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Could anything be more Intelligible t h a n Everyday Intelligibility?

Thomas Hart Benton & his style in painting

NEA ARTS number 2 2010

Arts Capital Art in the DC MetropolitAn AreA

National Endowment for the Arts

There are many ways to protect children Photo By: Parisa Shademan

A STAR ALLIANCE MEMBER

C.O.B.A.C. E V E R L A S T I N G M O U N T H LY

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Could anything be more Intelligible t h a n Everyday Intelligibility?

Thomas Hart Benton & his style in painting

Editorial Art History History Of Classical Music Traditions Monastic Art & Architecture Thomas Hart Benton & his style in painting A Son's Reflectins Beckett in Paris History Of Film The film Blanc The double life of Veronica An Ode to the Most Elegant of Actresses Could anything be more Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility?

c.o.b.a.c. international art magazine JULY 2010 Director: Ali Saadat R&D: Mehdi Derafshi Cover: Thomas Hart Benton - Ten Pound Hammer 1967 Lithograph cobac.a.c@gmail.com cobac.blog.com cobacac.blogspot.com Publishing texts and photos of this magazine can not be reproduced without permission of the owners.

All Rights of photos used in the content of this magazine belongs to the owners.

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Special thanks to: SIMA SHAHIDPOOR, babak ghanaat, mEhdi derafshi, omid saadat, mohammad mostafa

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Best wishes Ali Saadat cobac.a.c@gmail.com

E V E R L A S T I N G

Creating a powerful complex of artists that could be used in great works made my mind busy.

How should we do that? This question and its abstruse answer had been my nightmare since last month.

A perfect magazine, despite its design retains to the good and rich contents. Even thought choosing the subjects and how to place them in, has a special degree in its grace and if these three elements join well can create a perfect press. C.O.B.A.C. decides to attract a very special level of intellectuals in the world. So such a magazine like this for getting to this good has a long way. Satisfying such the group is more difficult than a regular group.

Gradually, C.O.B.A.C. will reach to its real position and by its potent editorials; writers and reach contents will be able to stand in a great rank.

Our magazine is not only a place for presentation of artists works but also it is a circle for exchange the science of art and philosophical discussions.

Where we are standing is very important and admirable. We talk about Derrida and Beckett, Nitsche and Hidegger. We talk about them with everlasting fame with everlasting fans.

Then C.O.B.A.C. reach to its real position, its name would be beside the great and will be everlasting forever and finally I gain calmness nearby my friends.

C.O.B.A.C.

Editorial

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T

8 E V E R L A S T I N G

C.O.B.A.C.

he history of art refers to the history of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. It is the history of one of the fine arts, others of which are the performing arts and literature. It is also one of the humanities.

The term sometimes encompasses theory of the visual arts, including aesthetics.

Considered encyclopedically, the history of art is an attempt to survey art throughout human history, classifying cultures and periods by their distinguishing features. This is undertaken by people and institutions with diverging goals, but whose efforts interrelate, including: academic art historians, museum curators, auction house personnel, private collectors, and religious adherents. Given these agendas, it is unsurprising that there are many ways of structuring a history of art, as will be outlined below.

The field of "art history" was developed in the West, and originally dealt exclusively with European art history, with the High Renaissance (and its Greek precedent) as the defining standard. Gradually, over the course of the twentieth century, a wider vision of art history has developed. This expanded version includes societies from across the globe, and it usually attempts to analyze artifacts in terms of the cultural values in which they were created. Thus, art history is now seen to encompass all visual art, from the megaliths of Western Europe to the paintings of the Tang Dynasty in China.

The history of art is often told as a chronology of masterpieces created in each civilization in the world. It can thus be framed as a story of high culture, epitomized by the Seven Wonders of the World, which is somehow different from vernacular expressions. The latter can, however, be integrated into art historical narratives, in which case they are usually referred to as folk arts or craft.

The more closely that an art historian engages with these latter forms of low culture, the more likely it is that they will identify their work as examining visual culture or material culture, or as contributing to fields related to art history, such as anthropology or archeology. In the latter cases art objects may be referred to as archeological artifacts.

A useful way to examine how art history is organized is through the major survey textbooks.

The most often used textbooks published in English are Ernst Gombrich’s Story of Art, Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, Anthony Janson’s History of Art, David Wilkins, Bernard Schultz, and Katheryn M. Linduff’s Art Past, Art Present, Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Hugh Honour and John Flemming’s A World History of Art, and Laurie Schneider Adams’s Art Across Time.

his

Art

story Part V

classical mu

10 E V E R L A S T I N G

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ne of the most revolutionary movements in the era took place in Florence in the 1570s and 1580s, with the work of the Florentine Camerata, who ironically had a reactionary intent: dissatisfied with what they saw as contemporary musical depravities, their goal was to restore the music of the ancient Greeks. Chief among them were Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer, and Giulio Caccini. The fruits of their labors were a declamatory melodic singing style known as monody, and a corresponding staged dramatic form: a form known today as opera. The first operas, written around 1600, also define the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque eras.

Music prior to 1600 was modal rather than tonal.

Several theoretical developments late in the 16th century, such as the writings on scales on modes by Gioseffo Zarlino and Franchinus Gaffurius, led directly to the development of common practice tonality.

The major and minor scales began to predominate over the old church modes, a feature which was at first most obvious at cadential points in compositions, but gradually became pervasive. Music after 1600, beginning with the tonal music of the Baroque era, is often referred to as belonging to the common practice period.

Baroque music

Instrumental music became dominant in the Baroque, and most major music forms were defined.

Counterpoint was one of the major forces in both the instrumental and the vocal music of the period. Al-

History of usic traditions E V E R L A S T I N G

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Part V

though a strong religious musical tradition continued, secular music came to the fore with the development of the sonata, the concerto, and the concerto grosso.

Much Baroque music was designed for improvisation, with a figured bass provided by the composer for the performer to flesh out and ornament. The keyboard, particularly the harpsichord, was a dominant instrument, and the beginnings of well temperament opened up the possibilities of playing in all keys and of modulation.

Much Baroque music featured a basso continuo consisting of a keyboard, either harpsichord or organ (sometimes a lute instead), and a bass instrument, such as a viola da gamba or bassoon. The three outstanding composers of the period were Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, and Antonio

Vivaldi, but a host of other composers, some with huge output, were active in the period.

Classical music era

he music of the Classical period is characterized by homophonic texture, or an obvious melody with accompaniment. These new melodies tended to be almost voice-like and singable, allowing composers to actually replace singers as the focus of the music.

Instrumental music therefore quickly replaced opera and other sung forms (such as oratorio) as the favorite of the musical audience and the epitome of great composition. However, opera did not disappear: during the classical period, several composers began producing operas for the general public in their native languages (previous operas were generally in Italian).

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and Architecture Monastic Art

Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.

12 E V E R L A S T I N G

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estern monastic art and architecture, as widespread and various as Christianity, takes its special character from the aspirations of members of monastic religious communities who have turned their thoughts away from the world and dedicated themselves to living under a regula ("rule"). In the West, monasticism, or monachism, was a strong force in the shaping of political, social, and artistic events for about 1,200 years, from the 6th through the 18th centuries.

Early Monastic Architecture

A monastery is the place of prayer, worship, and residence of a religious community whose members are bound by religious vows that cut them off from the world and its distractions and make them economically self-sufficient. Western monasticism is closely associated with Saint Benedict of Nursia (c.480-c.550), who founded the Benedictine order and the Abbey of MONTE CASSINO in southern Italy about 529. The architectural implications of the Rule of Saint Benedict are perhaps most fully spelled out in the ideal plan of Saint Gall (c.820),

Results of Monastic Reforms

With the numerous reforms initiated in the late 11th century and with the establishment of new orders that encouraged missionary and parochial work beyond the cloister, monasticism ceased, at least in the strict sense of men and women separated completely from the world. It does continue in the spirit of the remarkable and productive reforms of the 13th-century preaching orders of friars, who were uncloistered. Among them were the Franciscans, or Grey Friars (founded 1210), the Dominicans, or Black Friars (founded c.1210), and the Carmelites, or White Friars (reorganized c.1250).

Monastic Life Versus Monastic Art. By the 13th century, orders of monks, of regular canons (canons living under a rule), and of friars were all flourishing. The reforms and reorganizations that occurred subsequently were in effect variations on the possibilities offered by these developments. Institutionally, monasticism was the setting for much of the surviving creative artistic activity of the Middle Ages.

The secular clergy, which led neither a cloistered nor a communal life, existed alongside the regu-

lar clergy. Throughout the Middle Ages many of the oldest, greatest, and richest churches of Europe preserved their government of secular canons--for instance, Saint John Lateran, Rome; Saint Martin, Tours; Saint Paul's, London; and the cathedrals of Cologne and Mainz. To distinguish a specifically monastic style among other contributions to the achievements of medieval art is thus a problem of considerable complexity.

Discussions of monastic art run almost at once into a number of contradictory positions. Why should either monks or canons, whose principal business is to pray for humanity's salvation, be concerned with art at all? This question was even more pressing for the Franciscan friars, who, as an order, were not allowed to own any property whatsoever. The Franciscans overcame this prohibition by a legal maneuver that had official approval at the very top of the hierarchy: the pope was acknowledged as the legal owner of all the order's material possessions.

The general problem remained, however: to what extent should the monastic life use works of art?

Throughout the Middle Ages this problem vexed many minds, and almost all reformers made a point of including simplicity and austerity in their programs. Indeed, the ideals of poverty and of work proved to be in basic opposition; success in the observance of the ideal of work created a material abundance that required a need for economic management, which in turn gave a hollow ring to any profession of poverty.

The best-known statements on the proper relationship between art and worship come from members of the Cistercian order in the 12th century, particularly the outburst by SAINT BERNARD in his Apologia (1127) against artistic adornment, principally that of architecture. Those religious orders which sought the adornment of their prayers in the splendor of their buildings and through the

E V E R L A S T I N G

evolved from the pilgrim stations that had been established to receive offerings to a holy man who had perched atop a pillar, such as Saint Simeon Stylites (b. 390) at Qal'at Sim'an, Syria, or who secluded himself in a cave, such as Saint Benedict. The dominant feature of Western monasticism was its communal character. The size of individual communities varied enormously according to their financial endowments and prestige: some had only two or three members; others, although exceptionally, had as many as 900. An average number of members for a foundation based on the Rule of Saint Benedict was probably from 10 to 50 because ideally the abbot should know his monks and guide them as their spiritual father.

C.O.B.A.C.

Switzerland.

The origins of the typical monastic plan are obscure. To the extent that it is inward looking, with the intention of seclusion, it has the general characteristics of the courtyard structures of much Mediterranean architecture. Central to the monastery plan, as it had evolved by the 9th century, was the CLOISTER, from the Latin word claustrum, "a shut-in place." All the buildings normally used by the inhabitants opened off the cloister-in particular the church (see CATHEDRALS AND CHURCHES), the CHAPTER HOUSE for meetings of the community, the dormitory, the refectory, and storage facilities. Usually at a slight distance was the infirmary; normally also separate, at least by the later Middle Ages, were the quarters of the community's leader, the abbot or prior. Many monasteries also maintained external schools for oblates, children destined by their parents for holy orders. Usually sited near a stream, the entire complex was oriented so that water could be diverted to the drinking fountains and kitchen before reaching the wash houses and latrines. Within the complex there were usually accommodations for guests. Optional structures might include a chapel for the use of visitors, because they were not permitted in the church used by the monks or nuns; a gatehouse, occasionally enormous ones, such as that at Thornton Abbey (c.1385), Lincolnshire; and extraordinarily elaborate kitchens, such as those at Glastonbury Abbey (14th century), Somerset, England, and Fontevrault Abbey (founded 1100), France. Central to all monastic life were the devotions in the church and the liturgical requirements of the Hours and the Mass. Monastic life circulated around the cloister.

Throughout the Middle Ages certain anchorites and hermits became so popular with pilgrims that communities were formed around these solitary men of God. In Egypt and the Middle East, monasteries

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assistance of costly books and ornaments had, however, an unanswerable case. If Christ were physically present in the church in the service of the mass--as he was believed to be by the miracle of transubstantiation--no sacrifice toward the enrichment of that moment was too great. Even Saint Bernard admitted the force of the argument in favor of richly decorated churches. In fact, the greatest surviving examples of monastic art and architecture are directly related to the fabric of the church building and to the liturgical rites in it.

