Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact
a_film_by Main Page
Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
from an auteurist perspective. The index to these files of posts can be found at http://www.fredcamper.com/afilmby/ The purpose of these files is to make our posts more accessible, for downloading and reading and to search engines.
Important: The copyright of each post below is owned by the
person who wrote the post, and reproducing it in any form requires
that person's permission.
It is possible to email the author of any post by finding a post
they have written in the a_film_by archives at
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/messages and
emailing them from that Web site.
7501
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 7:49pm
Subject: Melvin's Inspiration
Be sure to consult this site
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/stills.shtml
before -- and after -- viewing "The Passion of The Christ."
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7502
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 7:58pm
Subject: Re: Not True: Gibson's 'Passion' to Open in 'Select' Theatres Only--
I also thought it was 2000 screens. How many screens are there in
this country and what is considered a big opening?
Glad I put the original FOX site in the email I posted today, and
glad Patrick sent the corrected information.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ciccone" wrote:
> You are correct, sir; but they forgot a hyphen!
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Zach Campbell"
> wrote:
> > Patrick:
> > > PS: Basic proofreading too, would be useful: e.g. "'The Passion
> > > of the Christ' are touting its 2000 screen premiere." Gibson's
> > > Christ will have His first coming in 2004, not at the start of
> the
> > > second millenia anno domini.
> >
> > I thought they were referring to the number of screens ...
> >
> > --Zach
7503
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 8:39pm
Subject: Re: Not True: Gibson's 'Passion' to Open in 'Select' Theatres Only--
> You are correct, sir; but they forgot a hyphen!
Ah, gotcha. Missed the irony ...
--Zach
7504
From: iangjohnston
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 8:47pm
Subject: Re: Pasolini
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ebiri@a... wrote:
> Dave Garrett:
> >
> > Image released the Trilogy of Life films on DVD several years
> > ago, but the release window was pretty brief and they went
> > out of print quickly. The ones you're seeing in stores are
almost
> > certainly remaining inventory that is (inexplicably) languishing
> > on the shelves.
>
> I think the confusion might be resulting from the fact that MGM/UA
> appears to have also released THE DECAMERON on DVD, and that title
> *is* widely available, for something like $19.99 retail.
> (Apparently, the disc came out in 2002.) But it's possible that
> ARABIAN NIGHTS and CANTERBURY TALES are unavailable. (I can't
> confirm that I've seen the entire trilogy on shelves in the US,
> although it is out in England.) But maybe MGM will come out with
the
> others soon as well. They played the Film Forum in NY for a week
> last year, in new prints, so there's cause for hope.
>
> Do check out the Water Bearer releases if you can. They were done
> with the help of the Pier Paolo Pasolini Foundation in Italy
> apparently, and they look quite nice. (GOSPEL is the only one that
> isn't in a restored print, for some reason.) They're also
available
> as two 3-disc sets.
>
> -Bilge
I haven't seen these Water Bearer discs, but I have read that the
Pasolini discs were of very poor quality. Not so? (But I do have
Vanguard's release of MEDEA, and it's terrible.)
The U.K. disc of IL VANGELO (from Tartan) is simply beautiful.
I believe the best source of Pasolini on DVD is in France, but with
only French subtitles. Carlotta has a box set PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
LES ANNEES 60, comprising ACCATTONE, COMIZI D'AMORE, UCCELLACCI E
UCCELLINI and EDIPO RE, plus the sketches LA RICOTTA (from ROCOPAG),
CHE COSA SONO LE NUVOLE? (from CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA), and LA
SEQUENZA DEL FIORE DI CARTA (from AMORE E RABBIA).
Ian
7505
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 8:53pm
Subject: Rohmer is Ill
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=493&e=1&u=/ap/20040213/ap_en_mo/people_eric_rohmer
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7506
From: Rick Curnutte
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 9:02pm
Subject: Re: Melvin's Inspiration
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> Be sure to consult this site
>
> http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/stills.shtml
>
> before -- and after -- viewing "The Passion of The Christ."
Yikes! Have you actually seen that film, David?
Rick Curnutte
7507
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 9:09pm
Subject: Re: Re: Melvin's Inspiration
No I haven't, but I'm sure its around.
Suggested further reading "Film in the Third Reich" by
David Stewart Hull (University of California Press,
1973) Plenty of ACCURATE information about Leni
Riefenstahl, plus insight on Zarah Leander, Emil
Jannings and many ohers.
--- Rick Curnutte wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
>
> wrote:
> > Be sure to consult this site
> >
> >
>
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/stills.shtml
> >
> > before -- and after -- viewing "The Passion of The
> Christ."
>
> Yikes! Have you actually seen that film, David?
>
> Rick Curnutte
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7508
From:
Date: Fri Feb 13, 2004 11:07pm
Subject: Johnny Guitar's a musical!
Johnny Guitar has been turned into a musical! Has anyone seen this?
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/84031.html
Don't tell me a lie,
Kevin
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7509
From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 4:21am
Subject: Re: Science Fiction and Theory
"hotlove666" wrote:
> As did Robert Sheckley, whose fine novel Immortality Inc. was
> filmed as Freejack, but I never saw it. I must someday - Geoff
> Murphy isn't a bad director, assuming he had a good script to
> work from, and not something that just took the premise and
> made it an action film. I fear it was probably the latter.
It mainly was, though if memory serves there's an effective series of
trick endings. By the way, Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World"
prefigures both GROUNDHOG DAY and THE TRUMAN SHOW, and the ending
tops them both.
> One reason those of us who love the genre are grateful to
> Kubrick, Lucas and Spielberg is that they put it on the big screen
> the right way. A.I. in particular is a gift from both Spielberg and
> Kubrick to those of us who cut our teeth on visionary dystopias of
> the 50s. But all of this is in some way I don't understand either
> irrelevant to auteurism or opposed to a specific form of it. I
> suppose the same could be said of any genre addiction,
> westerns, sci-fi, mysteries or whatever: it goes back to what Fred
> says about loving what's IN a film as opposed to loving the film
> itself.
I think this is because, as various people have argued, SF shares
certain "realist" assumptions with the 19th-century novel -- it
depends on taking the content of representations literally in a way
that goes against a modernist aesthetic. When STAR WARS (which I
like) came out in 1977, a lot of literary science-fiction people
hated it for being "second-order" SF -- self-consciously recycling
the iconography of the genre without contributing any new plot ideas.
(See e.g. Harlan Ellison's pan in his book WATCHING -- the first
anthology of film criticism I ever read.) Hence my feeling that
traditional literary SF, which innovates mainly through plot, differs
from today's big-budget Hollywood SF, which more often than not uses
familiar action-thriller-horror plots to carry us through visual
fantasy worlds. A.I. is a rare exception, and as I've said before I
suspect a lot of the conceptual intelligence of the script comes from
Ian Watson (whose novels are highly recommended).
The medium that bridges this gap is anime, which is able to move
faster conceptually because it works wholly by manipulation of known
signs rather than by any implied relationship with what the textbooks
call the "pro-filmic". But anime fans, again, are often a different
breed -- I wonder how far the distrust of SF by some cinephiles links
with the distrust of animation which Daney talks about in his KAPO
article?
JTW
7510
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 4:52am
Subject: Re: Johnny Guitar's a musical!
Yes I heard about this, and it sounds awful.
Can't bring "Bounce" to Broadway, but this things gets
a theater. Yikes.
--- LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
> Johnny Guitar has been turned into a musical! Has
> anyone seen this?
>
> http://www.playbill.com/news/article/84031.html
>
> Don't tell me a lie,
> Kevin
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7511
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 7:03am
Subject: Re: Re: Melvin's Inspiration
David:
>No I haven't, but I'm sure its around.
Yes, it's around. I have a copy, though without subtitles.
--
- Joe Kaufman
7512
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 5:49pm
Subject: question re: Lang's Mabuse (1960)
What's the correct aspect ratio of Lang's THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE?
There's a German DVD that presents it in 1.78:1, and the American disc
presents it in 1.66:1. Not much difference between the two, but I'm
curious to find out for sure.
-Jaime
7513
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 6:00pm
Subject: Re: Re: Melvin's Inspiration
I would also heartily recommend Eric Rentschler's books on Nazi cinema; he's
an excellent film historian and about as knowledgeable on this subject as
anyone.
G
[A]rmaments were not created chiefly for the protection
of the nations but for their enslavement.
--Mark Twain
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ehrenstein"
To:
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Melvin's Inspiration
> No I haven't, but I'm sure its around.
>
> Suggested further reading "Film in the Third Reich" by
> David Stewart Hull (University of California Press,
> 1973) Plenty of ACCURATE information about Leni
> Riefenstahl, plus insight on Zarah Leander, Emil
> Jannings and many ohers.
>
> --- Rick Curnutte wrote:
> > --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
> >
> > wrote:
> > > Be sure to consult this site
> > >
> > >
> >
> http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/stills.shtml
> > >
> > > before -- and after -- viewing "The Passion of The
> > Christ."
> >
> > Yikes! Have you actually seen that film, David?
> >
> > Rick Curnutte
> >
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
> http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
7514
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 6:22pm
Subject: Re: Science Fiction and Theory
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
"... SF shares certain "realist" assumptions with the 19th-century
novel -- it depends on taking the content of representations
literally in a way that goes against a modernist aesthetic. When STAR
WARS (which I like) came out in 1977, a lot of literary science-
fiction people hated it for being "second-order" SF -- self-
consciously recycling the iconography of the genre without
contributing any new plot ideas. (See e.g. Harlan Ellison's pan in
his book WATCHING -- the first anthology of film criticism I ever
read.) Hence my feeling that traditional literary SF, which innovates
mainly through plot, differs from today's big-budget Hollywood SF,
which more often than not uses familiar action-thriller-horror plots
to carry us through visual fantasy worlds. A.I. is a rare exception,
and as I've said before I suspect a lot of the conceptual
intelligence of the script comes from Ian Watson (whose novels are
highly recommended)."
In a 1967 article in "Cinema" (the US publication)Ellison objected to
2001: A SPACE ODYESSY because it was a throwback to 1950s science-
fiction. He'd read the script but hadn't seen the movie yet. This
was during the hayday of New Wave science fiction and right after his
cutting-edge anthology "Dangerous Visions" had been published. This
New Wave science fiction was chartacterized by both 19th century
literary forms you mention, but also by avant-garde forms. For
example, William Burroughs was championed as a new wave sci-fi writer
by Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard. Moorcock was the editor
of "New Worlds of Science Fiction" a UK publication that specialized
in new wave, and during the period that Burroughs lived in London he
socialized with the new wave writers. In "The Dreams That Stuff is
Made Of" mentioned by Bill, Tom Disch has a chapter on his
association with the new wave that's well worth reading (the entire
book is good.)
By the time STAR WARS was released, 2001 was respected by the sci-fi
community and STAR WARS was considered regressive because it harked
back to the space opera of pre-golden age sci-fi. Later, sci-fi pros
were grateful to STAR WARS because it made written sci-fi popular and
boosted dollar contracts for sci-fi writers (see issues of "Locus"
magazine, a professional journal for sci-fi writers for the years
1977 to 1983 to chart this development.)
So the attitude of sci-fi writers and fans has changed from one of
disdain during the 1950s and '60s to admiration for movie science
fiction by the 1980s. Of course, there are a few hold-outs such as
Ellison and Disch who continue to regard movie sci-fi as lagging
behind the best that the genre has to offer.
Richard
7515
From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 6:24pm
Subject: Re: Re: Melvin's Inspiration
Regrettably, there are bootleg prints of this piece of trash available from
various neo-Nazi groups on the Web; there is an ostensibly legit company,
Military Media Inc., which has it without Engl. subtitles.
They also sell a variety of other propaganda films that they label as such.
For some interesting materials on Der Ewige Jude, you might take a look at:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/
George Robinson
[A]rmaments were not created chiefly for the protection
of the nations but for their enslavement.
