A Girl and a Gun

RUTH'S EULOGY FOR GEORGE

ON HIS OWN TERMS

George and I met in the cathedral in Siena, Italy twenty years ago this month.  His entirely obvious line: “So, do you come here often?” became a part of family lore.  We were each on a tour out of Florence with a sweet guide who reminded us all as we left the bus not to forget any of our private parts.  At dinner that evening in Florence, George and I talked of many things that would become themes of the conversation fundamental to our relationship – the beauty of Europe, art and architecture, history, literature, politics, travel, the desire to see and experience more.  His blue eyes lit up when he spoke of his three children just starting their journey to adultness.  Here was a good man.  And tall. And attractive.  Then he was off by train to Paris.  I had mentioned a cherished book, Henry Adams Mont- Saint- Michel and Chartres (“The Archangel loved heights.”) that had gone missing from my collection.  A new copy appeared in my mail when I returned home.  Reader, I married him.

George read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being early in our marriage and passed it along to me.  We both cried.  We saw the movie.  As much as he respected Daniel Day-Lewis and to say nothing of his thoughts towards Lena Olin, he was not satisfied with a mere love story.  In George’s view, no movie could convey the richness of the book itself – the use of a story to explore and write about deeper truths. As I think about George these last few weeks, the title has come to mind.  It seems to me that this was a fundamental drive of George’s life – to look at everything - art, film, history, literature – and write to express the nature of the reality beneath. 

Yet, especially now, I find Kundera’s initial premise that a person begins a passage to oblivion upon death much too harsh.  I believe that each of us has a soul on earth and a spirit which continues beyond that which we can know.  In a way, George’s love of history and all that was beaautiful may have been a long search to answer that question if not a means to live lifely fully in the interim.  George accepted  Kundera’s later notion that a person can find a measure of earthly immortality in the ways he or she has touched the lives of others.

George anchored his life in his family.  He was proud of the achievements of all three of his children.  He also valued deep and lasting friendships.   Friends have written of that capacity and described his massive intellect and talent, his sometimes formidable presence, his love of beauty in all its forms, his humor.  He was a “cynical idealist”, a “critical-thinking romantic” capable of  a “savage but gleaming” irony.  He remained passionate about evil in history, particulalry the Holocaust, and would rage against social injustice in current times.  Most of all, George will be remembered for his courage and vitality and his tremendous will to live life fully.   If the recognition of his nature, of his spirit, by his family and many friends can give George a specific immortality then he has surely achieved it.

George built a life of prodigous achievement, ever turning to new sectors: academia, New York’s financial world, and most lately, the Internet.  He earned a double PhD at Stanford and was a Woodrow Wilson fellow.  He authored academic texts, two of which are still listed on Amazon.com, Europe in Upheaval: The Revolution of 1848 and Modern Europe in the Making:  From the French Revolution to the Common Market.  His slim but dense political biography, Edmund Burke, was an attempt to reach an intellegent but non academic audience. As a financial PR executive, and finally as a consultant, he successfully turned his talents to the commercial – speeches, advertising, public relations for Fortune 100 companies.  His films were several cuts above the high standards of his elite clients.  He still wrote for himself on the side:  His 1985 New York Times op ed piece, “If You Understand Pizza, You Understand Subway Fares” gave rise to an economic theory now known as the Fasel Corollary.  A later piece on the About Men page of the New York Ttimes Magazine, “A Son on His Own”, explored one of his favorite themes in cinema, coming of age, in a very personal way.  He wrote two yet-unpublished novels each set in the  French resistence movement of World War II.  As you see from the post below, he was at work on his memoirs, structured as look at his beloved Paris.  This blog gave him the great satisfaction of reaching out regularly to a new community around the world – created purely by shared interest and the power of his words.   

George lived to write and in the end, wrote to live.  If, as Kundera said, a kind of immortality consists of touching the lives of people whom one never meets, then surely his writings lift him to take his own place among the immortals.

And what else might this essentially private man wish for you  to know?  I think of three things:  First, in contrast to his occassionaly formidable demeanor, George could convey an uncanny sense of safety in his physical touch.  Small children felt it especially; animals too.  Our pets lined up by his chair.  He was sad that the newest generation of Fasels would not experience that touch.  Second, as much as he himself mastered the skill of good comic timing and appreciated the greats like Charlie Chaplin, the antics of Danny Kaye made him laugh irrepressably .  Finally, a man who loved Mozart, Brubeck, and Bach felt the soul in Motown. He might dance.  Moments of lightness.   He enjoyed life.  We had fun.

