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This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
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1701
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:03pm
Subject: Re: Re: Who is King Vidor?
Forgive me for pushing my own work, but the article that Film Comment
rejected can be viewed online as the first part of "American Tryptych:
Vidor, Hawks, Ford") http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html.
To defend the indefensible: Film Comment (was?) (is?) (seemed to be?)
under pressure to concentrate on current cinema; their readership (?)
wasn't interested in "old" movies -- unless linked to some event being
sponsored by Lincoln Center. At least, that's how the situation
appeared to me, as an outsider.
I did, therefore, suggest that they run a photo saying "Happy Birthday,
King," but they didn't want to do this. 1994 was the centenary of Ford,
Renoir, Vidor, von Sternberg. The last two guys got almost no attention
in the US and next to none in Europe (the exception being a Venice retro
of Vidor and some series in Germany -- both promoted by yours truly).
I managed to get my Vidor essay into print in Italian, Spanish (twice),
French and Swedish. But not English. Neither Senses of Cinema nor
Screening the Past had any interest in running (or even in reading) a
piece on Vidor (or the Tryptych). So it took me almost ten years to get
this out in English. All the more reason to celebrate Film
International !! And for me to recommend the essay to you.
Tag Gallagher.
Eric Henderson wrote:
>
> I agree with this. One of the seeming touchtone characteristics of
> cinephiles, I think, is an awareness of just how much one is still
> unfamiliar with, even at the same time as one is aware of how much
> they already know.
>
> --- David Ehrenstein wrote:
> > The linchpin of this culture's
> > ideology is that everyone has sufficient knowledge
> > because they know who and what is being publicized by
> > major coporations. Anything that isn't is ipso facto
> > unworthy of one's time.
>
>
1702
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
Robert Keser wrote:
>
> I'm in the midst of planning
> a course for Facets called "Making Marlene Dietrich" which proposes
> studying the various personae she evolved through half a century, and
> especially how she collaborated with cinematographers, designers,
> musicians, and writers...
Sounds good! I'm sorry I haven't seen the Dietrich expos in Berlin (or
Berlin).
>
> Your piece made me realize that there the flashback does not exist in
> Sternberg, or at least I can't think of any.
Anatahan is narrated in retrospect and there are flashbacks at the end,
when the girl looks at the returning sailors. (I think, offhand, that
Rossellini has only one flashback.)
>
>
> We need only watch
> Song of Songs to see much of the spark missing from her eyes.
In the second half of short thing on Mamoulian, I wrote:
In Song of Songs (1933) Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more
elusive and distant than any of her Sternberg characters (although
Paramount's intent was to find a more commercial director for her), and
the reason is that Mamoulian is literally incapable of looking at
Dietrich for more than a second or two without cutting to a reaction, or
cutting closer, or cutting farther away, before finally running away
entirely, from embarrassment, no doubt, at the perpetration of so many
cheap imitations of Sternberg, at the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of
creating a new Dietrich character (as Sternberg accomplished seven
times), can only record her aping her Sternberg personas. Again, he
fidgets. And, finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
cannot make a movie that is happening before us; instead, he makes a
film that follows a text. His tricks, like his cutting up Dietrich, add
a layer of distraction from whatever emotional reality his characters
might undergo, and worse, convince us that the tricks and special
effects are more interesting than the characters and their stories.
>
> I agree that "Shanghai Express continues for nineteen minutes after it's
> over", but not "solely to ponder faith". The way I see it, the power
> relationship has to be re-established by Lily purchasing the wristwatch,
> a fetish object to test her ex-lover's acceptance of her dominance by
> allowing her to "handcuff" him. In this action, she's like an animal
> marking
> its property. This seems well worth nineteen minutes to me (although
> maybe you are making a different point).
I meant it as a compliment, not a complaint. Your remark about her
dominance is fascinating; I never thought of it that way.
> Roger Ebert is bringing "the world's leading benshi" to
> accompany a showing of I Was Born, But...
There have been a number of benshi performances in Europe at Pordenone
or museums. And there are editions of some Mizomovies that have "music
& benshi" soundtracks. The problem is that they do it in Japanese, and
I can't understand a word, and so it's like an announcer who goes on and
on and never stops. (I hate to admit it, but I wish there were a DVD of
Anatahan where one could turn off von Sternberg's voice, at least for
one screening.) You know, John Ford's brother Francis got his start in
pictures as a benshi; they were common in the nickelodeon period in the
US, albeit not in Japanese.
>
1703
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 5:28pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
instead, he makes a
film that follows a text."
What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
"happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.
--- Tag Gallagher wrote:
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
1704
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 5:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
You're right to object. And I apologize. First, that was the second half
of a one-paragraph entry (so I give you the whole thing now). Second, I
was obliged to write about Mamoulian and yet I feel strongly that
negative criticism is not useful: better someone tell me how to like
what I don't like than how not to like what I do like, and in my
experience the reasons why others dislike something I like are always
irrelevant to why I like it, even when true. So I am simply (ab)using
Mamoulian in order to identify what von Sternberg does.
**
Rouben Mamoulian (Tiflis, Georgia, Russia. 1898-1987) Moscow Art
Theater. England 1920; US in 1923.
Imported from Broadway when sound came, Mamoulian responded as hoped. On
one hand, his films had a manner that privileged text and dialogue and
the careful playing out of a concept. On the other hand, they brimmed
with self-conscious tricks in cutting, camera movement and design. The
combination made Mamoulian.s movies seem refreshing and brash in the
early 30s (like David Lynch.s in the 80s), but already by the 40s they
seemed academic. Applause (1929) used a very mobile camera, in an
intentional reproach to the wooden staticity of most (but not all) early
talkies; Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
Tracy's transformation without a cut; and Love Me Tonight (1932) used
songs as an excuse for montage-of-free-association. But today none of
this bravura equals the simple, direct eroticism of Joan Peers's love
scene and strip-tease. And in contrast to Peers, Helen Morgan, the star
of Applause who was raved over at the time, is a bore, not by her fault,
but thanks to Mamoulia's general tendency to be a bore. His dialogue
could often profit from a seventy-percent cut, but instead his scenes
waddle slowly toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas. Queen
Christina (1934) has one of Garbo's better performances chiefly because
Mamoulian raises her natural ponderousness to Grand Guignol proportions.
Naturally Mamoulian fidgets; who would not? In Song of Songs (1933)
Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more elusive and distant than
any of her Sternberg characters (although Paramount's intent was to find
a more commercial director for her), and the reason is that Mamoulian is
literally incapable of looking at Dietrich for more than a second or two
without cutting to a reaction, or cutting closer, or cutting farther
away, before finally running away entirely, from embarrassment, no
doubt, at the perpetration of so many cheap imitations of Sternberg, at
the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of creating a new Dietrich character
(as Sternberg accomplished seven times), can only record her aping her
Sternberg personas. Again, he fidgets. And, finally, this is why
Mamoulian is boring: because he cannot make a movie that is happening
before us; instead, he makes a film that follows a text. His tricks,
like his cutting up Dietrich, add a layer of distraction from whatever
emotional reality his characters might undergo, and worse, convince us
that the tricks and special effects are more interesting than the
characters and their stories.
David Ehrenstein wrote:
> I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
> terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
> finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
> cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
> instead, he makes a
> film that follows a text."
>
> What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
> "happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
> Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.
>
>
1705
From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:18pm
Subject: Re: Who is King Vidor?
Mike Grost
Tag Gallagher's Triptych article is very interesting!
It is full of ideas that will illuminate future Vidor screenings. Especially interesting: The Vidor Rossellini comparisons; the look at the religious views of American filmmakers; the position of Vidor as an artist in the world of silent film.
Vidor and Visual Style
Vidor is darn hard to write about. Take the matter of his visual style. His films are full of great pictorial beauty. Yet this is achieved by apparently simple compositions. By contrast, a typical image in such great stylists as Sternberg or Welles looks enormously complex. Think of a typical Sternberg image. It might have plants in the foreground, netting, elaborate costumes, murals on the walls, huge props held by the characters. And Welles often positions his people in the most complex architecture: think of Touch of Evil, or the hotel at the end of Journey into Fear. But there does not seem to be anything like this in Vidor. The images look clean, direct, simple, uncluttered, made up of a few geometric objects or regions on screen. Yet the effect is of the richest pictorial beauty. And unlike those in any other director. How does Vidor do this? I have no idea. Yet ...
Recently saw Love Never Dies (Vidor, 1921), in a restored version on TCM. The scenario in this early Vidor is inconsistent and causes characterization problems. Yet Vidor has his great visual style here, right from the start!
Painful Truth
This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when everybody knows these great artists.
On Humilty
Eric Henderson writes:
> I agree with this. One of the seeming touchtone >characteristics of cinephiles, I think, is an awareness of
> just how much one is still unfamiliar with, even at the
> same time as one is aware of how much they already know.
True!
My father always used to say, "the more you learn, the more you discover you do not know". This is profoundly true!
Lloyd Hughes, the leading man in the 1921 Vidor, made 95 movies. I have never seen any of them! Nor had I ever heard of him. Here is a whole movie star, none of whose films is on my radar.
We have so much to learn about the cinema. We need open mindedness, humility, and a love of film art.
Mike Grost
1706
From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:20pm
Subject: Orson Welles
Peter Tonguette’s article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html
Mike Grost
1707
From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:38pm
Subject: Orson Welles
Peter Tonguette's article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html
Mike Grost
(whose e-mail sometimes has trouble with apostrophes)
1708
From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:23pm
Subject: From J. Hoberman
Some have expressed concern about the Village Voice's redesign and how
it might limit the length of J. Hoberman's movie reviews, and when I was
in New York recently for two days and picked up a copy I saw evidence of
same. I wrote him, also inviting him to look at our group, which he says
he will check out when he returns from Toronto. Here's his reply on the
question of the Voice's redesign:
"The Voice arts coverage has merged with the arts listings. Previously,
a page (such as mine) could hold some 1550 words. The new word order
allows for 1400. That redesign is complicated by the new mandated
layout. All review pages must be divided into at least three sections.
On my typical page, there is room for a "long" review of no more than
900 words, plus a shorter review of no less than 300 words; there's also
a gray box which is meant to be treated as a graphic element (used for
lists, asides, &tc)"
- Fred
1709
From: Maxime
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 7:46pm
Subject: Re: NYC: Barnet
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> 1. BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS
> 2. THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA SQUARE
> 3. THE SCOUT'S EXPLOIT
> 4. WHISTLE STOP (aka THE SMALL RAILWAY STATION)
> 5. BOUNTIFUL SUMMER
> 6. THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN
> 7. MOSCOW IN OCTOBER
> 8. THE OLD JOCKEY
> 9. MISS MEND
I wish I could discover By the Bluest Seas as it was the first time
again... (Does that make any sense?)
I don't think The Scout's Exploit deserves such a high rank in your
wish list. Good professional, impersonal job.
Bountiful Summer has a very high reputation in France since the
article by Rohmer. Imho overrated.
Miss Mend is a cheerful mixture of chaotic rigour.
I agree with you about Ledolom, non-Barnet movie ruined by formalism.
I haven't seen Moscow in October. Is that good, anybody??
My first to be seen list would be the following:
BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS
OKRAINA
THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN
THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA SQUARE
WHISTLE STOP
ALIENKA
MISS MEND
THE OLD JOCKEY
ONCE AT NIGHT
MEN OF NOVGOROD
1710
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 7:56pm
Subject: Re: Re: NYC: Barnet
> My first to be seen list would be the following:
Thanks very much! I hope the series is as comprehensive as BAMcinematek
hinted it would be. - Dan
1711
From: David Westling
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 8:46pm
Subject: My favorite year: 1932
> Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
> Tracy's transformation without a cut;
Just a technical point, but Mamoulian's version of the film starred Frederic
March. Tracy is in the 1941 Victor Fleming rendition.
An aside--since no one has mentioned it, I I thought I'd throw in 1932's
_The Phantom of Crestwood_. No more or less than a good mystery story, that
had its beginnings on the radio (the film being the resolution of a
long-running serial), it also stars the inimitable Karen Morley as the
almost heartless vamp who aims to destroy the lives of those who have
incurred her displeasure.
David Westling
1712
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 11:53pm
Subject: Re: Digest Number 105
This e-mail is just tio thank you and to remind the list that your article
on media coverage of Schmidlin's GREED and WELLES published on french
magazine TRAFIC is superb and more than proves your point.
I haven't read Film Comment in ages. The last articles I really liked were
two pieces by Kent Jones: the first on John carpenter, the second on Wes
Anderson. Oh, and there was that splendid article against "easy riders,
raging bulls", also by KJ.
ruy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Rosenbaum"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Digest Number 105
> The refusal of Film Comment to "recognize" Vidor was matched by its total
lack of interest in a piece on any of the recent Munich "restorations" of
shorter and unfinished Welles works--or the fascinating episodes done for
AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES, including the unfinished DOMINICI AFFAIR
(available on DVD in the U.S. for at least a year and never before seen in
the U.S., but ignored by everyone) at the same time that it was
commissioning reviews on such junk as RKO 281 (if I remember the title
correctly). This is not unusual but standard in mainstream American
journalism: assign coverege of the remake of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS or
the Hickenlooper decimation of THE BIG BRASS RING or anything else that has
the name Welles attached to it and that might conceivably line the pockets
of suits, but stay away from anything that Welles made himself and that
remains unseen or unchronicled. In other words, despite its many claims to
the contrary, the magazine is generally about the
> film business first of all, and everything else secondarily.
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
1713
From: planet_jake
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 1:58am
Subject: Hello, I'm new.
Hello, my name is Jake (Jacob, whatever) And I am a new face around
here. I am pretty much like everyone else here. Except I am just
beginning to discover the world of film, I am 18 years old, and have
been obsessed with film and its possibilities since I was 9. I can't
really say much, I'm not an expert yet, but I hope to be someday, My
DVD collection and favorite film list can be located in my profile
(links) if you would care to look, if not thats cool too.
Lets see, I was taken out of school when I was 14, and have been
teaching myself since then, and I am just now getting through the
final HSED tests, My hobby is of course, film, its also my life, I
may not contribute much on thses posts, but thats because I do most
of my thinking to myself, so don't mind me, I'm not rude, I'm just
quiet.
Oh and also until I get my hands of some equipment I am an avid
photographer, I'll see if I cant get some of my photos on a yahoo
page soon.
Thats about it, Thank you for your time, and that you for inviting,
and accepting me into this wonderful group :)
1714
From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:12am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea
Tag Gallagher wrote:
>
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
>
> > Roger Ebert is bringing "the world's leading benshi" to
> > accompany a showing of I Was Born, But...
>
> There have been a number of benshi performances in Europe at Pordenone
>
> or museums. And there are editions of some Mizomovies that have
> "music
> & benshi" soundtracks. The problem is that they do it in Japanese,
> and
> I can't understand a word, and so it's like an announcer who goes on
> and
> on and never stops. (I hate to admit it, but I wish there were a DVD
> of
> Anatahan where one could turn off von Sternberg's voice, at least for
> one screening.) You know, John Ford's brother Francis got his start
> in
> pictures as a benshi; they were common in the nickelodeon period in
> the
> US, albeit not in Japanese.
That could make a great story: American Benshi!
It's not quite the same thing, but I'm up for any live music with films
ever since last year when I saw Storm Over Asia with
accompaniment by Tuvan throat singers (they also came equipped
with electric guitars and keyboard). By the film's end, between
Pudovkin's sensational montage climaxes and the exciting music,
the audience was ready to rip out the seats and march on the
winter palace!