--Mark Twain
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Kaufman"
To:
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2004 2:03 AM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Re: Melvin's Inspiration
> David:
>
> >No I haven't, but I'm sure its around.
>
> Yes, it's around. I have a copy, though without subtitles.
> --
>
> - Joe Kaufman
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
7516
From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 6:24pm
Subject: Barnet at the Musei Kino
Barnet and others write about Barnet.
http://www.museikino.ru/eng/index.asp
http://www.museikino.ru/eng/exebit/barnet/BAB/index.asp
http://www.museikino.ru/eng/exebit/barnet/OAB/index.asp
http://www.museikino.ru/eng/exebit/barnet/OAB/index1.asp
7517
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Sat Feb 14, 2004 7:03pm
Subject: Re: Barnet at the Musei Kino
> Barnet and others write about Barnet.
Thanks very much - this is excellent.
Bernard Eisenschitz's essay on Barnet, published in Christie and
Taylor's INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY, turns out to be quite good and well
worth tracking down. - Dan
7518
From: Jess Amortell
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 0:22am
Subject: Re: question re: Lang's Mabuse (1960)
> What's the correct aspect ratio of Lang's THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE?
>
> There's a German DVD that presents it in 1.78:1, and the American disc
> presents it in 1.66:1. Not much difference between the two, but I'm
> curious to find out for sure.
>
> -Jaime
Isn't 1.78:1 the HDTV ratio ("enhanced for 16:9 TVs"), rather than something Lang would have composed for in 1960?
I gather, however, that 1.78:1 is in current use cinematically, apparently as a result. MILLENNIUM MAMBO, for example, is being shown at Anthology Film Archives with those distracting narrow bars above & below the image. I received the explanation that it's "somewhere between 1.67 and 1.85" and that their masking can only accommodate either ratio, with no stops in between. If that's true (any clarification is welcome), they need to get with the program! (even though they were right to choose letterboxing over cropping, of course...)
7519
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 8:29am
Subject: Welles, Done in By His Own Hand
Henrik (and Peter), let me demur from that implicit formulation, in
two parts:
1) I don't think all of Welles' protagonists are done in by their own
hands
2) I don't think Welles was.
1) Welles certainly liked the grand tragic roles - his only rival in
them was Olivier, with whom he wiped the floor cinematically. And you
can add Kane, George Amberson Minafer, Quinlan, Arkadin, Jake
Hanaford and Mr. Clay to the classical duo of Macbeth and Othello. To
say that each is done in by his own hand, however, is getting a
little too Joseph Wood Krutch-y about the meaning of tragedy for me.
Othello in particular could probably make a strong case for Iago
having done him in, even if the victim was complicit in his own
downfall because he fell for the ruse.
But there is also Falstaff, who is, I believe, the character Welles
most closely identified with, and only the most moralizing literary
critics have ever thought that Falstaff gets what's coming to him, or
that he engineers his own downfall - he is blackly betrayed by his
surrogate son Hal, whom Welles considered "a monster." Falstaff is a
character Welles had been playing since high school, and it was to
get money to mount his stage version of Five Kings, centered on the
Henriad and Falstaff, that he signed the RKO contract in the first
place.
Then let's look at some of the Welles protagonists who AREN'T tragic:
Setting aside the hundreds of characters Welles played on radio, on
the stage and on film (remember, his second film was the Entre'acte
to the farce Too Much Johnson - it just happens to be lost), I don't
think you can apply the word "tragic" to Hans Schindler, a war
criminal who is finally caught and killed, period; to Michael in Lady
from Shanghai, who is the last man standing at the end of the film;
to the blissfully well-off Emil de Houry in F for Fake, and the
heroes of all three episodes of It's All True, who triumph; to the
Cotten character in Journey Into Fear, who survives and prevails; to
Humphrey Jennings in The Fountain of Youth, who pulls off a revenge
on the woman who jilted him that would make Iago proud; to Pellerin
and Menaker in The Big Brass Ring, who ride off into the sunset
singing the Hasty Pudding song, or to the hero of what would have
been Welles' last film, himself, in the story of his most breath-
taking youthful triumph, the against-all-odds improvised premier of
The Cradle Will Rock.
That's also setting aside the heroines of certain films, made and
unmade: is Rita the real "Welles figure" in Lady from Shanghai? I
don't see much similarity. Is Pellagrina, who definitely IS Welles,
done in by her own hand in The Dreamers? And who is the heroine of
Mercedes? - the Princess, or the young girl who uses her poltergeist
powers to kill her and claim her rightful heritage? Welles told me he
would have liked to do many more films about charismatic women, but
he was typecast doing stories with male protagonists, where
inevitably the temptation to identify him with the characters he
played is strong.
And lastly, is Joseph K in The Trial done in by his own hand? Welles
was in the habit of saying that Joseph K was "responsible" despite
appearances, because his philosophy was pretty mainstream humanist,
but the film hardly shows that, and the character is proverbially the
greatest example in modern literature of a scapegoat hero, an
innocent victim who is destroyed for no reason at all because the Law
requires a sacrifice. His equivalent in antiquity would be Job, who
also isn't done in by his own hand.
2) Then comes the comparison to Welles, "done in by his own hand"
like his most famous characters (minus one: Falstaff). Truffaut said
that Welles' films are about The Young Man and The Old Monster (which
already gives an Oedipal fillip to the destruction of The Old
Monster, not really in tune with moralizing theories of tragedy); I
would prefer to call those characters the Marlowe and the Kurtz,
since Welles spent a year prepping Heart of Darkness and switched to
Kane because RKO deemed Heart too...everything. Remember: In a
stupendous casting coup for his first screen appearance, Welles was
going to play both parts! So as we go through the oeuvre looking at
the breakdown between the Marlowe and the Kurtz, which is Welles, and
which is Welles WHEN? - the roles have a way of flip-flopping.
Clifford Irving, the Marlowe in F for Fake, for example, certainly
had a come-down after the movie - he went to jail for trying to
emulate de Houry, whom Welles obviously adored and identified with.
And even though Welles played Quinlan, his spokesman in Touch of Evil
is Heston - Quinlan really is a fascist, albeit a funny one.
Nor do I feel that there is much of a parallel between the actions of
Welles the man and the wickedness of Kurtz, Macbeth, Georgie,
Quinlan, Schindler, Hanaford or even Harry Lime, a murdering shit;
when you get into artist-heroes, of course - Mr. Clay, Hanaford,
Arkadin, even Picasso - a certain amount of self-criticism inevitably
comes into play. Rather, Welles' sense of having been betrayed
throughout his life is the personal note I hear in Othello and
Falstaff, while, just to keep the man behind the mask honest, Quinlan
and Kane are there to call that very sense of victimization into
question - we don't believe it for a second when Quinlan
says, "That's the second bullet I caught for you, Hank."
Finally it is the Hal/Falstaff relationship that sums up my sense of
what happened to Welles' film career, with Hal representing
Hollywood. In fact, when Steven Spielberg refused to intervene to
save Cradle, well advanced in preproduction, after Welles' producer
screwed up the deal with Universal, where Spielberg was the third
most powerful man on the lot, I wouldn't have blamed Welles for
thinking: "Another Hal."
I don't want to be too simplistic about this. I acknowledge the
Dionysian side of Welles that was given free rein in Brazil, where
Betty Wilson told me she thought he experienced a kind of joyous
delayed adolescence, but at the end of the day, having studied that
pivotal episode closely, I think he did his job, made a better film
than the one he was sent down to make, championed the little guy and
attacked racism, and got screwed for it by a host of minor
Shakespearian villains ranging from a vile production manager named
Lynn Shore to his own right-hand man Jack Moss, while Nelson
Rockefeller, the guy who sent him in the first place, refused to
intervene to save the film and Welles, famously earning him a place
in the oeuvre as the disgusting lunatic in Lady from Shanghai.
Welles was a complex man, but in comparison to those who did him in
he was a prince, as John Huston said after his death, and much more
sinned against than sinning - or self-destructive, an interpretation
that has been promulgated in part so that Hollywood's conscience can
sleep peacefully. I hate to read it here, even in a defense of the
auteur theory. Welles was the author of many things, including, pace
Pauline Kael, Citizen Kane (sheesh!), but not of what happened to him
in 1942-3 and its long consequences.
7520
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 4:10pm
Subject: Welles erratum
"That's the second bullet I stopped for you, PARDNER." I wonder how
many felt implicated by that "pardner."
7521
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 4:22pm
Subject: Re: Welles erratum
Very inteesting too that in "The Trial" Welles' K
defies his executioners screaming "You'll have to do
it!" to them. This is a complete break with Kafka's
text.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> "That's the second bullet I stopped for you,
> PARDNER." I wonder how
> many felt implicated by that "pardner."
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7522
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 4:42pm
Subject: Re: Welles erratum
Thanks, David - I had forgotten that. That's what Welles did to
contradict the fatalism of the book, and the idea that Joseph K.
accepts his fate (and his guilt) at the end.
I wonder how Hitchcock would have filmed Kafka. Essentially. I guess,
he did, in The Wrong Man.
7523
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 6:03pm
Subject: Re: guilt
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Thanks, David - I had forgotten that. That's what Welles did to
> contradict the fatalism of the book, and the idea that Joseph K.
> accepts his fate (and his guilt) at the end.
>
> I wonder how Hitchcock would have filmed Kafka. Essentially. I
guess,
> he did, in The Wrong Man.
I remember an interview where Welles spoke about "The Trial" and said,
that in his mind, K was guilty as hell.
Its funny that you should mention Kafka and Hitchcock, as I always
have seen them sharing motifs: Alienation (K) vs. Loss of Identity (H)
and Persecution (K) vs. Wrongly Accused (H). But there tone is so
different, that I dont believe Hitchcock ever could do Kafka.
But if one should mention one film which were Kafka, I would also say
The Wrong Man, as it is the most dark in tone and full of despair.
7524
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 6:55pm
Subject: Re: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
The whole idea, in Hitchcock, of feeling as if you did something even
when you didn't, which he devises many ingenious plots to induce
PLAUSIBLY in his characters and the audience, is Kafkaesque, and in
its visual style Wrong Man is closer to the banal ordinariness of the
world in Kafka's The Trial than the flamboyantly dreamlike
Exrpessionism of Welles' adaptation, which is of course brilliant
too. But Welles gets the humor, for example in that opening scene
where Perkins is rousted out of bed and stammers "pornograph"
for "phonograph" - very Norman Bates. Kafka reportedly laughed
uproariously when reading The Castle out loud to friends.
Kafka is considered by no less an authority than Gershom Scholem to
have written a new Kabbalah, and is therefore a Jewish Gnostic. This
whole side of American cinema is one the French don't understand,
even when one of their own is practicing it: Cocteau in Orphee.
That's why Kafka is such a powerful literary influence on American
cinema - think of all the representatives of the Archons, the rulers
of the world created as a prison for us by the Demiurge, in Kubrick:
the evil officers, the aristos, the ghosts in the hotel, the orgiasts
in Eyes Wide Shut.
7525
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 7:17pm
Subject: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
hotlove666 wrote:
>....think of all the representatives of the Archons, the rulers
>of the world created as a prison for us by the Demiurge, in....
>
Sorry for the calculated snippage, but that particular director gets
wayyyy too much press, in my view.
But to quote Gabe quoting a question posed to Bela Tarr by a
disconsolate viewer of "Werckmeister Harmonies," "Where is the hope?"
(Tarr's reply was something like, "The hope is that you see the
picture," a more profound artist's defense of art than it first appears).
Actually, I have no problem with bleak films, and some of the bleakest
are some of my favorites.
The real purpose of this post is to toot my horn once again for the
truly Gnostic cinema, some films of the American avant-garde that
counter the view that the created world is a prison with the other side
of Gnosticism, the search for the light, for the divine spark of
divinity within us that can be represented as light.