Few walked away from an encounter with George unchanged.  He shared what he thought and he thought a great deal.  He coaxed a laugh.  He charmed.  He advised.  He instructed us all.  Anne, a great friend and poet, gave voice to George’s lessons:

Ascend.  Put your foot on the first step-

Continue up the stone staircase

Look at what is in front of you

Here in the library of human natura

* * *

Put yourself in the way of whatever is brilliant

Big, inspirational, vital, urban –

Take it in, accept the gift.  Remember it.

* * *

Invite John Wayne and Louis Malle into your evening-

Read everthing by Phillip Roth-

Go once more to Paris – and think – for god’s sake

Beyond the circumference of your own mind- 

His was a life fully lived but too soon left.  May his spirit and his memory remain with unbearable lightness upon us all.

Ruth, his wife

THANKS

Contributions to the Film Forum in New York City in George Fasel's memory have been generous.  We thank each and every one of you.  You have honored his love of that venue and made all that it represents quite visible.

If you would still like to make a donation, here is how: Send a check, payable to The Moving Image, to:  Film Forum 209 West Houston Street;  New York, New York, 10014, Attn. Sonya.  Please write In Memory of George Fasel on the front of the check so that your gift can be recognized as such.

Again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Note:  We don’t know how when George Fasel began writing.  He always said that he was aware of things around him, in an objective sense, from an early age.  As a young teen, he covered LA baseball and wrote freelance for whoever would publish.  By age 16 he won a journalism contest in competition with students from 30 high schools in southern California.  College and a double PhD (humanities and history, Stanford) trained him to think and write in the pure academic way.  Later, he would bring his own style and flair to marketing and financial PR, speech writing for Fortune 500 CEO’s, annual reports and the like.  As he eased out of the corporate life, he began to read and study what writers themselves wrote about writing.  He added memoirs to his reading lists.  One of his goals in writing this blog was to express a thoroughly rigorous analysis of film in a style freed of the academic. 

In the fall of 2004, just one year ago, George returned to his beloved Paris for several months and began to consider the city as a focus for his own memoir.  His notes, below, are themselves a contribution -  a writer writing about writing.  Like all his essays for this blog, they reveal his  considerable breadth of intellect and, mais oui, his view of (French) cinema as a window on a larger world.  Ruth

PARIS

Definitions & Goals

Sept. 15, 2004

            It seems important to get this project much more strictly defined, while leaving room for development as I go along.  I don’t think the notes on the first trip are anything like the way I want the finished piece to read, and that’s because I just relied on memory, and not imaginative connections, frameworks, and so forth.

            There are two subjects, Paris and me.  Paris is going to be the more interesting to most readers, although it’s equally true that my role in it—the personality I build, my relationship to Paris, my definitions of Paris, how it looks through my eyes—is the only thing that’s going to keep readers from saying, “Oh, it’s another Paris memoir,” and let it go at that.  So I need to work out questions such as:

·        Who am I that I should see Paris in this way?

·        What did I bring to Paris that made it what it was for me?

·        The other way round: what was there about Paris that shaped me, changed me, that might not or probably would not have happened without Paris?

·        As I sort through these questions,what sorts of answers are so commonly given that I need to avoid them or soft-pedal them?

·        How did the answers to these questions change over time?  In other words, how do I see Paris now that I did not in the ‘60s?  How different am I now than in the ‘60s and what, of that, has to do with Paris? 

·        Where do I find the line between a special personal point of view and something that’s too personal, because surely the line is there. 

·        Is Paris simply a place to which I come from time to time and stay for varying stretches, or is it something I take with me wherever I go?  Has it really changed me to that degree?

Here’s a place to start that bears some reflection.  Certainly, Paris did not “make” me; Richard Cobb insists it didn’t make him, and if it’s not true for him, of all foreigners, it’s not true for me.  I was made in Illinois, and by the time my family moved to California when I was six, during the war, I was pretty much what I am with respect to all the fundamentals.  There have been changes, of course, some of them extremely important, but they are rearrangements of those basic patterns.  The slate has not been and cannot be wiped clean, something entirely different written upon it. 

