Why Mr Markle wasn't at the Royal Wedding...

Dead Poets Society #77 Robert Penn Warren: San Francisco Night Windows

Robert Penn Warren: San Francisco Night Windows

So hangs the hour like fruit fullblown and sweet,
Our strict and desperate avatar,
Despite that antique westward gulls lament
Over enormous waters which retreat
Weary unto the white and sensual star.
Accept these images for what they are--
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.
Think you, hungry is the city in the fog
Where now the darkened piles resume
Their framed and frozen prayer
Articulate and shafted in the stone
Against the void and absolute air.
If so the frantic breath could be forgiven,
And the deep blood subdued before it is gone
In a savage paternoster to the stone,
Then might we all be shriven.

Ron Sexsmith at The Split Chimp, Newcastle

Ian arrives in America and contemplates five weeks without the FNB...

J. D. Salinger and the Nazis

I know, I know... the title sounds like one of those God-awful Channel 4 type documentaries where you can substitute 'Pyramids' or 'Sharks' for 'Nazis,' but...

J. D. Salinger and the Nazis
Eberhard Alsen

Uncovering the impact of Salinger's World War II experience

Before J.D. Salinger became famous for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye and infamous as a literary recluse, he was a soldier in World War II. While serving in the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Europe, Salinger wrote more than twenty short stories and returned home with a German war bride. Eberhard Alsen, through meticulous archival research and careful analysis of the literary record, corrects mistaken assumptions about the young writer's war years and their repercussions. Though recent biographies and films claim that Salinger regularly participated in combat, Alsen cites military documents showing that his counterintelligence work was well behind the front lines.

Alsen, a longtime Salinger scholar who witnessed the Nazi regime firsthand as a child in Germany, tracks Salinger's prewar experiences in the army, his work for the CIC during significant military campaigns, and his reactions to three military disasters that killed more than a thousand fellow soldiers in his Fourth Infantry Division. Alsen also identifies the Nazi death camp where Salinger saw mounds of recently burned bodies. Revealing details shed light on Salinger's outspoken disgust for American military leaders, the personality changes that others saw in him after the war, and his avoidance of topics related to the Holocaust.

Eberhard Alsen is a professor emeritus of English at Cortland College, State University of New York. He is the author of several books, including A Reader's Guide to J.D. Salinger and Salinger's Glass Stories as a Composite Novel.

https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/5662.htm#pk

Saviour

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #450

Mario Carnicelli: America in the 60s

Schoolboy, New York, 1966

South Pacific Restaurant, Chicago, 1966

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, 1967

Men Wanted shopfront, Chicago, 1966

Two girls in a car, Washington DC, 1967

Queue at job centre, Chicago, 1966

Fashion students, New York, 1966

Trade union workers, Detroit, 1966

Airport payphones, Chicago, 1966

Barber College, Chicago, 1966

Yellow cab, Chicago, 1966


Window Nurses, New York, 1966

http://www.davidhillgallery.net/


American Voyage: Photographs by Mario Carnicelli

Beautiful portrait of America in the 1960s, rediscovered after 50 years

In 1966, Mario Carnicelli won first place in an Italian national photography competition sponsored by Popular Photography magazine and Mamiya and Pentax. The prize was a scholarship to photograph America.

Carnicelli was fascinated by the almost reckless freedom offered by America, with its mix of cultures and traditions, its fashion and individuality; while at the same time he was aware of a pervading loneliness and rootlessness in people separated from family and clan. This beautiful book features over 150 colour and black and white images of America in the 1960s. It transcends other books on a similar subject matter; the photographs are truly compelling, drawing the reader/viewer into Carnicelli’s world. He approached the country as an outsider, and yet his perspective managed to capture the essence of the American experience. His photographs are a captivating, optimistic and contemplative look at the complexity of ordinary people living the American dream.

These photographs were recently rediscovered after 50 years, and the book’s release coincides with an exhibition of this work at Morton Hill Gallery in London.

