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1201
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 4:12am
Subject: Re: Kurosawa and Marker
> (deep breath) Marker is one of my blind spots. It may have to do
> with speaking French.
Do you mean difficulty in understanding spoken French in films (as you
mentioned before)? Because Marker has always dubbed in English whenever
possible. And, like Wim Wenders, he's one of Europe's biggest advocates
for dubbing.
But then Marker's films are in French, Spanish, English, Russian,
Japanese...
Marker is as good as Santiago Alvarez but unlike Alvarez he is the
ultimate non-conformist.
Gabe
1202
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 4:43am
Subject: Essay films
I like La Jetee. I have to see more Marker. I guess this is my
version of the "I've never understood the fuss about Mizoguchi" move,
intended in this case to make a point (at the expense of a
universally admired filmmaker who certainly doesn't need me to praise
him!) about essay films: I believe they are really, really hard to
pull off, and I think there are a lot of easy essay films out there
that don't cut the mustard, unless you just happen to be an
unconditional lover of the genre. Welles, a brilliant theorist of
essay films, kept trying throughout his life to make a good one, and
only succeeded at the very end, with Filming Othello. (I don't
consider The Fountain of Youth an essay film, although its form
influenced some of the botched attempts, like Portrait of Gina.) On
the other hand, Budd Boetticher nailed it in one try ("My Kingdom
For"), as did Vidor in both his attempts. Godard is obviously the
champ, although his later essays turn into the film equivalent of
lyric poetry, which is also hard to pull off in any medium (unless
you are an unconditional lover of the genre. As a point of
comparison, Blake Lucas loves westerns so much that he loves
Universal westerns of the 50s!) I don't think Godard always does pull
it off, but parts of Histoire(s) du cinema certainly come close
enough for government work. I don't know Resnais' early shorts well
enough to generalize (I do think Van Gogh sucks), but Cayrol and
Queneau aren't poetasters - they're the real McCoy, and it seems to
me that that's what Resnais always used. (But Queneau's narration for
the plastics film is a poem...) Duras is a very great filmmaker, but
her way of combining voice and image is not really essayistic. For me
La Femme du Gange and Navire Night, two hard-to-see films which blow
everyone and his uncle out of the water, are really experiments with
narrative form, like The Fountain of Youth and La Jetee. Thom
Andersen's new essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, is very good. It
will have its premiere either at UCLA or at Toronto, whichever is
slated first.
1203
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 5:26am
Subject: oh boy
If Kurosawa is overrated, then I guess I'm one of the ones at fault, although I think I've rated him
high enough for my own purposes. I'm a big fan, at least up until the HIGH AND LOW/RED
BEARD cusp, after which my affection lessens somewhat. Last summer's Kurosawa/Mifune
series at Film Forum only enhanced my esteem for films like SEVEN SAMURAI and THRONE
OF BLOOD, and turned me onto a few that I hadn't seen before (THE BAD SLEEP WELL, I
LIVE IN FEAR, SANJURO).
Chris Marker rules, but I don't like the A.K. doc at all (do we want to blame Kurosawa for this? I
suppose if we say he's "overrated" we could, very easily), and I haven't been able to watch all
of LEVEL FIVE in one sitting.
Sorry these comments are lacking in depth or explanation, I've just moved to a new apartment
and I'm exhausted.
Jaime
1204
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 5:37am
Subject: Re: Essay films/ Fred Halsted Tribute?/Kurosawa & Marker
hotlove666 wrote:
>...Thom
>Andersen's new essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself...
>
Hmmm. Is Andresen paying tribute in his title to an early 70s gay porn
film called "L.A. Plays Itself," directed by one Fred Halsted? If he
isn't, and if he doesn't know this film, he should at least be aware of
it, because others will be. It's in imdb, for example.
Stuart Byron, a former Variety critic who I knew and whose taste in film
was pretty good, claimed that this was a great work of film art. I knew
of this claim and somehow got invited to a private screening of it and
Halsted's short "Sex Garage" (whose cast, shockingly, included a WOMAN)
at MoMA, circa 1974. I thought they were both terrible, completely
uninteresting as cinema. But Halsted did have some supporters.
Bill, I don't think the essay film is any harder to do well than any
other genre, unless what you mean is that a narrative film that's
indifferently directed can be carried by a good script and acting,
whereas an essay film kind of has to be good as a film. Also, it's not
really a well defined category. Is "Chronique d'Un Ete" an essay film or
cinema verite? By its end it's surely an essay of some sort.
Great "essay films" include Ivens's "The Story of the Wind," Brakhage's
"Blue Moses" and "Sincerity" and "Duplicity" series, most of Hollis
Frampton's pre-1972 films, various great early Franju shorts ("Marie
Curie"), a number of great Hanoun films -- most of them, really, Jermoe
Hill's "Film Portrait," arguably a number of films by George Landow,
Christopher Maclaine's "The End," Jonas Mekas's "Lost Lost Lost" and
"Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania," Pat O'Neill's "Water and
Power," virtually all the films of Yvonne Rainer, Alexander Sokurov's
deeply moving "Confession" and "Elegy of a Voyage," arguably von
Sternberg's "Anatahan." Not to mention virtually all the pre-1935 films
of Dziga Vertov. I might add a plug for a film I recently plugged here,
clearly a film essay if there ever was one, Wilkerson's "An Injury to
One." And this is not a complete list, even from what I've seen.
Actually Ed Wood's "Glenn or Glenda" certainly qualifies, as loony and
as delirious as it is. Oh, and van der Keuken. And 325 terrific essay
films I haven't even seen yet (just guessing).
Or perhaps what you're really doing is admitting to a preference for
fictional narratives, perhaps even preferably of the Hollywood variety?
Jaime, I'm glad to hear from at least one other Marker admirer who
doesn't like "A.K." And I was being only semi-serious in "blaming"
Kurosawa himself; actually, it's good to hear a Kurosawa admirer doesn't
like it.
- Fred
1205
From:
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 1:47am
Subject: Joris Ivens
In a message dated 8/13/03 10:37:37 PM, f@f... writes:
>Great "essay films" include Ivens's "The Story of the Wind"
I've been wanting to see this ever since Zach brought it to my attention by
selecting it, I believe, as his favorite film of all-time. I know Fred's seen
it on film (humor), but how were you able to view it, Zach? I see it's not
available on video. As someone completely unfamiliar with his work, what other
Ivens are must-sees?
"F for Fake" and "Filming 'Othello'" are definitely great essay films, though
quite different from one another actually. The former is better regarded, I
think, as a freeform meditation on various subjects (fakery, authorship, the
nature of art, the impermanence of art) which integrates documentary and
fictional segments. The latter seems to me more like an actual filmed essay, a
memory of the making of Welles' "Othello" combined with the testimony of others.
In any case, Welles loved the form and in latter years was reconceiving his
decades-in-the-making "Don Quixote" as an essay film.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1206
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:15am
Subject: Re: Joris Ivens
Peter:
"As someone completely unfamiliar with his work, what other Ivens are
must-sees?"
His career was very long. About half of what I've seen is really great,
and the rest varies from very good to terrific, with a few exceptions,
such as "Song of the Rivers," good only in a few parts, and rather
revoltingly and explicitly Stalinist in a way that will only be apparent
if you know the history of the period. (Why everyone rags on Leni -- who
surely deserves it -- and gives a pass to Stalinst and Maoist filmmaking
is a topic for another day.)
If I could design an Ivens viewing program for you, I'd have you start
with his two wonderful early poetic short films, "Rain" and "Bridges,"
and proceed through some of the better 30s documentaries. Of the later
films a key pair would be the sublimely poetic "Le Mistral" -- and
earlier film about the wind -- and the equally poetic, but explicitly
political documentary "17th Parallel," which is really also a light poem.
The ten part film made in China is uneven, but worth seeing.
- Fred
1207
From: Rick Curnutte
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 2:09pm
Subject: Re: Kurosawa
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Damien Bona"
> Like Peter, I think Madadayo is the director's best film.
I was sent a screener for this when it was released theatrically
here, but was so cold on Kurosawa that I never bothered to watch it.
Obviously, I need to take a look at it.
Rick
1208
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 2:20pm
Subject: Re: Joris Ivens
Peter:
> I've been wanting to see this ever since Zach brought it to my
attention by
> selecting it, I believe, as his favorite film of all-time.
Yep, this is it.
> I know Fred's seen
> it on film (humor), but how were you able to view it, Zach? I see
it's not
> available on video. As someone completely unfamiliar with his
work, what other
> Ivens are must-sees?
I saw it on film at, regrettably, the last screening in Walter
Reade's retrospective. I had the chance to see it again at the
National Gallery of Art when I was at my parents' home in the spring
of last year, but I had an unusually bad allergic reaction to the
Virginia pollen and my cats, and couldn't make the screening.
A TALE OF THE WIND and several other Joris Ivens films are coming out
on DVD indefinitely - the official Ivens website (www.ivens.nl) isn't
very specific though. I've haven't seen enough or read enough to be
an Ivens expert, but I do know the gist of his life story as well as
the categories of some of his films. He started out interested in
photography (if memory serves, his father ran a photo shop that Joris
eventually took over for a short time), became interested in cinema
in the late 1920s, and started making films with other Dutchmen at a
film club. His early stuff apparently already showed promise:
unfortunately I haven't seen famous ones like RAIN or THE BRIDGE.
Most of these sorts of films were documentaries or purely poetic,
although he did make one fiction film, LES BRISANTS.
In the 1930s he started paying attention to leftist causes: BORINAGE
(another I haven't seen) is about the conditions of Belgian
laborers. THE SPANISH EARTH, perhaps Ivens' most famous film, is an
American-made documentary on the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway wrote
the narration, and Welles was supposed to speak it, but for reasons
that I can't recall at the moment, I believe Hemingway went on to
read it himself on the soundtrack. Can't recall if the Welles
soundtrack is extant.
(Good anecdote that I've told people before: the Ivens bio LIVING
DANGEROUSLY relates the story, which may well be a lie, about
Hemingway and Welles getting into a big fight around the time THE
SPANISH EARTH was being produced. Hemingway essentially accused
Welles of being a sissy, and Welles complied by gesticulating
effeminately and so on. This enraged Hemingway, the two brawled for
a while, and ended the night as friends, filling their bellies with
liquor.)
The rest of Ivens' career seems connected to his political concerns:
if there was a war or labor movement, Ivens was there to document
it. He travelled all over the world, meeting artists and political
leaders, always loyal to the cause. He had an affiliation with the
Communist Party for most of his life (though there is considerable
doubt that he really paid dues or was officially registered much),
and in his later years he was tormented that his dedication to Stalin
and Stalinism was, in fact, not a means of achieving the world he
wanted. As far as I know Ivens remained a leftist until his death,
but any taste he had for party dogmatism was probably gone by then.
A few highlights in his filmography -
LA SEINE A RECONTRE PARIS (1957) - Probably my second favorite film
of his, a gorgeous lyrical poem about the Seine river. Yet it also
doubles faintly as a sly ethnographic portrait. (Speaking of essay
films, doesn't Rouch count!?) Narration written (and, if I recall,
spoken) by Jacques Prevert.
A VALPARAISO (1963) - Beautiful, perhaps most notable for the Chris
Marker narration (written, not spoken, by him).
POUR LE MISTRAL (1965) - Good to see this film about the winds of a
region in southern France. Ivens was asthmatic and became fascinated
by the wind and air.
A TALE OF THE WIND (1988) - Co-directed by his wife, now widow,
Marceline Loridan. It's kind of hard to describe this film, because
most broad adjectives I can give to it only highlight that I can
usually apply the opposite. It's huge and intimate, profound and
carefree. Ivens mixes a bunch of his concerns and the results look
like an effortless testament: swan songs simply don't come more
personal or more flawless. Ivens' life practically began with
the "birth of cinema," and his acknowledgment of this fact comes in a
supremely graceful, humble nod to A TRIP TO THE MOON. I don't really
want or need to oversell this film, it is what it is, and I love it.
--Zach
1209
From: Greg Dunlap
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 2:29pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joris Ivens
> THE SPANISH EARTH, perhaps Ivens' most famous film, is an
> American-made documentary on the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway wrote
> the narration, and Welles was supposed to speak it, but for reasons
> that I can't recall at the moment, I believe Hemingway went on to
> read it himself on the soundtrack. Can't recall if the Welles
> soundtrack is extant.
There is a DVD that has THE SPANISH EARTH and THE 400 MILLION on one
DVD, and it contains both the Welles and Hemingway narrations for THE
SPANISH EARTH. According to the DVD, Welles' voice was considered "too
beautiful" for the film.
> A TALE OF THE WIND (1988) - Co-directed by his wife, now widow,
> Marceline Loridan. It's kind of hard to describe this film, because
> most broad adjectives I can give to it only highlight that I can
> usually apply the opposite. It's huge and intimate, profound and
> carefree. Ivens mixes a bunch of his concerns and the results look
> like an effortless testament: swan songs simply don't come more
> personal or more flawless. Ivens' life practically began with
> the "birth of cinema," and his acknowledgment of this fact comes in a
> supremely graceful, humble nod to A TRIP TO THE MOON. I don't really
> want or need to oversell this film, it is what it is, and I love it.
I saw this as part of the Ivens retrospective here last year, and was
also quite blown away and moved by it. I will not try to describe it
any more than Zach will, besides he did a very good job. It was after
seeing it that I picked up the aforementioned DVD and while the films
are interesting, they are of a different breed than A TALE OF THE WIND,
and from my understanding this is a fairly unique piece within his
career, sadly.
=====
--------------------
Greg Dunlap
heyrocker@y...
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
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1210
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 3:01pm
Subject: Essay Films
Fred,
Nope - I'm just admitting my ignorance, not having seen most of the
films on your list, which I will pursue systematically when my rich
uncle dies, and unsystematically till that longed-for day.
But it seems that every time someone tells me about a great essay
film, I'm disappointed when I see it. Maybe it's that, because they
usually don't cost much, filmmakers figure "hey, I can do one of
those," and then others - more accustomed perhaps to a steady diet of
narrative than you - say, "hey, that was kinda different" and give it
the cinematic equivalent of a gentleman's C, when in fact it is one
of the most demanding of all cinematic forms. I repeat: I've seen all
the extant Welles essay films, and I spent about thirty minutes
discussing his love of the form with him, and being blown away by his
brilliant ideas on the subject, but the only one that I think he made
work is Filming Othello. F for Fake is a B, with extra points for the
part Oja Kodar wrote, at the end.
For one thing, anyone with a good crew, script and actors can make a
decent narrative film, but a good essay film depends pretty much on
the filmmaker, even if he/she is working with a good editor, while a
good cinematic lyric poem is as hard to pull off as any lyric poem,
which is to say, as hard to pull off as anything I know - in
literature, the small presses have been cranking out proof of that
since the heyday of Grub Street (when the essay poem was still the
dominant poetic short-form). Which doesn't mean that there are only 3
or 4 good ones - it's just that not everybody gets to be Keats!
Case in point (although I guess Shelley would be a better lead-in for
this): The Story of the Wind. A former friend I saw it with was in
awe when we walked out. I thought the editing was bad. Then I found
myself in an editing room with the friend and quickly understood the
look of awe. I suspect The Story of the Wind is a "too late film,"
and will make a point of seeing the ones you list - noting with
interest that you aren't a million percent convinced by the whole
Ivens filmography yourself. There again: near-total ignorance on my
part.
Absolute and total agreement about Glen or Glenda, which also makes
use of word/image techniques not seen/heard since the early days of
sound: an amazingly sophisticated film.
Thom is alluding to LA Plays Itself in the title of his essay film on
Los Angeles in the movies, but by making it Los Angeles Plays Itself,
he is making the point (which I find a bit stretched) that calling
his native city "LA" is a barbarism perpetrated by Hollywood. That
said, the militant nativism of the commentary track is part of what
makes this Thom's best essay film yet. Unlike the all-knowing
voiceovers of Muybridge and Red Hollywood, he structures this film
around the gripes and occasional kudos of a v.o. who is obviously a
hometown boy (or girl - I believe he had an actress redo his temp
track), anchoring the whole thing in something human while making
possible a somewhat looser structure than the two previous ones.
Maybe he'll loosen up more when he makes his next one, but this one
is a lot of fun. It does contain a little bit of the near-homonym
homoerotic film you were asking about.
(The roughcut of Frederick Marx's new doc I saw in SF [sic] was very
good, and he fearlessly called it Boys 2 Men, or perhaps he was just
unaware that there's a high-profile gay feature out there with the
same name. Recommended viewing. NOT another Basketball Diaries!)
The French and the essay film: I have never discussed a documentary
or documentary project with a French intellectual who didn't say that
it was or was going to be "something between fiction and
documentary" - a noble theoretical tradition that has also spawned a
lot of terrible documentaries - I think we do them better. But essay
films are something else.
1211
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 3:05pm
Subject: To Zach
Thanks for a great essay on a filmmaker you know much better than I
do. I'll re-see Story of the Wind when it comes out on DVD, with some
of the others.
1212
From: programming
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 3:46pm
Subject: Re: oh boy
> Jamie wrote:
>
> Chris Marker rules, but I don't like the A.K. doc at all (do we want to blame
> Kurosawa for this?
>
>
> I've not seen A.K., but Marker's video on another Less than Meets the Eye
> filmmaker (Tarkovsky) is terrific. I think there is a richer vein of material
> to mine in Tarkovsky, though, compared to Kurosawa, in terms of themes that T.
> addresses that Marker is interested in.
>
> Marker's video on Medvedkin (whose Happiness I remember being great, although
> I've not seen it in a long time) is also terrific.
>
> So we don't have a pattern.
>
> (and Level Five IS a tough one - not up to Marker's usual standards I think)
>
> [Chicagoans, there are tentative plans for a mini-Marker retrospective at the
> Film Center next year (spring?)]
>
> Patrick Friel
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1213
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 4:39pm
Subject: Level 5
I am really glad to hear that Patrick thinks this isn't up to Marker's
standards. This gives me hope.
1214
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 4:56pm
Subject: Re: Marker, & Essay films
hotlove666 wrote:
>I am really glad to hear that Patrick thinks this isn't up to Marker's
>standards. This gives me hope.
>
>
>
Haven't seen "Level 5," but "Cry of the Owl" is another example of a
sub-par Marker. If I were going to try to convince you, I'd show you "Le
Joli Mai," "Cuba Si!," "The Kuomiko Mystery," "Sans Soleil," and "The
Last Bolshevik," which Patrick referred to -- it's the one on Medvedkin .
As for those "hey, I can do one of those" essay films, it seems to me
that I've seen more than a few Hollwyood feature wannabes that can be
described the same way, and that are so inept and poorly acted and
un-entertaining that they make even me appreciate the precise editing
and smooth cinemtography of a terrible and soulless blockbuster.
I'm glad we agree about "Glenn or Glenda"!
I will definitely try to see "Los Angeles Plays Itself" based on your
description. Besides, I'm partial to Thom Andersen ever since he
introduced me at a program I did at the LA Filmforum by calling me "The
last film critic in America" -- by which he meant the only critic he
knew of who won't write on a film from seeing only a video copy. I've
seen only his Muybridge film years ago.
- Fred
- Fred
1215
From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:01pm
Subject: Stuart Byron
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> Stuart Byron, a former Variety critic who I knew and whose taste in
film
> was pretty good, claimed that this was a great work of film art. I
knew
> of this claim and somehow got invited to a private screening of it
and
> Halsted's short "Sex Garage" (whose cast, shockingly, included a
WOMAN)
> at MoMA, circa 1974. I thought they were both terrible, completely
> uninteresting as cinema. But Halsted did have some supporters.
