BRIDE OF THE WIND: a Review

The movie entitled “Bride of the Wind” gets off to a dazzling start with near-replications of Klimpt images plus historic photos of his world and that of Gropius, Mahler, Werfel: a “climax society” to use a anthropological term meaning a peak of richness, “thickness” of detail and skill, and seductive worldview. Oskar Kokoschka, Anna Mahler’s lover, painted the original “Bride of the Wind” as a portrait of her.

I’d love to see a study of these various climax times and places of history. What makes them happen? Is it economics? A strong educational system? Charismatic personalities? The “times,” whatever that is -- maybe politics? To me, it seems as though they often form at the edges of the “normal” mainstream society -- often a kind of societee de refusee: people who make brilliant common cause when they’ve been excluded from the “main show,” who somehow have more energy, edge, and insight, maybe because they don’t have to play by stifling rules. Off-Broadway as opposed to The Great White Way. Indies. Romance and daring.

But this particular version of the story of that time, using Anna Mahler as the point of focus, seems not to have the qualities that made her and her series of lovers and husbands interesting in the first place. Rather, this movie, which is drawn from a book called “Bride of the Wind,” is like an album or checklist. Meets Mahler, check. Meets Gropius, check. The costumes are wonderful, the scenery is gorgeous, but the acting is... Quarrel, check. Making up, check. Death, check. All in sequence.

It’s vaguely interesting to me that this period in Europe is coincident with the Prairie Clearances for the Blackfeet. These pampered people in Vienna are roughly the same age as Bob Scriver’s parents and they shared some of the same values. Life is corseted, structured, predictable, capitalist -- and yet riddled with yearning, betrayal, economic tragedy and triumph, unsolvable medical problems. It is Charlie Russell yearning for freedom and acceptance among the Indians versus Mamie Russell yearning for security and respectable society. Joe DeYong accuses Charlie Beil of pushing him out, while Seltzer paints enough like Charlie to be mistaken for him, and Winold Reiss is up at St. Mary portraying the major people of the Blackfeet in a way no one has done before or since. There were love affairs and great patrons.

If all this were captured in some powerful way and popularized across the country, would it have the same larger significance as Viennese artists, architects, musicians and writers? Perhaps not. Would that spur Montanans on to greater achievement in the Humanities? Perhaps. But probably only Missoula cares. In the Sixties and Seventies Ace Powell definitely believed that the Montana community of artists was on the brink of some great breakthrough, maybe a little bit like the Taos 7. I don’t think he ever conceived that the breakthrough would be to the CM Russell Auction and the Cowboy Artists of America.

When I began to research Anna Mahler, I stumbled into something I had not expected at all: the Anna Problem. It turns out that not only did she and Mahler have a torrid affair, a true love affair at least from his side (which Jonathan Pryce does little to illustrate in the movie) but also she took charge of his history as firmly as Mamie grasped Charlie’s. Enlarging her own role, she edited from his letters anything that detracted from that image and destroyed the larger part of them. She presented herself as trapped and confined, never adequately funded or appreciated, but other sources contradict this.

The Anna Mahler Effect probably applies to Lorraine, Bob’s fourth wife, more than to me, since Bob divorced me in 1970 and I made my own way through several quite separate and unrelated careers after that. But the general public tends to see Lorraine and I entwined and the Anna Mahler effect rises up in a writhing dark shadow behind me. Protesting against it would be challenging strongly held beliefs about former wives. One can probably only take advantage of this Anna effect when widowed, not divorced, and Lorraine was the widow, though a common law wife. She could hardly capitalize on her relationship because she didn’t live long enough -- she only spent part of the inheritance. Instead of trying to be respectable, she went for suppression of her life with Scriver, which was not exactly supportive -- more a child’s dependency. But that was true of my time, too. Maybe it’s kind of inevitable when a fifty-year-old takes on a twenty-year-old. But then, so also when dealing with an alcoholic who is contemporary in age.

Such matters could have made a far more interesting movie than “Bride of the Wind.” In fact, part of the reason I ordered the movie from Netflix was that Jonathan Pryce was playing Mahler and I love his portrayal of Lytton Strachey in “Carrington,” where the Bloomsbury Group is the Climax Society. But the actress playing the title role in “Carrington” is Emma Thompson, who made her insatiability, her devotion, her struggle to accomplish her own work, much more meaningful. A basically unreasonable relationship between Carrington and Strachey became persuasive and finally transcendent. But that movie was made in 1995, before the YouTube generation reduced everything to narcissistic veneer, a style show. In 1995 one was still supposed to have content.

Anna Mahler doesn’t come off well on the basis of the facts: so many extraordinary men, so much concentration on her own importance to them as a muse. She can appear grasping and self-important, her attraction reduced to her qualities as arm-candy, which are admittedly major. What ARE the vital characteristics of a female muse? One wife of an important artist (not a Western artist) told me that she thought any woman who could convince an artist he was great would cause that man to fall in love with her. Of course, if he didn’t live up to her standards, HE dropped HER! I don’t know how it works with the genders reversed. Maybe it just doesn’t.