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foxed in & navel-gazing

@sethnakht / sethnakht.tumblr.com

she/her, sw meta and period fiction
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luckyricochet
"Why do you have so many names?" "Comment?" "Names. Joseph, Paul—names." "Oui, oui. Alors. So many before me, they make dead in battle. And so ma mère, she want me have protection of heaven. And so, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier." "What do I call you then?" "Gilbert."

THÉODORE PELLERIN as GILBERT DU MOTIER, THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

1x01, FRANKLIN (2024)

#franklin#franklin (apple tv)#marquis de lafayette#18c#tv#gifs#the gestures!
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cacchieressa
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iamnotshazam

"our son made it through the war to come of age, let's fucken party! rsvp only if you're a little bitch who's NOT coming. all y'all not dead of alcohol poisoning by morning (lmao losers) get dunkt on"

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alex51324

Note that "carriages at (time)" would by then have been a rather old-fashioned way of indicating at about what time guests should expect a social event to end. The impression here is that things are expected to be fairly sedate until midnight, when the adults (relatives, friends-of-the-family, parents of the youth's friends, etc.) clear out, and the young people are free to get their rager on.

#amazing
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villetteulogy

got my hands on German Pygmalion from 1935🦫

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villetteulogy

Things about Pygmalion 1935 that I loved:

-both Higgins and Eliza being musically inclined (playing respectively the piano and the accordion). Even Freddy gets a mandolin. There’s a scene where Eliza interrupts one of his lessons by running around the living room playing her instrument while he chases her….and that’s how Mrs Higgins finds them when she comes to visit her son.

-Eliza being given Higgins’ bathrobe to wear before her new clothes are delivered. Him wearing the same bathrobe later on.

-Eliza’s entire wardrobe! Each one of her looks post ‘makeover’ is to die for. The ballgown she wears at the embassy ball in particular is a 30s organza dream.

-This portrayal of Higgins. I think Gründgens struck a perfect balance between implacable genius and emotional turmoil. His growing attraction to Eliza is more evident in thus version, and reaches its zenith in the aftermath of the embassy ball where he voices his confused feelings to Pickering. It’s a softer take on the character compared to Leslie Howard’s lofty superiority, but equally compelling.

-The added ascot scene!! Aka, Eliza’s first foray into polite society (sans Mrs Higgins and the Eynsford-Hills) where of course she causes a stir. It’s set before Mrs H’s tea party and is very similar to Eliza’s debut in MFL.

-I loved everything about the way this version handled the resolution between Eliza and Higgins. The perfect amount of comedy and romance. ‘What do you think I should do, Professor Higgins?’ ‘Why you should stay with me, Miss Doolittle’ <3

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sethnakht

I'm so glad to find someone else who's seen it! I've only seen it once — the DVD won't play in my region code — but remember finding it fascinating, both structurally and as a historical document (with much, some extremely disturbing, left to unpack given who made it and when). Shaw hated it, iirc.

Some memories that may be misremembered details - would love love your take on what is actually in the film:

