Tonight I went to see a speech by Liv Ullman, a famous film star of yesteryear and now a humanitarian worker. She worked a lot with Ingmar Bergman. the only film of his i've ever seen is the seventh seal, and i actually only saw about half of it because i was just not getting into it. yet it's supposed to be one of the best movies ever made. it was in that book of really good movies meg gave me junior year, so i rented it, and if i do recall it was a very quiet movie, black and white, in subtitles of swedish or something. bergman's swedish, i do believe. ullman was norwegian, i thought of meghan. it was one of those allegorical movies, apocalyptic and such. a lot of people know the most famous image of the film, though: the grim figure of Death in the black garb, with his hand outstretched and his faced painted a cold, untempered white.

anyway so we went with Creative Mind, though only seven people actually showed up, and we were the ONLY young people i nthe entire quick center, which is huge. it was entirely filled with OLD PEOPLE. it was freakish. we worried that we would be set upon and cannibalized by some modern-day Elizabeth Bathory who would try to reclaim her youth through our blood. or something like that. anyway it wasn't terribly interesting, though my art professor was the one who came onstage and asked her questions after her speech was over. he showed some clips from her films, including one where she worked with ingmar bergman as the director and ingrid bergman as an actor. i loved her in the movie "notorious" (possibly because she played opposite my darling cary grant), and i remember her as one of the most beautiful of the old Hollywood stars, right up there with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Vivien Leigh, etc. ok, in the movie "Autumn Sonata", she was really scary looking, and it reminded me of the fact that so many of the gorgeous film star women don't seem to age very well. katherine hepburn definitely didnt, audrey hepburn didn't, meryl streep isn't...i can't think of many others right now lol. yet it seems that the men stay attractive longer; jimmy stewart, cary grant who was obviously handsome till his dying day, sean connery who is attractive still, gregory peck, paul newman, robert deniro. i know there's that whole hollywood prejudice against the aging actress, and forgive me for my superficiality but they really don't seem to retain their beauty as well as the actors do. (of course there are notable exceptions, like goldie hawn for the women and elvis and marlon brando for the men) it also made me wonder, would marily monroe have aged well? would james dean? maybe it's better that we don't know, that they were forever preserved in their youth and beauty. like hendrix and jim morrison; would their music have sucked later on? would plath's poetry have deterioriated if somehow she had pulled herself out of her depression and tried to live a happy life?

we read plath in creative mind today. my professor loves her and gave some detaile autobio info. there's a poem called lady lazarus, wherein she talks about being a cat with nine times to die, talking about her attempts at suicide. the first tiem when she was young, she accidentally ODed herself. the second time she ODed on sleeping pills and crawled into a crawl space for a really long time. by the time they found her, insects were starting to burrow into her skin. in the poem she writes "they had to call and call/and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls." ok reading this i had NO idea that was true. it's just so horrible to imagine. anyway plath wrote this three weeks before she actually killed herself, and from the description of the way she set it up, plus talking in this poem about the spectacle of coming back to life each time, it seems as though she wasn't really trying to kill herself. i think she wanted someone to save her. "Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ and i eat men like air." i think she thought she would triumph over death again, but she wasn't found by the au pair the way she had basically arranged to have been found, and the gas from her suicide intention accidentally knocked out the only neighbor who had a key, a neighbor the au pair actually tried to contact. how sad that what might have been another cry for help ended up a fatal reality. "Dying/ is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well." How sad that that proved to be the case.