O the Future! How Can We Tell?

Every year about this time, it’s the custom of news analysts to look back at events for the year, and come up with predictions, based on their analyses, of what will happen in the year to come.  This used to be the job of newspaper writers and TV commentators, but now anyone can do it---and we do, on Facebook and Twitter or blogs like this one.  Maybe the world as we know it will end next year, burned to a crisp by climate change, or the human population decimated by a new plague or Isis or some other group.  Maybe we’ll just go along, and some of us might even be royally bored—or not.

 

            Humans try everything to be able to predict the future, whether visiting astrologers, reading the entrails of some unfortunate sacrificial beast, or consulting all sorts of databases, polls and statistics.  In any event, it’s a crapshoot.

            We can’t even see a worldview, whatever our world might be, because we are right in the middle of things, and are bound by the limitations of our own intelligence and five senses.  Let me give you an example of wrong possibilities, conclusions come to by perfectly sound observations: those of a German philosopher, physician and cartographer named Hironymus Münzer, who made a very long journey around Western Europe in 1494-1495, and wrote about it.

Münzer

            For a biography of Münzer, there is a nice web summary at Project Gutenberg.  I did a translation of the Spanish part of the journey into English, and in 2010-2011 in a project called “Münzerama,” Myself and two of my former graduate students followed about 2/3 of Münzer’s Spanish/Portuguese route, chronicling what still remained from the sites he described. 

Maximilian

            Our trip was easy: a car, hotels, good roads, restaurants.  Münzer’s journey was a real slog: mostly on horseback, along narrow often rocky trails for the most part, staying sometimes in castles, sometimes in primitive inns or even private dwellings.  In a time of fortified cities and a sometimes chaotic countryside, the only way to make the trip was to have good connections to facilitate things.  Münzer and his companions evidently did: it’s most possible that he had tacit sponsorship of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, then looking both for connections to overseas trade being explored both in Spain and Portugal, and for matches for his two children, Philip and Margaret. Münzer’s cartographic skills, published within Hermann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 certainly gave him credibility.

João II

            Münzer met with João II, King of Portugal in Évora, and had an audience with The Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel at a monastery near present-day Madrid.  He apparently discussed cartography and trade with the former, who sent him on to Lisbon with introductions so that he could personally report on Portuguese maritime trade.  Visiting the Catholic Kings gave him time to observe young prince Juan, heir to the united Spanish Kingdom, and his sister Juana.  Both of these children would marry the two Hapsburg offspring in due course.

Fernando and Isabel,  Juan and Juana +
The Virgin and Dominican Saints

            But there was so much more.  1494-5 was a watershed time to be on the Iberian Peninsula, for two years earlier, the Catholic kings had conquered the last Muslim possession in Spain, the Kingdom of Granada, thus ending 700 years of Christian/Muslim conflict. This, together with their marriage, joining Castile and Aragon, effectively reduced rival kingdoms on the peninsula from five to three, and Navarre would be absorbed in 1512. Also in 1492, Fernando and Isabel expelled their kingdoms’ Jews, and the royally sponsored Inquisition was busily rooting out false converts (Münzer saw a few of these unlucky ones in prison in Zaragoza).  He also witnessed the dispersal of the indigenous population (the Guanches) of the recently conquered Canary Islands, and saw many of them being auctioned off into slavery in the city of Valencia.

            He saw further signs of the Catholicization of Spain in many places, with the recent conversion of most remaining mosques into churches, and the vigorous establishment of many Franciscan and Dominican monasteries..  He actually attended a functioning Mosque in Granada, which was soon to be closed as well.  Even more impressive was a visit to the Alhambra, former palace of the Nasrid Kings, which still retained much of its fabled richness.

Banana

            Other exotic experiences awaited: a crocodile skin and giant tortoise shell  relics at the Monastery of Guadalupe,  other exotic animals in private zoos, a stay with a Muslim family and a chance to witness a Muslim wedding ceremony at Arcos de Jalón, a visit to a glass factory and another to Lisbon’s Great Synagogue (Portugal had not yet expelled its Jews), and his very first banana (that he mistakenly called a prickly pear).  Münzer makes no mention of Columbus’s first voyage (the second voyage was then in progress), but when Columbus had returned from his initial journey in 1493, he was convinced that had reached the easternmost outposts of Asia.