  • Eliza speaks a fantasy argot of Berlin and Vienna dialects (Jenny Jugo, the actress, was Austrian), which has a slightly alienating effect, as though to suggest that this story cannot fully translate, ie. could never have taken place anywhere but England. Or maybe it's a Brechtian touch from the film's director, Erich Engel. (There's also a really weird choice regarding Sie/du usage between Higgins and Eliza that I don't remember well enough to mention in more than passing but that did seem like a cultural translation error.)
  • In the play, Eliza sends for a musical instrument, but it's never specified in the text what Alfred ends up bringing to Wimpole Street. In this film, I seem to remember it being a concertina (a bellows-driven free-reed instrument with buttons at the ends). Smaller than an accordion and thus easily portable, developed independently in England and Germany, the German concertina has an association with dance music and the working classes. (Both the Dutch and English films also give her a concertina, iirc — the instrument plays a huge role in the Dutch film, and you can spot it in her rooms in the English one.) In any case, she plays and sings a raucous song written for the film, "Ich bin lustig ob ich Geld hab' oder keins", "I'm jolly whether I've got money or none". The song potentially says as much about Germany in 1935 as about this specific iteration of the character — it has fatalist, devil-may-care lines like, "ich bin lustig ob die Welt zum Teufel geht" (I'm jolly if the world goes to the devil), etc.
  • Higgins twice invokes Schubert's "Ständchen" (Serenade), once on the piano and once, whistling, after returning home from the ball. It's a wistful love song — softly imploring the beloved to listen, to come out, to not fear being overheard — that would have been instantly recognizable to a bourgeois audience raised on Romantic Kunstlieder. This marks a change from the 1912 play, where the crew is implied to have gone to see the new Puccini opera set in the wild west; Higgins whistles an air from that opera after coming home (ironically, since it's a piece about a woman cheating to win a bet and save the man she loves). Perhaps there's irony in having German!Higgins reference a song about being overheard, not least because he never sings the lyrics, only plays/whistles the melody — thus going over Eliza's head.
  • Much is made of the fact that Eliza took a boy with her on her initial taxi ride to Wimpole Street. Alfred implies a fairly young boy in the play; here he turns out to be a blond, strapping fellow named Johnny. While Eliza goes in to ask for lessons, Johnny waits outside for an all clear signal, like a kind of bodyguard, adding an element of mistrust to her character as well as independence (she has the means to threaten). Overall, Jugo's Eliza seemed to me a good deal less vulnerable than the Liza of the play (where there are hints that other flower girls bully her, where she specifically wants a taxi ride in her new clothes to get her own back). Johnny reappears in a couple of other scenes, including as an ice cream vendor at the first outing taken before Mrs Higgins' at home, the horse races, but I forgot what he says or does, exactly; part of his purpose iirc is to show that Eliza can seamlessly code switch. In terms of the scene, was it that someone tried to walk off with ice cream without paying for it? I seem to recall Eliza demonstrating she can hold her own — springing both physically and verbally into the fray — only to begin speaking high German again once the disgruntled toffs (Higgins) appear.
  • Alfred ends up lecturing for a temperance society, I believe. Altogether they make something more Brechtian of him, at least in my memory — and wasn't there an extra scene including Eliza's sixth stepmother?
  • Another added scene is right before the ball — it shifts the balance of power (Higgins is never particularly in control in this film, however, iirc). Higgins is in a state, he comes out from his room upstairs in his dressing gown with his face almost totally masked in shaving cream and bumbles down a long set of stairs to interact with Pickering. I forgot why — maybe helping Pickering look for the ball invitation, which both have misplaced. Eliza then joins them, but not before looking down on them from above. There follows a scene where she immediately solves their problem, then asks for advice on what to wear — maybe which earrings? — and offers three options. Is that right? Or is it two? Higgins is iirc useless at fashion but does inadvertently reveal that he finds her smile charming. The posing of three options — or maybe it's two, and Higgins gives a third — is also used at the very end of the film.
  • After the post-ball fight, Higgins doesn't storm off to bed; instead, as you mention, he wanders into Pickering's room for reassurance. There I seem to remember he sits at the window, staring at the moon (another German Romantic association, like the Schubert), and wonders whether Eliza's rage is anything he can trust: whether it's something she copied from a book or whether her soul has really been transformed through the experiment. Pickering is astonished. I wish I had access to a screenplay or screencaps for this sequence to recall what he says exactly in the German. I remember thinking Gründgens sold this scene — in part because there's tension and intimacy with Pickering, in part because he's so incapable of expressing himself except in literary abstraction.
  • The final act includes several major changes. Mrs Higgins' artistic Chelsea drawing room has become a lakeside villa, Freddy is there playing lawn games and the mandolin? (I have a weird memory of a ukulele?) and setting up a boat, Higgins shows up and immediately has a cocktail I think? Maybe? Once alone with Eliza, and faced with the prospect that she'll marry Freddy, he leaves off some of the insults and challenges her — does she really think these people will accept her once they learn the truth of her origins? Eliza is initially dismissive, maybe? but ultimately decides to tell the truth over lunch with the Eynsford-Hills, causing a minor sensation and prompting the whole family to up and depart. Freddy bounds back and shouts to Eliza from outdoors that he doesn't care and wants to marry her anyway. Higgins congratulates her on her splendid honesty (as though to finally acknowledge that she's won the bet, though of course he's egged her on to do this with a kind of bet of his own). Eliza once more poses two/three questions; she asks him whether she ought to marry Fred or do something else, and he asks her to do neither and come back, and the film ends.