Suger and Theophilus

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Two statements by monks opposing Saint Bernard's reservations have survived from the 12th century. One is by Abbot SUGER of Saint-Denis, Paris, one of the most important statesmen of his age (d. 1151). Suger wrote a treatise--Libellus de consecratione ecclesiae sancti Dionysii (1154; A Little Book on the Consecration of the Church of Saint Denis)--concerning the rebuilding and decorating in the new Gothic style of a large part of the abbey church of Saint-Denis under his leadership.

A fascinating personal document, it justified the use of fine and rich art as a fitting tribute to the living presence of Christ in the mass.

Suger went on to describe the ideal church, which glowed with color and splendor from paintings, precious stones and metals, and stained glass windows. The same attitude is expressed in the treatise De diversis artibus (c.1150; On the Various Arts) by a monk calling himself Theophilus, who is now thought to have been the famous German goldsmith Roger of Helmarshausen. In writing this practical handbook for a variety of different crafts, Theophilus could not refrain at its end from a panegyric on an imaginary church decorated by a supposed pupil.

The structure dazzled the eyes as an earthly paradise. Other writers saw the church as a New Jerusalem as described in the Book of

Revelations, a point of view held by most churchmen.

Whatever the verbal disagreements among the different orders on the proper function of art and adornment, their individual ways of life were so similar that their dwellings remained fundamentally similar over an exceptionally long period. Two significant variations of the claustral pattern should, however, be noted; the first is typical of Cistercian foundations, the second of Carthusian. A Cistercian monastery incorporated two communities rather than one: that of the monks and their novices in addition to that of the lay brothers, who were essentially second-class monks. The lay brothers, who did the necessary farm and shop chores to make the monastery self-sufficient, were required to have their own accommodations.

Medieval Cistercian monasteries thus normally and uniquely possessed two communal dormitories and two communal refectories, but only one kitchen. The second variation is found in Carthusian monasteries, called charterhouses.

Because the Carthusians lived a hermitlike existence within a communal organization, they spent most of their time in separate cells, each with its own garden, all ringed around the great cloister.

Examples of charterhouses survive in the Chartreuse de Val-deBenediction (begun 1356) at Villeneuve-les-Avignon in France and the CERTOSA DI PAVIA (1396) in Italy.

Monastic Church Architecture and Embellishment.

The church was always the most imposing feature of a monastic complex. By its size and hierarchical elaboration, it expressed many of the aspirations of the community to which it belonged. It also gave some indication of the wealth and prosperity of the monastery and, inside, would probably commemorate patrons who provided sustained support to the community; many lay patrons were buried inside monastic

churches. The most precious human remains in a monastic church were the relics of saints preserved in shrines behind the high altar, as in Sainte-Madeleine (Saint Mary Magdalen; 1120-40) at Vezelay, and Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire (Saint Benedict; begun 1065).

The plan of a monastic church may reveal the nature of the community. The complex east end of the third church (consecrated 1095) at Cluny with its many radiating chapels reflects, for example, the liturgical preferences of the Cluniac order. Most churches belonging to the preaching orders have large naves as in the Dominican Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Saints John and Paul; 1234-1430) in Venice, because public preaching and teaching were important. The early austere ideals of Cistercianism can be seen in the architecture of their surviving 12th-century churches, as at Fontenay (c.1140) in France.

The declining simplicity of a once reformed and austere order can be traced at the Cistercian abbey church of Pontigny; it was rebuilt in 1186 with an elaborate Gothic east end, or chevet, with radiating chapels, an architectural magnificence that would have scandalized Saint Bernard.

Patronage and Monastic Art The patronage of a monastic house waxed and waned with the popularity of the order itself.

The great period of Benedictine patronage ended in the 13th century; the greatest period of popularity for the preaching orders was the 13th and 14th centuries. The Carthusians remained universally respected for their high ideals throughout the Middle Ages.

Despite the chronologically haphazard nature of this process of patronage, extremely fine collections of objects amassed by the wealthier houses have survived.

An early treasury (mainly 9th-12th centuries) remains, for example, at the Benedictine house of SainteFoy, Conques, France. A splendid

group of 11th- and 12th-century manuscripts from the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Martial, Limoges, survives in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and a large portion of the 11th- and 12th-century library survives at its original location in the Benedictine priory of DURHAM CATHEDRAL in England.

Monastic Artists

The monastic orders were much concerned with preservation of texts and of objects. Although the English painter John Siferwas (c.1400) and the Italian artist Fra ANGELICO were both Dominican friars, it is less clear how deeply members of religious orders were involved in artistic creation. It is possible to produce, from an earlier date, a scattering of names of Benedictine monks who were also painters and illuminators, including Eadwine (c.1149), creator of the Eadwine Psalter (Trinity College, Cambridge, England), at Canterbury and Matthew Paris (d.

1259) at Saint Albans. The writing of Theophilus, mentioned above, clearly indicates that in certain circumstances metalwork and stained glass might have been made in monasteries by monastic craftsmen. If they did exist, schools of monastic art flourished only spasmodically and infrequently, and from the 11th century onward a growing body of evidence points to the use of outside lay professionals for the creation of art in monastic houses. Spectacular examples of this process are apparent in the great mendicant churches of Florence, decorated in the 14th century by GIOTTO DI BONDONE and his followers.

In addition, the members of an order who were practicing artists can often be shown to have been fully trained professionals prior to joining the order; indeed, both the development of style and of technical expertise--particularly in architecture--would demand experience based on a mobility that was impossible for most professed monks.

Final Developments

In some areas of Europe, notably in Spain, France, South Germany, and Italy, the great medieval monastic institutions survived until the widespread social changes inspired by the French Revolution in 1789. In an even smaller area, especially in Spain, South Germany, and Austria, they have had a continuous history to the present.

During the 17th and 18th centuries a considerable amount of genuine modernization was effected to bring conventual buildings into line with revised conceptions of physical comfort and privacy. Rebuilding often included the church as well as the living quarters and was carried out on a palatial scale. Thus the 11th-century Abbey of Melk in Austria was totally transformed (1702-36) by the baroque architect Jakob PRANDTAUER. Similarly, the great Carolingian foundations of Saint Gall, Switzerland, of Ottobeuren, and of Saint Emmeram, Regensburg, both in West Germany, were all substantially and magnificently altered in the 18th century to become outstanding baroque and rococo monuments. At other monasteries such as Bec-Hellouin or Saint-Etienne, Caen, France, the medieval churches were left as they were, but the conventual buildings were dramatically transformed, mostly during the first half of the 18th century. The only monastic art and architecture of note in the 20th century were produced by the Swiss-French architect LE CORBUSIER. They are the startling free-form Pilgrim Church of Notre Dame du Haut (1950-55) at Ronchamp and the austere castconcrete Dominican Monastery of La Tourette (1954-59) at Evreuxsur-l'Arbesle, both in France. The history of significant monastic patronage of art and architecture, however, ends in effect with the political and social changes initiated by the French Revolution.

Thomas Hart Benton

& his style in painting

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C.O.B.A.C.

he top dog of Regionalism was, of course, Thomas Hart Benton. No American artist until Andy Warhol understood the art of publicity better: a cantankerous loudmouth brimful of vitality, Benton had an unerring eye for the jugular of the media. He was a dreadful artist most of the time. His work was genuinely popular, in part because of his ability to attract controversy, but mainly because it was bad in the way that popular art can sometimes be: not vulgar in the tasteful, closeted, Puritan-wistful way of an Andrew Wyeth, but "life-enhancing." It was flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, unable to touch a pictorial sensation without pumping it up.

"And yet Benton's is a curious case, because despite the energies he invested in attacking modernism as decadent, he actually began as a modernist painter. Born in Neosho, Missouri, to a political family - his father was a U.S. congressman and his grand-uncle a senator - he studied painting at the Chicago Art Institute and in 1908 left for Paris, where he spent three years. There he fell under the spell, first of Cezanne, and then of the American expatriate painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright. Back in New York, he struck up a peripheral relationship with Stieglitz's circle of modernists, though he was never invited to show at 291 and would later bitterly denounce Stieglitz himself as "no intellectual [and] thoroughly igno-

by: Robert Hughes, American Visions

rant." Since Benton destroyed most of the abstract paintings that he did in imitation of MacDonaldWright's Synchronism - "to get," he said, "all that modernist dirt out of my system" - they are hard to assess, but the survivors, like Bubbles, 1914-17, leave the impression of an artist doing illustrations of abstraction rather than abstraction itself - a pastiche of MacDonald-Wright's own versions of Robert Delaunay's disks. However, the basic attraction of MacDonald-Wright's work was the hidden figure it often contained - usually a version of a design or sculpture by Michelangelo. What captured Benton's interest, he later wrote, was the Synchronisms' use of Baroque rhythms, derived not from Cezanne's work, as was the case with most of the Parisian painters who had experimented with such rhythms, but from the more basic source of Michelangelo's sculpture.

"Benton rarely painted without a sculptural basis.

Some early Constructivist abstractions he painted in New York around 1917-18 were based on paper, wire, and wood constructions in the round. Thereafter, while rejecting abstraction, Benton would stress the abstract basis of his compositions, often too much. The scheme of his bulging figures - usually worked out in advance through three-dimensional clay models - was based on the linea serpentinata, the twisting line, of sixteenth-century Mannerism. From Michelangelo, and from other Mannerist sources like Luca Camblaso's block fig-

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Perhaps there were as many fairies per capita in Kansas as anywhere else. Was he, like Dorothy, not in Kansas anymore? But he was to turn from such somber reflections to an enormous mural commission, which he began in 1935. It is only one of his mural projects that survives undamaged in its original place.

"This was the decoration of the House Lounge in the state capitol of Missouri, in Jefferson City. Its theme was the social history of the state, from pioneer times to the present, the whole narrative spreading across four large walls and linked by the image of the Missouri River winding down through space and time. On getting the commission, he went at it with his usual thoroughness, reading voraciously about Missouri history, making innumerable sketches, building a clay model with relief figures twenty inches high and fifteen feet long, having it photographed and then checking the progress of the painting against the photos.

"Nowhere else can you get a better sense of the man: his enormous rhetorical energy and equally enormous vulgarity, his worship of the lateRenaissance and his cornball humor, his self-confidence and the anxiety that's written all over these huge posturing figures in their buckling space. Once Benton was done, this was no longer a lounge; as one aggrieved legislator complained, you couldn't settie down to a quiet game of cards with Jesse James about to jump off the wall onto your back. The Renaissance fresco the work most resembles - though this can only have been an accident - is Giulio Romano's room with The Fall of the Giants in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua; Benton's figures induce the same feeling of ill ease, through their instability. Some Missourians objected to its images, such as a homestead wife wiping her baby's butt with a pad of wool - not the right thing for the high deliberations of government. But they liked his vernacular and the big cast of characters: Huck Finn and his black friend Jim, Davy Crockett, and even Frankie shooting Johnny for doing her wrong.

A curiosity of this passage is that Frankie is firing her .44 right up Johnny's backside, as he sprawls in terror over the barroom table. Perhaps only a man who hated gays with Benton's consuming and pathological intensity could have produced such a remarkable image of anal rape, without knowing it.

"The color of the murals is tawdrily emphatic, as Benton's usually was, and they show no sense of surface - paint is dry stuff for conveying the message. The rhythmical distortion of bone and muscular structure, transcribed from the clay model, makes his human figures weirdly overdeveloped. Here, in a parody of Michelangelo and El Greco, are the twisting, bulging, overstressed forms of his mature work, mannerisms which would so influence his pupil, Jackson Pollock."

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ures and El Greco's posturing saints, Benton assembled a kind of "kinetic" composition in which nothing is at rest, everything strains and heaves against everything else. This incessant surge and flow would have large effects on his pupil, Jackson Pollock, but in Benton's own paintings it mainly produced rhetoric.

His ideas about "bulge and hollow," the rhythmical distortion of bone and muscular structure, made his human figures look strangely over determined, like lanky dummies with cartoon faces. Benton's trains lean forward like Walt Disney's as they steam along; the very clouds in his landscapes flex their biceps.

"There is a certain irony in the fact that Regionalism, which was promoted as the very expression of American democracy, was the kissing cousin of both the official art of 1930s Russia and that of 1930s Germany. If both Stalinist and National Socialist Realism meant images of rural production, green acres, new tractors, straw-haired children, and sinewy farmers breaking the sod of the homeland, so did the Populist/Capitalist Realism set forth by Benton and other Regionalists. All were arts of idealization and propaganda. In esthetic terms, little that Benton painted in the 1930s (or after) would have seemed out of place in the Moscow subway.