MARIO CARNICELLI (b.1937) was exposed to photography from a young age, through his family’s photography business in Pistoia, Italy. He went on to document public events, demonstrations and political meetings. His style was in uenced by the humanistic approach, photographers like Lewis Hine and the FSA-photographers. He worked for national newspapers and magazines and had several solo exhibitions of his work during the 1960s and 1970s, before retiring from photography in the 1970s to focus on running his own photography business. Many of his photographs, including his American Voyage essays, have lain forgotten until now.

ISBN: 978-1-909526-57-0
160pp; hardback; 150+ colour and b/w photographs
275 x 230mm / 10.75 x 9 in

Photographs by Mario Carnicelli

Edited by Tony Nourmand

http://www.reelartpress.com/catalog/edition/112/american-voyage

http://www.mariocarnicelli.com/

Dead Poets Society #76 Stevie Smith: Drugs Made Pauline Vague

Stevie Smith - Drugs Made Pauline Vague

Drugs made Pauline vague.
She sat one day at the breakfast table
Fingering in a baffled way
The fronds of the maidenhair plant.

Was it the salt you were looking for dear?
said Dulcie, exchanging a glance with the Brigadier.

Chuff chuff Pauline what's the matter?
Said the Brigadier to his wife
Who did not even notice
What a handsome couple they made.

Last night's set lists at The Habit, York

At The Habit, York: -

Ron Elderly: -
Try A Little Tenderness
Dead Flowers

Da Elderly: -
Harvest
Heart Of Gold

The Elderly Brothers: -
Then I Kissed Her
Hello Mary Lou
Bus Stop
Crying In The Rain
Surfin' USA

It was a busy one on a wet night. Our host kicked off with two original songs, backed by TWO bass players (see above) - a first for The Habit and probably most other venues. Highlights included: Stan covering Slow Train Coming and singing an excellent original song; Chris getting everyone singing along with California Dreaming and some deft harmonica work by a young guy who also wielded a resonator guitar. The Elderly Brothers finished off the night and included two songs appropriate for the weather conditions!

P.S. there will be no reports from The Habit for the next few weeks as Da is away on vacation.

W. C. Fields: the soul behind the gag

W. C. Fields

James Curtis

The New York Times

30 March 2003

Comedy, Bill Fields would say, is truth-a bit of artful reality, expressed in action or words, carefully exaggerated and brought to a surprise finish. Fields didn't think the mechanics of a gag counted for half as much as the soul behind it. You might coax a laugh from a willing audience over most anything, but a gag wouldn't be memorable without the delight of human recognition.

The comedy Fields propounded reached its apogee with a modest sixty-seven-minute film called It's a Gift. In it, he plays an everyman-hardworking, beset by life's frustrations, caring and respectful of a family that no longer appreciates him. He dreams his dreams in private. He is not brilliant, lovable, or even admirable, but his dignity never leaves him, and, in the end, he triumphs as much through luck as perseverance. When it was released, in November 1934, It's a Gift was a minor event, bound for a quick playoff in what Variety referred to as "the nabes." But the critics took notice, and a groundswell of enthusiasm for the fifty-four-year-old Fields and his work, which had been building for eighteen months, suddenly erupted. Andre Sennwald, writing in the New York Times, referred to Fields' growing legion of fans as "idolaters," and, although not necessarily one himself, he concluded his notice by sweeping away all doubt that one of the great comedies of the so! und era had arrived. "The fact is that Mr. Fields has come back to us again, and It's a Gift automatically becomes the best screen comedy on Broadway."

As Fields pointed out, the appeal of his character was rooted in the characteristics audiences saw in themselves. "You've heard the old legend that it's the little put-upon guy who gets the laughs, but I'm the most belligerent guy on the screen. I'm going to kill everybody. But, at the same time, I'm afraid of everybody-just a great big frightened bully. There's a lot of that in human nature. When people laugh at me, they're laughing at themselves. Or, at least, the next fellow."