My hunch is that Paris was, at the beginning, one of those rearrangements.  It provided an alternate vision of how life may be lived, alternate priorities and possibilities.  I began tinkering, adjusting, going forward and back (or sideways).  Part of it was a response to fashion, part of it was sixties’ rejection of stodgy fifties’ ways.  Part of it was to give myself a more interesting identity, even if to some degree it was fictitious.  Part of it was to make me feel better, to help me forget who I was while I took refuge in that new identity, or partial identity.  And that identity which I began to adopt in 1962—slowly, experimentally, piece by piece—certainly underwent evolution in more than one direction over the next ten years or so.  I think I was always tinkering during that time, trying to get something that fit and also made sense—I wasn’t going to be in Paris, so how could I make use of Paris profitably where I was? 

Because I was away for so long, from 1969 to 1985, the old Parisian identity would need some readjustment.  The city Americanized, and while there were always pockets of resistance, those changes went forward all the same.  I found a far more modern, high-tech, English-speaking, prosperous, confident society in Paris than I had known. In many respects, it was not so very different from where I had lived for the last six years (even though the differences could not be ignored).  So all this must be figured in and studied closely, even if all the close study—beyond its results—doesn’t make it to the page.

How do I tell the story?  There’s something to be said for the chronological: I came, I felt this and that, I learned this and that, my vision changed from A to B to G and H, etc.  There’s something to be said for the topical: there are these dimensions of Paris to be considered—language, how life is lived, food, culture, habits and customs, politics, preferences, films, etc.  I think chronological cannot be avoided, but perhaps I can emphasize topics as I go along—especially language, food, culture, film, politics, history, Americans. 

I don’t want to dismiss this issue, because it’s going to determine how I start to organize the actual writing, how I think about putting this thing together in a very practical way.  Perhaps the introduction needs to give a bird’s eye view of the total experience, saying something like:

I have been coming to Paris for more than forty years now, staying on my shortest visit barely twenty-four hours, and my longest a year (with other long stays of nine months, three months, and two months).  I have come as a graduate student, a college professor on a research project (twice), a vacationing tourist, and a businessman.  I have stayed in apartments, and in hotels from rather toney to exceedingly modest.  I have travelled elsewhere in France, if not comprehensively, at least frequently and have some basis for seeing the degree to which Paris is merely French and to what degree it is France.  Over that time, France, and especially Paris, which is my real focus, have  changed dramatically while, of course, also staying the same.  I believe I have done the same.  In this memoir, which is also an essay in observation, the subject is both the changes and the continuity, how a city (in particular) may go through sweeping evolution without changing, but in some cases in fact changing, its basic personality, and how the same is true of a man.  I’m also interested in how the two experiences interacted: while I certainly in no way changed Paris, I believe I was changed by it within the basic framework established for me many years ago.  Writing this book is my way of trying to find out.

Another important dimension:  in addition to the elements of memoir, I want to bring in books, films, and other cultural artifacts which show, comment upon, give telling examples of what Paris is like.  I want to bring in French films, American films about France, books of all sorts (history, memoir, fiction), to interest people in art, and music, and architecture, to bring in important historical individuals, to illustrate how Paris is seen by others compared to my own vision, or to demonstrate how these visions have influenced me, and probably others as well.  I want to talk about actors and writers and characters and historical persons that have moved me, and helped me see and understand Paris differently from I would have without them, helped me imagine a Paris I had never actually seen but which I saw, from these people and characters and visions, was real and essential.  I want to do this from very early on and make it an integral part of the story.  Beginning—first sentence—with some example of this is something to consider.  I want to draw on my full historical and cultural knowledge of France to write this story of Paris, and myself, because that knowledge may be as much as anything the basis of my love of this place. 

One of the great advantages of this approach is that I could give visions of Paris that are different from and larger than my own, get much more of the city into the book than I could do from my personal experience.  Example: I could give the Paris of Richard Cobb, using his books, Barnes’s essay, my own sense of those neighborhoods and how they have changed, and of course my own brief brush with (or near) Cobb in 1969.  Example: I could give some of the Paris of Balzac, and show how much has remained the same, walk some of the same areas, etc.  Example: I could talk about Paris films (Renoir, Carné, Duvivier, Godard).  Example: I could talk about les deux Bibliothèques nationales.  Example: I could talk about the Occupation, bring in films during the period, about the period, Paxton and revisionism, the Barbie and Papon trials—lots and lots of material.  Example: I could talk about Gabin, the proletarian ideal of the thirties, the Popular Front, the radical right, etc.  Example: I could talk about the Algerian War, the OAS, my time here, films, books, etc.  Example: DeGaulle.  I think I get the idea. 