The most explicit great version the Gnostic scenario I know of is
Christopher Maclaine's vastly underrated, sublime film, "The Man Who
Invented Gold." But the theme suffuses Brakhage's work, in which in many
films objects are presented as traps for light and abstractions using
out of focus and other devices are light freed, and arguably can be
found in some of the films of Bruce Baillie, Larry Jordan (Brakhage's
classmate in high school), and, with a distinctly phallic twist, Kenneth
Anger. Cornell's "Angel" is susceptible to such a reading, as is some of
Harry Smith.
For a good film that realizes the belief of some Gnostics that any kind
of sex was fine as long as it did NOT lead to procreation, see Andy
Warhol's "Couch."
- Fred
7526
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 7:33pm
Subject: Re: Gnostic Cinema
Fred: BITCHUN!!!!!
7527
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 8:32pm
Subject: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
--- Fred Camper wrote:
>
> For a good film that realizes the belief of some
> Gnostics that any kind
> of sex was fine as long as it did NOT lead to
> procreation, see Andy
> Warhol's "Couch."
>
And I'd reccomend the works of Curt McDowell,
particularly "Loads."
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7528
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 8:36pm
Subject: Re: Re: guilt
--- Henrik Sylow wrote:
> I remember an interview where Welles spoke about
> "The Trial" and said,
> that in his mind, K was guilty as hell.
>
>I believe what he meant by that related to the fact
that K was a passive acquiesenct cog in the machine
until the action of the story begins. What he laerns
of is some (but far from all) of the workings of a
system he'd unquestioningly supported up to now. K is
therefore markedly different from Vargas in "Touch of
Evil" who operates from principle -- mistaken as some
of them may be.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7529
From:
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 5:13pm
Subject: Re: Welles, Done in By His Own Hand
A brilliant essay, Bill, and I should say that I don't disagree with a word
of it! I can't remember what I said exactly in my conversation with Henrik
several months ago in the chat room, but I've never felt that Welles himself was
done in by his own hand or that most of his characters necessarily were. I
would even be careful about drawing too many autobiographical inferences in the
roles Welles chose to play. I interviewed Keith Baxter (Prince Hal in "Chimes
at Midnight") last summer and he told me that there were many aspects of
Falstaff that did mirror Welles (his kindness, his always being on the brink of
having no money yet people still adoring him, etc) but there were also many
aspects of Falstaff's character which you could never say were true of Welles (his
terrible betrayal of Hal, his dishonesty). So even here with the character
which one could so easily parralel with Welles... we're on shaky ground.
I agree with Bill that the character Welles probably identified with most was
Pellegrina from "The Dreamers," the character who had a tragedy in her life
and then assumed the identities of many people. And I consider the material
Welles completed for "The Dreamers" - notably the garden fragment - to be
hopeful, essentially optimistic, and absolutely thrilling.
Now I wonder if anyone agrees with me that as anti-20th century and
anti-automobile as "Ambersons" is overall, a little part of Welles identified with
Eugene and his "there aren't any old times" attitude. Welles' father was, after
all, an inventor.
Peter
7530
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Sun Feb 15, 2004 11:38pm
Subject: Re: guilty as hell
Welles' comments regarding his change to TRIAL's ending are among his
most famous, as far as students of his work are concerned: that he
didn't wish to show a Jew being murdered like that after Auschwitz.
http://wellesnet.com/trial%20bbc%20interview.htm
My estimation is that THE TRIAL is Welles' most divisive films.
Truffaut didn't care for it, and says so plainly at the opening of
Bazin's Welles book. But Welles himself, pre-CHIMES, called it his
personal favorite, and many have ended up agreeing with him (or have
come close, like me).
-Jaime
7531
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 0:56am
Subject: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
"The real purpose of this post is to toot my horn once again for the
truly Gnostic cinema, some films of the American avant-garde that
counter the view that the created world is a prison with the other
side of Gnosticism, the search for the light, for the divine spark of
divinity within us that can be represented as light."
Do you consider Landow's FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED
BUTTER a Gnostic film? I ask because the title refers to a
Tibetan text "The Great Liberation Through Hearing During the
Intermediate State" aka "The Tibetan Book of the Dead." This text
derives from a kind of Buddhist gnosticism,and the Landow film always
seemed to me a "search for the light."
Also, is the created world described in Gnosticism the same as the
physical world itself? In the Buddhist view, the physical world is
transformed by deluded consciousness so that sensa received and
transmitted from the exterior world are distorted so theroughly that
in a effect a new world is created. All our impressions of the
exterior world are delusions; the result of past and present ego-
emotional attachments. If Gnosticism regards the created world as
identical with the physical world then it differs with the Buddhist
understanding on this point, and indeed the world becomes a prison.
I've always understood Brakhage's films as being attempts to show the
data from the senses in a fresh way, namely that in films like TEXT
OF LIGHT he's showing objects in such as way as to reveal the true
nature of the object as luminous and manifesting "the divine spark"
(or in the Buddhist context, "suchness.")
Richard
7532
From: jaketwilson
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 2:01am
Subject: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
One of the puzzles of Kubrick for me is that there doesn't seem to be
any equivalent to the end of 2001 in his other films, which depict
only false gods, and which could easily be interpreted as atheistic.
Or am I missing something?
Two footnotes:
1. In terms of conscious aims at least, "hard" SF – the kind that
puts the "science" in science fiction – has traditionally been
aggressively rationalist and anti-mystical as well as anti-modernist.
Given that, it's interesting that John W. Campbell, the pioneer
editor of Heinlein, Asimov et al, also assisted at the birth of
Scientology (aka "dianetics") a syncretic religion which I gather
draws heavily on gnostic mythologies translated into SF terms:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/1896/achubbard.html
I mention this because it perhaps gives some context to the well-
documented rise of Scientology in Hollywood, and because Tom Cruise
in particular clearly uses his films as star and producer as vehicles
for his beliefs – most obviously in VANILLA SKY, a religious allegory
about awakening from a "false reality". Could there be an explanation
here for Kubrick and Cruise's otherwise surprising interest in each
other?
2. Presently one of the best known (self-proclaimed) Kabbalists
around Hollywood is Guy Ritchie, whose most recently announced heist
movie is meant to be some sort of esoteric allegory, like Madonna's
children's books. Does anyone think this could be interesting? I
hated LOCK, STOCK when I saw it on first release, but after SNATCH I
started to think Ritchie had something; both films show more than a
bit of Kubrick influence in the comedy-of-errors structure and the
grotesqueries. Didn't see SWEPT AWAY.
JTW
7533
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 2:29am
Subject: Re: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
--- jaketwilson wrote:
> One of the puzzles of Kubrick for me is that there
> doesn't seem to be
> any equivalent to the end of 2001 in his other
> films, which depict
> only false gods, and which could easily be
> interpreted as atheistic.
> Or am I missing something?
>
What makes you imagine the "God" at the end of "2001"
is True?
> Two footnotes:
>
>
> I mention this because it perhaps gives some context
> to the well-
> documented rise of Scientology in Hollywood, and
> because Tom Cruise
> in particular clearly uses his films as star and
> producer as vehicles
> for his beliefs – most obviously in VANILLA SKY, a
> religious allegory
> about awakening from a "false reality". Could there
> be an explanation
> here for Kubrick and Cruise's otherwise surprising
> interest in each
> other?
>
Not really. Crusie is (was) a major box office star.
Kubrick was interested in making a hit movie.
I
> hated LOCK, STOCK when I saw it on first release,
> but after SNATCH I
> started to think Ritchie had something; both films
> show more than a
> bit of Kubrick influence in the comedy-of-errors
> structure and the
> grotesqueries. Didn't see SWEPT AWAY.
>
Well you missed a truly awful film.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7534
From: jaketwilson
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 2:46am
Subject: Re: Welles, Done in By His Own Hand
> Now I wonder if anyone agrees with me that as anti-20th century and
> anti-automobile as "Ambersons" is overall, a little part of Welles
identified with
> Eugene and his "there aren't any old times" attitude. Welles'
father was, after
> all, an inventor.
Yes, absolutely; I tried to argue something of the kind a while back.
Isn't it true that in Welles the attempt to preserve the past is
always unhealthy, leading to stagnation, as with Kane stockpiling
treasures in his mansion? Whereas F FOR FAKE -- and I guess THE
DREAMERS, as you describe it -- have the idea that freedom and
maturity can only be achieved by embracing multiplicity, abandoning
the quest for a lost childhood paradise that would define the
authentic self. Maybe that's still a tragic attitude, though: there's
no Welles movie I've seen without the shadow of mortality, and
ultimately this letting-go of the ego ("Does a name really matter all
that much?") is a stage towards accepting individual death.
JTW
7535
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 2:48am
Subject: Re: Welles, Done In By His Own Hand
The father, I'd say. Cotten looks too much like a mummy in that shot
to be Welles. But he does anticipate, at that moment, in an
interesting way, Uncle Charley in Shadow of a Doubt, who says the
opposite of what Eugene says - I'm pretty sure Ambersons influenced
Shadow. BTW, I think Cotten is brilliant in both. It would have been
interesting to see Notorious with him, as Selznick was pushing for
when Grant's commitments delayed the start. Of course AH was right,
but Cotten would have been an interesting Dev.
7536
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 8:24am
Subject: Return of the Living Dead
Fun evening at UCLA, where Dan O'Bannon, Clu Gulager and James Karen
reminisced after a well-received screening of Return of the Living
Dead. All were quite conscious of the audacity of what they were
doing when they made it, although Gulager says he was uncertain that
O'Bannon knew enough to pull it of until he saw the film with his son
at a midnight screening at the World in NYC. They rehearsed for a
week on a stage before filming it; O'Bannon videotaped the rehearsals
and showed them to the actors while they were doing them so that they
could adjust their performances and perfect the rhythm of scenes,
which are mostly played in master shot and long takes, without his
having to take time to explain what needed changing. Karen said it
was like doing a Restoration comedy; O'Bannon said the critics didn't
get it, although young audiences always love it, as they did tonight:
The film's many cult lines - "I don't think that'll work Frank," "You
mean the movie lied?" "That's fucked! You know what's in the cellar?"
and my personal favorite, delivered by Gulager: "Shit! Shit!
Goddam!" - showcase both O'Bannon's genius for writing neo-Hawksian
dialogue and his ability with actors, because they are the kind of
lines that only work when you're watching the movie. His formula for
his one-of-a-kind masterpiece: realistic (but stylized) performances
in an incredible situation. Gulager was in a reflective mood, and as
intelligent as one would imagine from his acting.
7538
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 9:36am
Subject: Re: Return of the Living Dead
My favorite line has always been: "Send more Paramedics!"
It's pure luck that RotLD became such a great classic. Originally John
Russo, who co-wrote Night of the Living Dead with George Romero,
wanted to do a sequel, but Romero found the story utter nonscense and
they split; with a silent agreement: Romero would henceforth call his
films Dead, Russo Living Dead.
Russo could not find backing, so the project were shelved until Tom
Fox, a chicago stockbroker who wanted to make films, bought it.
Spending a few years putting the finances together. Tobe Hooper were
signed on as director and Dan O'Bannon was hired to rewrite the aged
script. But once again the project hit the wall, and Hooper withdrew.
Bannon was promoted to director.
As Romero in 1978 had made another zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead,
and was filming his third, Day of the Dead, Bannon decided to make the
film as different as possible from Romero, in order not to look like
immitation: He made it into a comedy, reducing the gore to a minimum
and made the zombies into perhaps slowmoving, but quiet smart and
resourcefull undeads: (send more policemen!).
Genrefans originally turned their fingers down. It was 1984, it was
the last struggeling years for gore, and horror was already being
replaced with silly one-liners, A Nightmare on Elm Street, that later
should become the biggest trend in the 90s. But as it arrived on
video, it found a cult audience, and slowly the appreciation grew and
grew.
It really is a wonderful film. The humor is so inventive and it is
full of memorable setpieces: My favorite is the death of Linnea Quigly
("I want to be eaten by old men"). Would such a line be possible
today?
