I Like Charade in June/ How About You?

8 June, 2023 at 9:23 pm (charade, dear diary, film)

As is inevitable in this day and age, one occasionally gets involved in a “What was your lockdown like?” conversation.  I just avoided going to a college reunion, and I’m sure much of the smallest of talk would have centered around trading anecdotes about isolation from family and support structures, about juggling parenting, schooling, and work-from-home, of eldest children trying to figure out how much college was actually worth when another Covid variant could cause another stretch of remote learning from within the college’s dorms.  The personal cost of the pandemic has been and will continue to be wildly varied, which makes it both an interesting conversation starter and an easy way to reveal vast gulfs of experience on either side of an anecdote.

My final pre-shutdown experience back in March of 2020 was deciding that it probably was not the better part of valor to venture out to a Welcome to Night Vale performance when I knew the governor was about to declare a state of emergency as soon as the timing was right for a press conference.  But a scant two weeks before that, I’d closed out a weekend of entertainment by walking around the Museum of Modern Art with an old roommate talking about the growing fears of infection and how seriously we should take the burgeoning news coverage.  Prior to that, the weekend had consisted of my first ever attendance at an actual Broadway show and the achievement of a long-awaited dream of visiting the New York Public Library’s Charade collection.

That’s not what it’s officially called, of course.  But, as I’ve previously mentioned, the Library of Performing Arts’ collection of the papers of Charade screenwriter Peter Stone were an enticement that had been hovering over my NYC visits for some time. I’d previously had an opportunity to swing by and plunge into the archives, Scrooge McDuck-stylee, in November of 2017 when I unexpectedly found myself with five hours to kill between planned events.  But I was with company and asking them to wait while I poured over ephemera of little interest to anyone else felt like the height of rudeness (he says on a blog where he’s detailing some of that ephemera). So I put it off until I found myself with another window of time to kill between events and was flying solo. Some people find it lonely and a little scary to travel by one’s self, but I find if one is looking to spend a literal half-day taking notes on contract details and script annotations of a minor ’60s romantic thriller comedy, it’s best not to trespass on another person’s patience. My friends were politely bored enough having to listen to me gush about the experience afterward; to deal with with it in real-time would surely have been unreasonable.

What is reasonable, unfortunately, are the fairly stringent copyright protections instituted by NYPL about the fabulous things that I found there. Obviously, they are aware that they have many, many things in their collection that are not in the public domain, and despite the fact that anyone with a digital camera and a library card could cheerfully make the protected contents of their archives significantly less protected, their policy states that “The Library does not grant written permission for any type of use of reproductions taken by readers“, and that photographs are only for “personal use”. I have read and re-read the permissions policy, and while I would say that the narcissistic ouroboros of non-commercial blogging is much more adjacent to personal use than it is to publication, I understand that this perspective probably wouldn’t stand up against a cease-and-desist notice.  Since copyright is designed to prevent unlicensed reproductions that will stifle, divert, and lessen sales, excerpts or “transformative works” that aren’t going to reduce access to and sales of the original aren’t considered violations. Which is why this post won’t be a catalogue of all the minutiae I’ve teased above. I have instead clipped a portion of an image from the NYPL’s “Peter Stone” image collection of a man in a smart… waistcoat, but changed it enough to hopefully make it something sufficiently Other.  I’m pretty sure that is permissible — and desirable, as something to slightly break up this unremitting block of self-indulgent twaddle with an image — but I’ve been wrong about the legality of Charade-based copyright issues before.

Speaking of, in that previous Charade post where I learned more about its copyright-free status, it was because an image was used in a publication because, as I interpreted it, there wasn’t any need for clearances.  I recognize that the film isn’t a cultural touchstone, but the primary actors are quite famous, and one might think that images from it would therefore be used more often, even in this youth-centric, trend- and clout-chasing culture.  I was therefore pleased to see Hepburn’s signature yellow coat as the eye-popping design element in an advertisement for the library streaming service Kanopy.   As much as I have been glad of the late-pandemic ability to return to public spaces, especially including cinemas, and therefore am not entirely likely to co-sign the sentiment of the ad copy, it was nice to see my parasocial icons being used in a professional publication aimed squarely at my demo.

But actually, my experience with Charade has only ever been home video-based.  It’s been nice to go from scraggly VHS in the “Audrey Hepburn” section of my local video store to crisp lines of the Criterion release to the nigh-verisimilitude of the current Blu-Ray transfer.  And one of the best aspects of this return to cinemas has been the occasional visit to repertory screenings in Boston.  A couple of these have been showings of movies I saw originally in the theatres and wanted to see again in that format in hopes of recapturing some of the thrill of that initial experience.  But mostly if I’m going to make the effort to drive for an hour and scrounge for parking in the minor local metropolis, it’s because I want to see a film that I never had the opportunity to see in its original intended form, because I’m curious if there’s anything about it that feels different when I’m watching an image projected through celluloid instead of staring at a glowing LCD.

And it’s fairly universally acknowledged amongst cineasts and film reviewers that film intended to be seen with an audience.  The laughs, both unexpected and knowing, that resound throughout the common cinema space have been the aspect of seeing these other revivals that have been the most vital.  I know what I like about these films from having watched them with myself over and over again.  I know how I’m going to respond to the rising action and the soundtrack flourishes and the jump cuts and the sudden swerves.  Much of the enjoyment of rewatching a film at home is the tension between knowing what’s about to happen and still experiencing the visceral thrill of then having it affect one regardless of that knowledge.  To that end: I know what I like about Charade — it’s a long list, granted (no pun intended), as recorded at obnoxious length over and over in this space — but it will be interesting to learn what others appreciate about it, in real time.

Related Links:

+ Vulture: “Bad projection is ruining the cinema-going experience.”
+ Medium: The Somerville Theatre’s 70mm Festival
+ The Hollywood Reporter: The legacy of Donner’s Superman looms large over new versions of the character.
+ Nicholas Roegly, creator of the best G1988 Beetlejuice print, brought his eye for luminescent architecture to Charade back in 2020, and I missed it. I would have debated long and hard over that price tag…