Behind the Basilica
Johnson, Hank
and Desire was apprentice work, scarcely seen at all.) This gangster movie is nothing but an exercise in moviemaking-Kubrick teaching himself to shoot a boxing match, then a love scene,...
...I'm not talking about the frisson of suspense, or cathartic pity and terror, but real fear: the feeling that you may not make it through to the closing curtain alive...
...But not enough of a difference...
...Since ten, a silent group has drifted up to stand in line like broken teeth, clot still and beaten...
...Hank Johnson ear rarely figures in the theater experience...
...Forty-five years of experience and a bigger budget make a difference: Eyes Wide Shut is more imposing than Killer's Kiss...
...Misgivings about a fire hazard can hardly compare...
...Now, forty-five years later, with a lifetime spent making one truly affecting, disturbing film after another, Kubrick has left us a strange memento: another technical exercise, photographed in that slightly veiled style he favored (with a wonderful strawberryblonde tint for the early party scenes), streaked with his usual sardonicism, studded with funny supporting performances that abet that sardonicism, and underlined with music shrewdly excerpted from already composed pieces...
...He wills his own misery, shunning comforts, deliberately alienating sympathy, and behaving irrationally, in order to prove to himself that he is free...
...Since the space was awash in ink-blotted paper, bearing illegible scrawls, and since HoneyweU's role involved skidding back and forth, candle in hand, sometimes barely keeping upright, the tiny audience, seated along the walls, had good reason to cringe...
...Behind the Basilica At noon the sisters hand them sandwiches and soup...
...Neither Kubrick's first film nor his last is a work of art...
...We must honor everything that came between...
...Precarious candles were only the starting point...
...The occasion was a dramatized Notes from Underground, performed solo in near obscurity by actor Robert Honeywell, from a script by director Michael Gardner...
...Of course, the quality of the distress was different: The "spiteful" narrator of the 1864 Notes suffers existentially, for no good reason except that he is...
...Humans will choose choice over happiness, the Underground Man insists, and he glories in his anguish...
...this Underground Man was really underground, after all, and while ranting about the "wall" (the limits of Commonweal 2 4 September 10, 1999...
...During seventyfive minutes of delirious pacing, the actor lit and extinguished the candles that provided the only light...
...This blood is soup, this body bread...
...And yet, Gardner's Notes did provide the audience with intriguing physical counterparts to the novel's metaphysics...
...This gangster movie is nothing but an exercise in moviemaking-Kubrick teaching himself to shoot a boxing match, then a love scene, then a chase, and so forth...
...But there was ample opportunity for trepidation, earlier this summer, in a tiny cellar-turned-stage on New York's Lower East Side...
...If a few hard-core Dostoevski enthusiasts had heard about this no-budget production, the New York City Fire Department, evidently, had not...
...As on-the-job training it's successful, but it's not a work of art...
...Oh ye dead arisen from the flood of traffic, take...
...The audience, in short, was treated to a dose of angst to rival that of Dostoevski's chronically tortured protagonist...
...Passers by who've eaten well don't feel beneath their soles the bottom line of hunger perforate and tear, nor think to wait upon a meal's divine forgiveness...
Vol. 126 • September 1999 • No. 15
