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Ahoy! Present Music does “Moby Dick,” as a new silent film, with live music

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Moby Dick; or, The Whale

A new silent film by Wu Tsang, accompanied live by Present Music’s ensemble.

Orchestral Music composed by Caroline Shaw, Andrew Yee and Asma Maroof

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A silent film version of Moby-Dick, accompanied by a crew of live musicians “on the deck” of the theater.

The notion intrigues and evokes…One imagines, in their questing voyage halfway around the globe, the sail-propelled whaling ship Pequod must’ve had vast stretches of yawning silence, though only from human speech.

Yet Herman Melville’s epic fictional trip, based his experience on such ships during the 19th century heyday of whaling, was surely accompanied by a layered array of sounds, musical in various ways and otherwise.

The rhythmic, surging crash and splash of the sea against the creaking wooden hull, echoing through the slats into the forecastle, the forward portion of the ship below deck where the the common crew members lived. In tight quarters with bunks against the inside hull, the rolling music of the ocean surely seeped deeply into many a seaman’s dreams. The rhythms likely reached back to Captain Ahab’s quarters.
Imagine also the ocean wind whistling and howling across the deck, and rippling and slapping powerfully against the mighty sails, causing further sequenced creaking from the wooden masts.

And, of course, sailors themelves were renowned for the sea chanteys they sang and played on fiddles and tambourines. A key character, the Black cabin boy Pip, is a tambourine player.

A silent “Moby-Dick” also recalls the first-ever film adptation of the great novel — the silent “The Sea Beast” from 1926, which starred John Barrymore as Ahab. It was remade into the first talkie version as Moby Dick in 1930, also starring Barrymore. The more definitive film version didn’t arrive until 1956 when the great director John Huston took on the project, casting Gregory Peck as Ahab, and Richard Basehart as Ishmael.

Without any modern special effects, much less digital magic, that film’s dramatic scenes of fighting the massive white sperm whale remain fairly breathtaking.

And though some questioned the casting of “good guy” Peck, he embodied the strange man’s stentorian eloquence and charisma, his stern fixation on the horizon of doomed destiny, an often-raging captain obsessed with revenge against the whale that tore off his leg and virtually demasted his manhood.

“Moby Dick; or, The Whale,’ a 2022 film by Wu Tsang, presented with a live orchestra. Photo by Diana Pfammatter, Courtesy Wu Tsang.

Silent, but not literally, is this new film by Wu Tsang (pictured at top), who is a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship winner. Along with the music, she takes the viewer by the hand in that her film does have a narrator, of sorts, though it’s not Ishmael, Melville’s narrator. Rather, in a twist, it is the book’s “sub-sub-librarian” who adapts a script from the book’s “extracts,” his  eccentrically encyclopedic array of quotations about whaling that prefaces the book’s famous opening line “Call me Ishmael.”

In an interview with Flash Art, Tsang describes this “librarian”: “In our version, he lives inside the belly of the whale, and he’s a kind of a Jonah-like god figure. He can provide these different layers of research and commentary that maybe the characters in the story are not able to reflect upon themselves.” 1

Tsang explained how her interest in the subject arose only a few years ago.

“A friend of ours, a film studies scholar named Laura Harris, was giving a talk about C. L. R. James’s book Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, which is a postcolonial reading of Moby-Dick.” 2

“Laura’s reading of Melville via James was an important opening that got me super excited to think about how something so old and historical can also have a very contemporary feeling to it. The book is also a prism through which to look at the present, even if it’s a very old story.”

Indeed, this writer is working on a novel about Melville, and in my extensive reading on the author and his work, James’ 1953 book remains among the most pertinent. One can argue the current crisis of leadership worldwide, where “strongman” leadership is ascendant, derives from the unregulated overabundance of capitalist economics. James, who identified as a Marxist, addressed this problem in drawing upon the clear significance of the whaling ship Pequod as a symbol for America and democracy under siege by an oppressive, self-interested leader.

Like America, Melville decribes an extremely diverse crew population, 44 men from the U.S. (including Native American), northern and southern Europe, South America, Africa, Polynesia, Iceland, the Azores, China, and India.

Monomaniacal Ahab convinces the crew to forsake its general mission of whaling, for the captain’s sole puropose — pursuing and killing Moby Dick. 3

Publicity for the new film indicates it addresses the issue of capitalism as well as colonialism.

Tsang comments in Flash Art: “Most modern forms of political leadership are not even straightforwardly about world domination or war, although we also experience that as well. It’s the drive to organize society in a capitalistic way, for an abstraction.”

In his book, James draws out the ways in which the Pequod’s crew and captain illustrate the structure of capitalism. The crew, James writes, is “living as the vast majority of human beings live . . . seeking to avoid pain and misery and struggling for happiness.”