Very curious how much of this is made up on my end, and to hear more of your thoughts!

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villetteulogy

Wow, kudos to you for remembering so much about this version: you have actually brought my attention back to many details I'd overlooked!

-I can't remember whether Eliza uses du or Sie when talking to Higgins, but she definitely addresses him by the latter at the end when she's trying to distance herself from him. Only then Higgins answers back in the same manner as a joke, but I *think* he always says du to Eliza. Eliza's dialect is something I can't place either, so I would also wager it's a made up language comprising different regional dialects.

-so that's what Eliza's instrument is! Thank you for specifying! I loved how often and prominently it is featured throughout the movie: even Higgins who seemed to detest it starts playing (with) it at the very end, just as he's accepting Eliza's role in his life. Her song cracked me up at first, but paying attention to the lyrics gives it a whole different (ie creepy) meaning. It's indeed very telling and appropriate for the time period and place this movie was made and indirectly set in. As far as I can tell this version likes to pretend it's set in England, unlike the more creative Dutch film. However, it has so many quintessentially German details about it that they immediately give away the lie. Mrs Higgins' flat being turned into what looks like a villa by the lake is a very glaring one: it just screamed Berlin to me. I'm guessing keeping the original setting was an intentionally superficial choice to divert the audience's attention from what was happening in Germany at the time.

-Higgins playing Schubert and then behaving like a Romantic hero for a bit is an interesting choice. Gründgens absolutely sells the emotionally stunted intellectual who doesn't see love even when it's staring him in the face, so it doesn't feel as jarring as some of Higgins' romantic moments in the Dutch version. IIRC, after his confrontation with Eliza he opens the door to Pick's bedroom (they have connecting rooms?) and starts ranting about how dangerous it is to get involved with a young woman, no matter her social class. Schopenhauer said that women are a joke of nature, so it must be true. Pick is half asleep so he asks Henry what the matter is with Eliza. Higgins answers that she's asking to be taken seriously as a woman. Pick asks why that shocks Henry? He's surprised by her 'sudden' change, since she'd seemed so passive for months. He wants to know out of scientific interest whether this change was brought by his lessons or if Eliza has always been her own woman. Then he starts admiring the night sky and the moon. Pick just leaves him at it.

-Johnny does have a more prominent role in this movie. I thought he looked younger than Eliza (he looked like a teenager to me), so I never picked up love interest vibes from him but I could be wrong. He's definitely fascinated by her transformation when they meet again at the races though, and he offers her an ice cream. There's a man about to go away without paying, and Eliza first jumps a fence and then breaks her umbrella trying to defend Johnny from the thief. I liked how much attention was given to Eliza's old way of life. The movie's apt subtitle being 'Elisa, das Blumenmädchen' really reinforces how Pygmalion is first and foremost Eliza's story.

-the final act is the one with the most changes from the original play! Higgins does start mixing cocktails at some point, but it's during Mrs H's tea party, while Eliza is telling everyone about her aunt. In the final act he just walks around disgruntled and tries to order Eliza to come home. Mrs H berates him and tells him to behave. I loved the moment where Eliza asks him to call her Miss Doolittle and Freddy immediately calls her Eliza. Their confrontation on Mrs H's porch/balcony is much shorter, and Higgins muses that she's turned out exactly like all other society girls. He also congratulates her on her upcoming nuptials and social advancement but warns her never to reveal her origins, as it could compromise her relationship with Freddy. Eliza goes to get ready for dinner and puts Higgins' ring back on! When she intentionally reveals her background to the Eynsford Hills at dinner, Higgins raises his glass to her and is obviously delighted. I got the impression that was all the confirmation he needed that Eliza wasn't after a social position, and had indeed a sense of self outside of her 'education'. Their second confrontation is also much shorter, she basically threatens to teach phonetics and 'steal' his methods, then she corrects his grammar (he gets a verb wrong) when he gets angry. Finally, she asks him what she should choose to do between marrying Freddy, selling flowers, or teaching. He answers that she should choose to stay with him (and still calls her Fraulein Doolittle). It's definitely missing the spark present in the 1938 movie, as Higgins is more flustered/embarrassed than angry! But I found it endearing nonetheless.