Also not directly related to benshi, Im Kwon Taek's excellent film
Chunhyang imaginatively interweaves the very prettily illustrated
narrative scenes with a stage performance of a "pansori" singer
who narrates (solving the problem of exposition), comments and
generally whips up the intensity of the proceedings. Well into the
story, though, the director throws in an intriguing third level
by staying on the reactions of the pansori singer's audience, so
that we are watching performance, reception, and dramatization
all dynamically rippling together.
This film also kept making me think of Sternberg in that the
director is always honest with the audience: he shows that the
young lovers are frisky and appealing and colorful, but he also
refuses to lie about the ways of the world or the cruel turns that
fate might hold. Like Sternberg and Mizoguchi, he's not so much
unsentimental as somehow a-sentimental: he wouldn't even know
how to exploit our emotions because this doesn't concern him--
which is a great relief.
His breakthrough film Mandala is even better, quite striking
visually with really memorable landscapes that are framed with
a kind of rough poetry, uniquely masculine to my mind. (It's very
hard to see a good print of this, but the drama is moving and
quite worth the effort). Has anyone seen these movies?
--Bob Keser
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1715
From: Tristan
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:31am
Subject: Re: Hello, I'm new.
Hi, welcome to a_film_by. It's good to see another teenager
interested in film. Have fun posting!
1716
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:31am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea
> His breakthrough film Mandala is even better, quite striking
> visually with really memorable landscapes that are framed with
> a kind of rough poetry, uniquely masculine to my mind. (It's very
> hard to see a good print of this, but the drama is moving and
> quite worth the effort). Has anyone seen these movies?
I've seen CHUNHYANG, but I'm afraid I didn't enjoy it as much as you.
Can't remember why - I think I found the emotions of the story more
conventional than you did. Dave Kehr was a big fan of the film, I
think. - Dan
1717
From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:04am
Subject: Re: Teaching Who King Vidor Is
MG4273@a... wrote:
> Painful Truth
> This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most
> modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or
> Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on
> a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when
> everybody knows these great artists.
Very movingly put, Mike. Of course, this is a lamentable situation.
But I believe there's hope. Myself, I deal mostly with urban commuter
college students, most of whom have to work, the kind of everyday
people who don't stand out especially, a bit older than dorm-dwelling
students.
When I get them in my Art of the Film course, it's amazing how
thirsty most are to learn new ways of looking. They know that better
things are out there, but they're not sure how to get at them (which
is the shame of our public education!) It's really moving to me to see
ordinary folks, who've never seen a silent movie, get all excited
debating about Man With a Movie Camera. The edgiest selection
I show is Sokurov's Mother and Son, and I hesitated about it
because I feared it might be too slow and need a level of
concentration that you don't learn from watching TV. However,
most of the students really respond to it, and one mother of two
thanked me because she had been literally afraid to go to a foreign
film before, but now she saw that she could understand them. A
number of other students ask me where they can buy the DVDs
of Black Narcissus, the silent Ben-Hur, and Red Beard (one
woman went out and bought The Third Man DVD the very night
we watched and discussed it because "I want my husband to
see it".)
I work in a college situation, but the same thing could be done at
the high school level, heck, in grade school! There are teachers,
I'm sure, who are making stabs at this, but there's no vision in
America to posit a plan that schools could follow: that's really
where the problem is. In the meantime, there's hope that cinephile
parents (and uncles and grandmothers) are exposing kids to their
own enthusiasms (and discussing the best ways to do this, on some
of the bigger netgroups), while Turner Classic Movies helps a lot.
Whatever the downside of converting movies to digital images
(which Fred Camper has rightly criticized), from the standpoint of
trying to build a film culture that honors its own history, the DVD
is our best hope, short of a massive national program of visual
education. But how did we reach a point where Film Comment,
rather than a part of the solution, is actually part of the problem?
--Bob Keser
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1718
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:05am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Robert Keser wrote:
> Like Sternberg and Mizoguchi, he's not so much
> unsentimental as somehow a-sentimental: he wouldn't even know
> how to exploit our emotions because this doesn't concern him--
> which is a great relief.
Im's SOPYONJE, which I liked much more than CHUNHYANG, is all about pansori singers; I wouldn't call it sentimental, but it is very emotional. Perhaps coincidentally, his two other, impressive films I've seen (out of hundreds) both seemed to have actual Mizoguchi antecedents: GILSODOM, about reuniting Korean families, suggested a modern version of SANSHO DAYU, and TICKET, set in a brothel, seemed to recall STREET OF SHAME.
1719
From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:35am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
How do you solve a problem like Mamoulian? (Okay, not as good
a pun as The People Against Oharu!)
The factor that turns me against Mamoulian is his arbitrary camera
movement. In Blood and Sand, there's a moonlight seduction
scene in a (blindingly overlit) garden with a fountain spraying
amiably. While Rita Hayworth works her wiles on Tyrone Power,
the camera moves around them, then tracks into the fountain to
block our view for a while, then decides to move to the side (this
description probably isn't exact, but it's close enough). But there's
no reason for the camera to be moving at all, and certainly
not meandering around the set and obstructing our view with an
entirely non-symbolic fountain. The effect to me is like being a
passenger in a car driven by a child.
Applause is practically nothing BUT shaky-cam tracking shots
that we try to justify by rationalizing in our brains that this one is
setting the scene and that one is moving us from the dressing room
to the stairs, or some such reasoning. When you examine the text,
though, there's not much evidence that the camera needs to be
wheeling around to increase the expressivity of a scene or to
embody some directorial worldview. Now and then the movement
does match or express some dramatic value (like a broken clock
is right twice a day), but the tracking shots seem like such a stunt,
all the more so when everything stops for some static dialogue
exchanges. In the burlesque numbers, the movie does capture a
kind of fleshy physicality, of big bodies lumbering back and forth,
but to my mind, not much of the kind of direct, unmediated emotion
we were admiring in Sternberg. That's what I see.
Before I'm awarded the scarlet letter 'N' for negativity, for falling
into the trap of wagging my finger at people for liking Mamoulian,
I'll confess to very much enjoying the imaginative visuals and artful
performances in City Streets, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, We Live
Again, Becky Sharp, and--quick, make the sign of the cross!--
Silk Stockings. And, of course, I'm the one who brought up the
delightful Love Me Tonight.
However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter if
we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
Holiday, then why not say so?
What would Mamoulian's Cleopatra have been like, I wonder,
if he had not been fired from the already begun production with
Elizabeth Taylor and a different cast (Peter Finch and Stephen
Boyd), cinematographer, and sets, not to mention script?
Probably not a loss on the magnitude of I, Claudius...
--Bob Keser
Tag Gallagher wrote:
> I feel strongly that
> negative criticism is not useful: better someone tell me how to like
> what I don't like than how not to like what I do like, and in my
> experience the reasons why others dislike something I like are always
> irrelevant to why I like it, even when true. So I am simply (ab)using
> Mamoulian in order to identify what von Sternberg does.
>
> **
>
> Rouben Mamoulian (Tiflis, Georgia, Russia. 1898-1987) Moscow Art
> Theater. England 1920; US in 1923.
> Imported from Broadway when sound came, Mamoulian responded as hoped. On
> one hand, his films had a manner that privileged text and dialogue and
> the careful playing out of a concept. On the other hand, they brimmed
> with self-conscious tricks in cutting, camera movement and design. The
> combination made Mamoulian.s movies seem refreshing and brash in the
> early 30s (like David Lynch.s in the 80s), but already by the 40s they
> seemed academic. Applause (1929) used a very mobile camera, in an
> intentional reproach to the wooden staticity of most (but not all) early
> talkies; Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch
> March's> transformation without a cut; and Love Me Tonight (1932) used
> songs as an excuse for montage-of-free-association. But today none of
> this bravura equals the simple, direct eroticism of Joan Peers's love
> scene and strip-tease. And in contrast to Peers, Helen Morgan, the star
> of Applause who was raved over at the time, is a bore, not by her fault,
> but thanks to Mamoulia's general tendency to be a bore. His dialogue
> could often profit from a seventy-percent cut, but instead his scenes
> waddle slowly toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas. Queen
> Christina (1934) has one of Garbo's better performances chiefly because
> Mamoulian raises her natural ponderousness to Grand Guignol proportions.
> Naturally Mamoulian fidgets; who would not? In Song of Songs (1933)
> Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more elusive and distant than
> any of her Sternberg characters (although Paramount's intent was to find
> a more commercial director for her), and the reason is that Mamoulian is
> literally incapable of looking at Dietrich for more than a second or two
> without cutting to a reaction, or cutting closer, or cutting farther
> away, before finally running away entirely, from embarrassment, no
> doubt, at the perpetration of so many cheap imitations of Sternberg, at
> the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of creating a new Dietrich character
> (as Sternberg accomplished seven times), can only record her aping her
> Sternberg personas. Again, he fidgets. And, finally, this is why
> Mamoulian is boring: because he cannot make a movie that is happening
> before us; instead, he makes a film that follows a text. His tricks,
> like his cutting up Dietrich, add a layer of distraction from whatever
> emotional reality his characters might undergo, and worse, convince us
> that the tricks and special effects are more interesting than the
> characters and their stories.
>
> David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> > I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
> > terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
> > finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
> > cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
> > instead, he makes a
> > film that follows a text."
> >
> > What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
> > "happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
> > Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1720
From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 6:34am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea
> > Robert Keser wrote:
>
> Also not directly related to benshi, Im Kwon Taek's excellent film
> Chunhyang imaginatively interweaves the very prettily illustrated
> narrative scenes with a stage performance of a "pansori" singer
> who narrates (solving the problem of exposition), comments and
> generally whips up the intensity of the proceedings. Well into the
> story, though, the director throws in an intriguing third level
> by staying on the reactions of the pansori singer's audience, so
> that we are watching performance, reception, and dramatization
> all dynamically rippling together.
>
I was knocked out by Chunhyang. It's a really lovely movie, and
Im's highly stylized is extremely impressive. I had previously had
no awareness of the pansori tradition, but I found the music in the
movie fascinating. The use of a pansori "narrating" the story -- a
folk fable -- to a contemporary audience is a very effective
distancing device, as are the shots of the audience which Bob
mentions. Im is empahasiazing objective and intellectual elements at
the expense of the visceral, which was a fascinating and daring
choice on his part. Im further holds the audience at bay through a
mise-en-scene that at times calls to mind Sirk - a somewhat removed
camera placement and objects that obscure or draw our attention away
from the actors. (There are a few love scenes which are, conversely,
very direct and, although the action is relatively subdued, they are
quite erotic.) Because one is kept a bit disengaged from the
proceedings for much of the running time, when the the emotional pay-
offs do come, they are particularly effective. The film works
simultaneously on a narrative, a structural and a polemical level.
And Imk uses color wonderfully well.
1721
From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 6:48am
Subject: Re: Hello, I'm new.
Hi Jake
Welcome to the board.
Although you say you're not a film expert yet, I'm sure you certainly
are in comparison to your contemporaries.
The thing is that through such resources as this board, one quickly
becomes more and more of an expert. At the same time, all of us are
constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas about films and
filmmakers and re-evaluating our opinions, and it's very exciting and
invigorating. For instance, I never gave Roy Mack a second thought
until Mike Grost make an intriguing case for him the other day.
SO keep reading, keep seeing movies and keep on contributing here to
the extent you feel comfortable (and hopefully Magnolia will be
knocked off your Favorite Movie list before long ;o) )
- Damien
1722
From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:56am
Subject: Gesture
All -
I took a grad seminar on feminist film theory a few years back and one of the
films we watched was The Wild Party (Dorothy Arzner, 1929). I didn't much
like The Wild Party at the time. Basically, it felt like a filmed play,
stylistically bland. But that seemed too banal a reason to dislike it so I kept my
mouth shut for the most part during the class discussion. When the prof asked what
we thought of it, however, someone (a man - perhaps significant, perhaps not)
piped up and said "I didn't like it - it was just a filmed play." I verbally
seconded and then the prof asked "Well, can you think of any reason why Arzner
would film like that?" No one had a response but I was breathless in
anticipation of how the prof would answer it. She finally offered: "A static,
tableau-like frame can highlight things like gesture."
This blew my mind since another work screened for this course was Dry Kisses
Only, the 1990 video where Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke freeze and move
back and forth on a shot from Arzner's Christopher Strong of Katharine Hepburn
and I forget who (Helen Chandler?) embracing - not so much (if at all) to bring
forth a lesbian subtext but rather to make material lesbian spectatorial
pleasure/desire. Suddenly, there seemed to be a use for a static,
just-filming-a-play style, something that had always seemed to betray film as an art.
Christopher Strong, for instance, seemed ideally suited to just this kind of play of
lesbian desire.
So then I went back to The Wild Party and another film I'd always had a
problem with, Laughter (Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast, 1930) and they both hit a bit
deeper this time, Laughter especially. I noticed a carefree skip in Fredric
March's stride; the dance sequence seemed more precious; etc. And then I started to
read some theorists on melodrama - Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Doane, Christine
Gledhill, etc. - who have all written quite brilliantly on gesture (among other
things) and I now have an entirely different way of looking at some
films/styles I'd previously dismissed.
I won't get into the theoretical stuff and I know that there are lots of
different ways to show gesture. Certainly, the cubistically cut plate smashing
scene in Battleship Potemkin shows a gesture. Basically, I was excited to have my
conceptions of film style flip-flopped.
This leads me to my purpose for writing which amounts to a question for Fred
Camper. Fred, a while back on the list, you mentioned "the poetry of tiny
gestures" while discussing Hawks as a great formalist and that it's "hard to see
this or explain it because it's so subtle." Also, allow me to quote from your
Red River capsule review: "Hawks's elusive style grows from a kind of
antiformalism that builds imagery around characters' tiny movements and gestures, so
that each shot seems organized around personality traits--it's almost as if each
composition grows organically from a single glance." Much as I love Red River
, I'm afraid that poetry of tiny gestures is too subtle for me, his style (at
least in relation to gestures, glances, movements, etc.) too elusive. Can you
attempt to explain this? Is there a specific scene that particularly bears
this out?
For the record, I'm not asking so I can elevate Arzner or D'Arrast into some
(the?) Pantheon. I'm not sure I'm interested in rescuing Arzner or D'Arrast as
formalists. For all I know, someone's already attempted that anyway. But
there is a way one can describe the films of Arzner or D'Arrast as antiformalist.
Not in the same way as Hawks, of course. I just want to better understand the
antiformalist qualities of a great formalist like Hawks so I can better
understand antiformalism in film overall. Make sense?
And now that I've written all this down, I guess it stems in part from an
annoyance with commonly held notions of film art. Too often, people think film
art inheres in overly formalist gestures (that word again) like a canted angle
or a swooping camera movement or cubist editing, some device that calls
attention to itself or the materiality of the medium and thus theoretically alerts
the spectator of the presence of the director or somebody behind it. In the case
of Hawks, I'm simply interested to learn how he can be "there" in the absence
of such overly formalist gestures.
And of course if anyone besides Fred has something to offer, please do so.
Kevin John
Montréal
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1723
From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:59am
Subject: Rouben Mamoulian
Mamoulian is a director whose personality is hard to nail down.
For the record, I enjoyed:
Love Me Tonight
We Live Again
Golden Boy
The Mark of Zorro
Summer Holiday
Silk Stockings
Did not like:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Queen Christina
Becky Sharp
High, Wide and Handsome
Blood and Sand
and have not had a chance to see other Mamoulian films.
Both The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand are remakes of fine silent movies
directed by the underrated Fred Niblo (Ben-Hur). Neither is especially close to
the original, however. We are a long way from Gus Van Sant's shot for shot
remake of Psycho (1998).
