1966


As all of my computer time is either at work or with my wife and children in the next room, I do not spend a lot of time looking at anything on the internet that comes with sound, especially such videos as involve young women talking about themselves or other subjects that would be considered controversial for the likes of me to be indulging in. Thus whenever I do venture onto Youtube, it is usually in search of some quick hit of inoffensive (in the context of bourgeois taste) pop culture candy that feeds whatever particular emotional hunger I have lately been feeling. Last week I stumbled upon exactly the sort of thing I happened to be looking for (I hope this works). I was indeed so much taken with this little snippet that I rented and watched the whole movie, which I had never seen, nor had had any particular interest in seeing, before; and while as expected it is not really very good, it is the sort of movie that if I were reduced to living alone in a trailer park or dreary hotel room in Arizona and it came on TV at 2am I would watch the whole thing, because I feel a connection to it, one that is obviously satisfying. But whence this connection to a really silly movie from a foreign country made before I was born? I have my suspicions.

The Song. This is odd because when I was growing up I did not like the song at all, thinking it too precious or contrived perhaps, the kind of thing that somebody in the 60s thought was cool when it wasn't. This last is still more or less my impression but the angle from which I regard it now is more attractive. That is, while it still is not cool by the standards of the authentic cool people, by those of the comotose poppy mainstream, and the dreary social and sexual lives it is well established that they lead, it is comparatively high fun without being hopelessly inaccessible. I think actually this is the secret to the whole movie, because it also has...

London. This is not today's too cool for people like me, multicultural, everybody is cosmopolitan London, but still the dowdy, rainy, somber, fish and chip eating, schoolboys wearing short pants, shabby black jacket and necktie wearing London of the postwar years. It has taken me until my 30s, probably because the idea seemed too hopeless, but I finally realize that London is, and always has been, even before I went there, my favorite city, and of all the great world-cities the one most compatible with my mind and temperament. Everybody can laugh if they want, but I am pretty certain that this is true. When I saw the opening clip, where Georgy is running up and down past all the storefronts, so many of the details, the faces in the store windows, the signs, the store displays, the staircase she runs down, the sinks in the bathroom, etc, were all familiar to me. Now I was born not long after the film was made and therefore certain qualities and details of the period, even in England, would have been recognizable or come back vividly enough to my memory, but not every movie from this period inspires such a recognition. One of the disappointments of the rest of the movie is that after the opening sequence the crowds and car traffic on the streets thins considerably, and the sense of London as a bustling city is diminished. But for me at least there are other aspects of the movie to identify with. Namely...

British Sex circa 1940-1970. The sex scenes, or at least the foreplay scenes, in the movie, even those involving Charlotte Rampling, who is of a very high type of desirability such as the most successful seducers of every age eternally contend for, are to me among the more accurate representations of what these events are really like to appear on celluloid. For me many of the most realistic, as well as endearing, sex scenes, both in writing and film, are in works made or set in Britain during the period noted above, with an especially heavy concentration between about 1960-1966. The downside of this of course is that the quality of the sex that was had in this era by the types of characters having it is generally considered to be substandard to awful by the standards of most desirable people of the present day. But as I am pretty certain I will never have sex like a sophisticated Frenchman or Spaniard; as cinematic Swedes are too good-looking, smart, deep and serious for me to relate to their understanding of the subject; as American movies and books are mainly about triumphing over one's rivals to win the cheerleader or the doctor, or scoring as a way to attain status (men) or sophistication (women, usually by having affairs with Europeans or older millionaires) rather than about actual intimacy between people with something in common; I think the old fumbling with buttons and brastraps scene in a London flat or Brighton hotel following an evening in a grimy pub will always maintain their place in my affections as a reminder that somewhere, at sometime, there were intelligent and even kind of sexy people whose life somewhat resembled my own, which is one of the more comforting thoughts available to a man of my biography and circumstances.

The year 1966 of course was a major transitional year in Western culture/lifestyle. It has always loomed much larger to me than perhaps is really warranted, on account of my having been born shortly after this year, so much after which seemed to be a complete break with what seemed to me even as a small child the far more attractive and more pleasant world that my parents and grandparents, and indeed everyone I knew, had lived most of their own lives in. Whatever was going on in the 60s that was somewhat cool, '66 was the last year of it. Without writing a dissertation on this well-worn subject, many of the developments, particularly in fashion, sociability, education, scholarship, etc that began to kick in after that year did not seem to me as an uninformed child, and still do not as an only slightly more-informed adult, to be great improvements over what had prevailed formerly.

An important part of the sense of transition adhering to the year 1966 that does not seem to me to get enough attention is that is was the last year large numbers of movies and TV shows were filmed in black and white. While there may have been a few stragglers in '67 and '68, I cannot think of any offhand. Everything pretty much went color starting in '67. But in '66, besides Georgy Girl, I can think of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, as well as the great Czech new wave films Closely Watched Trains and Loves of a Blonde (Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky--sorry, but it is a great title in Czech. I'm sure there are others. Anyway, these four films look completely 'natural' in B & W, and give absolutely no indication that they are to be among the very last of their kind, which kind constitutes an entirely different experience from color, and even today continues to prop up the idea in the public mind of the cinema as something glamorous, romantic and exciting, apart from being possessed of artistic merit, which modern films, even those of a high quality, can rarely duplicate. This last is in part due to the nature of the filmviewing experience. Most movies now being watched at home, on television, the flow of the images controlled by the viewer, he is susceptible to the distractions of normal life, which is significantly different from going into a darkened theater for several hours and giving oneself up from all other stimuli and concerns, which is apparently too much to ask of busy people in the 21st century. But the shift from black and white to all color should not be underestimated either, I think. Black and white cinematography puts a much greater emphasis on the human face vis-a-vis natural scenery, furniture or other backgrounds which have come to play so prominent a part in films now, and while colors allow for spectacular effects in certain circumstances, it has changed the nature of filmmaking so strongly that characters become less existentially central to the process, and therefore less prominently delineated in the writing and the mind of the viewer.

I am going to stop here.