Above them all sits Captain Ahab, the chief executive who wields centuries of accumulated knowledge and labor for his own gain, but who — not unlike Donald Trump and his circle — would blindly throw all of it into the abyss.

For James, the novel forces readers to consider whether this kind of civilization can even survive.

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Tsang continues, “I also was looking at different research around the maritime history of that time period. There’s a book called The Many-Headed Hydra (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000) that, like C. L. R. James, focuses on the ‘motley crew’ of sailors, and how this social class of people were coming from all over the world. The book talks about how the ship was a place of mixing for cultural exchange, news and information, and even spreading revolution.”

A significant part of the cultural exchange ocurs at intimate and personal levels. Thus the new film will play up a subtext of the book, homosociality and homoeroticism.

It portrays Ishmael, the American novice sailor, and Queequeg, the Polynesian lead harpoonist, as lovers, and the ship’s crew as a community that has partly transcended gender and race. It features queer sex, costumes codesigned by Telfar Clemens and, of course, sailors grasping gelatinous whale blubber.

Melville’s book doesn’t specifically depict gay sex but it’s not difficult to imagine the goings on in a ship of men at sea for many months at a time. And in the book, Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed in a crowded New Bedford inn of necessity, yet “upon waking next daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” Ishmael relates. “You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Later in the chapter “A Bosom Friend,” Ishmael continues, “how it is I know not but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often live and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cozy, loving pair.”

And then, “and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we…”

Although long-married and the father of four children, Melville was most likely a man of strong bisexual feelings, most markedly for his fellow contemporary author Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he ardently dedicates “Moby-Dick.”

In her comprehensive Melville: A Biography, Laurie Robertson-Lorant insightfully writes, “His essential bisexuality, more conscious and less guilt-ridden, thanks to his sojourn in the South Seas, than that of the many repressed Victorians, would enable him to envision social organizations that would liberate human personality, not constrain it; yet he, too, was a child of his culture and his time, just as deeply wounded in his maleness as women were in their femaleness by a patriarchal culture that repressed the feminine in man and the masculine in woman…” 4

And the very end of the grand tale — with the ship sunk in a whirlpool by Moby Dick, Ishmael is the lone survivor to tell his astonishing story — carries symbolic weight regarding the profound relationship between the two shipmates, bosom frends, singers of the sea’s engulfing song.

It is a sort of call and response, Queequeg, in his final breath, in effect calls up to his friend to take his air-filled coffin, which he requested built after a near-death experience. Ishmael responds, grabbing and embracing it to his bosom and surviving afloat for several days until another passing ship finds him.

As for the film’s music score performed live, I expect Present Music to execute it with vivid aplomb and style. There are good reasons they maintain an international reputation while remaining loyally-based in the town of their birth in 1982. Their Thanksgiving concert at St. John’s Cathedral was one of the most richly diverse and moving events I’ve experienced in some time.

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  1. Filmmaker/installation artist Wu Tsang’s full interview with Flash Art: https://flash—art.com/article/wu-tsang/
  2. C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, c. 1953, reissued in 2001, University Press of New England, Dartmouth College (with an introduction by Donald Pease).
  3. In the early 1800s when “Moby-Dick” is set, whales were hunted primarily for their oil, which was used for lighting lamps, the main source of illumination before the invention of electric lights. Whale oil lamps were in use from the 1780s to around the 1860s. Over time many lamps were converted from whale oil to kerosene or camphine and eventually to electricity. Whale oil was extremely popular because it burned cleanly, brightly, and lasted longer than candles or other oil.
  4. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, Clarkson Potter, 109                  The “sojourn in the South Seas” the biographer references includes Melville’s time spent among the naturally unrepressed Typee people. That experience led to his first, and highly successful, semi-autobiographical book Typee, which included, for the time, quite sensual descriptions of the islanders, who often spent time in the nude.

NPR American Masters question: What single work of art changed your life?