>
Stuart was a prototypical auteurist critic; I used to read him in the
Boston Phoenix when I was in high school and learned a lot from his
writing. He felt then Edwards's 10 was the second best film of the
70s, second only to Nashville.
By the way, Fred, Stuart had ulterior motives in hyping L.A. Plays
Itself -- he was the film's publicist.
1216
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:31pm
Subject: Re: Stuart Byron
Damien:
"By the way, Fred, Stuart had ulterior motives in hyping L.A. Plays
Itself -- he was the film's publicist."
Yeah, I only recently figured that out! If I had known that thirty years
ago maybe I would have been spared -- though I suppose the film was
rather educational in its way.
Stuart was a great guy in some ways, though. I remember first meeting
him when I was about 20, and he said something that suggested a way of
thinking about Hollywood film that hadn't really occurred to me before.
He talked about young auteurists seeking out films like "Firecreek"
(which I'd seen, and hadn't liked) that they hoped would keep the
Western alive, and he said something like this: "One reason that film
was such a rich medium is that it was an invented medium, so the realm
of classical narrative hadn't yet been explored in film in the way it
had in the nineteenth-century novel. Thus you could have more classical
works coexisting with more (not his word) modernist and avant-garde
works. But now the classical tradition has been fully explored, and just
as it is no longer really possible to write a sonnet in the style of
Keats, it will no longer be possible to make classical narratives."
The point of recounting this is not that he was right or wrong -- such
sweeping statements are rarely either "right" or "wrong" -- but that it
provided me with an interesting perspective I hadn't had before. And in
some sense and in some ways surely he was right. I mean, whatever you
think of Spielberg, I've never heard it argued intelligently that he's a
genuinely great and original filmmaker.
Stuart wrote a long paper on Minnelli that I don't think was ever
published but that I still have a copy of somewhere. His basic take was
that Minnelli's theme was freedom, and it was actually very helpful to
me to read at the time. It certainly helped me understand the ending of
"Some Came Running," even if I didn't accept his idea that the ultimate
realization of that theme was the even more space-expanding ending of
"On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" -- though he did have a point about
that film too.
I was very sad, after he died, when a friend send me a blurb that had
appeared in a gossip column before he died that said he had AIDS and was
hoping to hear from old friends. Even though I only met him a half-dozen
times at most, I certainly would have gotten in touch.
- Fred
1217
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 6:37pm
Subject: Re: Joris Ivens
LE MISTRAL!!!!!!!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Camper"
To:
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 3:15 AM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Joris Ivens
> Peter:
>
> "As someone completely unfamiliar with his work, what other Ivens are
> must-sees?"
>
> His career was very long. About half of what I've seen is really great,
> and the rest varies from very good to terrific, with a few exceptions,
> such as "Song of the Rivers," good only in a few parts, and rather
> revoltingly and explicitly Stalinist in a way that will only be apparent
> if you know the history of the period. (Why everyone rags on Leni -- who
> surely deserves it -- and gives a pass to Stalinst and Maoist filmmaking
> is a topic for another day.)
>
> If I could design an Ivens viewing program for you, I'd have you start
> with his two wonderful early poetic short films, "Rain" and "Bridges,"
> and proceed through some of the better 30s documentaries. Of the later
> films a key pair would be the sublimely poetic "Le Mistral" -- and
> earlier film about the wind -- and the equally poetic, but explicitly
> political documentary "17th Parallel," which is really also a light poem.
>
> The ten part film made in China is uneven, but worth seeing.
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
1218
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Aug 14, 2003 7:29pm
Subject: Essay films
Fred,
Thom is also a considerable critic in his own right, but such a
perfectionist that he has never published!
I still insist that my grandmother could make a good narrative
film if she had the crew, cast and script and wasn't too
unsympathetic to the material, and many do - many screw it up,
too. I just got an e-mail being circulated about a well-known H'wd
auteur who fell off the wagon while shooting a big budget
location film and even managed to screw up the camerawork by
one of the best in the business by being autocratically
incompetent. Then he planted a story with a suceptible journalist
blaming it all on the "suits" - a technique he has perfected over
the years. And there are lots of people who make one or two
films because they're good at taking orders and go to tv - but they
at least get the films in the can (or the producer does, as recently
happened on The Bourne Amendment, where Sony asked Frank
Marshall to step in and finish the shooting).
Wannabes are everywhere, particularly in cinema, because of
the glamor, but there is no room for wannabes making essay
films or lyric films - you're naked to the world on one of those.
Conversely, occasionally a H'wd director like like Boetticher or
Vidor, accustomed to working with the whole panoply of
industrial filmmaking help, actually does one of these little
one-man films better than a lot of the people doing it for a living -
which makes me think that just maybe there's a reason to
consider that real cinema is one thing, not several, a notion you
and Thom Andersen both exemplify.
I still remember the shock of pleasure when Hawks alluded to
Shoot the Piano Player, then my favorite foreign film, via a ghastly
Dumb Swede joke he wrote into El Dorado. This was long before
Spielberg (groan!) hired Truffaut to act in Close Encounters,
when it was still a shock to discover that that partricular barrier
didn't exist.
I will try to see any film Ivens made about the wind, including
reseeing Story of... when it comes out on DVD - that is THE
archetypal subject for an essay film (or even more, for a lyric),
which is why I was so bummed out when I saw Story of...
Obviously I need to give it another try.
1219
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Fri Aug 15, 2003 1:19am
Subject: Rouge
Though not quite ready yet, Adrian Martin and co's Rouge is nearing the
legendary with its new list of contents:
http://www.rouge.com.au/espace.html
If you wish to subscribe, you get an email back saying they will let
you know when updates are made. I say subscribe now (and tell your
friends) so they can hurry it up!
Gabe
1220
From: Rick Curnutte
Date: Fri Aug 15, 2003 1:06pm
Subject: Re: Rouge
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Gabe Klinger wrote:
> Though not quite ready yet, Adrian Martin and co's Rouge is
nearing the
> legendary with its new list of contents:
>
> http://www.rouge.com.au/espace.html
>
> If you wish to subscribe, you get an email back saying they will
let
> you know when updates are made. I say subscribe now (and tell your
> friends) so they can hurry it up!
>
> Gabe
This is great news! Adrian's written some stuff for me in THE FILM
JOURNAL in the past, and I've been anxiously awaiting this. Thanks
for the heads up, Gabe.
Rick
1221
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 7:47am
Subject: light and...playing catch-up
Electricity = good.
At the exact moment of the power failure, I was writing what was to
become the most brilliant and witty analysis of Chris Marker and
Orson Welles imaginable. It is lost forever. I can't remember what
I wrote, so you'll all just have to make do with what's out there
right now. Very sorry.
Also these Marker works are highly recommended (if they were not
mentioned already):
'Remembrance of Things to Come' (co-directed with Yannick Bellon)
'One Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevitch'
'The Last Bolshevik' (one of the major films of the 1990s)
'The Owl's Legacy' [TV Series]
'Letter from Siberia'
'L'Ambassade'
'The Battle of the Ten Million' (have not seen '¡Cuba Sí!')
'Grin Without a Cat' (the version I saw was that of the 2002 re-
release; I am unclear as to the specific differences between each
version, although I think one or both of the recent Film Comment
profiles on Marker should have good info on the film and its history)
'2084'
I have seen several of his video pieces, they were okay but I didn't
really get into them. Worth seeing, I guess: 'Matta'; 'Tokyo
Days'; 'Berlin 1990'; 'Bestiaire'; 'Prime Time in the Camps'; 'SLON
Tango'
Actually the last one is pretty stupid - a video shot of an elephant
in slow motion, set to some music. Perhaps I saw it out of context
or away from something that would have given it some meaning
(something I thought more than once when I recently saw all of these
videos in a row at Anthology Film Archives), but I could see no rhyme
or reason for it. It's Marker's worst film or video.
Jaime
1222
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 11:44am
Subject: Re: Rouge
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Gabe Klinger wrote:
> Though not quite ready yet, Adrian Martin and co's Rouge is nearing the
> legendary with its new list of contents:
>
> http://www.rouge.com.au/espace.html
Is it named after Kieslowski's ROUGE? Or Stanley Kwan's?
1223
From:
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 11:06am
Subject: Mekas
Fred Camper mentioned Jonas Mekas' work as essay films.
Recently TV unexpectedly showed Mekas' Scenes From the Life of Andy Warhol
(1990), a roughly 40 minute collection of Mekas' home movies which include the
artist. So at last, got to see a Mekas film here! The film has a pleasant
visual style - most of the images are creatively composed, and there is a good
sense of rhythm to the camera movements. Mekas has been filming what he calls his
Home Movies for over 50 years. Would love to see more of these. It is not
quite clear that this is an essay film, at least in the sense that Marker's are.
Mekas has seemingly no message here, other than warmth and affection for the
people portrayed - he only shoots happy moments, according to an interview with
the director that accompanied the film. Instead, there is a steady stream of
visual beauty that Mekas has uncovered with his camera. It is this sense of
visual joy and beauty that is Mekas' subject. It is better to see the film at
least twice - the formal compositional patterns become clearer and clearer every
time you watch it.
Did not like Marker's Sans Soleil at all. The relentless Communist propoganda
really made me gag. By the time that Marker opines that Communism builds
character, I was ready to throw tomatoes at my TV. I have an intense loathing of
both Facism and Communism. I can't even abide to hear Wagner or Richard Strauss
on the radio - if they come on, I get up and switch the radio off! La Jetee
also seems like an over-rated turkey.
Power is now back on in my part of Detroit. I have not been ignoring
a_film_by - have simply been without power here.
Mike Grost in Detroit.
1224
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 5:31pm
Subject: Re: Mekas
Mike Grost wrote"
Mekas has been filming what he calls
his
Home Movies for over 50 years. Would love to see more of these. It is not
quite clear that this is an essay film, at least in the sense that Marker's
are.
The Mekas films can be identified as essay films - traditionally, much of Mekas' work has been catagorized as a Diary Film. I included an entry on the form for The Encylopedia of American Independent Filmmaking. Here it is:
diary film: Avant-garde, experimental film form where the filmmaker carries a camera, often a Bolex or a digital video camera, and records personal observations, impressions, and events as a diarist would with pen and notebook. Edward Pincus's Diaries (1976) is a five-year portrait of his marriage. Andrew Noren's Kodak Ghost Poems are short, one-to- two minute segments of daily realism, romantic episodes filled with texture, and lovingly rendered female nudity. Howard Guttenplan, director of The Millennium is also an accomplished diary filmmaker. The best known diarist is Jonas Mekas whose Diaries, Notes and Sketches is a model of the form. The epic work is in several parts, Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), In Between (1978), Notes for Jerome (1978) and other films. Mekas helped define the style by utilizing single-frame shooting, bursts of frames, handheld camera movement, and over - and underexposure. Diary films, often unedited, are direct impressions of the diarist. This
most personal cinema is documentary and artist and shares the inner-most emotions and feelings of the "writer."
Vinny LoBrutto
---------------------------------
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1225
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 10:17pm
Subject: Another Diary Film, Spots of Time
John Dorr, the founder of the Los Angeles video co-op EZTV (where I
believe Dan made his first feature), made a diary film, John Dorr's
Christmas Greetings, and sent it to friends before his death. Like
John's four video features, it is a work of quirky genius.
One of the things John had been doing was shooting video 8mm behind-
the-scenes every day during the making of Short Cuts. The footage was
later turned into a conventional 2-hr doc for HBO, not edited by
John, but he included bits of what he had shot and even of the
finished Altman feature in his diary/letter. He actually edited a
little sequence about the filming of the scene where the fisherman
find the body in the river that is the best evocation of a film shoot
I've ever seen, because John, a great editor, cut it to capture the
way time flows during a shoot in a natural setting.
Needless to say, the subject of the sequence being filmed by Altman
also fits into the loose diary form, not just because John knew he
was dying, but because it unconsciously reenacts one of Wordsworth's
gloomiest "spots of time" in The Prelude, and an archetypal symbol of
death-/self-consciousness ("The Drowned Man") in the poetic tradition
that feeds into many of these diary or essay films. Maybe John hooked
into it through Carver's sophisticated use of the motif in the story
- I haven't read it - or maybe it just surfaced while he was picking
his footage to edit, as archetypes have a way of doing.
I believe that one of the few genuine Proustian moments (another
version of Wordsworth's "spots of time") in cinema appears in Budd
Boetticher's last film, "My Kingdom For." While watching video
footage he shot of Carlos Arruza, Jr., doing rejoneo in Budd's
bullring near San Diego (the film was edited on 2 VCRs in his and
Mary's bedroom) he realized that Carlos Jr. had made the same pass
exactly the same way Carlos Sr. did when Budd was filming him for the
documentary Arruza, filmed from the same angel, according to Budd's
Bressonian theory that there is only one angle from which a
particular moment of a bulfight should be filmed, which he as a
bullfighter would always instinctively select. So he put the old
footage of the father in the film, cutting to it from the new footage
of Carlos Jr. and letting his own voiceover carry the burden of the
meditation on Time enacted by the images.
1226
From:
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 6:52pm
Subject: Behind the scenes docus
In a message dated 8/16/03 6:18:35 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>One of the things John had been doing was shooting video 8mm behind-
>the-scenes every day during the making of Short Cuts. The footage was
>later turned into a conventional 2-hr doc for HBO, not edited by
>John
Was this "Luck, Trust, and Ketchup"? I'm a big, big fan of "Short Cuts" and
I actually remember thinking that the footage in this documentary was
fascinating (and that whoever shot it had amazing, even unprecedented access), but
that it was poorly assembled. Now it all makes since if the director didn't even
get to edit it.
I am in the "haven't seen" category for Marker's "A.K.," but the best film
I've seen in the subcategory of "behind the scenes" docus is Vivian Kubrick's
"Making 'The Shining.'" Elegantly assembled, she and editor Gordon Stainforth
were able to winnow down her hours and hours of footage into a few key moments
which seem to summarize the feeling of a Kubrick set. There's Kubrick The
Tyrant, but also Kubrick furiously typing new dialogue as the actors rehearse and
Kubrick explaining color coded scripts to his mother. Vivian K. began
shooting a similar documentary during "Full Metal Jacket," but I believe it was
abandoned at some stage.
I also quite enjoyed Alexandra Bogdanovich's documentary of her dad at work
on "The Cat's Meow," featured on the DVD of that film. Again, there's just an
intelligence in terms of what's included (scenes of Bogdanovich giving
direction, blocking scenes, acting out performances) and what's not (a lot of talking
heads and actors talking about motivation.)
Sorry for the brief tangent.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1227
From:
Date: Sat Aug 16, 2003 6:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: Joris Ivens
A big thanks to Zach and Fred for their succinct and informative remarks on
Ivens. He sounds like a fascinating person and filmmaker. If I'm ever able to
track down some of the key works (or if they're released on those DVDs), I'll
definitely post something here.
Thanks again, guys.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1228
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 0:00am
Subject: Re: Mekas
To Mike Grost, I did stop and think a minute before recommending some
Jonas Mekas films as "essay films." I supposed you could argue that all
of his films are "essay films," but that would be an argument at the
margins of the "genre," certainly not one I would make in the context of
offering recommendations. Personally, I wouldn't call most of Mekas's
films essay films, and certainly wouldn't call "Scenes From the Life of
Andy Warhol" an essay film. The two that I recommended, "Lost Lost
Lost" and "Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania" clearly are, the
first even more clearly than the second, and the first, which is three
hours long, is also my favorite Mekas film, though there are a few
recent long ones that I've not been able to see.
But for most Mekas films, I think you're right that a "sense of visual
joy and beauty" is their subject, or at least one of their subjects. The
way I sometimes put it is that Mekas's rapid-fire style intensifies
seeing by focusing one's attention in a very particular way.
I don't agree about Marker, even though I do agree about communism, but
you kind of admit to a certain lack of objectivity in citing your
inability to listen to Strauss or Wagner, so I don't feel the need to
get into a disagreement over this. But here's a thought for you. We both
love Ockeghem. One of the most beautiful moments in Ockeghem occurs in
the Credo of the "Missa Mi-Mi," when the Latin words that translate into
a declaration of the belief in one true Catholic church are sung to a
rapidly ascending melody. Now the church of Ockeghem's time was known to
torture heretics to death, including Jews. One way that at least some
churches did that is by hanging them in cages inside the church until
they died of thirst. Now, I would "like" to think that several of my
fellow-Jews were so hanging during the world premiere of the Missa
Mi-Mi. This is not because I am anything other than revolted by murder
and torture, of course, but rather because, as I've said before, I don't
think many, or any, of the works of art I love are free from the
possibility of having things about them that ought to repel one as much
as you are by Marker or Wagner. I mean, some of the directors we love
the most were anti-Semites, I'm sure, even if that didn't make it into
their films. "The Searchers" is a pretty nuanced treatment of whites and
Indians, but it still has elements that could easily have been seen as
racist by most viewers of the time, even if a subtler viewer could argue
that such a reading is a misinterpretation.
Walter Benjamin said it better than I can: "There is no document of
civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
- Fred
1229
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 4:02am
Subject: wagner, etc.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> I have an intense loathing of
> both Facism and Communism. I can't even abide to hear Wagner or Richard Strauss
> on the radio - if they come on, I get up and switch the radio off!
Any number of films (principally prewar, I guess) have Wagner pastiche soundtracks -- what then? Doesn't Borzage's A FAREWELL TO ARMS end with the Liebestod? Even if it's probably too early to be considered historically complicit... As for Strauss, I won't even ask you about 2001!
1230
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 4:29am
Subject: Movie docs detour
The guy who edited the Dorr footage on "Short Cuts" recently made a
film about Anne Sothern at EZTV. I think he got access to Aldrich's
16mm previsualization of a sexy Grand Guignol feature he was going to
do with Sothern but never got financed - there should be some in the
doc. I gather he shot the whole thing on 16.
Some French guy has been getting the same access on Spielberg's
shoots that John had on "Short Cuts." I don't know if he shoots as
well. Or edits as well.
I assume that Kubrick helped on Making The Shining. The cut to
Scatman Crothers already in tears when we haven't seen him before and
don't know why he's crying is just too wild to be the daughter. If it
is, SHE should have made "A.I."!
Tim Burton's "Vincent and Me" remains in durance vile because the
clips would cost $250,000. One reason the film's so good is that he
obviously gave no thought to the length of clips when he was making
it. It's finished but for the Avid-back-to-film part, and the clip
payments.
Andre S. Labarthe of "Cineastes de notre temps" fame tried to "take
back" the director profile from the PR types who took it over in his
film on Welles, "The Big O." I don't think the film works, but I
appreciated the attempt. (The ugly cracks about Bogdanovich in "The
Big O" came from Analiese Varaldiev, an EZTV regular whom Dan knows.)
Some of the recent additions to that series, produced by Andre and
Jeannine Bazin (who died last month), are good: "Cinema de notre
temps," they called the new series. The Pedro Costa film on the
Straubs editing Sicilia ("Ou git votre sourire enfoui") is very good.
I'd love to see Jean-Pierre Limosin's film on Kiarostami, but someone
had gotten there ahead of me when I went to steal it from the Cahiers
offices.
Schickel's Chaplin biodoc opened here this weekend - I haven't seen
it, or his Fuller episode for the new "Men Who Made the Movies."
Bogdanovich has recut the botched "Orson Welles: One-Man Band" for
Showtime, making it his personal essay on OW, but I suspect it's
bottled up in the Beatrice Wars, like "The Other Side of the Wind."