Mamoulian likes characters with double identities, such as the tailor in Love
Me Tonight, Zorro, and Jekyll/Hyde. And people caught between two worlds,
such as the hero of Golden Boy, and Silk Stockings. These people have two
personalities, and shuffle back and forth between them. The two personalities are as
different as possible. There is often a change of costume: William Holden in
Golden Boy looks completely different as the violinist with long hair, than he
does as the boxer with short hair and a sharp suit.
Jonathan Demme is a contemporary director with a fascination with people with
multiple identities. See "Who Am I This Time?", "Citizen's Band", "Something
Wild" or the FBI agent in "Married to the Mob".
Secret Identities began with charming rogues with multiple identities in such
1890's British authors as Israel Zangwill and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of
Being Earnest). The hero with a secret identity started with Baroness Orczy's
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1905), found a vigorous home in American pulp fiction
of the 1910's such as Frank L. Packard's "The Adventures of Jimmy Dale" and
Johnston McCulley's Zorro books, and has had a huge history in comic books
since the 1930's.
Fred Camper's description of Mamoulian as a dialogue and text oriented
director is insightful. (See, you sometimes CAN learn from a negative review!) The
up-side of this is that Mamoulian brings good craftsmanship to such stage
adaptations as Golden Boy and Summer Holiday. Both are a lot better done than one
might expect, with lively performances that are sensitive to the meanings and
feelings of the plays. Neither shows the inspired artistry of King Vidor's
version of Street Scene (1931), however.
I have never seen a film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remotely as good at
Stevenson's novella. Stevenson's original is structured as a mystery story,
and one doesn't learn the truth until the tale's finale. The 1920 silent
version with John Barrymore seems awful, too.
Mike Grost
1724
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 0:32pm
Subject: TIFF
I'm off to Toronto for the film festival - back on the 14th. Take care,
all. - Dan
1725
From: planet_jake
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 0:33pm
Subject:
Well I'll tell you something about my peers damienbona, they are the
worst kind of hypocrites, they rebel against one kind of conformity,
and embrace another. My identity is primarily that of a film geek, so
the first question I usually hear is have you seen American Pie 3
(For Example) They assume I run out every weekend to eat up whatever
hollywood regurgitates into the mass media trough, but thats not what
I do, and I dont think thats what any of us do. I generally seek
films tht I think would be psychologically rewarding, intellectually
stimulating, or emotionally satisfying, and I cant do that by
watching teenagers have sex with pies.
Anyways thats my rant.
1726
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:03pm
Subject: Ozu, Late Spring
I'm taking a course on Ozu this fall, and had my first class last
night. I may be disappointed with the course itself, for reasons I
don't need to go into deeply now. (For one thing, would anyone agree
with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
apart? Let there be someone of greater repute than me who believes
this, or I'm doomed.) The course is set up in conjunction with the
NYFF Ozu retrospective, and NYU will use its print budget for the
class to buy discount tickets for the students to attend screenings.
We watch five or six of Ozu's best known films on video in the
opening weeks, but we are required to revisit at least three of these
in the retrospective, as the course syllabus makes clear, "You
haven't really seen them yet!"
In short, the course is a bit more old-fashioned in the department
and puts a premium on authorship, formal analysis "for its own sake,"
and research. I feel as though the class discussions might often
stagnate into banal acknowledgments of Ozu's "transcendent" camera
and how good it is that we can recognize his deep humanism ... but
that seems like a small price to pay considering the treasures on the
screen.
Last night I saw LATE SPRING for the second time, and this time
(unlike my politely admiring first encounter), I was astonished.
This film is practically *perfect*.
I was overwhelmingly struck by how alike this film seems next to a
Ford film. The music is practically straight out of Ford, bouncing
along and flowing along. I felt a similar sense of pacing, of coming
and going in and out of homes, bars, communities ... Ozu places the
narrative a series of social ceremonies and private moments, whereas
Ford (whose films don't strike people as "slow") is a bit more
bustling, filling his own narrative with work, travel, broad comedy.
But in each case the directors are biding time and letting their
characters live in a world that moves on whether they like it or not,
and after a while emotions bubble to the surface in a string of
ascending climaxes. It's as if Ford and Ozu both make films about
the devastating impact of time and change sweeping along characters
who slowly come to realize their place. What a beautiful shot when
Chishu Ryu is walking in the park, the aunt scurrying along through
pigeons toward the staircase, and Ryu turns around for a moment to
look back toward the camera.
The powerful sense of character psychology struck me too: this film
is considerably sharper (if also subtler) on its characters than I
remembered. Setsuko Hara's constant laughing is a genius bit of
acting, a defense mechanism that she pulls over herself like a
security blanket when the issue of marriage comes up (her own
marraige, but also with her friends and acquaintances). And Ryu's
final words of advice to Hara are heartbreaking ... this is part of
why Ozu's film is supremely intelligent, because it recognizes that
traditions, institutions, and cultures are (for better or for worse)
larger than individuals, and we are made to see this fatherly
prodding as an act of utmost love, even as we're taking in the
inevitable sadness of the breakup of father and daughter, and we want
to imagine them staying together. Anyone less than a master couldn't
handle the demanding tonal balancing act necessary to pull of this
message in the way Ozu does ... this is a masterpiece.
--Zach
1727
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:59pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
I agree with everything Robert Keser writes about Mamoulian. I think
we're saying much the same thing. I also like CITY STREETS. Thanks for
the correction Spencer Tracy/Frederic March.
But I don't understand the paragraph below. You wish me to demonstrate
a waddle?
Robert Keser wrote:
> However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
> toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter if
> we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
> Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
> and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
> Holiday, then why not say so?
>
>
1728
From: Rick Curnutte
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:01pm
Subject: Re: Orson Welles
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Peter Tonguette’s article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:
>
> http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html
>
>
> Mike Grost
Yes, perhaps I'm biased because I know Peter so well, but this is
just about my favorite bit of film writing this year.
Rick
1729
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:05pm
Subject: Re: Teaching Who King Vidor Is
A ray of reality:
While it is lamentable that King Vidor et al. aren't household names on
one hand, and aren't even recognized by our film
museums/universities/film profs/periodicals on the other hand --- in
otherwords: while it is true that we do not have a "museum culture" in
the US in cinema, it is also true that in any given week there are five
or six John Ford movies on cable tv, playing to a potential audience of
40 or 50 million. If even 10,000 people watch one such movie, that's
more than attend a good European cinematheque in a year. Maybe only a
few dozen of these 10,000 people note the name "John Ford" or pay any
attention to any of that. But these films are still alive, still part
of living culture. There's something murderous about hanging a painting
in a museum, or putting a movie there.
Robert Keser wrote:
> MG4273@a... wrote:
>
> > Painful Truth
> > This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most
> > modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or
> > Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on
> > a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when
> > everybody knows these great artists.
>
> Very movingly put, Mike. Of course, this is a lamentable situation.
> But I believe there's hope.
1730
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:12pm
Subject: Re: Gesture
I'm not Fred, but:
1) Consider Chaplin. Static frame. Gesture. Is it cinema?
2) Hawks's style is probably impossible to convey with just words. I've
been doing criticism of late using Final Cut Pro and using clips and
various analytic methods, and it's possible that way to take a scene
(say, when Bogart meets Bacall in The Big Sleep) and show how the
cutting and framing and shot construction, which first look utterly
banal or just functional, are actually reinforcements of the gestural
play -- the exchanges of glances and looks. It's difficult to talk
about this because, as you say, almost all of our official teaching is
constructed to STOP and PREVENT you from relating to movies as movies.
My suggestion would be to put all of these formulae (damned theory!)
out of your heart and just watch a scene like this over and over, trying
as much as possible to get into empathy and sympathy with the characters
and their feelings. Eventually all will come clear like a sunrise.
LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
> She finally offered: "A static,
> tableau-like frame can highlight things like gesture."
>
> Fred, a while back on the list, you mentioned "the poetry of tiny
> gestures" while discussing Hawks as a great formalist and that it's
> "hard to see
> this or explain it because it's so subtle." Also, allow me to quote
> from your
> Red River capsule review: "Hawks's elusive style grows from a kind of
> antiformalism that builds imagery around characters' tiny movements
> and gestures, so
> that each shot seems organized around personality traits--it's almost
> as if each
> composition grows organically from a single glance." Much as I love
> Red River
> , I'm afraid that poetry of tiny gestures is too subtle for me,
1731
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:17pm
Subject: Re: Ozu, Late Spring
Zach Campbell wrote:
> would anyone agree
> with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
> apart?
Many miles.
Great post, Zach!
1732
From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:21pm
Subject: Rouben Mamoulian
CORRECTION: My last post quoted (admiringly) from a post by Tag Gallagher, which I managed to attribute to Fred Camper! My apologies to both men.
Mamoulian's slow pace and lengthy dialogue scenes perhaps reflect stage norms. Such long dialogue scenes were standard in much American theater of the 20th Century. Mamoulian has many credits as a stage director, and perhaps this just seemed "normal" to him. I found the dialogue interesting amd worthwhile in Golden Boy and Summer Holiday, and hard to take in Dr Jekyll and Becky Sharp...
When playwright Elmer Rice and director King Vidor adapted Rice's play Street Scene for the movies, they cut it drastically. Maybe as much as half of the original dialogue is gone. One can argue that this is largely an artistic improvement. While a few ideas are inevitably lost, the screen version is far more compelling.
Everyone's comments on Applause and City Streets make me long to see these movies!
Mike Grost
1733
From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:16pm
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
By all means, feel free to waddle (!) However, my comment
was intended to correct your self-criticism that you were
"simply (ab)using Mamoulian in order to identify what von
Sternberg does". My point, ill-expressed as it was, tried
to argue that it's perfectly okay to use Mamoulian in order
to identify the style of anyone else, from Sternberg to
Doris Wishman, as long as one can articulate one's
objections to his style. Hmmm. I'm not sure that's any
clearer...
Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)
--Bob Keser
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> I agree with everything Robert Keser writes about Mamoulian. I
think
> we're saying much the same thing. I also like CITY STREETS.
Thanks for
> the correction Spencer Tracy/Frederic March.
>
> But I don't understand the paragraph below. You wish me to
demonstrate
> a waddle?
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
>
> > However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
> > toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter
if
> > we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
> > Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
> > and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
> > Holiday, then why not say so?
> >
> >
1734
From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:29pm
Subject: Re: Ozu, Late Spring
I agree that Bresson and Ozu seem to be polar opposites in terms of
acting. Bresson tries to actually bypass acting by waiting for the
(often non-professional) player to reveal a "natural", unmediated
reaction in a scene, whereas Ozu's players are professional actors
who are plying their art.
--Bob Keser
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Zach Campbell"
wrote:
...would anyone agree
> with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
> apart?
1735
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:46pm
Subject: Re: Rouben Mamoulian
>I have never seen a film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remotely as good at
>Stevenson's novella. Stevenson's original is structured as a mystery story,
>and one doesn't learn the truth until the tale's finale. The 1920 silent
>version with John Barrymore seems awful, too.
>Mike Grost
My opinion, Mamoulian's is the best among the many film versions of the story.
BTW, LOVE ME TONIGHT will finally get its first video release (from
Kino) in the near future.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1736
From: planet_jake
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 1:09am
Subject: Ingmar Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" **SPOILERS***
For the first time tonight I viewed Ingmar Bergman's "Through a glass
darkly", and something isn't quite clear to me, perhaps I wasn't
paying close attention, but I am known to miss the more subtle things
in films like this. Did Minus and Karin have an incestual
relationship? It seems to me they did, when she runs away from him to
the half-sunken ship and they embrace, she seems to be fighting the
urge, and later she almost seems to confess as much to her father,
now another question arises, Did Ingmar Bergman use this incestual
(?) relationship to illustrate the extreme sexual frustrations of
Minus? Or did he use it to illustate the extreme depths of of Karins
illness?
1737
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 3:32am
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
And, of course, I'm the one who brought up the
> delightful Love Me Tonight.
One reason LOVE ME TONIGHT works so well is that the various
stylistic tricks (with sound, camera movement, editing, etc) are
openly put forward as 'stunts' to be enjoyed for their own sake. It's
not about personal emotion expressed through artifice, more like a
wonderfully ingenious puppet show. The characters barely seem to
exist in their own right -- maybe this is why they can transform
themselves so easily and completely?
Re Jekyll and Hyde adaptations, Renoir's TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR
CORDELIER is very interesting, and maintains the mystery-story
structure.
JTW
1738
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 3:47am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
So you agree with my analysis of Mamoulian, but you like what I dislike
-- that the tricks overpower the characters...?
Tag.
jaketwilson wrote:
>
> One reason LOVE ME TONIGHT works so well is that the various
> stylistic tricks (with sound, camera movement, editing, etc) are
> openly put forward as 'stunts' to be enjoyed for their own sake. It's
> not about personal emotion expressed through artifice, more like a
> wonderfully ingenious puppet show. The characters barely seem to
> exist in their own right -- maybe this is why they can transform
> themselves so easily and completely?
>
>
1739
From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 5:36am
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> So you agree with my analysis of Mamoulian, but you like what I
dislike
> -- that the tricks overpower the characters...?
Well, I think his approach works in that particular case. The point
isn't the technical tricks themselves so much as the way they make
the story & characters seem provisional, lighter than air -- a bit
like in some Disney cartoons. E.g. in the sequence where 'Isn't It
Romantic' is passed from one setting to another, the sense is that
the song is controlling the characters, rather than the characters
expressing themselves through the song.
JTW
1740
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:07am
Subject: Through a Glass Darkly
Planet Jake,
I believe they do commit incest, and it's probably a good thing: the
brother is the only male character in the film who shows any signs of
life, leaving us with some reason to hope when Karin is hauled off to
the asylum. I agree with Robin Wood that Bergman hurt his own film by
making Karin insane, because her vision of the Spider God is the
vision of all his subsequent work, beginning with Winter Light, the
next film, which is my favorite. According to Wood, Bergman's real
self finally burst from its shell after decades of imposed religious
belief when he dreamed up the character of Karin, but he still had to
deny her in that film.
Two unorthodox observations:
I greatly prefer now to see Bergman dubbed. Partly that's my
prejudice - the sound of Swedish grates on my ear - but with all the
dialogue in Winter Light, I'd feel I was missing the film if I spent
all the time reading subtitles when I should be looking at the
images.
If calling the sister and brother in Glass Darkly representatives of
the life force seems odd, given their incest, apparently for some
people incest is not that big a deal. (When I met Marcia Gay Harden
while she was making Miller's Crossing, she indicated that as far as
she was concerned the brother and sister she and John Turturro play
in that film are an incestuous couple, adding that she had taught all
her brothers how to kiss when they were growing up in Texas.) I'm
reading John Boorman's autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy,
where he recalls that he and his free-spirited sister Wendy fell in
love when she dumped her Canadian husband and moved back in with the
family, and that they came very close to acting on their feelings.
Boorman notes drily: "That incest was a taboo would have recommended
it to her."
A good book, by the way. Boorman's films are as loony as they come,
but he is lucid and often eloquent about the experiences that
inspired them.
1741
From: Robert Keser
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:30am
Subject: Re: Ingmar Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" **SPOILERS***
planet_jake wrote:
> "Through a glass
> darkly"... Did Minus and Karin have an incestual
> relationship? It seems to me they did, when she runs away from him to
> the half-sunken ship and they embrace, she seems to be fighting the
> urge, and later she almost seems to confess as much to her father,
> now another question arises, Did Ingmar Bergman use this incestual
> (?) relationship to illustrate the extreme sexual frustrations of
> Minus? Or did he use it to illustate the extreme depths of of Karins
> illness?
It's a while since I've seen this one, but my feeling is that Bergman
purposely leaves the specifics of their relationship shadowy, knowing
that nailing down literally what happened would remove some of the
attractive ambiguity that gives audiences (and critics) something to
chew over. There are other examples in Persona and (as I remember)
The Magician, where Bergman drops suggestions of relationships
without clarifying them.
Incidentally, writing from Stockholm, the critic Vernon Young pointed
out that Through a Glass Darkly and L'Avventura opened in the same
week [in Sweden?] and he makes "a serious distinction between
Bergman's lifeless treatment and the compassionate culture of
Antonioni". Both filmmakers enjoyed a lot of attention in their
heyday, the 1960s and 70s, and as their output has now slowed
to a trickle for various reasons, both have somewhat fallen out
of favor lately, or at least out of the spotlight.
--Bob Keser
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1742
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:34pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
Robert Keser wrote:
> My point ... was ... that it's perfectly okay... as long as one can
> articulate one's objections to his style.
I hope I succeeded...
(It's easy to say why one doesn't like something. Damn difficult to say
why one does.)
>
>
> Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
> 'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
> refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
> I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
> Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)
Me too. It was his wife and son who said the name begins with V and
that we should say "von Sternberg" rather than "Sternberg." (I asked;
they didn't volunteer this!) I pointed out that usage is different in
Germany, and they replied that this is America and we can call ourselves
anything we want. (There's no doubt the "von" was an add-on. Some
people, like Clive Brooks, used to call him "Von" but I don't if this
was without humour.) Note that David Shepard puts him in the V's.
1743
From: Robert Keser
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 6:44pm
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
>
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
> >
> > Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
> > 'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
> > refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
> > I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
> > Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)
>
>
> Me too. It was his wife and son who said the name begins with V
and
> that we should say "von Sternberg" rather than "Sternberg." (I
asked;
> they didn't volunteer this!)
That proves it: never ask!! (Did you interview them in
person, or was it an exchange of letters?)
I pointed out that usage is different in
> Germany, and they replied that this is America and we can call
ourselves
> anything we want.
Yes, they can. And we can call them whatever WE want. Ain't
democracy grand, at least compared to the Austro-Hungarian
empire?
(There's no doubt the "von" was an add-on. Some
> people, like Clive Brooks, used to call him "Von" but I don't if
this
> was without humour.)
Arthur Jacobsen, who was an assistant director at Paramount
in the 20s and 30s, said that Sternberg was so irksome and
hard to get along with that even someone as phlegmatic as
Clive Brooks would start dissing him as "von"! (That's in
one of the Director's Guild Oral History books).
>Note that David Shepard puts him in the V's.
That's more surprising, but he may believe in following
the exact usage in the onscreen credits.
--Bob Keser
1744
From: George Robinson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 7:49pm
Subject: Israeli film
Brothers and sisters --
I had wanted to reply to Dan's e-mail on Israeli film last week but had ISP
problems (of my own making, to be absolutely fair) and only got back on-line
today. That said, here's what I had written:
I'm glad that the subject of Amos Gitai and Israeli film came up
last week or so. This is exactly the sort of highly intelligent, serious
film group on which I've long wanted to try out some thoughts on why Israeli
film developed so slowly.
And make no mistake about it, until the past decade or so,
Israeli film was pretty dire with the notable exceptions of Gitai and some
very fine documentarians. There were individual films that were creditable,
and Eli Cohen (best known here for "The Quarrel" and "Under the Domim Tree")
showed some promise, but the rest of it was Golan/Globus rubbish and the
like, designed for the very small domestic market.
I once asked a prominent curator of Jewish film if it was just
me, if I was missing something or if there were good films that didn't get
shown here or what. This is someone who goes to the Jerusalem Film Festival
every year, so it's a well-informed opinion. The reply I got was, "No, they'
re pretty lousy films."
Well, as I said in a previous posting, that has been changing
for about a decade.
I think that even for Orthodox auteurists, there is something to
be learned here. Why was Israeli film so bad for so long? I have a few
theories and have heard a few others.
The one that even Israelis I know favor is that the language
market is extremely small; there are, after all, only about 4 million Hebrew
speakers in the world. So a film has to do stupendous business at home in
order to recoup its costs. Hence, filmmakers must appeal to the lowest
common denominator to reach the largest audience.
Maybe. Of course, there aren't a lot of Danish speakers in the
world either (5.3 million in Denmark) but in recent years the Danes have
given us von Trier and the Dogme 95 gang. (Let's put aside how we may feel
about them; clearly they are making serious films with some aesthetic
aspirations, which is not what you'd say about Menachem Golan or Ephraim
Kishon). One big difference, though, is that there is a history of narrative
filmmaking in Denmark that goes back to the very beginnings of the silent
era and includes such world-class talents as Dreyer and Christensen. (It's
telling, on the other hand, that both of them had to work outside the
country more often than at home.)
Still, there may be some merit to the linguistic/economic
argument. Certainly it is getting harder to find English-language
distribution for foreign films. But that's another story for another time.
There are, I think, two interrelated historical factors that
militated against the emergence of an Israeli cinema of real quality in the
first 50 years of the nation's existence (besides the obvious fact that when
you are in a nearly perpetual state of war there are more important things
to spend money on than movie-making). Modern Hebrew, let us recall, is a
unique proposition, the first example in history of a "dead" language being
revived for modern use. So the problem isn't just that the market was/is
small; it's a relatively new market altogether. (Seen any good movies in
Esperanto lately?) Allied to that fact is that Israel was slow to develop an
indigenous Hebrew theater tradition, with Israeli playwrights still thin on
the ground into the 1960s. I haven't done any hard research on this but I
suspect that you won't find a vibrant national cinema in any nation that
didn't already have some kind of fairly developed theatrical tradition
beforehand, at least not before the 1980s and '90s when film and television
became such pervasive and dominant industries/arts that they could generate
a momentum of their own in developing countries. (This is purely speculation
on my part and even as I'm typing this, I can think of notable exceptions
all over sub-Saharan Africa, although at least one of the best of them -
Ousmane Sembene - came out of a Francophone literary tradition of long
standing.)
The other problem is quite simply that the Israeli industry and
film/TV academies essentially date from the 1960s and after, with the result
that their engines are driven more by TV than by theatrical film. And it
shows in the visual style (such as it is) of many Israeli filmmakers of the
'60s-'80s. You only need compare Gitai, who was trained outside of Israel
(and who hangs out with Bertolucci and people like that) with Eli Cohen, who
has worked as much for Israeli TV as on theatrical features. Cohen is not
untalented (he is a particularly good director of actors in fact) but
visually his films are constructed around the same
master-shot-into-duelling-closeups as your average TV drama. I doubt if he
would ever play with long takes like Gitai's or take his oblique approach to
narrative structure. (And I seriously doubt if he would ever have a film end
on as inconclusive a note as "Kedma.")
I see that changing with, among other things, the big influx of
Soviet émigrés in the '90s. Dover Kosashvili, director of "Late Marriage,"
which is surely the best first feature from an Israeli filmmaker in a
decade -- I highly recommend "Blind Man's Buff" by Aner Preminger, which is
a first feature from about ten years ago and the last debut of such promise
that I've seen - comes out of the former Soviet Union; I don't know where he
went to film school, if he went to film school at all, but his film owes a
lot more to Jarmusch and Sirk than it does to previous Israeli models (other
than Gitai). "A Trumpet in the Wadi," a nice debut by Lina and Slava
Chaplin, is also the product of émigrés from Russia, likewise "Yana's
Friends," a comedy that I rather like. Both the filmmakers and the subject
matter in these films are redolent of the former Soviet Union. But Avi
Mograbi, a video artist who makes absolutely hilarious and mordant
satirical movies/videos, is a native Israeli and his stuff looks more like a
cross between Ross McElwee and the Marx Brothers.
Go figure.
I don't know where this will end up. Box office receipts in
Israel have plummeted since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada, and last
year's Israel Film Festival was mostly pretty disappointing. (Except for the
new Menachem Golan, which was every bit as awful as I expected; it's an
adaptation of one of A.B. Yehoshua's less successful novels that makes you
yearn for Merchant-Ivory.) The real question is, what happens when
Kosashvili and the other young filmmakers get to make their second features.
Or, more to the point, will they?
George Robinson
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1745
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:15pm
Subject: Re: Auteur Theory, Charlie's Angels
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> I was thinking about this a lot when MTV came along. Most of us
were
> accustomed to a cinema where the shot was a unit of meaning, so to
> speak: in other words, where a shot change meant a shift in our way
of
> looking, and where the contrast between two shots yielded
information.
> And then along came MTV, where shot changes no longer signified
like
> that, and where you'd go crazy in short order if you tried to make
them
> signify like that. Clearly the frequent, random shot changes were
doing
> something other than what I was used to - and whatever they were
doing
> quickly became codified for the audience, so it was pointless to
call
> these practices an aberration.
I'm not sure... Are music videos unique in this strategy, or is this
just rhythmic montage with a faster rhythm? (For example, is there
much difference between Dudow's setting of Brecht's
song, "Vorwaerts," in "Kuhle Wampe," and a music video?)
Also, is editing in which, as you write, "the contrast between two
shots yields information," really the norm? My preconception is that
this -- intellectual montage -- is rare. Of course it partly depends
on whether you mean diegetic or non-diegetic information. But my
impression is that in most films, meaning comes from within the shot;
editing just helps the narrative along, it's for continuity and
sometimes for emotive or rhythmic effect. (And sometimes it's just
pointless: for example, much as I like Fellini, I often get the
feeling that the only rationale for the editing is that one shot
ended and another is about to begin; there's no narrative, rhythmic,
or formal relationship between many shots.)
But I certainly could be very wrong about all this and wonder what
others think.
Paul
1746
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:42pm
Subject: Re: Joseph Pevney (and James Goldstone)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Enjoyed the posts on "what makes an auteur".
> Some directors were mentioned in passing, among them Joseph Pevney.
He
> directed some outstanding works for episodic television.
> Pevney made a whole series of Star Trek episodes. One can argue
that his
> episodes are the core of the series, and most of its best works.
I was very much a fan of the show in reruns when I was a child. I
recall reading David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek," where he
praises Star Trek's directors for their unobtrusive, self-effacing
style. I think this was the first time I encountered discussion of or
praise for a director. Pevney directed Gerrold's script of "The
Trouble with Tribbles." Gerrold might well have been thinking of
Pevney.
I vaguely recall what the Dec. 1963 Cahiers review of the American
cinema had to say about Pevney: something like, he has no trace of
style, but somehow we like him. I think Tavernier and Coursodon wrote
something similar, but more harsh: Pevney's incapable of adding "the
least trace of his taste" or "the least semblance of technical brio,"
but on his best days they're impressed by his gentleness, naivite,
and good will.
There was a brief discussion of Pevney on the Usenet newsgroup,
rec.arts.movies.past-films. I mentioned Tavernier's and Coursodon's
remark that Pevney's friendliness and charm in interviews might be
the reason for his brief moment in the spotlight of French criticism.
One poster responded: "They're so star-struck about directors over
there, they'll belly up for any hack ... that'll sit there
and play the 'auteur' game with them" -- which perhaps indicates the
status of Pevney (and French critics) with many film fans.
I saw some Star Trek episodes recently, and it was interesting
looking at them with new eyes, even as I recalled their narratives
vividly. Two episodes that impressed me dramatically and visually
were "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "What Are Little Girls Made
Of?", both directed by James Goldstone. They struck me as more
stylish than the norm for the series. So I'm curious about him. I saw
that IMDb indicates he was a visiting professor in film at Columbia
University.
Paul
1747
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 9:10pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteur Theory, Charlie's Angels
>"(And sometimes it's just
pointless: for example, much as I like Fellini, I
often get the
feeling that the only rationale for the editing is
that one shot
ended and another is about to begin; there's no
narrative, rhythmic,
or formal relationship between many shots.)
But I certainly could be very wrong about all this and
wonder what
others think."
You're very wrong about this. Consider the opening
sequences of "8 1/2," and the climactic car ride of
"Toby Dammit." The whole of "La Dolce Vita" is a
master class in sequence-montage. There is nothing
arbitrary about the order of what we're seeing. And
scenes begin and end in excruciatingly delibrate ways.
Fellini is the greatest auteur of them all.
And that's undoubtedly why most proponents of the
auteur theory reject him so reflextively.
--- Paul Gallagher wrote:
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1748
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 9:25pm
Subject: Pevney
In Back to God's Country and Yankee Pasha Pevney degrades
the lead (Rock Hudson, Jeff Chandler) - not a habit in Hollywood.
Tic? Obsession? Homophobia (Could anyone but Esther
Williams have known that Chandler was a transvestite?)?
Until such mysteries are solved, the work of the auteur theory is
not done.
1749
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:08pm
Subject: Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
Tracy's transformation without a cut;
The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Harold Kress, the film editor on the film:
"The shooting hadn't started yet. I went to see Spencer Tracy and asked him if he knew how they were going to do the tranistions from Jekyll to Hyde and Hyde to Jekyll. He said a still cameraman had taken several head shots of him. They hired 65 animators and were going to do it in the way they did the old film cards. They put this animation stuff on his face and told me to take it over to Walt Disney to see if they had any ideas. Disney said, 'This is terrible, it's a bunch of crap, you've got to find a better way.' I ran the two other Jekyll and Hyde pictures. Every time they showed Jekyll and Hyde, Frederic March dropped his hands down, they cut to the hand, hair started growing, cutaway, cutaway, all cutaways. I said to Specer, 'I've got an idea. The motion picture camera will be locked off, steel riveted to the stage floor so nobody can move it. Next to you we'll have one of those old-fashioned cameras with the big plate behind it and an artist who will sketch you. I'm only
going to shot your face, it will be so effective if we can see your face changing. There will be a long make-up table, all the pieces for your changes will be laid out and you'll be in a barber chair with wheels.' Spencer was getting so excited. We went to see the director, Victor Fleming, and he said, "Harold, Spencer and I have faith in you, go ahead and do it. You'll have to go up and see Victor Saville, he's the producer.' Saville said, "Young man you're just the film editor on this picture, this is none of your goddamn business and i"m going to have you fired." So I left the lot and went home. My wife Zelda said, "What are you doing home?" I said "I've been fired." Now the phone rings and it's the assistant director and he says. "We hear you're not on the lot, stick by the phone" Fleming canceled the day's shooting, he had Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and Spencer Tracy on the set- that's an expensive day. He and Spencer went up to see Louis B. Mayer and they said, "We want
Harold to do it, it's the only way, or else we have to do it the old way with the cutaways." Louis B. Mayer picked up the phone, called Ben Goetz at the London Studios and said, "Call Victor Saville and tell him you have a picture that's in bad trouble over there and that he's got to go to London tommorrow morning."
Tracy was a dream to work with. There were over 40 make-up changes. To keep the registration perfect we had to put him back and realign him. An artist sketched him and we lined up his nostrils. You couldn't touch the camera. I was ten feet away with a remote control switch. The camera was never changed and overnight a guard was on the stage. I would say, "Okay SPence, get ready, we're rolling, now just a little grimace, a little more, you fight it, fight it, cut." That went on for 46 changes of make-up. There were just a few times when the eyes blurred, but I couldn't help it, I had to make a continuous series of dissolves. The result was that you would stay on his face. For the scene when he was dying, SPencer wanted to say something. I said, "We'll do it just like a music number with playback. We'll make the sound track first." I had a disk cut. When we shot it to playback he mouthed the words. I got a nomination just because of my work. The picture didn't get a nomination. The
editors all knew that I had directed Tracy. If the movie is not good, it's not going to be good for the stars or for the studio. It's not going to be good for your reputation, so what the hell, you do the best you can to come up with ideas."
Vinny
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1750
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:32pm
Subject: Re: Pevney
Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
Do you want a list? It goes on forever.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> In Back to God's Country and Yankee Pasha Pevney
> degrades
> the lead (Rock Hudson, Jeff Chandler) - not a habit
> in Hollywood.
> Tic? Obsession? Homophobia (Could anyone but Esther
> Williams have known that Chandler was a
> transvestite?)?
>
> Until such mysteries are solved, the work of the
> auteur theory is
> not done.
>
>
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1751
From:
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:02pm
Subject: tutti-frutti
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Fascinating Posts! The Kress interview is really absorbing.
Have never seen Renoir's version (Dr. Cordelier). Would greatly like to.
The River (Renoir) will be on TCM tonight in the middle of the night. Very
interesting, and great use of color. This film really seems ancestral to
Satyajit Ray, who was Renoir's assistant on the film. ( I love Ray.)
James Goldstone and Star Trek
I liked "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" too. It has a script by the talented
Robert Bloch. It has been a long time since I've seen any Star Treks.
Joseph Pevney
Have never seen most of Pevney's theatrical work. "Man of a Thousand Faces"
is sympathetic, but a bit flat and dull in spots. It is thematically
interesting. The hero comes from a family of deaf people, and his talent is associated
with his origins in the deaf subculture. This culture is portrayed a gentler
and more loving than mainstream culture. And the hero has trouble adjusting to
mainstream culture outside of the deaf community.
This very much anticipates Mr. Spock on Star Trek. His Vulcan society is more
civilized and kinder than the rest of the universe. Like the earlier hero, he
is a talented representative of a subculture, now participating in the world
at large.
"Amok Time" takes us to the planet Vulcan. Celia Lovsky is good as a Vulcan
elder. The idea that a society could have a major female leader seemed
revolutionary in 1967. Lovsky might be best known to auteurists for her roles in Fritz
Lang pictures. She was the blind flower seller in "The Blue Gardenia" (a
favorite film) and the nurse at the start of "While the City Sleeps".
"Wolf in the Fold" deals with a whole planet of gentle people who only live
for pleasure. This is Hedonism raised to saintliness. Onnce again, the talented
Robert Bloch scripted. This is an interesting political idea.
Fellini
This auteurist regards Fellini as a major auteur. Favorite film: The Clowns.
Love many others, from Variety Lights to Intervista.
The car scene at the end of "Two Weeks in Another Town" (Vincente Minnelli,
1962) probably influenced the car scene in "Toby Dammitt".
Editing
Confession time: When watching films, I've been highly conscious for years of
composition, camera movement and color. But rarely notice the editing at all,
unless watching an official "montage classic" like The Man With a Movie
Camera. The attention paid to editing by members of a_film_by is a real eye opener!
Clearly, I'm missing something. (Please don't firebomb me over this - I
promise to be more observant in the future!)
Gesture
"The Man of a Thousand Faces" (Pevney, 1957) is a biopic about silent screen
star Lon Chaney. His parents were both deaf. My sister suggests that Chaney's
astonishing gift of gesture in his films is a result of Chaney's being raised
inside the deaf culture, where hand language is used for communication.
Jeanine Basinger's book on silent screen stars suggests that silent actors
used sweeping gestures involving their whole arms, in a way that is taboo among
modern actors, who are obsessed with underplaying, etc. The hero of Metropolis
(Fritz Lang, 1926) uses his whole arms in magnificent gestures, probably
directly coached by Lang. The finale has him and the other actors reaching out to
each other. It is very moving.
Mike Grost
1752
From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 1:22am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932
Robert Keser wrote:
> (Did you interview them in
> person, or was it an exchange of letters?)
Phone. Separately. Several times.
> Sternberg was so irksome and
> hard to get along with that even someone as phlegmatic as
> Clive Brooks would start dissing him as "von"! (That's in
> one of the Director's Guild Oral History books).
Lots of people dissed JVS. Lots of people didn't. I have a copy of an
unpublished int with Brooks (part of which I published in Cahiers); he
appears to have liked and admired JVS, which doesn't mean that he didn't
find things to diss about him.
I know two big books about John Ford where the authors went around and
collected every dissing story they could find and strung them together.
Funny thing, they didn't bother going around and collecting every
complimentary story, leaving the impression that there weren't any such
things to be found -- whereas the truth is closer to one diss-able
event for every 99 laudible events.
No one has bothered with JVS in a million years, except in Dietrich's
shadow, and in some wonderful passages in Maria Riva's book, in which a
very different man emerges than the one created by the cess pools of
journalism and rumor.
1753
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 3:34am
Subject: Pevney
Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
Do you want a list? It goes on forever.
I'm a-callin' yuh, Ehrenstein. Let's see that list, or a finite
subsection thereof. Ya varmint!
1754
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:02am
Subject: Re: Pevney
Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments"
Charlton Heston in "The Naked Jungle"
Charlton Heston in "Touch of Evil"
Charlton Heston in "Soylent Green"
Charlton Heston in "Bowling For Columbine"
Paul Newman in "Sweet Bird of Youth"
Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"
Paul Newman in "Harper"
William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard"
William Holden in "Picnic"
William Holden in "Sabrina"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Stand-In"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Casablanca"
Humphrey Bogart in "Beat the Devil"
Humprey Bogart in "We're No Angels"
Cary Grant in "Sylvia Scarlett"
Cary Grant in "My Favoirte Wife"
Cary Grant in "Monkey Business"
Cary Grant in "Walk Don't Run"
James Cagney in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties"
James Cagney in "White Heat"
James Cagney in "Love Me or Leave Me"
This is just off the top of my head.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
> Do you want a list? It goes on forever.
>
> I'm a-callin' yuh, Ehrenstein. Let's see that list,
> or a finite
> subsection thereof. Ya varmint!
>
>
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1755
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:06am
Subject: Re: tutti-frutti
>The car scene at the end of "Two Weeks in Another
Town" (Vincente Minnelli,
1962) probably influenced the car scene in "Toby
Dammitt".
Ah but "Two Weeks" was a reworking of the car scene
from "The Bad and the Beautiful."
"Toby Dammit" was inspired by actual incidents in the
life of Peter O'Toole -- who was originally set to
play the role until he read the script, realized he'd
be playing himself and chickened-out.
Why do you like "The Clowns" so much? It's a nice
little movie but scrcely in the same league with the
Magnum Opi di Fellini
--- MG4273@a... wrote:
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1756
From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:50pm
Subject: New member intro
Hello all. I've been lurking in the cybershadows reading the discussions
and after finding myself occasionally prompted to talk back to my monitor, I
thought I'd get involved. I don't know anyone in the group personally and
there's no reason anyone would know anything about me, so here's a little
intro.
Some bio: Born in 1974 in Bayside, Queens, NYC, moving across the city
border to Great Neck for my teen years. Studied business in college
(Bucknell Univ.) and came to Chicago for law school (Northwestern Univ.).
Having reconsidered and rejected the idea of a business law career these
last few years -- contemporaneous though probably not coincidental to my
burgeoning interest in art -- I'm currently considering a future in art
history and/or human rights work. My first, and still deepest, interest in
art was in post-war 20th century music (e.g., John Coltrane, John Cage,
James Brown). My exploration of film and visual art came more recently,
instigated by my first viewing of "Vertigo" on DVD about five years ago.
Incurable cinephilia took hold as I began watching and reading about film as
much as possible; e.g., see monthly logs:
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u (under "Doings")
A sense of my current tastes can be found in my "Best of 2002":
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u/doings/2002/jcg_2002roundup.htm
Over the last few years I've developed a great interest in avant-garde film,
though as a non-privileged filmgoer (i.e., neither academic nor critic) my
exposure to such work has been relatively limited; a posting follows on this
issue. A couple of years ago I started compiling a calendar of film & video
screenings in the Chicago area. It started as a way of recommending certain
films to my non-cinephile friends & acquaintances, and to encourage them to
see them on film rather than on video, but it grew into something a bit more
ambitious and earlier this year I made the calendar publicly accessible:
http://www.restructures.net/chicago/film.htm
In general, what I value in film and in all art is its capacity to challenge
and alter our individual/collective conceptual/perceptual faculties, while
providing moments of beauty/ecstasy, broadening and deepening our
understanding and appreciation of ourselves and the world around us. At
times I tend towards the dogmatic in insisting on the modernist notion of
expression-is-form, since the works I find most powerful are those which
explore the particular qualities of their medium in doing the magical work
of making the impossible possible. I find it difficult to verbalize about a
lot of this stuff, especially when it comes to describing and analyzing how
this functions in particular viewing experiences, but I'm hopeful that this
capacity will improve as I learn from the many eloquent voices in this
discussion group (many of whose published work I've already gained a lot
from).
Jason
-----------------------------------------
Jason Guthartz
jguthartz@a...
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u
-----------------------------------------
The major reason for art is to enable us to share -- and sensitize ourselves
to -- both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on
temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It's what you're
slowest to approve of that teaches you the most.
-- Raymond Durgnat
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1757
From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:50pm
Subject: Accessing the avant-garde
Tag wrote in the "Teaching Who King Vidor Is" thread:
> There's something murderous about hanging a painting in a museum, or
putting a movie there.
While recognizing and agreeing with the problems Tag alludes to regarding
"museum culture" I'd make these points:
1. There is a difference between watching a film and watching a video
transfer (broadcast via cable), and between watching a film in a theater and
a broadcast at home. Some works lose more than others in this change of
medium/context; no need to elaborate on this here.
2. Beyond the difference in image quality, the cable-TV context tends to
reinforce a certain mode of viewing centered on the
populist/entertainment/business/marketing end of visual culture, i.e., forms
of communication emphasizing narrative-with-a-message, just as museums (for
better and worse) induce an "art aura," asking for attention to form and for
contemplation/introspection. This is not to say one context is inextricably
linked to a particular mode of viewing, but that one context does in fact
have significant advantages over the other, whether due to their inherent
qualities or to how they are defined & deployed within society, or some
combination of the two. Resulting in...
3. Avant-garde film in particular suffers from the lack of regular
theatrical screenings. Because such works typically lose the most in the
film-to-video process, in terms of both appreciation and availability, the
only way those of us who have a serious interest in film-as-art have the
opportunity to experience even the smallest sampling of this vast amount of
work is via museums or similar institutions which have an existing
infrastructure that can provide public access to them on something like a
regular basis.
Of the cinephiles that make up this group, how many of us who do not have
privileged access (i.e., neither academic nor critic) have seen, or have had
the opportunity to see, anything close to a representational sampling of the
work of Anger, Breer, Deren, Frampton, Gehr, Jacobs, Kubelka, Lye,
Markopoulos, Menken, Rainer, Richter, Snow, Warhol, et al. As the best
known a-g filmmaker, Brakhage seems to have had a little better exposure
(especially after his death), though still nowhere near the amount worthy of
an artist of his significance. I know that in the last five years that I've
been seriously interested in film and living in a major center of
art/culture (Chicago), the opportunities have been severely restricted to
the occasional screening here and there by some of the filmmakers in the a-g
canon.
ASIDE: Even among those in this discussion group who have privileged
access, there doesn't seem to be broad interest in (discussing) a-g work.
I've found this disappointing and ironic, considering that these works are
least likely to be contested in terms of the "find-the-auteur" game.
I'm convinced that the main reason avant-garde film is considered
inaccessible (= unappreciable) is because it is inaccessible (=
unavailable). I don't expect a-g film to have the same level of
accessibility (in both senses) as films more closely connected to the
tradition of mainstream feature-length cinema, but I do hope/expect that
those with the means and who take art seriously (in our current state of the
world = museums) would treat film as equal among the visual arts. The two
major art museums here in Chicago, the Art Institute (AIC) and the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MCA), fail miserably in this regard, especially when
compared to their NYC counterparts. I can count on one hand the number of
classic a-g films screened by the AIC's Film Center per year**, while the
MCA even more shamefully doesn't have any regular film programming
whatsoever. The smaller, specialized venues do what they can, but it's
nowhere near enough. So if you have other plans for 8pm on that particular
Friday night, you're out of luck for the next decade or two (if you're
lucky).
** NOTE: The School of the AIC used to have public (& free!) screenings of
classic a-g work, but security measures implemented post-Sep-11 barred
non-students/staff from entering the building.
The problem is compounded further by the fact that much a-g work, to a
greater degree than non-a-g work, requires repeated screenings to appreciate
in any meaningful way (or so I'm told), yet such opportunities simply do not
exist. Many issues regarding programming practices can be cited, especially
those related to the length factor: while I'd gladly pay $10 just to see a
great 5-minute Brakhage film, those who program a-g work seem to feel
obligated to fill out a longer (frequently incoherent) program. The short
duration of a-g work may require a different approach to programming,
perhaps charging $2-3 for a 15-minute program, repeating the program
multiple times each day/week/month, as part of a venue's regular schedule
(e.g., "Hand-Painted Film Fridays"). I'm probably not the first to have
this idea, and it may not be financially feasible, but has anything close to
this ever been tried anywhere (outside of Anthology Film Archives)?
I don't wish to open a whole discussion about the validity of "canons" and
the insititutions that perpetrate/perpetuate them, but just want to make the
point that a whole world of great film exists that is currently unavailable
in any form, and as the existing infrastructure for access to art, museums
must take on this task. Unfortunately, outside of NYC, they only seem
willing and able to accomodate still photos and not moving ones, beyond
films/videos by artists who work in other media (e.g., Nauman, Serra).
Jason
P.S.: The release of works by Conner, Deren & Brakhage (and forthcoming by
Anger) on DVD points to this medium as an alternative means of accessing a-g
work. Given the aforementioned institutional neglect it may be our only
hope of seeing the stuff, and when large high-definition monitors become
affordable, seeing it properly.
-----------------------------------------
Jason Guthartz
jguthartz@a...
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u
-----------------------------------------
The major reason for art is to enable us to share -- and sensitize ourselves
to -- both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on
temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It's what you're
slowest to approve of that teaches you the most.
-- Raymond Durgnat
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1758
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 5:55pm
Subject: Re: Welcome Jason! /avant-garde cinema
Welcome Jason,
Great to have you aboard. I was impressed with your impassioned post concerning avant-garde cinema. Some thoughts:
There is not enough exposure to this world of film culture - I agree about the accessiblity situation.
Unfortunately there is a deeper problem. Even within the film community of filmmakers, cineastes, film critics, theorists etc there is a lack of education and even a hostility towards non-narrative cinema. As a film instructor I am amazed at the unwillingness of many to explore the roads traveled by the great filmmakers you have mentioned. For me this is the biggest problem. For many, avant-garde film is considered a ghetto.
Some quick snapshots:
In 1970 I was honored to have Jack Smith as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts. Unfortunately after one class he was fired because the students were outraged that he played, the Beach Boys, Christmas music etc. to a silent film by von Sternberg. The closed minded attitude quickly turned to anger as the masses stormed to the chairman's office to demand his removal. Instead I walked up to him, (I was 20 at the time) and asked him why he was playing these pieces of music. "I like conflict" was his response - that lesson has stayed with me to this day.
At a MOMA screening of Michael Snows Back and Forth a "suit" was so outraged over the film he would not stop stomping his feet in protest (the rest of the audience had already walked out) I turned and told him if he really didn't like the film he should leave.
Over the years people I very much respect have made stupid, vulgar and ignorant jokes about Brakhage Kubelka and others.
So I do feel that exposure, more venues and DVDs will help.
Most important are the voices that continue to educate us about these marvelous works of art - Our own Fred Camper is one of those courageous enlightened souls.
Spread the word - Keep the faith,
Vinny
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1759
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:17pm
Subject: Pevney
Charlton Heston in "The Naked Jungle"
Charlton Heston in "Touch of Evil"
Charlton Heston in "Soylent Green"
Charlton Heston in "Bowling For Columbine"
Paul Newman in "Sweet Bird of Youth"
Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"
Paul Newman in "Harper"
William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard"
William Holden in "Picnic"
William Holden in "Sabrina"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Stand-In"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Casablanca"
Humphrey Bogart in "Beat the Devil"
Humprey Bogart in "We're No Angels"
Cary Grant in "Sylvia Scarlett"
Cary Grant in "My Favorite Wife"
Cary Grant in "Monkey Business"
Cary Grant in "Walk Don't Run"
James Cagney in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties"
James Cagney in "White Heat"
James Cagney in "Love Me or Leave Me"
This is just off the top of my head.>
David,
Quite a mixed bag. Let me ask you something more useful, along the
same lines - something I was thinking about a few years back based on
seeing an indie film called Cleopatra's Second Husband, and which I
brought up in my last conversation with Jean-Claude Biette: We've
seen forests felled to print theories about the way The Director's
relationship to The Actress gets written into the film (castrated
metteur-en-scene plots, the woman as passive object of the male gaze,
the fetish-woman, etc.). What about The Actor?
Cleopatra's Second Husband is a very interesting - and rather
ghastly - film about a couple who take in a guy who eventually ends
up shtupping them both - he also has a gf who comes and goes, Losey-
like, along with the wife, who was having trouble getting pregnant at
the start of the film anyway and departs in the third act. At the end
the husband traps the guy - who is played by a typical present-day
young actor type, so one really thinks of him as an actor - in a
coffin-like box where he watches him die of starvation through a
video camera. After that, the couple is reestablished, and the wife
gets pregnant. It's by the director of Better Living with Circuitry.
I don't know if it ever got a release.
My question to Biette and his friend Benjamin Esdraffo over egg
creams in the restaurant of the Paris Holiday Inn in 1999 was the
same I have posed above, referring back to a written observation of
JCB's that great directors film both sexes the same - I'm remembering
badly, and I'd have to go back to the issue of Trafic where he said
that to get it right, so don't everyone jump on it.
The question led to an interesting discussion between JCB and BE
about the fact that French directors, unlike Americans, didn't
eroticize actors until Alain Delon, who had previously worked with
Visconti, came along and changed everything. I brought up Geradrd
Phuilippe as a counter-example and they both laughed. (Biette
observed that in Hawks it's a treatment usually reserved for the
second banana - Dewey Martin in Land of the Pharohs - whereas in De
Mille everyone and everything, even a scarab ornament, is eroticized.)
I recounted the strange plot of Cleopatra's Second Husband and asked
if it was in any way revelatory of directors' relationships to actors
in general, and Benjamin said that he thought actors were asked to
sacrifice themselves for films - again, probably not his word: it may
have been something like "abimer" - in a way that actresses weren't.
Not all, but some of your examples, might speak to that. Certainly
what I saw Pevney doing to Hudson in Back to God's Country did.
David? Anyone?
1760
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:18pm
Subject: Re: Accessing the avant-garde
Great post -- it's a big problem all right. I've seen some work by
most of the names you mention, but nowhere near as much as I'd like
to; certainly in my part of the world public screenings are few and
far between, though prints can often be sought out and viewed by the
sufficiently determined individual. One of my great regrets is that
back in 1995 when a Michael Snow retrospective came to Melbourne, I
wasn't smart enough to forget about my exams and attend -- like the
opportunity's ever going to come again in my lifetime!
It's doubly annoying that, apparently because it's easier
logistically, most galleries seem infinitely more willing to screen
visually dreary "video art", nor are they particularly cognisant of
the value of film as such. Some time ago I attended a touring
exhibition of Len Lye's artworks, including a number of his films
projected on a video loop -- roughly equivalent to exhibiting framed
reproductions of oil paintings in place of the real thing. When I've
seen Lye's early films in decent 16mm prints, the colours just pop
off the screen; on video, most of that life disappears.
I think TV and museums run about even in transmitting a potentially
obstructive set of messages about how a particular film "ought" to be
experienced. I'm not sure that TV necessarily privileges narrative
(again, what about music video?) but then I don't see "narrative-with-
a-message" as a negative, or necessarily "populist", category. Maybe
for related reasons, I have problems with "avant-garde"
and "experimental" as blanket terms to describe the kind of films
you're talking about, and "non-narrative" even more so. There is
certainly "narrative" in Deren, Anger, Markopoulos and others, even
if not of a conventional kind. One alternative might be to
distinguish between "lyric" and "dramatic" forms of cinema -- but
maybe we need to retain "lyric" as a more specific label?
JTW
1761
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:20pm
Subject: Tutti Fruti
I Clowns is my favorite Fellini, too. It's the ars poetica of the
oeuvre - it gives me enormous pleasure. Fellini Satyricon is second.
1762
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:36pm
Subject: Re: Pevney
This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.
Two words: Jack Lemmon.
JTW
1763
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney
Quite True.
And that's why he's the quintessential fin-de-siecle
actor.
--- jaketwilson wrote:
> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like
> male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e.
> stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early
> '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> JTW
>
>
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1764
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:55pm
Subject: Re: Tutti Fruti
What is it then about "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2" that
marks them as lesser works for you?
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> I Clowns is my favorite Fellini, too. It's the ars
> poetica of the
> oeuvre - it gives me enormous pleasure. Fellini
> Satyricon is second.
>
>
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1765
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:03pm
Subject: Re: Pevney
"The question led to an interesting discussion between
JCB and BE
about the fact that French directors, unlike
Americans, didn't
eroticize actors until Alain Delon, who had previously
worked with
Visconti, came along and changed everything."
Ce n'est pas vrai! Pas de tout!
Has everyone forgotten Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais ?
And Jean Cocteau and Edouard Dermithe?
Marcel Carne's work is also worth reviewing in this
regard.
Though I'd be the last one to deny the seismic shoft
Delon created.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
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1766
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: Welcome Jason! /avant-garde cinema
Tell us more about Jack Smith, vinny!
--- vincent lobrutto
wrote:
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1767
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:10pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney
Or Jerry Lewis.
g
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "jaketwilson"
To:
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 3:36 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Pevney
> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> JTW
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1768
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:41pm
Subject: Re: More about Jack Smith
Hey David,
Thanks for asking.
I was an art student at the time at SVA, I graduated high school in January and needed to be in school in order not to be drafted while I waited to begin film school which began that fall. So this was an elective. The name of the course was either film history or looking at film - it was not catalogued as a experimental film course. In Jack Smith's mind it was a history course. He, I learned later was a great admirer of von Sternberg. The film was The Last Command (1928) which really blew me away!. I was this 20 year old kid from Queens, New York who had been making his own 8mm movies and was soaking up everything I could about the cinema. So the students in the class were not film students but mainly art students. Jack Smith was this tall, skinny very, very intense guy wearing a skull cap. He introduced the film in a scholarly manner. No one in the room knew who he was. Later during that summer I read the Film Culture reader and realized who had taught my class! It was fucking Jack
Smith! Without explanation he worked the turntable (a pre-history of DJing) an played this eclectic mix, classical, show tunes, latin music, Xmas tunes. I really think it was the Beach Boys that took it over the edge for this un-enlightened group (present company excluded). During the break I went over to speak to him. I was really curious about his concept. Later I would learn this is the way he scored his films! That's all he said to me, "I like conflict." I said, "Thank you" and tried not to get stomped by the charge of the rest of the class to complain. As the second half of the class and the film proceeded I really understood what he was doing. By altering the context of the music and the film narrative two things became clear, the visual storytelling was constant but the changing music supported and contrasted the story in ways I could never have experienced in any other way. Their were a lot of unhappy campers at the end of the first class. He actually returned the next week.
This time he was with a huge entourage that lined the walls of the class. I wish I knew who was there that day, it had to be a who's who of experimental film and the NYC art scene. From there it is a bit of a blur, I don't remember what he showed, the animosity in the air caused such bad vibes it was impossible to concentrate but he plunged on with his game plan. The art Nazi's won that day but not without a fight. Jack did not give up - he was yanked. The experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut taught an experimental film class in the film school. He was an amazing teacher and a great guy. He showed many of his film collaborations with Nam June Paik, Snow, Brakhage, had Carolee Schneemann in class who showed us Fuses - Man!, was that intense, the film alone, and with her sitting there... Amy Taubin is on our faculty now, she teaches classes in avant-garde film and the role of women in cinema so the tradition carries on...
I have a lot to thank Jack Smith for, god rest his soul. He taught me valuable film lessons and to always be curious. No one in that class asked him why he was doing what he was doing - they just got mad - as a teacher every time a student expresses curiousity I know they are on the path - ask a lot of questions - you never know the answers unless you do or who is giving them.
Vinny
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1769
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:51pm
Subject: Re: Pevney
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.
Arthur Lake was embodying this degradation to perfection in the
Blondie movies, beginning 15 years before Jack Lemmon made his film
debut.
Laurel & Hardy were emascualted by "the wives" -- and only a chubby
chaser good find any eroticism present in Oliver Hardy.
-- Damien
1770
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 9:06pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney
Ah yes.
And as I'm sure we all remmeber, Arthur Lake married
Marion Davies' daughter by WRH, passed off for years
as her "niece."
--- Damien Bona wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson"
> wrote:
> > This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like
> male leads in
> > Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e.
> stripped of both
> > authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and
> early '60s.
> >
> > Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> Arthur Lake was embodying this degradation to
> perfection in the
> Blondie movies, beginning 15 years before Jack
> Lemmon made his film
> debut.
>
> Laurel & Hardy were emascualted by "the wives" --
> and only a chubby
> chaser good find any eroticism present in Oliver
> Hardy.
>
> -- Damien
>
>
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1771
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 9:08pm
Subject: Re: Re: More about Jack Smith
Wow that's great to read about, Vincent.
My "Film: The Front Line -- 1984"(Arden Press) has a
chapter entirely devoted to Smith.
--- vincent lobrutto
wrote:
> Hey David,
>
> Thanks for asking.
>
> I was an art student at the time at SVA, I graduated
> high school in January and needed to be in school in
> order not to be drafted while I waited to begin film
> school which began that fall. So this was an
> elective. The name of the course was either film
> history or looking at film - it was not catalogued
> as a experimental film course. In Jack Smith's mind
> it was a history course. He, I learned later was a
> great admirer of von Sternberg. The film was The
> Last Command (1928) which really blew me away!. I
> was this 20 year old kid from Queens, New York who
> had been making his own 8mm movies and was soaking
> up everything I could about the cinema. So the
> students in the class were not film students but
> mainly art students. Jack Smith was this tall,
> skinny very, very intense guy wearing a skull cap.
> He introduced the film in a scholarly manner. No one
> in the room knew who he was. Later during that
> summer I read the Film Culture reader and realized
> who had taught my class! It was fucking Jack
> Smith! Without explanation he worked the turntable
> (a pre-history of DJing) an played this eclectic
> mix, classical, show tunes, latin music, Xmas tunes.
> I really think it was the Beach Boys that took it
> over the edge for this un-enlightened group (present
> company excluded). During the break I went over to
> speak to him. I was really curious about his
> concept. Later I would learn this is the way he
> scored his films! That's all he said to me, "I like
> conflict." I said, "Thank you" and tried not to get
> stomped by the charge of the rest of the class to
> complain. As the second half of the class and the
> film proceeded I really understood what he was
> doing. By altering the context of the music and the
> film narrative two things became clear, the visual
> storytelling was constant but the changing music
> supported and contrasted the story in ways I could
> never have experienced in any other way. Their were
> a lot of unhappy campers at the end of the first
> class. He actually returned the next week.
> This time he was with a huge entourage that lined
> the walls of the class. I wish I knew who was there
> that day, it had to be a who's who of experimental
> film and the NYC art scene. From there it is a bit
> of a blur, I don't remember what he showed, the
> animosity in the air caused such bad vibes it was
> impossible to concentrate but he plunged on with his
> game plan. The art Nazi's won that day but not
> without a fight. Jack did not give up - he was
> yanked. The experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut taught
> an experimental film class in the film school. He
> was an amazing teacher and a great guy. He showed
> many of his film collaborations with Nam June Paik,
> Snow, Brakhage, had Carolee Schneemann in class who
> showed us Fuses - Man!, was that intense, the film
> alone, and with her sitting there... Amy Taubin is
> on our faculty now, she teaches classes in
> avant-garde film and the role of women in cinema so
> the tradition carries on...
>
> I have a lot to thank Jack Smith for, god rest his
> soul. He taught me valuable film lessons and to
> always be curious. No one in that class asked him
> why he was doing what he was doing - they just got
> mad - as a teacher every time a student expresses
> curiousity I know they are on the path - ask a lot
> of questions - you never know the answers unless you
> do or who is giving them.
>
> Vinny
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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> design software
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1772
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 9:30pm
Subject: Re: More About Jack Smith/Film the Front Line - 1984
Thanks David. A copy of your fine book Film the Front Line - 1984 sits proudly on my bookshelf. I bought it when it came out. I also have Jonathan Rosenbaum's Film: The Front Line 1983. That was a great series - why didn't it continue? We really need an annual publication that surveys films outside of mainstream cinema.
Vinny
---------------------------------
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1773
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 10:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: More About Jack Smith/Film the Front Line - 1984
Arden's a very small press and didn't get the support
it deserved.
Glad you've got a copy, vinny.
Amazing to think that so many of the people I wrote
about back then -- Jack, Warren Sonbert, Curt McDowell
-- are now dead of AIDS.
Serge Daney too.
--- vincent lobrutto
wrote:
> Thanks David. A copy of your fine book Film the
> Front Line - 1984 sits proudly on my bookshelf. I
> bought it when it came out. I also have Jonathan
> Rosenbaum's Film: The Front Line 1983. That was a
> great series - why didn't it continue? We really
> need an annual publication that surveys films
> outside of mainstream cinema.
>
> Vinny
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site
> design software
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1774
From:
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:21pm
Subject: Re: Pevney
> (Could anyone but Esther Williams have known that Chandler was a
> transvestite?)?
>
I had no idea either (or was this a joke I missed?). Please elaborate.
Re: Pevney, we're forgetting one of my all-time faves, Female on the Beach
(1955). But I think it's more a Joan Crawford film than a Pevney film. Check out
my review:
http://neumu.net/continuity_error/2003/2003-00003_continuity.shtml
Kevin John
Montréal
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1775
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 1:36am
Subject: Re: Pevney
Get Esther Williams' memoir "Million Dollar Mermaid."
She talks about Chandler there. However while this
created a brouhaha at the time, she had mentioned
Chandler's transvestite fetish years before in
interviews.
--- LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
> > (Could anyone but Esther Williams have known that
> Chandler was a
> > transvestite?)?
> >
> I had no idea either (or was this a joke I missed?).
> Please elaborate.
>
> Re: Pevney, we're forgetting one of my all-time
> faves, Female on the Beach
> (1955). But I think it's more a Joan Crawford film
> than a Pevney film. Check out
> my review:
>
http://neumu.net/continuity_error/2003/2003-00003_continuity.shtml
>
> Kevin John
> Montréal
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1776
From: J. Mabe
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 4:42am
Subject: Re: Tutti Fruti
I understand the word oeuvre... but ars poetica? and
someone else mentioned something like Magnum Opi which
I think I understand... but I have to admit I haven't
come across these words before, even in much of the
film literature and crictism I've read... where are we
coming up with these and is there a list of them
somewhere, maybe?
Thanks,
Josh Mabe
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> I Clowns is my favorite Fellini, too. It's the ars
> poetica of the
> oeuvre - it gives me enormous pleasure. Fellini
> Satyricon is second.
>
>
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1777
From: Robert Keser
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 5:00am
Subject: Re: Pevney
David Ehrenstein wrote:
> Get Esther Williams' memoir "Million Dollar Mermaid."
> She talks about Chandler there.
The story she tells is that she broke off their wedding plans when
she returned home one day and found him wearing a polka dot
dress. Her story goes that Chandler tried to explain to her about
cross-dressing, but the episode made him persona non grata to
her.
This one of the (few) revelations in her book, but you're right that
she rather dined out on it for a while. Supposedly, she secured the
approval of Chandler's children before publication of the story, but
the documents are not readily available.
--Bob Keser
> However while this
> created a brouhaha at the time, she had mentioned
> Chandler's transvestite fetish years before in
> interviews.
>
> --- LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
> > > (Could anyone but Esther Williams have known that
> > Chandler was a
> > > transvestite?)?
> > >
> > I had no idea either (or was this a joke I missed?).
> > Please elaborate.
> >
> > Re: Pevney, we're forgetting one of my all-time
> > faves, Female on the Beach
> > (1955). But I think it's more a Joan Crawford film
> > than a Pevney film. Check out
> > my review:
> >
> http://neumu.net/continuity_error/2003/2003-00003_continuity.shtml
> >
> > Kevin John
> > Montréal
1778
From:
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 1:13am
Subject: Re: Orson Welles
A big thanks to Mike and Rick for their very kind words about my Welles
piece!
Echoing Jonathan, it's really shocking to me that the Munich Welles
assemblies are not more widely known; they constitute the first ever attempt to bring a
real public to this huge body of work by arguably the greatest American
director. Thus, the wider availability of a work like "The Dreamers" is, as far as
I'm concerned, a major event in cinema - even if it's only going to be shown
at festivals or at the Munich Film Museum.
What's depressing is that the unseen Welles films are slowly beginning to see
the light of day: the Munich assemblies, the DVDs of "Around the World..."
and "Dominci Affair" mentioned by Jonathan, and so on. Yet they go largely
unmentioned in publications you'd expect more from.
Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1779
From:
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 1:17am
Subject: J. Demme
In a message dated 9/4/2003 6:01:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, MG4273@a...
writes:
> Jonathan Demme is a contemporary director with a fascination with people
> with
> multiple identities. See "Who Am I This Time?", "Citizen's Band", "Something
> Wild" or the FBI agent in "Married to the Mob".
>
And the lovely and underrated "Truth About Charlie" flirts with this theme as
well. I'm really glad to find another fan of "Who Am I This Time?"; I think
it's the greatest film adaptation of Vonnegut, perfectly capturing the tone of
his short stories. Like many of Demme's movies, it's also imbued with a
sweetness that's completely beguiling and utterly rare.
Peter
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1780
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 7:45am
Subject: Re: J. Demme
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
In a message dated 9/4/2003 6:01:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
MG4273@a... writes:
Jonathan Demme is a contemporary director with a fascination with
people with multiple identities. See "Who Am I This Time?", "Citizen's
Band", "Something Wild" or the FBI agent in "Married to the Mob".
It is true, that its a theme present in practical all Demme's films,
but is it more than a footnote of character development?
Howard is an old bumb / rich weirdo, Kay is a married wife /
"unmarried" lover, Audrey is a bad girl / girl next door, Angela is a
modster wife / independent woman, Starling is a by the book FBI agent
/ Lectors "mate", Andrew is a gay man / a gay man with AIDS.
Isnt it more about a public identity and a private identity and
becomming one with one self? Isnt that merely a part of character
development by the narrative? Or are his films statements about how we
camouflage our selfs thru masks made by our surroundings?
1781
From: George Robinson
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 6:09am
Subject: Someone was looking for Stephen Heath
Apologies for the cross-posting but I can'r for the life of me remember
which of these two lists I read this on -- someone was seeking Stephen Heath
recently.
I have no idea of Heath's whereabouts, but members of both lists may be
interested in this site:
http://www.modjourn.brown.edu/MJP_Cine.htm
which has PDFs of all 17 issues of Cine-Tracts, whose many contributors
included Heath, among others.
George Robinson (not affiliated with that website in any way shape or form)
Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.
--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1782
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 5:35pm
Subject: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
Stephen Heath teaches at Santa Cruz.
Saying that Cocteau eroticized Jean Marais before, say, Melville
eroticized Delon is like saying that Hollywood was in the habit of
degrading, rather than glorifying, male stars because of Laurel and
Hardy. I still think Pevney was up to something something odd in the
films I mentioned. And I don't mean not getting the girl.
An oeuvre is a body of work; an ars poetica is a work (originally a
poem) in which a poet reveals the principles of his art. Even though
it is called an Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope's poem of that
name is a good example of how artistic precepts can be made into art.
I Clowns (per Sylvie Pierre) locates the origin of Fellini's art in a
traumatic memory that is shown in much the same way the child's dream
of the wolves with no tails is described in Freud's case history "The
Wolf Man" - hence the title of her article on the film in Cahiers du
Cinema, "The Clown Man." In Fellini's case it is the traumatic memory
which opens the film of a series of circus acts that are metaphors
for castration, culminating in a long number by various clowns, each
more horrifying than the last. Freaked out, Fellini runs out of the
tent in terror.
After this experience he begins to see the people in his village -
all Fellini archetypes - as clowns, which is to say castrated.
Eventually the film even offers a theory of clowns - historically
based - as falling into two types: the Auguste and the white clown,
the male and the female, "two forms of castration," according to
Jacques Lacan (a French disciple of Freu, for those who don't know
the name). The thousand living, breathing caricatures that are
Fellini's visual style are all exfoliations of the clown
dream/trauma, which shape his particular form of the carnivalesque
(another technical term: see below), as well as his very particular
notions of male and female, which are the heart of his cinema.
What I loved and still love about the film is that Fellini makes all
this screamingly funny, and at the same time quite beautiful: many
shots of I Clowns are like paintings, even though they appear in the
midst of funny routines. Of course he's referring to a well-known
tradition in modern European painting.
[I thought of the film again a few weeks ago leafing through Diane
Keaton's terrific new book, Clown Paintings, which deals strictly
with amateur work (none by John Wayne Gacy, although his cankered
spirit hovers over the collection). Then there's Lon Chaney's great
observation that "A clown is funny in the circus ring, but not at
your door at midnight," which could be the epigraph for Clown House,
the Victor Salva film produced by Roman Coppola, whose success kept
Zoetrope afloat for 6 more months as it was going under.]
I Clowns taught me a lot (about the difference between Chaplin and
Keaton, the white clown and the Auguste, for example). Coming after
the mind-blowing Satyricon (there are Satyricon clowns in it, too), I
Clowns summed up Fellini and marked the beginning of his increasingly
dark late period. He never made anything but wonderful films, but I
prefer the arc that goes from 8 1/2 to I Clowns to what came after or
before (where my favorite is still I Vitelloni).
Also, I love the essay film genre, and I Clowns is one of the best
essay films I know. (Diane Keaton's Heaven is another.) The upbeat
films after I Clowns are all essay films: Amarcord (an expansion of
the village section in I Clowns), Fellini Roma, L'Intervista. His
first essay film was A Director's Notebook, about the period between
the abandoned Voyage of G. Mastorno and the shooting of Satyricon. I
haven't seen it since it aired on network tv at the time; incredibly,
Rossellini's film about Sicily also aired on network. Those were the
days!
Technical terms that may crop up in my posts aren't likely to be
found all in one place: oeuvre is in the dictionary; ars poetica
would be in any book of literary terms - M. H. Abrams' is the best;
and carnivalesque should be in any dictionary of terms relating to
structuralism, post-structuralism and "post-modernism." A Russian
theorist named Mikail Bakhtin invented the term to name a tradition
that has its origins in pre-Lent festivities of the middle ages, and
before that in the Roman saturnalia. (It survives in Halloween, I
believe, and the carnivals in New Orleans and Rio, etc.) It's
supposed to be an incipiently revolutionary cultural tradition
invented by the people, and not by intellectuals, although writers
like Rabelais and Cervantes turned it into high art. The two
directors who best embody it, each in his own extraordinary way, are
Welles and Fellini.
I thought the chapter in Million Dollar Mermaid where Williams drops
acid at Cary Grant's suggestion and sees her body in the mirror as
half male, half female (she realizes that she has internalized the
dead brother on whom her family's hopes had been pinned) was kind of
interesting. Bright lady.
1783
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 7:15pm
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
>"Saying that Cocteau eroticized Jean Marais before,
say, Melville
eroticized Delon is like saying that Hollywood was in
the habit of
degrading, rather than glorifying, male stars because
of Laurel and
Hardy."
Not at all.
Unless you're claiming that Leo McCarey and George
Stevens were having group sex with the boys.
>"Then there's Lon
> Chaney's great
> observation that "A clown is funny in the circus
> ring, but not at
> your door at midnight," which could be the epigraph
> for Clown House,
> the Victor Salva film produced by Roman Coppola,
> whose success kept
> Zoetrope afloat for 6 more months as it was going
> under.]"
I trust you're familiar with Salva's background as a
child molester.
What is Heath teaching at Santa Cruz?
--- hotlove666 wrote:
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1784
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 10:28pm
Subject: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
David,
I'll stand pat on my statement that the exception that tests (probat)
one rule (Cocteau as an exception to the run of European directors)
is no more probative about the rule's existence or non-existence than
is another exception (Laurel and Hardy as exceptions to the
representation of male stars by Hollywood) that tests another rule.
Anyway, it's totally unimportant, unless we want to argue that Joseph
Pevney's feature career is important, but "that way lies madness," as
Sarris would say. I'm very, very interested in your observation about
how actors are treated in Hollywood, if it can shed light on
Cleopatra's Second Husband and the larger issues it raised for me,
and would love to hear more.
Actually, I did hear something about McCarey and the boys...
Heath is teaching film. His only book since On Cinema is a
contribution to some monograph series, about the novel of Madame
Bovary. I haven't read it.
I am familiar with Victor Salva's rap sheet. How could I not be,
given the amount that has been written about it? I met him when my
very good friend (and very good editor) Ed Marx, who cut his last 3
films, invited me to roughcut screenings of both Jeepers.
For those who don't know, Victor Salva cast a quite young northern
California Lolito in Clown House, had sex with him and spent a year
in the clink, no doubt well deserved. And ever since Disney hired him
to direct Powder, my favorite of his films, the rap sheet is
regularly dragged out by the press, which I'm beginning to find a bit
tiresome, especially coming from reviewers. The worst was the
unlamented Gregory Weinkauff at the unlamented (except for my
friends) New Times. He went off hysterically about Victor's crime in
his preview note on Jeepers Creepers, which he hadn't seen, asking
how Coppola had dared give the guy a job (yay Francis, yay Roman, yay
Tom), then did it some more after seeing the film, which changed
nothing in his pre-ordained pan.
I will always have a little extra respect for director Stephen
Norrington because he wrote an angry letter about that to New Times
saying that Weinkauf was a "crap critic," which he certainly was. I
think my first post on a_film_by was about how glad I was not to have
to read the obnoxious ignoramus any more.
New Times printed the letter, which is more than the LA Weekly did
when I wrote that Manohla Dargis' capsule on Tigerland had no
business sniggering about the director's sexuality, despite the
shower scenes.* In that brief letter I pointed to Andy Klein's full
review in New Times, which demolished the film politically and
esthetically, citing many learned precedents, but without dragging in
Schumacher's homosexuality, as the "way it's supposed to be done." I
still think it is, unless you really have some point to make by
adducing biographical details.
As far as the Jeepers films go, I would say Victor very consciously
equates himself with the monster in shot after shot, scene after
scene, film after film (with no end in sight, judging from the latest
b.o.). No serious criticism of the two films can ignore the well-
known biographical details in interpreting those touches, but
Weinkauff and Dargis (in the moment of fatigue when she wrote that
capsule) weren't being serious.** Nuance.
*Counter-example 1: Manny Farber on the locker-room beefcake in
Bullfighter and the Lady, a film which he attributed to producer John
Wayne when he reviewed it for The Nation. Manny wasn't citing the
auteur's biography - he didn't even know who the auteur was at that
point! - but it was a valid observation.
**Counter-example 2: The codpieces in Batman and Robin are a
Schumacher gag about himself, but more importantly about the dynamic
duo as interpreted by the brilliantly prescient Frederick Wertham. I
wasn't bothered that people made a point of that. What Dargis was
doing in her Tigerland capsule was something else. At least she
wasn't demanding that the guy never work again.
By the way, I resaw La Chinoise last night for an article I'm writing
and was surprised by Anne Wiazemsky's reference to "the homosexuals
of the Comedie Francaise" in a position paper attacking bourgeois
culture which she reads to the little group. She shares a smile of
complicity with Juliet Berto after reading that sentence. What was
that all about?
1785
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 11:19pm
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
Bill K. wrote:
>New Times printed the letter, which is more than the LA Weekly did
>when I wrote that Manohla Dargis' capsule on Tigerland had no
>business sniggering about the director's sexuality, despite the
>shower scenes.* In that brief letter I pointed to Andy Klein's full
>review in New Times, which demolished the film politically and
>esthetically, citing many learned precedents, but without dragging in
>Schumacher's homosexuality, as the "way it's supposed to be done." I
>still think it is, unless you really have some point to make by
>adducing biographical details.
Has anyone attempted to recruit Andy to this list? I'm sure he'd be
a great addition here, if he has time for it. (He's saiyuk@w....)
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1786
From:
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 7:21pm
Subject: Fellini
Enjoyed everyone's posts on Fellini!
My favorite parts of Fellini are the sections in which he unleashes his
talent for the surreal, the fantastic and the spectacular. The sections which gave
birth to the adjective Felliniesque. And also anything which involves show biz
or musical numbers. The part of 8 1/2 that is best loved here is the finale,
in which everyone the director has ever known starts dancing around him in a
huge circle. Also love the early sections at the steam bath, and the huge ramp.
In I Clowns (The Clowns), much of the whole movie consists of such
Felliniana. He gets to let his talent rip. The big finale here in a circus is especially
delightful.
The whole period of Toby Dammitt (1968), Fellini Satyricon (1969), I Clowns
(1970) is especially rich in Fellini. His imagination really soared here. These
are films that do not look like much of anything else.
Perhaps also, there are sentimental reasons. The Clowns was the first film I
saw in which I understood Fellini. It is also one of his happiest and most
joyful works.
Do people in the US today still go to circuses? The circus came to Lansing,
Michigan (my home town) regularly in the 1960's. Plus, there was a documentary
TV series hosted by Don Ameche, which featured a different real life European
circus each week. For an hour, it showcased the fabulous acrobats, clowns,
vaudevillians and aerialists of the huge flourishing tradition of European
circuses in the 1960's. Us kids would never miss it! Hope video tapes of this
survive somewhere - I have not seen it anywhere since the 1960’s. Other shows like
Ed Sullivan were also full of vaudeville acts - loved that guy who got plates
spinning on poles. So films like Lola Montes, Billy Rose's Jumbo, I Clowns,
all seem part of a favorite world. Frank Capra's strange Rise and Shine also has
its moments.
Mike Grost
PS In case anybody wonders, tutti-frutti is not a term from aesthetics. It
is an old fashioned desert, in which all kinds of fruit were preserved together
in a compote. People liked to spoon it over ice cream and make a sundae. My
post had all kinds of stuff in it, like tutti-frutti, so it seemed a good title.
Little Richard wrote a zippy rock song called Tutti-Frutti (1954). It was the
first rock song by a black singer to be played on what were then all white
radio stations, instead being restricted to black stations. It is a landmark in
the integration of US show biz. Val Kilmer does a nice dance to it in the
movie Top Secret (1984). It also shows up in The Year of Living Dangerously.
1787
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 11:31pm
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
I find absolutely nothing objectionable about
"dragging in" Schumacher's sexuality.
If he DIDN'T take the opportunity to film Colin
Farrell nude in a shower I'd seriously question his
sanity.
--- Joseph Kaufman wrote:
> Bill K. wrote:
>
> >New Times printed the letter, which is more than
> the LA Weekly did
> >when I wrote that Manohla Dargis' capsule on
> Tigerland had no
> >business sniggering about the director's sexuality,
> despite the
> >shower scenes.* In that brief letter I pointed to
> Andy Klein's full
> >review in New Times, which demolished the film
> politically and
> >esthetically, citing many learned precedents, but
> without dragging in
> >Schumacher's homosexuality, as the "way it's
> supposed to be done." I
> >still think it is, unless you really have some
> point to make by
> >adducing biographical details.
>
> Has anyone attempted to recruit Andy to this list?
> I'm sure he'd be
> a great addition here, if he has time for it. (He's
> saiyuk@w....)
> --
>
> - Joe Kaufman
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1788
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Sep 7, 2003 11:38pm
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
>**Counter-example 2: The codpieces in Batman and
Robin are a
Schumacher gag about himself, but more importantly
about the dynamic
duo as interpreted by the brilliantly prescient
Frederick Wertham."
Wertham was a creep.
I used to know Paul Warshow, BTW. Nice guy.
> "By the way, I resaw La Chinoise last night for an
> article I'm writing
> and was surprised by Anne Wiazemsky's reference to
> "the homosexuals
> of the Comedie Francaise" in a position paper
> attacking bourgeois
> culture which she reads to the little group. She
> shares a smile of
> complicity with Juliet Berto after reading that
> sentence. What was
> that all about?"
I wondered about that too. Especially in light of J-L
G's disastrous attempte at hustling on a visit to
latin America back in the day.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
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1789
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 0:24am
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
What exactly did Pevney do to Taza and his pa Cochise? I realize we're talking pirates here...
1790
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 0:54am
Subject: Joel Schumacher and . . . .Joseph Pevney ?!?!
Having waded through the last through days of posts I
continue to be amazed that Joseph Pevney has emerged
as pivotial contributor to gay cinematic history.
To say that I am unconvinced would be putting it
mildly.
As for Joel Schumacher while he happens to be gay he
barely qualifies as a gay filmmaker. Outside of
"Flawless" he's never dealt with gay characters
head-on. And "Flawless" is unquestionably the
squarest, least gay "gay film" since "Three to Tango."
Schmacher is a man of another generation. He's never
identified with his gayness at all. It's something
quite distant from the career he's created for
himself. He'd be totally unable to handle anything
quite as adroit as "Dog Day Afternoon" or "Q & A" --
both works of the straight but far from clueless
Sidney Lumet. And he'd NEVER go near the likes of
"It's My Party" -- not only Randal Kleiser's best film
but one that's become more valid as the years go on
with the cocktail failing and assisted suicides
increasingly popular among the HIV-infected who've
"hit the wall."
The best passage in "Edie" is Schumacher relating what
"Dr. Roberts" shots (speed + vitamins) felt like.
Now THAT would make a great movie.
In fact, provided you could find a suitable actress to
play her (no mean feat) an "Edie" movie might well
bring out a Schumacher we've never seen before ie. a
real director.
But I'm not holding my breath
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1791
From: Robert Keser
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 2:01am
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
Pevellini is okay, but the real find is Pasoliniblo!
--Bob Keser
hotlove666 wrote:
1792
From: Damien Bona
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 6:34am
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> David,
>
> I'll stand pat on my statement that the exception that tests
(probat)
> one rule (Cocteau as an exception to the run of European directors)
> is no more probative about the rule's existence or non-existence
than
> is another exception (Laurel and Hardy as exceptions to the
> representation of male stars by Hollywood) that tests another rule.
The reason I mentioned Stan & Ollie (and Arthur Lake) was to indicate
that Jack Lemmon was not bringing a new sensibility to fioms in the
50s. Dominated males have been a staple of comedies from Day One.
I haven't seen Back To God's Country or Yankee Pasha so I can't
comment on those, but I do agree with David that, star status
notwithstanding, leading men have long been degraded in the American
cinema. In addition to comedies, this is especially true in such
genres as the social drama (Paul Muni in I Am A Fugitive; Henry Fonda
in The Grapes of Wrath), and film noir -- where the heroes were
almost always made chumps because their libidoes led them to
treacherous women and they were often slipped a mickey (Ralph Meeker
in Kiss Me Deadly, Mitchum in Out Of The Past, Fred MacMurray in
Double Indemnity).
> Anyway, it's totally unimportant, unless we want to argue that
Joseph > Pevney's feature career is important, but "that way lies
madness," as
> Sarris would say.
The second half of Sarris's quote is along the lines of "madness is
always preferable to smugness," with which I think we would all
agree.
1793
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 6:43am
Subject: Re: Auteurism? Don't shoot the critic!
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Ruy Gardnier"
wrote:
> But suddenly if you keep up with these critics-moviemakers' choices,
you'll
> see they abandon the defense of the authorship per se pretty soon.
I don't think Godard and Rivette should speak for all the other
critics and filmmakers -- not for Truffaut or Luc Moullet, etc., and I
think their points are more subtle than they are sometimes interpreted
to be. For example, Godard: "The battle continues for some. One must
continue to defend the politique des auteurs against Chauvet and
Charensol, if no longer against the rest. It's like school; there are
the big boys and the little ones, and you can't talk in the same way
to both." (Godard, CduC 171) And Rivette: "Time was, in a so-called
classical tradition of cinema, when the preparation of a film meant
first of all finding a good story, developing it, scripting it and
writing dialogue; with all that done, you found actors who suited the
characters and then you shot it. This is something I've done twice,
with _Paris nous appartient _ and _The Nun_, and I find the method
totally unsatisfying, if only because it involves such boredom. What I
have tried since -- after many others, following the precedents of
Rouch, Godard and so on -- is to attempt to find, alone or in company
(I always set out from the desire to make a film with particular
actors), a generating principle which will then, as though on its own
(I stress the 'as though'), develop in an autonomous manner and
engender a filmic product from which, afterwards, a film destined
eventually for screening to audiences can be cut, or rather
'produced.'" This doesn't invalidate auterism's role in more
traditional cinema, and isn't inconsistent with the "effect of the
text" variety of auteurism. It does point toward semiotics, where the
text, or the codes beneath the text, speak through (or around or
despite) the author. On the other hand, Rivette stresses the 'as
though.'
Rivette mentions Rouch: in miracles such as "Moi, un noir" and
"Chronique d'un été," the participants are clearly helping to
create
their own representation, their lives are their own to present, and
the process of creation or self-revelation is part of the subject of
the film. Nonetheless, the verité of this cinema has been only
seldom
repeated. Rouch is the difference that makes all the difference.
Maybe Rouch explains it: "When I'm making a film, it takes a few
minutes getting started, then I see the film taking shape in the
viewfinder of my camera, and I know at any given moment whether what
I'm getting is any good or not. The constant tension is exhausting,
but it's absolutely essential if one is to bring off this aleatory
pursuit of the most effective images and sounds, without ever being
certain until you're shooting the final sequences what the result will
be."
I suspect the role of the author at the point of production is
relative to historical and cultural circumstances. The concept may be
superfluous with the cathedral at Chartres (but despite "F for Fake,"
Hans van Meegeren is no Vermeer...), but it seems essential to the
greater part of cinematic history.
Paul
1794
From: Damien Bona
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 6:51am
Subject: Re: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> I find absolutely nothing objectionable about
> "dragging in" Schumacher's sexuality.
>
> If he DIDN'T take the opportunity to film Colin
> Farrell nude in a shower I'd seriously question his
> sanity.
I do question Farrell's sanity for opting to make a second film with
Schumacher.
1795
From: Damien Bona
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:01am
Subject: Re: Joel Schumacher and . . . .Joseph Pevney ?!?!
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> Having waded through the last through days of posts I
> continue to be amazed that Joseph Pevney has emerged
> as pivotial contributor to gay cinematic history.
>
> To say that I am unconvinced would be putting it
> mildly.
>
Pevney has a bit of queer appreciation (at least among camp
followers) because of his fierce Joan Crawford vehicle, Female On The
Beach.
I think that Pevney's main contribution to cinema was his performance
as John Garfield's brother in Robert Rossen's Body And SOul.
Little piece of trivia: Pevney is the widower of early '30s child
actress Mitzi Green.
1796
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:02am
Subject: Auteurism: Don't Shoot the Critic!
Here's Godard near the end of the marathon interview with CdC about
La Chinoise: "In France, we had never thought about cinema. [!] Then
one day people came who said: we have to think about it, because
cinema is serious. It was even necessary to say that oeuvres*
existed. Now I think that oeuvres don't exist - that's what you come
to after slightly deeper reflection about art. Even if it's in a can
or on a piece of paper, an ouevre doesn't exist the way a being or an
object does. Nevertheless, at that time, it was the first task that
had to be accomplished: make people conscious of the existence of the
oeuvre, and then you can tell them that now you have to go a little
further in your thinking. I'd even say that there is no auteur. But
for people to understand what I mean by that, you first have to tell
them for a hundred years that there are auteurs. Because their way of
thinking that there weren't wasn't the right way. It's a matter of
tactics."
*single works of art, films
I agree about madness and smugness. In fact, if an interpretation
isn't a little mad, it doesn't interest me.
1797
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:21am
Subject: Re: Auteurism? Don't shoot the critic!
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Ruy Gardnier"
>Somewhere I
> can't find anymore, Antoine de Baecque claims that the "politics of
authors"
> kept in itself the germ of the "effacement" of the author.
I think this is correct. Among other things, there's the legacy of
Bazin, but there's also the legacy of classicism: Hawks, for example,
is praised as a classical artist; personal expression is far from the
highest value. Here's a worthwhile article:
http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/5.2/Hodsdon.html
> "Politics of authors" was not at all about defending good directors
or
> identifying directors that had "universes". If it were, there'd be
no logic
> in the Cahiers writing against John Huston (and defending Ray) or
Fellini
> (and defending Rosselini) in the 50s-60s. It was, in fact, a
politics:
> choosing certain directors that push the boundaries of the image
against
> directors that just "do a good job" (if you compare the Cahiers and
Positif,
> you'll see that that's where the two differ most).
That's a very good point. I'll have to think about it; it seems at
least as true as Hodsdon's points, which seem to point in an opposite
direction. I think Comolli and Nardoni write something similar in
Cahiers somewhere around 1969 -- I'll look for the article -- but I'm
not sure how close the values of 1969 are to those of 1954.
> in portuguese, we have the common expression "cinema de autor", but
there
"Author film" is an old expression, dating back to the 1910's. From
the start it connoted art cinema. A frequent debate in the 1920's
concerned whether the director or the screenswriter is the author of a
film. There was a debate in a newspaper on this subject in 1946 or so.
I remember the participants were ironic, since it was someone like
Christian-Jaque (little regarded by Cahiers) who defended the role of
the director as auteur... I should try to find out...
>I'll
> seems to be no gap between critics considered as auteurists or not.
In the US the gap exists, in part to the influence of Pauline Kael. An
example: apparently A.O. Scott, a Kael admirer, got his job as the New
York Times' film critic when an article he wrote on slate.com
attacking auteurism attracted the attention of the Times' editors.
Paul
1798
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:32am
Subject: The Ars Poetica of Heath Pevellini
Actually, I was wondering if Pevney might not have been homophobic.
He made a few films with Jeff Chandler - maybe he knew about
those "tv dinners." Mark Rappaport's excellent essay film on Rock
Hudson shows that Hudson was something of a punching bag for
directors, but what happens to him in Back to God's Country is
extreme. First of all, he's constantly being compared, unfavorably,
to Steve Cochran, who plays the villain, and by the end he has been
reduced to an inert, paralyzed mass strapped to a dogsled who has to
be saved in extremis by the dog. I don't recall Rappaport dealing
with this particular film, probably because the sadism extends from
start to finish and can't be appreciated from a clip. It goes way
beyond Chuck making bricks, for example, which I would describe as a
temporary setback. By the very end of the film Hudson's character has
been turned into a totally immobile, impotent, 6-foot-long, 170-pound
whey-faced turd. It's remarkably like what happens in Cleopatra's
Second Husband.
Frederick Wertham was a creep, but he saw, in the FIFTIES, that
Batman's enemies were projections of disavowed parts of himself. I
realize that this is a little like praising Joe McCarthy's mastery of
political science, but far as I'm concerned, The Dark Knight Returns
and Burton's Batman films are simply extensions of critical insights
that made their first appearance in The Seduction of Innocence.
Ironically, even though Shumacher added a few gay flourishes - two,
to be exact - to what his predecessor had done, his job in the
hopefully-named Batman Forever was to heal the hero and the
franchise, which had been leaking dollars since Batman Returns. Now
they're farming it out to the guy who made Pi, to put the icky stuff
back. Or has that fallen through?
AOL members: Remember the day after the SEC investigation of AOL-Time
Warner was announced? The Story of the Day on "My AOL" was the
announcement, complete with graphics, that AOLTW was putting Superman
vs Batman into production. Hasn't been heard of since.
More news from Tinseltown: As NY battens down for the first Boris
Barnet retrospective, the Hollywood Cinematheque is preparing for a
23-picture retrospective of 3-D films (BELCH!). 'Scuse me...
To Joseph K - I'll see if Andy's interested.
1799
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:34am
Subject: Re: Auteurism - Don't Shoot the Critic!
Apparently A.O. Scott, a Kael admirer, got his job as the New
York Times' film critic when an article he wrote on slate.com
attacking auteurism attracted the attention of the Times' editors.
Plus ca change....
1800
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Mon Sep 8, 2003 7:49am
Subject: Re: Auteurism? Don't shoot the critic!
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Paul Gallagher" wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Ruy Gardnier"
> >Somewhere I
> > can't find anymore, Antoine de Baecque claims that the "politics of
> authors"
> > kept in itself the germ of the "effacement" of the author.
>
> I think this is correct. Among other things, there's the legacy of
> Bazin, but there's also the legacy of classicism: Hawks, for example,
> is praised as a classical artist; personal expression is far from the
> highest value. Here's a worthwhile article:
> http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/5.2/Hodsdon.html
>
> > "Politics of authors" was not at all about defending good directors
> or
> > identifying directors that had "universes". If it were, there'd be
> no logic
> > in the Cahiers writing against John Huston (and defending Ray) or
> Fellini
> > (and defending Rosselini) in the 50s-60s. It was, in fact, a
> politics:
> > choosing certain directors that push the boundaries of the image
> against
> > directors that just "do a good job" (if you compare the Cahiers and
> Positif,
> > you'll see that that's where the two differ most).
>
> That's a very good point. I'll have to think about it; it seems at
> least as true as Hodsdon's points, which seem to point in an opposite
> direction. I think Comolli and Nardoni write something similar in
> Cahiers somewhere around 1969 -- I'll look for the article -- but I'm
> not sure how close the values of 1969 are to those of 1954.
>
> > in portuguese, we have the common expression "cinema de autor", but
> there
>
> "Author film" is an old expression, dating back to the 1910's. From
> the start it connoted art cinema. A frequent debate in the 1920's
> concerned whether the director or the screenswriter is the author of a
> film. There was a debate in a newspaper on this subject in 1946 or so.
> I remember the participants were ironic, since it was someone like
> Christian-Jaque (little regarded by Cahiers) who defended the role of
> the director as auteur... I should try to find out...
>
> >I'll
> > seems to be no gap between critics considered as auteurists or not.
>
> In the US the gap exists, in part to the influence of Pauline Kael. An
> example: apparently A.O. Scott, a Kael admirer, got his job as the New
> York Times' film critic when an article he wrote on slate.com
> attacking auteurism attracted the attention of the Times' editors.
>
> Paul
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