"When Benton saw himself on the cover of Time at the end of 1934, he realized that he was truly famous. And to clinch his celebrity, he decided to punish New York for not having appreciated him enough.

He would leave, and with the loudest possible hullabaloo. It took the form of an attack on the New York scene as a conspiracy of homosexuals. There had been, he wrote in in 1935, a "concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice." Limp but implacable wrists were everywhere, and they ran everything: Far be it from me to raise my hands in any moral horror over the ways and taste of individuals... But it is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on a base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of taste characteristic of their kind.

"None of this could happen in the Midwest, whose citizens were "highly intolerant of aberration," subjecting the devious queer to "the scrutiny of strong prejudice." So back to Kansas the Michelangelo of Neosho would go, shaking the dust of Sodom from his feet. New York had had it, anyway: the big cities were dead. Only in the heartland could a real and virile American culture arise. And so on, and so forth.

"In fact, Benton was not to find the paradise of absolute heterosexuality that he had hoped for in the Midwest. Kansas City's newly founded Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art had just hired as its first director one Paul Gardner, a former dancer in Anna Pavlova's corps de ballet, who loathed Regionalist painting.

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A Son's Reflections

By Ted Kreiter

A

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udrey Hepburn, most pleasing to the eye, is the subject of a new book by her son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer. The book offers from the family archives photos never before seen by the public. Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit is Ferrer's attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the beautiful film star whom Cecil Beaton described as "the embodiment of a feminine Ideal."

In 1954, the famous photographer summed up "the person of Miss Audrey Hepburn" in an article for a women's magazine. "Nobody ever looked like her before World War II; it is doubtful if anybody ever did, unless it be those wild children of the French Revolution who stride in the foreground of romantic canvases.... She is a wistful child of a war-chided era, and the shadow thrown across her youth underlines even more its precious evanescence," he wrote.

In the late 1940s, Audrey had risen from the ruins of WWII like a phoenix. Growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland, she had suffered poverty and malnutrition. Once, rounded up with a group of young girls by a Nazi soldier to be part of a work detail, Hepburn bolted and ran through alleys to escape. She hid in a cellar for days before dragging herself out and finding her way home. She also was heroic; like many other girls in Holland, she hid secret messages in her shoes for the Dutch underground.

In the 1950s, Hepburn was asked to play the role of Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, a movie about the young Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust.

Anne Frank and Hepburn had much in common; they were even

the same age. Hepburn considered, but declined the role. "Reading her diary," she said, "was like reading my own experiences from her point of view. I was quite destroyed by it."

"Going back to that place would be too hard for her." Ferrer writes.

But it was something other than the wartime experience that cast a shadow over Audrey Hepburn's life, according to Ferrer. The abandonment by her father when she was six and his inability to connect emotionally with her when she found him again 20 years later affected her all her life. It is the reason she had such a deep desire to keep her family together.

During two marriages (which both had many happy years, according to Ferrer), Hepburn was successful at insulating her children from her Hollywood fame. They grew up in Europe, going to school with local children and hardly aware of her day job.

"When people ask me what it was like to have a famous mother," Ferrer writes, "I always answer that I really don't know." His mother never watched her movies after they were made, he writes, and she shied away when anyone would bring up one of her roles in conversation. If she had a favorite movie, he adds, it was Funny Face

with Fred Astaire, in which she was able to kick up her feet and show off her dancing skills. She had studied throughout her youth to become a prima ballerina, but at 5'7" and 110 pounds she was too

tall and too heavy for male dancers of her age. She settled instead for being a model and actress.

Having read none of the seven biographies written about his mother, Ferrer nevertheless sympathizes with the writers who had to struggle and still couldn't find

she subbed for the ailing Neal in presenting the award for Best Actor.

"She really was like those characters you saw in the movies," Ferrer writes, "emotional, courageous, delicate, romantic." As an actress she was always on time and always knew her lines. And

say.

Ferrer's touching account of his mother's final illness is the most personal part of his memoir. Hepburn spent her last weeks surrounded by family and friends at her beloved 18th century farmhouse, La Paisible, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. In a photo taken just three days before she died, a young Ferrer and his mother stand smiling in the garden. Hepburn, wrapped in a blue poncho against the January chill, is still lovely. Ferrer has his hand on her shoulder as if to hold her down to earth.

In the weeks before her death, a helicopter with paparazzi had been flying over. Once Hepburn, walking in the garden, had been forced to hurry back inside. Ferrer called an old family friend, a retired Swiss Army colonel, and asked if it would not be possible to stop helicopters from flying overhead on the day of his mother's funeral.

"I was asking a man who had never bent a rule in his entire life," Ferrer writes. This wasn't Italy or France, where strings might be pulled and miracles accomplished, he adds. It was Switzerland, where such things don't happen. The man came to the funeral but never called back to say if he had been successful.

As 25,000 visitors lined the streets of the small Swiss village of 1,200 inhabitants to silently watch the funeral, Ferrer helped carry the coffin down to the village church.

There was not a plane in the sky.

He later learned, he says, that an order had come down from he did not know how high in the government, decreeing a no-fly zone over the entire area. It was an indication of just how much Audrey Hepburn was revered by the world.

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she never would be heard speaking ill of fellow actors or director-seven Humphrey Bogart, who was so icy to her on the set of Sabrina, apparently because he didn't like her acting. When Ferrer told his mother he thought that wasn't fair of Bogart, Hepburn looked him straight in the eye and said that Bogart probably had good reason. It is possible, of course, that Bogart was afraid Hepburn would steal the show as she had from Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday. And she did.

Somewhat different was the strange case of Marlon Brando. In her first and only meeting with the famous macho actor early in her career at Paramount, the two were seated next to each other at an Actor's Guild luncheon. As they sat down, Audrey said a shy hello. Brando said not a single word to her during the entire dinner. For 40 years, Ferrer says, his mother believed that Brando had shunned her. But in the hospital near the end of her life, she received a letter from the famous actor. A mutual friend must have told him of Hepburn's feelings, and he wrote to set the record straight. Although she might have been shy of him at that luncheon, he recalled that he had been so much in awe of her that he was speechless. He couldn't think of a single thing to

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anything scandalous, to say about her. As Barry Paris wrote in a recent book about Hepburn, "The worst thing she ever did, it seems, was forget to mention Patricia Neal at the 1964 Oscars" when

19

Albert Camus 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960

BECKETT IN PARIS

January 25, 1981, Sunday, Late City

By Herbert Mitgang

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was preparing for a career as a teacher at Trinity Col- lege, Dublin. What made him begin to write some of his works originally in French and then translate them into English?

Beckett says that he began to write in French because he wanted to get away from his mother tongue; writing in English somehow made it come too easy. The French language offered greater clarity and forced him to think more fundamentally, to write with greater economy. But instinct rather than a deliberate plan determined whether his plays were originally written in English or French. ''Krapp's Last Tape'' was first written in English; ''En Attendant Godot'' in French.

Beckett's explanation about his bilingual writing is not as didactic as it may seem; listening to him, one gains new respect for ambiguity.

I wondered about his wartime experience during the Nazi occupation of France. When Paris was liberated, Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his clandestine activities. Denying that he had done anything unusual, he said that writing with economy and clarity were necessary when he worked inside a resistance group that conveyed information to the Allies. A French colleague carried certain details to him about German troop movements, and he translated them into English in as few words as possible for transmission to London.

He writes at home in his apartment in the 14th Arrondissement, where he lives with his wife (the nameplate in the hallway of his building simply reads BECKETT). He has been writing fairly steadily, he said, hardly finding time to get away to his country place in the Marne region.

He keeps up with his reading of old friends, such as Kay Boyle, admires the writings of Heinrich Boll and Saul Bellow, but doesn't follow current fashions in literature. In the small cafe where we sat, Samuel Beckett went unrecognized.

And so this is only an impression, with a few brushstrokes of fact added, of the author who bridges the century's literary history from James Joyce, his friend and fellow-expatriate from Dublin, to the most avant-garde writers of our own day. Emergency Exit As we walked outside, I suggested to Beckett that his photographs always made him appear too somber, and asked if he would allow me to take a few pictures. Relaxed, he stood in front of a street sign that read: ''SORTIE de SECOUR - ne pas encombrer'' (Emergency Exit - do not block).

Beckett weighed the words aloud. ''That's appropriate,'' he said with a smile.

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A

s he walked into the little cafe on the Blvd. St. Jacques in the 14th Arrondissement, everything about Samuel Beckett seemed at once familiar and unexpected. The penetrating blue eyes, the furrowed brow, the strong beak, the lined face that seemed as if it had been carved in polished granite: They were all there. But the impression of hardness and diffidence acquired from remembered photographs and stories didn't match this man. For everything about him was softer and warmer by degrees: the pleasant voice, the ironic glint in his eyes, the cordial air he conveyed made a stranger in his beloved city feel like a guest.

Beckett does not grant interviews; that was understood. He had enough honors, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in 1969 (which, of course, he did not accept in person), and worldwide acclaim. Public attention only distracted him from his writing and - what he gently intimated could be worse - only led to inaccurate ''interpretations'' of his life or what he ''meant'' to say in his works. And there are plenty of opportunities for misunderstanding: There is almost always a production of ''Waiting for Godot'' or ''Happy Days'' or ''Endgame'' on in Europe or in the United States. His latest short novel, ''Company,'' has just been brought out by Grove Press, his longtime American publisher.

And so no interview and no notes: ''Rien a faire'' (nothing to be done), as the opening line of ''Godot'' goes. Still, nothing forbade us from having a couple of cups of coffee, one long cigar and one short cigarillo, and a casual talk for an hour or so. He lit a Havanitos Planteros, saying that small cigars weren't as bad as smoking cigarettes. I had brought along a newspaper clipping noting that around the time of his 75th birthday on April 13, his one-character play, ''Rockaby,'' will be put on at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He glanced at it, handed it back and said he didn't save things written about him.

What matters to him, he indicated, is the integrity of his work. That is why he prefers such relatively small and attentive publishing houses as Grove in New York and Les Editions de Minuit in Paris. He keeps a close watch on the staging of his plays; his American director, Alan Schneider, consults with him in Paris beforehand.

He has directed his own plays in Dusseldorf; he says modestly that he knows enough German to make his ideas clear.

It was his interest in the Romance languages that first led him to France in 1926, when he

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Hist 24 E V E R L A S T I N G

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I

Multi-reel films

t was around 1912 that the actors in American films, who up to this point had been anonymous, began to receive screen credit, and the way to the creation of film stars was opened. The appearance of films longer than one reel also helped this process. Such films were extremely rare, and almost entirely restricted to film versions of the life of Christ, which had reached three reels in length in the first few years of cinema.

They were always shown as a special event in special venues, and supported by live commentary and music. A unique addition to this style of presentation was The Story of the Kelly Gang, made in

Australia in 1906. This was a fourreel version of the career of this famous (in Australia) outlaw, and was incomprehensible without explanation. More multi-reel films were made in Europe than in the United States after 1906, because the MPPC insisted on working on the basis of one-reel films up until 1912. However, before this, some MPPC members got around this restriction by occasionally making longer stories in separate parts, and releasing them in successive weeks, starting with Vitagraph's The Life of Moses in five parts (and five reels) at the end 1909.

In other countries this film was shown straight through as one picture, and it inspired the creation of other multi-reel films in Europe.

Pathé-Frères set up a new subsidiary company in the United States called Eclectic in 1913, and in 1914 this began production of features at the Pathé plant in New Jersey. The French Éclair company was already making films in the United States, and their production of features increased with the transfer of more film-makers when the French industry was shut down at the beginning of World War I. Up to 1913, most American film production was still carried out around New York, but because of the monopoly of Thomas Edison's film patents, many filmmakers had moved to Southern California, hoping to escape the litany of lawsuits that the Edison Company had been bringing to protect its

to Selig film productions, and became the biggest cowboy star for the next two decades.

Most of the major companies made films in all the genres, but some had a special interest in certain kinds of films. Once Selig had taken up production in California, they used the (fairly) wild animals from the zoo that Colonel Selig had set up there in a series of exotic adventures, with the actors being menaced or saved by the animals. Essanay specialized in Westerns featuring “Broncho Billy” Anderson, and Kalem sent Sidney Olcott off with a film crew and a troupe of actors to various places in America and abroad to make film stories in the actual places they were supposed to have hap-

pened. Kalem also pioneered the female action heroine from 1912, with Ruth Roland playing starring roles in their Westerns.