            The overall impression carried back by the Northern visitor was that the realm governed by the Catholic Kings, uniting to Spanish Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with Granada, along with a prosperous Portugal had ushered in a golden age of Iberian peace and stability, with grand economic possibilities.  This was radically different than the situation a quarter of a century earlier, when Bohemian knight, Václav Šašek z Birkova, and Gabriel Tetzel of Nuremberg visited the peninsula; at that time things were far more unpredictable and dangerous, for Granada was still separate, and civil wars were raging in both Castile and Aragon.

So in 1494-5, stability was the breaking out all over.  King João of Portugal, having lost his son and heir Afonso in a hunting accident, had confidence that his natural son Jorge could take on the succession.  Fernando and Isabel were consolidating their unified realms, not only by their relentless policies of religious, if not ethnic cleansing, but in their further integration into the European mainstream via marriage alliances with the family of the Holy Roman Emperor.  The furthering of international trade with Africa and Asia via maritime exploration put both Iberian countries on the road to opening vast new markets.  The report to Emperor Maximilian must have been rosy indeed.  Everything seemed organized and set.

But the Great Oracle was mum about what happened next.  Before the 16^th century began many of these bets were off!  The Spanish-Hapsburg marriages did happen in 1496 and 1497, but Prince Juan died soon after, and the Spanish throne would pass to the Hapsburgs, through the marriage of Juana (the crazy) and Philip (the handsome) and their son Carlos, the future King of Spain and Holy Roman emperor all at once..  João would soon die too, and his natural son Jorge would never rule, instead the throne passed to his cousin Manoel, who married in succession two of Fernando and Isabel’s other daughters.  As a condition of this alliance, the Jews of Portugal were expelled too.  Columbus, of course, soon figured out that he had claimed a new continent, rather than an old port for Spain, and Portugal would get a part of it too, as well as sizeable markets in Africa and Asia.  But in the end, it was the Hapsburgs who really triumphed.  By the time that Fernando and Isabel’s grandson Charles took the combined Spanish/Hapsburg throne, he would rule over a good piece of the known world, both old and new.  Go figure!

So for 2016, I’m just going with the flow, whether I like it or not. 

Sources:

A good summary of Münzer's career can be found at: http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/hieronymus_münzer

I've translated Münzer's Spanish and Portuguese portion of the trip (from a Spanish translation, not the original Latin) Look for it soon at: http://art.utsa.edu/faculty/judith_sobre#additional

Our Münzer project of 2010-2011 can be found at http://munzerama.blogspot.com.

James Firth has produced a book on Münzer and his discussions between himself and João II on African explorations in Portugal entitled Doctor Hieronymus Münzer's Itinerary (1494-1495) and the Discovery of Guinea; it was self-published in 2014 and is available at Amazon.com.

Pinoke: Wooden Head/Eye of Pine

            Last month, PBS had a two-part special on Walt Disney.  The later, megalomaniacal part of Disney’s career was familiar to me, but the first part, on how Disney and his large staff developed their marvelous animation techniques was new and fascinating.  Capping Part I were the first Disney features, Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), the latter considered perhaps the pinnacle of feature-length animated film. 

 

Young Disney

            The Disney film was based on a satirical tale by Carlo Lorenzani whose pen name was Carlo Collodi, first published in 1883. Collodi’s Pinocchio details the picaresque adventures of a walking, talking marionette. He finally becomes a real boy after a series of fantastic adventures, in which he

Carlo Lorenzani a.k.a. Colladi

gradually comes to an understanding of human emotions and responsibilities, as he evolves from childhood to adolescence.

            Seeing film clips within the documentary, I remember now why Pinocchio was the favorite film of my childhood.  My first encounter with it was its first re-release, when I was about four or five.  Someone had read me Collodi’s story, and I didn’t like it very much—it was way too satirically anarchistic for my kid’s mind at that point.  Disney’s version, on the other hand was perfectly comprehensible to a small child.  From the very first, I was enthralled with the crazy marionette show sequence, and also the carnival atmosphere of Pleasure Island.  At that point, I though Jiminy Cricket was an annoying nerd, and the Fox and Cat were silly, but the Blue Fairy and the red-cloaked Coachman were objects of fascination. I was into bright colors then, so naturally the brightest parts were the most fascinating: I loved the tawdriness of Pleasure Island for its kaleidoscopic glitter, including the shattering of a stained-glass window.

