Eurovision: "Rise like a phoenix" by Conchita Wurst

It is now about 3am on Saturday 10/5. The Eurovision final will be on Saturday evening.
After 3 years of forgetfulness, I watch Eurovision again this year and so far my favourite (a strong favourite) is "Rise like a phoenix", performed by Conchita Wurst, who represents Austria. Some other countries such as the UK, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Norway*... have some pretty good songs, but Austria deserves to win more than any other country. I'm quite afraid that people may be too conservative to vote for her, even though I honestly think a gender-neutral singer has a greater chance in Europe than any other continent on the planet.
Good music, meaningful lyrics, performed beautifully, with emotions. What more does one need in a music performance?  

Lyrics: 

Waking in the rubble
Walking over glass
Neighbors say we’re trouble
Well that time has passed

Peering from the mirror
No, that isn’t me
Stranger getting nearer
Who can this person be

You wouldnt know me at all today
From the fading light I fly

Rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you're my flame

Go about your business
Act as if you’re free
Noone could have witnessed
What you did to me

Cause you wouldn’t know me today
And you have got to see
To believe
From the fading light I fly

Rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn

I rise up to the sky
You threw me down but
I'm gonna fly

And rise like a phoenix
Out of the ashes
Seeking rather than vengeance
Retribution
You were warned
Once I'm transformed
Once I’m reborn
You know I will rise like a phoenix
But you’re my flame

  

The controversy I find predictable and understandable. I would be amazed if there were not such reactions. But on the brighter side, as far as I see, all or at least most of the negative comments point to the fact that Conchita Wurst dresses and wears makeups like a woman and at the same time keeps the beard, not the song, not the voice, not the performance.
I hope "Rise like a phoenix" will win. 
Wait for updates! 


*: Norway's represented by Carl Espen, with "Silent storm". The song improves when listened to the 3rd or 4th time, but I think it creates too weak an impression. A total opposite of Alexander Rybak's "Fairytale". 






Update after midnight: 
CONCHITA WON WITH 290 POINTS! WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!  AUSTRIA!

Virginia Woolf on Charlotte and Emily Bronte

From http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter14.html

"For the self-centred and self-limited writers have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë appear to have founded their styles upon a stiff and decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a power, a swiftness of its own. [...] It is there that she takes her seat; it is the red and fitful glow of the heart’s fire which illumines her page. In other words, we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel Villette. “The skies hang full and dark — a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms.” So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind which could not otherwise be expressed. But neither of the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation — they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book."

"The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to grasp. Especially this is so when, like the Brontës, the writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather a mood than a particular observation. Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said with eloquence and splendour and passion “I love”, “I hate”, “I suffer”. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. [...] But it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet. She must take upon herself a more laborious and a more ungrateful task. She must face the fact of other existences, grapple with the mechanism of external things, build up, in recognisable shape, farms and houses and report the speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself. And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree; by watching the moor sheep crop the turf; by listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass. The life at the farm with all its absurdities and its improbability is laid open to us. We are given every opportunity of comparing Wuthering Heights with a real farm and Heathcliff with a real man. How, we are allowed to ask, can there be truth or insight or the finer shades of emotion in men and women who so little resemble what we have seen ourselves? But even as we ask it we see in Heathcliff the brother that a sister of genius might have seen; he is impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar."



_________________________________________________________

This is the umpteenth time I've read this essay.
Virginia Woolf sums up wonderfully the powers of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Like me, she has more admiration for Emily Bronte, who has a significant presence in "A room of one's own", together with Jane Austen (and even though Virginia Woolf praises Jane Austen more often, I can't help feeling that she keeps her in a respectful distance and recognises, with reason, her talent, but personally prefers Emily).
The passage on Charlotte is beautiful- one who finds one's own words inadequate must thank Virginia Woolf for articulating such thoughts as to why "Jane Eyre" matters and evokes strong emotions in readers, many of whom hold it dear to their hearts, in spite of all its shortcomings. 
Some novels rise above their flaws. 
(Which reminds me, I must read "Villette").





_________________________________________________________

I cannot find what Virginia Woolf might have written about Anne Bronte. As it seems, she never mentions the other sister.

Virginia Woolf's reading of Jane Austen

Here are 2 interesting articles:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number12/lee.htm (Judith Lee)

As Janet Todd has shown, Jane Austen was a continuing presence in Virginia Woolf’s letters, diaries, essays, and fiction.