Minor curiosities were some of the films of Solax directed by Herbert Blaché and his wife Alice Guy. They left American branch of the Gaumont company in 1912 to set up their own independent company. The distinguishing feature of some of their films was a deliberate attempt to use resolutely theatrical-type light comedy playing that was directed towards the audience. This went against the trend towards filmic restraint already visible in what were called “polite” comedies from other film companies.

In France, Pathé retained its

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monopoly. Once there in Southern California, the film industry grew continuously.

The move to filming in California had begun when Selig, one of the MPPC companies, sent a production unit there in 1909. Other companies, both independents and members of the MPPC, then sent units to work there in the summer to take advantage of the sunshine and scenery. The latter was important for the production of Westerns, which now formed a major American film genre. The first cowboy star was G.M. Anderson (“Broncho Billy”), directing his own Western dramas for Essanay, but in 1911 Tom Mix brought the kind of costumes and stunt action used in live Wild West shows

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tory of film Part V 25

26

dominant position, followed still

by Gaumont, and then other new companies that appeared to cater to the film boom. A film company with a different approach was Film d’Art. This was set up at the beginning of 1908 to make films of a serious artistic nature.

Their declared programme was to make films using only the best dramatists, artists and actors. The first of these was l’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), a historical subject set in the court of Henri III. This film used leading actors from the Comédie Francaise, and had a special accompanying score written by Camille Saint-Saens. The other French majors followed suit, and this wave gave rise to the English-language description of films with artistic pretensions aimed at a sophisticated audience as “art films”. By 1910, the French film companies were starting to make films as long as two, or even three reels, though most were still one reel long. This trend was followed in Italy, Denmark, and Sweden.

Although the British industry continued to expand after its brilliant beginning, the new companies that replaced the first innovative film-makers proved unable to preserve their drive and originality.

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New film producing countries

With the worldwide film boom, yet more countries now joined Britain, France, and the United States in serious film production. In Italy, production was spread over several centres, with Turin being the first and biggest. There, Ambrosio was the first company in the field in 1905, and remained the largest in the country through this period. Its most substantial rival was Cines in Rome, which started producing in 1906. The great strength of the Italian industry was historical epics, with large casts and massive scenery. As early as 1911, Giovanni Pastrone's two-reel la Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) made a big impression worldwide, and it was followed by even bigger specta-

cles like Quo Vadis? (1912), which ran for 90 minutes, and Pastrone's Cabiria of 1914, which ran for two and a half hours.

Italian companies also had a strong line in slapstick comedy, with actors like André Deed, known locally as “Cretinetti”, and elsewhere as “Foolshead” and “Gribouille”, achieving worldwide fame with his almost surrealistic gags.

The most important film-producing country in Northern Europe up until the First World War was Denmark. The Nordisk company was set up there in 1906 by Ole Olsen, a fairground showman, and after a brief period imitating the successes of French and British film-makers, in 1907 he produced 67 films, most directed by Viggo Larsen, with sensational subjects like Den hvide Slavinde (The White Slave), Isbjørnenjagt (Polar Bear Hunt) and Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt). By 1910 new smaller Danish companies began joining the business, and besides making more films about the white slave trade, they contributed other new subjects. The most important of these finds was Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (The Abyss), directed by Urban Gad for Kosmorama, This combined the circus, sex, jealousy and murder, all put over with great conviction, and pushed the other Danish film-makers further in this direction. By 1912 the Danish film companies were multiplying like rabbits.

The Swedish film industry was smaller and slower to get started than the Danish industry. Here, the important man was Charles Magnusson, a newsreel cameraman for the Svenskabiografteatern cinema chain. He started fiction film production for them in 1909, directing a number of the films himself. Production increased in 1912, when the company engaged Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller as directors. They started out by imitating the subjects favoured by the Danish film industry, but by 1913 they were producing their own strikingly original work, which sold very well.

Russia began its film industry in 1908 with Pathé shooting some fiction subjects there, and then the creation of real Russian film companies by Aleksandr Drankov and Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. The Khanzhonkov company quickly became much the largest Russian film company, and remained so until 1918.

In Germany, Oskar Messter had been involved in film-making from 1896, but did not make a significant number of films per year till 1910. When the worldwide film boom started, he, and the few other people in the German film business, continued to sell prints of their own films outright, which put them at a disadvantage. It was only when Paul Davidson, the owner of a chain of cinemas, brought Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad to Germany from Denmark in 1911, and set up a production company, Projektions-AG “Union” (PAGU), for them, that a change-over to renting prints began. Messter replied with a series of longer films starring Henny Porten, but although these did well in the German-speaking world, they were not particularly successful internationally, unlike the Asta Nielsen films. Another of the growing German film producers just before World War I was the German branch of the French Éclair company, Deutsche Éclair.

This was expropriated by the German government, and turned into DECLA when the war started. But altogether, German producers only had a minor part of the German market in 1914.

Overall, from about 1910, American films had the largest share of the market in all European countries except France, and even in France, the American films had just pushed the local production out of first place on the eve of World War I. So even if the war had not happened, American films may have become dominant worldwide. Although the war made things much worse for European producers, the technical qualities of American films made them increasingly attractive to audiences everywhere.

Bahram Beizai film and theatre director, 26 December 1938

The “Film Bla Suggestions for a Variety of Fantasy

by Peter Valenti

Journal of Popular Film, Volume VI, No. 4, pp 294-304, 1978. Reprinted with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.

Published by Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth St., NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802.

Copyright (c) 2008.

28 E V E R L A S T I N G

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M

idway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in some dark woods, for I had wandered off from the straight path.

How hard it is to tell what it was like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn (the thought of it brings back all my old fears), a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.

The anxiety which Dante verbalizes as he begins his otherworldly pilgrimage in The Divine Comedy suggests an atmosphere typical of many American films of the 1940's. The “film noir,” with its exploration of the darkness of the human psyche and the delicate tensions characteristic of human

relationships, embraces a number of more traditional film categories: detective story, psychological thriller, and fantasy. Of the third category one well-known example is Julien Duvivier's Flesh and Fantasy, released by Universal in 1943. The omnibus approach to incredible tales of murder and duplicity worked even better three years later in the British film Dead of Night. However, not all fantasies are so grim; in fact, most fantasies made in America in the late 1930”s and 1940’s end rather happily. If we are not troubled that an American genre might reach its apotheosis in a British film, then I would like to suggest that another film made in England in 1946, A Matter of Life and Death, can be viewed as a culmination of the particular genre of the fantasy which ends with the reassertion of the forces of light and life triumphant over darkness and death.

We might use the term “film Blanc” to suggest a scenario. With the following characteristics: 1. a mortal's death or lapse into dream; 2. subsequent acquaintance with a kindly representative of the world beyond, most commonly known as Heaven; 3. a pudding love affair; 4. Ultimate transcendence of mortality to escape the spiritual world and return to the mortal world.

The film Blanc shows contemporary Americans successfully negotiating a return to the real mortal world after a trip to the twilight region between life in the physical world and either death or

an altered state of existence in another spiritual world. If films such as Suspicion (1941) and Scarlet Street (1945) can be characterized as black for their depiction of the bleaker aspects of human nature, then perhaps the mythically positive note struck by a group of American films made between 1940 and 1945 might well be termed the films of light. Two comedies – Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Columbia, 1941) and The Horn Blows at Midnight (Warner Brothers, 1945) - and two dramas - Beyond Tomorrow (RKO, 1940) and Between Two Worlds (Warner Brothers, 1944) – demonstrate the pattern of the film Blanc. In the turbulent and angst-ridden world of 1940, perhaps one could find the impetus to a form of film which minimizes the tensions of a world undergoing profound changes and emphasizes the possibility of transcendent forces guiding the progress of the mortal world. This positive affirmation of life operates consistently through these four films.

In the first of the comedies, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (directed

by Alexander Hall), an overzealous Messenger 7013 (Edward Everett Horton) prematurely claims the soul of a promising prizefighter (Robert Montgomery) and destroys his mortal body. When the fighter, Joe Pendleton, protests that he must be allowed to compete for the championship and therefore has to return to earth in an appropriate form, the messenger has to check with his superior, the kind but worldly-wise Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains). Ultimately

overeager mistake. The film suggests that heaven functions much as earth does, with obvious hierarchies and pecking orders, but with the obvious exception that the heavenly operation can correct virtually any mistake – perhaps a comforting thought to a world troubled by the activities of Germany and Japan.

The second comedy, The Horn Blows at Midnight (directed by Raoul Walsh), is somewhat more whimsical than Here Comes Mr Jordan, though it also portrays heaven as a vast bureaucracy.5 As a disgruntled trumpet player in a small orchestra performing

for the Paradise (“It’s Heavenly”) Coffee Program, Athanael (Jack Benny) finds the host's spiel so soporific that he falls asleep and wakes to find himself an angel.

Harpist Alexis Smith, who attempted vainly to keep him awake on the earthly stage, reappears in heaven as Elizabeth, the secretary to the Chief. This business analogue to God is played by Guy Kibble; like Mr. Jordan, he too must come to earth to straighten out the difficulties caused by one of his employees after Elizabeth has used her power of charm over the Chief to persuade him to send Athanael to earth on an important

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Pendleton is given another suitable body so that he can become champion, and Mr. Jordan is cut in on the take. Pendleton's story, told by his manager Max Corkle (James Gleason) in perhaps his best performance), ends happily with Joe's girlfriend Betty Logan (Evelyn Keyes). Thus a man is restored to the mortal world through the ministration of two kind angels, Rains and Horton. As one might expect in a comedy, the beginning of a productive relationship is suggested after the obligatory difficulties have been overcome. But the difficulties here result from a celestial error, an angel’s honest if

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anc”

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30 E V E R L A S T I N G

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mission. Since the regular demolition expert usually sent on this sort of work was busy, and since Athanael wouldn't be missed, he was sent to destroy Earth, Planet 33901, by blowing his trumpet at midnight. After a series of madcap adventures in which various comic characters attempt to steal his horn, he falls into the giant cup of Paradise Coffee which opened the film. He then wakes up by falling off the orchestra staging and tells Alexis Smith about the “craziest dream” he’s just had: “You know, if you ever saw it in the movies, you’d never believe it.”

Of course, by definition the fantasy film depicts events beyond what we could expect to occur in our “normal” world of reality.

Coleridge’s concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” must be accepted by tike audience if the film is to succeed; the lack of critical popularity which has been accorded the two dramatic “film Blanc” examples suggests that these movies offered a fantastic vision somehow distasteful to film reviewers. That all American fantasies here treated – with the possible exception of Here Comes Mr. Jordan – receive so little attention while any B-feature which presents a psychotic or confused reprobate generates considerable discussion indicates critics’ unwillingness to extend credulity to this genre. The two dramatic examples met with particularly negative reactions, though the films did generate some commercial success.

Critics may be willing to go along with comic depictions of a beneficent providence overlooking our mortal world, but when drama approaches heavenly messengers with seriousness, only the moviegoing public seems willing to accept the action.

Beyond Tomorrow (directed by A. Edward Sutherland) features a trio of elderly gentlemen who set out to help a young couple by deliberately losing their wallets on Christmas Eve. The three are killed in a plane crash before they

bring Jean Lawrence and James Houston (played by Jean Parker and a young Richard Carlson with an indeterminate southwestern accent) to the altar, but they continue their ministrations beyond the grave. The fatherly character actors Harry Carey, C. Aubrey Smith and Charles Winninger portray these newly winged angels as the only possible solution to the dilemma which now confronts the lovers: after Houston’s success as a singer, he is bewitched from Jean by the beautiful Arlene Terry, played by Helen Vinson. As Arlene and an uncomfortable Houston begin their holiday celebrations in a restaurant, they are shot by a man jealous of Houston’s success. The doctors give up hope, but O’Brien (Charles Winninger) requests the great voice above (we can call this voice God or summoning angel, as we please) to give James one more chance. The voice comes from a light growing in the distance and finally accedes to O’Brien's request that the double-exposure Richard Carlson be allowed to return to earth to resume his relationship with Miss Lawrence, who is by now of course most distraught in the hospital waiting room. After the restoration of young Houston, O’Brien meets Melton (Harry Carey) as both walk toward the great light from whence the voice had spoken.

