Jacob Lawrence: Toussaint L'Ouverture Series: Krannert Art Museum

If you are in the Champaign-Urbana, Illinois area, I recommend you stop by the Krannert Art Museum and take a close look at a great exhibit: Jacob Lawrence: Toussant L’Ouverture Series. The exhibit will run through April 28, 2013 and showcases all forty-one of the panels chronicling L’Ouverture’s epic struggle ot emancipate Haiti from the tyranny o fhte Spanish and French in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. Jacob Lawrence was only twenty-one years old when he completed the monumental series in 1938, setting the standard for Lawrence's lifelong dedication to the visual description of African American life and history within a narrative context and pays tribute to the hero of the Haitian revolution who in the late 18th century defeated Napoleon and drove him from Haiti.

Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Jacob Lawrence was raised in Harlem where he not only witnessed the poverty and prejudice that most African-Americans faced in the early 20th century, but also the remarkable cultural, intellectual and political development known as the Harlem Renaissance. Lawrence reached maturity in the 1930s, at a time when Harlem was among the world's most dynamic centers of aesthetic and social innovation. As orators shouted their messages from nearly every street corner in Harlem, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke were challenging and redefining the very identity of the African-American people; Langston Hughes was introducing the black experience to modernist poetry; Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway retooled jazz and African-American blues for the big band and the orchestra; and such artists as Aaron Douglas, Charles Alston, Archibald Motley, Loïs Mailou Jones, Romare Bearden and William H. Johnson introduced an expressive force to modern painting few had ever witnessed. It was against the backdrop of this vibrant milieu that the 20-year-old Jacob Lawrence made a dramatic debut with his Toussaint L'Ouverture Series.

For the series, Lawrence painted forty-one small tempera-on-white-paper works that chronologically documented the history of the Haitian revolution from Columbus's discovery of the island on December 6, 1492, through Toussaint's victory over the French with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804. Instead of traditional titles, Lawrence utilized descriptive quotations to function as a verbal description and to accentuate the narrative theme of the series. For instance, General Toussaint L'Ouverture, number twenty in the series, is labeled "statesman and military genius, esteemed by the Spaniards, feared by the English, dreaded by the French, hated by the planters, and revered by the blacks."

Pairing these descriptive quotations with the painted panels moves beyond a storyboard, resembling something closer to a graphic novel. When viewed in the two rooms of the Krannert, however, the graphic novel effect transforms into a visual experience that draws on cinematic techniques. Panels become cels, with the viewer tracking and panning like a camera to view the visual narrative, complete with descriptive intertitles.  This narrative “film” is both an historical and personal triumph well worth seeing.

The Toussaint L’Ouverture series (1937–38) is on loan from the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University and is an important focus for the University of Illinois’ commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King and celebration of the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (1862).

Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Ecology, Place, and Home in Dark City: Is It Our Nature to Live in the Dark?

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), opens in darkness, in a space lit only by stars and patches of blue that represent the blue world Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) claims the “Strangers” invaded to save their race. This long shot of outer space cranes downward from that blue patch of light to an artificially-lit night-time noir cityscape crowded with cars from the 1940s and 1950s and lit by a cinema neon sign announcing film titles that serve a prescient role: The Evil and Bo_k of Dreams [sic]. Movement from the hollow emptiness of space, a pristine natural cosmos, to a cacophonous city devoid of nonhuman nature startles us both visually and aurally with its clashes—both of space and of genres. Between the pristine and the decadent constructed spaces, outer space of science fiction meets the noir of the dark city, and the organic galaxies traced in white and blue natural lighting meet a luminescent shadowed urban world devoid of nature other than that created and inhabited by the Strangers.

