70. Tertium Quid: “The Green Knight” and Patricia Wilde’s Sanguinic, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
Mme Sesostris insisted that I take a look at the new David Lowery movie The Green Knight, so off we went to the local multiplex, where you can currently watch a movie without masks if you are fully vaccinated. Our resident psychic had caught Knight on opening day, so she was able to fill me in with spoiler-free information to aid my comprehension of the film. That’s what I intend here, but I have to warn you that I am going to give away some plot points that my reader may wish to encounter in the theater unassisted by yours truly. And that brings me to another suggestion: that you do, indeed, see the film in a theater. No matter how big a screen you have at home, here is a film that must be encountered at your neighborhood multiplex. Lowery’s direction plays with visual weight and movement torsions, including the shifting of “up” to “down”, as he forces the viewer to question ocular evidence moment by moment. For a hand-held camera sequence, you need a large hall and a wide wall for immersive projection. Some of the movie’s dialogue is all but whispered, so you may lose a few syllables here and there, but that is a small price to pay for the visual bravura of The Green Knight. (My readers care about visual bravura!) Madame has the entire film memorized, so she can check me for errors in my review.
The movie is an adaptation of a fourteenth century poem, Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, by an anonymous bard who wrote in a version of Middle English. My knowledge of the work is through the English translation of Simon Armitage (Faber and Faber, 2007). The protagonist of the original poem, Sir Gawain, is a young knight who sits next to his uncle King Arthur at Christmas festivities at Camelot. The feast is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious Green Knight who proposes a game: he will receive a single blow from any one of Arthur’s men brave enough to face an equivalent blow from him in one year’s time. None of the Knights rushes to take up the challenge, but our hero, Gawain, volunteers. He handily chops off the Green Knight’s head, but the body of the victim picks up the decapitated item, places it on its shoulders and rides off to await Gawain in one year. When the time passes, the young knight journeys to seek out the Green Chapel, where his challenger awaits.
The Gawain of the poem eventually arrives at a distant castle where the Lord invites him to stay in preparation for the fated encounter and even promises to help him find the Green Chapel. As part of the festivities, the Lord brings various hunt trophies back to his castle each day and presents them to Gawain as tributes: a deer, a boar, and a fox. In return, Gawain must endure the blandishments of the Lord’s own Lady in his keep, a beauty who entices the young knight toward her bed with kisses across three days. He resists her entreaties each time. The Lord demands that Gawain reciprocate his generosity with any “bounty” he has obtained daily within the castle walls. Thus, Gawain bestows upon his host one, two, and then three kisses in reply. (The Gawain poem is deeply into the chivalric idea of the game that is a serious test of honor.) When our perfect, chaste hero finally meets the Green Knight, he learns that the castle’s Lord has been his magical challenger all along in disguise. Gawain survives the blow of the Green Knight, and the poem ends happily with his return to Camelot with honor.
The film is quite different. Lowery’s story is about a layabout young man who is not yet a Knight of the Round Table. His mother appears to be a sorceress (Morgan le Fay perhaps) who summons the Green Knight to Camelot’s Christmas festivities, perhaps as a test for her son. The youngster decapitates the challenger and becomes famous -- if folk puppet plays are a sufficient form of fame. A year passes, and he sets off for his meeting with the Green Knight. On the way, Gawain crosses a battlefield where he is the victim of scavengers; they take the protective belt his mother had given him on his departure. Gawain then has encounters with a beautiful ghost, a group of giant women slowly heading north, and a talking fox. When he arrives at the castle of the Lord and Lady, his hostess rapes him manually and gives him another magic belt. The chief change that Lowery makes to the story’s ending is a vision scene as Gawain faces his own decapitation, in which he dreams of avoiding the game’s test, returning to Camelot, replacing Arthur as King, and leading a life in which he cannot look anyone in the eye because he has not fulfilled his quest in honorable fashion. (This “last temptation” may be indebted to Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ.) But Lowery arranges at the last moment for Gawain to face his fate bravely and obey the rules of the game. The Green Knight withholds his blow, and tells Gawain, “You must not lose your head!” This is the final word of the movie. It is voiced by the actor who played the manipulative Lord of the castle.
