Krapka!

Figures that I would only now notice that the film Kafka was airing tonight, a film I don't think I've seen since it was first released in the theatres in 1991. It's a peculiar film (very, very much so), but it has some magnificent cinematography, and the penultimate cinematic performance of Sir Alec Guinness as the Chief Clerk. It's odd to think about that, to reflect that the last time I saw this movie I was watching what turned out to be Guinness' last significant role. (He had an unbilled cameo in the film Mute Witness, a movie Guinness, as he wittily recounts in one of his journals, didn't even realize he was in; he apparently did some shots totalling fifteen minutes of time as a kindness for the young film director Anthony Waller.) It'e eerie to think of things in such terms now, especially because Guinness was one of my childhood 'heroes,' for lack of a better word; he always represented to me versatility, intelligence, civility, humour, and genuine class (as Dick Cavett once recognized, brilliantly, to be an anagram of Guinness' name). There are so few examples of this 'total package' these days, and it reminds me that much of what was said in the myriad articles published when Guinness died in 2000 was true: that he was the last of a generation, the last of a breed. At the risk of seeming sentimental, Sir Alec taught me a lot about the man I wanted to be, or at least wanted to emulate in my own way. In an increasingly ill-mannered society this is harder and harder to do, especially when people no longer attend to subtle of gesture and word and resonance, when the rampant screaming and shouting of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm is heralded as genius. Guinness was an actor who could convey more with a pursing of his eyelids than most could with entire soliloquies; and he always emerged, even from the hype of Star Wars, with dignity entirely in tact. I admire that, I admire it a lot.