In what looks like an homage to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the opening to Proyas’s film, like many openings to science fiction and noir films, introduces us to its settings and chief themes through visual effects and, as a parallel to Metropolis’s epigram and inter-titles, a voice-over, this time through the narration of Dr. Schreber. But it also highlights the most important element in the film, its representation of ecology, literally “the study of homes.” The shift from a traditional science fiction setting to one indicative of a carefully laid-out 1940s or 1950s noir world coincides with a swing from the pristine to the decayed and, in a parallel binary, from a natural to a constructed environment. The film seems to agree with Alexander Wilson’s assertion (with a few changes) that “the culture of nature—the ways we think, teach, talk about, and construct the natural world—is as important as the world itself” (11). To paraphrase, the culture of the world of Dark City, the way this noir world is thought about, talked about, and constructed becomes more important than the world, if it is a world, itself.

Like Dana Phillips’ article, “Is Nature Necessary?” Dark City offers a space where whether nature is necessary can be explored, especially in relation to the idea of ecology as the study of homes, a place where nature and culture interconnect rather than conflict with one another. The film allows us to examine at least three constructed settings—ecosystems—as possible homes for humans (and, perhaps, alien) survival, but the film demonstrates that only one of these three provides any promise for humans, as natural beings, to thrive—the constructed setting in which “nature is necessary.”

The film, Dark City, is about a dying race of aliens, the Strangers, coming to a blue planet, presumably Earth, and capturing some humans in order to examine what makes them able to survive as individuals. The Strangers share a collective mind that is in terminal decay. To study these captured humans, the Strangers construct a 1940s-style city and, in a way, construct their humans by implanting different memories into their brains. To see how these humans react in different situations and with different memories, the Strangers change both the city and its inhabitants’ memories each night at midnight, with the help of Dr. Schreber—a human forced to serve them—all while the humans are hypnotized into sleep by the Strangers.

Because these Strangers have an aversion to light, however, the city and its inhabitants never experience day. Within this context, one of the humans, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), evolves into a super-human, who can resist the Strangers’ will, stay awake and even change the shape of his surroundings in Dark City, just like the Strangers. When John Murdoch first resists the Strangers’ will and stays awake, he also resists the implantation of memories, so without memories, Murdoch must search for an identity. While Murdoch searches, however, the Strangers attempt to capture him and use him as their sole source of life. In the end, Murdoch claims his name, “saves” Dark City and its human inhabitants, and defeats the Strangers because they make a series of mistakes. Ultimately Mr. Book (Ian Richardson), the Strangers’ leader, fails to notice that Dr. Schreber has switched syringes and implants memories other than the collective memories of the Strangers into Murdoch’s mind. This seemingly “simple” story, though, occurs in a mixture of settings that serve as more than mere backdrop—especially the noir city that seems to pop out of the cosmos and the Shell Beach setting John Murdoch creates to replace the dark unnatural world of the Strangers.   But Dark City shifts our focus from the aliens (the characters) and the film’s narrative to its setting—all because the Strangers’ study occurs in a 1940s noir city rather than a site contemporary to the film’s date of production.

Science fiction plays a role in this realm, as well, since the Strangers act like the parasites depicted in films like The Hidden and control humans through the technology of their machines and their memory-filled syringes, but the underworld still looks like a horror film, perhaps as a way to highlight the Strangers’ alien presence. Yet both the noir and horror settings prove to be ecological nightmares for the Strangers seeking rejuvenation through their human studies. Shifts from outer space to the constructed spaces of the city and the underworld controlling it demonstrate that these Strangers are dying, and this death state is emphasized by the Strangers’ choice to inhabit only male human corpses, seemingly avoiding female bodies with life-giving reproductive capabilities.

Nature in a Lifeless Constructed Space

The shift in the film from the natural but inscrutable emptiness of outer space to the constructed space of the dark city and its underworld underlines perhaps the most important role conflicting settings play in the film—a marker of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In alliance with this natural world, Shell Beach and the sea it lines serve as symbols of the life-sustaining power of water and, ultimately, of irrational nature, the only successful ecosystem presented in Dark City. The noir cityscape fails both the aliens and the captured humans. The underworld and its machinery fails the Strangers, since they cannot control the one life force that might save them with their technology—John Murdoch. Only Shell Beach brings hope to the captured humans as a source for their own survival as a species with free will and agency.

