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a collection of film, literature, and poetry — predominantly of the queer variety.

( alex / isherwood and auden devotee )

exponential63:

westvillagecontructionnyc:

exponential63:

Maurice (James Ivory) at 26, 1987 – 2013 [x]

*****

Favourite Maurice things, 5/26: 

Maurice Hall/Alec Scudder

Original set photography by Jon Gardey [spelling corrected!] from Robert Emmet Long (1991) The Films of Merchant Ivory, 1st Edition.

Brand new scan, clean-up and slight colour manip work by me.

This is my cover to my dvd

westvillagecontructionnyc Yup, it was used later, in 2004, as the front-cover image for the (out-of-print) Merchant Ivory Collection DVD of Maurice (= ‘your DVD’). But check the differences: the DVD artwork reverses and crops Jon Gardey’s original photo, and gives it a misty, nostalgic faded-out look.

My scan is directly from the book stated above plus some colour work: in contrast with both the original photo and the DVD artwork, I’ve tuned up the green to make it really bright.

Most of Maurice’s beautiful colour stills photography was the work of Jon Gardey or Katya Grenfell, but they rarely get credited in most of the reproductions (including the DVD cover), I assume because their work is treated as ‘belonging’ to Merchant Ivory Productions…

amirdelmar:

Pit Stop - Yen Tan, 2013

"We Once Were Tide"

de-profundis-url:

talkaboutpreciousthings:

Maurice (1987)

Maurice is one of my favourite period films, and like A Room With A View, it’s beautiful, perfectly acted and has a great big, aching heart.

I’ve always felt more for Maurice & Clive than for Maurice & Alec, since I feel the latter is more of a fantasy, a dream, rather than reality. Even though I’m also always glad Maurice gets a happy ending, at least for a while.

What would have happened if Maurice & Clive would not have been interrupted that first time in the squeaky chair? How physical would their relationship have become at that point? Clive is the instigator, but where would he have stopped? His belief in platonic love between men wasn’t something he came up with on a whim, but maybe his youthful passion would have taken precedent for once. If you look at Clive’s relationship with his wife (I love that Clive’s wife is portrayed sympathetically, it adds to the complexity), it’s very chaste as well. Seems Clive was a man with less need for physical love - or someone who’d learnt to control it so well he’d forgotten it ever existed. 

It’s not hard to understand Clive, in spite of his abandonment of Maurice. He has responsibilities, family and a desire to belong. It wasn’t an easy choice in those days. Maurice doesn’t come from the same kind of family and Maurice’s choice in the end is one of exclusion; he and Alec won’t ever be able to live freely and openly. Also, I’ve always felt that Maurice & Alec’s relationship is (initially at least) more about Maurice finally experiencing physical love and getting a release for all his pent up desire than it is about love. Alec is a decent, clever and ambitious man, though. And maybe he and Maurice could make a life for themselves in some other part of the world. 

Interestingly enough, as much as I’m a huge Maurice fan (and Maurice and Alec are my ultimate OTP), I actually do have an issue with how Maurice and Alec’s relationship is portrayed. The two of them meet, fall in love and have a strong physical connection, but we don’t really see much beyond that. We don’t often see them having meaningful conversations demonstrating that they are right for each other. I mean, Alec’s decision to miss his boat shows that he supports Maurice no matter what, but physical love can be deceiving. What if when they get past that honeymoon period, they find that they don’t actually know each other at all?

However … with all that said, there is a reason why I can forgive Forster. As many people have pointed out, Alec and Maurice’s relationship is like a fantasy, with the two of them having their happy ending, and I think that’s intentional. Nowadays, discrimination is still a very real threat for same-sex couples, but more and more countries are legalising marriage equality, and overall, the new generation is becoming much more supportive of gay rights than the previous one. I’ve heard many stories of LGBT people who have been rejected by their families for coming out, or bullied at school, but later their families learned to accept them, and these people eventually found love. Here in 2014, as hard as it still is in many respects, finding love, and living a happy, fulfilling life is an actual possibility for gay people. Turn the clock back 100 years, and the best a gay person could realistically hope for was to not get caught by the police. Maybe if they were lucky, they could marry another gay person of the opposite sex, and find a lover on the side, but their relationship would have to remain secret.

Good artists create art in order to understand the world we live in, and even if some of it is fantastical, it helps keep us sane. Forster was often cynical about the state of gay rights, even after 1967, but he still desperately wanted to believe in that happy ending, which I guess symbolised a better world that seemed unattainable in his lifetime. That’s why I’ll always keep coming back to this story, because at the end of the day, that fantasy ending is about hope.

coolest-humans:

Léa and Adéle 

“Blue Is The Warmest Color”

Photography MIKAEL JANSSON

Stylist KARL TEMPLER

alec-scudder:

“They played for the sake of each other and their fragile relationship — if one fell the other would follow. They intended no harm to the world, but so long as it attacked they must punish, they must stand wary.”