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PAUL NEWMAN
1925 - 2008
When You Travel Far
by William Ney
Always a damn cigarette ...
"
Lung cancer killed my father, too. Two years ago.
"
Stuart Rosenberg, director of Cool Hand Luke, died in March 2007.
I don't care if it rains or freezes ...
Long as I got my plastic Jesus ...
"
Sittin' on the dashboard of my car ...
Christ, what a movie ...
What a kick in the balls ...
Exhausting to take in ...
Near apogee of the movement to bring theater's capacity for realizing tragedy and social psychology to the screen.
The movement to bring postwar New York to Hollywood, one might say.
The hustling bustle of the French New Wave somehow washed it away.
The New Wave was mostly merely a youth movement. (And that's fine.)
But also something of a move against logos, supplanting dialog, drama, even stories, with motion, montage ...
The worship of The Image.
Could marketing professionals be far behind?
The anti-logos movement encompassed more than French movies:
All the world briefly celebrated Robbe-Grillet's doctrine of the New Novel, in which psychology and exposition were left behind in favor of the appearances.
Today however we call this a film treatment.
And Derrida's ingenious Deconstruction was little more than exuberant
jejune high jinks with what Hegel, probably smiling, had called his Logic:
a way of showing how the nature of things is to pull themselves apart ...
... to Become something else and better.
Rocky Graziano
Nihilism being no less creative than death.
France, you see, in 1960 was still entranced by her first glance of Hegel, who for no good reasons (Bonaparte, Bismarck, Flanders Field ...) was not welcome back home until the cycle of Franco-Fritz nationalist wars had terminated with the Nazi regime.
Indeed 
, the brilliant heart of the matter,
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), was not translated into French until 1941 nor widely circulated until 1957.
The rest of the world, meanwhile, had already digested that boggling ball of fire before the first war.
The youthful revolution of postwar France, then, with its fascination for negation, was something of a throwback. But burst upon the local thinkers, and then the world, with the energy of an unpent reservoir streaming through a dam.
Hence some of the power and insurgent feel of the New Wave's naive aneantissement createur, which overwhelmed movie makers and theorists alike, and snuffed New York's stagecrafty approach as stodgy.
(Revenge, perhaps, for hustling Modern Painting from Paris during the war.)
Not that great American films were not to come, or that the New Wave is not
a glory of cinema.
But something humane that I miss was left behind.
At the '68 Convention -- Chicago -- with Arthur Miller
Campaigning for the AFL-CIO and Gore in 2000
Daughter Nel, partner in the food business
Our Town, on Broadway in 2002
The loss weighs heavier than one would have thought.
Perhaps something to do with the peripherals ...
His loyal, persistent practice of politics.
His philanthropy.
His wonderful wife and their modest private life -- exemplars ...
... for wayward American well-to-do's raised on frontier thinking and greed.
An admirable man all around.
Hard to find ...
I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Sittin' on the dashboard of my car
Comes in colors, pink and pleasant
Glows in the dark 'cause it's irridescent
Take it with you when you travel far
Index of photographs.
Comments are welcome and may be posted here.