            In an age before media blitzes, CD’s and streaming video, you had to wait for the tightly-controlled re-releases to see Disney films again, and until I was ten or eleven, I caught every revival of Pinocchio.  We had all the songs on 78 (and later 45) rpm. records, and for a number of years my friend Nancy and I did endless re-stagings of the marionette show between viewings (we misconstrued Jiminy’s remark “What a buildup,” said after Stromboli’s introduction as “What a Pillbox!,” a phrase that became a term for us to describe a jerk—and I still use it).

Collodi's Pinocchio and the Blue-Haired Fairy

            Though copious later academic criticism lauded the Collodi original and denigrated the Disney version as bland and sugarcoated, I maintain that for children, the Disney version really nailed it.  The large number of adventures of Collodi’s anarchistic marionette (and the fact that the wood Pinocchio was made of was alive before Geppetto even carved him) was reduced to the “Little Wooden Head” puppet, and his basic disastrous adventures on the way to responsibility and compassion were limited to two, and these played out within a short time-span.  The cricket Pinocchio slaughtered with a hammer in chapter 4 of Collodi’s story morphed into the top-hatted nerd Jiminy, the usually ignored “conscience.”  And Geppetto, rather than an opportunistic wood-carver who wanted to fashion a marionette to take on the road and make him money, became a very kindly, very naïve toy and clockmaker.

            But if Disney simplified the story, what he and his numerous collaborators produced was an hour and a half of perfectly understandable magic for a small child.  Pinocchio, the wished-for living marionette of a naïve and kindly father, was even more naïve--totally clueless, in fact--but after all, he was literally “born yesterday.”  Kids could certainly identify with pursuing potentially dangerous mischief, and lacked the experience as yet to see its pitfalls.  There were enough villains whose scurrilous natures to scare them into awareness that it was dangerous out there.  It sure worked for me.

            But my perceptions of Pinocchio changed radically as a youngish adult with a child of her own.  The film had dropped off my personal radar once I was a teenager, and I hadn’t seen it for a long time when I took my daughter to see it when she was six or seven.  This time, I was shocked and horrified.  Maternal instincts had kicked in, and I knew that it could be a jungle out there—I can remember my panic when she and I were in Madrid and she got shut out of the elevator I had boarded in a department store.  I was sure that I’d never find her again, she didn’t yet speak Spanish and I was convinced she was Doomed Forever.  Of course, a few minutes later, when I got back down, she was right at the elevator door, being conforted by a group of solicitous Spanish ladies.

The Coachman and Poor Alexander, Once a Boy

            It was the Coachman who frightened me now; I could see analogies to a network of child abductors kidnapping children for underage prostitution and worse (like Enriqueta Martí in her legend), for that now seemed the analogy to me of the donkey-boys sold to the circus or salt mines.  Diabolical Disney underneath it all—and revealing of the megalomania that had always been within him!  It was a relief to me that my kid didn’t like the film at all (she was into the more syrupy sweetness of the later Disney brand until she was old enough for real horror movies).

            I didn’t see Pinocchio again until after seeing the PBS show.  Then I watched it, and found a film that was completely different and fascinating once more.  Before watching it, I reread the Collodi original, and this time found it wickedly satirical and wonderful too, but that Pinocchio was an entirely different puppet-to-person.  I also read a lot of scholarly analyses of both the original and the Disney adaptation, in which the cartoon feature was denigrated for its blandness and sanitation—so typical of Disney from then on, and so much more widely franchised in nature.  This was most scathingly pointed out by David Bosworth in his article “From Wariness to Wishfulness: Disney’s Emasculation of Pinocchio’s Conscience.” The complexity of the Pinocchio story, now mythified, was definitively dilineated in an entire volume entitled Pinocchio Goes Postmodern edited by Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morressey.

            But as a stand-alone film, I’m with Maurice Sendak, and think that Pinocchio is terrific in itself.  I know that Disney and his staff worked and reworked the story over a number of years before they got it right for their particular vision.