1231
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:20am
Subject: Re: Movie docs detour
> Fuller episode for the new "Men Who Made the Movies."
It's good, but I don't think it had a very profound effect on me
except that it made me want to re-watch THE BIG RED ONE. Having only
seen this and the one he did on Hawks, I have to say that Schickel's
director docs seem good but not much more accomplished than something
that might be made for Turner Classic Movies or the A&E Biography
series.
> Bogdanovich has recut the botched "Orson Welles: One-Man Band" for
> Showtime, making it his personal essay on OW, but I suspect it's
> bottled up in the Beatrice Wars, like "The Other Side of the Wind."
I have a 75-minute version of ONE-MAN BAND (it's supposed to be 90
minutes, according to some listings) and all of the clips are
valuable in one way or another, and many are really delightful. My
favorite may be the no-makeup, no-sets rendition of the MERCHANT OF
VENICE monologue ("hath not a Jew eyes," etc).
However, I was not aware that Bogdanovich was working on it. I'll
ask the experts at Wellesnet.com and see what they have to say.
Jaime
1232
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 6:13am
Subject: Re: wagner, etc.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jess_l_amortell"
wrote:
> Any number of films (principally prewar, I guess) have Wagner
pastiche soundtracks -- what then? Doesn't Borzage's A FAREWELL TO
ARMS end with the Liebestod? Even if it's probably too early to be
considered historically complicit... As for Strauss, I won't even
ask you about 2001!
I looked up Wagner on IMDb and his music is cited for 271 films,
ranging from Birth of A Nation, Hallelujah, The Scarlet Empress, A
Farewell To Arms and The Gold Rush to Citizen Kane, Manpower, Hangmen
Also Die, Interlude, Verbotten and Stalker to What's Opera, Doc?,
Help!, And Now For Something Completely Different, Police Academy 5:
Assignment Miami Beach and Andy Hardy's Dilemma.
My favorite Wagner in a movie is Mazursky's Blume In Love.
1233
From: David Westling
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 7:25am
Subject: His Kind of Woman (1950)
Robert Mitchum Vincent Price Jane Russell Jim Backus Raymond Burr A Howard
Hughes Production Directed by John Farrow and Richard Fleisher Release date
1951 Dan Milner doesn't know why he's in a Mexican seaside town, and the
guys that hired him aren't very forthcoming. Always the waiting, the
waiting...punctuated by fatalistic bravado from Mitchum and goofy
Shakespeaean hamming from Price, while it's all Russell can do to keep from
being pushed off the screen. The lack of a narrative or dramatic center in
this film brings the focus to the various set pieces: a gambling game,
vague repartee among people barely in contact with each other; no one knows
what going on, and it doesn't matter. Burr is bug-eyed and over-the-top
maniacal as the hood who needs Mitchum's identity to get back into the
States. More oblique and more nihilistic than _Kiss Me Deadly_, _His Kind
of Woman_ is a nearly forgotten gem capturing an existential anomie Sartre
couldn't even dream of.
David Westling
1234
From: George Robinson
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 8:28am
Subject: Re: His Kind of Woman (1950)
This is the first time I've seen Fleischer's name linked to this film. I'm curious where you found that information. Not that I doubt you; on the contrary, it's a lot better than the average John Farrow film and while Fleischer isn't exactly Sam Fuller, he's a lot better than Farrow.
g
Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
----- Original Message -----
From: David Westling
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 3:25 AM
Subject: [a_film_by] His Kind of Woman (1950)
Robert Mitchum Vincent Price Jane Russell Jim Backus Raymond Burr A Howard
Hughes Production Directed by John Farrow and Richard Fleisher Release date
1951 Dan Milner doesn't know why he's in a Mexican seaside town, and the
guys that hired him aren't very forthcoming. Always the waiting, the
waiting...punctuated by fatalistic bravado from Mitchum and goofy
Shakespeaean hamming from Price, while it's all Russell can do to keep from
being pushed off the screen. The lack of a narrative or dramatic center in
this film brings the focus to the various set pieces: a gambling game,
vague repartee among people barely in contact with each other; no one knows
what going on, and it doesn't matter. Burr is bug-eyed and over-the-top
maniacal as the hood who needs Mitchum's identity to get back into the
States. More oblique and more nihilistic than _Kiss Me Deadly_, _His Kind
of Woman_ is a nearly forgotten gem capturing an existential anomie Sartre
couldn't even dream of.
David Westling
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1235
From:
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:09am
Subject: Essay Films, Varda
Thanks to Vincent LoBrutto, Bill Krohn and Fred Camper for really informative
posts on diary films, essay films, and Jonas Mekas!
Would love to see the films mentioned by Edward Pincus, Andrew Noren, Howard
Guttenplan and John Dorr. This is a strong reminder of how vast the cinema is,
and how much I still have to learn. A true map of the Great Films is still
very far away here!
Was just "wondering aloud" about the relation of Mekas to the essay film.
This is a branch of cinema almost entirely new to me.
Have read Mekas' book "Movie Journal". Favorite article: the one on Marcel
Hanoun. It shows Mekas' writing at its delirously poetic best.
An essay film that is visually beautiful is The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda,
2000).
The Gleaners and I shows Varda's personal sense of color. Scenes show the
bright, brilliant colors that are today called neon. Varda is unafraid to mix
several bright colors. The vibrating color harmonies that are produced can be
spectacular. The other filmmaker that one associates with neon colors is Storm De
Hirsch: see, for example, her Peyote Queen (1965). Like Varda, De Hirsch was
an independent woman filmmaker who pursued a non-standard vision through her
works.
Varda often constructs her scenes through strong vertical lines. Such lines
are found outdoors in fences, building and trucks. These lines tend to bound
regions of glowing color. At the base of the image tend to be horizontal
regions, parts of the ground, grass and sidewalks.
In principle, everyone knows about farms. In practice, most modern people in
industrialized countries have little first hand experience with farms. Varda
takes her camera to many actual farming locations. It is fascinating to see
what a potato or cabbage farm actually looks like - it is subtly different from
what one might expect. The commercial oyster beds Varda displays are also
visually fascinating. Recently, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer went to the Land of
Lakes dairy processing facility in Central California for a report (2001). The
huge plant looked utterly unlike anything I might have imagined, and the
report is a mini-classic at showing a world we have never seen. One also recalls
Lawrence G. Blochman's Recipe for Homicide (1952), a mystery novel with a
background of industrial food processing. This is a whole invisible world. Varda is
on to something different and important here.
Mike Grost
1236
From:
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:52am
Subject: Movie Docs
An enjoyable Making Of film is "A China Odyssey" (Les Mayfield, 1987). This
is allegedly a Making Of film about Steven Spielberg's film, Empire of the Sun.
But it slyly undercuts this subject. Spielberg's film is an extremely
unfaithful version of J. G. Ballard's novel. Mayfield's doc is structured around a
long interview of Ballard. In it, Ballard tells the original story of his novel.
This is intercut with numerous brief clips of Spielberg's movie. These now
"illustrate", not the story of Spielberg's film, but the original plot of
Ballard's book. Mayfield also includes many newsreels of old Shanghai, and other
archival footage (Empire of the Sun takes place in World War II Shanghai and
environs). It is all a little like a Classics Illustrated version of the Ballard
novel.
The biggest coup of Spielberg's film was the location photography he brought
back from filming in the real Shanghai. These scenes are in the early sections
of Spielberg's film. They are also liberally employed in the Mayfield doc.
Mayfield's film was shown on ABC TV in 1987. It seemed amazing at the time: a
whole hour long documentary on commercial TV about a major writer of fiction,
J. G. Ballard. Do not know if this doc is available on DVD anywhere.
Empire of the Sun is a major novel. But it is so harrowing and emotionally
terrifying that I do not know if I would recommend it to anyone as casual
reading. Ballard's greatest works are probably his short stories. "The Voices of
Time" (1960), widely available in "The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard", is
one of the most beautifully written short stories I have ever read. "The Cloud
Sculptors of Coral D" (1987) from the same collection also shows this great
prose stylist at his height.
Les Mayfield went on to direct the slaptsick comedy Encino Man (1992). I love
this movie, but it is perhaps too silly for the readers of a_film_by. Brendan
Fraser, my favorite leading man of the 90's, is delightful as the cave man.
Recently saw a silent comedy short "Family Life" (Robert P. Kerr, 1924) that is
also a slapstick gem. This stuff is way out, even by Harold Lloyd standards.
Mike Grost
1237
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 10:36am
Subject: David, George, Mike
Very interesting posts.
Farrow is a director Sarris missed. I didn't know Fleisher was on
Some Kind of Woman, either, but before dismissing JF, take a look at
The Big Clock. A bit of a madman, Farrow fathered Mia and wrote a
widely-read biography of Father Damien, as well as other more obscure
books of hagiography, including a history of the Popes. He also
published a slim volume of poetry. The Big Clock is based on a novel
by communist poet Kenneth Frearing, but Farrow made it into an
allegory of the clockwork deity of materialism, incarnated by Charles
Laughton and brought down by Ray Milland and Farrow's wife Maureen
O'Sullivan - whom Farrow seems to have cheated on regularly, always
erasing his sin in the confessional. The elevator shot, where the
camera camps in a car that stops at succeeding floors, is Steadicam
before the letter, and the overall visual design of the film, much of
it set in a single building, is quite pleasing. Joe Dante is an
admirer.
The Ballard doc sounds fascinating. The Brits are damn clever at this
stuff. I recommend Stalin: The Red God by Frederick Baker, who is
finishing a doc on The Third Man that I can't wait to see. (The only
extant essay film by Welles I haven't seen is Vienna and The Third
Man, which JR likes.) The SF Fest's Golden Gate Awards is a great
gathering of docs. Saw two German/UK ones I loved there last year;
Rivers and Tides and The Edge of Time: Male Domains in the Caucasus.
Missed de Oliveira's Porto of my Memory, which sounds like an essay
film, much admired by Charles Tesson.
Mike, wait until you can see it in 35: Lions Love by Varda is one of
my all-time favorite films. She's uneven, but as Dan would say,
that's the one where she outdid herself.
1238
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 3:46pm
Subject: Varda, Porto
As for people are saying "it's in" and "it's out", I guess I'm not
completely familiar with the whole concept of essay film. At least, I find
myself thinking that Histoire(s) du Cinema is much more essayistic than,
say, every film by Chris. Marker I saw (Sans Soleil is more of a diary film,
Level Five more of a fictional subjective film such as the recent Suzhou
River by Lou Ye). I wouldn't know if Porto da Minha Infancia by Manoel de
Oliveira is fully an essay film. But it's clearly one of my Oliveira
favorites, much much better than Vou Para Casa, released the same year. It
is a collection of acted fragments from the strongest memories Oliveira
holds from the city Porto. The short-circuit between time as that in which
we live and time as History, one of Oliveira's reincidences, is here fully
tasteful and deep. But as the film runs only for 60 minutes, no distributor
was interested and the film was never commercially released in Brazil (as
Vou Para Casa and some others by Oliveira did). I could see it only two
times at the Mostra de São Paulo, which takes place in late octobers (it's
coming!).
As for Varda, I'm not a big fan of her career as a whole, but I have to have
my 50 cents and praise the filmmaker who made the charming Cleo but most of
all Le Bonheur, which stands for me as one of the most beautiful and strong
accounts of how life goes on. A collection of short films by Varda I was
able to see is also considerably beautiful, much more than her feature film
work in the 70s and 80s. Du Coté de la Côte is a lovely depiction of the
Côte d'Azur so sweet and charmful one would love to get a plane ticket right
away (though the praise is rather intimate, not propagandistic). Ulysse is
also a must-see, and, just to end as I started, I'm pretty in doubt if it is
an essay film: Varda does some soul-searching and tries to discovered what
was in her mind when she shot a photograph of a man, a boy and a goat's head
skull.
Ruy
1239
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:01pm
Subject: Farrow, Mazursky
> Farrow is a director Sarris missed. I didn't know Fleisher was on
> Some Kind of Woman, either, but before dismissing JF, take a look at
> The Big Clock. A bit of a madman, Farrow fathered Mia and wrote a
> widely-read biography of Father Damien, as well as other more obscure
> books of hagiography, including a history of the Popes. He also
> published a slim volume of poetry. The Big Clock is based on a novel
> by communist poet Kenneth Frearing, but Farrow made it into an
> allegory of the clockwork deity of materialism, incarnated by Charles
> Laughton and brought down by Ray Milland and Farrow's wife Maureen
> O'Sullivan - whom Farrow seems to have cheated on regularly, always
> erasing his sin in the confessional. The elevator shot, where the
> camera camps in a car that stops at succeeding floors, is Steadicam
> before the letter, and the overall visual design of the film, much of
> it set in a single building, is quite pleasing. Joe Dante is an
> admirer.
I'm a Farrow fan as well. I first heard about him from David Thomson,
who thinks Farrow did strong work at least up to 1956's BACK FROM
ETERNITY; I don't know if I love any of Farrow's 50s work, but between
1939's FIVE CAME BACK and 1949's ALIAS NICK BEAL are a string of
impressive movies, some of them little known: in addition to the those
two, THE BIG CLOCK, CALCUTTA, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST, CALIFORNIA, and
YOU CAME ALONG are all worthy. Farrow favored a very fluid camera
(CALIFORNIA, as I recall, is especially full of long tracking shots) and
a heavy, dark mood. He was surprisingly grave for a Hollywood
entertainment director: if you think about THE BIG CLOCK's script, it
seems like a pretty lightweight action-adventure film, but in Farrow's
hands the forces of evil are taken very seriously; they become
psychologically plausible and hence more frightening. I guess NICK BEAL
is my favorite, though I haven't seen any of these films in a while.
HIS KIND OF WOMAN was certainly very interesting, maybe a little bizarre
in the way it mixes comedy and drama. I was mixed on it when I saw it;
maybe I'm in a better position to like it these days.
> My favorite Wagner in a movie is Mazursky's Blume In Love.
I think BLUME IN LOVE is a really wonderful film. I didn't stay with
Mazursky as long as Bill did: after BLUME he started getting a little
too splashily self-aware for my taste, and I haven't even seen anything
after SCENES FROM A MALL. But I still think the director of BOB & CAROL
& TED & ALICE and BLUME IN LOVE is a major dude, though my current
feeling is that he didn't hold onto his gift. - Dan
1240
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:34pm
Subject: Re: Varda, Porto
Varda can be problematic.
I wish "Lion's Love" were available. It was dimissed
as frivoilous back in 1969, but I disagree.
--- Ruy Gardnier wrote:
> As for people are saying "it's in" and "it's out", I
> guess I'm not
> completely familiar with the whole concept of essay
> film. At least, I find
> myself thinking that Histoire(s) du Cinema is much
> more essayistic than,
> say, every film by Chris. Marker I saw (Sans Soleil
> is more of a diary film,
> Level Five more of a fictional subjective film such
> as the recent Suzhou
> River by Lou Ye). I wouldn't know if Porto da Minha
> Infancia by Manoel de
> Oliveira is fully an essay film. But it's clearly
> one of my Oliveira
> favorites, much much better than Vou Para Casa,
> released the same year. It
> is a collection of acted fragments from the
> strongest memories Oliveira
> holds from the city Porto. The short-circuit between
> time as that in which
> we live and time as History, one of Oliveira's
> reincidences, is here fully
> tasteful and deep. But as the film runs only for 60
> minutes, no distributor
> was interested and the film was never commercially
> released in Brazil (as
> Vou Para Casa and some others by Oliveira did). I
> could see it only two
> times at the Mostra de São Paulo, which takes place
> in late octobers (it's
> coming!).
> As for Varda, I'm not a big fan of her career as a
> whole, but I have to have
> my 50 cents and praise the filmmaker who made the
> charming Cleo but most of
> all Le Bonheur, which stands for me as one of the
> most beautiful and strong
> accounts of how life goes on. A collection of short
> films by Varda I was
> able to see is also considerably beautiful, much
> more than her feature film
> work in the 70s and 80s. Du Coté de la Côte is a
> lovely depiction of the
> Côte d'Azur so sweet and charmful one would love to
> get a plane ticket right
> away (though the praise is rather intimate, not
> propagandistic). Ulysse is
> also a must-see, and, just to end as I started, I'm
> pretty in doubt if it is
> an essay film: Varda does some soul-searching and
> tries to discovered what
> was in her mind when she shot a photograph of a man,
> a boy and a goat's head
> skull.
> Ruy
>
>
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1241
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 5:37pm
Subject: Re: Farrow, Mazursky
Mazursky's "Next Stop Greenwich Village" is ripe for
re-evaluation. I tought it glib when it was first
released, but now I think it's among his best. Lenny
Baker's [assing (he died early on in the first wave of
the AIDS epidemic) has made it all the more touching.
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
> > Farrow is a director Sarris missed. I didn't know
> Fleisher was on
> > Some Kind of Woman, either, but before dismissing
> JF, take a look at
> > The Big Clock. A bit of a madman, Farrow fathered
> Mia and wrote a
> > widely-read biography of Father Damien, as well as
> other more obscure
> > books of hagiography, including a history of the
> Popes. He also
> > published a slim volume of poetry. The Big Clock
> is based on a novel
> > by communist poet Kenneth Frearing, but Farrow
> made it into an
> > allegory of the clockwork deity of materialism,
> incarnated by Charles
> > Laughton and brought down by Ray Milland and
> Farrow's wife Maureen
> > O'Sullivan - whom Farrow seems to have cheated on
> regularly, always
> > erasing his sin in the confessional. The elevator
> shot, where the
> > camera camps in a car that stops at succeeding
> floors, is Steadicam
> > before the letter, and the overall visual design
> of the film, much of
> > it set in a single building, is quite pleasing.
> Joe Dante is an
> > admirer.
>
> I'm a Farrow fan as well. I first heard about him
> from David Thomson,
> who thinks Farrow did strong work at least up to
> 1956's BACK FROM
> ETERNITY; I don't know if I love any of Farrow's 50s
> work, but between
> 1939's FIVE CAME BACK and 1949's ALIAS NICK BEAL are
> a string of
> impressive movies, some of them little known: in
> addition to the those
> two, THE BIG CLOCK, CALCUTTA, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE
> MAST, CALIFORNIA, and
> YOU CAME ALONG are all worthy. Farrow favored a
> very fluid camera
> (CALIFORNIA, as I recall, is especially full of long
> tracking shots) and
> a heavy, dark mood. He was surprisingly grave for a
> Hollywood
> entertainment director: if you think about THE BIG
> CLOCK's script, it
> seems like a pretty lightweight action-adventure
> film, but in Farrow's
> hands the forces of evil are taken very seriously;
> they become
> psychologically plausible and hence more
> frightening. I guess NICK BEAL
> is my favorite, though I haven't seen any of these
> films in a while.
>
> HIS KIND OF WOMAN was certainly very interesting,
> maybe a little bizarre
> in the way it mixes comedy and drama. I was mixed
> on it when I saw it;
> maybe I'm in a better position to like it these
> days.
>
> > My favorite Wagner in a movie is Mazursky's Blume
> In Love.
>
> I think BLUME IN LOVE is a really wonderful film. I
> didn't stay with
> Mazursky as long as Bill did: after BLUME he started
> getting a little
> too splashily self-aware for my taste, and I haven't
> even seen anything
> after SCENES FROM A MALL. But I still think the
> director of BOB & CAROL
> & TED & ALICE and BLUME IN LOVE is a major dude,
> though my current
> feeling is that he didn't hold onto his gift. - Dan
>
>
>
__________________________________
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1242
From:
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 1:47pm
Subject: Composition
Art historians sometimes use simple math, such as circles and rectangles, to
explore painters' use of composition. I have been exploring the same idea,
trying to analyze the frames of classic auteur directors. There are now ten
modest articles using this approach on my web site.
