ELIA KAZAN’S HOLLYWOOD STAR – ON THE WATER FRONT OF PROLETARIAN WIT SURREALISM
His wit a proletarian thunderbolt.
–Elia Kazan:
A slow day at the Kiwi blogger’s office as the Olympics Opening Ceremony in London got off to a hiss and a roar. Red, white and blue skies over Eden.
For some reason unknown, my mind meanders across Constantinople, Ottoman Empire’s New York son, Elia Kazan.
His self-expression and psychological realism. A gift of drawing out the best dramatic performances from the well of human experiences he saw in his actors. On the waterfront of a streetcar named desire he arrived east of Eden. ”I don’t move unless I have some empathy with the basic theme,” his emotinal palate bespoke him. He too carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. He was the force that held cohesion and permanency of team. His wit a proletarian thunderbolt.
An angel against personal alienation with an outrage over social injustice.
By the skin of our teeth while waiting for lefty, he raised the level of society’s consciousness through his art. Tea and sympathy. Cat on a hot tin roof. Sweet bird of Youth. Crying and laughing. There was such an attraction there in his work. That smile of his shining as art. Very tender and funny direction. The energy, keen intelligence, the boundless Chutzpah more than any Jew, bright as they come, intrepid splendor in the grass of home. Some empathy to channel life into art expressing the essence experimentally into filmic art depicting triumph through struggles.
Some way about pain, about hopes. Stimulating virtual improvisation that deeply involves emotional investment into art to the point where you’d eat your hat in creativity. Extraordinarily talented, perhaps we will never see his like again.
In my own view, the solution is to talk about human beings and not about abstracts, he said, to reveal the culture and the social moment as it is reflected in the behavior and the lives of individual people. Not to be “correct.” To be total. So I do not believe in any ideology that does not permit—no encourage—the freedom of the individual. Most honored.
Like most influential directors, he constantly rose to the challenge of his own aspirations.
Elia Kazan as an artist touched a capacity to honor not only the heroic man, but the hero in every man.
The most wonderful kind of art in the world. Courageous, generous.
Someone who could never just slip away.
His work like a drug, holding art together, keeping him high. When he wasn’t working, he didn’t know who he was or what he was supposed to do.
So absorbed in making the next film, he couldn’t think of anything else. His work his identity and when it’s done, running the risk of being a nobody. Only to find a Mosaic of smiles written across the skies, in the gifts drawn from a plethora of fun peoples ideas and art that he fused, shared and gave away as surrealism, without even really trying or thinking, or perhaps not saying thank you enough along the way too, or like riding art’s thunderbolts of inspriation, not even stopping to think of how.
[Thanks Elia Kazan for art's sake, interim awakenings of new sunrises, sunsettings and creative horizons].
Photos: Cinema Books. IMDB. Words: numerous Hollywood stars via Wiki. Photo: a Hollywood star – the Maori version, Author’s own.
~Posted by Horiwoodblog, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 28.7.12~
