Sheet-Metal Poetry
July 1, 2010
IN AN article in The Brussels Journal about the interesting genre of aviation movies, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
The real interest in aviation cinema lies, however, not in the perfunctory drama, but in the forms and movements of the aircraft themselves and – if one were to place such films in their historical sequence – in the urgent perfection of those forms towards the increasingly abstract. Oswald Spengler writes, in The Decline of the West Volume II (1922), of “Faustian Technics.” “The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time,” Spengler asserts, while “an ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons.” According to Spengler, “the machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric” until “they weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions.” One remarks an element of ambiguity in Spengler’s assessment. Spengler admires the machines, but he discerns their tendency to absorb and dehumanize their makers and users. Spengler perceives that machines might function on one level while signifying on quite another, often with rich connotation. The cruciform-dynamic shape of the standard airplane links its powered ascent with the spires of the great Cathedrals of the Gothic Age. The machine, in the metaphor, “vaults the heavens.”
One filmmaker who understood both the esthetic and spiritual implications of high-speed flight and the powerful allure over men of “subtle forces, currents, and tensions” was, perhaps unpredictably at the time, David Lean (1908-1991), known in his early career, in the 1940s, for spirited cinema-adaptations of Charles Dickens and in later career for lyric-heroic films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) that tackled historical topics on the largest scale. In 1952 Lean directed what I nominate as the finest aviation film ever, the brilliantly understated story of British test pilots in the first decade of reaction propulsion, The Sound Barrier. Lean’s well-paced film does two things at once, among many others, which might strike one as contradictory or irreconcilable.
The Sound Barrier celebrates in beautifully day-lit black-and-white cinematography the angular sheet-metal poetry of the sweptwing, jet-powered planform and it pays gentle respect to the pastoral beauty of the English countryside, where the testing of the aircraft takes place.
Mr. Bertonneau also writes:
My male students at SUNY Oswego, where I teach in the English Department, know almost nothing about flight or airplanes. They have never read Pylon (1935) by William Faulkner or Pilote de Guerre (1942) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and they have never heard of Flying Aces or the Supermarine Swift or the Sabre Jet. This deficiency belongs to their general spiritual emasculation in a world dominated by sensitivity, emotions, free-association, “smiley faces,” “fairness,” “comfort food,” soccer leagues for girls, “women’s studies,” “bad hair days,” “offense” and other specifically female institutions, conspiracies, and phenomena. In a Spenglerian mood, I say that fathers should instill in their sons careful appreciation for powerful, dangerous, and extravagant machines.
— Comments —
Lawrence Auster writes:
For a good movie about men in flight, aesthetically done, try Air Force. Here’s the Amazon review:
Director Howard Hawks casually referred to Air Force (1943) as his “contribution to the war effort.” It’s also a masterpiece, standing with John Ford’s They Were Expendable as the best WWII films Hollywood made while the war was still on. On the evening of December 6, 1941, a B-17 flies out of San Francisco on a routine peacetime training mission to Hickam Field in Hawaii. While en route, the officers and crew overhear radio traffic of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (“Whatcha got there,” somebody asks the radio operator, “Orson Welles?”). They touch down in a smoking world like a vision out of Dante, then hop from one Pacific outpost to the next as the clouds of war roil. The plane itself, the Mary Ann, is the movie’s main character; the biggest star, John Garfield, actually gets last billing as her newly assigned tail gunner. Air Force is one of Hawks’s supreme guys-doing-their-job movies, and the definitive war-movie portrait of America as a melting-pot of diverse individuals and types making common cause. The ensemble (Garfield, Gig Young, John Ridgely, Arthur Kennedy, the great Harry Carey, et al.) is superbly directed, there’s a strong Dudley Nichols screenplay (with an uncredited contribution by William Faulkner) and breathtaking editing of the battle scenes (which won George Amy an Oscar), and the camerawork is by James Wong Howe in peak form.
