A) It's not, Gaveston, with all due respect.
B) It's really simple to tie the loose strands of
Hair together, and the irony is that to do so borrows from its later descendant,
Rent.
Following context clues in the (admittedly incomprehensible to some, and kind of minimized in the revival) script of the play, Claude wants to be a filmmaker. They're there:
"Claude Hooper Bukowski
Finds that it's groovy to hide in a movie
Pretends he's Fellini or Antonioni
Or also his countryman Roman Polanski
All rolled into one..." (Manchester, England)
and
"I fashion my future on films in space..." (The Flesh Failures)
It was a subplot in the show that was eliminated more and more as the book became a "non-book." If he wasn't drafted, or if he had survived Vietnam, who knows what might have come from the mind of the young Polack who preferred to believe he was from Manchester? Could he have had a good shot at rivaling Lucas or Spielberg, who had their heyday around this time as well? Who knows?
Anyway, less waxing philosophical, more getting to the point. My film of
Hair would have Claude sort of be like Mark in
Rent: armed with a Super 8 camera, or a sketchpad he's constantly drawing storyboards on, depending on the scene. An early day Martin Scorsese, almost. Everything we see is filtered through Claude's lens. In the course of the movie, fades and scene openings could be done by initially seeing his silent mini-flicks that we enter into (turns into sound and color) or one of his sketches that 'comes alive' as we get closer to it. This also allows us to open up the stage setting to bigger scenes within New York, which in the heady days of the Sixties was a hotbed of performance art, demonstrations, "Be-Ins," etc. Claude shoots without a script and films what he sees, and boy, what rich material he has to draw from!
Take the lyrics for "Manchester" as an example, and you have a veritable roadmap! The darker more brooding scenes (Berger's treatment of Sheila) have the feeling and flow of early Polanski; heady scenes like the Be-In hearken back to Antonioni's best work in such films as
Blow-Up, and the more psychedelic or group scenes bear traces of Fellini's influence. All of this is totally in keeping with things suggested by Claude's character. It's apparent that sometimes, as close together as the Tribe keeps, Claude feels separate from them ("I'm in-vis-ib-le..."). He goes through bouts of distance from the rest of the group. The camera enhances his detachment, which is growing as he realizes that as carefree as the Tribe seems to be, they don't face what's really going on, and when you get right down to it, they're not really all that different at heart from their forebears (e.g., Berger's treatment of Sheila).
Formerly gvendo2005
Broadway Legend
joined: 5/1/05
Blocked: After Eight, suestorm, david_fick, emlodik, lovebwy, Dave28282, joevitus, BorisTomashevsky, Seb28
Updated On: 6/29/13 at 08:05 PM
