On the roof of the world

[imomus]

I've been watching two film fictions set in the Himalayas. Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937) was the most expensive film of its day, and popularised the idea of Shangri-La, a sheltered valley established centuries ago by (Christian) monks from Belgium, and entirely cut off from both the storms raging around it and the rest of the world (which, in 1937, had storms of its own to contend with).



Shangri-La is a utopian community ruled by the Golden Mean (moderation in all things, including moderation), in which people live vastly expanded lifespans. The architecture has a League of Nations feel to it, a series of conference centres balanced amongst vineyards and stepped orchards. Shangri-La is like Summerisle without the human sacrifice. Sections of the film have gone missing, and have been replaced with slide sequences which add to the strangeness, giving the film levels of ostranenie normally found only in art video.



My other Himalayan excursion was filmed just ten years later, in colour. Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) is a much richer world, visually. Again we're in a Christian environment, this time a nunnery perched high in the mountains. Black Narcissus is one of the most beautiful films ever made, with its rich early colour photography. It concerns human sensuality tugging at the respectable habits of life in a religious retreat, and sublimation being defeated by the arrival of spring, the incursions of various impudently sexy outsiders, and the gorgeous Himalayan scenery itself.

Comments

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Spitting on a glass palace is so much easier than building one.

[(Anonymous)]

a lovely quote LW ..I would steal it and use it for my own instant gratification if I didn't already know how to extinguish the sun..

happy new year to you and your nearest and dearest..I always enjoy reading your insightful comments on Click Opera.

maf

[shadowshark.livejournal.com]

Oh, very clever, yes. I didn't put my argument together very well (I think of livejournal comments as more like text messages than critical footnotes), but if you've seen the movie, then maybe you'll understand these problems I have with the movie: 1, that the idea of paradise is just to find a slice of English-speaking European architecture in the middle of 'nowhere,'
2, that the Belgian monk is not motivated by a love of humanity, but by a dislike of it. He lamented man's "vulgar passions" and started Shangri-la to preserve Europe's treasure and culture against the doom that was rushing in towards it. A quote from him:
"Look at the world today! Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is, what blindness, what unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality."
Don't you find that the least bit infantile? I'm not saying anti-nihilism is infantile, but this is not that. It's a self-righteous youth marking his territory with dislike of people masked as belief in them.
3, what I meant in bringing up the Dostoevsky quote what not a cynical 'damn him for trying!' It's the point that people aren't meant for a Shangri-la, and unerring kindness toward one another, and that you can't damn them all for having yin along with yang.
4, the whole subplot of George and the Russian woman is very poorly put together--he's just in hysterics throughout the whole movie, an explanation for his dislike of Shangri-la is never given, and he melodramatically throws himself over a cliff at the end with little real cause. Maybe you and Nick like that harsh, Old Testament-esque moral stance, but I don't!
The screenplay is here if you want it: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Lost-Horizon.html

Spitting on

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Ah Eugene have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of all the pleasures one tastes in outraging them. Come, my sweet virtue is but a chimera whose worship consists exclusively in perpetual immolation's, unnumbered rebellions against the temperaments inspirations. Can such impulse be natural? (Marquis de Sade, 1792.)


Is there room for order and faith?