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sethnakht

This made my day — thank you for writing this out and sharing. In your debt! You've sparked fresh memories for me too.

- I'd completely forgotten that Higgins ended up fond of the concertina by the end — going from cursing and chasing Eliza around to stop her playing to patting the instrument and smiling when he runs into it at his mother's house, or something like that.

- I also thought BERLIN upon seeing that lakeside villa. And the cocktails, though that's also a way to situate events in the thirties I suppose — one could have briefly been in a Noël Coward play. I had to wonder if they added the cocktails to make it clearer that Higgins was headlong and losing control, since Gründgens iirc interprets Higgins as rather stiff and doesn't particularly follow the scene directions to throw himself at furniture and nearly break a table and stumble over things (in contrast to Dutch!Higgins, who gets across that restlessness if not the emotional reserve). Now that you mention it, I seem to remember Clara's role at the tea/cocktail at home a little better; in a slight departure from the play, she's not so much drawn to Higgins as disappointed that he doesn't match the mental picture that had been conjured for her. Is that right? She'd imagined him differently, or some such. Did they keep the bit from the play where he tempts her into swearing? I adore the 38 film, but one of my regrets is that it cuts most of Clara's scenes and consequently a vivid illustration of Higgins' disregard for consequences and ability to get up to mischief when left unsupervised.

- I'm cracking up over the post-fight rant to Pickering. Schopenhauer! How could I forget? Of course. LOLOL.

- I agree with your read on Johnny - he seemed more like a Kumpel in her treatment of him than a love interest, if also a sign that she could hold her own and get help against the toffs if needed. He also served to define this Eliza against the one of the play, who seems to have few if any friends, lives alone, and finally claims she could never code switch (does Jugo still have that line about never being able to utter one of those sounds again? I can't remember). I also felt he served to show just how cold Higgins must seem to Eliza — in contrast to Johnny's friendliness, Gründgens radiates a certain amiable but nonetheless icy remove.

- Thank you, thank you, for this breakdown of the final act! So she does pose three options after all. I remember the ring sequence now - she seats herself before a mirror and puts it on, is she talking to herself during that scene too? The structure of the challenge — if she reveals her origins she stands to lose newfound security, if she hides them she's complicit, she melds in with the conforming masses — could have been subtly provocative in the context of when this was made, and I have to wonder how that got in (wouldn't be surprised if it's from Engel, who'd been initially fired by the UFA studio, I think in the 33 purge, for his communist sympathies; I've read in passing that he made several films on the theme of individuals choosing an unconventional path which skirted censorship, but haven't seen those films for myself). I like too that the ending is somewhat ambivalent — in asking her to come back, he's not specifying what that would mean (unlike Dutch!Higgins who overtly suggests marriage, which I personally found very jarring). At the same time, in respecting her preferred form of address (which play!Higgins could never bring himself to do), he's indicating a new basis for the relationship, one where she calls (more of) the shots. I can't help but feel like there's something dialectical going on with the three-four options thing - Engel worked closely with Brecht, who loved to employ Marxian dialectics as a practice of change-making - where the final synthesis at once negates and upholds. But that's a poorly thought-out aside. Wait wait - I can't remember what verb he got wrong, which was it? Was it that he used slang?

You're the best!

#pygmalion#pygmalion 1935#erich engel#films#long post
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villetteulogy

got my hands on German Pygmalion from 1935🦫

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villetteulogy

Things about Pygmalion 1935 that I loved:

-both Higgins and Eliza being musically inclined (playing respectively the piano and the accordion). Even Freddy gets a mandolin. There’s a scene where Eliza interrupts one of his lessons by running around the living room playing her instrument while he chases her….and that’s how Mrs Higgins finds them when she comes to visit her son.