I've seen her mentioned frequently in "A room of one's own", "The common reader" and some other essays, especially those on women and fiction. The name Wickham in "Mrs Dalloway" is an obvious allusion. "The voyage out", which I'm reading, has several allusions such as the name Willoughby, "Persuasion"... and some discussions on Jane Austen by the characters. Even though Virginia Woolf has an ambivalent view and doesn't want to consider Jane Austen a favourite, she admires her talent and sets her up as some kind of standard (one may even say she's obsessed with her).

She began by writing novels that were compared to Austen’s, and she ended by conceptualizing a figure of the artist (Anon) as a figure not unlike what Austen represented in her essays. [...] Woolf describes a woman who, if she had lived, would have written novels like those Woolf herself was writing.

This is not very far from the truth. One can read this essay: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter12.html I can see that in her 1st novel "The voyage out", Virginia Woolf, dealing with emotions and human interactions, tries to keep a cool, detached, controlled tone the way Jane Austen does, and at the same time, relies less on dialogues and focuses more on what people leave unsaid, as she thinks Jane Austen would have done if she had lived longer, "[s]he would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but what life is."
Her beautiful prose also reminds me of Jane Austen, but of course later, she departs from this track and develops her own style. 
Judith Lee quotes Virginia Woolf:

Ever since Jane Austen became famous they [critics] have been hissing inanities in chorus ….  [D]ebating whether she was a lady, whether she told the truth, whether she could read, and whether she had personal experience of hunting a fox is positively upsetting. We remember that Jane Austen wrote novels. It might be worth while for her critics to read them.

A while ago I watched "Becoming Jane" (having a vague feeling that I'd done so, many years before, but at the time didn't care very much about the author depicted), and didn't finish. Anne Hathaway's bad accent isn't as irritating as the fact that the film associates the author of "Pride and prejudice" with her heroine Elizabeth Bennet and implies that she incorporates her own experience with a vain man into her novel. The idea is distasteful not because I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Bennet, I simply think such a depiction is rather limited, and somehow discredits her abilities as a writer.
Judith Lee quotes Virginia Woolf again:

I have often thought of writing an article on the coarseness of Jane Austen. The people who talk of her as if she were a niminy piminy spinster always annoy me.

I'd have loved to read that. I myself think "rears and vices" in "Mansfield park", albeit denied by many people, is very likely to imply sodomy. Jane Austen's not that 'nice', priggish, prim as a person.
Judith Lee comments at length on this line by Virginia Woolf:

Here is Jane Austen, a great writer as we all agree, but for my own part, I would rather not find myself alone in a room with her. A sense of meaning withheld, a smile at something unseen, an atmosphere of perfect control and courtesy mixed with something finely satirical, which, were it not directed against things in general, rather than against individuals would be almost malicious, would, so I feel, make it alarming to find her at home.

Both John Fowles and I have expressed the same idea. But, putting me aside, it's more understandable that John Fowles feels this way, considering that he's a man and a man may sometimes be quite intimidated by a sharp, witty woman. But another woman!

If we reflect upon Woolf’s readings of Jane Austen, especially in A Room of One’s Own, we shall find that she consistently characterizes Austen in much the same way that critics have characterized Elinor.  For much of her life, Woolf in a sense positioned herself as “Marianne” to Austen’s “Elinor”: We find in the character a “sense” she admired and the attempt to imagine a “sensibility” in which her writing originated. At times, Woolf expresses an admiration and irritation much like Marianne’s, on some occasions defending and on others dismissing her “sister” in a continual dialogue as necessary and as frustrating as the conversations of so many of Austen’s sisters.

For the time being, I'm not sure, having read only "Mrs Dalloway" and some chapters of "The voyage out". But the idea is interesting.



http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol29no1/auerbach.html (Emily Auerbach)

Edward Albee entitled his famous play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I would ask instead, “Who’s Afraid of, Annoyed with, Intimidated by, in Awe of, and in Dialogue with Jane Austen?” and answer, “Virginia Woolf.” I insist that without Jane Austen there would be no Virginia Woolf. Perhaps more of interest to Austen aficionados, I also argue that because Woolf knew firsthand the difficulty and exhilaration of perfecting one’s craft as a revolutionary woman writer, she produced some of the most perceptive and illuminating critical comments about Jane Austen ever made.

