And no matter how bad everything might be, they could (and did) make things that little bit better by reminding everyone that "suffering" is not the only reality.

I think all of us need to be reminded of that every once in a while. I know I do.

You might have lost your job, your home and all of your savings during the Great Depression. You might have seen your entire family murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. You might have watched terrorists rape and murder an entire community of people who look just like you, then post photos of their mutilated, eviscerated bodies on social media while the rest of the world looks on with approval.

That doesn't mean you have to let yourself be defined by the pain, or the horror. And it doesn't mean you have to pass that pain and horror onto others.

The power of film in a time of pain is very much the subject of our final film before we break for "Premature Easter". 

This is also the first film of this series that is not quite like all the others.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is Woody Allen's treatise on the meaning of film in the mid 1930s.


It tells the story of Cecilia (Mia Farrow) a hapless, down-trodden young woman who is struggling to survive the Depression. She is bad at her job, her abusive husband is out of work, and her life is almost completely unbearable. Her only escape (and the only positive element in her life) is the local movie house, where she is able to lose herself for a few hours in the celluloid fantasy of a better life.


The specific film that provides Cecilia with comfort during the events of the narrative is a (fictional) RKO film, The Purple Rose of Cairo; a romantic Egyptian-themed melodrama about a group of wealthy Manhattan socialites and the intrepid archaeologist they encounter while on an impulsive holiday amongst the pyramids.


When her life hits a particularly low point, Cecilia retreats to the sanctuary of the movie theatre where she sits through screening after screening of The Purple Rose of Cairo.


Her presence does not go unnoticed.

The film is set in 1935 (coincidentally the year Woody Allen was born) and is a strong reflection of Allen's own relationship with cinema during his childhood. 

Although his early life was by no means as unremittingly awful as Cecilia's life in this film, Woody Allen' family was poor, and the movies he saw in his youth represented the miraculous dream of a different reality to an impressionable and imaginative young kid.

In The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia is given the chance to make a literal choice between life in that luxurious, perfect world, or life in her own brutal reality.

Depression vs. Comedy.


We will be screening The Purple Rose of Cairo at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 21st of March at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.



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