Henrik
PS: Damn I envy you :)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Fun evening at UCLA, where Dan O'Bannon, Clu Gulager and James Karen
> reminisced after a well-received screening of Return of the Living
> Dead. All were quite conscious of the audacity of what they were
> doing when they made it, although Gulager says he was uncertain that
> O'Bannon knew enough to pull it of until he saw the film with his
son
> at a midnight screening at the World in NYC. They rehearsed for a
> week on a stage before filming it; O'Bannon videotaped the
rehearsals
> and showed them to the actors while they were doing them so that
they
> could adjust their performances and perfect the rhythm of scenes,
> which are mostly played in master shot and long takes, without his
> having to take time to explain what needed changing. Karen said it
> was like doing a Restoration comedy; O'Bannon said the critics
didn't
> get it, although young audiences always love it, as they did
tonight:
> The film's many cult lines - "I don't think that'll work Frank,"
"You
> mean the movie lied?" "That's fucked! You know what's in the cellar?
"
> and my personal favorite, delivered by Gulager: "Shit! Shit!
> Goddam!" - showcase both O'Bannon's genius for writing neo-Hawksian
> dialogue and his ability with actors, because they are the kind of
> lines that only work when you're watching the movie. His formula for
> his one-of-a-kind masterpiece: realistic (but stylized) performances
> in an incredible situation. Gulager was in a reflective mood, and as
> intelligent as one would imagine from his acting.
7539
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 4:15pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Living Dead
Many accidents were involved, apparently. The decision to omit
coverage beyond masters was initially a time decision - what they
call "shooting the schedule," which in this case was 6 weeks. DO'B
obviously chose to run with it, and the rehearsal week and video
camera (also a time decison: a picture is faster than a thousand
words) helped him make it into a plus. The music was the producers'
pick, although in the vein DO'B would have gone with - I love "The
Trioxin Theme," used whenever the gas is being disseminated. The
slomo shots were an idea the editor came up with. And some details
were added by the production designer when he had figured out the way
things were headed - like the eye chart that says "Ernie is a
sonofabitch and a cheap bastard" - DO'B referred that kind of thing
to the look of the original Mad. Another is Trash's "Fuck You" shirt,
which says "TV Version" in the tv version. And the names of "Bert and
Ernie" are a complete fluke. DO'B wasn't familiar with Sesame Street
when he came up with them - someone pointed the parallel out to him
during the shoot.
To keep the record straight, Gulager said last night that after
seeing that midnight screening he realized that O'Bannon, about whom
famously said: A director is someone who presides over chaos.
AOne lats quote: Hawks to Joe McBride, when asked if he ever
improvised: Gosh, what do you a think a director DOES?
If you want to see a film by a Hawks fan who didn't get rehearsal
time, check out Revenge of the Nerds II - a catastrophe. Hawks spent
the morning rehearsing on Bringing Up Baby, then shot in the
afternoon. I first learned about the importance of rehearsals from
Jessica Lange, who made a big point of what a bunch of jerks the
producers of Frances were for not letting them have any. Then when I
met Fuller I knew just enough to ask, and found out that he had two
weeks with the actors before start of filming on Pickup. It has
become less affordable and less common these days, apparently, but
was SOP in the studio days.
On the other extreme, last night James Karen finally supplied the
punchline to the famous tale (reported by Newsweek) of Kubrick doing
85 takes of Scatman Crothers going up to the door of the Overlook and
knocking. Barry Nelson, who was kept waiting five days because of
that, paid someone a hundred dollars to tell him which take was
ultimately used: the first.
7540
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 4:30pm
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Living Dead
> To keep the record straight, Gulager said last night that after
> seeing that midnight screening he realized that O'Bannon, about whom
> famously said: A director is someone who presides over chaos.
> AOne lats quote: Hawks to Joe McBride, when asked if he ever
> improvised: Gosh, what do you a think a director DOES?
I think this came out garbled - did we lose Gulager's comment?
> I first learned about the importance of rehearsals from
> Jessica Lange, who made a big point of what a bunch of jerks the
> producers of Frances were for not letting them have any. Then when I
> met Fuller I knew just enough to ask, and found out that he had two
> weeks with the actors before start of filming on Pickup. It has
> become less affordable and less common these days, apparently, but
> was SOP in the studio days.
There are different schools of thought on this. Some actors and
directors want the very first attempt at a line to be exposed on film,
not lost in an unfilmed rehearsal. Others feel the opposite. Some law
of the universe seems to dictate that your two leading actors will
generally differ on this, and one of them will wilt while the other is
just getting warmed up.
I'm a rehearser, but my experience so far is that rehearsals that aren't
on the actual set, or something similar to it, are pretty much wasted.
When they start learning the actual space they have to move through,
actors often seem to erase the slate and start from scratch.
> On the other extreme, last night James Karen finally supplied the
> punchline to the famous tale (reported by Newsweek) of Kubrick doing
> 85 takes of Scatman Crothers going up to the door of the Overlook and
> knocking. Barry Nelson, who was kept waiting five days because of
> that, paid someone a hundred dollars to tell him which take was
> ultimately used: the first.
This actually makes complete sense to me. When you plow into a
multiple-take situation, you're almost always going to like the very
first or the very last takes best.
I always loved Shelley Duvall's response when asked what it was like
working on THE SHINING: "Did you ever see that movie GROUNDHOG DAY?" - Dan
7541
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 4:46pm
Subject: 2001
> I am well aware that some - perhaps many - auteurists loathe Kubrick
> in general and 2001 in particular. I obviously don't - quite the
> contrary.
Two years back, I revisited 2001 and did my level best to approach it
without prejudice. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't click for me
either. I posted my comments at the time on another board - hope it's
okay if I repost them here and ask for replies from the film's defenders.
=========
1) Some writers talk a lot about the eschatological aspect of the film,
the wonderous evolution of the human race to a new level. I can't feel
this. The Star Baby may or may not be intended as an optimistic
gesture; the case would be more convincing to me if I found any kind of
transcendental yearning for a new humanity in the previous 130 minutes.
I don't find that yearning embodied in any of the characters, not even
HAL. Is it conveyed to use directly by the wonder of the space shots?
By the beauty of the light show that Bowman experiences near the end?
To my mind, these are pleasures well within the reach of the present,
standard-issue humanity.
2) The film is most expressive - and I don't mean this as a slight - in
the realm of morbidity. Almost every emotional jolt I got from the film
falls into this category: the unnerving death-by-tiger of the lone
caveman in unblinking long shot; the caveman suddenly turned into a
corpse by a blow from a thigh-bone, again without visual emphasis; Gary
Lockwood's body twisting endlessly in space; the cut to the high shot of
the suspended-animation chambers become sarcophagi. Right now, I
believe that if I ever put 2001 together successfully in my mind, it
will have to be as a horror film, because the horrific aspects lead the
way emotionally for me.
3) The "distanced" acting styles in the second and third episodes aren't
all of the same type. Most of the dudes in the second episode act quite
a bit like TV actors (which is to say undirected actors): each line is
encapsulated, emphatic. During Heywood Floyd's little speech at the
moon colony, I remember thinking that one of the actors (the guy who
asks the last question) was better and more natural than the others;
this actor turns up again in the shuttle flight where everyone is eating
sandwiches, and once again he delivers his lines more naturally than the
other two people in the same scene. Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea in
the third episode are nowhere near as awkward as most of the actors in
the second episode - I found them both competent and low-key. We feel
some distance from them because Kubrick doesn't allow them to express
too many emotions that we can identify with, not because they perform
poorly. I guess I'm saying that I don't think Kubrick was really on top
of the acting situation in the second episode.
4) I'm still wondering about the construction of the film. Episode one,
silent but narrative, feels prefatory, and I thought it was pretty
successful in that role. Episode two and three, the dialogue episodes,
are rather different. #2 builds a mystery that remains mysterious at
its end, and offers some bits of "present-day," recognizable human life
placed in a futuristic context. Because it doesn't wind up telling us
much, it feels almost as prefatory as #1. #3, on the other hand, is
built around an old-fashioned suspense idea; it's the only classical
storytelling in the movie, I'd say, and it pulls together into an
emotionally satisfying ending. ("Emotionally satisfying" in the sense
that there's some complexity as well as some closure: the plot
culminates with the rooted-for defeat of HAL, but this is counterpointed
with the considerable pathos of HAL losing his mind.) But the very fact
that it pulls together so strongly makes it stick out of the film, in a
way. Episode four is silent and essentially non-narrative, at least to
the extent that, say, a Maya Deren film is non-narrative. It's a really
expensive avant-garde segment; the comparison to Maya Deren isn't
completely accidental, because Bowman's age-progression takes on a
visually symbolic quality that reminded me of her romantic strand of
avant-gardism. It's daring to end the film with a burst of
experimentalism, and this audacity probably justifies the use of
audience-pleasing, colorful special effects.
None of these episodes strike me as bad, not even #2; but I can't follow
the emotional logic of their progression. In a way, #3, the most
successful from an old-Hollywood point of view, causes the most problems
regarded in context: why old-fashioned suspense at this crucial stage?
5) Of course, Kubrick takes his good-natured time with things, as
always. I like some directors who just sit back and let us experience
the passage of time, but for some reason I don't give Kubrick this
break, and I get bored with the duration of the spacecraft shots. I
don't know why for sure, but I think that the passage-of-time directors
that I enjoy have more of an interest in the documentary aspect of the
image: the entropic quality of the photography, of the sound. Kubrick
stylizes this angle away, I believe. I'm still thinking about this.
(In a second post, I reply to a reply.)
> For me, the
> most compelling thing about the film is its atmosphere of utter
> loneliness -- the loneliness of any individual human personality when
> set against both the illimitable vastness of space and the
> unimaginable vastness of time.
This is interesting to think about. Usually, a film conveys loneliness
by making us identify with a lonely character, but that's not the
situation here. Less frequently, a film can make the spectator feel
lonely without any character being the intermediary for that feeling.
(I feel that way at the end of OUT OF THE PAST, because our
identification figures are all gone, and the last thing we see is the
beginning of their being forgotten by their loved ones.) I guess 2001
could be said to be in that category: not only can the space imagery
make you feel lonely (like the empty space around the gas station at the
end of OUT OF THE PAST), but Kubrick doesn't give us any fun characters
to keep us company. That can be a formal strategy.
The reason the film doesn't quite feel that way to me is that I get the
sense that Kubrick is having some fun out there in space, and invites us
to also. It's hard to feel lonely with the "Blue Danube" playing all
the time.
Ever see SILENT RUNNING, made a few years later by Douglas Trumbull, who
did the special effects for 2001? There's a film about loneliness.
(end of old posts)
- Dan
7542
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 4:48pm
Subject: Re: Re: Favorite Welles
> Dan, what do you like more about the 90-minute "Macbeth"?
Old-fashioned pacing, I guess. I feel that the movie gets a bit
monotone during the long nighttime interlude, which I believe is
substantially expanded in the 110-minute version.
Does anyone know whether Welles absolutely preferred the long version?
At the time, I had the sense that he may have wanted the cuts that
shortened the film, but I can't remember what made me think this. - Dan
7543
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 6:49pm
Subject: Re: 2001
>1) Some writers talk a lot about the eschatological aspect of the film,
>the wonderous evolution of the human race to a new level. I can't feel
>this. The Star Baby may or may not be intended as an optimistic
>gesture; the case would be more convincing to me if I found any kind of
>transcendental yearning for a new humanity in the previous 130 minutes....
To me it's much more simple. In the case of both the cave people and
the modern characters, they're confronted with something
inexplicable, terrifying, seemingly magical, and the confrontation
with that "something," the facing of it, leads to the next step in
evolution. To me it's appropriate that it wasn't anything they were
looking for or expecting or hoping to see.
--
- Joe Kaufman
7544
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 6:57pm
Subject: Re: Return of the Living Dead Erratum
Thanks Dan, something did get lost:
To keep the record straight, Gulager said last night that after
seeing that midnight screening he realized that O'Bannon, about
whom he had doubts at the time, is "a genius." Another genius
famously said: A director is someone who presides over
accidents.