All this possibility and potential takes me right back to the question of organization.  Now, it seems to me, I can lean much closer to the topical, although at some point rather early on I have to give a capsule glimpse of my history here so that I can refer to it in the topical treatments in a way I can understand. 

September 24, 2004

            One way of trying to make this interesting and different is to keep each essay, or story, or chapter/topic, from being predictable.  Each should take unexpected flights, make connections that would not immediately occur but make perfectly good sense, show how Paris leaps across time and place, from history to literature to film, if only you use your imagination. 

            Take my 9/15/2004 sketch on Cobb.  It’s OK for a while, introducing the organizing character and a place, but a good place to take a departure is where I turn to how the neighborhood had changed from the 1930s to 1962.  It might be a good place to take off on Haussmann’s overhaul of central Paris and the creation of the grand boulevards, how that development had changed the area from the time of the armées révolutionnaires. 

            Also, I think introducing Hôtel du Nord here is a mistake; probably better to save it for its own essay.  What might that include?

·        Canal—history, operation

·        Movie

·        From Arletty’s role to prostitution in Paris, pre- and post-war, and changes in street trade from 1962 to 2004

·        The current Hôtel du Nord

There needs to be something more: anything of historical significance that happened here, some interesting period in its development.  Perhaps some reading, perhaps something that could emerge from a visit.

The two Bibliothèques:

·        The Mazarin palace: history, 17^th century cardinals

·        Transformation into library; working there in 1960s

·        Neighborhood: the Restaurant Druot; the café; the Palais Royale, its history, and some of its famous residents (Colette; Cocteau?)

·        Mitterand: his presidency (and his past), Bastille, new bibliothèque, “modernization” of outer edges of Paris (la Défense, the northern science and industry museum—visit)

The occupation:

·        Perhaps begin with the house on rue Lauriston

·        History of occupation (include plaques of resistance and liberation); hotels and other buildings, like Opéra Garnier, which were important sites; Pont des Arts

·        Paxton and Vichy revisionism

·        Drancy, Vél d’Hiv; Chirac’s apology—all of which brings up history of anti-Semitism in France, and French cultural nationalism

·        Barbie, Poupon, Bousquet and the others

·        Occupation in movies—Le Chagrin et la pitié, Laisser passer, Huppert abortionist, Au revoir les enfants, Le Corbeau, etc.

Food in Paris:

·        French attitudes toward food

·        Contradictions: persistence of Parisian attitudes with intrusion of supermarchés, fast food, etc.

·        Les Halles: a brief history

·        A trip to Parisian market streets—rue de Buci, rue Mouffetard (visit marché de Montparnasse)

·        Historical attitudes: Brillat-Savarin, Escoffier, nouvelle cuisine

·        Bistros in Paris

To the barricades:

·        Food riots; the storming of the Bastille and subsequenct Parisian uprisings of the revolutionary years

·        1830, 1848, 1870-71

·        Changes between 1870 and 1934: working class migrating to suburbs, change in working class politics to reformist/electoral politics among socialists, decidedly non-revolutionary and non-autonomous PCF. 

·        1934, 1936, Algerian war, 1968 (connect to Zéro de conduite, cinemaphilia)

            

The cult of movies:

·        Invention of movies; popularity, now and then; the experience of going to movies in Pais

·        American movies in Paris: 1930s, Eddie Constantine, film noir, musicals, westerns, Jerry Lewis, today

·        Cinemaphilia: André Bazin and Cahiers du cinéma, Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque; The Dreamers,

·        The city in films: 1930s, 1950s, 1960s

·        Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais

·        Jean Gabin, Yves Montand, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve

De Gaulle:

·        In the land of democracy and equality, a hunger for heroes: Napoleon (and heroic royal figures—Saint-Louis, Henri IV), Napoleon III, General Boulanger, Marshal Pétain

·        De Gaulle always surrounded by that dichotomy: needed and distrusted, turned to for leadership and rejected for imperious style

·        De Gaulle biography

End Note: George drafted the essay on Cobb, wrote notes for other essays, and began to explore others.