Virginia Woolf the essayist is very different from Virginia Woolf the novelist. Whereas F. Scott Fitzgerald maintains a clear, concise style in both fiction and nonfiction (only becomes more poetic in novels) and Gertrude Stein's always a mess, Virginia Woolf's prose can be loose, disordered, tiresome in her novels, especially in her stream-of-consciousness ones, but in essays she writes in a clear, concise, straightforward style with such authority that one must nod with her. And whilst I cannot say, with the same conviction, that without Jane Austen there would be no Virginia Woolf, I agree with the next sentence above.

Although Woolf praised Austen for three decades, her own complicated relationship to Austen seems to have evolved over time. In early essays and references in novels, Woolf writes about Austen from a respectful distance and with considerable ambivalence. Later in her life, particularly after reading Austen’s juvenilia, Woolf appears to have identified more closely with Austen and to have become more intent on defending her from critics viewing her as a decorous maiden aunt writing “little” novels because of her “little” life. [...] “Jane Austen and the Geese” shows Woolf defending Austen as if to defend herself and all women writers.

Her ambivalence is understandable. Jane Austen has limitations and creates her own restrictions, she's too little of a rebel. One doesn't have to defend, say, Nabokov for his sophisticated style, even if it poses a problem for many readers, because it's an asset, but one that likes Jane Austen always feels the need to defend her, as others may criticise her for triviality, for her small canvas, limited world, for her narrow concerns (obvious in letters), for her determination to leave out poverty and suffering, for ending all novels with marriages, for sticking strictly to familiar things, for being dull, for conventions, etc. and they do have a point, at least to some extent. Her admirers, if they're serious readers, are aware of such issues. Jane Austen's such a problematic figure, as I've written before, on the 1 hand she has such genius, on the other hand one feels quite uneasy because she focuses on such tiny things. Above all, the things for which she's criticised are the very things that (misogynistic) men accuse female writers of. Virginia Woolf therefore has to defend her, to defend herself, who also focuses on emotions, longings, relationships, human interactions, and to attack the view that male things like war and politics are more important and interesting.

As a fellow writer, Woolf felt she could appreciate Austen’s intricate craft—and the labor it took to produce it—in a way that non-writers never could:  “Only those who have realized for themselves the ridiculous inadequacy of a straight stick dipped in ink when brought in contact with the rich and tumultuous glow of life can appreciate to the full the wonder of her achievement, the imagination, the penetration, the insight, the courage, the sincerity which are required to bring before us one of those perfectly normal and simple incidents of average human life”.

This is probably why I enjoy reading writers' writings on other writers than critics', not because of the childish view that you must do something well before critiquing someone else, but simply because a writer may have from experience some insight and understanding an outsider can never have. But then, obviously not every great novelist can be a great critic- I'm thinking of 2 persons specifically, Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov.

Patronizing critics sniping about Austen’s tiny life enraged Virginia Woolf. She refused to accept the idea that Austen must have been broken-hearted because she never married or led a “normal” life. Writing about herself, Woolf observed, “Happiness—what, I wonder, constitutes happiness?  I daresay the most important element is work” (Diary 7 May 1919). Woolf knew Austen worked hard to hone her skills and found joy in her profession—yes, profession—as a writer. “She was happy in her life,” Woolf notes of Austen. “Life itself—that was the object of her love, of her absorbed study; that was the pursuit which filled those unrecorded years and drew out the ‘quiet intensity of her nature’”

I do understand the view some people hold, the irony of an unmarried woman writing about love and ending all novels with marriages, but that means nothing, for Jane Austen has greater understanding of love and relations between men and women than many writers with more experience. In fact, I think marriage might have done her harm.

Woolf did not ever, however, become an uncritical Janeite.  She finds Fanny Price boring and confesses to reading Mansfield Park “two words at a time” (Letters 2 February 1925).  She seems to find Austen’s perfection, artistic control, aloofness, and inscrutability maddening at times, and she objects when readers link her own work or personality to Austen’s.  She complains in her diary of Katherine Mansfield, “A decorous elderly dullard she describes me; Jane Austen up to date” (28 November 1919), insisting in letters that she does not want to be “Jane Austen over again,” particularly if it means that she has to suppress half her sexuality (Letters 5 December 1919, 20 November 1932).  In the same letter censuring critics for treating Austen like a “niminy piminy spinster,” Woolf herself calls Austen “a limited, tart, rather conventional woman for all her genius” (20 November 1936).