-Eliza being given Higgins’ bathrobe to wear before her new clothes are delivered. Him wearing the same bathrobe later on.

-Eliza’s entire wardrobe! Each one of her looks post ‘makeover’ is to die for. The ballgown she wears at the embassy ball in particular is a 30s organza dream.

-This portrayal of Higgins. I think Gründgens struck a perfect balance between implacable genius and emotional turmoil. His growing attraction to Eliza is more evident in thus version, and reaches its zenith in the aftermath of the embassy ball where he voices his confused feelings to Pickering. It’s a softer take on the character compared to Leslie Howard’s lofty superiority, but equally compelling.

-The added ascot scene!! Aka, Eliza’s first foray into polite society (sans Mrs Higgins and the Eynsford-Hills) where of course she causes a stir. It’s set before Mrs H’s tea party and is very similar to Eliza’s debut in MFL.

-I loved everything about the way this version handled the resolution between Eliza and Higgins. The perfect amount of comedy and romance. ‘What do you think I should do, Professor Higgins?’ ‘Why you should stay with me, Miss Doolittle’ <3

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sethnakht

I'm so glad to find someone else who's seen it! I've only seen it once — the DVD won't play in my region code — but remember finding it fascinating, both structurally and as a historical document (with much, some extremely disturbing, left to unpack given who made it and when). Shaw hated it, iirc.

Some memories that may be misremembered details - would love love your take on what is actually in the film:

