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

ISIS, Isis, and George Orwell

Isis

Baalshemin being blown up

            Some time within the last month, members of ISIS (or ISIL), the big group that intends to establish a new Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, systematically mined and blew up the ancient Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra. Last weekend they also blew up the Temple of Bel at the same location. Palmyra had been an important trading city in the ancient world, and was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.  ISIS also demolished two Muslim shrines, one Shia, the other Sufi.  To top things off, they beheaded the retired local chief archeologist and historian, Khalid al-Asaad, who as a scholarly autodidact, had devoted his life to the study of the venerable city.  According to the New York Times report, ISIS branded Asaad as “an apostate…” and the “director of idolatry” and accused him of “presenting papers at infidel conferences.”  In other sites, such as Ninevah and Nimrud in Iraq, ISIS also blew up ancient buildings and smashed ancient images in local museums after looting them to sell off valuable pieces.

 

The Late Khalil al Asaad

            To make their caliphate work, it is apparently vital to trash everything that doesn’t fit with ISIS’s narrow parameters.  Idolatry is certainly against Islamic law—as it is to Jewish Orthodoxy.  The original intent here was to make the public statement that images, big or small, are not to be worshipped as gods, as there is only one immaterial One, who lives somewhere in the heavens.  But the gods –and any images once worshipped at the Bel and Baalshamin temples are long gone, and no one seems to have the least intention of reviving them.  In the Islamic, Christian and Jewish religions, the notion of a sole God has been irreparably established for a very long time.

            Why destroy dead idols, as ISIS has done in museums—at least those they couldn’t cynically sell to raise money for weapons?  The idea of destroying Muslim shrines dedicated to groups that fall outside ISIS’s canon, as well as the slaughtering of groups considered “the other,” like Yezidis, or Christians, has a longer history and way beyond and before Islam. As a matter of fact, building your place of worship right on top of the one of your defeated foe has a very long tradition: for example, the site of the Cathedral of Seville in Spain was originally occupied by a Roman Temple (or maybe some other cult even earlier), then became a Visigothic cathedral, then the city’s major Mosque, and since the 13^th century, the world’s second-biggest Catholic church. 

            But is ISIS planning to build big mosques on the sites of the Palmyra temples?  And why kill an archeologist-art historian, and a Muslim one at that?  If all of us art historians were condemned for studying, documenting and preserving old sites, is it carte blanche to remove not only the sites, but those who wrote about them? Does this make me a target for blasphemy and assassination for what I’m writing here?

            ISIS is probably aware that its acronym (in the United States at least) is synonymous with one of the most powerful of ancient Egyptian goddesses. (Maybe that’s why they prefer “ISIL” or “Islamic State.”)

It’s interesting to compare the destructive activities of ISIS with another time of looting of targeted sites: the Spanish Civil War. When, on July 18^th, 1936, General Francisco Franco and his allies staged a coup d’état, overthrowing the existing Republican government, it set off riots all over the country.  The Republic had been an uneasy coalition of worker’s groups, anarchists, Communists, Stalinist, Marxist or Trotskyite, liberals, and strong regional factions in a very diverse country.  It not only marked the beginning of a three-year civil war, but in its initial stages, it was a free-for all of all those republican groups on the left versus Monarchists, Carlists, rich landowners, mine owners and plutocrats on the right, as well as the Catholic church in general, which was hated for its enduring conservatism

Who got attacked depended of where you were.  Churches and convents were set on fire and looted of their considerable treasures everywhere.  In the Andalusian south, Landowners who owned most of the arable land and often treated agricultural workers like serfs were the targets.  In the northwest in Asturias, it was mine-owners, while in the Basque provinces and Catalonia, it was mixed in with separatism.  In Catalonia, it was rich industrialists who owned factories where disgruntled workers were organizing.  In some places in the same region, socialists, Communists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and other leftist groups fought each other, so that in Barcelona, far from the actual battlefront during the first years of the war, there was a civil war within a civil war.

All of this is way too complicated to analyze here, and your writer is just an Art Historian, but I think I can say that at that moment, a decade before the activities of the “Monuments Men,” art enthusiasts organized themselves and acted like a federation of workers with a purpose.  In Barcelona, both the systematic rescue of objects from damaged sites and items brought in by spontaneous individual and small groups was carried out, consolidated and catalogued by museum, academic and library personnel working for the Catalan republican government.  The rescuers fanned out to the towns and villages, trying to convince local revolutionaries to convert churches to garages or meeting halls, rather than just destroying them.