Like Mark Twain, Fields believed humor sprang naturally from tragedy, and that it was normal and therefore acceptable to behave badly when things went wrong. One of the key sequences in It's a Gift shows an elderly blind man laying waste to Fields' general store with his cane. Afterward, Fields sends him out into a busy street, where he is almost run down in traffic. "I never saw anything funny that wasn't terrible," Fields said. "If it causes pain, it's funny; if it doesn't, it isn't."

"I was the first comic in world history, so they told me, to pick fights with children. I booted Baby LeRoy. The No-men-they're even worse than the Yes-men-shook their heads and said it would never go; people wouldn't stand for it ... then, in another picture, I kicked a little dog.... The No-men said I couldn't do that either. But I got sympathy both times. People didn't know what the unmanageable baby might do to get even, and they thought the dog might bite me."

The conniving and bibulous character Fields developed caught the public imagination at a time when the nation was deep in the throes of the Great Depression and the sale of liquor was still prohibited by law. He appeared on the scene as the embodiment of public misbehavior, a man not so much at odds with authority as completely oblivious to it. He drank because he enjoyed it and cheated at cards because he was good at it. Fields wasn't a bad sort, but rather a throwback to a time when such behaviors were perfectly innocuous and government wasn't quite so paternalistic. Harold Lloyd called him "the foremost American comedian," and Buster Keaton considered him, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harry Langdon, the greatest of all film comics. "His comedy is unique, original, and side-splitting."

Fields had the courage to cast himself in the decidedly unfavorable light of a bully and a con man. He not only summed up the frustrations of the common man-he did something about them. Unlike most comedians, he never asked to be loved; he was short-tempered, a coward, an outright faker at times. Chaplin was better known, Keaton more technically ambitious, and Laurel and Hardy were certainly more beloved, but Fields resonated with audiences in ways other comics did not. He wasn't a clown; he didn't dress like a tramp or live in the distant world of the London ghetto. Indeed, for most audiences he lived just down the street or around the corner. He was everyone's disagreeable uncle, or the tippling neighbor who warned off the local kids with a golf club. People responded to the honesty of Fields' character because, like Archie Bunker of a later generation, everyone knew somebody just like him. They admired him in a grudging sort of way, and saw the humanity beneath his thick crust of contempt for the world.

"The first thing I remember figuring out for myself was that I wanted to be a definite personality," he said. "I had heard a man say he liked a certain fellow because he was always the same dirty damn so and so. You know, like Larsen in Jack London's Sea Wolf. He was detestable, yet you admired him because he remained true to type. Well, I thought that was a swell idea, so I developed a philosophy of my own: Be your type! I determined that whatever I was, I'd be that, I wouldn't teeter on the fence."

The childhood Fields exaggerated for interviewers was vividly Dickensian, and his run-ins with his father had the brutal energy of Sennett slapstick. Yet the humanity he always strived for in his film treatments failed him when dredging up details of his own early life. He invariably described his father as an abusive scoundrel, his mother as ineffectual and sottish, and his younger self as a Philadelphian version of Huck Finn. He sprang from immigrant stock-his father was British-and however American Fields seemed, there was always an element of the outsider in the characters he played. He embraced the nomadic spirit of his grandfather, whom he never met, and although he was married to the same woman for the entirety of his adult life, he was always at odds with both her and the world, embattled and solitary.

Fields moved through a career that lasted nearly half a century, acquiring slowly the elements of the character by which he is known today. Onstage, he perfected what can best be described as the comedy of frustration, building one of his most popular routines on the petty distractions a golfer encounters while attempting to tee off. His seminal pool act was similarly constructed, leading him to conclude that "the funniest thing a comedian can do is not to do it." In films, he found his voice after an abortive career in silents and became, in the words of James Agee, "the toughest and most warmly human of all screen comedians."

