The Evolution of Mirrors

 

The Mirror of Venus, or L'Art et Vie (Art and Life)
 ca. 1890 by Walter Crane

Mirrors have a long history, from natural reflection to carefully engineered objects. The very first “mirrors” weren’t objects at all—they were surfaces like still water. Early humans likely noticed their reflections in ponds or pools long before they tried to reproduce the effect. 

Polished stone seems to be the earliest manmade mirrors (c. 6000–4000 BCE). They come from places like Anatolia. People there polished dark volcanic glass (obsidian) into reflective surfaces. These were small, slightly distorted, but recognizable as mirrors. 

Next came metal mirrors (c. 3000 BCE onward). Ancient civilizations improved on this idea by polishing metals. In Ancient Egypt, mirrors were made from polished copper. In Mesopotamia and later Ancient China, bronze mirrors became common. These were often beautifully decorated on the back and used not just for grooming but also for ritual and symbolic purposes. 

Glass mirrors appeared during the Roman period. In the Roman Empire, artisans began backing glass with metals like lead or tin. These early glass mirrors were still dim and imperfect, but closer to what we recognize today. 

High-quality mirrors really emerged in Renaissance Europe, especially in Venice. Venetian craftsmen developed a technique of coating glass with a tin–mercury amalgam, producing clearer reflections. These mirrors were expensive luxury items — often more valuable than paintings. 

Modern mirrors (19th century–today) use a process that was invented in 1835 by Justus von Liebig. he developed a method for applying a thin layer of silver to glass using chemical reduction. This is the basis of today’s mirrors, though aluminum is now often used instead of silver.

Mirrors also carry symbolic meaning in art, literature, and film. This scene from Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai works as both a film effect and with symbolic meanings in the scene and the film overall.

Get to Know Your Rabbit

Get to Know Your Rabbit is a 1972 American comedy film written by Jordan Crittenden and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars Tommy Smothers, Orson Welles, John Astin, Katherine Ross and a gaggle of other recognizable players of the period.

It is a strange film that certainly never received much attention. I read about it years ago and was finally able to see it on a big screen in college.

Smothers and Welles

Corporate executive Donald Beeman (Smothers) is fed up with corporate America where he has been successful. He has a beautiful girlfriend and a great apartment - but something is missing. 

He quite impulsively quits his job and decides to hit the road as a very unlikely tap-dancing magician. He has been studying with Mr. Delasandro (Welles). Delasandro is impressed by Donald's sincere desire to learn but tells him it is very important to "get to know your rabbit" which is bestowed upon him when he graduates the program.

His former boss Mr. Turnbull (Astin) is determined to convince him to return to his office job, but Donald won't go back. When Turnbull shows up out of work and seemingly lost and homeless, Donald feels bad, and as he heads out on the road he makes Turnbull his manager so that he will have something to do.

Most of the film is about his adventures on the road where he is actually successful as a magician. He meets at one nightclub Katherine Ross' character, billed only as "Terrific-looking girl" (which I wholeheartedly endorsed when I first saw the film). He loves his act and volunteers to come on stage for his escape sack trick. The trick fails but they end up wrapped up together and despite her date's objections and chase, they escape to Donald's hotel, where they talk all night and then make love.

On a postcard to Turnbull, Donald writes that is is finally "living life at gut level." This inspires who has regained his business attitude to put out an ad for Tap Dancing Magician, Inc., "a seventeen-day drop-out plan for tired executives." 

SPOILER ALERT (but not really) The company becomes a huge success going global. When Donald returns he finds himself in charge and the icon for many execs who have taken the magician course (no longer offered by Delasandro) and taken their 17-day escape from the corporate rat race.

Donald finds himself feeling the same way he did when he originally quit his job. Can he escape again?

Tommy Smothers was known as half of The Smothers Brothers musical duo and as co-host of their own TV variety show.  Orson Welles was a filmmaker who couldn't get funding to make the films he wanted to make despite having made Citizen Kane and a few other great and now classic films. He was also an avid magician. John Astin will always be remembered as Gomez, the patriarch of TV's The Addams Family. Katherine Ross had already made The Graduate and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The last scene of the film shows Ross sitting in the back seat of a bus, a reference to the final shot of The Graduate.