I don't think anybody likes to be compared to a predecessor, even if it's a compliment. The good thing is that, I don't know for how long Virginia Woolf was compared to Jane Austen, but today she stands alone, as Virginia Woolf, with her own style, with her "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the lighthouse" and "The waves", etc., her association with modernism and stream of consciousness (together with James Joyce), Bloomsbury and her own place in literature. I haven't seen many people now compare her to Jane Austen.

Austen seems to confound any attempt Woolf makes to give her just one label. Woolf’s extensive comments on Austen leave us with a sense of implied oxymorons—Austen as a limited genius, an alarming domestic, a conventional rebel, an old-fashioned modern.

But ain't it true?

Unlike other women writers, Austen did not allow anger to distort her prose. Elizabeth Bennet does not suddenly in the middle of Pride and Prejudice stop to launch into a feminist diatribe against inadequate opportunities for women, the way Jane Eyre does. Woolf tells us that Jane Austen doesn’t preach or rant; she simply refuses to allow “masculine values” to prevail in her fiction, despite their dominance in society. Biased critics inevitably judged men’s novels about the battles of men in war more important than women’s novels about “the feelings of women in a drawing-room,” but Austen knew better than that. As she put it in Northanger Abbey, her novels displayed “the greatest powers of the mind” and “most thorough knowledge of human nature” in “the best chosen language”.

This is related to the point about defending Jane Austen, some paragraphs ago. Virginia Woolf, I believe, also learns not to preach or rant in her novels. That would be unpleasant.

As Woolf grew older and read more of Austen’s juvenilia, she seems to have acquired a greater appreciation of her unconventional depths and a greater disdain for those critics and readers who never got past the “quiet maiden lady” Woolf herself had once labeled Austen (Southam 244).

I have no intention of reading her juvenilia now, but over the past few months I have seen Jane Austen more clearly and found many of my previous conceptions entirely wrong.

Woolf, too, is an elusive, slippery, enigmatic figure, so writing about Woolf and Austen takes not just temerity but audacity.  My search has not concluded but has led me far enough to gain a greater appreciation of both feisty, non-niminy piminy women who ignored the honking critical geese, kept to their own style, went on in their own way, and found the courage to write fiction that changed the world.

What a conclusion. So far, more drawn to her nonfiction, now I have to read more of Virginia Woolf's novels. 

Thoughts after reading "Lady Susan"

I've been reading a Penguin book comprising 3 Jane Austen stories: the novella "Lady Susan" and 2 unfinished novels "The Watsons" and "Sanditon". They are said in the introduction to cover 3 periods in Jane Austen's writing life: "Lady Susan" belongs to the 1st, a bridge between her juvenilia and her 3 1st novels "Sense and sensibility", "Pride and prejudice" and "Northanger abbey"; "The Watsons" belongs to the unhappy, quiet middle period; and "Sanditon" is her last work, interrupted by her death, concluding the period that produced "Mansfield park", "Emma" and "Persuasion".
As expected, "Lady Susan" is thin literally as well as figuratively. A few details seem contrived, and the ending is quite hasty and unconvincing, which I also feel about the endings of "Sense and sensibility" and "Northanger abbey".
However, it's interesting, and unlike any of her works. 1st, the book's written in the epistolary form (so was "Elinor and Marianne", but it was rewritten and changed into 3rd-person narration and became "Sense and sensibility"). A mingling of voices, "Lady Susan" shows Jane Austen's brilliant gift for employing different language for her characters. One can see that this form is limited and not the best choice for Jane Austen (especially when I don't even like her real letters, which I consider tedious, full of gossip and triviality, and which are probably read more for the woman behind them than for literary value), but it's nice to see her do something different. 2nd, Lady Susan is a deceitful, hypocritical, mercenary, scheming, shamelessly selfish and ruthless woman. Although such a figure appears several times, with variation, in later works, as Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Caroline Bingley and Mary Crawford, Lady Susan, unlike them, is a widow, and a mother (a future version of the 4 characters I've just mentioned?), and more importantly, she's the central, eponymous character and the driving force in the story. In the later works, immorality is rather concealed- such acts, happening offstage, are mentioned or retold briefly and the villains tend not to be seen in close-ups. Here, it is direct, the readers have Lady Susan's perspective and hear of her plans and have insight into a person who has neither conscience nor shame. 
Compared to Jane Austen's later 6 novels, "Lady Susan" is less polished, but for various reasons I think it should be seen in relation to them, for the reader's understanding and appreciation of "Lady Susan" itself and Jane Austen's works as a whole. The only regret is that she didn't come back to the novella and revise, it could have become another masterpiece, and a very unusual one.