His time as one of Hollywood's top draws was brief-barely six years-and by 1941 his audience had largely abandoned him. Radio, where he could still find work, drained him of any subtlety, due, in large part, to his boozy exchanges with Edgar Bergen's sarcastic dummy, Charlie McCarthy. In spite of his own best efforts, he was constantly at pains to justify a character that had become so fixed in the public mind that he was widely presumed to be the same man he portrayed onscreen. The day he died, Bob Hope made a joke about him on NBC. Hope implied he had seen Fields drunk: "I saw W. C. Fields on the street and waved, and he weaved back." The audience laughed; Fields was by then the most famous drunk in the world. It no longer mattered that he had never played a drunk in his life.

In 1880, travelers approaching Philadelphia from Delaware County and points south would generally pass through the tiny borough of Darby on their way to the Quaker City. Less than a mile square, Darby was a mill town and a transportation hub, home to 1,779 permanent residents and a cluster of paper and textile factories that fairly dominated the landscape. Every day, fifteen thousand workers flooded the town, making the central business district, which ran four blocks along Main Street between Tenth and Mill, second only to Chester in terms of size and importance. There were taprooms and cafs, a funeral parlor, a dozen churches, an Odd Fellows lodge, and one of the oldest free libraries in the nation. Both the B&O and Pennsylvania Railroads passed through Darby, and trolleys connected the Philadelphia line with Wilmington and Chester. Just beyond town were cattle and horse ranches and a vast blanket of farmland that stretched toward Media. Wealthy buyers in search of prime racing stock would put up at the Buttonwood Hotel, at the terminus of the Chester Traction Co. line, or sometimes at the Bluebell Tavern, up near Grays Ferry, where George Washington was said to have stopped on his way to Philadelphia for the second inaugural. Of Darby's several inns, however, only one actually catered to the horse trade-a simple stone building at the southeast corner of Main and Mill Streets known as the Arlington House.

Older than the Buttonwood and less historic than the Bluebell, the Arlington stood directly in front of Griswold's Worsted, the largest and most modern of Darby's numerous textile mills, and a block and a half west of the town dock, the central receiving point for freight and supplies brought up the Delaware River and inland via Cobbs Creek. At the noisiest and dustiest intersection in town, the Arlington was a stopping point for dockhands, mill workers, clerks, tradesmen, and tourists on their way to or from Philadelphia. Atop its three modest stories was a fire lookout, a box- like room with windows on all sides that afforded a panoramic view of the mills along the two tidewater streams, Cobbs Creek on the east and Darby Creek on the west, and the main arteries leading off into Lansdowne, to the north, and Sharon Hill, to the south.

Locals and guests pausing at the bar on the ground floor were likely to be served by James Lydon Dukenfield, a robust Brit in his late thirties who ran the hotel with his wife, Kate, and a cousin from New York named Jim Lester. A short, stocky man with intense blue eyes, a thick moustache, and light hair he carefully parted down the middle, Jim Dukenfield broke Arabian horses for a living and obviously saw an opportunity when the little hotel, built on the site of an old flour mill, came up for lease. He was known for his flash temper, his extemporaneous bursts into song (the more sentimental the better), and the two fingers missing from his left hand. He had a ready smile that made him a congenial host, and an explosive contempt for authority that made him a difficult employee.

Jim had been a volunteer fireman in the days when such companies were like roaming bands of hooligans that would cut the hoses of rival companies for the privilege of knocking down a fire. He enlisted with the Philadelphia Fire Zouaves when the call came for three-year volunteers in August 1861. He deserted for five months-not responding any better to military authority than he had to any other kind-and was mustered out after "accidently" getting his fingers blown off while on picket duty near Fair Oaks. Four of his nine brothers also answered the call, and all survived with the exception of George, two years younger than Jim, who fell at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. Jim liked to say he had been wounded at the Battle of Lookout Mountain; his eldest son said he had more likely been caught picking pockets.

