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There are plenty of challenging reads out there, like Finnegans Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow.
But those are nursery rhymes compared to the Voynich Manuscript, a
mysterious text full of strange botanical drawings and an unknown script
that has put scholars and code breakers in a frenzy since it was last discovered by Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.
While interested readers have, for some time, had access to
photos of the pages, the manuscript itself is locked away in Yale
University’s rare books collection. But that will soon change. As Ben Guarino reports at The Washington Post, Spanish publisher Siloé
has been granted permission to make copies of the book, and will
produce 898 “clones” of the manuscript, reproducing each water stain,
worm hole and strange illustration. So far, about 300 pre-orders of the
reproductions have been purchased at around $8,000 each.
The idea is to get the manuscript into the hands of more
libraries and more scholars in the hopes of cracking the code. “Touching
the Voynich is an experience,” Juan Jose Garcia, editor at Siloé, which
spent 10 years trying to get permission from Yale to reproduce the
manuscript tells Agence France-Presse. “It’s
a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the
first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to
describe.”
The origin of the manuscript is not completely known. Radio
carbon dating places the paper in the 15th century, though the writing
may have taken place in the 16th century as well, according to Yale University.
It is thought that the book may be the work of English scientist and philosopher Roger Bacon, and that the manuscript was once in the possession of John Dee,
an astrologer, mathematician and polymath that advised both Mary I
and Elizabeth I. The book eventually made it into the hands of Emperor
Rudolph II of Germany before being passed along, fading out of history
until Voynich found it in a Jesuit college near Rome.
Since then, scholars have attempted to
figure out the meaning of the strange 240-page text. The first part
includes 113 drawings of botanical specimens that don’t seem to
correspond with any known plants, Yale University writes. The second
section contains astral charts and drawings. Other sections contain
drawings of female nudes near strange tubes, descriptions of medicinal
herbs and long stretches of indecipherable writing in an unknown
alphabet.
“The Voynich Manuscript has led some of the smartest people down
rabbit holes for centuries,” Bill Sherman of the Folger Shakespeare
Library, who curated an exhibit on the book told Sadie Dingfelder at The Washington Post. “I
think we need a little disclaimer form you need to sign before you look
at the manuscript, that says, ‘Do not blame us if you go crazy.’ ”
Some people claim the whole thing is an elaborate hoax or that
the language is complete nonsense. But a 2013 paper examining the
strange language determined that the distribution of the unique alphabet
and words is consistent with a real language. Then, in 2014, a professor from England claimed he’d deciphered 14 words in the text, including the names of the plants hellebore, juniper and coriander.
According to the AFP, the Yale library gets thousands of emails
per month from codebreakers who think they have figured out the text.
Rene Zandbergen who runs a blog dedicated to the manuscript claims that 90 percent of the rare book library’s online users are accessing digital images of the manuscript.
It will take Siloé about 18 months to begin producing the
facsimile editions. But for those who cannot wait that long or don't
want to pony up thousands of dollars for an unreadable book, Yale University Press is releasing its own version of the Voynich Manuscript in November, which includes critical essays and fold-out sections of the text for $50. By Jason Daley
Blonde Venus. Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes. The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. Platinum Blonde. Legally
Blonde. Incendiary Blonde.(Betty Hutton).
And — just for something different — The Tall
Blond Man with One Black Shoe.
The titles speak volumes. In
cinema — not to mention fairytale, myth, art, literature, politics and the realm
of popular culture in general — the image of the blonde or the fair-haired woman
has carried a strong symbolic charge. It can be identified with innocence and
purity but also with artifice and duplicity. It can suggest bounty, dazzle and
allure, the implication that all that glisters is not necessarily gold. It can
convey a heightened sense of spectacle. It is almost always associated with a
notion of the feminine. The figure of the blonde is one of Hollywood’s most
potent emblems and exports, and it has had an influence on other movie cultures
over the years.
The
Alliance Francaise Classic Film Festival has a short program dedicated to the
figure of the blonde in French cinema. It features a handful of films from the
1950s to the 70s, beginning with a classic whose title highlights its subject:
Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952), or Golden Helmet, a movie that emphasises
the sensuous blonde coiffure of actress Simone Signoret.
She
illuminates Becker’s handsome black-and-white film, set in low-life Paris at the
end of the 19th century. Signoret is Marie, nicknamed Casque d’Or, who falls for
a reformed criminal, with tragic consequences. In the movie, her celebrated
blondeness has a formal and an informal aspect. At a dance when the pair meet,
her hair is piled high on top of her head; she’s a sensuous, confident beauty in
a social world of display. Yet when the lovers are together in the countryside,
during the brief time they have together, her helmet of hair is loosened,
dishevelled, all artifice gone.
A decade after Casque d’Or, the
new wave swept through French cinema; and one of its most influential films,
Jean-Luc Godard’s remarkable first feature, Breathless (1960), is part of the
festival. Its female lead, American actress Jean Seberg, has a blonde helmet of
sorts, a sleek, androgynous crop.