One last quote: Hawks to Joe McBride, when asked if he ever
improvised: Good gosh, what do you a think a director DOES?
O'Bannon attributed his observation about realistic acting in the
film to "a critic." Was that you, Dan? I know you wrote about
return, favorably, and I seem to recall you made the Hawks
comparison. He said he was thinking of His Girl Friday when he
made Return.
7545
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:04pm
Subject: Re: 2001
I wrote an article on the structure of the film. I'll see if I have it
electronic - it's very long.
Re: the ending - it's up to the spectator's interpretatation. I have
always liked to think that the monoliths weren't sent by
extraterrestrials, as in The Sentinel, but by our distant
descendants, as in Last and First Men, the main influence on
Arthur Clarke's fiction. (Heywood Floyd is the only source in the
film of the idea that they were sent by extraterrestrials, and he's a
complete asshole.) Clarke has argued elsewhere, as a
scientist, for reverse-chronology causality, which also appears in
Imperial Earth. Ultimately I see 2001 as a film about influence,
inspired by Kane (sled=monolith). Kane: What is the origin of a
man's life? 2001: What is the origin of human intelligence?
7546
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:10pm
Subject: Re: Favorite Welles
He gave Republic his cut, and they didn't want to put it out like
that, after some initial bad reactions. They made him take out the
Scot accents and cut it down, which meant cutting in one case
into a 10-minute take of the murder. Dick Wilson had to lug the
film to Europe and force him to figure out the new cut; Dick then
restored the original with Bob Gitt at UCLA. As far as I know
Welles preferred the original cut, but both are his - the second
done under duress. I prefer the first myself, but don't dismiss the
second - just as in the case of Touch of Evil, where the cut we all
have known and loved isn't even by Welles, I like both versions.
Having only seen the remix once I couldn't say which I prefer.
7547
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:11pm
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Living Dead Erratum
> O'Bannon attributed his observation about realistic acting in the
> film to "a critic." Was that you, Dan? I know you wrote about
> return, favorably, and I seem to recall you made the Hawks
> comparison.
I don't think I was a working critic when the film came out, though I
ten-bested it in the LA Reader, and I think I twenty-bested it at the
end of the decade in Modern Times. - Dan
7548
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 7:37pm
Subject: Re: 2001
I do like the acting on the space station, and assume it was
sweated out of the actors in the usual Kubrick fashion. The
Russian, Heywood and the space taxi pilot are the ones who
stick in my mind - and they do stick, as comic types.
The structure I see in the film, not to be mysterious about it, is
that of the Romantic Ode: The Ode to a Nightingale (Keats) and
To the West Wind (Shelley) being probably the best-known
examples. The Romantics took over the form from Pindar, and it
involves sudden shifts from stanza to stanza, with pronounced
breaks in between.
This became somewhat more common in film after 2001, the
best example being Heaven's Gate, where the time-shifts
foreground Time as the subject of the film. In Kubrick, this kind of
block construction - used again in Full Metal Jacket - often
involves mixing modes, so that in the latter film you have a kind
of modernist narrative at the beginning, a deconstructed
narrative up until Tet and the gradual return of classical narrative
during the patrol at the end. These modes are also different
imaginative stances being tried out, as in Keats, Shelley or, for
that matter, Syberberg (Our Hitler).
I know this is all very "lit crit," but literature is part of what film -
narrative and non-narrative - inherited/appropriated for its own
ends.
7549
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Mon Feb 16, 2004 10:27pm
Subject: Re: 2001
I have quiet a different take on 2001 and its interpretation.
To me its not about where we come from, but how we develop af human
beings: about evolution.
2001 is an allegory. The first part of the narrative, "Dawn of Man",
is the pretext. Here we are presented with man, as vegetarian and
gatherer, then after having touched the monolith, they become
meateater and hunter: The monolith represents an evolution leap.
The key, IMO, to interpreting the second part, is something as
ordinary as broken glass. Towards the end, Bowman finds himself in
limbo, inside a white cube. There, while eating, he accidently breaks
his glass. Instead of reacting to it, he leans forward and observes
the shattered glass on the floor, and as he looks up, he sees himself
ages older in the bed, dying. This is the key.
Bill previously noted, that 2001 was gnostic, and I agree. While
looking at the glass, Bowman discovers fragility, that objects dont
last, by looking at himself, realising the future of himself, Bowman
rationalises mortality, that all things come to an end. The question
we need to ask ourselves is not: What is the meaning of life. How can
we ever expect to understand the meaning of life, if we dont
understand life as it is. The moment Bowman realises that all there is
to life is, that its fragile and can end at any time, then he meets
the monolith, and man leaps in evolution.
I disagree with the notion, that monolith=sled, in a Kane sense. The
sled represents both innocence lost and loss of childhood. The
monolith represents Man's longing and search for answers.
Henrik
7550
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 2:58am
Subject: Re: 2001
I have long believed that there are three ways of discussing a film - by expressing your opinion - by presenting your observations or by offering an informed opinion. Opinion as in I liked it I didn't like it has, in my view, very little validity.
The following is a response to Dan's lengthy post on 2001. I have chosen to offer my reply without going point for point - my goal here is not to argue or defend the film but to hopefully offer some insight. Those interested please refer to Dan's original post. As a Kubrick biographer and one who has taught classes on 2001 and Kubrick I offer the following:
There is no "Star Baby" in 2001 - the star child at the conclusion of the film was intended as an optimistic image - it is the rebirth of Bowman.
2001 is 139 minutes - what nine minutes has transcendental meaning that the other 130 doesn't contain for you - a search for a higher power or other forms of life is throughout the film.
Bowman does not experience a light show in 2001 - he passes through a star gate which takes him into another universe.
There are no cavemen in 2001 there are apes.
No matter how you put 2001 together it is not a horror film - what is morbid about the mystery and beauty of space?
There are no "dudes" in 2001
The acting style comes out of the story. The characters are not traditionally dramatized. To call some of the actors TV actors that are undirected makes little sense.
If you are watching 2001 to determine which actor is better than the other you have missed Kubrick's intent.
You may not "like" how Kubrick directed the actors but like it or not like Stanley Kubrick was never "not on top of" and acting situation in his mature films.
The Dawn of Man - The sequences in 2001 do have names they are not indentified as episodes - is not silent - there are sound effects, environmental sounds - the apes communicate with vocalizations.
There is no classical or traditional storytelling in 2001
The Jupiter sequence is not silent for the same reasons as above and it is not non-narrative - it is not a traditional narrative but there are a sequence of events that move forward to a conclusion.
2001 is a cinematic experience - it doesn't care if you get bored - if you reinvested yourself into the images and the pace you will begin to experience the film as it was intended.
Vinny
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7551
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 5:23am
Subject: Re: 2001
Mr. Lo Bruto: I love the film, but one of Dan's comments struck a
chord: the images of spacecraft are morbid, particularly Discovery,
which looks like a bone-fish swimming in a black sea.
Henrik: The sled is the object of Thompson's quest, and ours - the
quest for the secret of Kane. It is an origin, like the monolith. It
is there at the beginning and waiting for us at the end, so it's both
the past and the future - it what Kane is striving for, and the point
from which he began.
Also, of course, it's the biggest MacGuffin of all time, unless that
honor now belongs to the monolith!
7552
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 5:48am
Subject: Re: Welles, Undone by his Own Hand
Peter: Falstaff doesn't betray Hal - he pays him back. Hal stole the
loot from Falstaff after the Gadshill stickup, so Falstaff steals the
credit for killing Hotspur from Hal. In the process he unwittingly
breaks the cycle of vengeance, which is theoretically endless, by
assuming the stain of the killing that founds the reign of Henry V,
who only has to cast Falstaff out to be rid of it, and therefore be
able to rule without someone popping up and challenging him to a
duel, or leading a rebellion, to avenge Hotspur. In other words,
Falstaff makes himself the scapegoat for the new royal family.
("Innocent is a big word. Stupid is more like it.") The equal sign
the double plot structure puts between Falstaff and his highwaymen
robbing some fat friars and what the Bolingbrokes do to the Percys is
hard to overlook: they're all in the same business.
The fact that Shakespeare, after calling Falstaff Sir John Oldcastle,
a real man who served Henry the V during the rebellion and was ill
repaid for it, was obliged by the man's family to give him a new name
and came up with one that sounds like his own last name, adds another
breathtaking irony to one of the greatest stories ever told. I didn't
think to ask Welles about it when I had the chance, but as far as I'm
concerned, it's there in the film, as it is in every performance of
the play.
This is an example of what I meant many moons ago when I talked about
plot as a nonverbal signifying form in itself: The plot of Henry IV
Parts One and Two is not an allegory where people and actions signify
abstract themes; it is a political myth where one plotline signifies
the other, and things like guilt can be transferred the way meaning
is transferred in a metaphor. Chimes at Midnight is a long way from
being the only movie ever made where that happens. The reason
literary scholars still haven't figured out the plot of the Falstaff
plays, for example, is that they never saw The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, or read Peter Wollen's wonderful interpretation of it in
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.
7553
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 6:14am
Subject: Re: Re: 2001
Well we all know what's written on the monolith --
"Rosebud."
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Mr. Lo Bruto: I love the film, but one of Dan's
> comments struck a
> chord: the images of spacecraft are morbid,
> particularly Discovery,
> which looks like a bone-fish swimming in a black
> sea.
>
> Henrik: The sled is the object of Thompson's quest,
> and ours - the
> quest for the secret of Kane. It is an origin, like
> the monolith. It
> is there at the beginning and waiting for us at the
> end, so it's both
> the past and the future - it what Kane is striving
> for, and the point
> from which he began.
>
> Also, of course, it's the biggest MacGuffin of all
> time, unless that
> honor now belongs to the monolith!
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online.
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
7554
From:
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 1:20am
Subject: Welles
Jake Wilson wrote:
>Isn't it true that in Welles the attempt to preserve the past is
>always unhealthy, leading to stagnation, as with Kane stockpiling
>treasures in his mansion?
I think this is accurate and yet simultaneously there's this tremendous pull
in Welles towards lost paradises and lost innocence. I don't need to go down
the whole list at this point - there's Rosebud in "Kane," Merie Ole England in
"Chimes," and the days before horseless carriages in "Ambersons." Just
listen to the way Welles speaks the line of narration, "The faster we're carried,
the less time we have to spare," in "Ambersons"; you can hear the regret in his
voice.
And yet we're also speaking of a man who was an innovator, whose father was
an inventor, and in the films themselves there's something of a tension between
a nostalgia for the good ol' days and an excitement about the future and a
drive to move forward. This side of Welles I sense in some of his
characterization of Eugene in "Ambersons." It is fitting that the final line of the last
film he was able to complete - "Filming 'Othello'" - is something to the effect
of, "I wish I wasn't looking back on 'Othello,' but looking ahead to it."
>Whereas F FOR FAKE -- and I guess THE
>DREAMERS, as you describe it -- have the idea that freedom and
>maturity can only be achieved by embracing multiplicity, abandoning
>the quest for a lost childhood paradise that would define the
>authentic self.
And this multiplicity is found in the very form of what I've seen from "The
Other Side of the Wind" - a film comprised of documentary-like footage of the
film's lead character, a film director named Jake, interspersed with footage of
Jake's latest film, which looks vaguely Antonioni-esque. As Welles told Bill
during their interview, there's not a "Welles shot" in the film.
"The Dreamers" >looks< Wellesian to me, much more so than "Other Side," but
certainly thematically it resonates with the idea of Welles striving for
multiplicity.
Bill Krohn wrote:
>Peter: Falstaff doesn't betray Hal - he pays him back. Hal stole the
>loot from Falstaff after the Gadshill stickup, so Falstaff steals the
>credit for killing Hotspur from Hal.