  • Eliza speaks a fantasy argot of Berlin and Vienna dialects (Jenny Jugo, the actress, was Austrian), which has a slightly alienating effect, as though to suggest that this story cannot fully translate, ie. could never have taken place anywhere but England. Or maybe it's a Brechtian touch from the film's director, Erich Engel. (There's also a really weird choice regarding Sie/du usage between Higgins and Eliza that I don't remember well enough to mention in more than passing but that did seem like a cultural translation error.)
  • In the play, Eliza sends for a musical instrument, but it's never specified in the text what Alfred ends up bringing to Wimpole Street. In this film, I seem to remember it being a concertina (a bellows-driven free-reed instrument with buttons at the ends). Smaller than an accordion and thus easily portable, developed independently in England and Germany, the German concertina has an association with dance music and the working classes. (Both the Dutch and English films also give her a concertina, iirc — the instrument plays a huge role in the Dutch film, and you can spot it in her rooms in the English one.) In any case, she plays and sings a raucous song written for the film, "Ich bin lustig ob ich Geld hab' oder keins", "I'm jolly whether I've got money or none". The song potentially says as much about Germany in 1935 as about this specific iteration of the character — it has fatalist, devil-may-care lines like, "ich bin lustig ob die Welt zum Teufel geht" (I'm jolly if the world goes to the devil), etc.
  • Higgins twice invokes Schubert's "Ständchen" (Serenade), once on the piano and once, whistling, after returning home from the ball. It's a wistful love song — softly imploring the beloved to listen, to come out, to not fear being overheard — that would have been instantly recognizable to a bourgeois audience raised on Romantic Kunstlieder. This marks a change from the 1912 play, where the crew is implied to have gone to see the new Puccini opera set in the wild west; Higgins whistles an air from that opera after coming home (ironically, since it's a piece about a woman cheating to win a bet and save the man she loves). Perhaps there's irony in having German!Higgins reference a song about being overheard, not least because he never sings the lyrics, only plays/whistles the melody — thus going over Eliza's head.
  • Much is made of the fact that Eliza took a boy with her on her initial taxi ride to Wimpole Street. Alfred implies a fairly young boy in the play; here he turns out to be a blond, strapping fellow named Johnny. While Eliza goes in to ask for lessons, Johnny waits outside for an all clear signal, like a kind of bodyguard, adding an element of mistrust to her character as well as independence (she has the means to threaten). Overall, Jugo's Eliza seemed to me a good deal less vulnerable than the Liza of the play (where there are hints that other flower girls bully her, where she specifically wants a taxi ride in her new clothes to get her own back). Johnny reappears in a couple of other scenes, including as an ice cream vendor at the first outing taken before Mrs Higgins' at home, the horse races, but I forgot what he says or does, exactly; part of his purpose iirc is to show that Eliza can seamlessly code switch. In terms of the scene, was it that someone tried to walk off with ice cream without paying for it? I seem to recall Eliza demonstrating she can hold her own — springing both physically and verbally into the fray — only to begin speaking high German again once the disgruntled toffs (Higgins) appear.
  • Alfred ends up lecturing for a temperance society, I believe. Altogether they make something more Brechtian of him, at least in my memory — and wasn't there an extra scene including Eliza's sixth stepmother?
  • Another added scene is right before the ball — it shifts the balance of power (Higgins is never particularly in control in this film, however, iirc). Higgins is in a state, he comes out from his room upstairs in his dressing gown with his face almost totally masked in shaving cream and bumbles down a long set of stairs to interact with Pickering. I forgot why — maybe helping Pickering look for the ball invitation, which both have misplaced. Eliza then joins them, but not before looking down on them from above. There follows a scene where she immediately solves their problem, then asks for advice on what to wear — maybe which earrings? — and offers three options. Is that right? Or is it two? Higgins is iirc useless at fashion but does inadvertently reveal that he finds her smile charming. The posing of three options — or maybe it's two, and Higgins gives a third — is also used at the very end of the film.
  • After the post-ball fight, Higgins doesn't storm off to bed; instead, as you mention, he wanders into Pickering's room for reassurance. There I seem to remember he sits at the window, staring at the moon (another German Romantic association, like the Schubert), and wonders whether Eliza's rage is anything he can trust: whether it's something she copied from a book or whether her soul has really been transformed through the experiment. Pickering is astonished. I wish I had access to a screenplay or screencaps for this sequence to recall what he says exactly in the German. I remember thinking Gründgens sold this scene — in part because there's tension and intimacy with Pickering, in part because he's so incapable of expressing himself except in literary abstraction.
  • The final act includes several major changes. Mrs Higgins' artistic Chelsea drawing room has become a lakeside villa, Freddy is there playing lawn games and the mandolin? (I have a weird memory of a ukulele?) and setting up a boat, Higgins shows up and immediately has a cocktail I think? Maybe? Once alone with Eliza, and faced with the prospect that she'll marry Freddy, he leaves off some of the insults and challenges her — does she really think these people will accept her once they learn the truth of her origins? Eliza is initially dismissive, maybe? but ultimately decides to tell the truth over lunch with the Eynsford-Hills, causing a minor sensation and prompting the whole family to up and depart. Freddy bounds back and shouts to Eliza from outdoors that he doesn't care and wants to marry her anyway. Higgins congratulates her on her splendid honesty (as though to finally acknowledge that she's won the bet, though of course he's egged her on to do this with a kind of bet of his own). Eliza once more poses two/three questions; she asks him whether she ought to marry Fred or do something else, and he asks her to do neither and come back, and the film ends.

Very curious how much of this is made up on my end, and to hear more of your thoughts!

#pygmalion#pygmalion 1935#erich engel#henry higgins#eliza doolittle#gustaf gründgens
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villetteulogy
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lesliehowardforever

Pygmalion, 1938

#i love that even though they toned down the victorianism of mrs higgins' rooms for the 38 film#the key artistic elements remain - flowers#landscape paintings#cheyne walk - the embankment#in contrast to the abstractly spiritual - stern buddhas indicating an alien enlightenment - and vaguely menacing machineworld#that higgins inhabits#it's fun to imagine child!higgins surrounded by pre-raphelites and aesthetes and other victorians#and reading the differences as rebellion#and then taking the miltonian aspect - rebellion and exiting the garden#the final scene takes place in a sort of garden#just as the first begins in a kind of garden#only the first was outdoors and wet and marked by stark class differences while this is a contained indoor space#rambling way of saying I like this set lol#pygmalion 1938#leslie howard#wendy hiller#films#gifs
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cbk1000
“Memory heaps dead leaves on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend the sense.”

— John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

#john galsworthy#quotes
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