Peter Tonguette, our co moderator, asked this to be shared with the mailing
list.
There is an introductory article on the subject at:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/zmath.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/zmath.htm
Hope at least one of these links will work on all computers.
From there, one can link to the specific film articles. These are often
embedded in longer auteur studies. For example, the mathematical article on La
Notte is part of a much longer piece on Antonioni, without much geometry. So you
need to follow the book marks at the top of each article, to get to the
specific films with math.
Film criticism needs innovation.
But it should stay true to the four big principles of auteurist film
criticism:
1) Films are works of art, and should be experienced as art.
2) Films are best understood in the context of their artist's whole career.
3) Reverence for the great classic filmmakers of the world.
4) Writing about film should address everyone in the general public who loves
film as art.
Mike Grost
1243
From:
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 2:06pm
Subject: Mazursky
"Next Stop," "Blume In Love," and particularly "Enemies, A Love Story" are
wonderful films, I think, though I'd agree that he's not the most consistent
filmmaker. I would like to mention "Tempest," a very underrated film. I quite
enjoyed this for its intelligent modernization of Shakespeare and the enjoyable
pairing of John and Gena in a non-Cassavetes film.
I'm almost completely unfamiliar with John Farrow, so I've gleaned a lot of
recommendations from this discussion. Thanks!
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1244
From:
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 2:15pm
Subject: Welles' Vienna
In a message dated 8/17/03 6:36:43 AM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>(The only
>extant essay film by Welles I haven't seen is Vienna and The Third
>Man, which JR likes.)
I actually thought this was kind of minor. It contains some lovely moments
of Welles strolling around the city, talking up its history, food, and hotels,
but is very, very short and the ending is a little unsatisfying to me. While
it isn't an essay film, his other meditation on a great city, "London," is
much better, I think, a wonderful series of comic vignettes. It's really too bad
that they can't find the sound for the Four Clubmen sequence, as it looks
different from anything else in the piece: very dynamic visually. You can see a
frame enlargement of Orson dressed as a bag lady from "London" in my
"Dreamers" piece at Senses of Cinema.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1245
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 6:46pm
Subject: Mazursky, Fraser, Genius Loci
I actually caught up with Mazursky in his later phase, and besides
Enemies, a masterpiece, I recommend Faithful, trashed by Cher's
attempts to re-edit it, but ultimately released in the director's
cut, starring and written by Chaz Palminteri. It was one of three
films New Line acquired from Frank Price's defunct company for which
I wrote presskits. I may be the only person who saw them, since at
that point they were orphans and barely got released. I also loved,
in that package, The Stupids.
Speaking of comedy, I neglected to respond to Mike on Brendan Fraser.
I never saw Bedazzled, but it was playing on the store monitor at
Odyssey Video Friday night, and he's really funny as "Michael
Jordan"! ("Play one game at a time," "Give a hundred and ten
percent.") They should've used him in the new Swept Away. I'm looking
forward to seeing him work with Bugs and Daffy in Looney Tunes: Back
in Business.
Essay films and travel "docs" overlap, but if the director is
meditating on a place, he's not doing a travelogue - he's harking
back to another 18th and 19th Century poetic tradition, where the
spirit of the poet encounters the spirit of the place (the genius
loci, sometimes embodied as a breeze or wind). Quite apart from essay
films or lyrics that make it their subject, this Romantic tradition
is very important to directors like Ford or Cimino, who talked a lot
when I interviewed him after Heaven's Gate about his imagination's
relationship with natural locations. Most of the post-German
Straubfilms are imbued with that, too. Directors less articulate than
Cimino and the Straubs who talk about this poorly documented but
widespread and very important phenomenon will use phrases
like "getting something out of a location." John Dorr's section on
Altman's river shoot in John Dorr's Christmas Greetings is really
about John's own response to the location - Altman is never seen.
1246
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 8:10pm
Subject: Re: Mazursky
I've seen only three Mazursky films
Next Stop Greenwich Village, Moscow on
the Hudson and Scenes from the Mall,
and disliked all very strongly. I
nearly rented Tempest yesterday.
Filipe
---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
1247
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 9:37pm
Subject: Farrow and Mazursky
The name John Farrow conjures up elaborate but pointless tracking
shots, especially in the very dull California where they seem to go
on for several moments. His Warners movies of the 30s are all
negligible but there are interesting things going on in some of his
40s work. My favorite is Red, Hot and Blue -- he imbued a Betty
Hutton musical with a surprising sense of gravity, and as a Betty
Hutton fanatic I believe all Hutton vehicles should have been treated
very seriously. Having read Mia Farrow's autobiography, I suspect
her father's life was more compelling than his films.
I love Mazursky's 70s and 80s work and in many ways he was the heir
to McCarey and his wry appreciation of human foibles. I think Harry
and Tonto and Next Stop Greenwich Vilage are particularly notable,
and their humaneness in particular renders them among the best films
of the 1970s.
David, nice to see you here. I had never heard that Lenny Baker died
of AIDS.
1248
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Aug 17, 2003 11:01pm
Subject: Re: Farrow and Mazursky
Hi Damien.
It's not a terribly well-known fact. But then, as I'm
sure you're well aware, so much of the pandemic is
lost to the ofuscation of official "history." Lenny
Baker spent his last days in an apartment complex just
off Sunset at the edge of West Hollywood. I was over
there a number of times to visit my friend Anthony
Holland (who later contracted HIV and comitted suicide
as he entered the last stages). Cynthia Harris was
also living there as were a number of television
writers and producers. I became aware of Lenny Baker's
presence through his absence -- because I never saw
him. Delivery people would stop by peridoically to
bring things to an upstairs room just over the pool.
"Oh my," said Tony, "Another delivery for poor Lenny
Baker. He's dying up there you know. Cancer. Some rare
form of it that nobody understands. And they can't do
anything about it." He was apparently quite disfigured
and didn't want anyone to see him.
So he died alone.
>
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1249
From: George Robinson
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 2:13am
Subject: Re: Mazursky, Fraser, Genius Loci
I'm embarrassed to admit that Enemies is the only Mazursky I've seen. (We did a little roundtable of our friends in the Iras -- Damien is one that you know -- last year listing our most embarrassing omissions and I didn't mention that one but I probably should have.)
However, speaking as someone who has been laboring fitfully on a book on American film and the Holocaust, I can honestly say that Enemies is one of the rare films on the topic that really is brilliant, right down to the ending.
g
Alas, where is human nature so
weak as in a bookstore?
-Henry Ward Beecher
----- Original Message -----
From: hotlove666
To: a_film_by@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2003 2:46 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Mazursky, Fraser, Genius Loci
I actually caught up with Mazursky in his later phase, and besides
Enemies, a masterpiece, I recommend Faithful, trashed by Cher's
attempts to re-edit it, but ultimately released in the director's
cut, starring and written by Chaz Palminteri. It was one of three
films New Line acquired from Frank Price's defunct company for which
I wrote presskits. I may be the only person who saw them, since at
that point they were orphans and barely got released. I also loved,
in that package, The Stupids.
Speaking of comedy, I neglected to respond to Mike on Brendan Fraser.
I never saw Bedazzled, but it was playing on the store monitor at
Odyssey Video Friday night, and he's really funny as "Michael
Jordan"! ("Play one game at a time," "Give a hundred and ten
percent.") They should've used him in the new Swept Away. I'm looking
forward to seeing him work with Bugs and Daffy in Looney Tunes: Back
in Business.
Essay films and travel "docs" overlap, but if the director is
meditating on a place, he's not doing a travelogue - he's harking
back to another 18th and 19th Century poetic tradition, where the
spirit of the poet encounters the spirit of the place (the genius
loci, sometimes embodied as a breeze or wind). Quite apart from essay
films or lyrics that make it their subject, this Romantic tradition
is very important to directors like Ford or Cimino, who talked a lot
when I interviewed him after Heaven's Gate about his imagination's
relationship with natural locations. Most of the post-German
Straubfilms are imbued with that, too. Directors less articulate than
Cimino and the Straubs who talk about this poorly documented but
widespread and very important phenomenon will use phrases
like "getting something out of a location." John Dorr's section on
Altman's river shoot in John Dorr's Christmas Greetings is really
about John's own response to the location - Altman is never seen.
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1250
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 2:55am
Subject: Re: Mazursky, Fraser, Genius Loci
It's one of the best films ever made about the
Holocaust.
And it's
href="http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g002/mazursky_grandaughter.html"
target="_blank">Paul's best film as well.
--- George Robinson wrote:
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
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1251
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 5:41am
Subject: Enemies, A Love story
Curiously, the book was not well received by Singer's admirers, who
saw it as a cold, unpleasant aberration provoked by the author's own
survivor's guilt. Mazursky fell in love with it and waited a decade
to snag the rights.
Side notes: Joe Roth greenlit it during his tenure at Fox, and it
didn't do too well - he made his money back with Home Alone the next
year. I got to have breakfast with Lena Olin to interview her for the
presskit - one of the most peculiar people I ever met.
As I said before, I wrote a review for the Cahiers comparing the film
favorably to 8 1/2, its hidden model. Until Olin's suicide the film
is entirely from Herman's point of view, but at that point Mazursky
cuts loose from Fellini's male-centered world view, and the women
begin to exist in their own right. I have always found the last shot
of the women with the baby - after Herman vanishes from the movie
and, essentially, from the face of the Earth - both beautiful and
eerie: uncanny. They clearly don't need him anymore.
1252
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 6:24am
Subject: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
Finally found some time to watch the third-rate bootleg copy of Sam
Fuller's TV movie, and while it's got the expected weaknesses (mostly
having to do with the acting, and the characters always explaining
what they are doing, what they have done, and what they have to do,
to the audience) it's actually very compelling and fun. Christa is
surprisingly good, whereas Glenn Corbett is just "there"; for me, the
thing we might call "Fuller-ness," as described by many of his
admirers (from Godard to Adrian Martin to, humbly, myself) is
intrinsically pleasurable. Whatever other values a Fuller film has
(and for most, there are quite a few), "Fuller-ness" is a reward unto
itself - a turn-on. It makes a bad movie like STREET OF NO RETURN
not only palatable but delectable.
The chief source of strength (as opposed to the chief strength)of
DEAD PIGEON is the music, and the careful use of sound effects to
fake a number of scenes/shots (think of the train station in
MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS). Without the music the movie might for the
most part be hollow and ineffective, but with it, many scenes have a
strong emotional current. The music is no achievement in itself:
often it's only "mood music," the same 5-10 notes playing over and
over. One melody is marked "waiting music," the next is "suspense
music," and "action music," or "charming, eccentric music," and so
on. Think of John Carpenter's synthesizer themes. And it occurs to
me that many of Fuller's films have choice music themes, and almost
every single one has a musical interlude of one kind or another. I
even like the so-called "infamous musical number" in THE NAKED KISS
and the "bad" '80s rock tunes in STREET OF NO RETURN.
Anyway, Fuller! Fuller! Fuller! Cinema! Cinema! Cinema!
Jaime
1253
From: Fred Camper
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 6:32am
Subject: Re: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
Jaime N. Christley:
"....The chief source of strength (as opposed to the chief strength) of
DEAD PIGEON is the music...."
Hmmm, it's been more than two decades since I've seen it, but I did see
a good 16mm print. What I remember most is the editing, which seemed
even more extreme than with his films from 1964 and before. Isn't there
some amazing cutting of shots of babies in a maternity ward shootout scene?
Also, while I realize that some will find the children's song scene in
"The Naked Kiss" to be ridiculous, it seems to me totally obvious that
it's extremely great, essential Fuller, etc. etc. etc.
So I'm glad you like it.
You probably do have a point about Fuller and music, though I didn't
much notice it in "Dead Pigeon." Certainly the use of Beethoven in
"Verboten" is at once ridiculous and really great, as is much of what's
best in Fuller.
- Fred
1254
From:
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 2:48am
Subject: Re: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
I love "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street." Amazingly, it turned up on TV
about three years ago in a pretty nice looking print; that's where I saw it. The
maternity ward scene mentioned by Fred is one of many great sequences. I know
Bill groups the film in his M.I.A. category, so I'm sure he has some
interesting things to say about it as well. (And this is as good a time as any to ask
him [or anyone else in the know]: is there any validity to the story being
circulated about Warners finally bringing out the full "Big Red One"?)
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1255
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 7:36am
Subject: Re: Dead Pigeon (spoilers)
Fred:
> Isn't there some amazing cutting of shots of babies in a maternity
> ward shootout scene?
Yes, that was v. unexpected, even though I knew about it in advance.
I couldn't help but think, "Hey, they just cut in some shots of
babies and staged the shoot-out stuff in a room with empty cribs,"
but it caught me sufficiently off-guard to be effective.
I love the way the man and woman clown pick up the dead Charlie
Umlaut and carry him off, mocking the three or four scenes in which
Sandy and Christa carry away their drugged victims earlier in the
film.
> Also, while I realize that some will find the children's song scene
> in "The Naked Kiss" to be ridiculous, it seems to me totally
> obvious that it's extremely great, essential Fuller, etc. etc. etc.
> So I'm glad you like it.
It's a real emotional high! And totally unexpected. And if you are
carried along on it, to say "it's bad" becomes meaningless. (Ergo, I
am an auteurist, I think.) This is where I would side with you re:
your theories of "personal taste."
> You probably do have a point about Fuller and music, though I
> didn't much notice it in "Dead Pigeon."
Last year I attended a Q&A session with John Carpenter (hosted by
Kent Jones), and he mentioned a term called "carpet music." I may
have that wrong, but he was referring to the kind of music that
doesn't really stand on its own, and you don't really notice it (I
happened to have chosen to notice it, for DEAD PIGEON), but it
enhances a scene's effect, or creates an effect. It fills a void but
does not call attention to itself - you walk softly on a carpet, but
you don't know it's there (unless you choose to). Anyway, I think
that's what's going on with DEAD PIGEON, whereas with NAKED KISS it's
something else entirely.
Peter:
> is there any validity to the story being circulated about Warners
> finally bringing out the full "Big Red One"?
I wish I knew where I read that, but it was some time ago and I
haven't heard anything since.
Jaime
1256
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 1:13pm
Subject: Re: Enemies, A Love story
> As I said before, I wrote a review for the Cahiers comparing the film
> favorably to 8 1/2, its hidden model.
The strange ending of BOB & CAROL was quite Fellini-esque, and his
second film, ALEX IN WONDERLAND, was dubbed 1 1/2 by some critic.
Mazursky often seemed to be under the influence of Fellini, for better
or worse. I feel it a lot in NEXT STOP - he keeps pushing the
interactions toward a sort of stand-alone lyricism.
Welcome to the list, David. - Dan
1257
From: jaketwilson
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 1:25pm
Subject: Re: Mazursky, Fraser, Genius Loci
hotlove666 wrote:
> I also loved,
> in that package, The Stupids.
Me too!
> Essay films and travel "docs" overlap, but if the director is
> meditating on a place, he's not doing a travelogue - he's harking
> back to another 18th and 19th Century poetic tradition, where the
> spirit of the poet encounters the spirit of the place (the genius
> loci, sometimes embodied as a breeze or wind).
This makes me think of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, which
presumably relates to a comparable set of poetic traditions.
Incidentally could some of Kiarostami's terrific early shorts (e.g.
Regularly or Irregularly) be considered essay films? Or is the
'educational film' a different genre again?
JTW
1258
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 1:41pm
Subject: Re: Enemies, A Love story
Hi Dan!
Paul is in love with "81/2," but the true model for
"Next Stop" is "I Vittelloni" -- which is also the
model for Scorsese's "Mean Streets."
I've always found it off that Fellini isn't popular
with most auteurists though he's arguably the ultimate
auteur.
--- Dan Sallitt wrote:
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1259
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 3:00pm
Subject: Fellini
David Ehrenstein:
Paul is in love with "81/2," but the true model for
"Next Stop" is "I Vittelloni" -- which is also the
model for Scorsese's "Mean Streets."
I've always found it off that Fellini isn't popular
with most auteurists though he's arguably the ultimate
auteur.
Hi David, welcome to the list.
Great point about I Vittelloni, Mazursky and Scorsese. I've always admired Mazursky for his bi-coastal point of view and the Italian & Jewish influences in his work that merge for an original style. For most the Scorsese connection seems natural but the Mazursky seems forced. They wrongly interpret he is quoting Fellini just to be arty but the restless spirit in Vittelloni merges perfectly with the characters and their environment in Next Stop.
You are right about Fellini - just read Thomson's entry in the new dictionary edition - I was staggering after reading it. Many Italians from Italy also have a tough time with Fellini. When Roma was originaly released a well-dressed gentlemen from Rome was in front of me. When the lights came up he was incensed - "This is not Rome" "What is the name of the film?" I kept asking him" "Roma!, Roma!" Finally I said no, the title is "Fellini's Roma" - it is his vision of Rome the way he sees it. I think it is the application of imaginiation and personal psychology that turns some off and allows those of us who recognize his genius to understand his mastery over style and content. Fellini accepted and embraced what others consider grotesque - emotional and physical exageration were life to Fellini - boy do I miss him.
Vinny LoBrutto
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1260
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 3:28pm
Subject: back to "genre" and "realism"
I would like to go back to the discussion on genre and realism.
Does anybody know any film that is great thanks to relationship with
any genre?
I don't and if I do that will be a total change in how I see art.
As
I mentioned in one of my previous e-mails, I believe art should
capture essential emotions through form, and that form should work in
the way Brakhage says art should be like: "Immediately
sensual".
(This is at least what I experienced in all the great films I have
seen since discovering the greatest pleasures I can get from the
films.)
The "immediately sensual" is something beyond and above
language, as
it cannot be achieved through a system of signs. And as long as the
individual is open to it, it should work outside of its references
and everything else it alludes to.
It is very obvious that knowing the "similar" art works will
help you
understand it but they are not necessary or essential to understand
it.
I guess it comes down to how you answer the following question:
What is a better way to get a Beethoven sonata: Listening to a
Beethoven symphony or listening to a few Mozart sonatas? I know many
people would go with the latter but I have to say I am very much
against that. And the simple reason is that "genre" is not an
essential part of an artwork but its creator definitely is.
I'm sure almost everybody here will agree that to understand
Ray's
Bitter Victory (a war film, and I agree that I don't need a
definition to know that) seeing other Rays will help more than seeing
other war films (am I wrong?). This simple fact just proves that, for
an auteurist, genre is not one of the essentials.
I guess the reason why Tag reacts so much to discussing genres is the
fact that people wrote too many books about genres and not
the "essentials".
I should also add that Fred's American Melodrama lectures in the
School of Art Institute of Chicago were great and the reason behind
that I think simply proves my point. He talked much more about how
each director was unique than how individual directors were similar
to or differed from others. Many people that I know of are going the
other way.
"Realism" is much more complicated word because it really is
a "ghost", something that does not exist and therefore
something that
really is not even related to anything. When somebody uses the word
realism, I usually get what he or she means following the context.
However, it still is an empty word in every single way and it has no
meaning if the author does not define it.
