what is a clown?
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean-Pierre
Melville (director) Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'un clown (Twenty-Four
Hours in the Life of a Clown) / 1946
I
must admit that clowns are not my favorite subjects. I put them in a category
just slightly higher than mimes. But there are always exceptions, as in all
prejudices I pretend to. The great mime Marcel Marceau was certainly one of these
peculiarities in my evaluation of the art: he was a genius and I saw perform
live at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center with great delight. Concerning
American clowns, I saw the notable Emmett Kelly as a child at the Barnum and
Bailey Circus, visiting Cedar Rapids, and found him a memorable childhood
figure. And then, of course, there were unforgettable film and TV clowns such
as Red Skelton, whose show I watched also as a child. I think both he and Kelly
appealed to me as sad clowns, Skelton often crying while laughing ahead of his
own jokes.
And then, there was that saddest of
cinematic clowns, played by James Stewart in The Greatest Show on Earth,
Buttons, who keeps his makeup on whenever he appears in public, afraid that the
police will track him down, since he, as a former doctor, helped to mercifully-kill
his ailing wife. We might suggest that Cecile De Mille was a bit ahead of his
times on this issue.
Despite this, I have continually been
fascinated by the European notion of clowns. How can you love Fellini, as I do,
without recognizing that his central figures are based often on Commedia dell’arte
characters?
And then, one of my very revered directors,
Robert Bresson began his career with a documentary of the famous French clown Béby;
and almost as shockingly, so too did the rather hard-core nourish filmmaker Jean-Pierre
Melville, whose short documentary of 1946, Vingt-quatre heures de la vie
d'un clown (Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Clown) follows Béby, then
the greatest living Pierrot, who in full transsexual-like costume, plays opposite
to his “white-clown” partner, Maïss, in a nightly
stage show near the end of their illustrious careers.
By showing them perform, take off their
make-up and return home to the more-or-less regular lives, Melville reveals the
truth of the clown(s). These crazy and manic beings on the stage are rendered
somewhat real in their everyday lives—although it is clear that the younger
Melville sentimentalizes Béby, showing him leafing through his hundreds of photographs
and testaments from the past of his renown. Although it is a quite lovely
scene, when he commands his pet dog to pray along with him as he settles down
to sleep—a gesture which clearly the dog has long submitted to—we might also
describe Melville’s scene as approaching bathos, particularly given that
despite his nightly vespers, he appears as an almost misogynistic figure to his
wife, who brings him hot coffee the next morning. Given the time, we can
perhaps almost forgive him, since he daily plays a kind of beaten-down feminine
force each night. But, obviously, that is a paternalistic way of explaining Béby’s
relationship.
The performances that Melville captured
on film are truly what this documentary is all about, and my only wish is that there
were more. Perhaps I could come to understand the art of clowning, the myths of
the foolishness and deserved punishment with which they are embraced. The clown
is a type who does not recognize his/her own absurdity in the society as a
whole. We laugh, according to Bergson, because we also hate them, reject their
behavior. They are perhaps inside of us, but something we have resisted, removed
from our sensibilities in our efforts to become adult human beings.
I’ve always wondered whether the laughter
evoked from these clowns was different between the delighted children audiences—who
perhaps recognize themselves in these figures—and the adults who perceive them
as behaviors they have left behind. Béby is, after all, a baby who has never
been allowed to grow up into adulthood, and Maïss has no choice but to remind him of that
fact day after day, night after night. Perhaps there is no great of difference
between these figures and the later gangsters Melville portrayed throughout the
rest of his remarkable career: macho children who live out their lives in a
fantasy of riches they never truly deserved, despite their clever machinations
to achieve what they desire.
Of course, as Stephen Sondheim has
reminded us, we are all clowns, and will always be, stumbling and bumbling
through life. You may laugh, but I always cry.
Los
Angeles, August 8, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2019).
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