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Recycling Literature, Drama, Cinema, and Art
- Wayne State University Press
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83 ality, inversion, cross-dressing, explosion of clichés, and escalation of affect. Recycling Literature, Drama, Cinema, and Art The Flying Circus’ sketches drew heavily on canonical works of drama, literature, and film by such authors as Shakespeare, Proust, and Brontë, but emptied them of their revered mode of presentation and interpretation, often turning them into nonsense. Two of the most striking of such transformations are the Pythons’ renditions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Through coded language and intertitles, the Python versions of these classical works deflate their affect and reduce the texts to truisms. By transposing novel and play into code and depriving them of the polysemic character of literary language, the Pythons pursue their preoccupation with the vicissitudes of written, spoken, and visual language. As in “The All-England Summarize Proust Contest,” in which contestants must reduce Remembrance of Things Past to a half-minute, the two sketches ridicule the appropriation of canonical cultural texts for mass cultural consumption: in the Python context, it is not necessary to know the language of these works but only to know of them, a feature that also relates to the “sound byte” aspects of media culture. The sketches also highlight the absurdity of the media’s often seeking “new” forms to make older artistic works accessible to audiences. Once again, the Pythons challenge the pretentiousness of television (particularly the BBC and public television) in their recycling of masterpieces as an ostensible means to “elevate” lowbrow taste to the level of “middlebrow” culture. The sketches invite entry into the more serious dimensions of Python silliness. These sketches of classic texts are self-reflexive about relations among the Recycling Literature, Drama, Cinema, and Art Monty Python’s Flying Circus 84 arts, television, and especially the BBC, in insisting on the importance of “masterpieces.” They offer insights into the more serious dimensions of Python silliness as a challenge to the clichés of ordinary discourses and a sign that not everything merits high seriousness and reverence. The sketches expose the pretentiousness of television in its recycling of masterpieces as a supposed means to “elevate” taste, deflecting lowbrow inclinations, and as a counter to the banality of much programming. In its union of high and popular culture through invoking and then altering canonical literary, artistic, and cinematic forms, in reducing and transforming art works to “zaniness” or nonsense, the Flying Circus, through these inverted and crazy images of the world turned upside down, offers the viewer the opportunity to question received forms. Shakespeare’s work plays a prominent role in this world of nonsense. Allusions to Shakespeare are interspersed throughout the series, including various incarnations of Hamlet and multiple references to Shakespearian acting. For example, one sketch features a hospital to cure overacting, particularly bad Shakespearean actors addicted to declaiming the line from Richard III: “A horse, a horse. My kingdom for a horse.” Physicians examine these benighted actors in various stages of ranting until one of them, played by Idle, is selected for showing signs of “improvement” in his expression . Now he recites the line, in equally bad acting, without any affect. In another outrageous Shakespearian “performance ,” the viewer is privileged to watch “The First Underwater Production of Measure for Measure.” Actors emerging from the sea deliver the lines of the play and then disappear again into the water. Cinema is not exempt from Python tampering. The “French Subtitled Film” parodies the style of French New Wave cinema. The sketch takes place in a rubbish dump. [34.228.188.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:23 GMT) 85 The dialogue is minimal as Stig (Jones) and “Girl” (Cleveland) exchange a banal dialogue composed of one-liners . Stig tells the Girl, “Je suis révolutionnaire,” accompanied by the intertitle “I am a revolutionary,” whereupon her response is a simple “Oh.” When the pair meets again, the sketch culminates in images of war as a cabbage floats from the Girl’s hands into the air in slow motion. Phil (Idle), an announcer, interrupts the running of the film, describing it pompously with such clichés as “portraying the breakdown of communication in our modern society” and “in a brilliantly conceived montage, Longueur [the name assigned to the director] mercilessly exposes the violence underlying our society.” The sketch mimes the cryptic and disjunctive style of New Wave cinema and the tendency of reviewers to uncritically elevate this cinematic form and cinema, generally through pompous and inflated interpretation. Moreover, the choice...