Director Brian De Palma had made the 1968 underground comedy Greetings and Hi, Mom! which were both successful little films and well-reviewed. Get to Know Your Rabbit was a third comedy for him and it was considered to be absurdist satire. Crittenden's screenplay is filled with oddball characters and bizarre situations. But satire is tough and not everyone gets it.

Tommy Smothers was not confident in De Palma's direction but that may have been more about his own limited acting experience. According to De Palma, Smothers so disliked the film that he disappeared for several shooting days and refused to return for retakes.

Warner Brothers was not satisfied with De Palma's cut of the film. It was taken from him and recut with additional footage by Peter Nelson (credited onscreen as executive producer). Despite that, the studio still held onto the film for several years and when it was released it had very little promotion and quickly disappeared from theaters. De Palma refused to work for a major studio again for several years and then turned, quite successfully, to themes of suspense and obsession starting with his film Sisters. 

The film was certainly not an Oscar contender but it was the 1973 Nominee for a WGA Award for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen for Jordan Crittenden. 

It is an uneven, odd, perhaps cult, film, but I like it. It shows up sometimes on the TCM channel and is also available on Amazon Prime but I recently rewatched it on YouTube (see link below).

A Destitute King With No Country

I had a dream last night about Orson Welles, who I have written about here several times before. In the dream, he was doing a magic trick. He asked me to give him a coin. I placed a quarter in his gloved hand. He closed his hand and then opened it to reveal a key. He said, "This is what you were looking for, isn't it?"

I went downstairs, made my coffee and went online and did a search on his name. I thought that perhaps this was the day he was born or had died. It is not either of those. I searched on "Orson Welles magician," and it brought up links to the documentary about him by that name.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a film I had not seen. I had tried last year unsuccessfully to find it on some streaming services. But there it was, on YouTube, for free - perhaps not legally, but I watched it this morning. If it is still available and you are interested, watch the version below (but go full screen).

And there is a brief scene in the film that is pretty much my dream. Somehow, that bit of film was in my head, and now I have rediscovered it.

If the embedded video isn't working, the film is available for purchase. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles and many of his films as actor and director that are referenced in the documentary.

Me and Orson Welles

I will finish off this Wellesian week with a novel titled, Me and Orson Welles, written by Robert Kaplow.

Kaplow was a Rutgers student who "never stopped writing: songs, plays, sketches, novellas." Like myself, he spent a lot of time on campus "writing or prowling through the Alexander Library" and maybe he was also a fellow browser and buyer at the Old Yorke bookshop too.

Kaplow attended Rutgers at the same time as me, graduating a year after me in 1976. He was also an English major, and we certainly must have crossed paths and may have had a class together and sat through a Scott Hall lecture a few times.

He published Me and Orson Welles in 2003, and director Richard Linklater made a film adaptation with the same title in 2008.

The story revolves around Orson Welles, who was a big hero of mine in my college days. It is set in his Mercury Theatre days before Citizen Kane.

His theater group pulled off the famous 1938 radio War of the Worlds that had New Jerseyans and many others in the area in a panic over an alien invasion. Many radio listeners who heard only a portion of the broadcast took it to be a real news broadcast and that aliens had landed in New Jersey. Newspapers reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance. Welles played a fictional astronomer and Princeton professor who refutes talk about life on Mars just as a "cylindrical meteorite" lands in Grover's Mill, N.J.

In the novel, Orson Welles is 22 and about to have his debut production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre on Broadway in 1937.

The book's protagonist is Richard Samuels, 17, a high school senior with senioritis. He escapes New Jersey and wanders New York City on weekends trying to connect as a writer or something creative.

He stumbles into the about-to-open Mercury Theatre and gets noticed by Welles. he gets a very small part in the production.

Richard says, "This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pajamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love."