Melton has had great difficulty negotiating the darkness, and O’Brien agrees that sometimes you do have to travel through the darkness for a long time to get to the light. In 1940, on the eve of World War II hostilities, O'Brien’s comment seems particularly prophetic. The mythic qualities of his progress apply also to the quote which opens this essay because Dante’s spiritual pilgrimage is as much a trip through a terrifying region of the unknown as is the experience of a person about to enter a point of war: both fear for their lives, and neither can be sure how the ordeal will end. These tensions characterize Between Two Worlds

(directed by Edward A. Blatt) as well. I should say at the outset that I believe this underrated film deserves more attention than it has received, though it seems to have been a popular film upon its initial release.

A motley group of people booking passage from London for America is hit by a bombing raid and its voyage is not to America but to the other world. This realization dawns on these people gradually, however, and they attempt to change or forestall it in different ways. One couple, however, is with this group not because they are victims of the bomb blast but because, when the sensitive French pianist Henry (Paul Henreid, in a role not too different from the part he played in CasaBlanca two years earlier) cannot book passage for himself and his fiancee Ann (Eleanor Parker), he decides to asphyxiate himself. Ann, returning home to find Henry determined to end his life, decides to join him.

However, they are allowed another chance as Inspector Thompson (Sidney Greenstreet) - the obligatory authority from the world beyond who has power in such matters – allows them to return to their flat and turn off the gas before the fatal moment, while the other passengers complete their journey to the world of the dead.

The basic plot of the film was not new in 1944; Sutton Vane's 1923 play Outward Bound was the basis for a 1930 Leslie Howard film version with the same title before Warner Brothers produced their differently titled version. The most obvious departure from the earlier version – aside from the World War II setting of the film – is the addition of the veteran actor George Tobias as Pete Musick, a merchant seaman who can think only of returning to his family back in the states and cannot reconcile himself to the idea that he has died until his fellow passengers point out that his death was in the interest of liberty and freedom for his family and the world at large.

makers as well as the public have decided that the trips between heaven and earth may not be so plausible after all.

Further speculation about this film Blanc genre suggests reasons for its appearance during the war and its languishing shortly afterward, to the point of being virtually ignored in contemporary cinema studies. Perhaps the obvious benevolence of the omnipotent spirits and the kindly character actors who portray them suggest that even when times are difficult and one sees the world crashing about one’s ears, there are indeed powers above who will provide and who have ordained these seemingly tragic events for the best.

But such a pollyanna view of the world clashes violently with the pessimism and realism of much postwar film, which we hold in far higher critical esteem today.

Contemporary regard for fantasy seems more sympathetic to that expressed in Brewster McCloud (1970), where the misguided visionary crashes to a dusty death in the tacky atmosphere of the Astrodome. Perhaps the more film is studied as a serious art form, the less inclined critics and reviewers are to sympathize with genuine fantasy – which accepts the reality of other worlds of angels, collectors, and inspectors from heaven.

Escapism is here not the lucky accident which accounts for happiness in many 1930’s films, but rather the suggestion that something totally different from the mortal world can intervene to right the wrongs we see daily perpetrated upon ourselves and others. Richard Carlson, Robert Montgomery, Jack Benny, Paul Henreid, and David Niven portray characters who we believe should be given the opportunity which Beatrice arranged for Dante: the redemption from this dark vale of soul-making and the opportunity to show that man is deserving of something more than the grim lot assigned by fortune.

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win for them another day; even the omnipotent powers of the world beyond are reconciled to this truism. The 1946 British film, A Matter of Life and Death(directed

by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; retitled Stairway to Heaven for American release) repeats this pattern as David Niven, an RAF flier, returns to earth after telling the sympathetic Conductor Number 71 (played by Marius Goring) that he wishes to live. Live he does, and the film ends with RAF pilot Niven affianced to WAC Kim Hunter. Thus the pattern persists even after the war in a tribute to the victory. Like Between Two Worlds, the cataclysm of war does not preclude opportunity for fresh beginnings. The great stairway itself, which reaches all the way to Heaven, is like a great escalator and suggests the elevator in The Horn Blows at Midnight which mysteriously goes far above the top floor in a posh hotel whenever it has heavenly guests to transport.

The comic image in these films of a corporate heaven is further developed by the numbers assigned to messengers and planet earth, and the winged insignia on Mr. Jordan's uniform.

Perhaps we can fix more precisely the decline of the American film Blanc: in 1947, two films were released which, while continuing the general pattern, are today quite forgotten. Down to Earth (Columbia) takes as much as possible from Here Comes Mr. Jordan including James Gleason as Max Corkle and Edward Everett Horton as Messenger 7013, but the film fails; Rita Hayworth as the muse Terpsichore is no replacement for Robert Montgomery's Joe Pendleton. Robert Cummings portrayed the Archangel Michael who, like Mr. Jordan, must rectify a celestial error in Heaven Only Knows (United Artists). Michael's trip to Montana provides the only western setting for the film Blanc. But these films do not carry the sense of conviction that those made during the war do; evidently the film-

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The film has both the virtues and defects of a filmed theatre presentation. Characterization is excellent and skillfully done, but there is lithe technical virtuosity demonstrated in the film. Much of it is shot in nighttime, so darkness predominates. The double-exposure usually accorded to spirits in fantasy films is minimized, and there are some interesting shots tracked from below the performers to open the shipboard sequences. The sharp characterization, however, chiefly recommends the film today. The dialogue of John Garfield (who plays Tom Prior, an embittered newspaperman) is never more acerbic or more crisply delivered than in this film; unbeknownst to Tom Prior his real mother (played by Sara Allgood) is also aboard the ship and is a model of lower-middle-class goodness and humility. The evils of wealth contrast markedly with Allgood's beatific poverty: George Coulouris convincingly plays a powerful British industrialist who learns that his money and connections cannot get him off the ship. Faye Emerson portrays a slatternly actress, who realizes, as she states, that she is not a glamour girl “like Ann Sheridan,” one of Warner Brothers’ premier company actresses. Edmund Gwenn (who in 1947 played the genuine Santa Claus inMiracle on 34th Street) is the kindly steward who makes the transition between worlds as smooth as possible and introduces the Inspector, a man less ominous than efficient and fair-minded. At the film’s close, the passengers are resigned to their fates and the halfway couple reawakens to the possibilities of life amidst the ravages of war.

From these various films a few important images remain.

A couple is united in spite of the summons from the world beyond and even though the mortal world is far from just, it still represents a post-lapsarian opportunity to make things better, to improve one’s personal lot. Mortals are fallible, but their basic goodness will

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I

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remember seeing The Double Life of VĂŠronique in the tiny upstairs auditorium (it had previously been the balcony) at the Esquire Theatre in Denver sometime in 1992. There were, I believe, seven people in the theater on a Thursday night. It was the last night of the film's run in Denver, and I had recruited a friend to accompany me that night on the drive from Boulder to downtown Denver. (I had driven in by myself the night before, and was essentially cold-cocked by what I saw, so I knew I had to return.)

So there was me and my friend up front, a couple of anonymous patrons, and then one older guy sitting in the back row. After the credits rolled and we were making our way out of the place, the older guy came up to us and said something like, "It's quite a film, isn't it?" When I responded, "Yes, actually, I was just here last night and had to come back immediately to see it again," he kind of snorted in response. "This is my fifth time," he said, with an impatient scowl. But then he wanted to know: Did I know anything about Van den Budenmayer? I'm sure my face was a blank, and so he explained that the beautiful music in the film, the majestic "Concerto in E Minor" that accompanies the final performance by the Polish Weronika, was written by the Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer. The fellow had been haunting all the record stores in Denver and no one had heard of the guy. I wished him luck, and we parted ways.

I didn't find out why it was so danged hard to find information on Van den Budenmayer until the next year, 1993, when Faber & Faber published Kieslowski on Kieslowski, an excellent reference to the director's work. "He's our favorite Dutch composer from the end of the nineteenth century," the director says. "He doesn't exist." Judging from questions posted to Usenet newsgroups over the years, that poor fellow in the back row of the Esquire Theatre wasn't the only one driven a little batty looking for information on Van den Budenmayer.

People are susceptible to an in-joke like this (the unseen character of "Van den Budenmayer" was introduced in

The double lif

fe of Veronica

by Bryant Frazer

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the ninth of Kieslowski's 10 short Dekalog films for Polish television, and he's name-checked again in Three Colors: Red) because The Double Life of VĂŠronique is successful in creating what amounts to a mythology around the idea of the doppelganger. If you believe, for 97 minutes anyway, in the prima facie batty idea that there are two singers, one Polish and one French but both identical in appearance, who share an imprecise, unspoken, but deeply felt bond across the miles and national borders, then the notion of a grandiose but obscure composer named Van den Budenmayer writing a grand chorale that sounds like a polyphonic doorbell rung by the Grim Reaper himself hardly seems outside the realm of possibility. There is, in fact, something to be said for pulling this off with a straight face, and I think that's an indicator of Kieslowski's good humor.

On one level, The Double Life of VĂŠronique is serious like a tumor. The execution is sober, and the piece itself is freighted with intimations of mortality and a foreboding sense of the metaphysical unknown. But on another, it's an extraordinary playful film, intoxicated perhaps by spiritual indulgence. It's hard to say whether Kieslowski, who certainly regarded the Church with some suspicion, was any kind of religious believer; based on his work I expect he leaned toward atheism. Of course, Double Life isn't meant to be read literally. It's poetry, not prose, fantasy rather than scripture. But it's as expressive an attempt as I've seen to qualify on film those feelings that are stirred up inside us as we try to make sense of what's perhaps a deeply ingrained tendency to believe in the existence of a self beyond what can physically be described -- to believe in the purely metaphysical concept of the soul. For what else but a sort of communion between like souls can explain the connections between Weronika and Veronique? Well, perhaps they are two women shar-

ing one soul, with a self-awareness bobbing dimly into consciousness, like words in another language filtered through short-wave radio static. There's nothing in Double Life that suggests the intervention of a deity; quite to the contrary, the real omnipotent figure influencing Veronique's actions turns out to be

by Jean Louis Trintignant seems to contrive to bring the entire trilogy to a fortuitous close. When he describes to Jacob's character, Valentine, the happiness of her life decades hence, as dreamt by him, she seems suddenly to be taken by superstition: "Who are you?" she asks. And the answer comes

only a man in love -- Alexandre, he of the tiny puppet theater, sequestered in a cafe near a train station on a busy street with tape recorder rolling.

There's a similar feeling, as it turns out, at the end of Kieslowski's Red, when the character played

back, cool and mysterious: "A retired judge." (Perhaps God is dead, and then again perhaps he is just in retreat, weary of measuring out the sins and grace of mortals.) Valentine's response here is telling, and it echoes Veronique's own frightened flight at the end of Double Life to

folio, or with the tassles at the end of a blanket. When Weronika sings her last chorale and pitches forward to the stage floor, there's a tantalizing cut to a shot that swoops quickly over the heads of the spectators and away from her body -- the POV, perhaps, of a soul

(dating back at least to Dreyer's Vampyr) who've thought to put their own audiences inside the coffin. It's as though Kieslowski's film itself has briefly allowed itself the notion of the soul, and then brings itself sternly back to physical reality: dead is dead after all. Then

again, I'm not sure there's any other moment in this film as immense and mysterious as the one when the French VĂŠronique, reading an EKG and fiddling with a shoelace received from a mysterious, unknown correspondent, suddenly snaps it taut in her hands: flatline.

It's not all portents and parallels and shivering peeks into the abyss, of course. With this film, Kieslowski became a more intensely sensual filmmaker than ever before, a condition perhaps stirred in him by the remarkably guileless beauty and talent of his young actress. She barely seems to be acting at all; the performance isn't entirely naturalistic -- there are moments when she seems to be looking directly into the camera, as easily as she turns her face up to meet the falling rain or a shower of dust from a ceiling -- but it feels intuitive.

And there are scenes where both Weronika and Veronique are in bed with with their lovers, and the camera moves in extremely close -- in one shot examining her body through a spherical glass, like the ball through which Weronika views the Polish countryside early in the film -- and light and shadow play across the pale flesh given a preternatural glow by the golden filters favored here by Kieslowski and his cinematographer Slawomir Idziak.

Through Jacob, the film discovers an extraordinary intimacy with its character that's crucial to its emotional credibility -- and which has no real precedent in Kieslowski's work previous. If we didn't feel like we really knew this woman, feel like we know what she's feeling though she expresses it only with her presence on screen and a very few words, we'd have little patience for the existential rigmarole the director intends to put us through.