I personally think that the only people who used the word in an
interesting way were Mondrian and Brakhage. They were talking about
how an artwork should capture the reality of the emotions (that we
know are real in some way) and they both acknowledged that we
couldn't know anything about the reality of the outside world. I
think something very much worth reading if you have time (or even if
you don't have time) is Victor Grauer's great book
(unpublished, very
unfortunately), which you can read on his website: Montage, Realism,
and the Act of Vision. (http://worldzone.net/arts/doktorgee/home.htm)
After his lecture on Hitchcock's Wrong Man, somebody asked the most
interesting question of the discussion to Jonathan Rosenbaum:
"Why do
you think there were so many trains passing by, we both hear the
sounds and see the lights and they seem to have no connection to the
story?" His response to this very interesting question (and
I'd like
to hear if anybody has a comment on it) was something like: "The
area
the guy lived in had many train lines passing by so I guess he was
just trying to be realistic." That was the most un-cinematic
answer I
have ever heard for a good cinematic question.
So I guess the problem with the concept of realism is that either it
doesn't mean anything or it means something that blocks our
experience of art. That is of course until everybody in the world
agrees with me that it should be used in the way Mondrian used it.
Yoel
1261
From:
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 3:59pm
Subject: Genre
Genre studies is a very diffuse subject, with many different approaches.
It seems clear that genres encouraged directorial creativity in real ways.
Here is an excerpt from my web site, on the realtionship between genre and auteurism, focusing mainly on the genre of film noir:
For example, a characteristic of film noir is: "Directors are encouraged to do something creative with mirror shots." Another defining characteristic of film noir: "Directors are encouraged to do something creative with steep overhead camera angles." How the individual director does this is entirely up to the director. The genre encourages and suggests a certain approach. The director builds on that suggestion, using all of his personal creativity, to make something unique and wonderful.
For example, Anthony Mann used a series of steep overhead angles in the staircase finale of Desperate (1947). Robert Siodmak used an overhead angle at the start of the armored car sequence in Criss Cross (1949). The two sequences are very different. Mann is interested in the compositions he can create with overhead patterns of stairs; Siodmak with combining overhear shots with camera movement. Their overhead shots are not at all the same. Both are highly imaginative. Both clearly took great personal creativity on the part of their directors. They are the exact opposite of hack work: they are the sort of personal visual creativity celebrated by the auteur theory. But it is also clear that the genre of film noir encouraged both artists to experiment with overhead angles, and to do something spectacular with them in their movies.
Similarly, film noir encourages directors to make elaborate mirror shots. This almost certainly encouraged Mann to use a mirror for the famous murder scene in T-Men (1947), and Siodmak to include all the complex "mirror on the staircase" shots in The Spiral Staircase (1946). Once again, the two films show personal artistry, and their mirror shots are very different. Please also see the complex mirror shots in the hotel rooms in Phil Karlson's Kansas City Confidential and Tight Spot, or the shot combining a mirror and camera movement in the library sequence of Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard.
By contrast, Westerns, comedies and musicals of the late 1940's are far less likely to include complex mirror shots, or steep overhead angles.
Knowing about the characteristics of genres helps us understand a film. When we watch The Spiral Staircase, we can understand both what the genre of film noir encouraged Siodmak to attempt, and what is the result of his personal artistry. There is more of the latter than of the former, yet both are real.
Another example. The 1950's Hollywood Western genre includes such characteristics as: "Directors are encouraged to do something creative with landscape," and "Costume designers are encouraged to do something creative with brightly colored cowboy clothes." The specific landscapes in the films of such directors as John Ford, Anthony Mann and André de Toth are highly different and individual. Each shows their director's strong personal visual style. But it is also true that the genre itself encouraged these directors to do something spectacular with landscape.
Such an approach to studying genre is not reductive. It does not attempt to ignore personal creativity, or reduce a film to a collection of genre ideals. Instead, it helps highlight ways in which genres sponsored personal creativity.
The above approach also does not try to define genres as rigid laws, which directors must obey. Ford included landscapes in his Westerns, a genre which encouraged them. But he also invented great landscapes for his comedy The Quiet Man (1952), a genre which has little inherent interest in landscape.
Mike Grost
1262
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 4:48pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Actually Jonathan's answer is correct. "The Wrong Man"
is a hyper-realist film, shot on the locations where
it actually took place. I grew up in the smae area of
Queens and the story is quite familair to me.
Ballestrero's lawyer later ran for local office.
Trins are simply a fact of life in that area and to
ignore them in a film striving for documentary-style
realism (a la the Fox films of the same period) would
be impossible.
--- Yoel Meranda wrote:
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1263
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 5:38pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Nice post on genre, Mike.
> "Realism" is much more complicated word because it really is
> a "ghost", something that does not exist and therefore
> something that
> really is not even related to anything. When somebody uses the word
> realism, I usually get what he or she means following the context.
> However, it still is an empty word in every single way and it has no
> meaning if the author does not define it.
I guess this realism discussion drove away Tag Gallagher, which wasn't
my intention. Anyway, I saw two interesting new films recently that
both seemed to require that the R word, or something like it, be used to
discuss them.
The first was Amir Karakulov's DON'T CRY, a 2003 Kazakh film. In the
first shot, we learn that the protagonist is a foreign opera singer who
lost her voice and moved to Kazakhstan to live with family. The film is
shot with an unsteady DV camera, with non-actors improvising dialogue in
long, digressive scenes. Very little overt pleasure for the audience,
visually or verbally. At the very end, the protagonist's very sick
niece says she wants to hear her aunt sing. In the same unadorned,
dogged style as the rest of the film, Karakulov shows the actors
improvising stage makeup and applying it to their unglamorous faces.
Then, when the protagonist opens her mouth to sing, the style of the
film changes for its last few minutes: an orchestra accompanies the
protagonist's beautiful voice, the cutting becomes more classical, the
images more composed. The film becomes a full-bodied rendition of an
aria from MADAME BUTTERFLY, and then ends.
The experiment was fascinating, but I felt that the bulk of the film was
too tedious for me, even though I understood why Karakulov wanted it
that way. The other film, Lee Chang-Dong's 2002 South Korean OASIS, was
more to my taste. Here, the main character is a childlike, antisocial
criminal, just out of jail after three convictions, and clearly heading
for more trouble, as he gets in the face of everyone he meets, and seems
incapable of suppressing his rebelliousness against all social norms.
It's quite difficult to sustain identification with this character.
Eventually he meets and is inexplicably attracted to a woman who is
pretty much completely disabled with cerebral palsy: she can sometimes
get out a few words, but can't control her body enough to walk, crawl,
or stand.
The first clue to Lee's aesthetic plan comes in the woman's first scene.
We see a CGI bird fluttering around the ceiling of a small apartment.
Eventually the bird morphs into a beam of light: Lee pans down to show
the light coming from a mirror in the hand of the disabled woman, in our
first glimpse of her. There is no stylistic precedent for this special
effect in the film. The scene plays out without further fantastic
elements, but Lee repeats the trick soon after: the mirror, now broken,
reflects dots of light onto the ceiling, which turn into CGI butterflies
and fly away. As the film begins to document the romance between these
characters, fantasy interludes become a part of the film's narrative:
the characters from an Indian mural on the wall enter the film at one
point, and at various times the actress playing the disabled woman
simply stands up, drops her cerebral palsy impersonation, and becomes a
normal attractive woman for the balance of a scene. The criminal
character seems partly redeemed by love in the film's second half, and
partly unable to change his sociopathic ways.
The main thing I want to say is that you really can't get at the heart
of what these films are trying to do without the R word. In DON'T CRY,
the contrast between uneventful actions/uncomposed images/unacted
dialogue and a full-bodied operatic high is the point of the movie:
style changes. In OASIS, the interplay between the debilitating
portrait of psychological and physical malfunction and the imagery of
fantastic idealism is the basis for the film's structure. You can try
to talk about DON'T CRY purely in terms of opera and everyday life, or
OASIS purely in terms of a depiction of inner life made manifest, but
then you lose the main point, which is that the films' form is
dichotomized, and the two styles collide meaningfully within each film.
If you don't use the word "realism," you just have to talk around it,
as I've been trying to do.
Another thing I want to say is that the baseline of realism that each
film lays down seems to have something to do with a denial of pleasure,
a pleasure that other movies usually give us. In DON'T CRY, we are
denied pleasure in so many ways: there's no narrative kick, no enjoyable
character, no lucid imagery (the film is shot in DV). In OASIS, we're
denied the considerable pleasure of likable characters and beautiful
bodies to identify with, and the pleasure of seeing people change or
even control their lives. Here the form of realism is Zola-like, and if
I'm not mistaken, the word "realism" first became popular in conjunction
with Zola, no? Anyway, I do believe that a denial of a pleasure that
has become conventional is often or always part of the shifty "realism"
concept.
- Dan
1264
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 6:12pm
Subject: Re: Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
sorry to ask but what's an M.I.A.?
----- Original Message -----
From:
To:
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 3:48 AM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
> I love "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street." Amazingly, it turned up on TV
> about three years ago in a pretty nice looking print; that's where I saw
it. The
> maternity ward scene mentioned by Fred is one of many great sequences. I
know
> Bill groups the film in his M.I.A. category, so I'm sure he has some
> interesting things to say about it as well. (And this is as good a time
as any to ask
> him [or anyone else in the know]: is there any validity to the story being
> circulated about Warners finally bringing out the full "Big Red One"?)
>
> Peter
>
> http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
1265
From:
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 3:33pm
Subject: M.I.A
In a message dated 8/18/03 2:55:45 PM, rnobrega@c... writes:
>sorry to ask but what's an M.I.A.?
I should apologize for throwing the term out there without giving some
background!
"M.I.A." (Missing In Action) is a term Bill uses to describe some of the
post-Hollywood films of Hollywood directors like Welles, Vidor, Boetticher, and so
on. I'll let Bill give a full explanation, but I touch on his definition
briefly in my piece on Welles' "The Dreamers" (an "M.I.A." film if there ever was
one.)
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1266
From: Fred Camper
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 8:08pm
Subject: Re: M.I.A
ptonguette@a... wrote:
>In a message dated 8/18/03 2:55:45 PM, rnobrega@c... writes:
>
>
>I should apologize for throwing the term out there without giving some
>background!
>
>"M.I.A." (Missing In Action) is a term Bill uses to describe some of the
>post-Hollywood films
>
Well, but you should explain the source, for those whose first language
isn't English. It's originally a war term, for a soldier who cannot be
found and is probably either captured by the enemy or dead. It could
also be used for people in other situations -- a person who is hiding
out from a big fightwith her husband might be slightly ironically said
to be "missing in action." So it can be used for a film too, something
that gets lost not in actual war but in the chaos of commercial
distribution.
I'm reading the genre stuff with interest and thinking about a response
when I get time to write one.
- Fred
1267
From:
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 4:10pm
Subject: Re: M.I.A
In a message dated 8/18/03 4:08:40 PM, f@f... writes:
>Well, but you should explain the source, for those whose first language
>isn't English.
Fred's right - my apologies, Ruy.
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1268
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 9:18pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Yoel:
> I'm sure almost everybody here will agree that to understand
> Ray's
> Bitter Victory (a war film, and I agree that I don't need a
> definition to know that) seeing other Rays will help more than
seeing
> other war films (am I wrong?). This simple fact just proves that,
for
> an auteurist, genre is not one of the essentials.
But what if one rejects the premise that a film is to
be "understood"? I don't think one understands art: one experiences
it. Different contexts will lead to different ways of understanding
this experience. The binary opposition between "knowledge of other
Ray films" and "knowledge of other war films" doesn't get at the root
of auteurism, in my opinion. Both (as well as many other
classifications) are important for contextualizing and probing our
experience of art.
> "Realism" is much more complicated word because it really is
> a "ghost", something that does not exist and therefore
> something that
> really is not even related to anything. When somebody uses the word
> realism, I usually get what he or she means following the context.
> However, it still is an empty word in every single way and it has
no
> meaning if the author does not define it.
This simply isn't true though! I already set forth a definition that
nobody's bothered to comment on, so here I go again -- realism is the
attempt to recreate the semblance of reality of art. It isn't
necessarily illusionism: people don't have to be "fooled" for art to
be realist. And it's clearly dependent on historical and cultural
context: what is realistic to an ancient Egyptian isn't necessarily
so to a 19th-century Parisian, and what's more, realism might not be
valued so highly in one context in comparison to another. And, most
importantly, to speak of realism in art or to call an artwork realist
is *not* the same as saying it is actually "realistic"
and "truthfully representative" (ideas that, I believe, actually are
bankrupt). But this is, as far as I can tell, a satisfactory
definition of realism, and just because the concept is constructed
and mobile doesn't mean it is therefore "nonexistant."
'Auteurism' is a complex word too, but by this sort of rationale we
could call "auteurism" a word without meaning. Maybe it is, but that
doesn't stop us from discussing the issues with the utmost dedication
and interest. The same with realism, an important concept running
throughout the history of art, in fact long before the celebration of
individual authorship entered our enlightened homo sapien minds.
--Zach
1269
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 9:45pm
Subject: Big Red One
I started working on getting that restored in 1978, when the
lorimar cxut was released. Got Joel Silver involved, was told the
neg had disappeared, found it with a little help from Lieth
Adams. Joe Hyams took it on and got it ok'd by Bob Daley, with a
production number, then it stopped dead. Joe never said why.
Christa asked me and Tony Bozanich (post-production
coordinator on It's All True, my partner on the restoration project)
to hand off to Michael Friend, then head of the Academy Archives,
where he had done a lot of important work just barely inside his
brief of restoring Oscar winners (e.g. all of Satyajit Ray!) and
some outside it. We gladly did so. No sooner had Michael
started doing a budget with Curtis Hanson than I got a call from
Rick Schmidlin, of Touch of Evil remix fame, wanting in. I asked
Michael, who had the misfortune to know Schmidlin before
anyone and said "Over my dead body." I told Schmidlin he
wasn't needed. Someone who should have known better gave
him Christa's number, and in one afternoon he talked her into
dumping Michael, without telling him or consulting me. When I
heard about it, I told her the guy was just interested in scoring
and would forget her as soon as he had. She went ahead;
Michael, outraged, bailed out, and subsequently lost his job
(he's now at Sony), and Schmidlin didn't return Christa's calls for
3 years. Lately Richard Schickel has gotten interested in
pursuing it through his Warner Video connection, with Schmidlin
and the ever-faithful Curtis, but I hear from Christa that they may
only restore a couple of scenes for the DVD - not what Michael
or, before him, Tony and I had planned at all. A tragedy. But I
adore Christa, who made a mistake because Schmidlin came in
with a recommendation from someone she trusted.
Another tragedy is what became of Street of No Return. The
alcoholic French producer took Sam's cut and spent a year with
TEN EDITORS (look at the credits!) recutting it, turning what
would have been a beautiful swan song into chopped liver. As
Fred has pointed out, Sam had great editing ideas, and the
obvious rhythmic flaws in Street, Red One and Shark, which was
also taken away from him, are not his style. So the swan song
turns out to be The Madonna and the Dragon (aka Tlinginlit), a
down-and-dirty political noir shot in the Phillipines just before the
overthrow of Marcos, while the Street producer was "saving"
Sam's cut. I love Madonna and also, for the record, Thieves After
Dark, a beautiful film that caught many critics off guard because
they hadn't noticed that White Dog was the work of a man who
had recently become a father, and had finally gotten WWII off his
chest with Red One. His last film, a 30-minute Patricia
Highsmith adaptation called The Day and Hour of Reckoning
made for French tv, is quite insane. I think Jaime would like it.
Maybe someone will have a French Fuller retro some day and
kick it off with his first Eurofilm, Dead Pigeon. Fred, I think we
both saw it at the First Avenue Screening Room.
1270
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 9:57pm
Subject: MIA
One nuance: when I started writing about the MIA's for Cahiers,
they hadn't been heard from for a while, and I wanted to say they
were "Missing, but in action" - ie they had been making films
outside the system. (The Cahiers had been inattentive to
American cinema for years as well, because of Vietnam, where
the military expression "MIA" had resurfaced.) My original intent
was to contrast them with filmmakers of the CIA (Cinema
Independant Americain), which was essentially at that time a
government grant system - one that Serge D. had asked me to
fill them in on, although I never did. The idea was that The Other
Side of the Wind or Metaphor were better models for young
filmmakers desiring to work outside the system than Nick
Broomfield or Jill Godmillow, the two examples I had in mind
when I coined the never-used term "CIA." That configuration has
changed with Sundance, but I still cherish the MIAs. Auteurist
nostalgia.
1271
From:
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 7:03pm
Subject: Re: Big Red One
In a message dated 8/18/03 5:45:47 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
>I hear from Christa that they may
>only restore a couple of scenes for the DVD - not what Michael
>or, before him, Tony and I had planned at all. A tragedy.
That's unbelievably depressing. I don't understand why they wouldn't put out
the full version of the film if they have access to the deleted scenes.
Something similar seems to be happening with the upcoming DVD of Bogdanovich's
"Mask"; there are deleted scenes listed as special features, but there's no
indication that they've been restored to the actual film. I hope I'm wrong.
I will say that it's a real testament to Fuller's genius that I do very much
like the current versions of "The Big Red One" and "Street of No Return"; as
butchered as they are, the force of his talent and personality makes them
better than many films where the directors had final cut! I haven't seen "Thieves
After Dark" or "The Day and Hour of Reckoning," but I think I've seen them
turn up on eBay from time to time, so I'll definitely keep my eyes peeled.
Peter
http://hometown.aol.com/ptonguette/index.html
1272
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 11:29pm
Subject: Red One
It's a mystery to me. Since the key to financing a true restoration
of Sam's cut is tv sales (according to a plan worked out by Marvin
Usevich and super-salesman Norman Horowitz years ago), the
tv sales staff may be blocking it - most of them came from
Lorimar. That's one speculation. I have never understood why it
got as far as having a production number and then died - Hyams
retired (he used to "handle" Eastwood and Kubrick) and never
said anything about what happened. It could make them money,
and there are plenty of very competent folks like Tony B. or
Michael F. who'd gladly do the work for flight pay. I watched the
same thing happen for 11 years with It's All True, but that had a
curse on it! This one is beyond me. I just hope it happens
someday by some miracle, because the 4-hour cut will be
mind-blowing.
Side note: When Greg Ford was at Warners doing Blooper
Bunny et al., he found a vault that contained the scoring
sessions for The Wrong Man and Rebel Without a Cause - the
former including discussions during the session between
Hitchcock and Herrmann. He gave it to someone at Warners,
and they lost it.
1273
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 11:39pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
how can there be any valid criticism if one can't comment properly on the
natures of our feelings towards film, if they're so innefable? I don't know
if I get that right, but it sounds to me outdated heideggerianism as much as
what the french are used to call "demission de la critique". I can be wrong,
of course...
ruy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoel Meranda"
To:
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 12:28 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] back to "genre" and "realism"
> The "immediately sensual" is something beyond and above
> language, as
> it cannot be achieved through a system of signs. And as long as the
> individual is open to it, it should work outside of its references
> and everything else it alludes to.
>
1274
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Mon Aug 18, 2003 11:44pm
Subject: Re: M.I.A
great "thank you"s to fred, peter and bill for the generous explanation and
the context of the term. I knew alreadu what the term meant in military
terms, but I guess I wouldn't have guessed the whole context of the term
when adapted to the world of cinema by myself... :)
ruy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Camper"
To:
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] M.I.A
>
>
> ptonguette@a... wrote:
>
> >In a message dated 8/18/03 2:55:45 PM, rnobrega@c... writes:
> >
> >
> >I should apologize for throwing the term out there without giving some
> >background!
