It’s been cold and rainy, rainy and cold.
[‘Etretat in the Rain’ (1886), Claude Monet]
With good timing, though I say so myself, I’m reading the recently published, first biography in English of Claude Monet, the painter of weather and water. He grew up in Le Havre (‘very rainy, Le Havre’, as Noël Coward might have said), a place close to my heart, and he spent most of his time living along the Le Havre to Paris railway and Seine river routes, when he wasn’t in places like Etretat with its spectacular cliffs. No Matisse-style Med sunshine and bright light for him. (The train journey from Le Havre to Gare Saint-Lazare is still fantastic, running from the atmospheric train shed which features in La Bête humaine to the atmospheric train shed in Monet’s paintings, crossing and recrossing the boucles or loops of the Seine, past fields of blue flax flowers, and via Rouen and Vernon-Giverny).
[channelling Saul Leiter in Norway]
I started reading in rainyt Bergen, Norway’s wettest city, carried on in Oslo, home to this wonderful Monet painting, and now I’m reading in Cambridge where the conduit and watercourses are overflowing.
I’m dismayed that Monet has been reduced to the Impressionists’ poster-boy, regarded as all-too-easy to like, when in fact he was phenomenally ahead of his time. He wasn’t out to paint pretty pictures, he was the prime innovator, the artistic revolutionary, the breaker of the many, long-standing but nonsensical Salon rules about not painting outside, not using modern, ordinary, domestic, street life as subjects. The biography presents him as something of a difficult character, a tough but wheedling, scrounging genius who left his family for weeks at a time, was cavalier about unpaid bills, deliberately gave out contradictory stories and facts. But he was utterly, exhilaratingly single-minded and tenacious, an atheist, a non-conformist, totally unwilling to compromise, mainly because he simply couldn’t do otherwise. He simply refused to do the people/collector/gallery-wonder pleasing stuff which is so ironic given his reputation today as one of the easiest all painters to like to the point where there is now a lot of inverted snobbery about his work. He life is an object lesson in not giving a toss, and being right to do so.
[The Beatles (Oct 1964) by Robert Whitaker at Auchen Castle in Scotland]
But where was I with the weather? Oh yes, indoors, listening to the rain pelting down. I can’t say I’m complaining as a deluge is a lovely excuse to stay inside, with songs about rain by the Beatles (‘when it rains…it’s just a state of mind’) and Bob Dylan as the soundtrack. I like working at a desk with soft lamplight listening to the rain outside, and nothing beats watching an old black-and-white film with lashings of rain when the real thing is happening at the same time. As Don Paterson puts it in Rain,
“I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;
one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame
to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone…”
[It Always Rains on Sunday]
When I think of rainy films, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) with the fabulously-named Googie Withers - a name on a par with Hermione Gingold in my book - is one of my favourites. It could have easily been set in Stockport when I was growing up - maybe with the title extended to It Always Rains and is Excruciatingly Boring on Sunday.
Yet now I think this sort of scene is beautiful. This is ‘Manchester Downpour’ (2019) taken by Simon Buckley on his iPhone (in August, classic Manchester). I once had a summer job just beyond the bridge on the left, and admit I never once saw it this way when I arrived at Deansgate station which is where this was taken. I was just dreading another day working inside a Securicor van.
[The Big Sleep, 1946]
Rain is very film noir: glistening pavements, wet alleys, reflections of street lights, soaking wet hats and mackintoshes, shiny black umbrellas, rain bouncing off all surfaces.
[windscreen in Psycho]
And always the view of a windscreen with slow, rhythmic wipers creating tension, mostly because they never clear the screen quickly enough for my liking.
Of course, the heavy rain when Marion Crane arrives at Bates Motel in Psycho prefigures the shower scene. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you in all this rain”, says Norman Bates, just as no-one will hear her when he stabs her in the shower.
[Clint Eastwood almost dissolving]
Rain is perfect for a film noir, but can get a bit slushy and pathetic fallacy in romantic films, when it’s all about clouds and storms in relationships with the sun appearing at the end etc etc. I enjoyed The Bridges of Madison County far more than I was prepared to admit at the time, and like the way it reversed the usual rain-then-sun pattern, but the storm at the end was simply too torrential. I get it, the rain mirrors Meryl Streep’s tears, but I was bothered that it was going to take Clint Eastwood for ever to dry out.
Interestingly, the rain-soaked Les Parapluies de Cherbourg has a sad, teary ending, too, but is also one of the most exquisite films ever. The title sequence alone, with the choreography of umbrellas, is amazing, but so are the wonderful scenes in which colour plays one of the main characters.
[‘Walk with Soames’ (1958), Saul Leiter]
It’s not difficult to recast the rain as an artistic, theatrical or cinematic effect which can also alter the way we see things. Monet may paint it, but no-one captures it in photographs as well as Saul Leiter (1923-2013) who said, “A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person.” Happily, an important exhibition of his work is about to open in Milton Keynes, and I’m actually hoping it’s going to pour down when I go.
I’m ending with a pendant photo to last week’s final photo, this time from Mon Oncle (1958), and with an umbrella instead of baguettes. Finally, the rain has stopped, but it’s always best to be prepared for the next downpour.
Happy Sunday!
Another lovely Sunday piece Jane, thank you. Read, appropriately, as the rain yet again patters against the windows.
I smiled at and agreed with your appreciation of the names Hermione Gingold and Googie Withers. Anyone called Hephzibar also does it for me. Such a lovely mouthful of a name.
Lovely, as usual. Thank you. And now I’m thinking of other rainy film scenes. The first to mind is when it rained frogs in *Magnolia*. And Google Withers is indeed a wonderful name. We enjoyed seeing her recently in *One of Our Aircraft Is Missing* (Powell & Pressburger, 1942): very good as a Dutch resistance leader, not her usual kind of rôle! No rain it however, not that I recall.