O Dear, O Dear

 He keeps popping into this blog but I disguise his identity and make no attempt to link his appearances. Over a course of three years- or something like- we (because he attends the Quaker meeting) have seen him devolve from eccentric to psychogeriatric. He craves help but refuses help. Self pity has eaten his brain. He still has his moments of lucidity- when he can discourse with apparent cheerfulness on renaissance art and politics- but mainly now he paces and mutters. "O dear, O dear". Most of us have heard his story by now but if if someone new comes by he'll corner them if he can and perform his ancient mariner act. We apologise to one another for going out of our way to avoid him....

Lee

 I don't like biopics. They isolate, simplfy, betray. This is true even of what I take to be the greatest of all biopics, Lawrence of Arabia. Want to know about Lawrence? Don't start here; so much is wrong. For starters Peter O'Toole is very tall and Lawrence was very short.....

Ken Russell had the right idea. He didn't do cradle to grave. Cradles were for rocking madly and graves for dancing on, both to the music of whatever composer he was having fun with. He reduced the life of Tchaikovsky- in his own words as I remember them- to the story of a homosexual married to a nymphomaniac. He reduced the life of Mahler to the story of a Jew married to a Nazi. He turned the life of Liszt into a psychedelic, head banging rock and roll circus, with added Nazis. His films isolate, simplify, betray- and don't pretend otherwise- but by God they're cinematic!

Last night we watched Lee. The biopic about Lee Miller. Who was Lee Miller? She was a model, a muse, a photographer, a war correspondent, a drunk, a lady of the manor. The film can only hint at much of this. For instance she was a friend of Picasso- and he was the first person she went to visit when she entered Paris with the US army.- but he doesn't appear at all or even get a mention-  but then how could you reduce him to a walk on part in someone else's life story; he was too big, too dominant, too mythic. Where the movie succeeds is as a story about war and the effects of war.  As I watched it I had two thoughts, one after the other: firstly that I avoided this god-awful mess by a mere six years, secondly that war is so bloody, bloody stupid.

Lee was a witness who fixed her memories by photographing them. She saw the Yanks use napalm against German positions at St Malo, women who'd slept with Germans having their heads shaved in liberated Paris, railway carriages and storerooms piled up with corpses in Buchenwald and Dachau. When she got to Berlin she blagged her way into Hitler's flat- then being used as a kind of clubhouse for American officers- and had herself photographed soaping her back in his bathtub. No wonder she suffered from PTSD! But then so did that entire generation- my parents not excluded.....

After the war Lee boxed up her pictures and stashed them away in the attic of her farmhouse. Her son didn't discover them until after her death- or really have any idea till then of who and what she'd been. They can be found online at the Lee Miller Archives, thousands of them, all higgledy-piggledy- fashion shots next to portraits of Picasso next to images of Dachau next to family snaps.  Quite extraordinary.