> >
> >"M.I.A." (Missing In Action) is a term Bill uses to describe some of the
> >post-Hollywood films
> >
> Well, but you should explain the source, for those whose first language
> isn't English. It's originally a war term, for a soldier who cannot be
> found and is probably either captured by the enemy or dead. It could
> also be used for people in other situations -- a person who is hiding
> out from a big fightwith her husband might be slightly ironically said
> to be "missing in action." So it can be used for a film too, something
> that gets lost not in actual war but in the chaos of commercial
> distribution.
>
> I'm reading the genre stuff with interest and thinking about a response
> when I get time to write one.
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
1275
From: Damien Bona
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:35am
Subject: Clarence Brown
Last night I watched The Yearling and was wondering if anyone had
thoughts on Clarence Brown.
I find him to be a maddeningly inconsistent (even within single
sequences) director, one who at his best can be as lyrical in his
rendering of communities as Ford and as evocative in the portrayal
of nature as King Vidor. Characters in Brown's movies seem to have
the gift of understanding each other in ways that go far beyond the
dialogue they exchange (there are certain looks exchanged between
Donald Crisp and Anne Revere in National Velvet that bespeak of a
life shared over many years). He also peppered his movies with
moments and elements that are so poetic and so outside the realm of
the normal Hollywood narrative film that they border on the
experimental (e.g. Claude Jarman, Jr. running through the woods with
a group of deer to the music of Sibelius -- filtered through Herbert
Stothart -- in a scene that takes on a completely balletic feel;
Butch Jenkins watching the train in The Human Comedy; the highly
stylized treatment of "Problem Movie" subject matter with the Juano
Hernandez and David Brian characters working as symbolic prototypes
rather than flesh-and-blood people, which makes for a jarring
contrast to documentary look of Robert Surtees's photography in
Intruder In The Dust).
Brown was also capable of causing great depths of feeling to emanate
from his characters – even a film as palpably MGM-phony as National
Velvet is highly emotional, and Of Human Hearts is hokum but it gets
me every time, thanks particularly to Beulah Bondi. Which brings up
another Brown attribute – he was a superb director of actors. He
even managed to elicit subtle and affecting performances from such
hams as Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore (Ah, Wilderness!) and
Mickey Rooney (The Human Comedy). For what it's worth, he was
Garbo's favorite director.
On the other hand, much of Brown's work seems perfunctory, and such
movies as Come Live With Me and They Met In Bombay could have been
the work of any Metro hack (Richard Thorpe, Woody van Dyke, Robert Z.
Leonard, etc.). And sometimes when he was striving for "important"
and/or universal effects, he simply came across as unbecomingly self-
conscious and hollow. The Human Comedy in particular runs the
entire gamut of Brown's strengths and weakness, veering wildly from
the elegiac to the bathetic to the just plain dull.
-- Damien
1276
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 4:32am
Subject: Re: Clarence Brown
> Last night I watched The Yearling and was wondering if anyone had
> thoughts on Clarence Brown.
I've seen a handful of his films and usually didn't see much going on,
but I do like his ANNA CHRISTIE enough to be interested in him. Most of
the films of his I've seen are alleged to be minor works. - Dan
1277
From:
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 2:31am
Subject: Clarence Brown
During the early 1930's, Brown directed Joan Crawford in a number of
vehicles, that helped define this star's image. Possessed (1931) is riveting, a word
that one does not always apply to Brown's other projects. There is a note about
this film on my web site, mainly dealing with the unusual "long take and
depth staging" visual construction of this film. Please see:
(http://members.aol.com/MG4273/brown.htm)
http://members.aol.com/MG4273/brown.htm
I keep planning on expanding this article, but keep getting stopped in my
tracks by the bewildering variety of Brown's work, as described by Damien Bona in
his post.
His Garbo silents "Flesh and the Devil" (1926) and "A Woman of Affairs"
(1929) have gotta be two of the dullest silent films ever made. The characters seem
de-boned and neurasthenic. Their camera work has none of the fascinating
qualities of Possessed. In fact, it makes one wonder if Possessed's visual style
and staging is the work of its cinematographer, Oliver Marsh.
Idiot's Delight (1939), an adaptation of Robert Sherwood's really strange
political comedy stage play, seems just plain weird today.
Mike Grost
1278
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 6:57am
Subject: Re: Bigger Than Life question
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
>
> Near the end of the film, Lou Avery (Barbara Rush) and her son Richie are in > a hospital waiting room. Lou tries to flag down a nurse to get some
> information on the status of her husband. The nurse passes her by, either failing to
> hear her or ignoring her, and Lou says something. What does she say? It sounds
> like "Nurses are always in such a hurry" but I'm not sure. Help?
I heard exactly that at the Walter Reade tonight -- the first word is extremely clenched. Not exactly the film's most quotable line, is it? I suppose, though, it introduces a shift in her attitude, borne out in her almost startlingly assertive exchange with the doctor.
The Walter Reade ballyhoos its widescreen series: "Whether you know these movies by heart or if you're coming to discover them for the first time, we can promise you one thing: they'll never look better than they do on our big, beautiful screen, which has the best projection in town." While the projection is fine, that promise was not upheld tonight. The screen is wide but, like others in New York's revival houses, apparently not quite wide enough -- actors were sometimes cut off at the left. The theater concedes that ALIENS will be shown at 1:85, but that implies that everything else is 2:35 -- some enterprising periodical (which probably won't be Film Comment) should send a surveying team out to gauge the exact ratio on display.
But that's a quibble; much more disappointing was that the usual hideously purple print was shown -- not the revelatory new one from the Ray retro, which was projected out of focus at MoMA (unless it's the print itself that's out of focus), and which I'd hoped for a clearer look at here.
By the way, is this the nearest approximation of the Abraham and Isaac auteur film that Bill K. was recently imagining?
1279
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 7:46am
Subject: Re: Varda, Porto
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Ruy Gardnier" wrote:
> I wouldn't know if Porto da Minha Infancia by Manoel de
> Oliveira is fully an essay film. But it's clearly one of my Oliveira
> favorites, much much better than Vou Para Casa, released the same year. It
> is a collection of acted fragments from the strongest memories Oliveira
> holds from the city Porto. The short-circuit between time as that in which
> we live and time as History, one of Oliveira's reincidences, is here fully
> tasteful and deep.
While I haven't seen many of the films mentioned here, it would be hard to imagine an essay film more sublime than OPORTO OF MY CHILDHOOD. If anything, it may be too poetic to qualify as an "essay."
For the record, for those wishing to pursue the subject, there's a 30-page essay by Phillip Lopate, "In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film," attempting to define this elusive form (and ultimately naming Marker as "the cinema's only true essayist").
1280
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 11:29am
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
The two subjects are separate discussions so I will try to keep them
separate.
David wrote: "Actually Jonathan's answer is correct. "The Wrong
Man"
is a hyper-realist film, shot on the locations where it actually took
place."
So should we just accept that trains are there and that they are
nothing but a "fact of life" as David puts it? But they are
something
more than a fact of life in Wrong Man. They do have a destabilizing
effect because of the unpredictability of when they are going to
happen and because they change the light composition and sound rhythm.
And by the way, Wrong Man is a hyperrealist film? Assuming I know
what you mean by that, Wrong Man is as formalistic as a film gets,
just as all the other great films that are called realist or
naturalist. Taking things for granted, saying they just add up for
the hyper-realistic effect, blocks seeing and experiencing what is in
front of you.
Zach's definition of realism ("realism is the attempt to
recreate the
semblance of reality of art.") is great. Then, my question is:
Why
should I care for something that cannot even be achieved? I like the
fact that you define it as an attempt, but it is an attempt that is
going to fail with no doubt whatsoever (right?). Discussions about
what was attempted or what the intentions were do not really help us
understand a film (of course they might in a very very indirect way).
For me, the question always is what the film does to you and not what
it wants to do to you.
Dan wrote: "Another thing I want to say is that the baseline of
realism that each film lays down seems to have something to do with a
denial of pleasure, a pleasure that other movies usually give us."
I only have one criterion for deciding whether a film is a good
artwork or not: Whether or not it gives me esthetic pleasure. If the
realism is going to deny me that, then for me we are not talking
about art but "cultural artifacts". Were you also talking
about
esthetic pleasures?
Also, many people thought it was very useful to use the term realism
to describe Dardenne Brothers' amazing Le Fils (The Son). The
best
review I read was talking about how much of a formalist Dardennes
are.
Just to summarize what I want to say about realism: In art, whether
you want it or not you "shape" the reality in front of you
according
to your needs. As a film viewer there is only one reality you can
definitely be sure of. And that is the fact that there is a bunch of
light projected onto the screen in front of you. The lights create
compositions, compositions create rhythms, and together they
hopefully express something that is in us.
I love the following quote by Ernie Gehr (January 1971):
"In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own
presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as
vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant
garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a
real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not
reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a
vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own
existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an
internal balance of time, a movement within a given space."
The concept of realism blocks us from experiencing this "movement
within a given space". And the perfect example is Rosenbaum's
comment
on Wrong Man.
Yoel
1281
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 0:10pm
Subject: The Great DVD Extras Snow-Job
Hello crew -
The discussion of BIG RED ONE on this list coincided with my viewing of the
DVD of a great film: Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. It is great
to see the film itself in such a pristine form, but the 'extras' on this
double-disc leave an awful lot to be desired. And my hermeneutic suspicion
kicked into overdrive, as I wondered: how many DVDs are actually 'snow jobs'
designed to obscure the awful truth about the troubled production or
distribution history of certain films?
Richard Schickel's commentary over this movie is a disgrace - lazy,
uninteresting, doesn't cite sources like Frayling's biography or
anybody/anything else. (He talks about the 'opium pipe dream narrative'
theory like it's a bright idea passed on from Leone straight to him!) But
what really bugged me was how LITTLE he lets on about the well-known release
problems of the film - the notorious, chronologically reshuffled 'American
cut'. He does say: 'this is a version unseen in 1984 in North America', or
words to that effect, but that's about it. No discussion of the 'producer's
cut' and what it actually entailed. (I actually could not bear to listen to
every word of this windy 219 minute commentary, so if anybody can correct me
here, so be it!)
The snow job is radically compounded on the inset materials of the DVD
itself: asterisks mark THREE SCENES as 'containing footage originally unseen
in USA' or somesuch, when the original cuts excised some 80 minutes of the
movie !!!!
I can only suspect that this DVD represents the producer's and studio's sly
attempt to cover up and erase the extent of what they actually did to that
film, once upon a time! With Leone not around to intervene. And Schickel on
hand to tacitly collaborate with the studio's spotless self-presentation.
By the way, the DVD does NOT contain any of the 'excellent 40 minutes' of
extra stuff which Leone himself took out in his final edit (scenes which I
discuss, working from the full version of the script, in my BFI book on the
film). Now the endless rumour about this material seeing the light of day
has resurfaced in a new form which I heard today (at a Melbourne screening
of the glorious new English-language version of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE
UGLY): it is to appear in a restored print? I doubt it, but does anyone have
any hard facts about this?
Viva Leone!
Adrian Martin
1282
From: jaketwilson
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 0:11pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Yoel, when you say that genre doesn't matter -- or more generally,
'context doesn't matter' -- you seem to be advocating what I would call
an 'innocent' way of relating to art, i.e. a willingness to respond in
the terms laid down by the work of art itself. I agree with this
completely -- if we don't respond 'innocently' to begin with we simply
cut ourselves off from whatever new experience might be on offer. This
relates to a point I was trying to make earlier -- that most filmmakers
have in mind a primary audience of 'ordinary' viewers rather than
'expert' critics. I also agree that artworks are ultimately
'experienced' rather than 'understood' and that the unique experiences
they provide cannot be reduced to terms other than their own (else why
would artists bother creating them in the first place?). Still, to the
extent that our self-appointed task is critical evaluation and analysis
of given films ('understanding,' if you like) we do have to situate
these films in a wider context of one kind or another -- else where do
we get our standards for comparison? I would argue that you can't fully
understand the nature of Griffith's achievement without a wider
knowledge of silent cinema, any more than you can fully understand
Beethoven's achievement without a wider knowledge of classical music,
though you can certainly respond very intensely to both artists without
any such expertise. Equally, while you don't need any special knowledge
of film to be disgusted by an Alan Parker movie, it's hard to explain
just why Parker's movies are bad without placing them alongside
something good.
On realism, I was recently reading Adrian Martin's essay on Manny
Farber (published in the NZ literary journal Landfall). Martin points
out that in a way Farber is more of a 'realist' in his criticism than
even Bazin -- one of his very frequent moves is to praise or fault a
film on the grounds of literal accuracy, even when the film itself
doesn't seem to be playing by these rules. (Two examples that spring to
mind are Farber commending Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH as a 'document of
a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt,' and
complaining about Jodie Foster's performance in TAXI DRIVER on the
grounds that Foster seems too cheerful and bright-eyed to play a child
prostitute.) Something I really like in Farber's criticism is the way
he moves back and forth between a quite abstract, 'formalist' mode of
commentary, and these kinds of concrete notations where he's seeking to
make connections between the fictional world of a film and his own
personal perception of 'reality.' Ultimately these two ways of looking
seem to complement each other, since our only way of critically
'placing' a film is by setting it against the sum total of our own
experiences, including but not limited to experiences of other movies.
So I don't agree at all that a great film operates purely in its own
terms without referring to anything outside itself -- rather, the the
better a film 'works' for me, the more aspects of my life outside the
cinema it seems to relate to and comment on. Incidentally, while I
think that Dan's examples of 'realism' are convincing, I'm not 100%
convinced that such realism is always experienced in the first instance
as unpleasurable. For me, there's an automatic rush of pleasure
whenever I feel that typically disregarded or repressed truths about
existence have been recreated onscreen. This has nothing much to do
with whether a film can be considered 'realistic' overall -- it happens
all the time in good comedy, for example. Though perhaps it could be
argued that comedy -- even art generally? -- always involves deriving
pleasure from its opposite.
JTW
1283
From: jaketwilson
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 0:12pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Yoel, when you say that genre doesn't matter -- or more generally,
'context doesn't matter' -- you seem to be advocating what I would call
an 'innocent' way of relating to art, i.e. a willingness to respond in
the terms laid down by the work of art itself. I agree with this
completely -- if we don't respond 'innocently' to begin with we simply
cut ourselves off from whatever new experience might be on offer. This
relates to a point I was trying to make earlier -- that most filmmakers
have in mind a primary audience of 'ordinary' viewers rather than
'expert' critics. I also agree that artworks are ultimately
'experienced' rather than 'understood' and that the unique experiences
they provide cannot be reduced to terms other than their own (else why
would artists bother creating them in the first place?). Still, to the
extent that our self-appointed task is critical evaluation and analysis
of given films ('understanding,' if you like) we do have to situate
these films in a wider context of one kind or another -- else where do
we get our standards for comparison? I would argue that you can't fully
understand the nature of Griffith's achievement without a wider
knowledge of silent cinema, any more than you can fully understand
Beethoven's achievement without a wider knowledge of classical music,
though you can certainly respond very intensely to both artists without
any such expertise. Equally, while you don't need any special knowledge
of film to be disgusted by an Alan Parker movie, it's hard to explain
just why Parker's movies are bad without placing them alongside
something good.
On realism, I was recently reading Adrian Martin's essay on Manny
Farber (published in the NZ literary journal Landfall). Martin points
out that in a way Farber is more of a 'realist' in his criticism than
even Bazin -- one of his very frequent moves is to praise or fault a
film on the grounds of literal accuracy, even when the film itself
doesn't seem to be playing by these rules. (Two examples that spring to
mind are Farber commending Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH as a 'document of
a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt,' and
complaining about Jodie Foster's performance in TAXI DRIVER on the
grounds that Foster seems too cheerful and bright-eyed to play a child
prostitute.) Something I really like in Farber's criticism is the way
he moves back and forth between a quite abstract, 'formalist' mode of
commentary, and these kinds of concrete notations where he's seeking to
make connections between the fictional world of a film and his own
personal perception of 'reality.' Ultimately these two ways of looking
seem to complement each other, since our only way of critically
'placing' a film is by setting it against the sum total of our own
experiences, including but not limited to experiences of other movies.
So I don't agree at all that a great film operates purely in its own
terms without referring to anything outside itself -- rather, the the
better a film 'works' for me, the more aspects of my life outside the
cinema it seems to relate to and comment on. Incidentally, while I
think that Dan's examples of 'realism' are convincing, I'm not 100%
convinced that such realism is always experienced in the first instance
as unpleasurable. For me, there's an automatic rush of pleasure
whenever I feel that typically disregarded or repressed truths about
existence have been recreated onscreen. This has nothing much to do
with whether a film can be considered 'realistic' overall -- it happens
all the time in good comedy, for example. Though perhaps it could be
argued that comedy -- even art generally? -- always involves deriving
pleasure from its opposite.
JTW
1284
From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 0:19pm
Subject: Re: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Well, I agree with most of Yoel's sentiments, but with some
qualifications. As Mike points out, seeing how a film differs from
others in its genre is one way of approaching it; sometimes those
differences can be a part of its meaning. This isn't exactly a "genre"
issue, but many have pointed out that by killing off his star a third of
the way into the movie in "Psycho," Hitchcock violated audience
expectations -- expectation built up over watching many films -- and
thus made a film that was far more unsettling than it would be
otherwise. And the flashback structure and bitter ending of "The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance" depend at least to some degree on their
relationship to the conventions of the western. This is only a very tiny
aspect of what's great about them, but it's a relationship I can't
dismiss entirely.
Are these films great "thanks to relationship with any genre"? Of course
not. But what *is* it that makes a film great? I think we would all
agree, even as auteurists, that the fact that a film is the intensely
personal and individual expression of its director's vision is no
guarantee that it will be great, good, or even watchable. Nobody has
ever said what makes a film great, and I suspect that it would be
theoretically impossible to do so.
Mike wrote, "Knowing about the characteristics of genres helps us
understand a film. When we watch The Spiral Staircase, we can understand
both what the genre of film noir encouraged Siodmak to attempt, and what
is the result of his personal artistry." Well, yes, but here I also
agree with Yoel. I'm not going to use Siodmak, who I don't much like,
but a great noir director -- Welles. Seeing "Touch of Evil" in the
context of other noirs is far from useless, and the differences ought to
be illuminating, but seeing it in the context of other Welles films is
likely to be far more illuminating.
About "realism," as I've written here before, it's a word that is so
troubled and means so many different things that I try not to use it.
And Dan's post notwithstanding, I don't think one really has to use it,
at least not in the naïve sense it's most often given. I've seen "Don't
Cry" too, and was especially touched by a long take in which the aunt,
who is broke, and yet fails to sell her fancy dress at an outdoor
market. The take captures some of the slowness of waiting and of
failure. It does so by giving a hint of real time that rapid cutting
would likely not allow so easily. This is not a great fllm, nor a great
scene, and that's perhaps because it doesn't cohere formally, but
certainly there *was* something touching about the feel of the long
take. But in great formalist films the long take can have some
"Bazinian" elements -- that is, be great in small part because it gives
the feeling of trying to achieve some "semblance" of reality. The
opening of "Touch of Evil" is great mostly because of the light and
space and movement, its plastic elements, but surely the feat of
connecting diverse spaces and events and compositions in a single take
relates not only to the film's labyrinth theme but also adds a certain
kind of intensity as a result of the Bazinian qualities of a long take.
And the one-take bank robbery in "Gun Crazy," shot from the back of the
hold-up car, is great mostly because of the instability it creates, but
one cannot ignore the relationship between inside and outside and time
and the action that the singe take produces.