Edgar G. Ulmer and The Black Cat: Horror and the Bauhaus Modern

Edgar G. Ulmer and The Black Cat:

 Horror and the Bauhaus Modern

            World War I made an indelible mark on artists of the period, many of whom fought on the battlefields of Europe. The German painter, Otto Dix, for example, survived four years of trench warfare but never recovered from its traumatizing effects. The nihilistic worldview resulting from Dix’s war experience comes out in his work. One of his only expressionistic paintings, Lichtsignale (The Flare, 1917), most clearly demonstrates how reality becomes horrifying—how the repercussions of war replicate (or foreshadow) images we associate with fantastical horror films. In the painting, explosive flares, like lighting flashes in terrifying films like Frankenstein, reveal a mound of twisted corpses, skulls and distended limbs, hidden in the darkness. The painting shows us real horror, expressed more effectively, perhaps, because of its fragmented style that reflects the chaos on display. In Dix’s work, only death can be found behind the darkness. This same revelation of real terror brought to the fore with the help of some of the conventions of the horror genre occurs in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), a Universal Studio film. The film discusses the futile past and looks forward to the future of another immoral war. By examining the film, our intention is to discuss issues of artists’ responses to World War I by joining Austrian aesthetic movements with the horror genre. Edgar G. Ulmer serves as a bridge between European aesthetic responses to WWI and the popularity of Universal’s horror films in 1930s Hollywood. The Black Cat offers a space in which the consequences of the Great War—massive death and destruction—can be discussed, interrogated, and held up, perhaps, as a warning against the War to come.

The set design of The Black Cat demonstrates immediately that the film responds in complicated ways to World War I. But it is the film’s plot that clarifies how deeply the film is embedded in historical memory, since it is built around Werdegast’s return from a Russian prison. As commander of Fort Marmorus during its last World War I battle, Poelzig betrayed the fort to the Russians, their enemy, causing the deaths of thousands and the capture of his officers, including Werdegast. Werdegast has not forgiven Poelzig for his gruesome act and seeks vengeance for himself and for his wife and daughter. Poelzig has built on his previous terror, killing Werdegast’s wife and other young attractive women he has embalmed and preserved under glass. Like a zoo keeper, Poelzig admires his collection of beautiful corpses, so much so that he tries to sacrifice Joan Alison, the innocent American witness, in a Satanic ritual because he had already murdered Werdegast’s daughter, Karen, and Joan must take her place. With its clear references to Alister Crowley, the ceremony also highlights post-War conditions where decadent behavior serves as a way to escape the real horrors around them. The sacrificial scene brings to mind a combination of two of Otto Dix’s triptychons, Grosstadt (1927-28) and der Krieg (1929). Grosstadt illustrates how poverty and pain after the war encourage a painted life of escape; while der Kriegis meant to resurface memories of war terrors buried beneath a decadent life. In the scene from The Black Cat Joan lies prostrate on an angled cross, with other angled steel rods, like the bayonets and tree stumps in the Dix triptychon. Poelzig’s speech reinforces this modern image.  During the ritual, Poelzig chants in Latin, “The truth is great, and it will come to the fore … with a grain of salt” (Soister 171), a Nietzschean sentiment that, again, highlights modern skepticism nihilism and, perhaps, existential angst. The ceremony also strips Werdegast of any hope that might preserve his future, since he saves Joan but discovers the body of his daughter while helping Joan escape—Werdegast’s daughter (also Karen) had also been sacrificed and her beauty preserved.

