Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

The Imagination of Revenge

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Last Saturday, Rosemary, our daughter Hilary and Hilary’s younger daughter Lauren, 11, and I watched King Solomon’s Mines after dinner. I make it a point to select a film for us to watch that will please everybody. In many cases I have seen the films before and usually I had seen them as a boy.

As a man of 71 I can laughingly comment that I would surely dump my wife of 45 years for Deborah Kerr (or Charlotte Rampling or Molly Parker). Rosemary smiles but does not know how serious I am really. My eldest granddaughter Rebecca is shocked and said so that I would opt for a dead woman (Kerr) over my very much alive wife.

I have no idea if Rosemary thinks the same (would she dump me for the handsome dead star?) about the other star of King Solomon’s Mines, Stewart Granger. But what is important is that it is human to dream, to imagine and associate.

For today I took out the 1934 version of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Montecristo, directed by Rowland V. Lee and with Robert Donat and Elissa Landi.

My reason for picking these films is that I remember them as the films of my boyhood. Life was simple. You went to school, you ate and you went to the movies. There were only five classifications for movies worth seeing, they were conboys (Argentine Spanish), de guerra (war), espadachines (sword fighters but especially with fencing foils), piratas and that exclusive classification, Tarzán.

I had read 13 of Andrea Camilleri’s novels featuring Salvo Montalbano, a comisario of police in Sicily before I first saw the wonderful Italian TV series Montalbano with Luca Singaretti as the sensitive man who likes to eat and swim.

For many of us who read novels before seeing films the often-made argument is if the actor or actress fits our idea of the protagonist of the novel. For many Basil Rathbone was and is Sherlock Holmes. For John le Carré we know that after having seen Alec Guinness play George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in the TV series, somehow the man, Guinness had taken his character, Smiley out of his head and that he, le Carré would henceforth have a hard time writing about that protagonist.

Few today would ever read To Kill a Mockingbird and not imagine Atticus Finch not being Gregory Peck.

But in spite of the reality of a film and its actors supplanting the imagination of the characters of a novel I see imagination still with us and important.

Earlier today, Lauren was playing in the living room. She was putting her fingers in the soil of my potted plants. I asked her what she was doing. Her reply startled me, “I don’t know what I am doing,” and she grinned as she told me. I realized that somehow I had broken a game of her imagination.

When Rebecca was 8 I proposed to my friend, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez that he teach her to draw and paint. At the time Rebecca was just three blocks away. I found it practical that Rebecca would learn art from a master while conversing in Spanish. Sánchez was adamant that this was not a good idea. He explained that a child until 11 or 12 had to be left alone to play with their imagination. They had to be left alone so that they could draw loosely without any restraints of an imposed style.

Ancillary to this was that old-time dictum (is it still relevant today?) that you never asked a very young child what a sketch or painting was supposed to represent. Nor were we supposed to ask, “What did you learn in school today?”

It seems we had to be careful not to destroy that world/life of the imagination by asking precise questions as to content and meaning.

We watched The Count of Montecristo. Lauren had seen a more modern version of it but was still transfixed, glued to all the activity on our Sony Trinitron TV set with its former cutting edge cathode ray tube.

The whole evening cemented my acute realization on how important a child’s imagination is. And of course part of that is a child’s willingness to read books without pictures where the child has to imagine faces and places.

In the beginning of Olaf Stapeldon’s Star Maker and man sits in his garden, leaning on a tree to gaze a starry sky:

Overhead obscurity was gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an unbroken spread of stars. Two planets stared unwinking. The more obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion’s four-square shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the zigzag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on the dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried grave-yards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced awning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.

And from there he soars out of his body to explore space. Stapledon published Star Maker in 1937 and is a work that is purely of the imagination.

Coincidentally tonight, in bed reading the Sunday NY Times that is delivered Saturday night I found in the Sunday Review a column by conservative Ross Douthat, who in spite of being a conservative is someone I admire and read. The column called Puddleglum and The Savage points out that on November 22, the date of John Kennedy’s assassination (the presidential motorcade was leaving Love Field), C.S. Lewis collapsed in his Oxford bedroom. And when a TV in the next room announced Kennedy’s death Aldous Huxley requested a final shot of LSD.

In that column I found this:

In C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair in which a character named Puddleglum confronts a queen who has confined the heroes in an underground kingdom, and lulled them with the insistence that the underground world is all there is – that ideas like the sun and sky are dangerous wishful thinking, undermining the immediate contentment [Puddleglum says]

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things. – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones…We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”

As I read the above I understood the role of old-style films with few or elaborate special effects. I understand the importance of convincing, pushing, coaxing a young person to read. By doing so it will be a while before an Alec Guinness or a Luca Singaretti can replace that imagined person into the flesh and bone of the actor playing him.

We enjoyed The Count of Montecristo. I did not tell my family that my image of the count had for some years been the face on the cover of my Penguin Classic - Portrait of an Artist by Jacques-Louis David and that Robert Donat seemed too pretty and too good to play the vengeful man. After all The Count of Montecristo features: literature’s most famous case of an implacable and most un-Christian revenge. It features a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides, an extended scene of torture and execution, drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism, a display of the author’s classical history, the customs and diets of the Italians, the effects of hashish and all in about 1000 pages.