Montage

Books
Once, about twenty years ago,at the beginning of our friendship, Geo
and I spent a 2-3 hour car ride from Springfield MA to NYC --we had
been at a press check for the company he worked for, overseeing a
brochure that I had designed-- talking about the books we had read and
enjoyed. Not just talking, but igniting that spark of excitement in
reliving those literary experiences. We covered Roth,Updike, Bellow,
Chekhov, Marquez, Pynchon, Rushdie, Dickens, Kesey and on and on and
on.Geo was a voracious and most generous reader with an appetite for
literature that probably surpassed or at the very least conflated with
his interest in film. We were always passing on “must reads” to each
other and I always wondered how he found the time to read as much as he
did. Ruth recently told us that he was disciplined about how he spent
his time-- reading always trumping tv.

Philip Roth was definitely one of his favorites. Geo had just recently
reread all of Roth’s novels (24) in chronological order and had written
an essay filled with probing analysis and insight. I have a another
piece he wrote in appreciation of James Salter’s Light Years. And then
there’s the novel
he wrote-- an exciting story filled with all the moral intrigues of the
French Resistance under the Nazis during WWII...and on and on.

Film
I think it was August 3rd, I remember meeting George for a quick lunch
at Burritoville in the Village. Despite his difficulty in getting
around-- he was walking with the aid of a cane-- he was not going to
miss our plan to see The Conformist.
We hurriedly scanned the menu ( he invariably picked the hottest item
on the menu ) and then got down to talking about what we did over the
previous weekend. He gave me his latest medical news--with maddening
equanimity --  he was incredibly frustrated trying to push up the date
for his upcoming operation. Before our food came, he dipped into his
briefcase pulled out a book and slid it to me across the table, dust
cover down.It was Alan Lelchuk’s Brooklyn Boy. Lelchuk’s book is about
the Brooklyn of the 40’s and 50’s.
My Brooklyn. There was an expression on his face of such satisfaction
that somehow in this present he’d given me the perfect gift. I was so
moved by his thoughtfulness and generosity.
We cabbed it to the Film Forum to see “Le Conformiste”. We sat in the
dark and were mesmerized by every frame. Every so often we’d exchange
“did you see that” elbow nudges for the “sweet spots” in the
film--those stunning scenes in which framing, staging, and choreography
come together with surety and grace. There were so many of those I was
black and blue for days.
FIN.The credits rolled. The lights went up. There was an expression on
George’s face of such satisfaction that he had received the perfect
gift... a masterpiece. We filed out of the theatre with words of wonder
for Bertolucci and co. hanging in the air.
We talked excitedly for a few minutes about the film then he took a cab
home and I went back to work.The next day on his site he reviewed the
film and in his explosion of praise was probably responsible for the
unprecedented stampede of people queuing up at the Film Forum that
week.

I think what I’m trying to say is obvious -- George’s love of art in
words and images was the siren song for thinking. He found it
irresistable.
He left us wanting more.
He was a great friend.
I miss him immeasurably.

Elliot Schneider

When George Made Films

George and I met  through business, the film businsess that is.

He was an executive in corporate communications at a major New York bank and I had a production company producing films for corporations such as the bank where George worked.

George came to me because he had heard that I made films that humanized corporations and corporate people and he, on the other hand, loved film and wondered how we could collaborate to make his bank seem like a human place to work.

And that was what I got to love about George.  For the fact that he loved film andwhat it could do, for being a wonderful, flexible, and telling medium.  He loved film for its ability to get beneath the surface of the obvious and bring out the very best in humanity.  He loved film for its ability to be funny, sad, soft and tough too, when it had to be.  He loved it for its ability to captivate, to be able to put a smile on the viewer's face, or even a tear in one's eyes.

I loved George for his insights, for his humor and at times for his cynicism, which I saw as a healthy cynicism.  Making films with Geroge was always fun, no matter what the subject, no matter what part of the world we were shooting in.  The films we made together were always successful because we never failed to touch people in a positive way.  And yes, we had so much fun making them.

Thank you, George.  You were a good friend and a good teacher.  Making films will never be the same without you.

Paul Galan, New York City