The ten-minute virtuoso vision scene in which Gawain imagines an alternative climax to his story is done primarily with powerful visuals, and indeed the director of the movie is a brilliant maker of images. If you have seen his Pete’s Dragon or A Ghost Story, you know how much information he can convey with his eye and his camera. The movie’s cinematographer is Andrew Droz Palermo. Together, Lowery and Palermo create fascinating low-light visions that remind one of the work of Sven Nykvist for Ingmar Bergman.
Tutored by Madame Sesostris, I have my own interpretation of what the film The Green Knight accomplishes on its own terms. I take the theme of the movie to be the effort of one medieval youngster to join his Body to his Soul. (You can see my derivation of this concept in the physical act of decapitation itself.) If you have read C. S. Lewis on this theme (in his 1964 The Discarded Image), you know that one of the core beliefs of medieval minds was the importance of spirits (or Spirit) for providing the tertium quid which joins the two realms, Body and Soul, and thereby constitutes a mature, responsible human being, or Knight. In the film The Green Knight, the world of spirits is depicted in Gawain’s adventures on the way to the Green Chapel: the encounter with the ghost of Winifred, the vision of female giants, and the intercessions of the talking fox. Each of these cinematic anecdotes is an original development of the poem’s details. For example, the only hint of Winifred’s tale is two words in the poem: Holy Head. Lowery has invented the details of each encounter. What becomes clear is that Gawain’s innate passivity before the various visions he is vouchsafed is a sign of his immaturity. Winifred almost has to force him to rescue her head from the depths of an adjacent pool. The giants provide no map to his goal. And Gawain does not listen to the advice of the fox as he nears the fearsome Chapel. It is one of the achievements of actor Dev Patel as a feckless Gawain, that he manages to make the young man’s frequent failures watchable across more than two hours.
Lowery has photographed anti-heroic actions in an heroic visual style. The close-ups of the faces throughout the movie are indebted to Sergei Eisenstein. The camera movement is expressive in the mode of Ophuls and Kurosawa. I am thinking of a long tracking shot on the dire battlefield in which the continuous movement of the camera and of Gawain on his horse is capped by a sudden weight given to Gawain’s steed as he is reigned in and halted. You feel that cessation in your bones. Or the way horse and rider are photographed in a raging windstorm, so that their slow progress in the half-light exactly catches the beleaguered atmosphere and its moment: the pacing, the camera lens, the proximity of the camera to its subjects, all are contributive. Lowery physicalizes a magical world.
I am also impressed with what Palermo accomplishes with his darkling images and camera scans across the visual field. As his camera pans in close-up above a textured surface, the cinematography manages to evoke what look like intermediary colors – golds, reds, blues -- that flicker center-screen and render the shifting chromatics all the more vivid in their evanescence. It is as though the movie has become an animated tapestry whose every detail is luminous, gold thread into gold weave. Needless to say, you have to see the movie in a theater in order to appreciate this effect. I was mesmerized.
This fascinating film uses the medieval lore of the Gawain poem to its own modern ends. Another example of successful exploitation of such themes would be The Four Temperaments, the 1946 ballet by George Balanchine to the music of Paul Hindemith, currently in the repertories of many companies around the world. It so happens that a video of the late Patricia Wilde’s Sanguinic Variation from this ballet has been posted on the internet as a tribute to her artistry upon her recent death on July 17 at the age of 93. Wilde is famous for having created the ballerina role in Balanchine’s brilliant 1957 ballet Square Dance; upon retirement as a performer she became a director of the school of American Ballet Theatre, a much in-demand teacher and coach, and eventually the artistic director of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater for fourteen years. Wilde did not create the Sanguinic role in The Four Temperaments (it may have been made on Mary Ellen Moylan, who also died recently), but you can see what a triumph she had in the ballet thanks to the video now available for viewing without charge. You will be watching a performance by New York City Ballet filmed in the early 1960s for broadcast on Canadian television. (The complete film of the performance is also currently streaming on the internet at no charge. Wilde’s Sanguinic is the highlight.) She is partnered by a young Anthony Blum.