Jim Dukenfield was one of thirteen children, most of whom followed their father, John Dukinfield, to the United States in the mid-1850s. John was the second son of George Dukinfield, who in turn was the third son of Lord Dukinfield of Cheshire. John Dukinfield and his elder brother George were born patricians, but the estate passed in line to a grandson who was a clergyman and vicar of the county. When he subsequently died without issue, the estate reverted to the chancery and became property of the kingdom. John moved to Sheffield-not to work in the mines but to distinguish himself as a comb maker, carving premium designs from animal horns. He married an Irish Catholic girl named Ann Lyden and began her career in wholesale motherhood with the birth of their first son, Walter, in 1835. The business grew steadily, and by 1837 John had taken George on as a partner. They established a little factory in Rockingham Street, where they made buttons, spectacle frames, and pocket knives, and installed their families in adjacent housing nearby.

John was a restless spirit, impulsive and autocratic. He had a big nose that would later inspire his niece Emily to remark that his grandson, the film comedian he never met, resembled him "especially above the mouth." In 1854, John was seized with the notion of moving to the United States, where there would be fresh supplies and a ready market for his imitation pearl buttons and tortoiseshell glasses. He packed a trunkful of supplies, enlisted his twelve-year-old son Jim for the trip, and left Ann, pregnant as usual, in George's care. The voyage was arduous, plagued by bad weather, and they were shipwrecked off the coast of Glen Cove, Long Island. John and his son made their way to Dudley, New Jersey, north of Camden, then crossed the Delaware River into Philadelphia, where they opened a dry goods store in the Kensington district, known because of its concentration of British textile workers as "Little England." Ann followed with most of the other kids; Godfrey, the youngest, made the crossing from England in his mother's arms.

The family had largely reassembled by November, when John filed a declaration of intent to become an American citizen. He also began spelling his name "Dukenfield" (with an "en" in place of the "in"), apparently considering this to be an appropriate Americanization of the name. The Dukenfield boys were all fiercely independent-not unlike the old man-and no two spelled the family name alike. According to one source, it derived from "Dug-in-field," meaning "bird-in-field," and there was (and still is) a township in Stockport Parish, near Manchester, called Dukinfield. Jim spelled it with an "en," and other variations included Duckinfield (favored by George as a child), Duckenfield, and even Dutenfield.

The older boys took jobs in and around Philadelphia. Jim, who was good with horses, became a driver. His brother John became a bricklayer, and another brother, George, became a potter. Walter, the eldest, worked as a bartender at the Union Hotel. The family business moved to Girard Avenue, west of Second, and eventually north to 625 Cumberland, where it remained into the 1890s. John Dukenfield opened a tavern on East Norris Street, and it was there that he increasingly spent his time. He managed to drink the business into a downturn, and, in 1859, with six children under the age of ten still living at home, he abandoned his wife and family. Ann struggled mightily with the business, eventually passing it to her brother-in-law George.

Excerpted from W. C. Fields by James Curtis Copyright © 2003 by James Curtis

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/books/chapters/w-c-fields.html

Buy the book!!!!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/W-Fields-Biography-James-Curtis/dp/0375402179

http://www.jamescurtis.net/w__c__fields_43320.htm

Film Noir Posters #12 The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)

A coule of Italian posters intent on spicing it up!



A gothic reimagining?


The 'Naked City' version:


A reminder that Huston's wasn't the first version:

Pari: J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey in Iran

Franny and Zooey in Iran

Sasha von Oldershausen

The Paris Review

5 April 2018

I had a bad experience in Hollywood once. —J. D. Salinger

To understand J. D. Salinger’s opinion of Hollywood, one needn’t look much further than his stories. Holden Caulfield launches into an invective against the industry on the second page of The Catcher in the Rye. Of his brother D. B., Holden says, “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D. B., being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”

Salinger’s own profound aversion to the industry began when he sold the film rights to his short story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” to the producer Samuel Goldwyn. The story, first published by TheNew Yorker in 1948, offers a scathing portrait of upper-middle-class American society. In Salinger’s opinion, Goldwyn missed the point entirely in the campy and hyperromanticized 1949 Hollywood feature My Foolish Heart.