I'm not the world's greatest André Bazin advocate, but his central
essays are also not wrong: surely one of the powerful things about
narrative movies is the relationship of the images on the screen to what
we might call "the real world" -- at least before there was a TV show of
that name. At the same time, returning to paraphrasing a Sitney quote
about "Ordet" and travelogues, I'm not all that much interested in those
things that might be true about both a William Wyler and an Orson Welles
film, and this is why Bazin is of only limited use to me. (Though Bazin
does much more than that -- see his terrific essay on Bresson, for
example.) But many filmmakers do play with the effect of a photographic
image all the time. Even Brakhage, when he lets the photographic images
he sometimes paint over shine through briefly, invokes the peculiar
power of a photograph of a recognizable object, and is using the
difference between his paint and those images. Brakhage uses texts too,
and the meanings of the words he scratches onto "23rd Psalm Branch" and
"I...Dreaming" are not unimportant. His late films "Night Mulch" and
"Very" paint over the trailer for "Quills." "Night Mulch" is the rare
Brakhage I don't much like, at least on one viewing, because the way the
words of praise shine through seem too much of just a joke, but "Very"
is great, and partly (partly supporting Yoel) because the words are far
less visible, but the fragments of words still are important. The viewer
simply feels a recognizable photo image or a word differently than
"abstract" patterns of paint.
This is not to defend the world "realism," but the concept behind it:
that many films do, in Zach's phrase, "attempt to recreate the semblance
of reality." The great ones do so as a part of an attempt to also do
something else. And Yoel, the idea of "failure" is already inherent in
Zach's phrase, in the meaning(s) of the word "semblance." And I wouldn't
dismiss it as you do with "For me, the question always is what the film
does to you and not what it wants to do to you," because what a film may
"want" to do even while failing to do it is indeed a part of what it
actually does to you. There are many great films that are partly about
the failure of their own aspirations -- "Dog Star Man"/"The Art of
Vision" can be seen as a study in the failure of its attempt to
understand the universe through metaphor, for example.
Does a film's degree of "realism" have to do with how good a film it is?
Of course not. But, as I said, it's not really clear to me what *does*
have to do with how good a film is. So we talk about stuff. I try to
talk about things that might help a viewer see what most deeply affected
me in a film. That doesn't mean I can "explain" what most deeply
affected me. Film criticism, when it's not trying to become "theory," is
really at its best about making up stories -- not as in telling the
story of a story movie, but rather the story of the viewer's encounter
with the work and its formal elements. And we have to partly make it up
because we cannot fully describe it.
The model of film as a personal expression of its auteur works pretty
well with classical Hollywood, but it's not the only possible model for
the making of great art. Were the builders of the great Gothic
cathedrals trying to express their "personal vision"? We don't even know
who most of them were. In the art world today it's become a cliché to
say that a new work questions the whole concept of artistic originality,
usually to debunk it. A small number of such works is actually good. But
then, only a small number of new paintings that try to be personal
expressions are good too.
Following Brakhage, Yoel writes, "The 'immediately sensual' is something
beyond and above language, as it cannot be achieved through a system of
signs." But Brakhage's films are full of metaphor, and while it would be
a huge mistake to emphasize the metaphors over the "immediately
sensual," it would also be a mistake to ignore them; ultimately the two
elements work together. "Blue Moses" is partly about film as a system of
signs, though it can also be seen as a critique of that view -- but
you're not going to get the critique so well if you don't understand its
English text.
And there are some more obvious exceptions. Michael Snow's "So Is This,"
which I like a lot, consists entirely of text, in the form of printed
titles. I've already described Frampton's "Poetic Justice" (post 1199).
And while "Poetic Justice" certainly depends on its being a film image,
that image is among the least seductive, and least interesting, Frampton
has constructed, presumably to better focus the viewer on the act of
reading. If I remember right, Lemaitre's "Le Film Est Deja Commencer" is
entirely voiceover and printed titles.
I don't think we can totally disregard "signs" as part of a film's
meaning. I mean, on a really really simple level, so simple that no one
would (I hope) dispute it, "Vertigo" depends on the fact that Madeline
is a woman, and stands for the male romantic aspiration in general, and
the film plays on the expectations we bring to a love story involving a
man and a woman. Perhaps in some more enlightened time it would have
worked fine if Madeline were a man, but the way Hitchcock films and
lights Madeline are so coded into the romance of male love for a woman
that you couldn't just plug a man in there (whether or not Scottie were
a man or a woman) and film it the same way without the resulting
weirdness changing the film. Is the fact that Madeline is a woman part
of what's great about Vertigo? Of course not. But it's part of what
"Vertigo" is.
In the art world, too, the plastic or graphic elements are not always
the only thing that's important. Duchamp's famous Mona Lisa with a
moustache, L. H. O. O. Q., forms a wonderful obscene pun when the
letters are pronounced in French (which translates as "She has a hot
ass"), and while if you don't know Duchamp's work the whole thing is
just going to seem like an adolescent joke, within the system of
Duchamp's work it's a good deal more than that.
Yoel is right that I didn't spend all that much time on melodrama as a
genre in the melodrama course I taught, though I did include items that
talked about this in the reading list (the pages of the course are at
http://www.fredcamper.com/Melodrama/ ) I read some stuff about film
melodrama in general and found it not all that illuminating. Part of the
issue is what one is trying to do when one talks and writes about film.
Surely if one is doing the sociology of a mass art then genre becomes
important. And a lot of film writing now, perhaps the majority, has
little or nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with
sociology. I mean, what else would call those studies of "fan culture,"
in which the professor analyzes what Star Trek fans write in their
fanzines and on their Web sites? I'll admit to having read just about
none of this, so I shouldn't pontificate.
- Fred
1285
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 0:41pm
Subject: Query: John Hughes
Dear crew -
I have always been intrigued by the work of the late John Hughes - not the
American or Australian film directors of that name, but the American film
critic who wrote for various publications in the 70s including FILM COMMENT
and REAR WINDOW. His writing was really lively and inspiring. But I know
very little about his life and times. Can anyone on the list offer any
insight?
thanks, Adrian Martin
1286
From: Patrick Ciccone
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:29pm
Subject: "Realism" and Dickens
Fred, did you mention your view that a total simulation or recreation
of reality as perceived by "weaponless consciousness"* would be the
worst type of art? I sort of agree. However, the failure of cinema
to recreate reality or objects across time (that is, cinema's failure
to be a functioning time machine) is one of the most poignant and sad
themes in film, as evidenced in such great works as VERTIGO, LA JETEE,
LOLA MONTES, and so on.
Instead of replying in substance to everything else, I offer this
ironic desription of realistic literature in Dickens OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
that I like a lot:
"Mr Podsnap's notions of the Arts in their integrity might have been
stated thus. Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of
getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at
nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and
dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits
representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a
quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming
home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable
performance (without variations) on stringed and wind
instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving
close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at
ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Nothing
else to be permitted to those same vagrants the Arts, on pain of
excommunication. Nothing else To Be--anywhere!"
Patrick
*"weaponless consciousness" Agee's phrase from LET US NOW PRAISE
FAMOUS MEN:
"[T]he camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless
consciousness, the central instrument of ourtime ; and is why in turn
I feel such rage at its misuse: which has so nearly universal a
corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes
I can trust even so much as my own."
1287
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:33pm
Subject: Re: Genre
Thanks to Mike Grost for the great response. I agree with it totally,
just as I do with Zach when he writes:
"But what if one rejects the premise that a film is to
be "understood"? I don't think one understands art: one experiences
it. Different contexts will lead to different ways of understanding
this experience."
What I meant by "understanding" was "understanding how to
experience
a film".
I never claimed that genres have not contributed to art in any single
way. But one could also claim that they took away the freedom of the
director because of their conventions. I am not discussing whether or
not genres were useful in the creative process.
What I am trying to say is that people give so much energy on
analyzing the genre conventions and ideologies that they forget to
look at films themselves. If you start analyzing or experiencing a
film simply based on how it is parallel to or different from the
other films in its genre, you will never start grasping what is
unique about it. That is the right way to go if you have no interest
in experiencing beauty.
For example, I heard so many people saying "Searchers is great
because it pushes the boundaries of its genre". Well this is a
useful
fact that will help us find some of the right questions that will
lead us to find out why The Searchers is great. But, in itself, the
statement means nothing to me and does not interest me at all.
Zach also writes: "The binary opposition between "knowledge of
other
Ray films" and "knowledge of other war films" doesn't get at the root
of auteurism, in my opinion. Both (as well as many other
classifications) are important for contextualizing and probing our
experience of art."
For me, there is a "binary opposition": understanding the
director is
for me thousands of times more important than "understanding the
genre" (whatever that means). Genres "help" us
understanding and
therefore experiencing the film but they are not "essential".
The
directors are very essential. (If you need me to explain what I mean
by the word "essential", just ask and I'll try) I would
say that
seeing all the John Ford films 3 times would definitely help you
appreciate The Searchers. However, picking many westerns and seeing
them 3 times might not help you at all. (Especially if those are from
directors whose style has nothing to do with Ford's such as Ray
or
Boetticcher)
Just think about all the time wasted on terrible westerns just
because they are westerns. And also about how that same energy could
have been used to talk more about great films. How many years ahead
the film criticism would have been? Thousands?
Yoel
1288
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:52pm
Subject: Re: Query: John Hughes
Now thee'sa name I haven't heard in a poon's age! When
did he pass?
In my files I've got a copy of his magazine "The
Thousand Eyes." In fact, as I recall, I wrote
something for it once.
Hughes was very hung-up on middle-period Rivette,
especially "Out One." His auteurism was such that he
seemed to imagine a kind of "Vulcan Mind-Meld" with
the filmmakers he admired -- one in which he'd
actually replace them, In his interview with Rivette
Hughes is especially impatient to complete Rivette's
sentences.
--- Adrian Martin wrote:
> Dear crew -
>
> I have always been intrigued by the work of the late
> John Hughes - not the
> American or Australian film directors of that name,
> but the American film
> critic who wrote for various publications in the 70s
> including FILM COMMENT
> and REAR WINDOW. His writing was really lively and
> inspiring. But I know
> very little about his life and times. Can anyone on
> the list offer any
> insight?
>
> thanks, Adrian Martin
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
1289
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:55pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Yoel:
> Zach's definition of realism ("realism is the attempt to
> recreate the
> semblance of reality of art.") is great. Then, my question is:
> Why
> should I care for something that cannot even be achieved?
I think you're still confusing labels of "realism" and "reality."
Realism gives the impression of reality in at least some way - and
it's visible in some ways, invisible in others. It can be visual
(perspective, proportion, etc. are "correct"), psychological and
emotional (figures in a painting or book feel and behave as the
intended audience would expect a real person to do), temporal (a film
in "real time").
I believe I'm understanding (and I agree with!) your insistence that
realism isn't really something that decides the greatness of art --
I'm not trying to argue for realism as some standard with which we
can evaluate and rank a filmmaker. I am arguing for realism as a
complex set of trends that will indicate what an artist is doing.
And discussing realism isn't about gauging the degree to which art
is "realistic" or "true" -- it's about teasing out how an artist will
use or avoid conventions of realism in order to create a statement.
Dan's post about the two films is a great, concrete example of how
this can be done. Realism is going to be a more important and
helpful issue with some artists more than others. But it's a
meaningful issue just the same, in my opinion.
--Zach
1290
From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 2:01pm
Subject: Re: "Realism" and Dickens
Patrick Ciccone wrote:
>...However, the failure of cinema
>to recreate reality or objects across time (that is, cinema's failure
>to be a functioning time machine) is one of the most poignant and sad
>themes in film...
>
Yes, yes, yes, and I could also cite Brakhage, Breer, Gehr, Snow, and
many others..
Also, following on comments by Dan and Zach, for the "failure to recrate
reality or objects across time" to be a theme, some of the codes of
"realism" have to be invoked. Or, you could put that another way, but
the point is that some reference is being made to the world we walk
around in every day. That's why we notice that the San Francisco of
"Vertigo" -- or of Brakhage's "Song 7" -- is a bit hillier than our
town, at least for most of us. And that's also why we notice that
Hitchcock's, or Brakhage's, editing seem a little different than the way
"we" see our town.
- Fred
1291
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 2:02pm
Subject: Re: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
although I feel in some way close to Yoel's approach on realism - I agree,
for instance, that it is a close-to-meaningless term when it is generally
used, above all when it is meant to imply that the filme gave a true
impression of reality -, I cannot stop myself from thinking that BELIEF is a
major thing in cinema and a huge huge part of feelings and reasonings we get
by seeing a movie we have only because you believe that those "pale shadows"
on the screen are in fact as real (or more real) as the living person lying
in a chair right beside you.
How much a film makes you think it is real can be a quality. Jean Douchet (I
guess it was him) praised Mizoguchi and Renoir for being the only ones for
whom even those guys on the end of the screen seemed to be there
realistically.
Also about genre, I don't think we can fully understand the art of major
manierist moviemakers such as Brian DePalma, David Lynch or Joel Coen
without an approach on genre. Most of their films (and others' from the
same period) deal with the history of cinema and genre in particular that
it's nearly impossible to ignore the context if you really want to grasp
something out of them.
ruy
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Camper"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
> Well, I agree with most of Yoel's sentiments, but with some
> qualifications. As Mike points out, seeing how a film differs from
> others in its genre is one way of approaching it; sometimes those
> differences can be a part of its meaning. This isn't exactly a "genre"
> issue, but many have pointed out that by killing off his star a third of
> the way into the movie in "Psycho," Hitchcock violated audience
> expectations -- expectation built up over watching many films -- and
> thus made a film that was far more unsettling than it would be
> otherwise. And the flashback structure and bitter ending of "The Man Who
> Shot Liberty Valance" depend at least to some degree on their
> relationship to the conventions of the western. This is only a very tiny
> aspect of what's great about them, but it's a relationship I can't
> dismiss entirely.
>
> Are these films great "thanks to relationship with any genre"? Of course
> not. But what *is* it that makes a film great? I think we would all
> agree, even as auteurists, that the fact that a film is the intensely
> personal and individual expression of its director's vision is no
> guarantee that it will be great, good, or even watchable. Nobody has
> ever said what makes a film great, and I suspect that it would be
> theoretically impossible to do so.
>
> Mike wrote, "Knowing about the characteristics of genres helps us
> understand a film. When we watch The Spiral Staircase, we can understand
> both what the genre of film noir encouraged Siodmak to attempt, and what
> is the result of his personal artistry." Well, yes, but here I also
> agree with Yoel. I'm not going to use Siodmak, who I don't much like,
> but a great noir director -- Welles. Seeing "Touch of Evil" in the
> context of other noirs is far from useless, and the differences ought to
> be illuminating, but seeing it in the context of other Welles films is
> likely to be far more illuminating.
>
> About "realism," as I've written here before, it's a word that is so
> troubled and means so many different things that I try not to use it.
> And Dan's post notwithstanding, I don't think one really has to use it,
> at least not in the naïve sense it's most often given. I've seen "Don't
> Cry" too, and was especially touched by a long take in which the aunt,
> who is broke, and yet fails to sell her fancy dress at an outdoor
> market. The take captures some of the slowness of waiting and of
> failure. It does so by giving a hint of real time that rapid cutting
> would likely not allow so easily. This is not a great fllm, nor a great
> scene, and that's perhaps because it doesn't cohere formally, but
> certainly there *was* something touching about the feel of the long
> take. But in great formalist films the long take can have some
> "Bazinian" elements -- that is, be great in small part because it gives
> the feeling of trying to achieve some "semblance" of reality. The
> opening of "Touch of Evil" is great mostly because of the light and
> space and movement, its plastic elements, but surely the feat of
> connecting diverse spaces and events and compositions in a single take
> relates not only to the film's labyrinth theme but also adds a certain
> kind of intensity as a result of the Bazinian qualities of a long take.
> And the one-take bank robbery in "Gun Crazy," shot from the back of the
> hold-up car, is great mostly because of the instability it creates, but
> one cannot ignore the relationship between inside and outside and time
> and the action that the singe take produces.
>
> I'm not the world's greatest André Bazin advocate, but his central
> essays are also not wrong: surely one of the powerful things about
> narrative movies is the relationship of the images on the screen to what
> we might call "the real world" -- at least before there was a TV show of
> that name. At the same time, returning to paraphrasing a Sitney quote
> about "Ordet" and travelogues, I'm not all that much interested in those
> things that might be true about both a William Wyler and an Orson Welles
> film, and this is why Bazin is of only limited use to me. (Though Bazin
> does much more than that -- see his terrific essay on Bresson, for
> example.) But many filmmakers do play with the effect of a photographic
> image all the time. Even Brakhage, when he lets the photographic images
> he sometimes paint over shine through briefly, invokes the peculiar
> power of a photograph of a recognizable object, and is using the
> difference between his paint and those images. Brakhage uses texts too,
> and the meanings of the words he scratches onto "23rd Psalm Branch" and
> "I...Dreaming" are not unimportant. His late films "Night Mulch" and
> "Very" paint over the trailer for "Quills." "Night Mulch" is the rare
> Brakhage I don't much like, at least on one viewing, because the way the
> words of praise shine through seem too much of just a joke, but "Very"
> is great, and partly (partly supporting Yoel) because the words are far
> less visible, but the fragments of words still are important. The viewer
> simply feels a recognizable photo image or a word differently than
> "abstract" patterns of paint.
>
> This is not to defend the world "realism," but the concept behind it:
> that many films do, in Zach's phrase, "attempt to recreate the semblance
> of reality." The great ones do so as a part of an attempt to also do
> something else. And Yoel, the idea of "failure" is already inherent in
> Zach's phrase, in the meaning(s) of the word "semblance." And I wouldn't
> dismiss it as you do with "For me, the question always is what the film
> does to you and not what it wants to do to you," because what a film may
> "want" to do even while failing to do it is indeed a part of what it
> actually does to you. There are many great films that are partly about
> the failure of their own aspirations -- "Dog Star Man"/"The Art of
> Vision" can be seen as a study in the failure of its attempt to
> understand the universe through metaphor, for example.
>
> Does a film's degree of "realism" have to do with how good a film it is?
> Of course not. But, as I said, it's not really clear to me what *does*
> have to do with how good a film is. So we talk about stuff. I try to
> talk about things that might help a viewer see what most deeply affected
> me in a film. That doesn't mean I can "explain" what most deeply
> affected me. Film criticism, when it's not trying to become "theory," is
> really at its best about making up stories -- not as in telling the
> story of a story movie, but rather the story of the viewer's encounter
> with the work and its formal elements. And we have to partly make it up
> because we cannot fully describe it.
>
> The model of film as a personal expression of its auteur works pretty
> well with classical Hollywood, but it's not the only possible model for
> the making of great art. Were the builders of the great Gothic
> cathedrals trying to express their "personal vision"? We don't even know
> who most of them were. In the art world today it's become a cliché to
> say that a new work questions the whole concept of artistic originality,
> usually to debunk it. A small number of such works is actually good. But
> then, only a small number of new paintings that try to be personal
> expressions are good too.
>
> Following Brakhage, Yoel writes, "The 'immediately sensual' is something
> beyond and above language, as it cannot be achieved through a system of
> signs." But Brakhage's films are full of metaphor, and while it would be
> a huge mistake to emphasize the metaphors over the "immediately
> sensual," it would also be a mistake to ignore them; ultimately the two
> elements work together. "Blue Moses" is partly about film as a system of
> signs, though it can also be seen as a critique of that view -- but
> you're not going to get the critique so well if you don't understand its
> English text.
>
> And there are some more obvious exceptions. Michael Snow's "So Is This,"
> which I like a lot, consists entirely of text, in the form of printed
> titles. I've already described Frampton's "Poetic Justice" (post 1199).