Welles’ Broadway production of Julius Caesar was staged in modern dress and was intended as a polemic against the fascist forces growing in Europe. 

Welles' Julius Caesar

McKay and Efron

The film adaptation, Me and Orson Welles, stars Zac Efron as Richard, the wonderful Christian McKay as Welles, and Claire Danes as the third part of a little triangle they form. The film received good reviews. ( “One of the best movies about the theater I've ever seen,” said Roger Ebert)

Kaplow was inspired while flipping through old magazines in the basement of the Alexander Library (a place I often visited to escape real studying - great old leather easy chairs back then) and coming across a photo of Welles on the Julius Caesar stage, sitting next to a young boy who was playing the lute. Richard becomes that bit part lute player.

Another Kaplow connection - he became an English teacher in New Jersey, as I did.

Kaplow also wrote Alessandra in Love and Alex Icicle: A Romance in Ten Torrid Chapters, and two interestingly-titled literary parodies, The Cat who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun and Who’s Killing the Great Writers of America?   His website is robertkaplow.com

Orson Welles: Charlatan Extraordinaire

Who was Orson Welles? He was an actor and director on radio, the stage, and in films. He became a celebrity, a favorite of TV talk shows. He became known as a troublemaker on sets. He was difficult, so no one would give him money to make films. He acted in poor films, did commercials, and narrated things in order to pay the bills. He was a magician. By his own admission, like all actors, he was a charlatan.

A charlatan is hardly a compliment to lay upon oneself. They are a swindler, someone practicing quackery, deception, a confidence trick, usually to get money but also to achieve fame. Welles did all that to make films.

The word is French. Once, a charlatan was a seller of medicines who might have used music and magic to attract a crowd. Not unlike filmmakers.

Welles' radio drama, The War of the Worlds, was certainly a grand deception that worked so well that it got him the chance to make Citizen Kane at the age of 23. That would be the only film of which Welles had full creative control

His much less-known film, F for Fake, is certainly a charlatan at work. The subject is fakery, art, and authorship. It was his final directorial project. In it,  Welles tells the story of the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and also the story of a hoax-biographer, Philip Irving.

I think for Welles, this film was not quite a documentary. It was intentionally fiction, a fact about fictions, and filled with film tricks.

It was also self-referential. Francois Truffaut said that he believed Welles made the film as a “reposte” because of the controversy created by the overrated film critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that Welles had not written a single line of Citizen Kane. This was later shown to be untrue.




The Film Institute at Montclair State University held an event on "Welles at 100" in 2015 and has posted a few short videos about Welles.





One topic discussed then was how the charlatan side of Welles emerged.




In the video below, Welles shares his views on cinema and movie-making with French film school students. He applauds actors as the most important element. He praises the French for allowing for a director to be the true author of a film, but he is no fan of the director being the most important person on the set. He compares them to orchestra conductors and stage directors - in both cases the orchestra and acting company can perform quite well without a director once the pre-work has been done. Prepare and then get out of the way.


 


Like Herman Melville with Moby Dick (Welles would have been a great Ahab. Instead, he only played Father Mapple. See more about that here.) Welles will always be best known for Citizen Kane.
When I taught film courses and showed that film I was careful not to say it was "the greatest film ever made." It gets that title sometimes and it certainly is great, but a) I hate best-of, and greatest lists of anything, and b) that's the worst intro you could give to students about any film.

It was a critical success and a box office disappointment. The latter is due to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire boycott and outright attempts to kill the film. Yes, the film is largely based on Hearst, but that is hardly the point of the film.

Welles wanted his first film to be about people who are "larger than life," He was thinking Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli scale. One of his influences was supposedly Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan'' which is a novel supposedly also based on Hearst's life. Welles' ex-wife Virginia was part of Hearst's social circle and Hearst was a friend of his father.

Welles claimed that he took from Bible the idea of using different points of view on the man and "witnesses" testifying, sometimes contradicting, about Kane's character.'