Yes, you're absolutely right. "Betrayal" was Keith Baxter's word; hopefully
his point will be clear in the full context of our interview. That interview,
by the way, is due to be online March 1 at The Film Journal.
Peter
7555
From:
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 1:21am
Subject: Re: Re: Return of the Living Dead Erratum
Bill,
Did O'Bannon say whether he had any directing projects currently in the
works?
Favorite line from "Return of the Living Dead": "Yessir, you're gonna owe me
a big one!"
Peter
7556
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 6:25am
Subject: Re: 2001
I'm more aligned with Vincent's wonderful and wonderfully terse
defense of 2001 than Dan's well-observed account of his difficulties
with the same film, but Dan is one of the few people I know whose
commentary on films he doesn't necessarily like are as interesting as
his (and many other people's) commentary on the films he likes or
loves. This is a rare thing: usually when a person talks about a
movie they don't like - but that I do - it's dispiriting, and
wasteful, not informative.
Consider Dan's post against Stephen Hunter's rambling, drooling
"attack" on 2001.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/movies/
reviews/A27508-2001Nov1.html
THIS guy won the Pulitzer. And where does that leave us.
-Jaime
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, vincent lobrutto
wrote:
7557
From: Fred Camper
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 7:06am
Subject: Re: Re: Gnostic Cinema (was: guilt (plus Science Fiction and Theory)
Richard asked:
"Do you consider Landow's FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED
BUTTER a Gnostic film?"
Well, it's quite a great film, I know that. It's also one of the
strangest films I've ever seen. And he made a later film, "Bardo
Follies," that's also related to the "Tibetan Book of the Dead" -- he
even called it some kind of adaptation, I think, and there are bubbly
images that perhaps describe passing between worlds. It's actually more
explicitly a light film than "The Film That Rises," but light isn't so
important in quite that way in his later films.
My knowledge of Gnosticism is not as refined as it should be but I think
that the created world is the physical world. The true "Fall" occurred
with the creation of the physical world that imprisoned us. It's not
consciousness that deludes us but matter that entraps us, though for
some a change in consciousness might help free the "spark."
Richard wrote:
"I've always understood Brakhage's films as being attempts to show the
data from the senses in a fresh way, namely that in films like TEXT OF
LIGHT he's showing objects in such as way as to reveal the true nature
of the object as luminous and manifesting 'the divine spark' (or in the
Buddhist context, 'suchness.')"
His films are complicated and more than most susceptible to multiple
interoperations, but I agree with your description as one of the main
ones for many of the films. Also, the arc of his career from the mid-50s
to about 1980 structures itself, in part, as a quest to free light.
Totally off topic, and with apologies to those who may have heard it
already: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one
with everything."
- Fred
7558
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 8:21am
Subject: Re: Return of the Living Dead
He's working on 2 books and toying with an idea for a film.
7559
From: hotlove666
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 8:46am
Subject: Re: Gnostic cinema
Fred is right: in Gnosticism, Creation and Fall were simultaneous.
But false perception can certainly be part of the picture - in Blake,
for example, who is the most overt and systematic Gnostic among the
Romantic poets. Blake's God was the Imagination, and he felt that
fallen Man's Imagination was imprisoned by the forms of Nature:
"Little Fly, thy Summer's play my thoughtless hand has brushed away.
But art not thou a Man like me, and am not I a Fly like thee? For I
laugh and dance and sing, till some blind hand shall brush my wing.
So am I a happy Fly, if I live or if I die."
Blake considered the Enlightenment to be a form of Natural Religion -
Isaac Newton, to Blake, was a Druid. So was Wordsworth. If and how
that split (Blake's visionary poems and Wordsworth's "Religion of
Nature") can be seen in American avant-garde film I don't know. I do
know that the opposition was not nearly as clearcut as Blake thought
it was - there are spooky intimations of apocalypse in Wordsworth's
early poetry, but he was too much of a humanist to take that path.
These days, with Last Times fanatics in control of at least one
nuclear arsenal and perhaps two, my respect for Wordsworth is
increasing.
Also Scientology is indeed a form of Gnosticism. It's easily the
wackiest form of Gnosticism ever devised, which is not surprising
coming from a (pretty good) pulp sci-fi writer. But I don't know that
the system has ever found its cinematic exponent.
7560
From: George Robinson
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 8:53am
Subject: Re: Re: Gnostic cinema
What? You don't consider Battlefield Earth to be the pinnacle of cinematic
art?
George (I never learned to play pinochle, but if you're up for a few hands
of poker, I'm your man) Robinson
[A]rmaments were not created chiefly for the protection
of the nations but for their enslavement.
--Mark Twain
----- Original Message -----
From: "hotlove666"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 3:46 AM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Gnostic cinema
> Fred is right: in Gnosticism, Creation and Fall were simultaneous.
> But false perception can certainly be part of the picture - in Blake,
> for example, who is the most overt and systematic Gnostic among the
> Romantic poets. Blake's God was the Imagination, and he felt that
> fallen Man's Imagination was imprisoned by the forms of Nature:
>
> "Little Fly, thy Summer's play my thoughtless hand has brushed away.
> But art not thou a Man like me, and am not I a Fly like thee? For I
> laugh and dance and sing, till some blind hand shall brush my wing.
> So am I a happy Fly, if I live or if I die."
>
> Blake considered the Enlightenment to be a form of Natural Religion -
> Isaac Newton, to Blake, was a Druid. So was Wordsworth. If and how
> that split (Blake's visionary poems and Wordsworth's "Religion of
> Nature") can be seen in American avant-garde film I don't know. I do
> know that the opposition was not nearly as clearcut as Blake thought
> it was - there are spooky intimations of apocalypse in Wordsworth's
> early poetry, but he was too much of a humanist to take that path.
> These days, with Last Times fanatics in control of at least one
> nuclear arsenal and perhaps two, my respect for Wordsworth is
> increasing.
>
> Also Scientology is indeed a form of Gnosticism. It's easily the
> wackiest form of Gnosticism ever devised, which is not surprising
> coming from a (pretty good) pulp sci-fi writer. But I don't know that
> the system has ever found its cinematic exponent.
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
7561
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 11:51am
Subject: OT: Buddhist jokes
> Totally off topic, and with apologies to those who may have heard it
> already: What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one
> with everything."
There's a companion joke: Why couldn't the Buddhist use his vacuum
cleaner? Because he'd lost all his attachments. - Dan
7562
From: Gary W. Tooze
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 1:28pm
Subject: Re: 2001...
At 08:42 AM 2/17/2004 +0000, you wrote:
>The Star Baby may or may not be intended as an optimistic
> >gesture; the case would be more convincing to me if I found any kind of
> >transcendental yearning for a new humanity in the previous 130 minutes....
I have a different take altogether... the Star baby is a representation of
our only true contribution. It essentially is the only thing we can ever
really do. We are all standing on the shoulders of past generations....
including our ancestor that determined the use of a tool (the most
important step in the history of our evolution) . HAL is the ultimate tool
- run amok. The optimistic nature of the film involves our regaining
control of the tool. We will exist - not be defeated by our technology....
this as well as defining our own infancy in space exploration. We learn to
walk... to eat... and to go to the toilet - we are children - still learning.
My complete review is here:
http://207.136.67.23/film/DVDReview/2001.htm
Cheers,
Gary William Tooze
http://www.DVDBeaver.com
7563
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 6:23am
Subject: Re: Re: 2001
> The structure I see in the film, not to be mysterious about it, is
> that of the Romantic Ode: The Ode to a Nightingale (Keats) and
> To the West Wind (Shelley) being probably the best-known
> examples. The Romantics took over the form from Pindar, and it
> involves sudden shifts from stanza to stanza, with pronounced
> breaks in between.
>
> This became somewhat more common in film after 2001, the
> best example being Heaven's Gate, where the time-shifts
> foreground Time as the subject of the film. In Kubrick, this kind of
> block construction - used again in Full Metal Jacket - often
> involves mixing modes, so that in the latter film you have a kind
> of modernist narrative at the beginning, a deconstructed
> narrative up until Tet and the gradual return of classical narrative
> during the patrol at the end. These modes are also different
> imaginative stances being tried out, as in Keats, Shelley or, for
> that matter, Syberberg (Our Hitler).
>
> I know this is all very "lit crit," but literature is part of what film -
> narrative and non-narrative - inherited/appropriated for its own
> ends.
This is quite interesting, and rings true. I'm not quite sure how to
react from an artistic point of view, though. Presumably the value of
this mode comes from some interaction or synergy among the different
styles, so that the whole is more than the sum of the parts?
The observation about morbidity, in a film often described in spiritual
terms, was my attempt at chicken-sexing, so to speak. To my mind, being
an auteurist means putting out one's antennae and picking up the
frequencies that the film's style is transmitting, which often have
little to do with plot, issues, etc. Of course, I'm open to the idea
that I'm missing a lot here, especially as my response to the film is
modest. - Dan
7564
From:
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 7:44am
Subject: Re: 2001
Dan:
> Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea in
> the third episode are nowhere near as awkward as most of the
actors in
> the second episode - I found them both competent and low-key. We
feel
> some distance from them because Kubrick doesn't allow them to
express
> too many emotions that we can identify with, not because they
perform
> poorly. I guess I'm saying that I don't think Kubrick was really
on top
> of the acting situation in the second episode.
>
The thing to remember (for me at least) is that Bowman and Poole are
very different narratively from the other characters in the film.
True, everybody is out in space and is familiar with being an
astronaut to some degree, but while the others are just scientists
and company men who do business out there, Bowman and Poole are more
like today's astronauts -- that is, people with the necessary
personality profiles to allow for them to explore space and not go
crazy for a very long time. I've always found it strange when sci-
fi films featured astronauts with Type A Personalities doing their
crazy Method shtick out in the vast reaches of space. My guess is
that Charlton Heston & co. would never have passed the NASA vetting
process. You don't send ticking human timebombs out into the cosmos
piloting zillion dollar spaceships and heading projects that took
years to get off the ground. When 2001's critics diss the bland
performances of Dullea and Lockwood, I always get images of Brando
screaming "Stel-laa!!" in a flightsuit.
>I'm still wondering about the construction of the film. Episode
one,
> silent but narrative, feels prefatory, and I thought it was pretty
> successful in that role. Episode two and three, the dialogue
episodes,
> are rather different. #2 builds a mystery that remains mysterious
at
> its end, and offers some bits of "present-day," recognizable human
life
> placed in a futuristic context. Because it doesn't wind up
telling us
> much, it feels almost as prefatory as #1. #3, on the other hand,
is
> built around an old-fashioned suspense idea; it's the only
classical
> storytelling in the movie, I'd say, and it pulls together into an
> emotionally satisfying ending. >
I'm not entirely sure why you're bothered by this structure. If it
doesn't seem to flow emotionally, that might be because you're
approaching it from a slightly more conventional angle. Actually,
I'd say Part One is kind of a unique narrative in and of itself.
It's not really prefatory; it's its own story. (Somewhat unrelated
note: Everytime I see the film I'm struck by just how economical
these opening scenes are, the way Kubrick almost effortlessly
establishes the apes' fear of the tiger, their helplessness at the
stalemate around the watering hole, etc.)
Parts 2, 3, and 4, in some way, play out the same story on a larger
narrative canvas. So to see these parts as being distinct from one
another is somewhat incorrect, I believe. The key here is that the
protagonist of 2001 is really humanity itself -- that's why Kubrick
builds his scenes so slowly, allowing us to inhabit them and spend
time in them (which is why when Poole or Bowman runs around the
centrifuge, the camera -- and the audience -- moves with them). His
aim is to place the audience *on* those ships; it's an experiential
movie in that sense. But of course, ignoring the element of the
audience-as-protagonist will leave you with a fractured narrative,
with different characters in each one. *We* are the connecting
tissue in the film. That may sound pretentious (cue Robin Wood and
his endless damning comparisons of the film with Hawks's THE THING),
but, well, it's a movie about Big Ideas, and unabashedly so.