She had already cut her hair short for her
movie debut in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, and wore it the same way in the next
film she made with him, Bonjour Tristesse (1958). For Hollywood, she had played
French characters. In Breathless (which Godard dedicated to B-movie outfit
Monogram Pictures), she is an American in Paris, a young woman who incarnates
both naivete and duplicity — a fresh version of a familiar trope.
In cinema, the figure of the
blonde often appears alongside the contrasting figure of the brunette; Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (1953), starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, is probably the
most engaging example.
Blondeness changes meaning over time, however. In the
love-triangle drama Red Dust (1932), for example, Jean Harlow is an easygoing
platinum blonde with a chequered past, while Mary Astor is a ladylike brunette.
In the 1953 remake, Mogambo, the brunette, played by Ava Gardner, is the woman
with the fast reputation, while Grace Kelly is the embodiment of blonde
refinement. Yet, in a classic piece of Hollywood casting, the actor playing the
love interest is the same in both movies: Clark Gable.
The blonde-brunette double act
will feature at the festival with Viva Maria! (1965), a burlesque female buddy
movie set in Central America at the turn of the 20th century. It gives us Jeanne
Moreau and Brigitte Bardot as contrasting yet well-matched activist-anarchist
showgirls who join a circus, invent the striptease and embrace revolution.
And, of course, there’s Catherine
Deneuve, the MVP of blondes, represented in the festival with a lesser-known
film, Lovers Like Us (Le Sauvage, 1975).
There might be blondes of greater
celebrity: Monroe, Harlow, Bardot, for example. But Deneuve has longevity on her
side, and an extraordinary catalogue of roles.
In 2010, when the Cinematheque
Francaise held an exhibition called Brune/Blonde: Female Hair in Art and Cinema,
the catalogue featured an interview with Deneuve that was devoted to her
thoughts about coiffure and make-up and the way her blonde hair functioned in
her roles.
Her range was apparent from the
outset. In Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), Jacques Demy’s exquisite and
melancholy musical, she’s the embodiment of quotidian beauty and everyday
longing. In Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), she’s a woman descending from
panic into madness, in a film that plunges the viewer directly into her
experience. In Bunuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), she’s the icy bourgeois wife with
a masochistic secret life.
Hollywood cinema, above all, has
fostered and fetishised the figure of the blonde. Among directors, few are more
associated with this impulse than Alfred Hitchcock. Deneuve could have been a
Hitchcock blonde: they met and talked about doing a movie, a detective story
that existed only as an outline.
The exemplary moment of
blondeness in Hitchcock is without a doubt the scene in Vertigo (1958) in which
Kim Novak, playing a brunette who has dyed her hair blonde at the behest of
James Stewart’s character, presents herself for his inspection, then consents to
an additional reconfiguring of her coiffure. Stewart is obsessed with recreating
a lost love, in a situation whose implications he is unaware of; it’s a scene
with multiple resonances of performance, impersonation, ambiguity, desire and
haunting circularity.
Hitchcock’s blonde figures are
more complex and varied, it must be said, than tradition has it: the cool
command of Kelly is very different from the vulnerability and awkwardness of
Tippi Hedren.
The history of Hollywood
blondeness has twists and turns. For Ellen Tremper, author of I’m No Angel: The
Blonde in Fiction and Film, “the blonde of the cinema of the 1930s, Mae West,
Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, and Jean Arthur, would change the American
landscape and women’s place in it”. These 30s heroines, she says, have wit and
intelligence; they are assertive, not passive figures of
contemplation.
In the 40s, Veronica Lake became
famous for a distinctive, off-kilter coiffure, blonde curls cascading over one
eye. Although an engaging comedienne, she is best known for a trio of noir films
in which she was paired with Alan Ladd. Decades later, her image resurfaced in
LA Confidential (1997), in which Kim Basinger played a Lake doppelganger who
works for a 50s callgirl ring that specialises in movie-star lookalikes.
And, of course, there is Monroe,
defining Hollywood blondeness, and to some degree transcending it by sheer
effort of will. Her body of studio work is surprisingly confined: only once, in
Clash by Night (1952), in which she portrays a cannery worker, did she play a
character with an ordinary job. In her major roles she was always a variation on
a gold-digger or a stereotypical “dumb blonde” — yet she managed to subvert the
stereotyping or deepen its implications, no matter what the challenge was
off-screen.
In The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), on what was reportedly a
chaotic and troubled set, she gives an effortlessly appealing performance in an
unlikely period piece: it is her co-star, Laurence Olivier (also her director),
who appears awkward and uncomfortable.
Monroe, one way or another,
continues to leave her mark on the evocation of blondeness.
