Skip to main content

Ma Belle

I wonder why I saw the two most important movies in my life so close to each other, when I was sixteen or seventeen, and why I have never seen another movie so great as those, and likely never will. I saw "Immortal Beloved" first -- which I could appreciate all the more playing the piano, and I fell in love with every aspect of that movie: it will never fade from my mind. The other movie "La Belle et le Bete" came later, introducing a shadowy world that has affected me forever -- it is excruciating to watch the commentaries today and see the actors, and the sets, and to know that it was all real, just as it is excruciating to think that Mary and Percy Shelley existed somewhere, and John William Waterhouse existed somewhere -- somewhere I wasn't.

The castle sequences were filmed in a dilapidated park in France that still seems obscure and un-noteworthy to anyone -- that it is festering in seclusion even now with those same lichen-covered statues is unthinkable to me -- and why I should not be there, even more so. Jean Marais did a lot of interviews about it and as always seems to be the case, the beastly characters are played by friendly, charming people -- he reminded me so much in his manner of David Selby or Lara Parker -- I guess it is the complacency that rests in past greatness. I do not know if I'll ever know the feeling because I don't think I will ever be great.

Popular posts from this blog

The secret to a happy home

I finished Marion Harland's guide tonight and I wonder ceaselessly at two things. 1. She is so down on America! Even more than I am. She complains of things in which I am so well-steeped I could not see them for what they were. In particular, American style and cookery. It is true that our food, which we count as so much more generous in portion than the overseas counterpart, is as coarse and indecorous as it is plentiful, but as an American woman I cast up my hands and declare I would rather spend my time on something else. She makes an interesting point about American women's fashions. In France women wear what looks good on them, and in America women wears what comes off the manufacturing line in the latest style. It is very conformist, and I have to admit I feel it in myself, for I would be embarrassed to wear something that is "out" even if it flattered me better. 2. Harland's other point I feel clearly from last night's experiences. I looked in my journ...

Sprouts

Sprouts Originally uploaded by ladyhildegarde . I am getting sprouts. Hopefully they are carnations. It is such a beautiful spring day. It's good I'm taking the chance to come outside: I have craved a moment to reflect on something beautiful.

Blanche, a re-telling of Snow White

I began this story after reading a collection of short stories by Angela Carter. “Snow White” has always been a favorite tale of mine and I have placed this re-telling in nineteenth-century rural Louisiana. Near Vacherie, Louisiana, there are not only swamps but also old beautiful plantations. Some of them are restored but others are abandoned and ruined. The places I have seen captured my imagination and I combined them with my impression of Snow White as an object of envy and lust. My heroine Blanche is a hard-working girl who longs to be rich and to live in New Orleans, where her father was born. She is threatened constantly by the attention of the rustics who live around her. Her stepmother beats her when she finds Blanche in Jean-Jacques’ arms. When Blanche runs away from home she is beguiled by Philipe de la Roche, who persuades her to live in New Orleans in a fancy house with seven women. Blanche does not realize that the women are prostitutes. The farmer Jean-Jacques, who love...