> And while "Poetic Justice" certainly depends on its being a film image,
> that image is among the least seductive, and least interesting, Frampton
> has constructed, presumably to better focus the viewer on the act of
> reading. If I remember right, Lemaitre's "Le Film Est Deja Commencer" is
> entirely voiceover and printed titles.
>
> I don't think we can totally disregard "signs" as part of a film's
> meaning. I mean, on a really really simple level, so simple that no one
> would (I hope) dispute it, "Vertigo" depends on the fact that Madeline
> is a woman, and stands for the male romantic aspiration in general, and
> the film plays on the expectations we bring to a love story involving a
> man and a woman. Perhaps in some more enlightened time it would have
> worked fine if Madeline were a man, but the way Hitchcock films and
> lights Madeline are so coded into the romance of male love for a woman
> that you couldn't just plug a man in there (whether or not Scottie were
> a man or a woman) and film it the same way without the resulting
> weirdness changing the film. Is the fact that Madeline is a woman part
> of what's great about Vertigo? Of course not. But it's part of what
> "Vertigo" is.
>
> In the art world, too, the plastic or graphic elements are not always
> the only thing that's important. Duchamp's famous Mona Lisa with a
> moustache, L. H. O. O. Q., forms a wonderful obscene pun when the
> letters are pronounced in French (which translates as "She has a hot
> ass"), and while if you don't know Duchamp's work the whole thing is
> just going to seem like an adolescent joke, within the system of
> Duchamp's work it's a good deal more than that.
>
> Yoel is right that I didn't spend all that much time on melodrama as a
> genre in the melodrama course I taught, though I did include items that
> talked about this in the reading list (the pages of the course are at
> http://www.fredcamper.com/Melodrama/ ) I read some stuff about film
> melodrama in general and found it not all that illuminating. Part of the
> issue is what one is trying to do when one talks and writes about film.
> Surely if one is doing the sociology of a mass art then genre becomes
> important. And a lot of film writing now, perhaps the majority, has
> little or nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with
> sociology. I mean, what else would call those studies of "fan culture,"
> in which the professor analyzes what Star Trek fans write in their
> fanzines and on their Web sites? I'll admit to having read just about
> none of this, so I shouldn't pontificate.
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
1292
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 2:23pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Ruy wrote: "how can there be any valid criticism if one can't comment
properly on the natures of our feelings towards film, if they're so
inneffable? I don't know if I get that right, but it sounds to me
outdated heideggerianism as much as what the french are used to
call "demission de la critique". I can be wrong, of course..."
It was a response to my post: "The "immediately sensual" is
something
beyond and above language, as it cannot be achieved through a system
of signs. And as long as the individual is open to it, it should work
outside of its references and everything else it alludes to."
First of all, I wasn't talking about the criticism. I was talking
about the experience of art. Please try to read my paragraph with
that in mind. I can try to clarify if it still doesn't make
sense.
Also, I don't know much about Heidegger so I have no idea on what
you
mean by "the outdated heideggerianism". Maybe you can explain?
Here is what I think about criticism. I believe the images and sounds
work in such a way in cinema that they create an effect that it is
more complex than a system of signs. Therefore, any criticism (that
has to be in some system of signs such as a language) will have
to "reduce it" to be able to explain. In his recent post,
Fred calls
this "telling a story".
So, yes, I believe Vertigo is "ineffable as a whole" but good
criticism can tell me "something" about it that will enhance
my
experience. A critic should be aware of these limitations.
The analogy is with the ideologies. Can any of them explain (as they
claim to be able to) "the state of the world"? The answer is
a clear
no. Are they helpful, along with other things, in deepening our
understanding and experience of it? The answer is a clear yes (to me,
at least).
One of my best friends who is also from Istanbul has a very simple
sentence to summarize what I mean: "Art precedes theory". He
is right
100%.
Yoel
1293
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 1:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: back to "genre" and "realism"
Jake wrote:
> On realism, I was recently reading Adrian Martin's essay on Manny
> Farber (published in the NZ literary journal Landfall). Martin points
> out that in a way Farber is more of a 'realist' in his criticism than
> even Bazin -- one of his very frequent moves is to praise or fault a
> film on the grounds of literal accuracy, even when the film itself
> doesn't seem to be playing by these rules. (Two examples that spring to
> mind are Farber commending Michael Snow's WAVELENGTH as a 'document of
> a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt,' and
> complaining about Jodie Foster's performance in TAXI DRIVER on the
> grounds that Foster seems too cheerful and bright-eyed to play a child
> prostitute.)
I make comments like this last one all the time, but I suspect I'm
really complaining about something other that a lack of realism. For
instance, I wouldn't complain, "Hartley's characters talk in too regular
a meter to be from Long Island," or "No one speaks as slowly as the
characters in PETRA VON KANT." When I'm happy with a film, I accept the
fact that all art has elements of realism and elements of abstraction,
and I enjoy the abstraction for what it expresses. And when I'm unhappy
with a film, I suspect that what bugs me is not a departure from
realism, but that I don't like the effect obtained by the particular
departure.
So maybe Farber was really saying that he disliked the effect of having
Foster be cheerful and bright-eyed, and not that he required absolute
verisimilitude.
I don't think of Bazin as a "realist," but maybe this is just a semantic
issue. His ideas about the realism of the photographic image are
central, but he often argued in behalf of films (like HENRY V, for
instance) that use abstraction to useful ends.
Maybe I am the last Bazinian....
Welcome, Adrian! - Dan
1294
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 3:24pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism" OASIS
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> Nice post on genre, Mike.
>
> > "Realism" is much more complicated word because it really is
> > a "ghost", something that does not exist and therefore
> > something that
> > really is not even related to anything. When somebody uses the word
> > realism, I usually get what he or she means following the context.
> > However, it still is an empty word in every single way and it has no
> > meaning if the author does not define it.
>
> I guess this realism discussion drove away Tag Gallagher, which wasn't
> my intention. Anyway, I saw two interesting new films recently that
> both seemed to require that the R word, or something like it, be used to
> discuss them.
>
> The first was Amir Karakulov's DON'T CRY, a 2003 Kazakh film. In the
> first shot, we learn that the protagonist is a foreign opera singer who
> lost her voice and moved to Kazakhstan to live with family. The film is
> shot with an unsteady DV camera, with non-actors improvising dialogue in
> long, digressive scenes. Very little overt pleasure for the audience,
> visually or verbally. At the very end, the protagonist's very sick
> niece says she wants to hear her aunt sing. In the same unadorned,
> dogged style as the rest of the film, Karakulov shows the actors
> improvising stage makeup and applying it to their unglamorous faces.
> Then, when the protagonist opens her mouth to sing, the style of the
> film changes for its last few minutes: an orchestra accompanies the
> protagonist's beautiful voice, the cutting becomes more classical, the
> images more composed. The film becomes a full-bodied rendition of an
> aria from MADAME BUTTERFLY, and then ends.
>
> The experiment was fascinating, but I felt that the bulk of the film was
> too tedious for me, even though I understood why Karakulov wanted it
> that way. The other film, Lee Chang-Dong's 2002 South Korean OASIS,
was
> more to my taste. Here, the main character is a childlike, antisocial
> criminal, just out of jail after three convictions, and clearly heading
> for more trouble, as he gets in the face of everyone he meets, and seems
> incapable of suppressing his rebelliousness against all social norms.
> It's quite difficult to sustain identification with this character.
> Eventually he meets and is inexplicably attracted to a woman who is
> pretty much completely disabled with cerebral palsy: she can sometimes
> get out a few words, but can't control her body enough to walk, crawl,
> or stand.
>
> The first clue to Lee's aesthetic plan comes in the woman's first scene.
> We see a CGI bird fluttering around the ceiling of a small apartment.
> Eventually the bird morphs into a beam of light: Lee pans down to show
> the light coming from a mirror in the hand of the disabled woman, in our
> first glimpse of her. There is no stylistic precedent for this special
> effect in the film. The scene plays out without further fantastic
> elements, but Lee repeats the trick soon after: the mirror, now broken,
> reflects dots of light onto the ceiling, which turn into CGI butterflies
> and fly away. As the film begins to document the romance between these
> characters, fantasy interludes become a part of the film's narrative:
> the characters from an Indian mural on the wall enter the film at one
> point, and at various times the actress playing the disabled woman
> simply stands up, drops her cerebral palsy impersonation, and becomes a
> normal attractive woman for the balance of a scene. The criminal
> character seems partly redeemed by love in the film's second half, and
> partly unable to change his sociopathic ways.
>
> The main thing I want to say is that you really can't get at the heart
> of what these films are trying to do without the R word. In DON'T CRY,
> the contrast between uneventful actions/uncomposed images/unacted
> dialogue and a full-bodied operatic high is the point of the movie:
> style changes. In OASIS, the interplay between the debilitating
> portrait of psychological and physical malfunction and the imagery of
> fantastic idealism is the basis for the film's structure. You can try
> to talk about DON'T CRY purely in terms of opera and everyday life, or
> OASIS purely in terms of a depiction of inner life made manifest, but
> then you lose the main point, which is that the films' form is
> dichotomized, and the two styles collide meaningfully within each film.
> If you don't use the word "realism," you just have to talk around it,
> as I've been trying to do.
>
> Another thing I want to say is that the baseline of realism that each
> film lays down seems to have something to do with a denial of pleasure,
> a pleasure that other movies usually give us. In DON'T CRY, we are
> denied pleasure in so many ways: there's no narrative kick, no enjoyable
> character, no lucid imagery (the film is shot in DV). In OASIS, we're
> denied the considerable pleasure of likable characters and beautiful
> bodies to identify with, and the pleasure of seeing people change or
> even control their lives. Here the form of realism is Zola-like, and if
> I'm not mistaken, the word "realism" first became popular in conjunction
> with Zola, no? Anyway, I do believe that a denial of a pleasure that
> has become conventional is often or always part of the shifty "realism"
> concept.
>
> - Dan
I saw OASIS at the Palm Springs International FF in JAN2003 and was hoping
to see it again (but it is not scheduled for our local SD ASIAN FF in OCT).
OASIS does all that you say reference realism, but I wonder if you caught on
that Kyung-gu Sol's character, Jong-du, was wrongly imprisoned for his
brother's crime. Jong-du is more of a mentally challenged individual,
childlike, as you said, than a criminal, hence he is taken advantage of by his
family, in the same vein as his beloved, hence, the attraction. These people
would be completely ostracized by their families except for what their families
can get out of them...a better apartment and jail substitute.
Kyung-gu Sol reminds me of the Robert DeNiro character in MEAN
STREETS. He is the lead in PEPPERMINT CANDY with its interesting
reversing of time; he also plays a silly role in JAIL BREAKERS. I always find
him entertaining
1295
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 3:30pm
Subject: John Hughes
John was one of my best friends. When did he die and how?
1296
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 3:41pm
Subject: Re: back to "genre" and "realism" OASIS
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> Nice post on genre, Mike.
>
> > "Realism" is much more complicated word because it really is
> > a "ghost", something that does not exist and therefore
> > something that
> > really is not even related to anything. When somebody uses the word
> > realism, I usually get what he or she means following the context.
> > However, it still is an empty word in every single way and it has no
> > meaning if the author does not define it.
>
> I guess this realism discussion drove away Tag Gallagher, which wasn't
> my intention. Anyway, I saw two interesting new films recently that
> both seemed to require that the R word, or something like it, be used to
> discuss them.
>
> The first was Amir Karakulov's DON'T CRY, a 2003 Kazakh film. In the
> first shot, we learn that the protagonist is a foreign opera singer who
> lost her voice and moved to Kazakhstan to live with family. The film is
> shot with an unsteady DV camera, with non-actors improvising dialogue in
> long, digressive scenes. Very little overt pleasure for the audience,
> visually or verbally. At the very end, the protagonist's very sick
> niece says she wants to hear her aunt sing. In the same unadorned,
> dogged style as the rest of the film, Karakulov shows the actors
> improvising stage makeup and applying it to their unglamorous faces.
> Then, when the protagonist opens her mouth to sing, the style of the
> film changes for its last few minutes: an orchestra accompanies the
> protagonist's beautiful voice, the cutting becomes more classical, the
> images more composed. The film becomes a full-bodied rendition of an
> aria from MADAME BUTTERFLY, and then ends.
>
> The experiment was fascinating, but I felt that the bulk of the film was
> too tedious for me, even though I understood why Karakulov wanted it
> that way. The other film, Lee Chang-Dong's 2002 South Korean OASIS,
was
> more to my taste. Here, the main character is a childlike, antisocial
> criminal, just out of jail after three convictions, and clearly heading
> for more trouble, as he gets in the face of everyone he meets, and seems
> incapable of suppressing his rebelliousness against all social norms.
> It's quite difficult to sustain identification with this character.
> Eventually he meets and is inexplicably attracted to a woman who is
> pretty much completely disabled with cerebral palsy: she can sometimes
> get out a few words, but can't control her body enough to walk, crawl,
> or stand.
>
> The first clue to Lee's aesthetic plan comes in the woman's first scene.
> We see a CGI bird fluttering around the ceiling of a small apartment.
> Eventually the bird morphs into a beam of light: Lee pans down to show
> the light coming from a mirror in the hand of the disabled woman, in our
> first glimpse of her. There is no stylistic precedent for this special
> effect in the film. The scene plays out without further fantastic
> elements, but Lee repeats the trick soon after: the mirror, now broken,
> reflects dots of light onto the ceiling, which turn into CGI butterflies
> and fly away. As the film begins to document the romance between these
> characters, fantasy interludes become a part of the film's narrative:
> the characters from an Indian mural on the wall enter the film at one
> point, and at various times the actress playing the disabled woman
> simply stands up, drops her cerebral palsy impersonation, and becomes a
> normal attractive woman for the balance of a scene. The criminal
> character seems partly redeemed by love in the film's second half, and
> partly unable to change his sociopathic ways.
>
> The main thing I want to say is that you really can't get at the heart
> of what these films are trying to do without the R word. In DON'T CRY,
> the contrast between uneventful actions/uncomposed images/unacted
> dialogue and a full-bodied operatic high is the point of the movie:
> style changes. In OASIS, the interplay between the debilitating
> portrait of psychological and physical malfunction and the imagery of
> fantastic idealism is the basis for the film's structure. You can try
> to talk about DON'T CRY purely in terms of opera and everyday life, or
> OASIS purely in terms of a depiction of inner life made manifest, but
> then you lose the main point, which is that the films' form is
> dichotomized, and the two styles collide meaningfully within each film.
> If you don't use the word "realism," you just have to talk around it,
> as I've been trying to do.
>
> Another thing I want to say is that the baseline of realism that each
> film lays down seems to have something to do with a denial of pleasure,
> a pleasure that other movies usually give us. In DON'T CRY, we are
> denied pleasure in so many ways: there's no narrative kick, no enjoyable
> character, no lucid imagery (the film is shot in DV). In OASIS, we're
> denied the considerable pleasure of likable characters and beautiful
> bodies to identify with, and the pleasure of seeing people change or
> even control their lives. Here the form of realism is Zola-like, and if
> I'm not mistaken, the word "realism" first became popular in conjunction
> with Zola, no? Anyway, I do believe that a denial of a pleasure that
> has become conventional is often or always part of the shifty "realism"
> concept.
>
> - Dan
I saw OASIS at the Palm Springs International FF in JAN2003 and was hoping
to see it again (but it is not scheduled for our local SD ASIAN FF in OCT).
OASIS does all that you say reference realism, but I wonder if you caught on
that Kyung-gu Sol's character, Jong-du, was wrongly imprisoned for his
brother's crime (fatal car accident). Jong-du is more of a mentally challenged
individual, childlike, as you said, than a criminal, and he is taken advantage of
by his family, in the same vein as his beloved, hence, the attraction. These
people would be completely ostracized by their families except for what their
families can get out of them...a better apartment and jail substitute.
Kyung-gu Sol reminds me of the Robert DeNiro character in MEAN
STREETS. He is the lead in PEPPERMINT CANDY with its interesting
reversing of time; he also plays a silly role in JAIL BREAKERS. I always find
him entertaining
1297
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 3:53pm
Subject: OASIS
> I saw OASIS at the Palm Springs International FF in JAN2003 and was hoping
> to see it again (but it is not scheduled for our local SD ASIAN FF in OCT).
> OASIS does all that you say reference realism, but I wonder if you caught on
> that Kyung-gu Sol's character, Jong-du, was wrongly imprisoned for his
> brother's crime.
I did notice this. Same plot twist as Brett Wagner's fine FIVE YEARS,
which was on the festival circuit the same year as OASIS.
> Jong-du is more of a mentally challenged individual,
> childlike, as you said, than a criminal, hence he is taken advantage of by his
> family, in the same vein as his beloved, hence, the attraction.
My feeling was that, despite all the mitigating circumstances, he was
still a bit too much for society to swallow whole. We saw him attempt a
rape, to cite just one offense.
> Kyung-gu Sol reminds me of the Robert DeNiro character in MEAN
> STREETS. He is the lead in PEPPERMINT CANDY with its interesting
> reversing of time
Another fine film by the same director, Lee Chang-Dong - who is also the
Minister of Culture of South Korea! - Dan
1298
From: programming
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 4:09pm
Subject: Re: Clarence Brown
Damien inquired:
Last night I watched The Yearling and was wondering if anyone had
thoughts on Clarence Brown.
Quite a while back I wrote a paper on Clarence Brown and Maurice Tourneur
(I'm not exactly sure anymore why this subject! - it was pre-"serious"
auteur days).
I can't speak to the sound Browns (and would probably agree with Mike about
Flesh and the Devil), but the silent films The Goose Woman, Smouldering
Fires, Last of the Mohicans, and Light of Faith I remember as all being
quite good. Perhaps he still had enough Tourneur influence rubbing off
before he moved to the star vehicles of the 30's and the Americana of the
40's.
[I did see all these in not so good video copies]
Has anyone else seen these?
Patrick Friel
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1299
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 4:28pm
Subject: Re: Clarence Brown
> Quite a while back I wrote a paper on Clarence Brown and Maurice Tourneur
> (I'm not exactly sure anymore why this subject! - it was pre-"serious"
> auteur days).
Brown apparently revered Tourneur, and worked under him for years.
> I can't speak to the sound Browns (and would probably agree with Mike about
> Flesh and the Devil), but the silent films The Goose Woman, Smouldering
> Fires, Last of the Mohicans, and Light of Faith I remember as all being
> quite good. Perhaps he still had enough Tourneur influence rubbing off
> before he moved to the star vehicles of the 30's and the Americana of the
> 40's.
>
> Has anyone else seen these?
I've seen THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, which is amazingly good. I've
always given the credit for it to Tourneur, who I believe is the
credited director; but apparently Brown also directed some of the film
when Tourneur was ill. - Dan
1300
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Tue Aug 19, 2003 4:35pm
Subject: Re: OASIS rape scene
> > Jong-du is more of a mentally challenged individual,
> > childlike, as you said, than a criminal, hence he is taken advantage of by
his
> > family, in the same vein as his beloved, hence, the attraction.
>
> My feeling was that, despite all the mitigating circumstances, he was
> still a bit too much for society to swallow whole. We saw him attempt a
> rape, to cite just one offense.
This is a most difficult scene, that for me was only interpretable in a following
scene when the poor woman is attempting to put on lipstick...his attempted
rape was apparently seen as an acceptable pass that she wants to respond
to.
For me, OASIS was a very heartfelt movie about the feelings of outcasts
seldom seen on the scene. The 'magical" scenes were perfect.
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