I discovered Kieslowski with this film, and I very much wanted him to be a young filmmaker. Of course, he wasn't particularly young -- he made Double Life at the age of 50, and when you have that piece of knowledge, the film transforms a little bit. You realize that the direc-

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passing out of this world. And then Kieslowski brings us back to earth -- the next POV shot is taken from eye level, at a Dutch angle, as a bystander loses Weronika's pulse and declares: "She's dead." A few moments later, we see the view from inside her grave, Kieslowski being one in a line of filmmakers

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her father's home: "I feel something important is happening around me.

And it scares me."

Does Double Life (the film, not the woman) believe in the idea of a soul? Perhaps. When she sings in rehearsal, and when she makes love, Weronika fiddles in one hand with the laces on her music port-

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tor is looking on his young actress from the vantage of someone who has a few years in him. You get the sense that there are aspects of her personality - her ability to fully inhabit a character who smiles into the drenching rain, or to reach some kind of communion with an alternate version of herself, or who, yes, possesses such a sensuous and attractive form - that he admires, or perhaps wishes he were able to share. In his essay in the booklet accompanying Criterion's DVD, "The Forced Choice of Freedom," Slavoj Zizek makes explicit the parallel between Veronique's choice in the film - after Weronika has made the fatal choice to continue singing despite her heart condition, Veronique abandons her singing career -- and Kieslowski's choice to continue making films although he, too, may have been aware that he had his own heart problems that the life of a director could aggravate. Whatever -- Kieslowski completed his next three films, the famous Three Colors trilogy, with Jacob playing a crucial role in the last film, and retired from filmmaking in 1994. In March of 1996, he died of cardiac arrest.

There's long been some chatter to the effect that The Double Life of Veronique -- indeed the whole of Kieslowski's output after this film, when he started working with French funds -- is overrated. That's subjective, of course. All I can say I'm sure of for my own part, is that it reveals itself, reliably, each and every time I visit it, as one of the most beautiful things I know of in this world.

There's been some controversy about Criterion's DVD version of this film, since the color timing on recent video transfers differs dramatically from the more reddish-orange tone seen on older laserdisc and VHS releases. I saw the film four times theatrically (twice at the Esquire, once at Denver's hilariously named Chez Artiste multiplex, and one last time at the University of Colorado -- sitting in front of Stan Brakhage, who declared, as the credits rolled, "Well, that was a lot better than I expected") and while I've always felt the old video versions were very poor in terms of color fidelity, I have to say that I did not remember the theatrical prints tending to outright green as the newer versions do. In one of the DVD supplements, Slawomir Idziak discusses the use of colored filters that took the color palette into a decidedly unnatural realm. (He specifically mentions the use of greens.) There was apparently some disagreement even with Kieslowski himself about how radical the colors should really be on release prints, and different color timings were apparently tried. Idziak claims that the print that showed up at Cannes featured the more radical colors that he favored. If my memory isn't faulty, perhaps American release prints (which, after all, had an alternate ending, which is included as a supplement to this release, appended at the last minute) were struck using the more conservative color timings. In any event, the color scheme presented on this disc sounds pretty similar to the one Idziak describes, so I can only assume that Criterion did indeed get it right.

An Ode to the Most Ele

By Molly Haskell

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S

he appeared as fragile as a cut flower, but for someone who looked as if she might blow away with a strong breeze, Audrey Hepburn proved astonishingly durable as a star. She lit up the screen in 1953, as the hooky-playing princess in "Roman Holiday", and from then on set her own pace and style with a look that decidedly ran counter to then-prevailing standards of female beauty. She was patrician, exotic, boyishly slender at a time when the accent was on big-breasted bombshells and girlnext-door types -- and even the latter had hourglass figures. Yet her blend of bohemianism and haute couture, of rebel and royalist, took fire and the best directors in Hollywood fell over each other in their eagerness to work with her.

In its Absolutely Audrey Festival this month, AMC features four of the actress's finest: William Wy-

ler's "Roman Holiday" and "How to Steal a Million", Billy Wilder's "Sabrina", and George Cukor's "My Fair Lady". She mesmerized other directors, too: Stanley Donen in "Funny Face" (1957) and "Charade" (1963), Fred Zinnemann in "The Nun's Story" (1959) and King Vidor in "War and Peace" (1956).

Indeed, Hepburn starred in a remarkable number of really good pictures, especially considering, in 1953, the studio system was ebbing. And when you compare her to the now-you-see-them nowyou-don't careers of today's beleaguered female stars, struggling to get parts in a macho, bottomline Hollywood, her staying power looks downright miraculous.

But then, there was always something miraculous about this creature who, while playing a princess, was enacting a fairy tale of her own, the one in which a young unknown is plucked from obscurity and becomes a star overnight.

Well, not complete obscurity. The daughter of a Dutch baroness and an English banker who deserted mother and daughter when Audrey was six, Hepburn grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland and went to London on a dance scholarship.

She was working as a model and bit-part actress when, shooting a British film on the Riviera, she met Colette. The writer was dazzled and handpicked her for the lead in the Broadway version of "Gigi."

This performance got her the part in "Roman Holiday" opposite Gregory Peck -- and an OscarŽ to boot!

Hepburn made all of her costars look good, from gigolos (George Peppard in 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's") to aging Romeos (Humphrey Bogart in "Sabrina" and Gary Cooper in 1957's "Love in the Afternoon"), but there was something magical about her pairing with Peck. As the scheming journalist whose heart is captivat-

Wilder grabbed Hepburn for "Sabrina" as the chauffeur's daughter who goes to Paris and comes back a polished cook and fashion plate.

He saw her classiness as unique, "a salmon swimming upstream" in a Hollywood of "drive-in waitresses," as he put it, according to his biographer Ed Sikov. He liked that she was intelligent and cultivated. He'd first cast Cary Grant in Bogart's role, but Grant withdrew and Joseph Cotten, who'd played it onstage with Margaret Sullavan, wasn't a big enough star (and Sullavan was too old for the screen version).

There was a great behind-thescenes to-do about the wardrobe for "Sabrina." Givenchy won out over Edith Head, who'd done so well by Hepburn in "Roman Holiday," and now was reduced to supplying the tree-climbing tomboy rags in the pre-Paris sequence.

Rumor has it that before her teamup with Givenchy, Hepburn had applied to Balenciaga, then the most fashionable designer, who at first thought she was the Hepburn (as in Katharine). He agreed to see her, only to find out she was a virtual nobody, and turned her down flat. The studio wanted her to pay for the Givenchy gowns: If they paid, they'd have to give the designer a credit in the film. And thus, though Edith Head won an OscarŽ for Hepburn's sensational black gown, it was pure

Givenchy. Featuring the "Sabrina neckline," it covers the actress's protruding collarbones but reveals the throat. On the set, Head told her to wear falsies, but Wilder vetoed the idea; he liked her thinness and wanted to go against the bosom-worship of that time.

Hepburn wore clothes better than any other actress ever has; it's an essential element in her personal. And "My Fair Lady" was an exceptional showcase for her . when she emerges the fair lady, wowing even arid Rex Harrison, she is sublime in her Cecil Beaton period costumes. She played opposite Peter O'Toole, another sparkling British leading man in "How to Steal a Million." This heist adventure reverses the "My Fair Lady" dynamic as a very elegant Audrey Hepburn changes into a grubby cleaning lady for a caper with O'Toole.

If it's true that Balenciaga once rebuffed Hepburn because she wasn't the Hepburn, it was Audrey who had the last laugh. Now she's taken her place with Katharine and all the great stars of the '30s and '40s as a luminous screen memory who was ultimately inimitable and irreplaceable.

Molly Haskell is a film critic and author. Her most recent book is a collection, "Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Men and Women and Films and Feminism."

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ed, he was at his most heartstoppingly attractive. Looking at them today, Peck and Hepburn seem not to know how beautiful they are, and the mutual caress of their personalities at that moment in time -- both shy, both vulnerable, one entering a scary new world, the other slightly wiser and more cynical -- can still take your breath away. Females of all ages and nationalities went crazy. Women cut their hair short in imitation of Hepburn's, and it was the one movie that I, entering my teens, and my mother, both adored.

And to think it might never have happened! After all, Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant were first slated for the roles. Other revelations lie in store in AMC's documentary about the making of the picture, called "Backstory: Roman Holiday". For instance, the original script was written by Dalton Trumbo who, shortly after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee and being sent to jail for his Communist sympathies, realized he had to write something commercial to support his family while away. He drew on America's then-infatuation with British royalty -- Queen Elizabeth's coronation was in 1953 -- and the idea of a princess wedding a commoner from Princess Margaret, at the time weighing marriage to fighter pilot Peter Townsend.

After "Roman Holiday," Billy

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egant of Actresses

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Could anything be more Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility?

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I

t has always seemed to me that the text of a thinker is only worth studying if reading it makes a significant difference in how we see the world and ourselves. Our job as commentators is to clarify the text and bring out its relevance.

But how does one go about clarifying and applying a thinker like Heidegger? Since Heidegger, unlike contemporary analytic philosophers who attempt to give a logical analysis of concepts, always attempts to anchor his discussion in the phenomena, I try to use Heidegger's text to draw attention to pervasive phenomena that are often overlooked, and then use an elaboration of these phenomena to cast exegetical light on the text.

Hubert L. Dreyfus Finally, I test the significance of the result by seeking to show the relevance of Heidegger's insights to issues of current concern. The following remarks are meant to demonstrate this approach.

I. Average versus Primordial Understanding Heidegger says that Division I of Being and Time provides a phenomenology of average everydayness and so will have to be revised in the light of the authentic way of being he describes in Division II. My attempt to write a commentary exclusively on Division I2 was, therefore, criticized on the ground that I presented as Heidegger's view theses that were taken back in Division II. None of the critical reviewers, however, said what my

exclusive concentration of Division I led me to get wrong. And, as far as I could tell, none of the claims made in Division I were taken back in Division II. I now see, however, that focusing exclusively on Division I did, indeed, lead me to make at least one serious mistake. I overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility described there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding, in contrast to a richer more primordial kind of understanding described in Division II. In my Commentary, I spelled out Heidegger's basic theses that people have skills for coping with equipment, other people, and themselves; their shared everyday

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copi n g practices conform to norms; the interrelated totality of equipment, norms and social roles form a whole which Heidegger calls "significance." Significance is the basis of average intelligibility, and this average intelligibility can be further articulated in language. As Heidegger puts it "We have the same

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thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said".

In spite of the obvious irony, in Heidegger's conclusion that "publicness primarily controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right", I concluded that, for both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the source of the intelligibility of the world and of Dasein is the average public practices articulated in ordinary language.

This interpretation still seems right to me, but I went on, mistakenly, to conclude from the basis of intelligibility in average understanding and ordinary language that for Heidegger, as for Wittgenstein, there was no other kind of intelligibility. I noted Heidegger's claim that "by publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone", but I went on, nonetheless, to argue that there could be no higher intelligibility than the public, average, intelligibility provided by the social norms Heidegger calls the one.

Any higher intelligibility, like Plato's ideas, Descartes' mathematical relations among bits of extension, or Hegel's self-transparent Geist, I claimed, would necessarily be metaphysical, so Heidegger would surely have rejected any such idea. Likewise any sort of private intelligibility that was not, at least in principle, shareable would seem to be, for those left out, a sort of unintelligibility. The whole point of intelligibility is that it be shared or at least sharable, if not by all rational creatures, at least by those brought up in a given culture or form of life. So, I simply denied that for Heidegger there could be any higher intelligibly than that in the public practices and the language that articulates them.

I've since come to see that I was wrong. Heidegger clearly holds that there is a form of understanding, of situations, on the one hand,

and of Dasein itself, on the other, that is superior to everyday understanding. He calls this superior understanding "primordial understanding". I still hold, however, that this primordial understanding cannot be some radically different way of making sense of things, since, for Heidegger, this higher intelligibility must somehow be based on and grow out of the average intelligibility into which everyone is socialized. So, although such higher intelligibility may in fact be accessible only to the few, as a form of shared intelligibility it must in principle be available to everyone. What could such a more primordial form of understanding be?

To get a clue, it helps to recall what we learn from Ted Kisiel's researches into the sources of Being and Time. According to Kisiel, the book grows out of Heidegger's work on Aristotle: Division I elaborates on techne, everyday skill, and Division II on phronesis, practical wisdom. So we would expect Heidegger to present his own version of the mastery of the cultural practices that, according to Aristotle, enables the phronemos to "straightway" "do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way." But just what phenomena do Aristotle and Heidegger have in mind with techne andphronesis? The way to find out is to let these phenomena show themselves as they are in themselves, so I will take a moment to describe, in a very abbreviated way, four stages one goes through in acquiring a new skill in any domain, as well as what one has when one has become an expert, especially the expert in social situations, Aristotle's man of practical wisdom.