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This is the colorized cover of the Kindle edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” as illustrated by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 edition, but with the author’s name added. (see below) 
Well, I gotta right to sing the blues, Or to sing praises, like a fool, to the earthly heavens where art might come from. And if it is the blues, it’s the kind that inspires you rather than keeps your head just above water.
You see, my song sort of went on and on (by Facebook comment standards), spilling over the 12-bar blues form like water in a sinking ship. But the editors at PBS American Masters Facebook page didn’t jettison any of my load of responses to the provocative question: What single work of art changed your life?
They’ve received 247 responses and counting. Here’s my response. I couldn’t quite help myself. I have even expanded on it here, with a bit more text and imagery.
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As a long-time generalist arts journalist, I’ve encountered so much extraordinary art in all its forms. How to pick one? I might say seeing Picasso’s “Guernica,” but it was an oddly truncated experience, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed before I could see all of it. I’d literally been stopped in my tracks on the staircase for long minutes because the center of Guernica filled the doorway view at the top. Then the doors closed, as the museum was closing for the day. I didn’t have time to return before flying back home. The great work moved to Spain a short time later, in 1981. So, I live with a reproduction of it, and that oddly but profoundly unfulfilled experience. 1
Imagine seeing, through a doorway, the middle of this astonishing political mural by Picasso, being stopped in your tracks by it on a museum staircase — and then the gallery doors closing on you at 5 p.m. That’s my sadly truncated but unforgettable experience of seeing the mighty “Guernica.” Courtesy Magazine Artsper
“Guernica,” of course was named for the Spanish town bombed in 1937 by Nazi planes, complicit with Fascist dictator Franco  — the first act of modern war terrorism on a civilian population of nascent World War II.
***
And then, seeing Arshile Gorky’s often-gorgeous metamorphosis from surrealism to abstract-expressionism — closely reflecting my own artistic sensibilities — at the Guggenheim Museum of Art is another life-changing moment.
The plow and the song - Digital Remastered Edition Painting by Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky’s 1946 painting “The Plow and the Song,” (above) lyrically transmutes his memories of homeland Armenia to the modernist present. The memories were rooted in his long, desperate childhood escape, by foot, with his sister Vartoosh and mother, from the Armenian holocaust conducted by the Ottoman Empire. Their mother, Sushan der Marderosian pictured below — in this wrenchingly poignant Gorky painting from about 1926, with the artist at the age of their exodus — died of starvation in 1918. (Courtesy pixels.)
Pleased with my Milwaukee Journal review of the Guggenheim show, Gorky’s nephew Karlen Mooradian contacted me. I was fortunate enough to obtain an in-person interview with him and Gorky’s sister Vartoosh Adoian Mooradian (Gorky’s original name was Vosdanig Adoian) in Chicago, but I was never able to publish anything from the interview. I did glean great insight from Mooradian’s 1980 book The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky, about his artist uncle, who committed suicide in 1948. He profoundly influenced many abstract expressionists, none more than Willem de Kooning. 2
The Artist and His Mother, 1926 - 1936 - Arshile Gorky - WikiArt.org
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Then, music vibrates on and on in my life, where the single transforming moment could be the Butterfield Blues Band’s ground-breaking East-West album, or first hearing John Coltrane’s achingly eloquent and exalting A Love Supreme suite, or his searing Live at Birdland, and imaging being there, in that fire.
John Coltrane “Live at Birdland.” Courtesy deep groove mono
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Or, by contrast to such earnest passion, the lacerating sneer of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” which helped pinpoint the existential waywardness of the freedom my generation declared from bourgeois convention and responsibility. Or, by another contrast, Dylan’s affirmatively flashing “Chimes of Freedom,” poetry aflame in music
Or, hearing Beethoven or Mahler in fearless, heaving performances, in Milwaukee and Madison. Grammy-winning conductor John DeMain especially unlocked much of Mahler’s glorious might with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, in a full Mahler symphonic cycle in the 1990s and 2000s.
In theater, a darkly, full-chested staging of Macbeth at American Platers Theater, and a thunderbolt-raging King Lear at UW-Milwaukee. So, yes, the commonality here seems an appetite for grand gestures, of many sorts.
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That’s why I finally must land on the experience of reading Moby-Dick for the first time (as some readers of this blog might’ve guessed). I was already in my ‘40s and, knowing its reputation and having seen Huston’s movie version, I remained unprepared for how inexorably the book swept me away, even though many readers understandably turn back to the shore. And yet, there’s so much you’d miss. Even the cetology I gobbled up like so much krill going down a cavernous throat.
Yet the haunting had begun several decades earlier when I found a copy of the 1930 Random House edition which brought the book to widespread readership.
My plastic-covered copy of the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick, what I still believe is the definitive version of an illustrated edition of the book, with art by Rockwell Kent. Photo by Kevin Lynch