In the 80s, Madonna
did her best to own it, restaging Monroe’s Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend
number, rifling through the Hollywood cultural dress-up box for a variety of
shades and identities. Her video clip for Vogue, directed by David Fincher,
explicitly raids both classic Hollywood portraiture and the vogueing phenomenon
of the gay club. While her video clips ruled, her movies faltered, although she
had made a promising start with Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), in which
Rosanna Arquette is a bored suburban wife freed by indirect contact and
identification with Madonna, loose cannon and girl on the run.
On screen, Kathleen Turner
began the 80s as a dark blonde throwback femme fatale in Body Heat (1981), while
Romancing the Stone (1984) showed her as a heroine in the adventurous tradition
of the 30s. By 1999, in The Virgin Suicides, she’s the oppressively anxious
maternal presence in a movie revolving around female fragility and male
obsession, with Kirsten Dunst, as her daughter (Lux, or “light”), an emblem of
blonde unattainability.
And in the 80s Michelle Pfeiffer
— recently name-checked in Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk number, in which he invokes
“that ice-cold Michelle Pfeiffer / That white gold” — has presented versions of
blondeness, both cool and hot, that often have old Hollywood resonances.
She
made an impact in Brian De Palma’s new take on Scarface (1983), as a gangster’s
moll; in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) she was an escort turned lounge singer,
both world-weary and glamorous; reviewer Roger Ebert compared her to Rita
Hayworth in Gilda and Monroe and Some Like it Hot. She could be fragile, too. In
The Age of Innocence (1993), Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel of
New York society, Pfeiffer plays a woman enduring social isolation, a
determined, self-aware figure: yet, in the end, she’s no match for Winona
Ryder’s embodiment of quietly brutal brunette conformity.
Set against those actresses
identified forever with their blondeness, there’s the occasional example of
uncharacteristic blondeness when an actress is presented almost wilfully against
type. The most potent example is Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai (1947);
her husband, director and co-star, Orson Welles, decided not only to cut her
long hair but also to change it from red to bleached blonde. Producer Harry Cohn
was reportedly apoplectic.
Producers were also none too
happy with director Wong Kar-wai when, in Chungking Express (1994), he made one
of his stars, Brigitte Lin, almost unrecognisable in a curly blonde wig. She was
playing an enigmatic woman caught up in a drug deal gone wrong; it was the
director’s reference to the figure of Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s Gloria
(1980).
If blondeness is almost always
gendered feminine — the extra “e” a giveaway — there is a space in popular
culture for the male blond, although a far more limited one. Few male actors
have made it part of their identity.
Golden boys are rarely constructed as
blond, and the assistance they are given by the hairdresser is much more
low-key, colour-coded “light-brown” or “sandy”. Rare exceptions, perhaps: Peter
O’Toole and Jean Marais. O’Toole in particular, over the course of a long and
varied career, could present an image of male beauty without seeming to be
intimidated by the prospect.
In general, when an actor is
given noticeably blond hair, it’s a pointed statement — it often signifies
difference, extremity, sexual ambiguity. It can confer glamour, often with a
homoerotic aura.
When Terence Stamp made his
feature debut in Billy Budd (1962), his black hair was dyed blond, signifying
virtuous blondeness but also iconic presence, desirability. Clive Owen’s
breakthrough role in Croupier (1998), as a blocked writer turned casino
employee, a character is in the process of moral transition: he has platinum
blond hair that he dyes back to its natural black, a move that represents the
assumption of a different identity.
In My Beautiful Laundrette
(1985), a cross-cultural gay love story that is also a tale of Margaret
Thatcher’s London, Daniel Day-Lewis is Johnny, a street punk who sports a dark
quiff of hair with a peroxide skunk-streak through the middle — his hairstyle
singles him out, yet shows him as a divided soul. Years later, Ryan Gosling went
platinum for The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), in which he plays a motorcycle
stuntman who gets caught up in dramas of crime, fatherhood, identity and
privilege.
Was the 80s the height of
blondeness? Does the image of the blonde actress have the same potency these
days? It has always had a troubling connection to the notion of whiteness and
racial stereotyping. Yet singer Beyonce, always a shrewd reader of culture, has
found a way to subvert expectations and constraints, embracing and extending
blonde meaning.
Actresses are less invested in
directly embodying the image, less identified with it, more able to play with
it, on and off the screen. Yet there is still currency in the term, the ideal.
One manifestation is Frank Ocean’s new, long-awaited album, which is called
Blonde (or Blond, depending on the territory).
And David Lynch’s Mulholland
Drive (2001) has just been anointed as the film of the century so far in a BBC
international critics’ poll. Starring Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring, it’s
a film fascinated by the play of identity, by the endless enigma of Hollywood
and representation — exemplified by the distinct yet connected figures of the
blonde and the brunette.
Les
Blondes runs in Sydney from August 26
to 28 and September 2 to 4; Canberra and Brisbane from September 2 to 4; Perth
from October 13 to 16; and Melbourne from November 4 to 6.