II. A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition4

Stage 1: Novice

Normally, the instruction process begins with the instructor decomposing the task environment into context-free features that the beginner can recognize without the desired skill. The beginner is

then given rules for determining actions on the basis of these features.

The student automobile driver learns to recognize such domainindependent features as speed (indicated by his speedometer), and is given the rule, "Shift when the speedometer-needle points to 10.

The child who is supposed to learn to act ethically in his or her culture might be given the rule.

"Never tell a lie."

Stage 2: Advanced beginner

As the novice gains experience actually coping with real situations, he begins to note, or an instructor points out, perspicuous examples of meaningful additional components of the situation. After seeing a sufficient number of examples, the student learns to recognize them. Instructional maxims can then refer to these new situational aspects.

Of course, if the beginner follows the rule, "Shift at 10 miles an hour," the car will stall on a hill or when heavily loaded. So the advanced beginner learns to use (situational) engine sounds as well as (non-situational) speed in deciding when to shift. He learns the maxim: "Shift up when the motor sounds like it is racing and down when its sounds like it is straining."

Likewise, the policy of not lying will get a child into fights and excluded from important events so, with the coaching of the parents, children learn to tell their friends when leaving their homes that they had a good time regardless of the truth. Thus the child learns to replace the rule "Never lie" with the maxim "Never lie except in situations when making everyone feel good is what matters."

Stage 3: Competence

With more experience, the number of potentially relevant elements that the learner is able to recognize becomes overwhelming. At this point, since a sense of what is important in any particular situation is missing, performance becomes nerve-wracking and ex-

lead to irrational decisions and inhibit further skill development, in fact just the opposite seems to be the case. If the detached rulefollowing stance of the novice and advanced beginner is replaced by involvement, one is set for further advancement, while resistance to the acceptance of involvement and risk normally leads to stagnation and ultimately to boredom and regression.6

Stage 4: Expertise

With enough experience with a variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical decisions, the competent performer seems gradually to decompose this class of situations into subclasses, each of which share the same decision, single action, or tactic. This allows an immediate intuitive response to each situation.

The expert driver, generally without paying attention, not only feels in the seat of his pants when speed is the issue; he knows how to perform the appropriate action without calculating and comparing alternatives. On the off-ramp his foot just lifts off the accelerator or steps on the brake. What must be done, simply is done.

Also, with enough experience and willingness to take risks, some people grow up to be ethical experts who have learned to tell the truth or lie spontaneously, depending upon the situation, without appeal to rules and maxims. Aristotle would say that such a person has acquired the virtue of truthfulness. Some people grow up to be experts capable of responding appropriately to a wide range of interpersonal situations in their culture. Such social experts could be called virtuosi in living.7 As a result of accepting risks and a commitment to being better than average, the virtuoso in living, develops the capacity to respond appropriately even in situations in which there are conflicting concerns and in which there seems to those looking on to be no appropriate way to act. Pierre Bourdieu

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Competent performers, therefore, must decide for themselves in each situation which sort of situation they are in as well as what to do, without being sure that their understanding of the situation will be appropriate.5 Such decisions are risky, however, so one is tempted to seek the security of standards and rules. When a risk-averse person makes an inappropriate decision and consequently finds himself in trouble, he tries to characterize his mistake by describing a certain class of dangerous situations and then makes a rule to avoid them in the future. To take an extreme example, if a driver pulling out of a parking space is side-swiped by an oncoming car he mistakenly took to be approaching too slowly to be a danger, he may make the rule, never pull out if there is a car approaching. Such a rigid response will make for safe driving in a certain class of cases, but it will block further skill refinement.

In this case it will prevent acquiring the skill of flexibly pulling out of parking places. In general, if one seeks to follow general rules one will not get beyond competence.

But without guidelines, coping becomes frightening rather than merely exhausting. Prior to this stage, if the rules do not work, the performer can rationalize that he has not been given adequate rules rather than feel remorse for his mistakes. Now, however, the learner feels responsible for disasters. Of course, sometimes things work out well, and the competent performer experiences a kind of elation unknown to the beginner.

Thus, learners at this stage find themselves on an emotional roller coaster.

As the competent performer becomes more and more emotionally involved in his task, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw back and to adopt thedetached rule-following stance of the beginner. While it might seem that this involvement would interfere with rule-testing and so would

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hausting, and the student may well wonder how anyone ever masters the skill.

To cope with this overload and to achieve competence, people learn through instruction or experience, to devise a plan or choose a perspective. The perspective then determines which elements of the situation are treated as important and which ones are ignored. By restricting attention to only a few of the vast number of possibly relevant features and aspects, such a choice of a perspective makes decision making easier.

A competent driver leaving the freeway on an off-ramp curve, learns to pay attention to speed of the car, not whether to shift gears.

After taking into account speed, surface condition, angle of bank, etc., the driver may decide he is going too fast. He then has to decide whether to let up on the gas pedal, take his foot off the pedal altogether, or step on the brake, and precisely when to perform any of these actions. He is relieved if he gets through the curve without being honked at, and shaken if he begins to go into a skid.

A young person learns that there are situations in which one must tell the truth and others in which one lies. Although this is daunting, the adolescent learns to decide whether the current situation is one of building trust, giving support, manipulating the other person for his or her own good, harming a brutal antagonist, and so forth. If, for instance, trust is the issue, he then has to decide when and how to tell the truth.

The competent performer, then, seeks rules and reasoning procedures to decide upon a plan or perspective. But such rules are not as easy to come by as are the rules and maxims given beginners. There are just too many situations differing from each other in too many subtle ways. More situations, in fact, than are named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each situation.

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describes such a virtuoso: Only a virtuoso with a perfect command of his "art of living" can play on all the resources inherent in the ambiguities and uncertainties of behavior and situation in order to produce the actions appropriate to each case, to do that of which people will say "There was nothing else to be done," and do it the right way.8 This is obviously Aristotle's phronemos. Of course, there may be several wise responses. Indeed, on my account, the idea of a single correct response makes no sense since other virtuosi with different funds of experiences would see the matter differently, and even the same phronemos would presumably respond differently once he had had more experience and therefore could discriminate a richer repertoire of situations.

III. The Phronemos as a Socially Recognized Virtuoso versus the History Maker as World Transforming Master We can now generalize this account of skill acquisition and return to Being and Time to see whether the virtuoso's increasingly refined sense of the social situation is, indeed, the more primordial understanding Heidegger has in mind.

We can do this by seeing how Aristotle's phronemos is related to Heidegger's resolute Dasein. Heidegger is clear that the average way of acting is to obey standards and rules. He describes "Dasein's lostness in the one", as following "the tasks, rules, and standards ‌ of concernful and solicitous being-in-the-world" (312). In contrast, Heidegger's resolute individual deviates from the banal, average, public standards to respond spontaneously to the particular situation. In Heidegger's terms, irresolute Dasein responds to the general situation (Lage), whereas resolute Dasein responds to the concrete Situation (Situation). As Heidegger puts it: "for the one ...the Situation is essentially something that has been closed off. The one knows only the 'general situa-

tion'", while "resolute Dasein" is in touch with the "concrete Situation of taking action". The distinction between these two kinds of situation seem to come out of nowhere in Being and Time but they clearly have their origin in Heidegger's detailed discussion of phronesis in his l925 Sophist Lectures. There he says: Dasein, as acting in each case now, is determined by its situation in the largest sense. This situation is in every case different.

The circumstances, the givens, the times and the people vary.

The meaning of the action itself, i.e. precisely what I want to do, varies as well‌.It is precisely the achievement of phronesis to disclose the respective Dasein as acting now in the full situation within which it acts and in which it is in each case different.9 Given the phenomenology of skill acquisition, it should be clear that the concrete Situation does not have some special metaphysical or private kind of intelligibility cut off from the everyday.

Rather, intelligibility for the phronemos is the result of the gradual refinement of responses that grows out of l o n g experience acting within the shared cultural practices.

Thus, in discussing phronesis Heidegger quotes Aristotle's remark that "Only through much time‌is life experience possible."10 And in Being and Time he is explicit

that the intelligibility of the Situation disclosed by resolute action is a refinement of the everyday: Authentic disclosedness modifies with equal

primordiality both the way the 'world' is discovered and the way in which the Dasein-with

ommended .

All the virtuoso can do is stay open and involved and draw on his or her past experience.12 The resulting resolute response defines the Situation. As Heidegger puts it, "The Situation is only through resoluteness and in it".

Like the phronemos, the resolute individual presumably does what is retroactively recognized by others as appropriate, but what he does is not the taken-for-granted, average right thing - not what one does - but what his past experience leads him to do in that particular Situation. Moreover, as we have seen, since the Situation is specific and the phronemos' past experience unique, what he does cannot be the appropriate thing. It can only be an appropriate thing.

Still, unlike Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith suspending the ethical, who can only be understood by himself and others as a madman or a murderer, "Resolution does not withdraw from 'actuality', but discovers first what is factically possible; and it does so by seizing upon it in whatever way is possible for it as its ownmost ability-to-be in the 'one' ". Thus, in responding to the concrete Situation the resolute individual is recognized as a model; not of what generalthing to do, but of how to respond in an especially appropriate way. In this way, "when Dasein is resolute, it can become the 'conscience' of others".

It should now be clear that Kisiel's claim that Heidegger, in his account of resolute Dasein in Division II, is working out Aristotle's phenomenology of practical wisdom helps make sense of Heidegger's cryptic remarks about the resolute Dasein's response to the concrete Situation. But Kisiel's plausible way of understanding the passages in question is complicated by another group of interpreters who point out that Heidegger's account of authenticity is also deeply influenced by his early interest in the account of radical transformation in St. Paul, Luther

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Thus, "Even resolutions remain dependent upon the one and its world".

Moreover, as Aristotle already saw, expert response is immediate, and Heidegger agrees that "resoluteness does not first take cognizance of the Situation ‌; it has put itself into the Situation already. As resolute, Dasein is already taking action". Or, as Heidegger already put it in his l924 lectures: "inphronesis ‌in a momentary glance [Augenblick] I survey the concrete situation of action, out of which and in favor of which I resolve [Entschliesse] myself."11 Also, according to Aristotle, since there are no rules that dictate that what the phronemos does is the correct thing to do in that type of situation, the phronemos, like any expert, cannot explain why he did what he did. Heidegger, of course, agrees: The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something occurrent which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It only gets disclosed in free resolving which has not been determined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination.

So when Heidegger asks rhetorically, "But on what basis does Dasein disclose itself in resoluteness?" he answers: Only the resolution itself can give the answer. One would completely misunderstand the phenomenon of resoluteness if one should suppose that this consists simply in taking up possibilities that have been proposed and rec-

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others is disclosed. The 'world' which is available does not become another 'in its content' nor does the circle of others get exchanged for a new one; but both being toward the available understandingly and concernfully, and solicitous being with others, are now given a definite character‌.

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and Kierkegaard. These interpreters focus on Heidegger's use of the term Augenblick.

We have already seen that, indeed, in the 1924 Heidegger uses the term Augenblick to describe the phronemos's instant of insight.

This reading is confirmed by Basic Problems where the Augenblick is equated with Aristotle's kairos, the moment of appropriate skillful intervention. "Aristotle saw the phenomenon of the Augenblick, the Kairos," Heidegger says.13 But Augenblick is also Luther's translation of St. Paul's moment in which we shall be changed in a "twinkling of an eye." So John Van Buren claims that "Heidegger took the movement that concentrates itself at the extreme point (eschaton) of the kairos to be the kairological time that he had already discovered in the Pauline eschatology."14 Unfortunately, the evidence Van Buren cites for this claim does not seem to establish it or even suggest it, but rather suggests the contrary, viz. that Heidegger here uses "Kairos" to refer, not to religious time, but to secular action in a concrete situation.

In WS 1924-25, Heidegger connected kairos in Aristotle with the Pauline theme of kairos as 'the twinkling of an eye': Phronesis is the glancing at the this-time, at the this-time-ness of the momentary situation. As aisthesis, it is the glance of the eye, the Augen-blick, toward the concrete at the particular time….15 Van Buren seeks further support in a passage from Heidegger's lectures, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, but this passage too supports the Aristotelian reading.