Lupita Nyong'o 's style

2 kinds of love and the ending of "The apartment"

So I watched "The apartment" again last night, about 24 hours after the 1st time, with immense pleasure.
I suppose there are tons of things one can write about when one discusses "The apartment": the dialogue, the plot, the wit, the humour, Shirley Maclaine's sweetness and melancholic air, the characterisation of C. C. Baxter (aka Bud), the doctor's talk on being a mensch, the repulsiveness of Sheldrake and the other 4 men, the suffix "wise", etc.
But I'd like to focus on the ending. "The apartment" is reminiscent of an essay on the 2 kinds of love in "Anna Karenina" and "Fathers and sons", the 1st one is romantic, passionate love, which can be tormenting or destructive (Vronsky- Anna Karenina, Bazarov- Anna Odintsova), the 2nd one is prosaic, intimate love, between 2 people who may not feel passionate about each other but who have trust and understanding and who find happiness in being together (Levin- Kitty, Arkady- Katya). I'm not against romantic love, but (according to some books I've read and some films I've watched) methinks, the fact that 2 people love each other doesn't necessarily mean that they can be happy together. "The apartment", albeit quite different, does seem to make the same point. In the end, there is no kiss, there is no embrace, there is not 1 saccharine bit, such things are not for Bud and Fran. Billy Wilder rejects sentimentalism and refuses to give the audience the sugary, cutesy ending they expect, but a realistic and unsentimental yet fantastic one. "The apartment" makes me think of the films I've seen which follow the formula that all such scenes (when one realises who one's true love is) must have kisses and embraces and tears and smiles of happiness, always. "The apartment" is an antithesis to such platitudinous mushiness. 
Its ending, especially the last 4 words, is fantastic. It doesn't follow a formula. It's closer to life. It's unforgettable. 

Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine"

Before watching "Blue Jasmine" I had 2 preconceptions.

1 was that Cate Blanchett wouldn't disappoint me, and she didn't. As I've often said, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett are the 2 best actresses working today, and 2 of the greatest of all time. But that's also why I thought she wouldn't surprise me.



I was wrong. I was blown away.

"Blue Jasmine" tends to be compared to "A streetcar named Desire"- it's similar enough to remind one of Tennessee Williams's play and different enough to be a Woody Allen film rather than a remake. The film as a whole, I think, doesn't measure up to the 1951 "Streetcar" film in some aspects: the other actors are rather forgettable (except Sally Hawkins), the supporting characters can be inconsistent or simply caricatural, a few details (such as the 2 moments of revelation) seem quite contrived, Ginger's house is unrealistically, unconvincingly spacious, and then the plot doesn't have the dynamic between 2 persons, 2 forces, 2 sets of values (though one may defend the last point by arguing that Woody Allen chooses to focus on Jasmine and present her as causing her own downfall and destroying everything for everybody and that I'm simply biased).

However, with Cate, these things don't matter greatly; and if they do, the film should nevertheless be watched for Cate alone- hers is 1 of the most outstanding, breathtaking and haunting performances in film history. I remember watching the 1995 TV adaptation of "Streetcar", looking at Jessica Lange and seeing, hearing Vivien Leigh. Cate escapes that, though her character Jasmine is not the same as Blanche DuBois, there was still a danger that her performance as Jasmine could be a replica of Vivien's, but she presents a different interpretation, a different approach, a more naturalistic style of acting, and it works beautifully. She mumbles, she rambles, she shakes, she bursts into tears, she stares into space, she looks the other way, above all, we look at her and see Jasmine, not Cate Blanchett, not Blanche DuBois, not Vivien Leigh, we see the madness and despair in her eyes and feel her pain and watch her fall apart. Some actors act only with the face, some also with hands and arms and legs and feet, with movements and gestures and voice- Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine", like Vivien in "Streetcar", acts with every fibre in her body. She's so magnificent and hypnotic that the flaws of the film almost escape notice.