The Fairy: Madeleine in Blue

            The movie is a great reflection of the time it was made (1937-1940).  World War II was already raging in Europe, and we needed diversion from an uncertain future.  The country had just weathered the Great Depression, which certainly shaped popular and more serious culture in the 1930’s, and this can be seen in how many of the characters were defined.  The blond and very elegant blue Fairy (not the blue-haired fairy of Collodi) is envisioned like Madeleine Carroll in blue, wafting lingerie and veils, and elegant heeled slippers.  The amoral opportunists Honest John the Fox and Gideon the Cat look and act like a vaudeville team, the fox riffing dialogue like something out of Dickens or the Wizard of Oz and Gideon silent and anarchistic as Harpo Marx (my favorite bit for him is when he blows a smoke ring and tries to dunk it in his beer as if it were a donut). 

Stromboli and Gypsy Puppet-Master

Stereotypes from that era abound: Stromboli is a Gypsy replete with earring, but his accent is like Chico Marx’s, and he lapses into pure cartoonish bombastic gibberish most of the time, just like the marionettes in his show, with their caricatured national accents. Wooden "Cigar-Store Indians" scatter cheroots on Pleasure Island. Typical of Disney too, there are two cats, a coy Figaro and a really giddy Gideon, the alley cat, while Cleo the pet fish is a little flirt, but the wild fish and other sea creatures in the ocean range from cute to exotic and big.  Lampwick  the juvenile delinquent who becomes a donkey is the spitting image of one of the Dead End Kids, a popular gang of street boy characters portrayed in a number of feature films of the period.  The villainous males whether animal or human, have a comical, bombastic edge, except for Monstro the Whale, who is more  a force of nature than a bad guy.

Gideon and his Erstwhile Donut: Up in Smoke

            But the film does have one really menacing villain, the red-cloaked Coachman, who runs the Pleasure Island syndicate.  He reminds me of The Godfather or the head of some drug cartel, seemingly benign to those who play his game, but all-controlling and truly lethal to those who don’t.  Even now I can see him running a criminal empire with cold-hearted efficiency; even his gentler facial expressions are potentially scary.

Coachman as Crime Boss

            Overarching all of this is the sheer artistry and beauty of the animation itself.  More than 30,000 individual hand-painted cells make up the finished film, and the recently invented multi-plane camera aided in three dimensional illusionism.  The result of such painstaking technique allow the figures, man and beast alike, to have a phenomenal elegance and grace of movement, whatever their personalities.  There is nothing like it in contemporary digital animation that so often has a whiplash speed and precision, and the labor-intensive nature of the movie’s fabrication would be prohibitively expensive to duplicate today.  Maybe that’s the point, since Disney’s animators then worked for slaves’ wages, and after this period, Disney and his staff would become adversaries in a bitter labor dispute.

            There would be other variations on Collodi’s tale, and every so often talk surges about a live-action Disney production of Pinocchio.  If there were to be one, I’d never go see it.  Everything would have to be updated: the violence would be digitally enhanced, the sins far more graphic than shooting pool, smoking cigars and drinking beer; Lampwick would probably be renamed “Lightbulb,” and, in our post-Jaws era, Monstro would return to being Collodi’s shark. 

Jaws A More Modern Monstro?

In the case of the 1940 Pinocchio, the medium really is the message.

 

Real at Last!

Some Pinocchio Criticism:

Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morressey, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern, Perils of a Puppet in the United States, N.Y. and London, Routledge, 2002. 

Maurice Sendak, Caldicott and Company: Notes on Books and Pictures, Noonday Press, 1988

David Bosworth: “From Wariness to Wishfulness: Disney's Emasculation of Pinocchio's Conscience” The Georgia Review Vol. 65, No. 3 (FALL 2011), pp. 584-608

http://www.jstor.org/stable/479125

Gideon and Harpo: http://moviepilot.com/posts/2015/08/04/these-11-celebrities-who-inspired-your-favorite-disney-characters-might-just-surprise-you-3438712?lt_source=external,manual

Some Youtubes (Sorry for the Commercials)

Blue Fairy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_M95CWviH4

Puppet Show: : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQC5bQKPj6o

Metamphosis: Coachman and Pleasure island (Neither has donkey-trafficking scene)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9tBipVWUhM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_wfqqnhbLU