Wilde was rightly admired for her strong and varied allegro technique (the poet Frank O’Hara celebrated Pat Wilde’s expert “ten steps” in one of his journal verses). But she also had balletic line and the ability to encompass a densely detailed role with her dance imagination. This response to Balanchine’s fantasy distinguishes her among her sister ballerinas at the company during the 1950s and early 1960s. You not only see her mental and physical strengths but her ability to leave a clear image behind – not only the design idea that the choreographer imparts to the work but the ballerina’s complicity in achieving a movement insignia.
You also see how lightly she can trace Balanchine’s patterns in the stage space and air. Every effect is under control and rendered fleet in delivery. What you notice is the reliance of performer and choreographer upon the ability of the dance image to be replaced quickly and definitively with yet another design, and then yet another, and another. Wilde makes sure that each visual conceit arrives without blur and without visible preparation. She has a way of pouncing, cat-like, upon the cadential bracketings in Hindemith’s score. Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments features throughout an Egyptian look in profiled figuration, and the Sanguinic movement is a challenge for the ballerina’s regular shifting of shape. Like a new Cleopatra, she must have infinite plastic variety. Wilde’s achievement reminded me of films of Balanchine’s Don Quixote, in which Suzanne Farrell is incisive in the role of Dulcinea.
Veterans of 4Ts know that the various lead roles of its Variations are not really portraits of “people” suffering from an excess of each temperament. One must look beyond conventional dramatic characterization. We are watching something closer to allegory, in which a lead becomes the medieval humour itself, something like its poetic embodiment. However, Balanchine does “characterize” the female role here to some extent. On one level, we are watching a châtelaine accept the attentions of a new admirer in her Court of Love. We see this character in the way she is tipped back toward him upon their entrances, her plumb line displaced by the invisible, pointed hennin this medieval mistress is wearing on her head. We can also see such a persona in the opening entrée in which the lover invites his lady to dance with him and she consents gladly. These touches are there in the choreography, and Wilde uses a delicacy of suggestion to communicate their implications.
She is able to render a tender regard by recognizing that her partner is present. At one early point, after having joined him in unison dance, the ballerina separates from him with a formal salute. And then she falls back twice, off pointe, to return to his arms. It is Wilde’s quick turn of the head and her hand gesture toward him that show the warm bond. I emphasize this ballerina’s evenness of dance production because it makes such details stand out. We notice the relational implications almost subliminally. We are watching acts of trust.
The ballerina’s traversal of this role’s technical difficulties paints a portrait of a strong, dominant personality, one that takes pleasure in fidelity in love. You may be reminded of a passage in the Gawain poem in which the Lady who will attempt his seduction is described: “The body of the beauty seemed to bloom with blood.” Sanguinic describes a vortex of erotic desire which captures its willing participants and renders their partnership in ritual action. Wilde gives herself up to this rite even as she physicalizes its inhuman force.
Which is another way of saying that if Balanchine’s Sanguinic is portrayed in Body (the ballet’s inherited tradition of technique and composition) and in Soul (the dance idiom made personal and plastic before the amatory theme), what would be its abiding Spirit which connects the two? Perhaps we could fall back on Diaghliev’s reply to one of Cocteau’s queries: “Ah, that is the mystery of Terpsichore, my dear.” But in this case, we also have a performer in Patricia Wilde who makes a living connection in her assumption of the role. She is the tertium quid. Perhaps her essential contribution can be found in the hidden strengths that make her seemingly unforced momentum constitutive of the “meaning” of the Variation. Her steady dedication in this dance points beyond to the entire statement of the ballet and its revelations about a general medieval sensibility.
The Four Temperaments was made as the first work presented by Ballet Society, the forerunner of New York City Ballet, and like many post-War efforts, its goal was partially a salvage operation. Yes, Balanchine seems to insist, despite Europe’s wreckage, we can have the ballet, and it can be what we have always been drawn to and it can be open to innovation. The choreographer attracted dancers who were brilliant conservators and explorers. Patricia Wilde was there to hold fast and to dare.
In the new movie The Green Knight we see a world where the inhabitants can appear so contemporary, so like many Americans today in their doubts and fears. We could be said to be watching a kind of mass paranoid hysteria on and off screen. No one trusts anymore. The movie’s young Gawain has to learn that skill. But in Balanchine’s ballet, the two lovers are adepts. Wilde’s Sanguinic incarnates the social adhesive and the private rite.
P.H.
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