From that moment on, Salinger vowed to never have his work adapted to the screen again. He refused to sell any more film rights, and he successfully fought a series of copyright-infringement lawsuits over the unauthorized adaptation of his works in film and in any other medium. The current trustees of the Salinger estate include his widow, Colleen M. Salinger, and his son, Matthew R. Salinger, who have been just as unyielding as the author himself. The infamously litigious estate has fought off the many Western filmmakers who have wanted to adapt Salinger’s work and likely will continue to do so for some time: U.S. copyright law ensures that intellectual property is protected for the lifetime of the author plus an additional seventy years. Yet in the nineties, a gap in international copyright laws enabled one unlikely director to slip through the cracks.

The virtually nonexistent relations between the United States and Iran extend to their copyright relations. While many countries have agreed to international standards such as the Berne Convention, which affords foreign artists the same copyright protections countries offer to their own artists, Iran has not. And this is how the Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui—one of the premier auteurs of Iran’s New Wave cinema—seized the opportunity that no Western filmmaker could.

In 1995, Mehrjui released his film Pari, a composite of Franny and Zooey and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” from Salinger’s Nine Stories. Mehrjui, who was educated in the United States and studied at UCLA, no doubt read Salinger throughout his schooling there, if he hadn’t already done so in his homeland. In Iran, certain Western artists are exalted to mythic proportions. It’s almost impossible to find any one of the small smoke-filled Tehran coffee shops that hasn’t played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon at least once this week. And at any given bookstore, one would be likely to find translations of Salinger, Steinbeck, and Sontag nestled among Iran’s own literary giants—Forough Farrokhzad, Sadegh Hedayat, Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Rumi.

In classic Iranian New Wave fashion, Mehrjui’s visual retelling of Salinger’s stories is allegorical and poetic. He uses symbolism to translate the incisive and dialogue-heavy characterizations for which Salinger is famous. Due to the Islamic regime’s rules about the expression of modesty, Mehrjui could not shoot his Zooey character steeped in a bathtub, as he appears in Salinger’s work, and so the director explores the symbolic potential of water and submersion elsewhere. The film opens with a waterlogged dream sequence in which Pari, the Iranian Franny, is forced underwater by a band of her classmates. In the book, Franny only mentions the dream in passing. In the film, it sets the tone, and the perpetual symbol of murky water recurs throughout.

Mehrjui’s film projects Salinger’s original postwar narratives onto an Iran still reeling from the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War. Mehrjui’s version of Zooey, here known as Dadashi, is an aspiring actor who for much of the film is dressed for the part of a soldier wielding a gun—a sober reminder of a not-too-distant past. The film’s final scenes culminate in a metanarrative in which Dadashi, acting on set as a fallen soldier who lies dying on a hill, cranes his neck to see women carrying jugs of water up and over the other side.

Yet there are also scenes that seem almost directly lifted from the original stories, with just a touch of Iranian flair. In Salinger’s original, Franny sits across from her boyfriend, Lane, at an upscale restaurant in New Haven, where she’s barely touched the chicken sandwich she ordered, and tells him about the book she is reading, The Way of a Pilgrim, about a monk in Russia who finds solace in a prayer. In Mehrjui’s rendition, Pari does the same opposite her fiancé (lest the Islamic regime come down on the film for its depiction of extramarital relations), telling him about a Sufi book while her chicken kebab grows cold.