If asked, I cannot compare Cate's performance as Jasmine and that of Vivien as Blanche, it's impossible and both are 2 of the most deserving Oscar winners. But taking the career as a whole I must say that, as much as it pains me to say, Cate Blanchett (as well as Meryl Streep) is greater than Vivien at acting- having wider range, greater versatility, she is unrecognisable. 

I may say more, but words are inadequate. Just watch the film.

Vivien Leigh as Catherine Earnshaw

might not have been a bad idea after all.
Catherine Earnshaw in "Wuthering heights" is 1 of the roles Vivien Leigh very much wanted to play but couldn't, together with Ophelia and Elizabeth Bennet and Joan Fontaine's role in "Rebecca".


So far I have generally thought her not perfectly suitable for the role, because she had such a classical, impeccable beauty that didn't seem right for Catherine Earnshaw. But then, could anyone expect the lovely, charming Vivien Leigh to transform into Scarlett O'Hara? Clark Gable, for example, said "I’ll be truthful about it, however; I’ll confess that the first time I saw her I doubted that Vivien could really play Scarlett. That reaction shows I’m no casting director." Vivien not only became Scarlett, spoilt, frivolous, vain, materialistic, manipulative, mischievous and selfish yet charming, determined, strong, independent and smart, but she also made it impossible for (most) people to conceive the idea of a remake of "Gone with the wind" with another actress playing Scarlett, and at the same time, defined the Southern belle so strongly that Bette Davis's performance as Jezebel the year before paled in comparison and so would anyone who played a Southern belle. Come to think of it, Scarlett O'Hara and Catherine Earnshaw are similar in some aspects- both are selfish, both choose money over love, both are full of life and somehow destructive and self-destructive. Vivien must have seen in Scarlett what she had in herself that she could make use of- strength, independence and self-determination. Fans of "Gone with the wind" must be familiar with the legend of the film itself, the making of a masterpiece, the story of how Vivien made up her mind on fighting for the role and beat hundreds of other actresses in the race (including Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis) and then proved all doubters wrong, which isn't much different from the way Scarlett O'Hara swears to God "I'll never be hungry again" and does whatever it requires to survive and achieve her goals. Similarly, I think Vivien wanted the main role in "Wuthering heights" not for the sole purpose of acting opposite Laurence Olivier, but because she believed that she had the qualities to portray Catherine Earnshaw. Look at her, Vivien was indeed pulchritudinous, 1 of the most gorgeous actresses to grace the silver screen, if not the most, but in addition to that charm and sweetness and the perfect features, there was something else, indescribable, since Vivien didn't possess the kind of refreshing, innocent and youthful image of Audrey Hepburn, nor the soft, gentle look of Ingrid Bergman, but seemed to have some kind of fire, something wild and fierce, even destructive and dangerous. From what I've read, she was in general a very passionate person, and then had to struggle in "her possession by that uncannily evil monster" (Larry's words). The sentence describing Catherine Earnshaw can apply perfectly to her: "She burned too bright for this world."


Above all, unlike Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly..., Vivien Leigh's not a film star, but an actress, and a great one. And whilst people talk of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis more often, I admire Vivien more for the fact that, as she didn't belong to Hollywood, she was as different in her roles as she could, and wasn't stuck to 1 definite persona. These 2 actresses were undoubtedly excellent, but after all in films Katharine Hepburn was always Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis was always Bette Davis, Vivien, albeit often vivacious, managed to be different, and a decade after Scarlett O'Hara, she again played a Southern belle in "A streetcar named Desire", a totally different one, and again did it so wonderfully and reached such an unimaginable height in acting that she was Blanche DuBois as much as Blanche DuBois was her, that one reads Tennessee Williams's play and hears her voice, that one sees Jessica Lange in the same role in the TV version and only sees Jessica Lange as Vivien as Blanche DuBois (and, as I've read, it's the same with other actresses who have played the character in theatre after Vivien Leigh). Most admirable is the way she made use of her inner demon for her craft, her performance, as she portrayed the smallest nuances, the vulnerability and fragility, the insecurity and desperation and despair underneath the shifting mood, the snobbery and frivolity of the character. Her theatrical acting was the most appropriate approach. She turned into the character, and defined the character. 

The only thing to resent is that Vivien made the mistake of choosing theatre over film. And that she didn't get the role of Catherine Earnshaw, which, I now believe, she could have played marvellously.

Photos of Audrey Hepburn (P.4)