I suppose someone will suggest that it's hard to relate to these
characters, if they're supposed to represent humanity itself. I
can't say anything to that, except that I disagree. I actually find
Bowman & Poole, for all their outward plainness, to be very
compelling characters. The birthday scene, the dilemma over what to
do with Hal, the quotidian details (the exercise, the astronaut
food, etc.) allow me to connect with these guys, even if they're not
chewing scenery or shedding tears.
>
> Usually, a film conveys loneliness
> by making us identify with a lonely character, but that's not the
> situation here.
See above re: the real protagonist of the film. I always get a
profound sense of loneliness from the film as well. And that
loneliness is echoed, I think, by humanity's loneliness out in
space. Which is sort of the supreme, beautiful irony of the film:
Here we are finally discovering we're not alone in the cosmos,
and...we're alone in the cosmos when we do it, so much so that by
the end of the film, there is only one guy left onscreen.
As for the musical choices, perhaps "The Blue Danube" isn't a very
lonely piece, but Khatchaturian's "Gayane" might well be the
loneliest, saddest piece of music ever written...so much so that the
ALIEN films later used it repeatedly anytime a character was left by
themselves out in space.
-Bilge
7565
From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 10:03am
Subject: BLOWUP DVD audio
In case anyone cares, I'm re-posting something I just wrote for the
Mobius forum. Hopefully this will format correctly:
Has anyone checked out the new disc of BLOWUP? Is it just some
peculiarity of my home set-up or is the audio on this disc an
absolute catastrophe?
There's no bass whatsoever. Maybe actually for the first second or
so, then it disappears from the main title music. The rest is
processed sounding, scratchy and phasey.
The audio on the music-only track is, roughly, 15 dB louder than on
the movie soundtrack. Turning it up doesn't help. (The music-only
track sounds pretty good.)
Comparing it to the Criterion laserdisc sound, well, there's no
comparison. The Criterion sounds about right for a movie of that
vintage, has a certain amount of "oomph."
This is a movie in which the audio is very important. A non
movie-obsessed friend of mine recalled, after a period of decades,
the sound of the wind in the trees in the park where the central
event takes place.
Why hasn't a Bergman-sized fuss been made? Is it just my system? (I
tried it on a Pioneer and a JVC player, and the audio sounds the same
on both.)
I think this disc needs to be recalled.
--
- Joe Kaufman
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7566
From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 1:17pm
Subject: Re: 2001
One of the challenges of 2001 is that it is more than the sum of its parts Dan, that is an excellent observation. Throughout his career Kubrick was trying to explode the concepts of the traditional cinematic narrative. He truly achieved this in 2001 but the results make it complex for the viewer. The film is more about "big ideas" than plot so when one tries to make sense out of each section of the film and relate them it narratively they are usually disapointed and frustrated.
Bilge, your understanding of Poole and Bowman's personalities is insightful and exactly what Kubrick was going for. In talking to Keir Dullea he went into great detail about the professionalism of the astronauts. He studied their training and the importance of being logical and unemotional in the tasks of being an astronaut. This is another aspect of 2001 that was revolutionary. As you point out the type A personality may be good drama but not realistic. I also find them fascinating. It takes a more work on the viewer's part to penetrate their characters but it is ultimately more rewarding.
Vinny
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7567
From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 5:37pm
Subject: Re: Re: 2001
> The thing to remember (for me at least) is that Bowman and Poole are
> very different narratively from the other characters in the film.
> True, everybody is out in space and is familiar with being an
> astronaut to some degree, but while the others are just scientists
> and company men who do business out there, Bowman and Poole are more
> like today's astronauts -- that is, people with the necessary
> personality profiles to allow for them to explore space and not go
> crazy for a very long time.
I had no problem with Lockwood and Dullea's performances. If a director
wants to make an audience connect to taciturn personalities, he or she
can do so pretty easily. I figure Kubrick wasn't going for that sort of
emotional response to the characters - I guess you experienced a more
direct connection to these guys than I did.
> I'm not entirely sure why you're bothered by this structure. If it
> doesn't seem to flow emotionally, that might be because you're
> approaching it from a slightly more conventional angle.
Maybe you're right. But I don't get immediately what we feel as a
result of the collision of the different formats. I'm thinking about
this, though.
> that's why Kubrick
> builds his scenes so slowly, allowing us to inhabit them and spend
> time in them (which is why when Poole or Bowman runs around the
> centrifuge, the camera -- and the audience -- moves with them). His
> aim is to place the audience *on* those ships; it's an experiential
> movie in that sense. But of course, ignoring the element of the
> audience-as-protagonist will leave you with a fractured narrative,
> with different characters in each one. *We* are the connecting
> tissue in the film.
Yeah, but we experience disconnected things. I accept that this is
intentional, but the you-are-there filming doesn't eliminate the issue
of the disconnected formats. One should be able to talk about the
effect of clashing acting styles, storytelling strategies, etc.
> As for the musical choices, perhaps "The Blue Danube" isn't a very
> lonely piece
It suggests to me a sort of modernist, ironic distance from "the awe of
space." No? - Dan
7568
From: Elizabeth NOLAN
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 6:10pm
Subject: OSCAR boycotts of specific films because of their content
'Friedmans' victims ask Academy to deny documentary Oscar
NEW YORK -- Two men whom Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to sexually
abusing
as boys have written an open letter to Academy Awards voters, speaking
out
against the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Friedman family.
(from Hollywood Reporter)
I thought a OSCAR boycott might arise for FOG OF WAR, as an arrogant
McNamara might see any award as vindication for his 'mea culpa' before
he meets his maker.
I did not anticipate a Friedman's boycott. Have their been similar
OSCAR boycotts of specific films because of their content?
7569
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 6:54pm
Subject: Re: 2001 and the American avant-garde (att: Fred)
It's not about a whole, greater or lesser - it's about the leaps, and
where they take us. It breaks down into 6 moves as I see it:
The Dawn of Man - irony (the "dawn" is composed of night
images, except for the last day images when we learn to kill
each other - we never see an actual dawn)
The bone-the space shuttle-the space station - synecdoche -
images of part and whole
The plot, from the space station to the death of HAL - metonymy,
one thing after another
Jupiter and Beyond Infinity: hyperbole, images of height and
depth (for example, that deep space ship that looks like a
bone-fish at the bottom of a sunless sea: height and depth
fused. Then the high-flying Stargate stuff, which sometimes
harks back to the ocean depth idea).
Bowman in the Louis XIV environment - metaphor: images of
inside/outside
The birth of the Star Child - metalepsis: paradoxical images of
early and late ("The Child is Father to the Man")
These are moves, not movements; they aren't of equal length.
And the fact that the same moves happen in the same order in
all the great odes of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge
is no accident. This is my gibbering gasbag mentor Harold
Bloom's Map of Misreading, which maps the rhetorical
tropes/revisionary ratios/typical images of each of the six moves
in the Romantic Ode and later poems descended from it, all the
way to John Ashbery.
Each revisionary ratio is a reading/misreading of a predecessor,
in Kubrick's case Ophuls. Whereas I think Clarke was influenced
by Stapledon, Wells and, believe it or not, Robert Browning, to
whose poem "Childe Roland to the Drk Tower Came" he refers
the monolith in one of the published variants of the ending of the
novel. The 6 ratios trace out a movement of imaginative
contraction/expansion (the Dawn sequence, the entire plot, and
the Louis XIV sections being contractions, and the
bone-shuttle-station, Beyond Infinity, and Star Child being
expansions). To make the whole thing even more outrageous,
each ratio is also a different Freudian psychic defense.
With or without the theoretical labels, this rhythm is pretty familiar
to anyone who knows the English Romantic poetry tradition from
Book One of Paradise Lost on, but I wouldn't try to apply it to an
Andre de Toth western. It's useful for thinking about films like
2001 or Our Hitler, that's all. I wouldn't be surprised, too, if the
Straubs know a version of it from their involvement with German
Romanticism, particularly Holderlin. And I wonder if it applies to
at least some work of the American avant garde, which explicitly
compares itself to poetry from time to time.
By the way, all of the music selections were made from a bunch
of possibilities Jan Harlin, K's brother-in-law, pulled together for
him to choose from. Harlin specifically suggested the Strauss
Dawn theme for the beginning and end - K just said he wanted
something that set a certain mood and ended suddenly. JH is
quite the music buff, and plans to do a series of tv shows about
classical music now that he has some time on his hands.
I think the Strauss waltz is thrilling. Look at how Cimino used it in
the 2001-influenced opening of Heaven's Gate. It's orgiastic!
7570
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:06pm
Subject: Re: 2001
> > As for the musical choices, perhaps "The Blue Danube" isn't a very
> > lonely piece
>
> It suggests to me a sort of modernist, ironic distance from "the awe of
> space." No?
What's fascinating about 2001's "Blue Danube" sequence is that
Kubrick's movie is the one, above all, that helped to define the way I
think about outer space (not to mention cinematic space), so that
distance is not the same kind of "ironic distance" normally employed
by filmmakers (Kubrick included, in his way), but the kind that the
idea of outer space brings to everything.
The waltz makes the coldness of space warm for a few minutes, without
sacrificing its grandeur. (Enhancing it, in fact.) Kubrick's cinema
is amused, not mocking.
In other sequences, the memory of this warmth remains, contrasted
against the horrors of murder, anxiety towards the unknown, etc., etc.
-Jaime
7571
From:
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:08pm
Subject: Re: 2001
Dan Sallitt:
>
> Yeah, but we experience disconnected things. I accept that this
is
> intentional, but the you-are-there filming doesn't eliminate the
issue
> of the disconnected formats. One should be able to talk about the
> effect of clashing acting styles, storytelling strategies, etc.
Sure. I guess I don't really agree with the notion of the acting
styles being all that radically different from one another. I mean,
they're different actors, sure, but they all generally seem to be
from the same book to my eyes and ears.
As for the experiencing different things part, there's a bit of
quantum cinematics going on here. Every time the monolith appears,
man undergoes some kind of evolution. And the film does so as well.
The first scenes are primitive and very direct -- elemental emotions
(fear, anger, etc.) conveyed through simple imagery, sans dialogue.
Then, we get music, followed closely by dialogue (not to mention the
ability to deceive and evade through that dialogue -- note the charm
of the daddy-daughter scene placed in pointed contrast to the scene
of Floyd evading the Soviet scientists' questions). The rather stagy
scenes with Floyd all lead to a fairly satisfying and conventional
storyline in the Bowman-Poole-HAL chapter (where we go even beyond
dialogue, to lip-reading, suggesting that HAL & his ilk have somehow
taken the initiative). And then we go avant-garde. So, the film
itself goes through the stages of cinema history while it goes
through human history:
1.) Silent cinema (The Apes)
2.) Canned Theater, with a brief detour into the musical (Floyd's
multiple performances in front of his daughter, the Russians, his
fellow Americans)
3.) Conventional narrative (Discovery, Bowman/Poole/HAL)
4.) Experimental film
5.) The final scenes are a return to the silent cinema, in a way,
but this time conveying something far more than the simple,
elemental concepts of the first episode. Now we've got solitude,
death, knowledge, mysticism, etc. (Maybe this is the 60s art film, a
la Bergman and Antonioni...)
>
> > As for the musical choices, perhaps "The Blue Danube" isn't a
very
> > lonely piece
>
> It suggests to me a sort of modernist, ironic distance from "the
awe of
> space." No?
Sure, but more importantly, it's a bit of a play on the dance
between the ships. After all, the main motif of the waltz is the
circle, and here we have circles (circular spaceships, circular
planets, circular orbits, circular landing pads) up the wazoo.
Remember, this is the guy that opened DR. STRANGELOVE with warplanes
refueling in mid-air to "Try A Little Tenderness."