In Citizen Welles, a biography by Frank Brady, I loved reading about young Orson as a film apprentice screening John Ford's Stagecoach forty times, trying to learn cinematic techniques.

Not unlike others, from Napoleon to Bob Dylan, Orson Welles was a very good con artist who proved adept at self-promotion and self-invention.

The magician in him said that "everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors.''

That was true of his best and worst work.

Welles' film work made me think more about the technical aspects and possibilities of cinema. He also made me think about how we perceive the world in the light and shadows of a flickering projector and outside in the sunlight, shadows, and moonlight, where things often don't appear as they are in what we call reality.

Welles editing F is for Fake

Father Mapple, Captain Ahab and Orson Welles

Orson Welles played Father Mapple in John Huston's film version of Moby Dick. He gives the sermon on Jonah and the whale that Ishmael and his Christian shipmates hear before sailing. Welles would have made a great Ahab.

Welles planned to do something on his own with Melville's Moby Dick. He started and never finished filming some scenes in 1971.

The footage is Welles reading from the book, shot against a blue screen with some basic inserted footage that made it look like he was at sea.

At the time, he was actually filming The Other Side of the Wind, another more ambitious film that was also left unfinished.

It is unclear what Welles planned to do with the Moby Dick readings.

When Orson Welles died in 1985, all of his unfinished films were left to his long-term companion and mistress Oja Kodar. She turned many of them over to the Munich Film Museum for preservation and restoration. In 1999, the Munich Film Museum edited together the rushes of Moby Dick into a 22-minute cut, but we don't know what Welles planned to do with that footage - certainly not just him reading a book on film.

Jane Eyre Is Back On Those Moors

Mia Wasikowska is Jane in the film directed by Cary Fukunaga

The director of the new movie version of Jane Eyre that opens this week says there was an unwritten law requiring that it be remade every five years. There are a bunch of them. Of all those 19th-century literature class novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been the most filmed. (Pride and Prejudice is a rather distant second.)

I saw the George C. Scott and Susannah York version on TV when I was in high school (do the math) but (according to The NY Times, there have been "at least 18 film versions, going back to a 1910 silent movie, and 9 made-for-television “Janes” — so many that they sometimes seem to quote from one another as much as from the novel."

Dark, damp old stone homes, lousy boarding schools, orphans, pompous upper class men, the moors, accidents, forbidden love and unrequited love and marriages that are mostly bad. Why is this stuff so popular?

It's not really much of a spoiler to say that burning bed chamber and all, Jane will marry Rochester whether or not he is as damaged (horse fall, lost eye and hand) in the film as in the book.

I haven't seen most of the versions including a 1996 Franco Zeffirelli version with William Hurt as Rochester or the film of  Wide Sargasso Sea, based on the Jean Rhys novel that told the story from the point of view of mad Bertha who is locked in the attic.

The new director, Fukunaga, is only known to me for Sin Nombre. That was a well-reviewed film about a Honduran teenager trying to reunite with her father on a journey to Mexico that she hopes will lead her to America. The director says that he sees Jane as being "like Gossip Girl, and Charlotte and Emily were like Goth twins. It’s a totally different sensibility. The emotional world that Charlotte inhabited is much darker and more dangerous.”

So, is Jane's story Gothic horror and also early chick-lit?


Playing Jane this time is Mia Wasikowska who I saw last year in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland as Alice and in The Kids Are All Right as the daughter, Joni.

The only film version of the novel I really can recall is the one that Fukunaga apparently also recalls. It's the Robert Stevenson 1943 gloriously black-and-white version.

It's pretty faithful to the novel, if you're trying to use it to get out of a reading assignment, and very "literary" with a screenplay partly written by Aldous Huxley.

It was made in a time when Hollywood was mining the classics for scripts that had "class" and included the lots of book quotes in voice-over. I watched it because I was an Orson Welles fan more than a fan of the book. He is a very moody, brooding and method Rochester.

"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."   - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

 

More about the new version at ‘Jane Eyre’ - Cary Fukunaga Revises a Classic - NYTimes.com