Both King Solomon's Mines and The Count of Montecristo can be found at Limelight Video

Alas they and the Vancouver Public Library do not have The Corsican Brothers with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. or The Crimson Pirate with Burt Lancaster. Next Saturday's film will have to be another.

Link to: The Imagination of Revenge

At age 71 I am a former magazine photographer and writer in obsolescence (redundant in British lingo) retired because at least here in Vancouver and probably in the rest of Canada the era of paid photography is either gone permanently or at best for a while.

A scanned 100 ISO Polaroid taken with Mamiya RB and 90mm lens. I used a 2x3 Chimera softbox fired by a Norman 200B

I purchased my first camera an Agfa Silette in 1956 in a Washington DC pawnshop. The first roll I used was Kodak Tri-X. I remember taking snaps of the Parthenon replica in Nashville. The negative is long lost.

A year later after saving up with odd jobs in the boarding school I was attending, St Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas I spent $100 on a Pentacon F single lens reflex which came mail order from Olden Cameras in New York City.

But it wasn’t until I moved with my Canadian wife and two Mexican-born daughters to Vancouver in 1975 that I became a photographer full-time. In that job I have been sent all over the world on assignments, worked for virtually every magazine around (except the National Geographic) and had access to film stars, rock stars, directors, politicians and hoods.

Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD, 140mm lens, Ektachrome 100G, 2x3 ft Chimera softbox fired by Norman 200B

Until three months ago my only digital camera was an iPhone 3G. I have taught photography at several schools in Vancouver and I have never had the need to tell my students that I did not own anything like the expensive Nikon and Canon DSLRs they had in their hands.

Three months ago, after having been urged by my wife, I finally purchased a digital camera. I am extremely proud of my most sophisticated Fuji X-E1.

Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD 90mm lens, Kodak Plus X negative scanned, from below, with sheet of white paper over it to get the texture seen here.

I went to Buenos Aires a month ago and took the Fuji (along with two Nikon FM-2 loaded with b+w and colour negative film). Because I have yet to acquire anything like Lightroom I shot jpgs and I was satisfied, even happy with my results.

Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD 140mm lens, 2x3 softbox powered by a Dynalite. This is a scanned and reversed Polaroid peel from the 100 ISO Polaroid film.

Just a few years ago I did a lot of work for a local arts weekly. Work diminished. In one assignment where I had to photograph some Shakespearean actors I took some pictures with my iPhone 3G but I used the modeling light of a 2x3 ft sofbox and placed my subjects on a nondescript darkish wall. The folks at the magazine never noticed the difference and even lauded me for sending them something that seemed to be “different” from my usual.

Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD. 90mm lens, 2x3 softbox and Norman 200B, Ektachrome 100G

Before I left for Buenos Aires I shot a cover for the publication and five inside shots with my Fuji. I did use a largish softbox and a good studio flash. They never noticed the difference either

iPhone 3G, under Western Red Cedar, late afternoon

But I had to adjust to the idea of still using the small camera on my big tripod. When you shoot loose with a small camera you (or at least I did) tend to have heads too close to the top or slice the fingers of my subjects’ hands. For too long I have used a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD on a tripod and I like to frame my shots carefully.

Nikon FM-2, 85mm lens, Kodak Tri-X, modeling light from Dynalite in 2x3 softbox — colour added in scanning negative

When I shoot cover jobs for magazines I rarely take more than 20 pictures on 120 Ektachrome (now Fuji Provia). With my digital Fuji I shot the cover with 8 exposures. I am not about to let that camera dictate how I am to use it. I was frugal with film, I will be frugal with pixels!

The purpose of this essay, my first purpose-written for Medium.Com is to clear misunderstandings that I have gleaned from reading some of the interesting stuff in Click the Shutter. A few have written that with an iPhone 5 you don’t need better equipment. Others decry the loss of the analog system of taking pictures. Others, rightfully state that the equipment is not as important as knowing how to use what one has. I would only modify that last statement by adding that it is important to note the limitations of the equipment being used. With that said I have often loaded my heavy and largish Mamiya with Ilford 3200 ISO film and hand held it as if the camera where a 35mm camera.

While digital stitching has made the expensive swivel lens film cameras of the past obsolete, I still believe my Noblex (it takes a negative or slide that is 2¼ by 7 inches long) can take pictures that very good and with a perspective different to the one of stitching.

If there is a problem with digital cameras it is the perception, mostly thanks to their advertising, that says that with one of these in your hands you can do anything. I would beg to differ as this eliminates the idea of using lighting to control contrast and to impose on the picture a bit of one’s personal style.

Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD, 250mm lens wide open with slow shutter and using the modeling light (no flash) coming from a 2x3 softbox powered by one Dynalite head. Vignetting Corel Pro X2

With that said I will place here some portraits of my granddaughter through the years and I will mention what I used and how I took them. Note, especially, one photograph that I took with my 3G iPhone. If one realizes the iPhones are most comfortable with low contrast situations you will understand why my Rebecca sitting in a metal bench under a conifer in a late afternoon looks so good. Slide film would have rendered the scene a greenish blue. A digital camera, even a cheap one with good white balance would have rendered the scene in the right colour.There is a saying in Spanish (I am Argentine born):

El diablo sabe más por viejo que por diablo.

That translates to: the devil knows more not because he is the devil but because he is older. Something then has to be said for experience.

And lastly here in Vancouver we still have at least five labs that process colour negative and slide film in small and large formats. The b+w film I shoot, I process and print in my still functioning darkroom.