Pari struggles with the same critical questions of identity and belief as Franny, only within a much different sociopolitical and cultural milieu. In fact, Salinger’s stories provide Mehrjui with a strange but fitting framework through which to depict the condition of the modern Iranian woman, which in the nineties was rapidly changing. By the year 2000, more women in Iran were attending universities than were men. Pari, like Franny, is depicted as educated and outspoken and vehemently challenges the academic patriarchy. Even her fiancé, who speaks highly of his own work, is bent on getting Pari’s approval. He is visibly injured when she does not sufficiently stroke his ego, but Pari could not care less.

Conversations about belief and spirituality function as a through line in Franny and Zooey. In Pari, the Iranian city of Esfahān provides an idyllic and sacred backdrop for that negotiation. Pari imbibes the silence and space in Esfahān’s most beautiful, iconic mosques.

Child protagonists are as much a key feature of Iranian New Wave cinema as they are of Salinger’s stories. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and in Mehrjui’s adaptation, Seymour—Assad in the film—has encounters with a little girl, who acts as the dulcet foil for the adult tragedy to come. The narrative builds to Seymour’s/Assad’s psychological undoing and eventual suicide. In the story, he shoots himself; in the film, he self-immolates.

It’s possible that Salinger might actually have liked Pari had he watched it. The Iranian film industry is decidedly not Hollywood, and Mehrjui’s sensibilities are subtle and self-aware. But Salinger never did. He was oblivious to the film’s existence until 1998, when Lincoln Center planned to screen the film during a three-week festival celebrating Iranian cinema. Publicity around the event brought the film to Salinger’s attention. Representatives of Salinger responded immediately with a letter, stating that the screening would constitute a copyright breach. Though Lincoln Center might have contested the warning, they decided instead to cancel the screening, perhaps wary of the legal track record of past Salinger adaptations.

In a New York Times article published in response to the controversy, the Iranian director expressed bewilderment over the decision. “I don’t want to distribute the film commercially,” Mehrjui said. “It’s kind of a cultural exchange. I just want to let the film be seen for the critics and the people that follow my work.”

He added, too, that he had written the reclusive author seeking permission to use the material for his movie and, when he hadn’t heard back, decided to move forward with the project. “In our country, we don’t have copyrights,” he said. “We feel free to read and do whatever we want.”

This is, of course, not entirely true. Iran does indeed have domestic copyright laws in place, though they are nearly half a century old, and in many ways, they have failed to provide artists and businesses with the protections they require. These laws, however, do not extend to any work produced outside the country, and Iran boasts a bustling market of pirated films. In busy corridors of Tehran, young boys sell stacks of pirated DVDs in plastic sleeves, their cover art badly photocopied, for less than a dollar. Truth be told, I’ve probably seen more Hollywood blockbusters during my stints in Iran than I have in my lifetime in the United States.

The so-called intellectual freedom Mehrjui described has come at a major cost for Iran in recent years—most especially for Iranian software developers, who, because of the country’s abstention from these international copyright standards, have struggled to target an international market. Recently, Iran has been forced to reconsider and reconfigure its laws. In November 2017, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced that it would draft a new copyright bill for submission to Parliament, which could bring the country one step closer to joining the Berne Convention. Even if Iran does enter these agreements, U.S.-based artists will still likely have a hard time reaping their royalties thanks to ironclad economic sanctions that have made financial transactions with the country impossible.

But were it not for the lack of copyright relations between the United States and Iran, this oblique dialogue between two major artists from seemingly disparate cultures would not exist at all. A couple of years ago, the film was available in its entirety on YouTube, though that’s since been taken down. At Columbia University’s library, an uncirculated copy of Pari has an aggressive-looking FBI sticker slapped across the front that warns of copyright infringement, an offense punishable by up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

If you really want to find the film, though, you just have to look. But I won’t tell you where. With all due respect to Mr. Salinger, I, for one, would like to live in a world where both the stories and the film they inspired can coexist.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/05/franny-and-zooey-in-iran/

See https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/21/movies/iranian-film-is-canceled-after-protest-by-salinger.html

And... http://www.filmsufi.com/2013/05/pari-dariush-mehrjui-1995.html

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #449