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Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
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27301
From: "joe_mcelhaney"
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 11:05pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) joe_mcelhaney
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
NYU is one of
> the oldest, and I'm very happy to hear that Roger McNiven taught
there -
> that must have been inspirational: As a private programmer, Roger
> played a major role in my education. And as I noted, Rossellini and
his
> late films had been very prominent in the NY film scene (Film
Comment,
> for instance) in the 70s. That - and Rice University - are places
where
> his personal impact would have been considerable, to some extent
> because of a guy you probably never met named John Hughes who
became
> RR's prophet in NY.
Roger was, in fact, a close friend of mine. We were students during
the same period, me doing undergraduate work and he doing graduate. I
never took a class from him but simply listened to him and learned,
probably more than I learned from most of my official classes. That
was a difficult period in film studies in that there was a strong
resistance to not only auteurism but to the very concept of pleasure
in cinema. Roger's application to the doctoral program at NYU was
initially rejected by the faculty since he was perceived to be a
lightweight. This objection came primarily from the department
chair, who did not approve of auteurism and whose own Intro to Film
course regularly began with a screening of Flashdance -- which he
then got up and denounced. (That kind of teaching.) Roger did get
in, though, on his second application. The only class they allowed
him to teach was one on violence in fifties American cinema: Oswald,
Boetticher, Fuller, Mann. After that, he adjuncted at various places,
ending up in Florida, before he died. At any rate, my enthusiasm for
Rossellini was one that I largely developed through Roger. But I
can't help recalling now my initial access to Rossellini, a year
before I entered NYU. On television one night in Ohio, a station
programmed Stromboli (the English-language version) followed by the
English-language version of Elena et les hommes, Paris Does Strange
Things. Maybe Langlois was their guest programmer.
By the way, Bill, if you're still reading this I had dinner with
Howard Mandelbaum the other night (speaking of Roger!). Since Howard
is the biggest Dwan fan I know of I mentioned the Dwan essay you
wrote for senses. Now he's very excited and wants to read it. (He
weeps during Dwan films and I'm not always sure why. Anyway, he
loaned me his video of The Gorilla.) But he asked me if the Dwan
essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
capitalism." Is this true?
>
> So all that seems to have combined to give you access and
information
> that the Sarris Generation as such didn't really have, although
> Rossellini's most intelligent champions in NY included members of
that
> generation - Marty, Roger - and stretched back to Jonas Mekas, who
had
> Little Flowers on the loop at Anthology. So, no, he wasn't burried,
but
> I don't think Sarris did a lot to help the cause. (I'm sure Gary
> Sherman's students out here got an earful, too - he named his son
> Cosimo.) On the other hand, I don't recall Sarris championing the
tv
> movies when they were playing, although he includes and italicizes
> Prise de pouvoir in the very brief RR item in The American Cinema.
>
> Anyone else like Rossellini?
27302
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 11:13pm
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) cellar47
--- hotlove666 wrote:
>
> And of course ever frame of Kubrick's oeuvre
> starting with Paths of
> Glory, if not earlier.
>
>
>
Quite true. I find "Lolita" particularly Ophulsian.
Yahoo! Mail
Stay connected, organized, and protected. Take the tour:
http://tour.mail.yahoo.com/mailtour.html
27303
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 11:54pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
>
> By the way, Bill, if you're still reading this I had dinner with
> Howard Mandelbaum the other night (speaking of Roger!). Since
Howard
> is the biggest Dwan fan I know of I mentioned the Dwan essay you
> wrote for senses. Now he's very excited and wants to read it. (He
> weeps during Dwan films and I'm not always sure why. Anyway, he
> loaned me his video of The Gorilla.) But he asked me if the Dwan
> essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
> knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
> capitalism." Is this true?
>
I have fond memories of Roger and Howard in New York and their
screenings in their apartment. I'm delighted to hear that Howard is
alive and well. He had this stupid accident a long time ago, I hope
he's completely healed. Give him my best whenever you see him.
JPC
27304
From: "Maxime Renaudin"
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 11:55pm
Subject: Re: Dwan & capitalism (Was: Viva Rossellini!) jaloysius56
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
> But he asked me if the Dwan
> essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
> knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
> capitalism." Is this true?
I'd be curious to hear Bill about that... Anyway, if you put private
initiative in a free market as the basis for capitalism, Dwan is your
man with at least one film: "The Inside Story", a delightful economics
lesson about money's circulation and consumption as the keys to
everybody's problems... "We got a lot of good reactions from the
financial world", told – quite proudly – Dwan to Bogdanovich.
27305
From: MG4273@...
Date: Wed May 18, 2005 8:39pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) nzkpzq
I always got the impression from Sarris' writing that he was wild about
Rossellini, and regarded him as one of the giants of the cinema.
The admittedly brief article in The American Cinema describes R's films as
"sublime, ... years ahead of their time".
There is much in Sarris' collected reviews, "Confessions of a Cultist". A
long article lauding R as one of the Big Four masters of Italian Cinema (along
with Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni). R shows up on Sarris' list of the Top Twenty
directors of all time (p45). R's influence on Godard is repeatedly noted. And
there is a rave for "The Rise of Louis XIV".
Later, Sarris' enthusiastic blurb would be on Peter Brunette's book on
Rossellini.
The impression I always got from Sarris, and other writers, was that the
greatness of Rossellini was auteurist doctrine.
Other auteurist writers were consistently enthused about Rossellini, too. But
Sarris was in there, pitching with all his might.
Mike Grost
27306
From: "Maxime Renaudin"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 0:55am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! jaloysius56
Which films are we talking about here? Virtually any RR, or, more
specifically, the late TV period? I don't think that I will exaggerate
in telling that the '45-'54 classics are regularly shown in France
(is 'la Macchina Ammazzacattivi' ever shown anywhere?), and I thought
it had to be the same in the US. But, for the late ones, that's
another story. I cried for ten years, exasperated for such a lack,
until a full retro of his TV work in 2000. Exhausting and exciting
marathon. But somewhat disappointing too. It could be argued that, if
the films are not shown, that's simply because nobody wants them to be
shown. There is quite a strong resistance from some (and apparently,
those who make the programs, if any) auteurists to this strange
objects. There is, from 'Viaggio in Italia' to 'Socrate' such a gap
that many did not follow RR. I don't think that one could enjoy both
equally, or for the same reasons. I keep enthusiastic memories of
Agostino (I wish I could see them all again), but I think 'Il Messia'
is mostly a bore.
In a way, I believe that Oliveira succeed with Palavra e Utopia where
RR failed most of the time.
27307
From: "Maxime Renaudin"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 1:09am
Subject: Late Rossellini in DVD jaloysius56
http://www.unilibro.it
Agostino D'Ipponia, Blaise Pascal in June 2005
Il Messia, Cartesio, Anno Uno, Socrate already there.
27308
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 1:42am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! tharpa2002
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Maxime Renaudin"
wrote:
"Which films are we talking about here? Virtually any RR, or, more
specifically, the late TV period? I don't think that I will
exaggerate in telling that the '45-'54 classics are regularly shown
in France (is 'la Macchina Ammazzacattivi' ever shown anywhere?),
and I thought it had to be the same in the US."
"La Macchina Ammazzacattivi" was screened at the Director's Guild
here in Los Angeles about 10 or 11 years ago (I think it was part of
a Cinematheque program.) They also screened "Giovanna D'Arco al
Rogo" (sp?)said to be its first screening in Los Angeles, and "Idea
of Sicily" and "India" these being the rarities among more easily
seen titles that were shown in that program. About 5 years ago the
Instituto Italiana in Westwood screened a restored print of "Paisa"
introduced by Renzo Rosselini.
"Stromboli" was often televised in the Los Angeles market in the
1960s. It was my introduction to Rosselini as a teenager and was
then (and now) one of my favorite movies though my friend Peter Henne
has made a persuasive case against it. "The Messiah" is the most
difficult Rosselini movie to see in the US; as far as I know only a
video tape of washed out print is available.
Richard
27309
From: Craig M Keller
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:00am
Subject: Re: Late Rossellini in DVD evillights
On Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 09:09PM, Maxime Renaudin wrote:
>http://www.unilibro.it
>
>Agostino D'Ipponia, Blaise Pascal in June 2005
>Il Messia, Cartesio, Anno Uno, Socrate already there.
It seems all have only Italian subtitles, except 'Cartesius' (of which edition I have a copy) 'Anno uno,' and 'Socrate,' all of which also contain English subs.
On the early-mid Rossellini tip: next month, a beautifully restored edition -- with new English subtitles -- of 'Francesco, giullare di Dio' will be released on R2 UK DVD from Masters of Cinema.
craig.
27310
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:01am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! fredcamper
hotlove666 wrote:
> ...Have you noticed how rarely Rossellini is talked about here? ....
Not everyone has the time and inclination to make 12 or 13 posts in a day!
Mike Grost is quite right that early on Sarris expressed great
admiration for Rossellini. There's at least one FILM CULTURE article
with deeply evocative descriptions of "Viva L'Italia" and "India" that
had me salivating for years until I was able to see each, in rare
prints, in the early 70s. But while I may have taken Sarrirs' FILM
CULTURE 28 as the "Bible," it wasn't my only one, or I never would have
found my way to the American avant-garde (which I discovered first) or
to, say, Rivette and Rouch. Nor did I have any friends who simply
accepted Sarris blindly.
I "discovered" Rossellini for myself in a viewing of "Stromboli" on TV
in 1965, close to the beginning of my interest in film. It was ecstatic;
was completely blown away. From that moment on, I tried to see every
one. Few could be obtained for rent, so we weren't able to show many in
our film society -- we did find a 35mm of "Desiderio," if I remember
correctly, which was quite strange, at one point quite moving. Seeing
Rossellini's films was always a major quest. I once went by bus from
Boston to New York with my friend Tim Hunter in order to see "Fear" on
TV at something like 2 AM. Another friend met us at Tim's parents'
apartment, where, not knowing anything about it, one of us looked it up
in the TV listings to read to the others this three word description:
"Poor blackmail movie." We laughed, figuring it would be great, which it
was. "India" was shown in a good color print from the Cinematheque
Francaise at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970; apparently it is
now a partly "lost" film, because the color restoration is horrible;
I've seen two color prints and they're both ridiculously high contrast
(or maybe it was the same print, once in New York and once in Paris). I
managed to see La Macchina ammazzacattivi only about ten years ago, in a
so-so 16mm print at the San Francisco Cinematheque. As for John Hughes,
I borrowed a car and drove to Washington from New York once with Hughes
and Ronnie Scheib as passengers and someone else too to see "Europe 51"
and "Viva L'Italia," both incredibly great. This was about 1974. Later I
was able to phone Rossellini (who I didn't know at all) and get his
permission to let me borrow the Pacific Film Archives's print of "Europe
51" to show in Chicago. (The PFA explained to me that he if he agreed
when I reached him, he might say he would phone the PFA to release it,
but certainly would not, so it was some sort of deal where I had to
reach him at a time when the PFA was open and then pay their phone
charges for a call to him immediately after.) When NBC commissioned him
to make an hour long TV film about Sicily, that was telecast for the
first time in, I believe, Christmas of 1968, my mother and stepfather's
apartment in Manhattan was the scene of a gathering of perhaps a dozen
cinephiles (mom and stepdad were away, fortunately) as there was a
decent color TV there. That's great too. (Richard Modiano, if you're
reading this, was that the same thing you saw? I believe it was called
"Roberto Rossellini's Sicily" when telecast. Was it a print that was
screened?) I tried to get a print out of NBC to show at MIT with no
luck. I also went to New York other times to see Rossellini films: for
example, the premiere of "Socrate" at the Museum of Modern Art, around
1970, attended by him. That was memorable mostly for the greatness of
the film, but also for an incident at the Q&A, in which someone asked a
long abstract and rather aggressively-posed question about his use of
backgrounds I think that in hindsight owed something to the jargony
world of emerging European "theory." And the questioner wouldn't quit,
badgering RR until a man stood up near the front and said something
like, "I don't know about any of this, but I know that I've seen almost
all your films and I love them, and I love you," after which various
people approached the front of the room for autographs and the scene
dissolved into fan worship, which I rarely like but which here seemed
like a great conclusion.
The point is, here is one long-time auteurist and Sarris disciple who
has thought at least since 1965 that Rossellini was either the very
greatest of filmmakers or one of the three or four greatest. There was a
blurb for "Voyage to Italy" that I wrote circa 1968 that ended, in my
typically adolescent hyperbolic mode, by calling him "the greatest
living artist." (I found a 35mm distributor for that film who said he
would rent it to us to show at MIT. This was around 1968. Then he
realized that he had destroyed all his prints of it -- all 40 of them.)
For a long time my top three filmmakers have been Mizoguchi, Rossellini,
and Brakhage. The other young "auteurists" I knew in the Boston area in
the second half of the 1960s all loved Rossellini's films. Tim Hunter
managed to interview him for the "Harvard Crimson" while he was a
student there, for example, and Tim graduated in 1968. I've seen, and
shown, Rossellini's films whenever possible, and have been able to see
most of them. I can count the ones I think are less than overwhelmingly
great from "Open City" onward on the fingers of one hand -- and about
those, such as "Anima Nera," I could well be wrong. When "Messiah"
premiered in Chicago in 1977 (in what was then a pristine 35mm print) I
wrote an extravagantly ecstatic Reader review. My later review of
"Stromboli" is at http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Rossellini.html
Part of Rossellni's importance is, as I think Bill indicates, that his
films offer a genuinely different alternative for cinema. For me, those
are an anti-formal, anti-geometrical visual style and anti-formal
approaches to film rhythm and time as well; an interest in trying to see
without preconceptions; an openness to the hugeness of the universe.
Fred Camper
27311
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:06am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! (correction) fredcamper
Fred Camper wrote:
>.... I can count the ones I think are less than overwhelmingly
> great from "Open City" onward on the fingers of one hand -- and about
> those, such as "Anima Nera,"...
Oops, I haven't seen this, I meant "Anno uno." On my one viewing of
"Anno uno," I just couldn't get as excited about the Christian
Democratic Party in Italy as I can over WWII, St. Francis, Ingrid
Bergman, India, or Socrates. (What? Am I saying that subject matter is
actually important??)
Fred Camper
27312
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:09am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! cellar47
--- Fred Camper wrote:
I once
> went by bus from
> Boston to New York with my friend Tim Hunter in
> order to see "Fear" on
> TV at something like 2 AM.
This guy
http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g009/timhunter.html
right?
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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27313
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:42am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Modiano"
> "La Macchina Ammazzacattivi" was screened at the Director's Guild
> here in Los Angeles about 10 or 11 years ago (I think it was part of
> a Cinematheque program.) They also screened "Giovanna D'Arco al
> Rogo" (sp?)said to be its first screening in Los Angeles, and "Idea
> of Sicily" and "India" these being the rarities among more easily
> seen titles that were shown in that program.
It was a Cinematheque program--one weekend of Rossellini so they chose
selectively (Eric Sherman was very involved this) to represent all
periods of his career. This is where I, like you, was able to fill in
some of the gaps, notably "India" as I referred to in an earlier post.
That one especially was one of the best-regarded I had still not seen
and one of his best--the print we saw was very good I thought,
contrary to what Fred C. said of his experience with the film in post
written a little ahead of this. I'm someone who has seen a lot of
faded color, indifferent color restorations and so on, and I can't
attest it was pristine but I had no problem with it compared to a lot
of things. "Idea of Sicily" was that same TV documentary Fred
mentioned later, I believe.
A few days ago, I intimated that there was probably no director of
this stature who had been so tough to catch up with, as far as seeing
at least the major part of his work. You know, that's not all bad,
is it? The whole of cinema, and even great cinema, was not meant to
just fall into our lap. People who like painting, music, literature
never say, let me get have everything worthwhile given to me right
now. Why should we? That said, it's kind of a sad world when there
is so little interest in playing someone like Rossellini theatrically.
As I observed before, a West Los Angeles theatre here (it was the
Nuart) did very well at one time with, of all things, the historicals.
They were popular, believe me, for the few days they'd play each one,
kind of like "Star Wars"--you had to stand in a long line. I'm sure
some other L.A. Rossellini fan will bear me out on this.
It seems like there were two threads kind of confused, or unhelpfully
interwoven, here. One, are we neglecting Rossellini? Well, it's
pretty obvious by this point that this group generally reveres him,
and many of us have had similar experiences catching up with him,
and in fact a startling number of us discovered him through late
night TV screenings of "Stromboli" in the 60s--and that was the
shorter version and not the longer original that came along later and
is now more generally seen.
The other thread is about Sarris and whether he was helpful to
Rossellini or not. But Mike is right that Sarris has been
consistently out there for Rossellini and one thing he didn't even
mention is that in at least two of those Sight and Sound polls done
every ten years, Sarris named "Francesco, Giulare di Dio" as one of
his ten favorite movies (I can't remember if it still made it this
last time). The problem with Sarris is those categories, which he
kind of bends to his will. As I've said I would have liked Ophuls
as one of the best American directors based on those four films he
made here, but Sarris used the occasion to talk about his whole
career--he loves him and it is one of his best essays, but I just
reread it and it is about all of Max Ophuls, not "Max Ophuls in the
American Cinema." Take a look if you doubt this. With Renoir this
is more or less true as well. In Fringe Benefits, it just seemed
like if he could find any excuse to put someone in the book he did.
English-language versions of foreign films do not make someone a
part of the American cinema, and I'm just saying that objectively.
I don't think Rossellini is ever part of the American cinema any more
than say, Mizoguchi, who Sarris also loves. Sarris just found a way
to mention Rossellini where he couldn't with Mizoguchi. But if in all
of Mizoguchi's films, the hero of "Sansho Dayu" had somehow wandered
onto that beach at the end and suddenly, unexpectedly said to
someone "Dude, where's my mother?" you can bet Mizoguchi would be
in the American Cinema too.
Blake
27314
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:24am
Subject: The Inside Story (Was: Viva Rossellini! ) hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
I had dinner with
> Howard Mandelbaum the other night (speaking of Roger!). Since
Howard
> is the biggest Dwan fan I know of I mentioned the Dwan essay you
> wrote for senses. Now he's very excited and wants to read it. (He
> weeps during Dwan films and I'm not always sure why. Anyway, he
> loaned me his video of The Gorilla.) But he asked me if the Dwan
> essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
> knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
> capitalism." Is this true?
Oh my God. Give Howard my very fondest regards when you see him next.
Tell him I loved his book w. Penny Stalling, Flesh and Fantasy,
hereby recommended to anyone who can lay hands on it.
Howard knew me when I was carrying the banner for Cahiers-style
Communist film criticism in NY with John Hughes, and I may have said
something to that effect about The Inside Story, which like many
Dwans I discovcered at Roger and Howard's. It is an astonishing film
from Dwan's Republic period, and it is indeed about capitalism: It's
the story of a thousand dollars that comes to a small town and leaves
it, having passed from hand to hand and changed many people's lives.
It's an argument against keeping your money in a bank - hoarding -
because it should be out working and changing the world. Since
Rossellini never got around to doing his Marx film, The Inside Story
(a story told, as Ronnie Scheib commented at the time, by two
paranoid old men in a bank vault) will just have to do.
I haven't gotten around to crying at Dwan's films yet, but give me
time. The Gorilla probably won't be the one - it's minor, but it's
quite lovely.
27315
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:25am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! /also Mizoguchi's "Sansho Daya" fredcamper
Blake Lucas wrote:
> ....Eric Sherman was very involved this....
I don't mean to get overly personal in all of this, but in a continuing
answer to Bill/hotlove's doubt that early auteurists appreciated
Rossellini enough, Eric was one of the people in my parent's apartment
watching "Sicily" at Christmas time, 1968. I mean, ten or so people
gathered to see an hour-long TV movie -- I think they all really
appreciated Mizoguchi. Marty Rubin was there too, and I think John Belton.
> if ....the hero of "Sansho Dayu" had somehow wandered
> onto that beach at the end and suddenly, unexpectedly said to
> someone "Dude, where's my mother?" you can bet Mizoguchi would be
> in the American Cinema too.....
Maybe not, because maybe (contrary to the things I've said elsewhere)
that would just wreck the film that contains what is perhaps my favorite
piece of sound in all cinema, or at least, in all of narrative cinema
(excepting of course those films that use Bach and Monteverdi and the
like), the mother's mournful call, "Anzu...Zushio..."
Fred Camper
27316
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:26am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! fredcamper
David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g009/timhunter.html
>
> right?
Yes; I met him in seventh grade...
Fred Camper
27317
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:26am
Subject: Re: Dwan & capitalism (Was: Viva Rossellini!) hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Maxime Renaudin"
wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
> > But he asked me if the Dwan
> > essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
> > knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
> > capitalism." Is this true?
>
> I'd be curious to hear Bill about that...
I posted on it before reading this.
Anyway, if you put private
> initiative in a free market as the basis for capitalism, Dwan is your
> man with at least one film: "The Inside Story", a delightful
economics
> lesson about money's circulation and consumption as the keys to
> everybody's problems
Bingo, Maxime!
27318
From: "Richard Modiano"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:27am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! tharpa2002
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
"...When NBC commissioned him to make an hour long TV film about
Sicily, that was telecast for the first time in, I believe, Christmas
of 1968,...(Richard Modiano, if you're reading this, was that the same
thing you saw? I believe it was called "Roberto Rossellini's Sicily"
when telecast. Was it a print that was screened?)"
That's it, but this was an Italian version because the title was in
Italian and was translated as "Idea of Sicily." Since the running time
was the same it was probably identical but for the language. They
screened a good 16mm print.
Richard
27319
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:49am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! hotlove666
To everyone who has restored my faith in American auteurism, thanks
for that. But I do note that most of us telling these war stories
about just trying to see the damn things - Tag's book begins with
one: it's de rigeur in writing about Rossellini - are of a certain
vintage, and I hope this flurry of discussion arouses some interest
among those who have not had the primal experience of trudging 50
miles through the snow to see The Machine for Killing People dubbed
in Ukrainian. It's what it's all about.
I for one did not know how highly Fred rated RR - that was a
fascinating post, Fred. "Please sir, I'd like some more." And I was
happy to hear one young member weigh in from France. Maxime: Not all
the tv movies are great, as Fred has already noted, but Louis XIV,
Augustine, Pascal and Age of the Medici are as good as Voyage in
Italy or Amore - especially (paradoxically) if you get to see them on
a big screen, in good prints. I had no problem making the leap from
Stromboli to to Prise de pouvoir when I first saw the latter, because
they are both about the same thing: "Death and the sun cannot be
looked at directly." Tag wrote a great little piece for Cahiers on
the tv films when they were shown in Paris. I know you aren't in the
habit of reading the magazine, but see if you can track that one down
at a library, it's the best thing I've read on the subject.
I wish it were available in English - and more to the point, I wish
the films were. Those with power, use it! I'm getting too old for all
this trudging!
27320
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:57am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! cellar47
Well I went to high school with him.
--- Fred Camper wrote:
> David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> >
> >
> http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g009/timhunter.html
> >
> > right?
>
> Yes; I met him in seventh grade...
>
> Fred Camper
>
>
__________________________________________________
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27321
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 4:07am
Subject: re: Sarris legacy (was: Viva Rossellini) apmartin90
From my own geo-cultural place and generation, I can mostly second
Joe's impression of Sarris' legacy - as well as the comparative stature
among serious cinephiles of my acquaintance of Ophuls and Rossellini. I
was personally 'schooled' much more in the MOVIE/POSITIF tradition,
mixed with various bits of SCREEN and post-68 CAHIERS (what an
education!), via my first major university teacher, Tom Ryan (who is in
the FILM JOURNAL Robert Mulligan special). Of course I had read Sarris
as a teenager before that, but by the late '70s, the books he was
churning out then, like the 'film and politics' one and the slim Ford
one were regarded as very weak and insubstantial (and I still think
this). As Joe said, Sarris' lists were something to 'test yourself
against' and then basically leave behind. Note to all Americans on this
list: nothing much that Sarris has written for over three decades have
hardly any bearing on film taste, opinion, analysis, etc outside a
certain USA reading public - particularly pre-Internet, it simply
wasn't available to many people around the world. He is a 'name' in
most film cultures but almost without content! (I don't mean this as an
insult to the guy.) I read Kent Jones' piece in the latest FILM COMMENT
(the longer 'uncut' version is available on-line) with interest, but
could relate personally to almost nothing in it: my sense of mise en
scene, and even auteurism, have very little to do with what 'my
generation' regarded as Sarris' waffly, belles lettres impressionism
(the exact opposite of Farber's far more precise and jazzy
impressionism, which had a huge impact on me and many I know). I would
be hard pressed to recall a single phrase/idea/association from all the
Sarris essays I have perused in FILM COMMENT since the mid '70s - they
employ a kind of spidery rhetoric of taste that quickly dissolves, in
my opinion.
As for Ophuls/Rossellini: for my generation, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN
WOMAN was and is a supreme masterpiece, and engagement with all other
available Ophuls films followed that lead - I would say this is true at
least of Australia and UK. I remember attending a glorious big-cinema
screening of LOLA MONTES when I was about 17 - when the lights went up,
both my Literature professor and my Philosophy professor were there
!!!! But there was a big Rossellini cult too: remember that Sam Rohdie
from SCREEN (who taught in Australia in this period) had instigated a
lot of work in English on Rossellini, and Don Ranvaud, Paul Willemen
and others at FRAMEWORK followed suit. I feel that these two
'fountainheads' - Ophuls and Rossellini - have always loomed large
around me - far more so than Andrew Sarris !
Adrian
27322
From: ptonguette@...
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 0:11am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! peter_tonguette
Well, I adore the Rossellini films I've seen (not a lot) and count at least
two of them ("Viaggio in Italia" and "Francesco, giullare di Dio") among my
very favorites by any director. I also found "Stromboli" to be incredible when I
viewed it several years ago on television, as well as "Il Messia." Whenever
I think of Rossellini, specific sequences from the films come to mind.
In "Italia," it's the climactic scene in the ruins of Pompeii, during which
the excavation reveals (evidently) a married couple. What an incredible
moment! I suppose, though, that it becomes even more incredible when thought of in
context of the extraordinary ending, during which, as Dave Kehr writes in his
capsule, "in one of the moments that only Rossellini can film, something
lights inside them [Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders], and their love is renewed
as a bond of the spirit."
In "Francesco," it's the scene between St. Francis and the leper, which moves
me to tears just thinking about it.
I recently turned 22, for those keeping track of the average age of a
Rossellini fan!
Peter Tonguette
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27323
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 4:37am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! (correction) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> Oops, I haven't seen this, I meant "Anno uno." On my one viewing
of
> "Anno uno," I just couldn't get as excited about the Christian
> Democratic Party in Italy as I can over WWII, St. Francis, Ingrid
> Bergman, India, or Socrates. (What? Am I saying that subject
matter is
> actually important??)
>
This was also my least favorite of all the ones I've seen. The
subject matter was part of in a way maybe, in that I spent the film
kind of trying to absorb this historical material and couldn't do
much more than that, nor did I ever become too aware of what else
the film was asking of me. But you know, that part of it might be
more evident on a second viewing. In cases of other films you allude
to, I felt my greater willingness and in some cases eagerness to
embrace those subjects also freed me to start seeing other things
going on in Rossellini's art more readily.
blake
27324
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 4:40am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
it several years ago on television, as well as "Il Messia." Whenever
> I think of Rossellini, specific sequences from the films come to
mind. In "Italia," it's the climactic scene in the ruins of Pompeii,
during which
> the excavation reveals (evidently) a married couple. What an
incredible
> moment!
That also links up nicely w. the last line of Prise de Pouvoir: "Death
and the sun" etc. I connect the incinerated couple, the tuna fishing
and the volcano in Stromboli, and the summing up by Louis to the
theories of Bataille, another materialist mystic.
BTW, I do recommend to all you Stromboli fans - not having seen
Magnani's simul-remake - Cold Heaven, by Nicolas Roeg. Kinda strange -
as David and I have previously remarked here.
27325
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 5:03am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! /also Mizoguchi's "Sansho Daya" lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
> Blake Lucas wrote:
> > if ....the hero of "Sansho Dayu" had somehow wandered
> > onto that beach at the end and suddenly, unexpectedly said to
> > someone "Dude, where's my mother?" you can bet Mizoguchi would be
> > in the American Cinema too.....
>
> Maybe not, because maybe (contrary to the things I've said
elsewhere)
> that would just wreck the film that contains what is perhaps my
favorite
> piece of sound in all cinema, or at least, in all of narrative
cinema
> (excepting of course those films that use Bach and Monteverdi and
the
> like), the mother's mournful call, "Anzu...Zushio..."
>
> Fred Camper
My goodness, Fred, I hope you don't think I'd really want to see the
film wrecked, nor that I don't value that same piece of sound in the
same way you do and just as deeply. That's exactly why I picked the
most extreme example I could think of to try to humorously point up
a tendency in Sarris' book to really not stick to the subject of
American Cinema--not really my main problem with the book even.
It's not as if this could really happen--though I must admit I have
heard Bach treated in a lot of different ways and I guess some of
them might appall you. Did you ever hear the pop song "How gentle
is the rain?"
People have often told me I'm way too serious. But you know, Fred,
as Roy Anderson/Ralph Meeker said to Howard Kemp/James Stewart in
The Naked Spur, "Loosen up...spring is here."
Blake
27326
From: Mathieu Ricordi
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 5:08am
Subject: Re: re: Kung Fu Hustle mathieu_ricordi
This is a great film indeed. The wonderful law/moral fleeting (elusive)
kickstart reminded me of the opening tableau in Herge's comic strip
"Tintin in America" where a gangster with a smoking gun and wad of money
walks by a policeman who stands to salute him. The absurdity works in both
pieces on not just a comic level, but a socially pressing one, especially
in its particular manifestation of archetypal satire. Herge's characterizations
(particularly in his principal character's trips to America and the Congo)
are misunderstood to this day as silly, offensive, and particular of an old
politically backwards way of thinking. In actuality, his playful and
boldly comedic turns with straight-on demonstrations of Westernly practiced
models of conduct were a perfect (and unebashadly pleasurable) description
of the irrational portraying the irrational. Stephen Chow is perfectly
attuned to this way of thinking, and his comic-strip wit carries with
it the child's spirited responce to ghastly/serious cultural
unloading/inheritance. The Axe gang leader demanding the best view
possible from his right hand man inside his car to watch his two hired
assasins murder the best fighter from Pig Stye Alley is the perfect
representation of ramapant blood lust demands on genre films.
The violence finding its way in the car/viewership pod and hillariously
in the Gangster's hair is Chow's talented balancing act of serious
inquiry and cleansing good will; the heart fights to be light when it's
been dealt a heavy hand. Here the stakes are definetly heavy, and Chow's
demonstration that violence begets violence (the axe gang already ruling
the mass doesn't need to bother with the poor Pig Stye yet makes a point
to tough out the long war there) is loaded with an understanding that
greed and corruption are a plague whose light shines particularly
bright. Chow's own character's desire to be a malicious tribe
member is in itself a tribalist pursuit spawned by backward notions
of heroism and empty valour. Old fashioned morals therefore get
fashionably/rightfully placed with an olden day musical-hall sensibility,
Chow finds a mad-cappers delight at showing the dread of old wrongs
not yet righted, and subverts the stature of long accepted cliches.
Part of my distaste for previous martial-arts extravaganzas such as
"Hero", and escpecially "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is that
there was always something too easy and unimaginative about regurgitating
actions heroes of the genre back to audiences in a way that blanketed
the real myths behind the personages or their cultural inheritence.
I have a feeling that Chow feels the same way, as J.R. Jones pointed
out in the Chicago Reader review, the Kung-Fu experts here are rooted
in real cultural experiences that become archetypes through there
current situations. Like Herge before him, Chow makes art/mythology
in a comedic, dramatic, and almost surreal way utilizing everyday
types; cultural expression becomes the real brought to hyper
stylized purpotions, not the cliched stylized repeating itself.
Others have mentioned Jerry Lewis as a reference point for Chow's
work and I see it to, but more recently I see Itami and Youseff
Chahine as complimentary entries into probing. Itami's "Tampopo",
amd Chahine's "Alexandria, Forever and Again" were also very
much involved in presenting massive cultural regression in an
artfully progressive way; both also (like Chow) utilized Western
influential overbearence in their teqniques and hommages yet viewed them
from culturaly integrel, and solid vantage points. All three artists also
use similair tropes to hyper expose the follies of the situations
they are presenting with under-cranked film speeds, perfectly timed
and executed gags that play out like their own singularly
contained two-reelers, and a uniquely set filmic universe where
over-melodramatic and zany laugh routines don't at all seem out of
place. "Kung Fu Hustle" is a perfectly apt title for Chow's work since
it is only superficialy a martial arts flick (or more to the point
only superficialy a martial arts movie satarizing martial arts movies).
The "Hustle", is that the genre won't identify itself, even if the comedic
surface makes it appear like the familiar is just being jested with.
One of the big misconseptions with highly referential movies
(such as that of Leone, the New Wave, the 70s generation ect.) is
that their hommages or easy identifications were neccesarily
a way they they critiqued the originals; many were finding their
way through current realities instead, using their reference points
as artisticly ponderous paths. Chow surely has Kung-Fu on the screen,
but he has something else on the brain entirely, a purpousfully
ludicrous rendition of media and genre saturated mayham in need
of bracing moral clarity (also deftly showed in Shaolin Soccer's
"Universal struggle" championship game); passing it off as mindless
dribble would be like angrily walking away from Thora Birch's
"Coon" painting in "Ghost World". The film shows that their
is great sophistication in archetypal ridicule, and intilect
in hilarity as form of study. So to with the mise-en-scence,
Combining a 28mm lens choice for modeling personalities with the 50mm to
sit back and observe their folly, the silent-film two-reel sensibility
gets backed by improving art canvassing of character distortion and
empathy. But this is just scratching the surface, Chow brings forth
momentous spurges of action poetry to amplify his comedic, communal
fable; the deadly sounds of an assasin slowly growing momentum by
slicing in half a passing cat (miraculously timed when the animal's
shadow appears) is jaw dropping, and combines a funny/surreal/tense
display of awe. Like these sounds on the unsuspecting soon to be
victim, the film creeps up on you in ways that are enlightening
and constantly pleasurable. Revelatory Hyperbole and exageration through drama
and gallows humour are an altogether fading art, but Chow respects it,
and here he has let the Pit of the Globe theater connect with the
balcony in an all encompassing forray of serious amusement.
Finally, the perfect riproast to "Kill Bill" has arrived, and it has
the wit, skill, and original sense of proportions (and higher intent)
to elevate itself higher than covers would suggest. The former is a dud,
and Chow's film is the perfect rinsing.
Mathieu Ricordi
27327
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:28am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! /also Mizoguchi's "Sansho Daya" fredcamper
Blake Lucas wrote:
>
> My goodness, Fred, I hope you don't think I'd really want to see the
> film wrecked....
I assumed you were being humorous, but I still wanted to comment on the
incongruity of your funny line.
>
> ....I must admit I have
> heard Bach treated in a lot of different ways and I guess some of
> them might appall you. Did you ever hear the pop song "How gentle
> is the rain?"
Actually, I like it quite a bit. The title is "A Lover's Concerto"; it's
by The Toys, mid 60s I think; you're quoting the first line. I have an
old 45 rpm copy somewhere. However I will *not* start quoting the
lyrics. Like most popular song lyrics, you can find them easily enough,
I'm sure, by entering the section you quoted as an exact phrase in google.
Fred Camper
27328
From: Peter Henne
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:50am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! peterhenne
Online Now Send IM
Blake,
I went to those American Cinematheque screenings too, and I agree with you 100 per cent that the print of "India" was serviceable. And as I recall I sat in on several of these with Richard. But what I most took away from the series was Rossellini's adaptation of Paul Claudel's "Joan at the Stake." But then, I am a sucker for film representing theatre, aestheticizing spaces which have been previously aestheticized.
Richard is correct that "Joan at the Stake" was billed as the Los Angeles premiere. The film must be quite rare, as Peter Brunette had not seen it when he published his book. For what it's worth, several years ago amazon.com placed it on its web site as an upcoming DVD release, without specifying the manufacturer. But no DVD to my knowledge has materialized.
Peter Henne
Blake Lucas wrote:
It was a Cinematheque program--one weekend of Rossellini so they chose
selectively (Eric Sherman was very involved this) to represent all
periods of his career. This is where I, like you, was able to fill in
some of the gaps, notably "India" as I referred to in an earlier post.
That one especially was one of the best-regarded I had still not seen
and one of his best--the print we saw was very good I thought,
contrary to what Fred C. said of his experience with the film in post
written a little ahead of this. I'm someone who has seen a lot of
faded color, indifferent color restorations and so on, and I can't
attest it was pristine but I had no problem with it compared to a lot
of things. "Idea of Sicily" was that same TV documentary Fred
mentioned later, I believe.
Blake
__________________________________________________
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27329
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:59am
Subject: Re: Late Rossellini in DVD joka13us
>On the early-mid Rossellini tip: next month, a beautifully restored
>edition -- with new English subtitles -- of 'Francesco, giullare di
>Dio' will be released on R2 UK DVD from Masters of Cinema.
>
>craig.
Due out this Monday the 23rd. (Bresson's TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC also,
though from Artificial Eye.)
--
- Joe Kaufman
27330
From: Craig M Keller
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 7:12am
Subject: Kung Fu Hustle / Rossellini correx evillights
On Thursday, May 19, 2005, at 01:08AM, Mathieu Ricordi wrote:
>I have a feeling that Chow feels the same way, as J.R. Jones pointed
>out in the Chicago Reader review, the Kung-Fu experts here are rooted
>in real cultural experiences that become archetypes through there
>current situations.
Just a quick note -- unless you're referring to a J.R. Jones capsule (which may or may not exist, I don't know), the 'Kung Fu Hustle' (collision-P.S. -- the Chinese title of the film is simply and eloquently: 'Kung Fu' / 'Gong Fu') review published in the Reader was written by a_f_b list-member Kevin Lee.
Also, to Joseph K. -- Yes, you're correct, re: the MoC release of 'Francesco, giullare di Dio' being May 23rd. I meant to type a quick correction of this -- I erroneously mentioned a June release date in a post earlier in the evening.
craig.
27331
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 7:41am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Peter Henne
wrote:
But what I most took away from the series was Rossellini's
adaptation of Paul Claudel's "Joan at the Stake." But then, I am a
sucker for film representing theatre, aestheticizing spaces which
have been previously aestheticized.
>
> Richard is correct that "Joan at the Stake" was billed as the Los
Angeles premiere. The film must be quite rare, as Peter Brunette had
not seen it when he published his book.
That was indeed a rare screening of "Joan at the Stake." I felt
blessed to be there.
Somehow, I didn't think it was going to start playing at the local
multiplex next week.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27332
From: Matt Teichman
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 11:57am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! bufordrat
Somehow the image of the director of _River's Edge_ taking a bus with
Fred to see a Rossellini film on TV at 2 am is rather surreal. (based
only on my having seen the film, of course; never had the pleasure of
meeting the man)
-Matt
Fred Camper wrote:
>David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
>
>
>>http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g009/timhunter.html
>>
>>right?
>>
>>
>
>Yes; I met him in seventh grade...
>
>Fred Camper
>
>
27333
From: "jess_l_amortell"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:00pm
Subject: Re: Howard Mandelbaum (was: Viva Rossellini!) jess_l_amortell
> I have fond memories of Roger and Howard in New York and their
> screenings in their apartment. I'm delighted to hear that Howard is
> alive and well.
I just noticed he's co-presenting a slide lecture, introducing a double feature at Film Forum next week:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/screendeco.html
27334
From: BklynMagus
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 2:47pm
Subject: Re: Welles and Storytelling cinebklyn
I watched TCM last night and saw "Mr. Arkadin,"
"The Immortal Story," and "F for Fake" (in
that order).
I am far from a Welles expert, but have always
preferred his late films made in Europe to those
he made in America.
What I noticed this time was the dominance of
the theme of storytelling and the efforts of people
to substitute a story for reality which culminates
in "F for Fake" where reality is seen as a variation
on storytelling.
Arkadin tries to wipe out his past (reality) and
substitute a story. When the story fails he simply
disappears, as if he only existed so long as the
story existed. The fun of this concept may be
augmented by the fact that there are several
versions of the film, so there are several versions
of the story. Maybe there is a version somewhere
yet to be discovered in which his story is believed
and he doesn't vanish.
In "The Immortal Story" Mr. Clay tries to turn a
story into reality and the attempt "kills" him.
What is also interesting is that in both cases rich
men try to use money to control reality and are
defeated.
In "F for Fake" the critique is expanded. There
would be no fakes and fakers unless there was a
market, a market that is dependent upon capital.
The market also gives rise to experts who are
necessary to authenticate genuineness (which
raises the whole question of how to determine
what is genuine).
This viewing confirmed for me that "F for Fake" is
my favorite Welles film -- not merely a summing
up, but an expansion of his philosophy. In a way
it slips the bonds of criticism with its critique of
expertise, since film critics can be seen as experts
who authenicate the genuine artistry of certain
films and filmmakers and not others. Critics are
in the service of the intellectual market which
needs to create a hierarchy of value for works of
art.
Individuals can then demonstrate their intellectual
capital by showing their appreciation for and
understanding of what the experts have deemed
genuine. If they are rich enough they can actually
purchase the works as well, adding to their lustre.
But if Welles is a charlatan who make a movie
about fakers, and who ends his film with a false
story presented as reality, then what is genuine?
Charlatans after all are in the business of
unreality. I would propose it is the joy I and
others receive from watching "F for Fake" as what
is genuine and beyond the experts since joy is a
personal matter and not subject to critique.
Welles directs his critique not at the art, but at the
market that sustains the fiction of expertise.
Brian
27335
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:02pm
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! fredcamper
Matt Teichman wrote:
> Somehow the image of the director of _River's Edge_ taking a bus with
> Fred to see a Rossellini film on TV at 2 am is rather surreal....
Well, at the risk of continuing this OT stuff, I should complete the
image: there was a third person on that seedy Greyhoud with us, Tim's
very nice, very-psychologically-healthy-seeming (thus unlike the two of
us), and very pretty girlfriend at the time. Tim ran one of the Harvard
film societies, and particularly loved Hitchcock, but also loved much of
the auteurist "list" of the time.
About loving certain scenes: Rossellini once said in an interview that
there are key scenes that caused him to make whole films, though I'm not
getting this exactly right. He cited the fishing scene in Stromboli,
with the waiting, as one example. I don't think that this means his
films are uneven so much as that they are sometimes based on waiting for
revelation(s). Revelation in Rossellini, particularly in the pre-1967
films, is often a case of unexpected connections: the priest's speech in
the monastery in "Paisan," the sermon to the birds in "Franceso," the
museum scene in "Voyage to Italy," the ending of "Stromboli." There's
even one in the alleged potboiler (which I quite like, though it's no
"Stromboli" or "India"), "Generale Della Rovere": the ending.
About "India" prints: was the one that those who saw it found
"serviceable" harsh and high contrast, sort of like Kodachrome printed
onto Kodachrome? Because the film in 1970 had very gentle, very
sensuous, very supple colors, which seemed crucial to its nature as a
kind of inventory of the sensual pleasures of what virtual all tourists
call an extremely colorful country. The prints I saw might seem OK to
someone who hadn't seen the earlier print, in that the color at least
wasn't tinted one way or the other. But the colors and surfaces lacked
detail and texture.
Fred Camper
27336
From: "samfilms2003"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:42pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! /also Mizoguchi's "Sansho Daya" samfilms2003
> Actually, I like it quite a bit. The title is "A Lover's Concerto"; it's
> by The Toys, mid 60s I think; you're quoting the first line. I have an
> old 45 rpm copy somewhere.
I think I have it also.
It could be a folk song he arranged for Anna Magdalena's (or she arranged who
knows) book so a pop version shouldn't be appaling..
Now the Swingle Singers - I won't go there ;-)
-Sam
27337
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 3:59pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
> About "India" prints: was the one that those who saw it found
> "serviceable" harsh and high contrast, sort of like Kodachrome
printed
> onto Kodachrome? Because the film in 1970 had very gentle, very
> sensuous, very supple colors, which seemed crucial to its nature
as a
> kind of inventory of the sensual pleasures of what virtual all
tourists
> call an extremely colorful country. The prints I saw might seem OK
to
> someone who hadn't seen the earlier print, in that the color at
least
> wasn't tinted one way or the other. But the colors and surfaces
lacked
> detail and texture.
It's going on a dozen years, but "very gentle, very sensuous, very
supple colors" sounds right to me. I wonder if Peter and Richard
and anyone else who was there might have that impression too. I
feel that for me "harsh and high contrast, sort of like Kodachrome
printed onto Kodachrome" would have alienated me somewhat, and I
was very rapt by this film. I came out feeling it was one of my
half dozen favorites, perhaps with "Paisa," "Stromboli," "Voyage,"
"Louis XIV," "Augustine" (that's chronological, and not precise),
with the difference I've been able to see all of those more than
once, unlike this one. The reason I can't verify the quality of the
color absolutely is, of course, that I have nothing to compare it
to, while you've seen it several different ways (I've had that
experience with other films, like "Yang Kwei Fei"--where the print
I saw earlier was much better made than later one).
As I said, Eric Sherman was the guiding force behind this Rossellini
weekend, and I'm sure if it had been completely up to him, it would
have been a full retrospective. You know Eric. He is devoted to
Rossellini, named his son Cosimo as Bill mentioned before, and
actually got to know him at some point. How this is relevant to the
above is that there was a concerted effort on Eric's part to get the
best possible prints of the titles shown, mostly from European
sources and a few new prints made with extra care, of which "India"
may have been one. He had spent some time working on it--it wasn't
just getting on the phone and telling someone "Send whatever print
you have." Preceding the Cinematheque weekend was an "event
screening" at the Academy of "Open City"--by far the best print I
have ever seen of that film.
Blake
[No stale jokes today, but thanks for identifying the title of
"The Lover's Concerto" which I liked, too]
27338
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 5:32pm
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! tharpa2002
Blake Lucas wrote:
"It's going on a dozen years, but "very gentle, very sensuous, very supple colors" sounds right to me. I wonder if Peter and Richard and anyone else who was there might have that impression too."
That's how I remember it too. It didn't seem harsh or high contrast. I think I talked about that with Peter (or another ftiend who was also there) because India is a very sunny, equatorial country and colors can be very vivid under those kinds of lighting conditions.
And I second Blake's high evaluation of "India."
Richard
P.S. I saw an excellent print of "Yokihi"/"Yang Kwei Fei" in Japan newly struck for a Mizoguchi retrospective there. The Japanes laser disc of same was mastered from this print.
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27339
From: "Michael E. Kerpan, Jr."
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:05pm
Subject: Yokihi / Princess Yang Kwei Fei (was: Viva Rossellini!) michaelkerpan
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Richard Modiano wrote:
> P.S. I saw an excellent print of "Yokihi"/"Yang Kwei Fei" in Japan
newly struck for a Mizoguchi retrospective there. The Japanes laser
disc of same was mastered from this print.
The version captured in the French DVD set looks pretty lovely.
(I still pat myself on the back for ordering the French DVDs rather
than waiting for Criterion to finally get around to releasing some
Mizoguchi on DVD here). ;~}
MEK
27340
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:13pm
Subject: Re: Howard Mandelbaum (was: Viva Rossellini!) hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jess_l_amortell"
wrote:
> I just noticed he's co-presenting a slide lecture, introducing a
double feature at Film Forum next week:
> http://www.filmforum.org/films/screendeco.html
I neglected before to recommend Screen Deco, Howard's second book,
written with Eric Myers, an excellent unit publicist who is the son of
legendary H'wd publicist (and marathon runner) Julian Myers. The book
is a feast for the eye and mind.
27341
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:20pm
Subject: Re: Welles and Storytelling hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:
>
> In "The Immortal Story" Mr. Clay tries to turn a
> story into reality and the attempt "kills" him.
OW: "He dies because he's completed his purpose in life, or as Karen
Blixen would have said, more honestly, "because he has completed his
role." There's nothing more for him to do in the puppet theatre except
die.
27342
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:22pm
Subject: Re: Welles and Storytelling hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, BklynMagus wrote:
> I watched TCM last night and saw "Mr. Arkadin,"
>
> What I noticed this time was the dominance of
> the theme of storytelling
Too bad that rights disputes keep Filming Othello, which I prefer to F
for Fake, from being shown. Welles plays two scenes from the play to
the camera - the high point of the film - both of which are about story-
telling: "and thereby hangs a tale [sic]."
27343
From: BklynMagus
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 6:37pm
Subject: Re: Welles and Storytelling cinebklyn
hl666 writes:
> Too bad that rights disputes keep Filming
Othello, which I prefer to F for Fake, from
being shown.
I have only seen it twice and liked it very
much both times, but I could not remember
it well enough to include in my post. My
feeling is that it builds on "F for Fake" in
the sense that it shows ven more ways of
telling and re-telling a story.
Brian
27344
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 8:08pm
Subject: U-I and other '50s Westerns ((Was: Re: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>Blake Lucas" wrote:
> I may not (and do not) "love 'em all." I am close to having seen
them
> all. Are you?
> Nope, and I'd welcome the (time and) opportunity to do so. I'll
sure
> subscribe to the Western Channel when I finally pack it in. I know
I'd
> enjoy seeing them, as I enjoy the smaller group of Uni scifiers
> pretty in toto.
This post opens up territory that I wouldn't mind writing several
books to explore. I can only try to give a few quick, specific
responses to the things you say here.
First, the Western Channel. For some reason, why they have a deal
with Universal it seems to mostly be for later movies--the only 50s
one I've seen them show in two years or so I've had it is
"Law and Order" (Nathan Juran), which is in fact not nearly as good
as the early 30s Edward L. Cahn classic on which it's based.
Hopefully, this will change, but for the meantime the channel is
still a blessing to Western aficionados. For example, they seem to
have carte blanche with Columbia which has enabled me by now to get
almost complete with Scott-Brown (they do show the one I haven't
seen yet), which never quite rises to the level of those last
Boetticher Ranowns in these earlier films but does have many
outstanding B Westerns (including a couple without Scott by Alfred
Werker). Some of the best Scotts are directed by people like
Douglas, De Toth and Joseph L. Lewis (Mike favorite "A Lawless
Street"). The channel also seems to have at least helped to
subsidize a very interesting Peckinpah documentary which I highly
recommend, and they are showing Peckinpah's TV series THE WESTERNER
(all episodes), which is essential viewing, IMO.
> I wasn't dumping on Uni westerns, just alluding to traits I see in
> the ones I've seen that add up to "institutional clutter": the
prop
> dept, costume dept, standing sets that are recycled as part of the
> style, leading to a certain "busy-ness"; the Uni research dept,
which
> it seems could always be counted on for a bit of authentic
historical
> context, and the influence of Freud in H'wd in the 50s, which
simply
> became part of writers' baggage in constructing stories.
>
I like the studio style, obviously. I love locations for many
Westerns as much as studio-based ones, maybe even more, and the
studio can claim some, including my favorite three, Mann's "Bend of
the River" and "The Far Country" and Sherman's 1958 "The Last of the
Fast Guns" (entirely shot in absolutely stunning Mexican locations
I've never seen in any other movie). But those standing exterior
sets and backlot locations can be used to advantage, because as one
immediately recognizes them, one focuses on the fact that these
movies may not be about the history or geography of the West, but
more intimate or abstact issues. In "No Name on the Bullet" Audie
Murphy rides across very familiar back lot hills as the film opens
to an exterior town set that is also within the studio--one just
focuses on who he is, what the relationships and ideas are, and not
the "West" and that's appropriate here. "A bit of authentic
historical context" and "the influence of Freud in H'wd in the 50s"--
yes, that's true at times, even before the 50s at times, and not
just in this studio. I'm not sure I see this as a problem. I love
Westerns, which to me are not movies of men chasing each other on
horseback (though there are some beautiful scenes of this very
thing) but take in a lot of things. But I don't really take it to
heart in a general way until 1946, when I feel it came into maturity
and became a genre for adults.
> (Even a blacklistee like Zimet [not a contract writer anywhere]
> does it in the script for Naked Dawn, and Ulmer just strips away
> anything
> that could rationalize the characters' behavior, including
> dimestore Freud, unwittingly recovering the originality of Zimet's
> inspiration,
> Gorki's first short story Keltash [which Ulmer may not have known -
> if he did, it would be because he happened to have read it, not
> because he was told].)
Bill, this is an error, though an understandable one. "The Naked
Dawn" is not a U-I production. They released it, and it floats
their logo, but it is strictly a pickup, like the Hugo Haas ones
they started to release at about this time. It wasn't made there,
it doesn't use any of the studio's people (and this surely better
explains the presence of a writer like Zimet, as someone like
Bernard Gordon, who wrote several U-I movies, found his career there
quickly over when he was blacklisted). That it has some interesting
affinities with some of their better Westerns--recalling the
eroticism of "Four Guns to the Border" and anticipating the parable-
like nature of "The Last of the Fast Guns"--is something I can't
begin to explain. Of all U-I's "adopted" films, it is the one that
most fits, and yet is completely individual in every way, especially
in Ulmer's direction. I adore this brilliant movie, by the way, and
was very interested in what you said about it here, especially about
that Gorki story, something I didn't know.
> My sample is not enough to generalize about the studio style, but
re:
> Boetticher, it is, because it applies to all the westerns HE made
for
> Universal. I do think it helps to see how a director handles not
only
> a genre but a studio style, and I will stick to my assertion that
the
> tabula rasa approach to westerns in the Ranowns was a wiping clean
of
> a particular tabula, the Universal western studio style, which BB
> knew well, and not "the western" in general.
>
> So after leaving Uni, which almost made an alcoholic of him, Budd
> made a western set in the middle of nowhere with no reference to
> History and unconscious meanings that are dissolved in the
> action "like salt in the sea," to quote Bazin, as opposed to being
> spelled out in dialogue. And even though a couple of the Ranowns
are
> town westerns, they apply the same stripped-down story and visual
> esthetic as the ones that are set in Lone Pine, Budd's Zabriskie
> Point.
>
That's very well-said. I pretty much agree. How a director handles
a studio style (as well as a genre) can even be especially
interesting in a case like Budd's here, as he wasn't as happy there
as some of the other directors. And negotiating that challenge can
lead to good films as well as bad or "impersonal" ones. I will have
to think a little about "tabula rasa" because while the Ranowns do
move toward "purification" (a word I can't find in this post so must
have been in one of your earlier ones), it is of a very refined
kind, which doesn't preclude complexity of character, relationships,
and narrative, even if the storytelling and style seemed most marked
by an elegant simplicity. There is no distracting "baggage" but
there is psychological insight and in the best of the films, play of
the present against the past (Scott's relationships with dead or
absent wives). The characters are not opaque--and they even may
have piercing insights with regard to each other (the villains
especially are gifted with this, as Masters' "story" inside the
wagon in "7 Men from Now" gloriously shows). Burt Kennedy's
scripts, specifically, are among the best ever written for the
genre, as Budd was always very quick to acknowledge.
I consider the Ranown cycle definitely the peak of the late
50s "purification" of the genre, really a final stage before it had
to change radically with Peckinpah, Hellman, Leone, and Eastwood.
But it's important to remember it couldn't even have happened in the
early 50s when Boetticher was contracted to U-I. The 50s is the
Golden Age of Westerns, and one of the reasons it's Golden is that
it is not the same from beginning to end--it is evolving constantly,
in a lot of films and with a lot of different directors, and with a
lot of things coming into play. So the films of the first half of
the decade (even the "neurotic" Mann ones for example) tend to be
more expansive and historically based, but increasingly the tendency
is toward these more intimate and modest, very subtle films, of
which Boetticher is the peak but not the only example (see Richard
Bartlett at U-I) and purely existential stories, which dominate the
genre in say, 1959 (see a_f_b favorite "Day of the Outlaw" by De
Toth, for example), in which the trappings of the genre are by now
so familiar that nothing needs to get in the way of a story's actual
concerns, while genre conventions also lend themselves easily to
effective storytelling.
>> Personally I have nothing against including studio style in
analysis
> of single films
I completely agree with that, obviously.
Blake Lucas
27345
From: Peter Henne
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 8:12pm
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini!/India print peterhenne
Online Now Send IM
Agree with Blake, Richard, and Fred on their estimation of "India." Richard, we probably did discuss "India," and I vividly remember conversation after "Joan at the Stake." The impression of "India" lodged in my memory is that the print was a little contrasty but not harsh, plus it was hard to judge because so much of the film was shot under a blazing sun. I was just glad to be able to see it. I've been out of the loop on retrospectives the past 4 years, but can anyone think of more great films in a director's series from the past 20 years that remain so inaccessible?
Besides a Rossellini redux, I am burning for an extensive Miklos Jancso retrospective. In the mid-'90s I proposed the idea to two L.A. exhibitors. One of them laughed out loud.
Peter Henne
Richard Modiano wrote:
Blake Lucas wrote:
"It's going on a dozen years, but "very gentle, very sensuous, very supple colors" sounds right to me. I wonder if Peter and Richard and anyone else who was there might have that impression too."
That's how I remember it too. It didn't seem harsh or high contrast. I think I talked about that with Peter (or another ftiend who was also there) because India is a very sunny, equatorial country and colors can be very vivid under those kinds of lighting conditions.
And I second Blake's high evaluation of "India."
Richard
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27346
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 8:27pm
Subject: Re: 70s Universal Westerns (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Another great auteur western made at Uni very late in the day: The
> Great Northfield Minnessota Raid, which actually takes the
> historicizing/Freudian bent of the studio's 50s westerns over the
top.
I am not with you on this Philip Kaufman movie at all, which I found
to be typically facetious 70s "revisionism." There may be some
relationship to earlier Westerns of this and other studios (the
subject of James/Youngers has been done continually) and to a
"historicizing/Freudian bent" but it is not so much taken "over the
top" as corrupted into something which is for me, very unpleasant.
I happened to catch up with this just in the last few years as have
been trying to fill in the blanks on 70s Westerns in a general way,
and for me it was one of the worst.
Late Universal's one absolutely standout Western of the 70s for me
is "Ulzana's Raid" (Aldrich). Interestingly, that one does relate
in a meaningful way to the early 50s pro-Indian cycle to which the
studio contributed so much--most consistently in the films of George
Sherman, but in works by many other directors as well. "Ulzana's
Raid" is harsher and perhaps more pessimistic but I believe it
refuses the facile cynicism of most 70s Westerns. I like
Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" in a way--think it's definitely
worth some sustained attention--and that also goes for "My Name Is
Nobody" which has been much discussed here recently. This is really
a European film which Universal simply released, but at least they
did not subject it to the unbelievably ruthless cutting that "Once
Upon a Time in the West" suffered from Paramount on first release.
27347
From: "Michael E. Kerpan, Jr."
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 8:36pm
Subject: James Bros -- Long Riders (was: 70s Universal Westerns) michaelkerpan
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Lucas"
wrote:
>
> I am not with you on this Philip Kaufman movie at all, which I found
> to be typically facetious 70s "revisionism." There may be some
> relationship to earlier Westerns of this and other studios (the
> subject of James/Youngers has been done continually)....
Moving just a few years later, there's Walter Hill's "Long Riders". I
always loved Ry Cooder's score -- and really liked a number of scenes.
How would you rate this one?
27348
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 9:01pm
Subject: Re: Sirk/Hunter (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Lucas"
> wrote:
>
> Sirk not only
> > created his own films at the studio but also wound up inflecting
the
> > studio style more pervasively
>
> Don't forget the role of producer Ross Hunter, who was the key to
> Sirk's career at Universal and the pioneer of the kind of
melodrama
> that Sirk made, built around a) targeting women, who had nothing
like
> this available on tv; b) sets vs. locations as an economy measure;
> c) remakes of properties the studio owned (in some cases);
d) actresses
> with marquee value who were no longer expensive. >
This is at least in part debatable. As that list of producers I
added on intimates, I acknowledge their importance in the studio
(Budd Boetticher felt they were too important, often at the expense
of directors), but the relationship between Ross Hunter and Douglas
Sirk in more complicated than the above suggests. And in this
particular relationship, I believe it was really Sirk who led in
every important way. Remember, first of all, that Sirk was older
and much more experienced than Hunter in movies when they first got
together. Hunter had been an associate producer with Leonard
Goldstein for a couple of years (and apparently done a good job),
and when Goldstein left the studio, various projects moved on to
other hands, including Hunter's in the case of "Take Me to Town"--
his first full credit and first collaboration with Sirk (Sirk
meanwhile had directed a number of films for the studio already).
The two moved onto their next picture together, "All I Desire."
This was indeed Hunter's idea. He has said that his favorite movie
was Vidor's "Stella Dallas"--hence the casting of Barbara Stanwyck.
But note the realized picture--it is in every way a Sirk movie,
complete with his ideas of form and melodrama, and inner critique to
trouble the surface narrative of family reconciliation. While I
have no wish to undermine Hunter's affection for "Stella Dallas" I
wonder if even that earlier film is simply a tearjerker with no
complexity--it seems to me it has had quite a lot of thoughtful
analysis in different critical threads of recent years. But the
real key about "All I Desire"--and this goes for all subsequent
Sirk/Hunter movies--is that it was Sirk and not Hunter who really
understood melodrama in a profound way. This was in fact evident
very early in a German film like "Schlussakkord"--which is just
superb and prefigures the U-I ones--and when Sirk saw his career
headed back decisively in this direction when "All I Desire" came
up, he immediately started to draw on his classical background and
knowledge of Greek Tragedy and especially Euripides "Alcestis" which
he mentions a number of times in Halliday. That touchstone play
allowed things to settle in his mind about Hollywood-type reversals
and happy endings, so that he was able to make "Magnificent
Obsession" (the Sirk/Hunter turning point of the following year, in
terms of the commercial viability they found in the genre) with real
artistic conviction, even if other projects that followed had even
more potential for him.
To pretend that Ross Hunter had this same profound understanding of
melodrama is an idea I just can't buy. I do think the relationship
was mutually beneficial, and they got along very well by accounts of
both, but they wanted somewhat different things from these movies
and each got what he wanted. The problem with what Hunter wanted is
that I don't believe he ever could have gotten it without Sirk--and
his filmography proves it. There are some nice movies--and within
the genre (like "One Desire" by Jerry Hopper) and one bold move
found him bringing in another director from Germany, Helmut Kautner,
for two black-and-white 'Scope movies late in the decade, "The
Restless Years" (beautifully done and very moving) and "Stranger in
My Arms" (also very good), but the Kautners flopped and he went back
to Germany. Hunter never made another black-and-white movie after
this, and after "Imitation of Life," with Sirk gone, he did indeed
continue on with those remakes, but they are absolutely pallid by
comparison with the Sirks. I'm sure he realized this after "Back
Street" because apparently he tried to lure Sirk back for "Madame
X." I'm glad Sirk said no, for many reasons.
To recapitulate on your points above:
a) targeting women, and d) actresses with marquee value but no
longer expensive. Both partly true but there was already precedent.
"Because of You" (Pevney, produced by Albert J. Cohen) had the same
strategy with Loretta Young, was the first of her last two pictures
(Pevney's charming Capraesque "It Happens Every Thursday" was last),
and was in the woman's picture/melodrama genre, if without any of
specifics of style Sirk would bring to it. Hunter is said to have
had a gift for getting along with female stars in later phrase, and
casting of Jane Wyman and Lana Turner (also of someone like Anne
Baxter in "One Desire") was certainly his doing.
b) sets instead of studio locations. That was the studio aesthetic,
not attributable to any one producer and really going back to
earlier years of Universal's history. Location shooting did become
more prominent for other studios during the decade, and generally
earlier--but it's certainly not absent at U-I as in, notably,
several Manns, and "Captain Lightfoot" (Sirk/Hunter).
c) remakes of properties the studio owned. You are absolutely
right. Hunter alone seems to deserve credit for this, certainly for
making a success of the idea with "Magnificent Obsession," even
though it's Sirk's realization of the film which really nailed it.
But I do think it is really Sirk who more generally inflected the
studio style, especially in melodrama. It's not that anyone else
really understood his aesthetic, unless it was a cinematographer
like Russell Metty or other people who worked with him (various
art directors, and Frank Skinner, who hit a career high with
his "Imitation of Life" score in my opinion). But even though
others who ventured into melodrama territory like Pevney, Keller and
Edwards (the wonderful, very distinctive "Mister Cory") inflected it
differently, they all seem to be making an effort to be more
visually stylish as Sirk's influence took hold.
As intimated before, I think U-I producers could affect their films
strongly and even positively, notably Rosenberg, who I've mentioned--
not just in outdoor adventures and Westerns but when he tried other
things, which he did a lot; can anyone ever forget June Allyson as
"The Shrike" (Jose Ferrer)? I've covered William Alland with Jack
Arnold and more generally in the sci-fi cycle elsewhere, and he made
good Westerns too. Perhaps the most amazing guy though is Albert
Zugsmith--there no more than three years and take a look at his
filmography. Speaking of Kevin favorite "Female on the Beach" by
the way, that was Zugsmith's first for U-I, while his last was
"The Female Animal" (which he wrote the story for)--as it's also
about a woman living on the beach and involved with a younger man,
it completes a circle for Zugsmith and suggests that as much as
Pevney or Crawford, he might be co-auteur of "Female."
One correction on my list of producers (a typo): Howard Christie had
30 films, not 21.
> Was it you who argued
> that the Sirk-Hunter melodramas created the style for Uni tv
> series?
It was definitely not me. I don't agree with that at all. Even
Hunter's weaker later productions don't give in completely to that
flat TV look (he still had Metty) though some later Universals do.
More generally, the whole studio style begins to change radically
when it becomes MCA/Universal in the early 60s, leading to the TV
series, the theme park, a whole new aesthetic. For those who wonder
why I always insist on saying "Universal-International" or just U-I
for the 50s movies, that is the reason. It is to disassociate it
from the later version (though not from the earlier Universal of the
first "Back Street," the horror films, the first Deanna Durbins and
Abbott & Costellos, "Shadow of a Doubt," "Cobra Woman" and on).
True, the new MCA version gave Hitchcock a home for his last years
(this may have been a mixed blessing after the first two films but
I'll let Bill speak to that), and during one brief adventurous
period they even backed "Two-Lane Blacktop" (though deserted it when
it was released--you were lucky to catch it the first time around).
But mostly, one thinks of it as the studio which nurtured Steven
Spielberg, and that's why I just cannot consider it the same as the
studio which gave me "Bend of the River," "Written on the Wind,"
and "The Incredible Shrinking Man."
Blake Lucas
27349
From: MG4273@...
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 5:05pm
Subject: Re: Howard Mandelbaum (was: Viva Rossellini!) nzkpzq
In a message dated 05-05-19 14:17:21 EDT, you write:
<< I neglected before to recommend Screen Deco, Howard's second book,
written with Eric Myers, an excellent unit publicist who is the son of
legendary H'wd publicist (and marathon runner) Julian Myers. The book
is a feast for the eye and mind.
>>
This book is terrific. Recommended it a long a time ago on a_film_by.
So is this the same Howard of Roger&Howard and the screening with sheets in
their apartment everyone talks about? (I wasn't dere, Chalie).
It has the nightclub set from "Broadway" on its cover. In the play, the club
was just a little seedy hole in the wall, but in the movie, it is Deco in
excelsis.
"A must-have for anyone who owns a tux." - LA Weekly (quoted on the back
cover).
Mike Grost
27350
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 9:18pm
Subject: Re: Re: Sirk/Hunter (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) cellar47
--- Blake Lucas wrote:
Hunter never made another
> black-and-white movie after
> this, and after "Imitation of Life," with Sirk gone,
> he did indeed
> continue on with those remakes, but they are
> absolutely pallid by
> comparison with the Sirks. I'm sure he realized
> this after "Back
> Street" because apparently he tried to lure Sirk
> back for "Madame
> X." I'm glad Sirk said no, for many reasons.
>
Hunter bounced back with "Airport" -- as big a success
for Universal as "Magnificent Obsession." it was, of
course, quite a different kind of melodrama than the
ones he made with Sirk. And he stumbled again with the
musical remake of "Lost Horizon."
He did, however, pay Larry Kramer so much money for
his screenplay that Larry was able to utilize it to
found ACT-UP.
And for that alone I am truly, albeit inadvertently,
grateful to Ross Hunter.
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27351
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 10:01pm
Subject: Re: Howard Mandelbaum (was: Viva Rossellini!) jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> >>
> This book is terrific. Recommended it a long a time ago on
a_film_by.
> So is this the same Howard of Roger&Howard and the screening with
sheets in
> their apartment everyone talks about? (I wasn't dere, Chalie).
> It has the nightclub set from "Broadway" on its cover. In the
play, the club
> was just a little seedy hole in the wall, but in the movie, it is
Deco in
> excelsis.
>
> "A must-have for anyone who owns a tux." - LA Weekly (quoted on
the back
> cover).
>
> Mike Grost
I don't own a tux but it's a must-have for me too. Oh that crane!
And yes, it's the same Howard of the New York apartment screenings.
JPC
27352
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 10:37pm
Subject: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" jpcoursodon
"Pas sur la bouche" has been out on DVD in the States for a while
now, although it didn't get a theatrical release (Resnais direct to
video!) but there hasn't been much (any?) comment on a_film_by since
David waxed almost as enthusiastic over the film as he does
over "Ceux qui m'aiment..." I can understand Fred refusing to see it
on DVD but some members must have checked it out.... I was eager to
see it after all the raves in the French press (and David's own of
course -- and perhaps Bill, I forget...) although I wasn't crazy
about Resnais's earlier singing extravaganza ("On connait la
chanson"/"Same Old Song".
This one is something you have to watch strictly for the mise en
scene. The concept is similar to what Resnais did with the
wonderful "Melo": take a hopelessly dated vehicule (in this case a
1925 French operetta) and treat is lavishly and completely straight,
without irony (although you might argue that the very choice of
material is in itself ironic), without a trace of camp or parody.
The plot and the characters are not just old-fashioned, they're
positively outlandish from a "modern" point of view -- of course
they were already caricatures in the original show -- and Resnais
clearly relishes the fact. Obviously no one in 1925 could have
responded to the show the way we respond to it now (it's a period
piece now whereas it took place at about the time it was performed
on stage). This tension between two zeitgeists contributed to
make "Melo" fascinating; it doesn't work as well for me this time
around, perhaps because so much about the characters and the songs I
find unpleasant, but the film is a visual treat, and Azema is as
good as she was in "Melo". All the above is just a hasty first
impression. I'd like to hear from others once the Rossellini thread
has been exhausted.
JPC
27353
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 11:27pm
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" cellar47
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
> "Pas sur la bouche" has been out on DVD in the
> States for a while
> now, although it didn't get a theatrical release
> (Resnais direct to
> video!) but there hasn't been much (any?) comment on
> a_film_by since
> David waxed almost as enthusiastic over the film as
> he does
> over "Ceux qui m'aiment..." I can understand Fred
> refusing to see it
> on DVD but some members must have checked it out....
> I was eager to
> see it after all the raves in the French press (and
> David's own of
> course -- and perhaps Bill, I forget...) although I
> wasn't crazy
> about Resnais's earlier singing extravaganza ("On
> connait la
> chanson"/"Same Old Song".
>
Well "On Connait la Chanson" isn't strictly a musical.
Only Jane Birkin lip syncs to herself. It's really
part of Resnais' "British" side, and relates in that
sense to "Smoking/No Smoking." The true predecessor
for "Pas sur la Bouche" is "StavIsky. . ." which I
regard as Resnais' first musical. No singing in it, as
far as the humans involved. But the images sing. And
the sequence at Biarritz where the Baron enters the
hotel room as the maids change the sheets is a musical
number.
"Stavisky" grew out of the extended period Resnais
spent in New York in the early 70's and ecame a
Sondheim enthusiast. I used to see him around town all
the time, but I was much too intimidated to approach
him. Damn -- I wish I had! I'll never forget going to
see the first show of Kazan's "The Arrangement" on
opening day, and when it was over Resnais' date
(Florence Malraux?) said "Well, shall we go?" to which
he replied "No! We're going to sit right here and see
it again!"
Resnais is a huge musical comedy fan. There's a great
moment in "Je T'Aime Je T'Aime" where Claude Rich sits
on the floor of his room listening to the overture
from "New Girl in Town" hat's almost as ritualized as
the scen in "Velvet Goldmine" where Christian Bale
listens to his "Brian Slade" album.
Resnais saw "Compnay" numerous times, and thus cast
Strich in "Providence."
He also said that he idea for how to make "Stavisky"
became clear to him while seeing "Follies" --
particular the climactic "Live Laugh and Love" number
where the entire show seems to have a nervous
breakdown -- sets collapsing, chorus grils screaming,
lights flashing. Much of the score of "Stavisky" is in
fact derived from numbers Sondheim cut from "Follies."
He's a prodigous worker, capable of turning stuff out
at a rapid rate -- even while in thrall to conceptual
complexity. That's why he disdains "Send in the
Clowns" so much -- and didn't have anyone sing it at
his recent 75th birthday concert. It was just
something he tossed off in a couple of hours so
Glynnis Johns could have a solo, for crying out loud!
> This one is something you have to watch strictly
> for the mise en
> scene.
Well yes, but it's more than that. I liked the music
more than you did. It's not great stuff, but
serviceable. Kind of like "Give a Girl a Break." In
fact it fulfills my baroque desire for a French "Give
a Girl a Break."
A fortiori I like any movie in which Lambert Wilson
gets to sing.
And don't forget the hedgehog!
Discover Yahoo!
Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it out!
http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html
27354
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 11:27pm
Subject: Stella Dallas (Was: Sirk/Hunter) sallitt1
> This was indeed Hunter's idea. He has said that his favorite movie
> was Vidor's "Stella Dallas"--hence the casting of Barbara Stanwyck.
That's funny. 25 years ago, I idly wondered in print, "What power on
earth kept STELLA DALLAS from being remade in the late fifties?" Do you
know anything about it? - Dan
27355
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 0:08am
Subject: Re: 70s Universal Westerns (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Lucas"
wrote:
"Ulzana's
> Raid" is harsher and perhaps more pessimistic but I believe it
> refuses the facile cynicism of most 70s Westerns.
I hadn't thought of this film - one of my favorite Aldriches - as
late Uni, but perhaps it can usefully be viewed in that light. I know
about Naked Dawn being a pickup. I was just struck, as you are, by
the similarities to in-house Uni westerns (do you recognize any of
the below-the-line names?) - and also to the Arnolds and the non-Uni
Boettichers we've been discussing as part of a late Fifties tendency
to abstraction or inwardness or intimacy or whatever you want to call
it, which the great heyday of cranking those suckers out prepared the
way for. For those who don't know it, I should give credit to Andre
Bazin's landmark piece on Seven Men from Now for the idea that
Boetticher and Kennedy were purifying a genre. One senses from this
piece that Bazin had seen more than a few forties and fifties
westerns, even if he didn't write about them.
Incidentally, just to reestablish my own cred here, the first 500 or
so movies I ever saw were "cowboy pictures" shown at the Liberty, the
theatre my little hometown had just for kid matinees on Saturday; the
stuff we usually talk about here played a block away at the Grand,
where I never set foot.
27356
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 0:28am
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> And don't forget the hedgehog!
And the quick shot of L'Action Francaise. I was one of the forunate
group who saw this at the LA Cinematheque. We all thought we'd died and
gone to heaven. It couldn't be the same on DVD, but I'll buy it anyway.
I noted here at the time that the rhymed subtitles were the single most
disastrous esthetic mistake in the history of cinema. I assume that on
the DVD one can simply turn them off, which would be an enormous help.
(Probably JP never bothered to turn them on. Watch a couple of minutes,
with susbtitles, JP, and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Thinking
back, I'm almost positive that the transcendent experience of seeing
Pas sur la bouche nourished the great thread on "minor musicals," of
which this is an example. But that's like saying that The Four Hundred
Blows is a "coming of age picture".....
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Discover Yahoo!
> Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more. Check it
out!
> http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html
27357
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:35am
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
I was one of the forunate
> group who saw this at the LA Cinematheque. We all thought we'd
died and
> gone to heaven.
OK, but please please Bill, could you explain to me like I am a
six year old why you thought you'd died and go to heaven? Sometimes
watching the film I thought I'd die of embarrassment, but possibly
we're talking about the same thing. I'm sorry but PAS SUR LA BOUCHE
is definitely not the French "Give a Girl a Break". Or maybe I
should forget I'm French and try to understand what turns you
Yankees on when you hear that score. JPC
It couldn't be the same on DVD, but I'll buy it anyway.
> I noted here at the time that the rhymed subtitles were the single
most
> disastrous esthetic mistake in the history of cinema. I assume
that on
> the DVD one can simply turn them off, which would be an enormous
help.
> (Probably JP never bothered to turn them on. Watch a couple of
minutes,
> with susbtitles, JP, and you'll see what I'm talking about.)
But why should the subtitles enter into your appreciation of the
film -- of any film? Actually the subtitles were on when I watched.
I often read subtitles of French films because I have trouble
understanding what those French people are saying, they all mumble
so much and talk so fast... But I didn't pay any attention to the
film's subtitles because I knew they were going to upset me and I
was upset enough by the stupidity of the songs (which of course,
heard in the right spirit, are probably absolutely delightful).
JPC
Thinking
> back, I'm almost positive that the transcendent experience of
seeing
> Pas sur la bouche nourished the great thread on "minor musicals,"
of
> which this is an example. But that's like saying that The Four
Hundred
> Blows is a "coming of age picture".....
>
What?? This is NOT a "minor musical" How can a Resnais film
be "minor"?.It's a major film (and to me a minor failure). Did we
really have a thread on minor musicals? Was it started by this?? "I
Love Melvin" is a million times greater than "Pas sur la bouche"
even though "Bouche" is a Resnais film and as such almost by
definition great -- although the material is despicable to the point
that you really have to take several steps back ("le recul")to begin
accepting it.But then that's the whole point, of course: this is not
something you're going to accept "on the first degree" as the French
say. And I'm more than willing to step back (to the risk of falling
off some cliff) but I still can't really enjoy that musty stuff no
matter how much talent or even genius went into the production.
Actually I did enjoy a lot of it somehow -- mostly Azema's acting
and singing. She looks and sounds so much like a twenties woman --
or rather my idea of it, which come to the same thing. And the great
sets and lots of cute things Renais was doing with light and camera
moves and the soundtrack. So I'm conflicted on this one. Maybe He
should have done a French version of "Give a Girl a Break" (or even
of "I Love Melvin" ). JPC
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Discover Yahoo!
> > Have fun online with music videos, cool games, IM and more.
Check it
> out!
> > http://discover.yahoo.com/online.html
27358
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:40am
Subject: Re: 70s Universal Westerns (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> Incidentally, just to reestablish my own cred here, the first 500 or
> so movies I ever saw were "cowboy pictures" shown at the Liberty,
the
> theatre my little hometown had just for kid matinees on Saturday;
the
> stuff we usually talk about here played a block away at the Grand,
> where I never set foot.
Aw Shucks Bill, we all know you're just a plain kid from the
boondocks. Maybe not attending "The Grand" led to your shameful
behavior at the New York Film Fest. screening of "India Song". JPC
27359
From: MG4273@...
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 9:49pm
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! nzkpzq
Posted a while back on how Rossellini likes to create on-screen mazes out of
buildings, walkways, etc. Another example of this: the Florence episode of
Paisan. Florence is turned into a giant maze of roofs, tunnels, courtyards, and
even corridors of the Uffizi Gallery! Quite beautiful and imaginative.
And Fred Camper listed a number of climaxes in Rossellini where the lead
experiences a revelation. One more: the end of the Naples segment in Paisan, where
the black American soldier realizes for the first time how desperately poor
the Italians are after war.
Ending stories on a revelation seems so avant-garde. It is a bit like the
quite endings in prose science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, which sometimes end
on a body posture.
Mike Grost
27360
From: MG4273@...
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 9:59pm
Subject: Re: George Sherman (was: U-I and other '50s Westerns nzkpzq
In a message dated 05-05-19 16:17:49 EDT, you write:
<< George Sherman's 1958 "The Last of the Fast Guns" (entirely shot in
absolutely stunning Mexican locations I've never seen in any other movie). >>
Sherman's "Commanche" is another 50's Western with spectacular Mexican
locations.
Even in his 1940's B-movies, Sherman evinced an interest in Latin America.
His whodunits "Mystery Broadcast" (1943) and "Crime Doctor's Courage" (1945)
have some pleasant Latin characters.
Much of Sherman's work seems above average, despite his B-movie position.
Mike Grost
27361
From: "joe_mcelhaney"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 2:07am
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" joe_mcelhaney
I loved the film but was only able to see it on DVD since the few
screenings it received in New York last year took place while I was
in Italy. I really don't quite know what to say about it except that,
on the most obvious level, I found it a delight to watch and listen
to, totally pleasurable.
I'll take a stab at something...and someone somewhere has probably
already noted this: One of the interesting elements of the film for
me was not simply the tension between this "dated" 1925 operetta and
this contemporary film which brings it to life. What I also found
interesting was that the characters in the source material were so
preoccupied with the question of fashion, with the contemporary, with
what is "in" and "out" in virtually all manifestations of life, from
manners and sexual behavior to décor, wardrobe and language. Their
desperate desire to be contemporary and live in the moment makes the
characters and the social world that they move through somewhat
quaint and remote when looked at through a contemporary lens. It
periodically even turns them into the ghost-like figures which haunt
so much of Resnais's cinema, as in those wonderful shots in the film
when they will exit the front door of Azema and Arditi's apartment
and their image will dissolve at the threshold, as the sounds of wind
and birds flapping are heard on the soundtrack. At the same time, I
don't think that Resnais ever invites us to feel remote from the
situation or superior the characters since the obsession with the new
which dominates the source material is far from being a situation
which is safely tucked away in the past. It continues to be a
dominant element of the modern, of how people collectively think and
feel. This may be why it was also important that the actors not camp
it up but play it "straight" and with great commitment and feeling.
What may seem dated to some viewers in the original operetta will
take care of itself. But what is important is that the material come
alive as fully as possible for a contemporary viewer so that the film
seems to be at once a period piece, perhaps even a kind of ghost
story, but also fully new and exciting, and not really a work of
nostalgia. (I love the paradox of the excitement in the film of
seeing a play in Old French, a language which no one understands, and
precisely because of this, such a theatrical experience becomes the
height of fashion in 1925 Paris.)
The mise-en-scene was, of course, glorious. But were others as
struck by the cutting and sense of space that emerged through the
decoupage as I was?
27362
From: "Noel Bjorndahl & Carole Dent"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 2:12am
Subject: Re: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) noelbjorndahl
It warms my heart to hear first-hand from a close NY friend about Roger McNiven's impact on the American film scene after he left Australia at the end of 1969. Roger was the closest friend I ever had. We met through an old school friend of mine at Roger's inner Brisbane flat in 1966 and our rapport was immediate and lasting.
I had a long background in film from early childhood but at 21 my film knowledge and tastes were still in formation. Roger had been an architecture, then philosophy student at the University of Qld but had decided to throw aside his original career trajectories as he came to discover that film produced in him an intellectual and emotional engagement previously lacking in his academic studies. In the years 1966-1969 Roger and I educated each other in our mutual passion for the seventh art. It was I humbly offer a profound "sentimental education" and one that mutually transformed our lives. We were joined by the formidable Bill Van Der Heide (who himself went on to become a charismatic film educator and author of a book on Malaysian cinema), and a good friend from childhood,Toivo Lember (who has made a career in Australian films as a sound recordist, winning AFI and BFI awards for his work on Shine).
In 1966 there were no serious courses in film study within tertiary institutions here. Budding auteurists like Roger and our small group tended to engage with people in the film societies whose interest in film was genuine but usually conservative and in pursuit of a very narrow canon (eg Resnais, Bergman, Fellini, S Ray, Eisenstein, Lang's German period, Murnau, Wajda, Kalatazov, Humphrey Jennings, David Lean and Carol Reed, token nods to Ford and Welles, nods to the French New Wave, a condescending view of Hitchcock as a "mere entertainer"). Paul Rotha was a standard film history, "Sight and Sound" and "Films and Filming" the only regular magazines.
Roger, Bill, Toivo and I decided to break with these influences and after a few private screenings of Hawks, Hitchcock, Renoir, Gremillon and the like at Roger's Kangaroo Point flat we formed the first University of Queensland Film Group. Robin Wood's ground-breaking book on Hitchcock and Sarris's categorization of American directors were both just around the corner. We decided we had the greatest affinities with the Sydney University Film Group crowd; its bulletin was then shaped by the strong personalities of Bruce and Barrett Hodsdon (both of whom have contributed immeasurably to what little film culture has existed in Australia for the last 40 years) and John Flaus, a near-legendary figure who became the first academic film appointment in this country and whose conversations about Boetticher, Joseph H Lewis, Sam Fuller, Gerd Oswald and the western genre generally made him a kind of mentor to us all.
During 1966, Roger, Bill, Toivo and I mounted an Alfred Hitchcock festival of 15 films in Brisbane under the umbrella of our fledgling film group. Our regular programming followed the polemical auteurism of the SUFG model. We produced a booklet containing a notable essay on The Birds by Roger and one on Marnie by Bill Van Der Heide, among others. Despite the thinly-veiled scorn our Hitchcock festival elicited from the Film Society people then, it drew a measure of respect from the local community and enticed serious Hitchcock scholars from Sydney and Melbourne, like Ken Mogg and Eamon Byrne, to attend.
Roger migrated to Sydney in 1967 and joined the SUFG auteurist "push": I followed in 1968 and shared a Sydney terrace with Roger and Eamon, where we conducted lengthy film weekends. I think every budding cineaste in Sydney passed through those Lodge St Glebe screenings sometime during 1968 including many who were to become notable Australian film critics, film makers, and actors. We aligned ourselves with Cahiers, the English Movie magazine crowd (V F Perkins, Robin Wood, Paul Mayersberg and others) and, of course, Sarris. We screened not only American Langs, Rossellini, Visconti, Sirk, Anthony Mann, Preminger, Nick Ray, Bresson, Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Renoir but also Gerd Oswald, Jerry Lewis and Joe H Lewis, Frank Tashlin, Phil Karlson, Ulmer and many, many more then marginal figures.
Roger and I later in '68 and for most of '69 moved to a flat together and continued to leave and breathe the cinema outside of our normal working hours only with a smaller, tighter circle of film friends.
By the end of '69, Australia had grown too small for Roger's restless spirit of enquiry: America was about to undergo an explosion of film scholarship over the next couple of decades and Roger correctly predicted that Australia, aside from a few notable voices, didn't have the population base to support an expansive film culture and was too remote from the world centres of research to stimulate the kinds of projects he needed to be involved in. After long hours of tossing around ideas about the best place to be, he chose NY over Paris and London. He invited me to join him in migrating there but I chickened out. My loss was NY's gain: he returned and stayed with me and my family twice-in 1974, when he was glowing, happily involved with The Thousand Eyes, enjoying his relationship with Howard, and obviously thriving as a private film educator in wholly resonant cultural environment. He brought me over a batch of The Velvet Light Traps and opened my eyes to the richness and diversity of American Film Studies in the 70s. By the time of his second visit in 1984, Roger was enjoying NYU but despondent over the deaths of so many of his circle of friends from the AIDS epidemic.He gave me a wonderful article he had written for Cinema Journal on the use of architecture in Bigger Than Life and All That Heaven Allows which I personally think is his best work and so meticulously reflects his early interest in architecture. He also gave me as a gift J P Coursodon's marvellous 2-volume work on American Directors to which of course he contributed essential essays on La Cava and Tourneur-two directors we both greatly admired. I continue to treasure those well-thumbed volumes and follow JP's threads on this listserv with more than a modicum of interest.
I didn't know in 1984 that I would never see Roger again-he died in 1988, at the height of his intellectual powers and ambitions. His last letter to me dates back to 1985. My whole 30 year career as a film educator in Australia was in no small measure indebted to the midnight to dawn conversations Roger invariably had after viewing one or other of our film discoveries during that wonderful moment in time from 1966 to 1969. I still miss him terribly.
Noel Bjorndahl ----- Original Message -----
From: joe_mcelhaney
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 9:05 AM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey )
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
NYU is one of
> the oldest, and I'm very happy to hear that Roger McNiven taught
there -
> that must have been inspirational: As a private programmer, Roger
> played a major role in my education. And as I noted, Rossellini and
his
> late films had been very prominent in the NY film scene (Film
Comment,
> for instance) in the 70s. That - and Rice University - are places
where
> his personal impact would have been considerable, to some extent
> because of a guy you probably never met named John Hughes who
became
> RR's prophet in NY.
Roger was, in fact, a close friend of mine. We were students during
the same period, me doing undergraduate work and he doing graduate. I
never took a class from him but simply listened to him and learned,
probably more than I learned from most of my official classes. That
was a difficult period in film studies in that there was a strong
resistance to not only auteurism but to the very concept of pleasure
in cinema. Roger's application to the doctoral program at NYU was
initially rejected by the faculty since he was perceived to be a
lightweight. This objection came primarily from the department
chair, who did not approve of auteurism and whose own Intro to Film
course regularly began with a screening of Flashdance -- which he
then got up and denounced. (That kind of teaching.) Roger did get
in, though, on his second application. The only class they allowed
him to teach was one on violence in fifties American cinema: Oswald,
Boetticher, Fuller, Mann. After that, he adjuncted at various places,
ending up in Florida, before he died. At any rate, my enthusiasm for
Rossellini was one that I largely developed through Roger. But I
can't help recalling now my initial access to Rossellini, a year
before I entered NYU. On television one night in Ohio, a station
programmed Stromboli (the English-language version) followed by the
English-language version of Elena et les hommes, Paris Does Strange
Things. Maybe Langlois was their guest programmer.
By the way, Bill, if you're still reading this I had dinner with
Howard Mandelbaum the other night (speaking of Roger!). Since Howard
is the biggest Dwan fan I know of I mentioned the Dwan essay you
wrote for senses. Now he's very excited and wants to read it. (He
weeps during Dwan films and I'm not always sure why. Anyway, he
loaned me his video of The Gorilla.) But he asked me if the Dwan
essay was about capitalism. When I looked puzzled he said, "When I
knew Bill Krohn he used to say that Dwan's films were all about
capitalism." Is this true?
>
> So all that seems to have combined to give you access and
information
> that the Sarris Generation as such didn't really have, although
> Rossellini's most intelligent champions in NY included members of
that
> generation - Marty, Roger - and stretched back to Jonas Mekas, who
had
> Little Flowers on the loop at Anthology. So, no, he wasn't burried,
but
> I don't think Sarris did a lot to help the cause. (I'm sure Gary
> Sherman's students out here got an earful, too - he named his son
> Cosimo.) On the other hand, I don't recall Sarris championing the
tv
> movies when they were playing, although he includes and italicizes
> Prise de pouvoir in the very brief RR item in The American Cinema.
>
> Anyone else like Rossellini?
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27363
From: LiLiPUT1@...
Date: Thu May 19, 2005 10:49pm
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" scil1973
I'm kinda with JP on this one. Since one of my shortcomings is to equate
"catchy" with "good," I think the songs are a good deal better than JP does (that
finale really sticks in your craw - I was singing "Mais c'est pas mal" for
hours afterwards). But with the choice of material, the angel wings fluttering on
the soundtrack, and the evaporation of the characters as they exit, Resnais
seems to be throwing his hands up at the musical. He's given us a parable about
the putative impossibility of the musical today rather than the thing itself.
So when Huguette tells Faradel he's "out of date" at the beginning of the
film, she's really talking about the musical. It is in this way, but in this way
only, that the film reverberates in the present. Ok, I suppose the little
eccentric touches along the way perform that function as well. But the film's
surrealism was way too modest and sporadic to be truly creepy or dreamlike or even
a trenchant meditation on history (to pull some ideas from Rosenbaum's
review). It's more like an odd duck, rather soufflet-like in the end. Nothing wrong
with that. But I'll take (ducks) FROM JUSTIN TO KELLY or any number of recent
Bollywood productions.
Kevin John
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27364
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:16am
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" sallitt1
> He's given us a
> parable about the putative impossibility of the musical today rather
> than the thing itself.
Or maybe about the impossibility of rendering this particular musical on
film? In the same sense that his early documentaries on painters could be
said to be about the impossibility of rendering the paintings on film?
But you say it as if it were a bad thing....
Here's a tiny bit more on the subject, from my post #8826: "PAS SUR LA
BOUCHE reminded me that, in his unusual way, Resnais often seems to be
working out on film Bazin's ideas about translating one art form into
another. Resnais is both within the play (i.e, he's not inclined to make
the play "cinematic" by opening it up, adding naturalistic elements, etc.)
and a commentator on it: he plays with the camera, but generally in such a
way as to draw our attention to the theatrical integrity of the space, or
to illuminate a theatrical convention. The film made me think about his
40s documentaries on artists, or rather about Bazin's commentary on those
documentaries (which Bazin produced)."
- Dan
27365
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:23am
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
I
> don't think that Resnais ever invites us to feel remote from the
> situation or superior the characters since the obsession with the
new
> which dominates the source material is far from being a situation
> which is safely tucked away in the past. It continues to be a
> dominant element of the modern, of how people collectively think
and
> feel.
Yes, but, don't forget that the play was intended for a mostly
petit bourgeois audience who knew nothing, or very little, about
what was really new in the arts and disliked it instinctively, and
liked to make fun of it or to see the press and comedians make fun
of it, so that the play systematically makes fun of the avant-garde
and artists in general for the enjoyment of that largely ignorant
and culturally-deprived although affluent audience. At the Resnais
stage, the satire is directed at both those twenties audiences and
the characters in the play, which itself directed the satire at such
things as cubism and Russian ballets, which it presented as
laughable highbrow affectations. And clearly the mindset of the
people in that play is even closer to late nineteen hundred
bourgeoisie than to the twenties. Not that I want to make a
sociological case for or against the film, but I feel the ambiguity
is so overwhelming that I find it hard to enjoy this stuff the way I
do a Hollywood "minor musical".
Just one example. The song "Je me suis laisse embouteiller" -- which
serves no purpose in the plot -- is a recitation of racist cliches
against Arab and Spanish workers who spoil France, which was written
without the slightest "irony" or "distance" but on the contrary to
please the audience of the time. To clinch it Resnais gives us a
close shot of the far-right newspaper "L'Action francaise". You
might find the song delightful but don't tell me you don't need
some "distance" to enjoy it. (of course my reaction was: Nothing has
changed...).JPC
> The mise-en-scene was, of course, glorious. But were others as
> struck by the cutting and sense of space that emerged through the
> decoupage as I was?
Lots of long takes, no cutting from dialogue scenes to sung
scenes. Resnais says there are about 170 shots in the film (120
minute long) which is very little, and he used practically all the
shot footage. JPC
27366
From: "Josh Mabe"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:32am
Subject: Revenge of the Cheerleaders brack_28
I've got two weeks without class and a Netflix account so I went ahead
and rented Revenge of the Cheerleaders. I'm pretty certain that it's
the same Nick Dorsky that did Visitation and Hours for Jerome that
wrote, shot, and produced this film. The director of "Revenge..."
also directed "What Happened to Kerouac?" which Nick Dorsky was a part
of, so I guess it's too much to be a coincidence. The only thing I
can really say is that there is nothing to say... it's a straight-up
silly movie about cheerleaders getting naked and having sex with David
Hasselhof. I don't even know why I watched the whole thing... it was
entertaining I suppose. Though I am delighted to know that in 1976,
images shot by Nick Dorsky were being shown in drive-ins across the
nation.
Oh yeah... and in the "Behind the scenes" feature there is a totally
out-of-place slow moving shot around a cat laying in the light and
shadow of some shutters... I'd be willing to bet it's a Dorsky shot.
J. Mabe
27367
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:38am
Subject: Noel on Roger jpcoursodon
Noel's long autobiographical post on his relationship with Roger
McNiven was fascinating and I learned so much from it. I didn't even
know Roger hailed from Australia! I wish I had known him better.
More and more I think someone should write a world history of
cinephilia and auteurism.
Thanks again for sharing your memories with us, Noel.
JPC
27368
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:48am
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > He's given us a
> > parable about the putative impossibility of the musical today
rather
> > than the thing itself.
>
> Or maybe about the impossibility of rendering this particular
musical on
> film? In the same sense that his early documentaries on painters
could be
> said to be about the impossibility of rendering the paintings on
film?
>
> But you say it as if it were a bad thing....
>
> Here's a tiny bit more on the subject, from my post #8826: "PAS
SUR LA
> BOUCHE reminded me that, in his unusual way, Resnais often seems
to be
> working out on film Bazin's ideas about translating one art form
into
> another. Resnais is both within the play (i.e, he's not inclined
to make
> the play "cinematic" by opening it up, adding naturalistic
elements, etc.)
> and a commentator on it: he plays with the camera, but generally
in such a
> way as to draw our attention to the theatrical integrity of the
space, or
> to illuminate a theatrical convention.
This is true, but was there any other way of doing it? He did it
with "Melo" and to me it worked perfectly; then he does it again
with equally "dated" but very different material and I don't think
it works at all, despite all the care and talent lavished on it. I
blame the material. Of course you can disregard the material and
have a good time. Myself, I find it hard. Maybe I shouldn't listen
to the lyrics. JPC
The film made me think about his
> 40s documentaries on artists, or rather about Bazin's commentary
on those
> documentaries (which Bazin produced)."
>
> - Dan
27369
From: Fred Camper
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 4:04am
Subject: Re: Noel on Roger fredcamper
jpcoursodon wrote:
> Noel's long autobiographical post on his relationship with Roger
> McNiven was fascinating ....
Yes. Though I hardly knew Roger really well I did know he was from
Australia. He got to the US at first by working in the Australian
Consulate in New York. He and Howie moved to better and better
apartments, presumably as their economic situation improved; the first
screening I went to was on the Lower East Side, with the screen in the
kitchen and the projector in the hallway. Then there was a studio-loft
on 13th Street, and finally a larger loft, I think in the 20s.
But what most interested me about Noel's post were the parallels to the
discovery of great films by my friends and myself at the same time. I'm
convinced that it really helped that there were no film courses and not
that much of a film culture. A few early and key viewing experiences of
films that were so obviously masterpieces (in my case, among them "Shock
Corridor," "Vertigo," "The Searchers," and various avant-garde things)
were enough to convince one that the mainstream film culture had it all
wrong, and the gradual discovery of these things on one's own added to
the excitement. Absent film courses or even a lot of good film history
and criticism, one fell back on looking at the films again and again,
not a bad alternative, perhaps even a better one than the environment
that faces young people today. Word would reach me from a friend that
the previously unknown "Day of the Outlaw" might be the greatest de
Toth, and was certainly an ultimate one -- perhaps discovering it one
one's own would be even better, but one friend is not the same thing as
the weight of multiple art history texts. And I did discover another de
Toth, "The Last of the Commanches," perhaps my third favorite, on my
own, courtesy of a screening at Howard and Roger's. It had no reputation
that I knew of, and there it was, flat out great.
The "us against the world" feeling that most of us had contributed to
the urgency of our experiences, and the urgency of trying to see every
film by a filmmaker. It didn't take long to figure out that the late 50s
Sirks were incredibly great, but who would have thought the obscure
"Summer Storm" would be so overwhelming? Then one has to scamper to see
the others of the 40s.
I certainly would like to see all Rembrandt's paintings, but they've
also all been seen, analyzed, written about, and had their attributions
questioned, before. Finding these great unknown films had the quality of
real discovery.
Fred Camper
27370
From: LiLiPUT1@...
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 0:15am
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" scil1973
In a message dated 5/19/05 10:21:08 PM, sallitt@... writes:
> But you say it as if it were a bad thing....
>
Well, if it is indeed about the impossibility of rendering this particular
musical on film, then I suppose it's not a "bad" thing. Of course, the question
then would be "why bother?" Merely to explore the relationship between theatre
and cinema? Minor indeed.
But if it is about the putative impossibility of the musical today, as I
suspect, then that is a problem because the musical has been impossible in western
cinema for several decades now. Why not make it possible?
Kevin John
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27371
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 4:43am
Subject: Re: George Sherman (was: U-I and other '50s Westerns lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> In a message dated 05-05-19 16:17:49 EDT, you write:
>
> << George Sherman's 1958 "The Last of the Fast Guns" (entirely
shot in
> absolutely stunning Mexican locations I've never seen in any other
movie). >>
>
> Sherman's "Commanche" is another 50's Western with spectacular
Mexican
> locations.
> Even in his 1940's B-movies, Sherman evinced an interest in Latin
America.
> His whodunits "Mystery Broadcast" (1943) and "Crime Doctor's
Courage" (1945)
> have some pleasant Latin characters.
> Much of Sherman's work seems above average, despite his B-movie
position.
Thanks for noticing "Comanche" which not only had stunning Mexican
locations like "Fast Guns" but also stunning Linda Cristal.
I think Sherman may have discovered her for American films in the
earlier "Comanche." My other favorite Sherman, "The Treasure of
Pancho Villa" was also shot entirely in Mexico. It has some
affinities of story with Fleischer's "Bandido" (and I consider it
superior--have reseen both within the last year), with Gilbert
Roland playing a very similar role in both films.
Though I've seen forty of his films I haven't seen those two earlier
ones you mention from the 40s. But why should his "B-movie position"
keep him from being above average? It certainly doesn't for a lot
of other directors revered by auteurists.
It's my view he has simply not been discovered yet, and I hope to do
my part one of these days. If you missed Sarris completely, it can
be a burden, but I'm not even suggesting Tavernier and Coursodon
need to like him. As I recall, they weren't that enamored, though
did like a few of his films.
But I do know some good non-Westerns by him (especially the noir
"The Sleeping City"--I'll pull out my notes on this one of these
days and describe exactly how Sherman directed a scene in which
Coleen Gray expresses to Richard Conte her rather dark view of life).
And he even did a pretty good "minor musical" with Donald O'Connor
and Gloria De Haven, "Yes Sir, That's My Baby." He is one of my
twelve all-time favorite directors of Westerns, and definitely
the most obscure of the twelve.
Blake
27372
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 5:13am
Subject: Re: Stella Dallas (Was: Sirk/Hunter) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > This was indeed Hunter's idea. He has said that his favorite movie
> > was Vidor's "Stella Dallas"--hence the casting of Barbara Stanwyck.
>
> That's funny. 25 years ago, I idly wondered in print, "What power
on
> earth kept STELLA DALLAS from being remade in the late fifties?" Do
you
> know anything about it? - Dan
I'd like to say this is the definitive answer and I believe it is, but
although I remember Hunter waxing on about STELLA DALLAS, I'm not
certain about this. I'm pretty sure he said STELLA was his first
choice at the time but the studio didn't own the rights and wouldn't
pay for them, as opposed to other remakes he did wind up producing
which they did own.
So he found this story "Stopover" (which became ALL I DESIRE) and
cast STELLA DALLAS star Stanwyck in homage. Alternatively, the
Stanwyck casting was the whole extent of the story, but the first
version, which I believe is right, is certainly consistent with his
looking for old melodramas/woman's pictures to remake.
I'm glad it was ALL I DESIRE instead of STELLA DALLAS, as I think the
elements were better for Sirk--the contrasting sisters, the somewhat
dark but interestingly sympathetic character of Dutch, the small town
atmosphere--and also very good for Stanwyck, who almost had a
specialty in the 50s of this kind of role of wandering worldly woman
with some unresolved yearning for domesticity, as in Lang's CLASH BY
NIGHT and also Sirk's THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW, even if MacMurray's
character is more the center of that one.
I wonder if maybe you agree, Dan, since as I recall this is a Sirk
movie you liked very much.
Blake
27373
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 5:34am
Subject: Re: 70s Universal Westerns (Was: No Name on the Bullet (Jack Arnold) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
I know
> about Naked Dawn being a pickup. I was just struck, as you are, by
> the similarities to in-house Uni westerns (do you recognize any of
> the below-the-line names?)
I don't remember the below-the-line names right now. I knew some but
definitely not U-I people in any case. One thing I might have given
the studio credit for, though, was springing for Technicolor prints,
which an indie like this would surely not have had if not released
by a major.
- and also to the Arnolds and the non-Uni
> Boettichers we've been discussing as part of a late Fifties
tendency
> to abstraction or inwardness or intimacy or whatever you want to
call
> it, which the great heyday of cranking those suckers out prepared
the
> way for.
We definitely take a very similar view of The Naked Dawn.
Interestingly, it could almost be considered marginal to the genre
with its jeeps and so on, but feels so much like one that it fits in
especially with the tendencies we've both described. Ulmer was not
a Western specialist, of course--that can sometimes be an advantage
with an interesting piece of material like this.
Much more than Sarris, Tavernier and Coursodon knew Westerns and I
remember that in 30 ANS (I don't know which one wrote this, or maybe
they both did), they made The Naked Dawn a touchstone of their Ulmer
entry, and pointedly contrasted it to other 50s Westerns, properly
recalling the direction it took, and evoking, if I remember
correctly, Sunrise, which, if that's right, would have made Ulmer
very happy if he read that entry (quite a poetic entry in my memory).
For those who don't know it, I should give credit to Andre
> Bazin's landmark piece on Seven Men from Now for the idea that
> Boetticher and Kennedy were purifying a genre. One senses from
this
> piece that Bazin had seen more than a few forties and fifties
> westerns, even if he didn't write about them.
Bazin wrote about a lot of forties and fifites Westerns. He has
several famous essays on the genre, which he loved and knew well.
Attitudes about some things change, but for me his view of Westerns
has generally held up very well and I feel a lot of affinity with
it, even if I don't agree that perfection came in 1939 (as I believe
Stagecoach is the only great one from that year and some of those
others, if likeable, are not that great). His 7 Men from Now piece
is good. He isn't the only one to ever write on the film, and it's
not necessarily definitive, if I may say so. But the fact that he
picked this out from all the B to medium-level Western programmers
of the time, so many of them good, showed an amazing level of taste
and discernment.
>
> Incidentally, just to reestablish my own cred here, the first 500
or
> so movies I ever saw were "cowboy pictures" shown at the Liberty,
the
> theatre my little hometown had just for kid matinees on Saturday;
> stuff we usually talk about here played a block away at the Grand,
> where I never set foot.
Yes, I knew you were from Texas. And here I am, born and raised in
L.A., yet writing about Westerns anyway.
Blake
27374
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 6:03am
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" cellar47
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
> Yes, but, don't forget that the play was intended
> for a mostly
> petit bourgeois audience who knew nothing, or very
> little, about
> what was really new in the arts and disliked it
> instinctively, and
> liked to make fun of it or to see the press and
> comedians make fun
> of it, so that the play systematically makes fun of
> the avant-garde
> and artists in general for the enjoyment of that
> largely ignorant
> and culturally-deprived although affluent audience.
Thus linking it to one of my all-time favorite
musicals,"Funny face."
It's always fun to see intellectuals play at being
anti-intellectual.
"Pas Sur La bouche" us a musical performed by ghosts.
Like"Melo" it's of the 20,s therefore Resnias'
childhood -- which he is in the process of reliving.
>
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail Mobile
Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Check email on your mobile phone.
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27375
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 6:21am
Subject: Re: Viva Rossellini! (Was: The Exile - No Turkey ) hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Bjorndahl & Carole Dent"
wrote:
> It warms my heart to hear first-hand from a close NY friend about
Roger McNiven's impact on the American film scene after he left
Australia at the end of 1969.
Noel,
Collecting and archiving the rare post that comes along like this is
reason enough for the existence of this list. I didn't know anything
about Roger's background - didn't even know that he came from
Australia - but what I experienced at Roger and Howard's in NY over
several years, I now realize, was an extension of a whole history I
never knew on another continent. Needless to say, the directors
screened when I was attending were the same your group had been
screening before, and I owe much of my knowledge of still hard-to-see
filmmakers like Dwan and Tourneur to those screenings.
27376
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 6:29am
Subject: Emmer (Was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
The film made me think about his
> 40s documentaries on artists, or rather about Bazin's commentary on
those
> documentaries (which Bazin produced)."
>
I hope some day that you can see some of the work of the man who
inspired Resnais to become a filmmaker and make those documentaries,
Luciano Emmer, whose career spans neo-realism to present-day feature
filmmaking, with a long sojourn in televison making art documentaries
and dramatic interludes that every Italian of a certain age seems to
have grown up on. I had a chance to see a lot of them at Torino and
regret only seeing a few - Fleischer and Straub beckoned, but Fleischer
is everywhere here these days, the Straub sucked and Emmer isn't evn a
footnote to film history in the US. We're not talking earthshaking
stuff - just an amazing career I wish I could sample more of, because I
sure enjoyed what I saw.
27377
From: "Noel Vera"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 6:42am
Subject: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith noelbotevera
Thought I'd try something a little different from the usual pan:
http://journals.aol.com/noelbotevera/MyJournal/entries/765
27378
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 6:58am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera" wrote:
> Thought I'd try something a little different from the usual pan:
>
> http://journals.aol.com/noelbotevera/MyJournal/entries/765
Hahaha! Maybe musicals still are possible in our day and age. (BTW,
they're doing one of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir at a theatre in LA.)
I haven't seen the film yet, although I wrote a pre-review on the
politics and the metaphysics for CdC's May issue. I based it on my
reading of Empire (which a young security guard who spotted my tattered
ILM t-shirt explained to me) and Clones. Also on the novelization,
which contains references to "shock and awe" and Reagan's "It's morning
in America." (The metaphysics is in the book's prologue: "With every
victory of the Light, it is the darkness that wins.")
Scott Foundas had a good "pro" piece in the Weakly. But it didn't rhyme.
27379
From: "Saul"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 7:55am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith asitdid
Online Now Send IM
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera" wrote:
> > Thought I'd try something a little different from the usual pan:
> >
> > http://journals.aol.com/noelbotevera/MyJournal/entries/765
>
> Hahaha! Maybe musicals still are possible in our day and age. (BTW,
> they're doing one of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir at a theatre in LA.)
>
Noooooo.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (here i imiatate Darth, learning of Padme's
death -- I really had to stop myself from laughing at several points
in the film, that included -- my favourite was the opening scroll.
"War!" writes GL, with a large exclamation mark..............) But
Noooo, not a musical version of one of my most cherised film watching
experiences.... Don't let anyone destroy the Ghost and Mrs M. I love
those old b&w ghost stories, set by the rocky coast and crashing
waves. I saw one as a very young boy whose name I can't recall, though
I dream of the final scene almost every week. There was some
murder-mystery plot, and something to do with poison in a tea cup --
there was a rocky mountain pass of some sort, upon which the bridge
was weakened and unsafe to cross -- a man's sister or cousin or wife
or something, whom he thinks is poisoning her, goes for a walk, and he
doesn't let her know of the dangers -- then something happens that
puts doubt in his mind as to whether it was her that actually poisoned
him -- he runs to warn her of the bridge, and arives to see her body,
broken on the rocks below -- final shot is of him, starting out to sea
on a windswept coastline, with a v.o. saying something to the effect
that he'll never know if he let an innocent woman die -- this scene
still haunts me -- i recount it in some detail here in the vein hope
one of you guys, or girls, recalls the title............... though in
the end, I guess it doesn't matter -- the film will probably always be
more vivid in my mind and dreams.
> I haven't seen the film yet, although I wrote a pre-review on the
> politics and the metaphysics for CdC's May issue. I based it on my
> reading of Empire (which a young security guard who spotted my tattered
> ILM t-shirt explained to me) and Clones. Also on the novelization,
> which contains references to "shock and awe" and Reagan's "It's morning
> in America." (The metaphysics is in the book's prologue: "With every
> victory of the Light, it is the darkness that wins.")
>
> Scott Foundas had a good "pro" piece in the Weakly. But it didn't rhyme.
Why be either "pro" or "negative". The film has it's audience, our
opinions won't change that. Why not be neutral -- GL expanded the
possibilities of cinema in ways akin to something visionary. Though
there's a lot in him I don't like, he should be up there with those
auteurs we so heatedly discuss. I have no problem with saying that I
don't really like his films, but would put him high in the auteur
ranking -- perhaps not quite pantheon, though why not?
27380
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 8:27am
Subject: Re: James Bros -- Long Riders (was: 70s Universal Westerns) lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Michael E. Kerpan, Jr."
wrote:
>> Moving just a few years later, there's Walter Hill's "Long
Riders". I
> always loved Ry Cooder's score -- and really liked a number of
scenes.
> How would you rate this one?
I liked this one very much. "Just a few years later" could make a
big difference as sour 70s "revisionism" had kind of passed by 1980
when Hill made this. He tried to take the genre in a way that
seemed natural to go at this point, very abstract--but not in the
way we were talking about before. All Hill's Westerns have these
familiar subjects--here James/Youngers/Northfield, last days of the
Apaches in "Geronimo: An American Legend," and Wild Bill Hickcock
in "Wild Bill." The familiarity draws attention to the way his
style transforms the material into something which might be taken as
post-modern or something like that. There's action and drama and
characters, but there is something almost opaque about the
characters. They register in a way, and display some idiosyncracy
but are not really dimensional. Interesting films, of which I
admire "Geronimo" especially, like "Long Riders" too and am less sure
about "Wild Bill" which almost seemed to float off into unreality or
a kind of dreamscape, though I'd see it again sometime.
Like you, I especially loved Ry Cooder's score--his first for films,
as Hill brought him into the cinema for this. Just a lovely score--
it made the film. (But there is at least one a_f_b member who
doesn't like Cooder's work on films--you may have missed that).
With Cooder, Hill gives the Western a fresh sound.
But my favorite James & Younger Brothers/Northfield movie of all
time is handily "The True Story of Jesse James" (Nicholas Ray, 1957).
Blake
27381
From: MG4273@...
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 4:28am
Subject: Re: Impossible Musicals (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") nzkpzq
Are musicals really impossible? In 2004 alone we had such pleasing films as:
Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha)
De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler)
Ella Enchanted (Tommy O'Haver)
Plus the French drama Les Choristes / The Chorus (Christophe Barratier) had a
lot of good music in it - some fine Rameau (but not his nephew). This film
was a huge hit in France - but has never been mentioned on a_film_by, as far as
one can tell.
Like JPC I was disappointed in "The Same Old Song" (Resnais). Am looking
forward very much to "Pas sur la bouche".
Mike Grost
27382
From: "Blake Lucas"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 8:35am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith lukethedealer12
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
> Thought I'd try something a little different from the usual pan:
>
> http://journals.aol.com/noelbotevera/MyJournal/entries/765
The movie couldn't possibly be this good, and certainly not the
other reviews which will be coming along.
Now I know at least one reason I'm on this list, to experience the
release of Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith in this kind of way,
for I have never planned to see it. I'm guessing a_f_b members split
in all directions on this series, which I abandoned after a really
awful viewing of the very first Star Wars, and that's confirmed by
Saul post written soon after this, which expresses an interesting
ambivalence between his personal reactions to the films and how he
rates George Lucas in spite of that.
But just a footnote--I hope everyone believed me when I reported
that late 70s/early 80s screenings of Rossellini historicals were
popular. For an evening screening I went to of Age of the Medici
(one showing of the whole film, with breaks) the line was literally
around the block, just like a Star Wars movie.
27383
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 9:15am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Saul" wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
I love
> those old b&w ghost stories, set by the rocky coast and crashing
> waves.
Highly recommended: The Uninvited and Tormented by Bert I. Gordon. Yes,
Bert I. Gordon.
would put him high in the auteur
> ranking -- perhaps not quite pantheon, though why not?
Far Side of Paradise. Francis moves from Oddities, One-Shots and
Newcomers to Subjects for Further Research, but George is definitely
Far Side.
27384
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 9:18am
Subject: Re: Impossible Musicals (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Ella Enchanted (Tommy O'Haver)
Totally. Also Moulin Rouge.
> Like JPC I was disappointed in "The Same Old Song" (Resnais
Same Old Song is as deliberately painful as L'amour a mort, and has the
same basic structure; the snowflakes become songs.
27385
From: "Matthew Clayfield"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 10:49am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith mclayf00
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Saul" wrote:
>
> Noooooo.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (here i imiatate Darth, learning of Padme's
> death -- I really had to stop myself from laughing at several points
> in the film, that included...)
Yes, that scene in general was a bit much for me. From the
Frankenstinean slab to the breaking free from his constraits to his
cry of "No-o-o-o!" with arms outstretched. All a bit much...
27386
From: "Henrik Sylow"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 10:55am
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith henrik_sylow
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Saul" wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
> > > Thought I'd try something a little different from the usual pan:
> > >
> > > http://journals.aol.com/noelbotevera/MyJournal/entries/765
> >
> > Hahaha! Maybe musicals still are possible in our day and age. (BTW,
> > they're doing one of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir at a theatre in LA.)
> >
>
> Noooooo.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (here i imiatate Darth, learning of Padme's
> death -- I really had to stop myself from laughing at several points
> in the film
I completely bursted into laughter there, as it was so overdramatised
and reminded me of the bad acting by Calculon from "Futurama".
I honestly think that it is worse than "Attack of the Clones". While
it has better dialogue (which doesn't really says much), the emphasis
was like if Lucas had no idea what the sentence meant, the story and
its ups-we-better-make-up-something logic is painful to watch, and it
was more boring than any other of the two first films. And i would
like to stress the boring.
Why does Padme die is my favorite (there are no medical explainations,
she just decides to die), beating the hasty explaination of why
Obi-Wan is able to become a Force spirit in "A New Hope", but doesn't
explain why Anakin becomes one, and beating, that there now is air
resistence in space (as the droids fall of the fighter as Obi-Wan climbs).
Henrik
27387
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 0:48pm
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" sallitt1
> Of course, the question then would be "why bother?" Merely to explore
> the relationship between theatre and cinema? Minor indeed.
>
> But if it is about the putative impossibility of the musical today, as I
> suspect, then that is a problem because the musical has been impossible
> in western cinema for several decades now. Why not make it possible?
I'm just thinking out loud, but...there are two broad categories of
approach here for a filmmaker adapting some recondite source material to
the cinema.
1) The filmmaker could think, "I'm turning this into an Alain Resnais
musical, damn it!" This involves dismantling the source for spare parts,
so to speak, discarding what doesn't fit your vision, adding your ideas
when needed, and basically using your own art ideas to unify the thing.
Nothing wrong with this, if you stay within copyright laws.
2) The filmmaker can make a film that somehow incorporates, whole or
substantially, the source. There are various options, but in all cases
the source retains its integrity, and the filmmaker makes a film around,
or on top of, or maybe even in support of, the source.
I picture Resnais saying, "Okay, I adore the play, for whatever reasons,
some of which may not be artistic. It's not something I would create
personally, but I am fascinated with it as an object. Sometimes there's a
lot of real artistic excitement there, and sometimes there's simply the
curiosity that comes when a culture gap opens between artist and audience.
I'd like to convey my complete respect for this work as a whole, while
maybe standing back just far enough to show the wheels turning. I think I
can both make the operetta itself and also make a movie about the
operetta. Maybe no one will notice the second movie, but that's okay."
So, to me, the answer to "why bother?" isn't a pure one. Using cinema to
elucidate theater is a modest kind of formal pleasure, and then there's
more substantial pleasure to be had if you respond at all to the original
work. Maybe a viewer will get one or the other rather than both. But I
suspect that the two pleasures combine and interact for Resnais.
As for making the contemporary musical possible, I don't think that
Resnais is the guy for the job. I actually don't think that this goal
needs government funding or anything: the musical impulse is sturdy and
keeps popping up in the darndest places. As an obvious example, music
videos often reach for that good old fusion of music and story.
The examples that Mike gave are attempts to maintain the old forms but
integrate newer music and more contemporary attitudes. There's an element
of nostalgia or camp in these works usually, whereas music videos don't
necessarily show either trait. In this retro-hybrid form, the musical may
never show the same strength that it used to have. Which doesn't mean
that good movies with retro elements can't be made - I rather liked ELLA
ENCHANTED, for instance. - Dan
27388
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 0:59pm
Subject: Stella Dallas, All I Desire sallitt1
> I'm glad it was ALL I DESIRE instead of STELLA DALLAS, as I think the
> elements were better for Sirk--the contrasting sisters, the somewhat
> dark but interestingly sympathetic character of Dutch, the small town
> atmosphere--and also very good for Stanwyck, who almost had a
> specialty in the 50s of this kind of role of wandering worldly woman
> with some unresolved yearning for domesticity, as in Lang's CLASH BY
> NIGHT and also Sirk's THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW, even if MacMurray's
> character is more the center of that one.
>
> I wonder if maybe you agree, Dan, since as I recall this is a Sirk
> movie you liked very much.
Absolutely. STELLA DALLAS is a problem-ridden source, in the 30s as now -
I didn't necessarily want to see Sirk beating his head against it. I was
just wonderin'.
And, yeah, ALL I DESIRE is terrific. Just the look of that small town
really gets me. I feel as if the later Sirk style rears its head here,
but maybe with a few more naturalistic elements than it would have later.
- Dan
27389
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:08pm
Subject: Re: Impossible Musicals (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Are musicals really impossible? In 2004 alone we had such pleasing
films as:
> Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha)
> De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler)
> Ella Enchanted (Tommy O'Haver)
> Plus the French drama Les Choristes / The Chorus (Christophe
Barratier) had a
> lot of good music in it - some fine Rameau (but not his nephew).
This film
> was a huge hit in France - but has never been mentioned on
a_film_by, as far as
> one can tell.
>
> Like JPC I was disappointed in "The Same Old Song" (Resnais). Am
looking
> forward very much to "Pas sur la bouche".
>
> Mike Grost
You mentioned a number of films that have music/songs in them,
but that doesn't make them "musicals" -- unless we want to redefine
the term "musical" as any movie that has music and songs in it. But
the term traditionally defines a Hollywood genre born with sound and
that peaked in the fifties then declined and pretty much
disappeared. I don't know whether or not "musicals" have become
impossible but for the same reason I am uncomfortable with
calling "Pas sur la bouche" a "musical" when it has so little (if
anything) to do with the tradition in question.
Re: "Same Old Song": the French title ("On connait la chanson"=
We know the song) should be taken literally. The songs used in the
film, some going back to the thirties, some much more recent, are
all very well-known of most French viewers, and the element of
pleasurable recognition probably did a lot for the film's success
(everybody I know in France, cinephiles or not, just loved it). But
I wonder how foreign audiences who were not familiar with the songs
may have responded.... "Pas sur la bouche" of course is a completely
different kind of experiment (interestingly none of the songs from
the Yvain "operette" -- the French term for that kind of French
stage "musical", which was hugely popular throughout the '20s
and '30s, -- became well-known/ perhaps because the were too plot-
character oriented, or two melodically complex).
To Kevin, I would respond that exploring the relation between
theatre and film is not a "minor" preoccupation at all. "Melo", a
masterpiece, did exactly that, and "Pas sur la bouche" also attempts
to do it in a fascinating -- although to my taste rather
unsuccessful -- way. JPC
27390
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:18pm
Subject: Re: Impossible Musicals (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>.
>
>
> Same Old Song is as deliberately painful as L'amour a mort, and has
the
> same basic structure; the snowflakes become songs.
This sounds interesting, Bill, but I'm not sure I understand what
you're saying. Can you explain?
And audiences (French audiences at least) certainly didn't
experience the film as "painful" (although I did, somewhat). JPC
27391
From: "joe_mcelhaney"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:21pm
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" joe_mcelhaney
I found the element of satire in terms of High Art and modernism that
J-P disliked rather mild and, in fact, typical of so many musicals
and operettas: This need to situate the spontaneity and vibrancy of
popular forms and their immediate connection to audiences over the
supposed remoteness of Art. One of the many things I found to be
interesting about Resnais's film, though, is that he is reviving an
essentially forgotten work of popular culture, one which has lost its
connection to an audience, while the very things the material
satirizes (Cubism, Russian ballet, etc.) have become
institutionalized -- one of the many complex threads of past and
present that run through the film.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>
>
>The song "Je me suis laisse embouteiller" -- which
> serves no purpose in the plot -- is a recitation of racist cliches
> against Arab and Spanish workers who spoil France, which was
written without the slightest "irony" or "distance" but on the
contrary to please the audience of the time. To clinch it Resnais
gives us a close shot of the far-right newspaper "L'Action
francaise". You > might find the song delightful but don't tell me
you don't need some "distance" to enjoy it. (of course my reaction
was: Nothing has changed...).
Exactly. Isn't this distance the point? Arabs "polluting" the
purity of Paris. 1925 lyrics which, with barely any tweaking, could
roll off the tongue of the right-wing today. It was daring of Resnais
to keep this in, I think, and creates a necessary distance. So often
when musicals are revived and perceived to be politically problematic
then there are alterations in the text or songs are dropped entirely
for fear of offending contemporary sensibilities. (This happens all
the time with Show Boat. It happened with the Broadway revival of
Annie Get Your Gun. There was even a revival of Porgy and Bess where
Porgy isn't on crutches!) Resnais retains the song not only giving us
a fascinating glimpse into the racism of a cultural moment but it
also is one of the ways the film reflects back on the moment we are
living in now. (Also, in addition to the cut to "L'Action francaise"
Resnais does cut to Isabelle Nanty rolling her eyes during Arditi's
racist tirade.)
Off-topic for a moment: Would David or J-P or anyone interested in
musical theater like to have a used CD of The Gay Life
(Dietz/Schwartz/Barbara Cook/Walter Chiari)? I bought it yesterday
and then completely forgot that I already had it. Great ballad in
it: Magic Moment. Adapted from Schnitzler's The Affairs of Anatol.
Let me know. I'll drop it in the mail to any interested party.
27392
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:25pm
Subject: Re: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" cellar47
--- joe_mcelhaney wrote:
>
> Off-topic for a moment: Would David or J-P or
> anyone interested in
> musical theater like to have a used CD of The Gay
> Life
> (Dietz/Schwartz/Barbara Cook/Walter Chiari)? I
> bought it yesterday
> and then completely forgot that I already had it.
> Great ballad in
> it: Magic Moment. Adapted from Schnitzler's The
> Affairs of Anatol.
> Let me know. I'll drop it in the mail to any
> interested party.
>
>
Thanks, but I have it on LP. Lovely show. Barbara Cook
is amazing.
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27393
From: "Rick Curnutte"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:44pm
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith racurnutte1
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Henrik Sylow"
wrote:
> I completely bursted into laughter there, as it was so
overdramatised
> and reminded me of the bad acting by Calculon from "Futurama".
>
> I honestly think that it is worse than "Attack of the Clones".
While
> it has better dialogue (which doesn't really says much), the
emphasis
> was like if Lucas had no idea what the sentence meant, the story
and
> its ups-we-better-make-up-something logic is painful to watch, and
it
> was more boring than any other of the two first films. And i would
> like to stress the boring.
>
> Why does Padme die is my favorite (there are no medical
explainations,
> she just decides to die), beating the hasty explaination of why
> Obi-Wan is able to become a Force spirit in "A New Hope", but
doesn't
> explain why Anakin becomes one, and beating, that there now is air
> resistence in space (as the droids fall of the fighter as Obi-Wan
climbs).
It's surprising to me that afb members are being so dismissive of
such a distinctively great work (especially since even the
mainstream critics, usually so ambivalent toward Lucas, seem to be
embracing this one). SITH is, easily in my opinion, the best of the
series. Better than any Lucas directed and better than fan-favorite
EMPIRE.
All the complaints about dialogue and such ring empty to me. Lucas
has always been open about his clinging to old-Hollywood narrative
traits (most dialogue and acting of the golden-oldie, pre-Brando
naturalist era was quite similar to Lucas'). The guy is, after all,
a formalist first and foremost. I think he's ferociously at the top
of his game here. This thing is lean and mean, aching and powerful.
I was choked up for pretty much the final 45 minutes or so, a
reaction I've not had to ANY previous STAR WARS films.
Lucas' experimental upbringing has always been evident. I think, for
the first time, the technology has caught up with his mind in SITH.
It's a visual miracle, really.
Anyway, my two cents. Bill, I think you'll LOVE this one.
Rick
27394
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 1:55pm
Subject: Speaking of Musicals cellar47
Here's my boyfriend Bill's account of the Harold Arlen
tribute at the Academy last night.
http://people-vs-drchilledair.blogspot.com/
For me the cinematic treatwas getting to See"Casbah"
again. Believe it or not this was the first version of
"Pepe Le Moko" that I ever saw. Consequently it's the
one that means the most to me. It was on "Million
Dollar Movie" on Channel 9 in New York. And that meant
in a single week I was able to look at it nearly a
dozen times. It's the only real dramaticrole Tony
martin was ever cast it. He deserved more, as he was
quite sensational.
It was directed by my second-favorite blacklisted
director (Abraham Polonsky being the first), John
Berry. And as I'm sure the list knows he emigrated to
France, and father Denis Berry -- who was Jean
Seberg's second-to-last husband. (Six Degrees of Tony
Martin!)
One of the last things Berry did was appear in Chantal
Ackerman's marvelous musical "Golden 80's" where he
was romantically and vocally paired with Delphine
Seyrig. Along with "Pas Sur la Bouche" and "Jeanne and
the Perfect Guy," Ackerman's film is one of the best
musicals of recent years. (I don't much care for any
of those previously listed.)
Be on the lookout for the new Ducastel et Martineau
"Crustacés et Coquillages," which ends eith a very
Charles Walters musical number.
Last evening ended with "Get Happy" from "Summer
Stock" -- sending the audience out into the night with
a prime example of Walters' brilliance.
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27395
From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 2:15pm
Subject: It's All Gone Peter Tong eanmdphd
I thought I'sAGPT use of 'talking heads / documentary approach'
weakened this film. Some of the visual story telling was quite good;
the film did not need verbal commentary, it just interrupted the flow.
27396
From: LiLiPUT1@...
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 10:55am
Subject: Re: Impossible Musicals (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") scil1973
Mike et al -
Allow me to rephrase. The INTEGRATED musical is what is impossible. And when
it becomes possible, it's usually shite. DE-LOVELY has a few integrated
numbers but what an appalling, homophobic concept! The distance between NIGHT AND
DAY (Curtiz's not Akerman's) and DE-LOVELY is...no distance at all. I've heard
both ELLA ENCHANTED and BRIDE AND PREJUDICED were shite too but I'll make up my
own mind, natch. But both films come from traditions that have done the most
to keep the intergrated musical alive anyway - the kid's movie and Bollywood.
THE CHORUS is not an integrated musical. And then there's THE PHANTOM OF THE
OPzzzzzzzzz...huh...wha...zzzzz...
JP, I didn't mean to suggest that an exploration into the relationship
between theatre and film is always a minor preoccupation. I can't comment on MELO
because I've seen it only once and on a crap video at that. But Mizoguchi's THE
STORY OF THE LATE CHRYSANTHEMUMS (beyond the obvious subject matter) and AN
ACTOR'S REVENGE (the 1963 one...has anyone seen the 1935?) are two films I adore
which explore that relationship.
Dan, reading your last post on PAS SUR LA BOUCHE was a bit odd because I
approached the film in almost the same manner as you did - as a curio that demands
a certain modicum of concentration to pick out all the distancing elements.
But again, those elements were so mild and spaced so far apart from one another
that I felt as if I finished an exceedingly decent game of Clue at the end.
Time well spent, I say. But the film just didn't recombine my DNA or take my
breathe away like REVENGE or CHRYSANTHEMUMS did.
Kevin John
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
27397
From: "joe_mcelhaney"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:07pm
Subject: Re: Noel on Roger joe_mcelhaney
Noel, thank you so much for that posting on Roger McNiven. I really
didn't know all that much about Roger's Australian past. He did talk
about that group you were a part of and his auteurist beginnings
there. But otherwise, Australia was something he wanted to half erase
from his past. He struggled to get rid of his accent, for example.
Interesting that some members of this group who knew him didn't even
know that he was Australian. We were on a panel together once at a
conference and the entire panel went out for drinks beforehand. The
women on the panel, who had never met him before, immediately noted
the (repressed) accent, complimented him on it, and were shocked that
he would want to deny his origins in this manner.
I wish his writings were better known. That essay you mentioned on
All That Heaven Allows and Bigger Than Life is first rate, as you
noted, and deserves more attention. And I love his piece on La Cava
in the Coursodon book. An earlier version of it appeared in Bright
Lights, rewritten by Howard, much to Roger's consternation. The
second published version of it is the "director's cut."
Did you know about his Martha's Vineyard theater, where he would
program films during the summer at some barn-like space and local
film celebrities would turn up and talk about their work? Patricia
Neal often came and Roger would show things like The Fountainhead or
Breakfast at Tiffany's. Neal tried to talk Roger into showing Seven
Women and told him that Mildred Dunnock would love to come and talk
about Ford and the making of the film. But Roger wasn't able to show
scope films in that space. Lillian Hellman came for a screening of
The Little Foxes. Very imperious and demanding on the phone, she
wanted to get paid for the appearance. I think they settled on
something like fifty dollars. She showed up in a wheelchair, with a
male nurse, who wheeled her into the projection booth with Roger,
undressed her completely, laid her out on a table, and gave her a
vigorous massage. Roger had to try hard to avert his eyes from the
withered, nude body of Hellman. But she was very lively during the
discussion, the crowd loved her, and as she was being wheeled out
past a cheering throng she turned to Roger and said, "Roger, we can
forget about the fifty dollars."
27398
From: "jpcoursodon"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 3:57pm
Subject: Re: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche" jpcoursodon
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
Resnais retains the song not only giving us
> a fascinating glimpse into the racism of a cultural moment but it
> also is one of the ways the film reflects back on the moment we
are
> living in now. (Also, in addition to the cut to "L'Action
francaise"
> Resnais does cut to Isabelle Nanty rolling her eyes during
Arditi's
> racist tirade.)
But isn't the eye-rolling a cop-out? One character winking and
telling us: "What a lot of crap this guy is saying!" (in the spirit
of a film in which characters are constantly addressing the
audience, which was a convention of the genre on stage and has been
systematized by Resnais in the film). I doubt that the actress who
played the part on stage in 1925 rolled her eyes. This is just for
us more enlightened people. Not that I want to make a big deal out
of it, but isn't Resnais trying to have his cake and eat it too?
The courage of keeping the racist tirade is part of the general
scheme of being as completely faithful to the original as possible.
In that Resnais was obviously right. If you want to "modernize"
something like "Pas sur la bouche" you might as well junk the whole
thing and just keep the title (and maybe not even that because the
title itself sounds so dated). By the way there was a 1931 film
adaptation of the operetta which Resnais saw on a moviola at Bois
d'Arcy (they only have one print and won't screen it) and he says
that his version is much more faithful. The same applied to "Melo,"
which had been filmed two or three times before.
JPC
> Off-topic for a moment: Would David or J-P or anyone interested
in
> musical theater like to have a used CD of The Gay Life
> (Dietz/Schwartz/Barbara Cook/Walter Chiari)? I bought it
yesterday
> and then completely forgot that I already had it. Great ballad in
> it: Magic Moment. Adapted from Schnitzler's The Affairs of
Anatol.
> Let me know. I'll drop it in the mail to any interested party.
I'd love it! Unlike David I don't have everything!
27399
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 4:12pm
Subject: Same Old Song (was: Resnais's "Pas sur la bouche") hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
> This sounds interesting, Bill, but I'm not sure I understand what
> you're saying. Can you explain?
>
> And audiences (French audiences at least) certainly didn't
> experience the film as "painful" (although I did, somewhat).
The Janoui-Bacri script is a lot of fun, but whenever it's just
getting rolling he cuts to a song, and the story/character movement
runs head-on into it like a brick wall. In other words, the songs
aren't smoothly integrated; the way they are cut in is like the way
the snowflakes are cut in in L'amour a mort, where they interrupt the
film (like death) rather than continuing it. I assume people enjoy
the songs of their youth more than they do looking at a black image
filled with snowflakes, but the editing is the same, and the effect
is quite unlike that of songs in a musical. In both films the effect
is deliberate, not accidental.
Even the party sequence with the superimposed ghostly jellyfish works
this way: All the plots are being amusingly or movingly resolved when
suddenly a jellyfish swims through the shot and everything stops dead
while it passes. The songs and the jellyfish represent inner states,
but these portrayals of inner states break the rhythm of the story
rather than enhancing it. As usual (except for Melo and maybe La
guerre est fini), he's messing with the rules and aims of narrative
cinema.
27400
From: "hotlove666"
Date: Fri May 20, 2005 4:32pm
Subject: Re: Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Sith hotlove666
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Rick Curnutte"
wrote:
> Anyway, my two cents. Bill, I think you'll LOVE this one.
>
> Rick
Can't wait. I stopped by the Chinese at 11 (my computer had frozen)
and the famous line (which had formed at the traditional theatre
rather than the Arclight, where it was playing) was gone. Just an old
man in a wheelchair. I asked him what happened to the line. He
said, "I was wondering that too. I aksed, and found out they all
bought tickets on the Arclight. They're no dummies."
In keeping w. what Rick said, I'm a bit surprised that a group
founded on equal respect for narrative and abstract cinema would be
so incurious about the work of the only practitioner of the latter
who has successfully made the transfer. The Star Wars films are
experimental cinema made with increasingly huge budgets and aimed at
an audience of 12-year-olds (until this last one, apparently). They
are visual filmmaking: The dumb dialogue, badly acted, is like title
cards in silent cinema. And it is very much an esthetic, polemical
choice - these aren't films you can watch with your ears (except for
the sound design).
By all accounts, Revenge of the Sith is also a balls-out attack on
Bush's war dictatorship by the one filmmaker who has the power to do
that for a large audience (with Rupert Murdoch distributing!), own up
to it in interviews (unlike Spielberg, who backed down on Minority
Report) and get away with it.
Again, without seeing how it's executed, I also know that the story
carries to its logical conclusion which was already evident to my 18-
yr-old security guard interlocutor in Phantom Empire: Obi-Wan made a
big mistake killing Darth Maul, because the rules of the galactic
game are that there have to be two Sith Lords - he's opening a slot
for Anakin to move into when he becomes Darth Vader. In fact, all the
heroic actions in Empire and Clones - all the things audiences
cheered for in the first Star Wars - lead to the triumph of evil at
the end of SWIII. And the 12-yr-olds who cheered when Obi-Wan iced
Darth Maul are now old enough to take the lesson when it's finally
spelled out here. From a moral standpoint, the second trilogy is as
daring as, say, Fury.
And yet I'm regularly informed by the experts that the Star Wars
movies are reactionary, poorly-made and don't have stories. I'm
really at a loss when I read things like that. It's people preaching
to each other and believing what they hear.
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