Phronesis is the illumination of dealings that temporalizes life in its being. The concrete interpretation shows how this being, kairos, is constituted…. It goes toward the eschaton, the extreme, in which the determinately seen concrete situation intensifies itself at the particular time.16

Although the translation leaves things rather murky, clearly Heidegger is here describing the cultural virtuoso's resolute dealing with the concrete Situation, not the moment of rebirth of the Christian in which he gets a new identity, nor the moment of the coming of the Messiah when the world will be transformed and the dead raised in the twinkling of an eye.

But, in spite of these blatant misreadings of the texts, the interpreters who want to give Heidegger's use of Augenblick a Christian interpretation are onto something important. There is a surprising moment where Heidegger introduces the Augenblick in a way that seems clearly to refer to the phronemos' daily dealings with things and equipment. He says: To the anticipation which goes with resoluteness, there belong a Present in accordance with which a resolution discloses the Situation….That Present…we call the Augenblick…The Augenblick permits us to encounter for the first time what can be 'in a time' as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.

(387, 388) So far, this is no surprise, but then Heidegger appends a footnote saying, "S. Kierkegaard is probably the one who has seen the existentiell phenomenon of the Augenblick with the most penetration…". What can this mean?

Heidegger seems to want to describe the phenomenon of the response to the concrete Situation at a level of formality that covers any decisive moment in which Dasein, as an individual, breaks out of the banality of the one and takes over its situation, whether that be the Greek act of seizing the occasion or the Christian experience of being reborn.

17. For Heidegger, either type of decisive moment is an Augenblick.

In a course given shortly after the publication ofBeing and Time, the Greek and Christian views, their radical difference, and their formal similarity are spelled out together.

Heidegger first speaks in general terms of "Dasein's self-resolution (Sich entschliessen) to itself …to what is given to him to be, this selfresolution is the Augenblick".18 He then fills this out in Aristotelian terms, explaining, "The Augenblick is nothing else than the glance of resoluteness, in which the full Situation of an action opens up and is held open."19 But he also suggests that this Aristotelian moment of decisive action falls short of the kind of radical transformative Augenblick Kierkegaard had in mind.

"What we here indicate with 'Augenblick' is what Kierkegaard was the first to really grasp in philosophy - a grasping, which begins the possibility of a completely new epoch in philosophy since Antiquity."20 Although Heidegger's view is difficult to sort out, if we hold onto the phenomena in question, we can be sure that, Heidegger did not simply identify the Greek understanding of kairos with the Christian understanding of Augenblick, although he did see each as manifesting a resolute, i.e. open, way of beingwhich was a precondition of a special moment of decisive action. One thing is sure, one can't even begin to make sense of Heidegger if, like Kisiel, one simply cites lecture-texts to argue that Heidegger's account of resolute Dasein in Being and Time is an adaptation of Aristotle's phronemos, or, like Van Buren, one cites other lecture-texts to argue that Augenblick in Being and Time must be understood in the light of Christian kairological time. Without first seeing that Aristotle and St. Paul are describing two genuine, but seemingly irreconcilable, phenomena, the challenging exegetical questions do not even arise.

Once we focus on the phenomena, however, we can see that each interpretation has something right but each mistakenly claims to have the whole story. A satisfactory interpretation requires clearly distinguishing two experiences of the source, nature, and intelligibil-

gives up a banal, general understanding of social norms and responds to the concrete Situation, but he can still be understood by his peers to have effectively solved a shared problem. In anticipatory resoluteness, however, anxiety in the face of death has freed Dasein even from taking for granted the agreed-upon current cultural issues.

Repetition makes a reciprocal rejoinder to the possibility of existence that has-been-there‌.But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility in a resolution, it is made in a Augenblick; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that which in the today, is working itself out as the 'past'.

Here the Augenblick does name the inception of a new creation. In the moment of decisive action, then, authentic Dasein can take up marginal practice from the cultural heritage.

[Fate] is how we designate Dasein's primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen.

Dasein can then act in such as way as to take over or repeat the marginal practices in a new way and thus show a form of life in which that marginal practices has become central and the central practices have become marginal.

Such an innovator is so radical that he transforms his generation's understanding of the issue facing the culture and produces a new authentic "we." He thus goes beyond not only the banal general understanding of his peers, but even beyond the Situational understanding of the phronemos.

23 We could call such a fully authentic history-making Dasein a cultural master. 24 IV. Ethical and Political Implications The phenomena of the social virtuoso and the cultural master have ethical and political implications. For example, Heidegger's account of the resolute response

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average understanding and so he is generally more effective. But he is not yet fully authentic.

Besides the effective coping of the phronemos, made possible by an expert grasp of the concrete Situation, there is a fully authentic way of acting made possible

by Dasein's understanding of its own way of being. This authentic way of acting is a more complete form of resoluteness in which Dasein not only faces the anxiety of guilt, viz. the sense that its identity and social norms are thrown rather than grounded and so have no final authority, but, furthermore, faces the anxiety of death, viz. that Dasein has to be ready at all times to die, i.e. give up its identity and its world altogether. In such an understanding, Dasein manifests "its authenticity and its totality".

Heidegger seems to be distinguishing and ranking the two ways of holding onto anxiety and the kind of resoluteness each makes possible by holding that only the second is authentic and whole. In Chapter V, when he turns to the "authentic historizing of Dasein", he says: We have defined "resoluteness" as a projecting of oneself on one's ownmost being-guilty ‌.Resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatoryresoluteness. In this, Dasein understands itself with regard to its ability-to-be, and it does so in such a manner that its will go right under the eyes of Death in order thus to take over in its thrownness that entity which it is itself, and to take it over wholly.21 Anticipatory resoluteness makes possible an even more primordial form of intelligibility than the pragmatic understanding evinced by the phronemos or social virtuoso.22 To be innovative in this strong sense requires anticipatory resoluteness - anxiously facing both death and guilt. The resolute phronemos merely experiences his thrownness and so has the sense that the social norms are not rules to be rigidly followed. He therefore

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ity of decisive action -- the Greek experience, arising from a primordial understanding of the current Situation, that makes possible virtuoso coping in the current world and the Christian experience, arising from a primordial understanding of Dasein itself that makes possible a transformation of self and world. Heidegger seems to be distinguishing Dasein's primordial understanding of the current Situation from Dasein's experience of its most primordial way of being, and yet trying to subsume them both under theAugenblick when he says, "Dasein gets brought back from its lostness by a resolution so that both the current Situation and therewith the primordial 'limitSituation' of being-towards-death, will be disclosed as an Augenblick that has been held on to."

At other places in the text, moreover, it seems clear that the two different forms of understanding are disclosed by two different forms of resoluteness. The first is discussed in Chapter 2 of Division II. There Heidegger defines resoluteness as "self projection upon one's ownmost being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety‌."

This kind of resoluteness arises from facing one's thrownness and the consequent anxiety that comes with the realization that one's average understanding with its rules and standards has no intrinsic authority. Holding onto this anxiety makes possible the openness, involvement and willingness to take risks that, in turn, make possible the acquisition of expertise. Resoluteness thus makes possible the virtuosity of the Heideggerianphronemos who, because he has held onto anxiety and so no longer takes for granted the banal public interpretation of events, can see new possibilities in the most ambiguous and conflicted situations and so can do something that all who share his world will retroactively recognize as what was factically possible at the time Such a person's understanding of his society is richer and deeper than the

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to the factical situation offers a way out of the antinomy presented by Dworkin's and Derrida's account of legal decision making. Dworkin holds that "judges must, …so far as possible, regard the existing legal practice as expressing … a coherent conception of justice and fairness, and so are charged to uncover this conception and to make decisions in specific cases on the basis of it."25 Thus, according to Dworkin, an explicit sense of the principles involved should actually guide a judge when she applies the law as well as when she justifies her decision.

Derrida is enough of a Heideggerian to sense that there is no theory behind a judge's practice and no single right decision, so he rightly sees that the judge's justification could not be the basis of her decision and must, therefore be, at best a rationalization. Thus he rejects Dworkin's rationalism. However, without an understanding of the phenomenon of skillful coping behind Heidegger's claim that a resolute way of being makes possible a richer more primordial kind of understanding, Derrida wrongly concludes that in making a decision the judge must be making "a leap in the dark."26 I suspect that, three different sorts of cases are lumped together by Derrida.

(1) There is the case of extrapolating the law to new situations that are similar but never identical to previous cases and for which there is no set of features in terms of which one can justify one's judgments of similarity. Here Derrida is right, there can be no theory of how to proceed, but Heidegger would presumably analyze an expert judge's decisions on the basis of the phenomenon of expert coping and so hold that the judge, like any resolute phronemos, neither acts on principle nor makes a leap in the dark, but rather straightway engages in "the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time".

With an eye to the phenomenon, we can see that the judge would

be acting as a social virtuoso led by her past experience to respond to the subtle similarities between the current situation and situations in which she had already made what were recognized as appropriate responses. Even when such a phronemos reflects she does not reflect on abstract principles but stays involved and reflects on her expert sense of the concrete situation.

As Derrida sees in such cases there cannot be one right decision as Dworkin assumes. Two different judges with different past experience and different ways of having entered the current situation may well see the situation differently.

Remember, Heidegger says: The Situation cannot be … presented like something occurrent which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It only gets disclosed in free resolving….

But even then, one if the several possible wise decisions need not be chosen arbitrarily. The virtuoso judges can talk to each other about the way they entered the current situation and relate the situation to other situations in the hope of getting their colleagues to see things the way they do. This may work to produce agreement, but even if it does not, the choice between the remaining candidates is not the arbitrary imposition of power; it is a choice between possible wise decisions.

Still, Derrida is right that, since similarity cannot be reduced to certain shared features, any justification that tried to explain the judge's decision in terms ofclasses of situations would have to be a rationalization that drew either on principles like those the expert followed when she was only competent or, at best, more refined principles the expert had abstracted from many cases. But Heidegger would want to add, I hope, that, although such principles could not capture the judge's expertise, they need not be arbitrary. That is, they could serve as convincing justifications for a competent decision

even though they could not be used to determine what counted as the relevant similarities in the next case and so could not serve as the basis for a genuinely wise decision.

(2) There is the decision of a legal innovator who brings to bear a whole new way of looking at the role of the law in some domain. Such a decision would be even further from being rationalizable, but, if Heidegger is right, it would not be a leap in the dark but a masterful response to marginal practices. The marginal practices, as Nietzsche says, make "a leap from the wings to center stage"27 but the innovative master does not make a blind leap in responding to them; rather, thanks to his openness, he has a subtle sense of the marginal practices that are moving into the center.

(3) The nearest thing to a Derridian leap in the dark occurs where there are two or more conflicting sets of values. These are the kinds of cases that reach the Supreme Court.

For example, pornography cases in which the court must decide between the well being of the community and the right to free speech. In such cases there does not seem to be any nonarbitrary way of deciding which way to understand the situation. Each judge will decide on the basis of his or her own set of values and past experience but the decision will be imposed by the majority. This does seem to be a case, if not of a leap in the dark, at least of an arbitrary imposition of power.

Only this third type of case fits Derrida's analysis, but Derrida's mistakenly holds that all decisions that extrapolate to a new situation have the arbitrariness found only in type-three cases. He claims that either a decision is guided by cognitive rails and so is mechanical but uninteresting, or else it is arbitrary, thus missing the relevance of the two types of primordial understanding that Heidegger describes. By in effect denying

the way a resolute person's past experience can feed into a sense of what is factically possible and thus make possible a wise or even an innovative decision that is not dictated by principle but is not arbitrary either, Derrida gives support to the nihilism of the legal realists.

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In summary, according to Division II of Being and Time, public, average, everyday understanding is necessarily general and banal. Nonetheless, this leveled average understanding is necessary both as the background for all intelligibility and in the early stages of acquiring expertise, and so it is both ontologically and genetically prior to any more primordial understanding. Once, however, an expert has broken out of the banal thanks to the anxious realization of his thrownness and , by repeated risky experience in the everyday world, has mastered the discriminations that constitute his skill, he can respond to the situation in a more subtle way than a non-expert can. This primordial understanding of the concrete Situation has no special content -- no source of intelligibility other than everyday intelligibility - but it, nonetheless, makes possible the social virus's successful responses to the most difficult social situations. Furthermore, by facing the anxiety of death and so seeing that the issues of his culture and even his own identity could be radically changed, a fully authentic Dasein can manifest an even higher kind of primordial understanding.

As a cultural master he can take up marginal possibilities in his culture's past in way that enables him to change the style of a whole generation and thereby disclose a new world.

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Conclusion

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