Apel.les Fenosa

The Retablo of Lanaja as it was

            But issues can become clouded and arguments difficult, the further away sites were from the cultured coast and nearer to the actual front.  The Barcelona sculptor Apel.les Fenosa, fighting with a republican militia company in central Aragon, worked furiously in whatever spare time he had in the area to salvage works, and often met with outright hostility;

“It’s thankless work, and the People don’t understand it.  One    day they will kill me, confusing me with a robber, as a profiteer of pillage. Ingrates because they are guilty of not understanding.  Ingrates because they are guilty of bad faith and ingrates by those that know how much all of this is worth, without having done anything to save it, and when they see it saved, they accuse you of being a thief and vampire of the population.”

The locals believed that they were being patronized by city folks who didn’t  understand the dire living situation imposed by a poorer economy in the line of battle.  In the small town of Lanaja was a church that the locals had attacked.  When Fenosa arrived there, they were cutting up pews for firewoods.  They were also cutting up centuries-old wooden altarpieces for the same purpose:

Panel from Lanaja Retablo just after rescue

“I found a formidable retablo, thirty feet high, which they had dismantled piled up in the committee courtyard. They wanted to use it for heating fires in the winter…” 

Same panel, restored and rehabilitated

They offered to trade the dismantled altarpiece for a truck, which Fenosa and his companions didn’t have, and so the would-be rescuers had to leave most of it behind (they managed to rescue three painted panels, in bad shape, which they sent on to Barcelona, restored after the war, and eventually sent back to a museum in Aragon).

But when do aesthetics trump human desperation?  Fighting with a Marxist militia company in the same region, the British writer George Orwell vividly described local conditions for soldier and civilian alike:

George Orwell

“[Yet] I believe that even in peacetime you could not travel in that part of Spain without being struck by the peculiar squalid misery of the Aragonese villages. They are built like fortresses, a mass of mean little houses of mud and stone huddling round the church, and even in spring you see hardly a flower anywhere; the houses have no gardens, only back-yards where ragged fowls skate over the beds of mule-dung”

Firewood was the one thing that really mattered…..When we were not eating, sleeping, on guard, or on fatigue-duty we were in the valley behind the position, scrounging for fuel. All my memories of that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost perpendicular slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots to pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a couple of hours could collect enough fuel to keep the dug-out fire alight for about an hour.”

            All of that ready wood in those gigantic altarpieces, not in very good condition at that time at any rate, certainly was a temptation when freezing to death was the alternative.

            When does what we call “Art” cease to be important for its own sake, when are its component materials are worth more than the finished project (except in the eyes of a cultured minority)?  In the case of Palmyra and a good deal of the educated world in this time of mass-media and instant communication of events, such destruction, not only carried out, but publicized by its perpetrators, seems inexcusable and tragic, particularly when they are at a remote site, and revered as past history, representing as they do now defunct religions or empires.  The looting and selling of portable objects is unpalatable but more understandable.  Since the ancient looting of the ancient pyramids in Egypt, moveable objects are easily carried off and fenced, whether as in the case of ISIS its revenue will be used to buy arms, or for petty criminals, a quick buck.

            In the case of Spain in 1936, the looting and destruction was a more or less spontaneous manifestation of the uprising.  In the case of ISIS, destruction is intentional, planned, and in their eyes a manifestation of their narrow, very black-and-white ideology, which spans both space and time.  If they triumph in their Caliphate, all culture will be a very narrow, mostly black-and-white corridor of faith---their's.

 ________________________________________________________________________________

About the killing of Khalid al Asaad:

 New York Times

Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/world/middleeast/isis-palmyra-syria-antiquities-scholar-beheaded.html#    

The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/18/isis-beheads-archaeologist-syria

An overview of the complicated situation in Republican Spain in the 1930's: 

Stanley G. Payne, Spain’s First Democracy.  The Second republic 1931-1936,  Seattle, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. (p. 30)

Apel.les Fenosa is quoted: (in Catalan)

“Catalunya ha salvat a Aragó un trésor artistic,” Mirador. Setmanari de Literatura, Art i Politica, Any VIII Núm 397, Barcelona, dijous, 3 desembre 1936 (segona epoca), pp.8-7.

http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/mirador/mirador_a1936m12n397.pdf  Mirador

George Orwell's account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War can be found online at:

 Homage to Catalonia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201111.txt