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The visual artist in me responded to this powerfully. I knew then, my day of reckoning with the book loomed somewhere in the future. There have been many illustrated editions of this book since, and some are steeped in their own fiery inspiration. But none so eloquently captures the spirit of the book as it manifest itself in the Depression era, as does that 1930 edition.
Rockwell Kent, in his way, approaches Melville’s genius in his 228 woodblock prints. The black and white Deco-influenced imagery is proto-noir, capturing the sense of lost-at-sea and impending doom and, in deft knife strokes, the essence of characters lurking inside their ravaged, or mortally infected, souls. 3
Infected by what? The blood-lust fervor of Ahab, akin to a demagogue manufacturing an enemy, in the whale that took his leg. The expansively stentorian Ahab, recalling Lear, captivates the whole crew in his questing rage — except for first mate Starbuck and, to a degree, Ishmael, who remains somewhat remote, and “aloft.”
Alas, Random House jumped on their perceived marketing coup with the new edition so strongly that they failed to put Melville’s name anywhere on the cover, only including “Illustrated by Rockwell Kent” on the spine. It was yet another of countless insults to the great and long-forsaken writer, right at the emergence of his genius to broader acceptance. The current Kindle version (at top), at least, corrects that “oversight” with the original cover (colorized though it is).
Captain Ahab — Rockwell Kent – Biblioklept
Here’s a brooding but burning portrait of Captain Ahab, by Rockwell Kent. 
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So, back to Melville’s text:
The extraordinarily antiphonal voices of Ishmael and Ahab echoed through my head and psyche, across the oceanic expanses of poetic writing, gritty details, and surprising humor, which might make some virtually sea-sick, but hang onto the horizon as the crow’s nest sways!
It was indeed postmodern in 1851, in how Melville strangely constructed it, and summed up his own creation as well as anyone: “It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.”
“Thar she blows!” from “Moby Dick,” 1930, illustrated by Kent. Courtesy “History of Art: Masterpieces of World Literature: Herman Melville.”
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Yet it persists, remaining afloat as a metaphor and allegory for America, in the tall, creaking bones of The Pequod, manned by people from many races. And what else did it all mean? Defying fate? Or God? Or nature? Or Nature? Hubris as delusion, or the destiny of grace embraced, one storyteller’s backward glance into timelessness?
Rockwell Kent Ishmael Going Abroad Giclee Art Print | Etsy
Here, Pequod first harpoonist Queequeg, who deeply befriends Ishmael early in the novel, remains vigilant for the White Whale, even while down in the forecastle where the crew bunks. Illustration by Kent. Courtesy Etsy.
From childhood, oceanic depths had always scared me. In time, Melville’s mounting whorl of words, and his own extraordinary life story, compelled me to begin writing a novel about its author.
These days, people critique the book’s scarcity of women characters. Yet, as Sascha Morrell comments. “On the other hand, the novel makes numerous appeals to the maternal forces of nature. It also breaks down gender norms and boundaries, from Ishmael’s surrender to Queequeg’s ‘bridegroom clasp,’ to Ahab’s boasting of his ‘queenly personality’ to the ambiguous mingling of ‘milk and sperm’ in the infamously erotic chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand.’”
Another she doesn’t mention is one of my favorite chapters, the stunning awe of gigantic maternal nursing in “The Grand Armada.” For that matter, tell (the late) Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a brilliantly concise and empathetic Melville biography, how much it lacks for a human female presence. Or Laurie Robertson-Lorant, author of a comprehensive Melville biography. Or Elizabeth Schultz, the doyenne of visual art about “The Great American Novel.”
Moby Dick breaches like a god reaching for the stars, (or to “kiss the sky,” as Jimi Hendrix would exult in the 1960s). in this image by Kent from 1930.
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On the other hand, one could quote any number of astute observers on the book’s magnificence: Hardwick, F. O. Matthiessen, Harold Bloom, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, and Lewis Mumford all come to mind, worth looking up. Most recently, I revisited D.H. Lawrence on Moby-Dick and he says: “A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book, with an awful meaning, and bad jolts.” Read his essay in Studies in Classic American Literature for more. 4
So, living on the Heartland edge of a Great Lake, I remain haunted by this and more, by Saint Elmo’s Fire and the diabolical blood ritual, by Pip seeing God’s foot on the treadle of the loom, by the Catskill Eagle emerging from the woe that is madness, by Ahab’s burning obsession, by the massive will and long, mysterious memory – is it consciousness? — of the white whale and, of course, by Queequeg’s coffin, a miraculous, sacred offering from a brotherly friend, somehow rising, just free of the hellish vortex.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf…”
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1 Picasso was adamant that Guernica remain at the Met until Spain re-established a democratic republic. It would not be until 1981, after both the artist’s and Franco’s deaths, that Spanish negotiators were finally able to bring the mural home.
2 Mooradian’s The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky includes 70 illustrations, a Q& A interview with Willem DeKooning about Gorky, as well as interviews with Alexander Calder, Lee Krasner Pollock, Malcolm Cowley, Reuben Nakian, Barnett Newman, Peter Blume, Meyer Schapiro, Saul Steinberg and other important figures in modern art and criticism.
3 The edition of Moby-Dick with Kent’s illustrations remains in print. I recommend the version with an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, published by The Modern Library, in paperback 2000.
4. Studies in Classic American Literature, DH Lawrence, Penguin, 1923, 1977, 159