Discovering his murdered daughter triggers Werdegast act of vengeance on Poelzig, now for the atrocious acts he had committed during and after the war. With Thamal, his servant’s, help, Werdegast straps Poelzig into the embalming rack and begins literally flaying him alive. Joan screams, Peter escapes his basement prison to save her, and—after mistaking Werdegast’s attempts to help Joan escape as an assault—shoots Werdegast. The Alisons role as innocents is cemented when Joan tells Peter, “He wanted to help us.” Werdegast protects them telling them, “You poor fool. I was only trying to help. Now go! Please go!” With the Alisons out of the picture, Werdegast can bury the World War I memories that haunt him—as he buries himself, Poelzig and the fort below the Bauhaus mansion. After activating the dynamite under what is left of Fort Marmorus, Werdegast explains, “Five minutes and Marmorus, you and I and your rotten cult will be no more.” Before the fort explodes, Werdegast tells Poelzig, “It has been a good game.” For Werdegast and Poelzig, death is the only escape from the horrors of war—just as in the Dix painting (The Flare) only death waits behind flashing light. Poelzig’s introduction to their game clarifies its ending:

You say your soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead? And now you come to me, playing at being an avenging angel—childishly thirsty for my blood. We understand each other too well. We know too much of life. We shall play a little game, Vitus. A game of death.

The Black Cat illustrates not only the historical context of its setting. It also harks back to a Europe before the war. As the layers of Poelzig’s house are uncovered, so too are layers of memory “housed” by Poelzig and Werdegast. Poelzig, the greatest Austrian architect, and Werdegast, the greatest Hungarian psychiatrist represent the Austrian-Hungarian Empire—broken up by the War that destroyed them and their relationships—the dissolution of the Hapsbury and of the Austro-Hungarian empires moved the Western world into the modern age. As an Austrian and a Hungarian, respectively, Poelzig and Werdegast’s destruction—first symbolically by the War’s consequences, and then literally by the dynamite explosion of the house—parallels the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It also may represent an escape from a history too painful to remember to something new—something modern.The Black Cat, too, moves us from the horrific past that is destroyed by dynamite toward a (modern) future, away from the “Old World.” Set and released in 1934, the year after Hitler’s election as Chancellor of German, The Black Cat demonstrates Ulmer and Laemmle’s awareness of possible terrifying repercussions of fascism, the National Socialists, and its dictator. Within the context of the film, it seems that the only solution is destruction and then possible regeneration. The old Fort Marmarus must be destroyed, as must its representatives—Werdegast and Poelzig. Only the innocents—the American Alisons—survive. But this argument—that the old must be destroyed for new and fresh ideals to take their place—is complicated by the literal destruction of Poelzig’s Bauhaus-style mansion at the end of the film.

The claim seems to be that a modern world built on the graves of the war dead will collapse, that the only escape from terrifying historical memory is a literal escape and, perhaps, one that requires obliviousness as well as innocence. This simple solution to the destructive nature on which a culture has been built becomes a true image of the actual fall of the Bauhaus in Germany in 1933. The Bauhaus was destroyed in Germany, but it “escaped” to the United States where its ideas survived and flourished. The literal fall of Poelzig’s Bauhaus seems to hold at least two meanings: It represents the destruction of the Bauhaus in Germany (that occurred a year before the film’s release). And it points us to a real solution to horror, destruction and regeneration. Such a view of regeneration may bring us back to Poe’s story, “The Black Cat,” illustrated in the film only by the presence of an immortal cat. In Poe’s “The Black Cat”, all that is evil must be burned for purity to return. To regenerate and regain purity—to find something other than death behind the light—Fort Marmarus and the modernist Bauhaus built upon its foundation must be destroyed, at least according to The Black Cat. So does the film critique or exult the modern aesthetic it highlights throughout?  Perhaps it does both. It shows us that to bury the past, we must destroy its foundation, even if such destruction takes the new (Bauhaus mansion) with it (the fort below). But once the fort and the modern structure above it collapse, the perspective changes, returning to the innocent Americans who began the tale. The Bauhaus school left Germany in 1933 but was rebuilt in the United States soon after—the new world to which the Alisons return after their adventure in the old.