-Bilge
7572
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:33pm
Subject: Re: 2001 and space
I meant to say, in my post, that implicit in the great distances we
find when looking at outer space, between Earth and the other objects
in the solar system, between galaxies and stars, etc., there is a kind
of irony, a physical distancing effect (not even an effect, but a
property!), and this whole arrangement allows Kubrick enough room to
make a "joke" about spaceships dancing around one another - a joke
that has probably occurred to astronauts and cosmonauts without
Kubrikc's help - while at the same time conveying the fact that this
is what space is really like.
That still might not make much sense. Oh well.
-Jaime
7573
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:37pm
Subject: Re: 2001
My favorite scene on the moon is in the space cab, when the
spot-on-looking astro-jockey hands out the Space Spam while
he and Floyd talk man-to-man and "let their hair down" by saying
"damn."
7574
From: hotlove666
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:03pm
Subject: re: 2001
Very interesting post, Bilge. Dawn and the Space Waltz definitely
refer to silent cinema. And I think what happens once we're
inside the space station is that Kubrick starts doing those
Wellesian wide-angle shots of talky scenes - notably the
conversation between Floyd and the Russian - as if we were
seeing the film image ingesting the theatrical cube and still
trying to digest it.
7575
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:05pm
Subject: Eyecandy
The Blue Danube really is one of the most beautiful sequences ever
made in Cinema - and it is nothing more than just eyecandy and a joke
:)
Serving as linkage between prelithic ages and the future, the initial
cut (bone --> shuttle) notes upon tool of the time, while the
remaining sequeces shows the tranquility of space by having Earth and
the orbital spacestation move exact as when dancing walse: Doubtless,
Kubrick got the idea for the score by their movement.
The joke here is, that the more advanced tools become, the greater
difficulty in their use: The velcro shoes, the zero G toilet
instruction to name two.
Kubrick loves eyecandy, from simple things as the opening sequence of
Lolita (painting of the toes) to entire sequences (Alex' gaze in
Clockwork Orange and Lyndon's stature in Barry Lyndon). Being a
photographer at heart, the playfulness of his visuals is IMO one of
the elements, that makes Kubrick such a great master.
Henrik
7576
From: jaketwilson
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 11:27pm
Subject: Re: 2001 and space
Jaime M. Christley wrote:
> I meant to say, in my post, that implicit in the great distances we
> find when looking at outer space, between Earth and the other
objectsin the solar system, between galaxies and stars, etc., there
is a kind of irony, a physical distancing effect (not even an effect,
but a
> property!), and this whole arrangement allows Kubrick enough room to
> make a "joke" about spaceships dancing around one another - a joke
> that has probably occurred to astronauts and cosmonauts without
> Kubrikc's help - while at the same time conveying the fact that this
> is what space is really like.
Sure. I don't think Kubrick is distancing himself from "the awe of
space" at all; if anything is being mocked, it's the human culture
which produced "The Blue Danube". But for me the scene is both jokey
and exultant; it's about the glorious effrontery of trying to impose
a human perspective on the universe.
In an IMAX documentary shot in space (I forget the title) there's a
scene where we hear "White Christmas" while the astronauts float
around. I found that scene, like many of the mundane details included
in the doco, very moving and very reminiscent of 2001: the kitsch
of "White Christmas" mainly works to reminds us that any piece of
music, indeed any human artifact, might appear trivial and artificial
against the background of the cosmos. But realising the "triviality"
of our own concerns makes us cherish them all the more -- hence the
pathos inherent in the SF "sense of wonder".
JTW
7577
From:
Date: Wed Feb 18, 2004 8:11pm
Subject: Re: 2001
I really enjoy 2001, but have always found it hard to "understand it". Its
visual beauty is without a doubt. Favorite scene: the Stargate, which does
indeed echo the tradition of "color music" or abstract cinema, such as Jordan
Belson or the Whitney brothers. This is a fascinating piece of work. Also very
interesting: the scene with the men in their red spacesuits, in the red interior
of Hal. This has a dazzling use of color. It reminds one of Kurosawa and other
Japanese cinema, with the red panels similar to Japanese screens. In some
ways, 2001 is a film "about color".
Have never been able to assign coherent meanings to the plot, or explain
Kubrick's/the film's attitude towards the material. Is Hal's fall a tragic fall
from greatness? Or is it a negative commentary on computers? Is the fact that
astronauts are so subdued a negative commentary on them - are they under
military discipline like the evil boot camp leaders in "Full Metal Jacket"? Or are
they sympathetic professionals? Why does Hal have so much more personality than
them? Is this a commentary on Kubrick's part? (Douglas Rain is a favorite
stage actor locally, being a star at Stratford, Ontario for many years). Why are
the astronauts cast as leading men types, but then not given traditional
leading man material? One could go on and on like this... Kubrick is extremely
evasive about everything. This does not mean it is a bad film. But it is very
different from say, Fritz Lang, whose attitudes usually come through loud and clear.
Have never known anything about Gnosticism before, or about Bloom's ideas of
form in romantic odes. I've read all this poetry (complete works of Milton,
Thomas Gray, Marvell, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Longfellow) but never heard of
Bloom's ideas. So I'm Learning! Fascinating stuff...
Mike Grost
Tho he inherit pride nor pinion
That the Theban eagle bear,
sailing with supreme dominion,
through the azure deep of air -
Yet before his infant eyes would run
such forms as glitter in the Muses' ray
with orient hues unborrowed of the sun.
Thomas Gray - The Progress of Poesy
(the Theban eagle is Pindar)
7578
From: iangjohnston
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:11am
Subject: Re: OSCAR boycotts of specific films because of their content
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Elizabeth NOLAN wrote:
> 'Friedmans' victims ask Academy to deny documentary Oscar
> NEW YORK -- Two men whom Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to sexually
> abusing
> as boys have written an open letter to Academy Awards voters,
speaking
> out
> against the Oscar-nominated documentary about the Friedman family.
> (from Hollywood Reporter)
>
> I thought a OSCAR boycott might arise for FOG OF WAR, as an
arrogant
> McNamara might see any award as vindication for his 'mea culpa'
before
> he meets his maker.
>
> I did not anticipate a Friedman's boycott. Have their been
similar
> OSCAR boycotts of specific films because of their content?
I don't know how far these "boycotts" actually went, but I remember
reading people urging boycotts of THE PIANIST (because of Polanski's
conviction for statutory rape) and TALK TO HER (because of the
bullfighting scene [animal rights...]-- presumably considered more
reprehensible than one of the main character's rape of a comatose
patient).
7579
From: Jaime N. Christley
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 8:20am
Subject: Re: 2001 (Kubrick and Ophuls)
>Is the fact that
> astronauts are so subdued a negative commentary on them - are they
under
> military discipline like the evil boot camp leaders in "Full Metal
Jacket"?
I think any such connection is purely accidental.
I find that Kubrick's films really open up when they're studied
against Max Ophuls' films: much of Ophuls' work was about characters
who were pushed and pulled, done under or rocketed skyward by forces
that (a) were greater than any individual person and (b) were social
forces, created by people to define behaviors and decide fates.
Kubrick's forces are not always created by people, sometimes they're
created by angry ghosts and beings from outer space, or gods, etc.
Mike, your writing on Ophuls really opened my eyes to Kubrick, who was
already one of my favorite filmmakers. You might consider the Ophuls
"machine" structure (see your discussion of the "needle and thread
search" sequence in LOLA MONTES) in relation to the machines that
Kubrick works with: the literal machines of 2001 (although the grand
Ophulsian structure may be the evolutionary process as imagined by the
Kubrick-Clarke, or simply the monolith itself), the military-social
machines in FULL METAL JACKET and PATHS OF GLORY, the supernatural one
in THE SHINING, the social codes in BARRY LYNDON, the fatalistic law
and order machine of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Murphy's Law in THE KILLING,
the nuclear deterrent program in STRANGELOVE, etc. One of Kubrick's
themes has been the failure of these machines or the failure of the
heroes/heroines because the machines worked too well - not *quite* so
with Ophuls.
I had an instructor who suggested that Paul Thomas Anderson might be
considered a "worthy" heir to Ophuls. His structures are not as
rigorous as Kubrick's or Ophuls', though...it remains to be seen, I
think, what he'll bring to the cinema in the end, if anything.
7580
From: jerome_gerber
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 1:12pm
Subject: Terrence Malick's new film
Malick fans
Just been announced that Terrence Malick will be directing
"Che"...a biopic of later life of Che Guevara. It will star Benicio Del
Toro....and Javier Bardem in supporting role...(Castro?)...Variety
story below.
Malick in 'Che' revolution
Bardem expected to take supporting role; film to lense in July
By ALISON JAMES, DANA HARRIS
Terrence Malick will direct "Che," a biopicbiopic that will star
Benicio Del Toro as Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che"
Guevara. Malick also wrote the script.
Budgeted at $40 million, the film is produced by River Road
Entertainment, VIP/Rising Star, Morena Films, Laura
BickfordLaura Bickford, Steven SoderberghSteven Soderbergh
and Del Toro. Philip Elway and Andreas Schmid are executive
producers. Film is being financed by River Road and VIP,
contingent on sales closing at the American Film Market next
week.
The film is scheduled for a four-month South American shoot to
begin in July.
Javier Bardem is planning to take a supporting
role in the pic.
At AFM, former Studio Canal subsid Wild Bunch will reprep "Che"
in all territories except the U.S. and Spain. It's the
shingleshingle's biggest pic as an indie outfit.
Bill Pohlad's River Road retains North American rights, with
Spanish distribution going through Morena.
Malick brings a certain firsthand experience to the project. When
the Bolivian army murdered the 39-year-old Guevara in 1967,
Malick was in the country to write a piece on Guevara's guerrillas
for the New Yorker.
Walter SallesWalter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," which
bowed at the recent Sundance Film Festival, starred Gael Garcia
BernalGael Garcia Bernal as the pre-revolutionary Guevara.
Malick's pic will focus on the last part of Guevara's life.
River Road has a first-lookfirst-look deal with Focus Features,
which acquired "Motorcycle Diaries" at the festfest.
The radical is also the subject of "Traveling With Che Guevara," a
documentary directed by Gianni Mina. Made during the
production of "The Motorcycle Diaries," it focuses on Guevara's
traveling companion, Alberto Granado. Now 81, he served as a
technical adviser on the Salles film, in which he was portrayed by
Rodrigo de la Serna.
"Traveling With Che Guevara" screened in the Panorama section
at the recent Berlin Film Festival.
7581
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 2:36pm
Subject: Re: Re: 2001 (Kubrick and Ophuls)
--- "Jaime N. Christley"
wrote:
>
> I find that Kubrick's films really open up when
> they're studied
> against Max Ophuls' films
Kubrick greatl admired Ophuls. I have no doubt that
his interest in "La Ronde" led to his discovery of
Schnitzler and the eventual creation of "Eyes Wide
Shut." However in terms of mise en scene "Lolita" and
"2001" are more Ophulsian.
You might
> consider the Ophuls
> "machine" structure (see your discussion of the
> "needle and thread
> search" sequence in LOLA MONTES) in relation to the
> machines that
> Kubrick works with: the literal machines of 2001
> (although the grand
> Ophulsian structure may be the evolutionary process
> as imagined by the
> Kubrick-Clarke, or simply the monolith itself),
Correct. In many ways HAL is Kubrick's
Walbrook-equivalent. But ther's much more of Walbrook
in Sellers' Quilty AND Mason's Humbert.
the
> military-social
> machines in FULL METAL JACKET and PATHS OF GLORY,
> the supernatural one
> in THE SHINING, the social codes in BARRY LYNDON,
> the fatalistic law
> and order machine of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Murphy's
> Law in THE KILLING,
> the nuclear deterrent program in STRANGELOVE, etc.
To some degree, particularly "Paths of Glory."
>
> I had an instructor who suggested that Paul Thomas
> Anderson might be
> considered a "worthy" heir to Ophuls. His
> structures are not as
> rigorous as Kubrick's or Ophuls', though...it
> remains to be seen, I
> think, what he'll bring to the cinema in the end, if
> anything.
>
>
So far he's contributed nothing save hype. I see him
as the heir to Michael Cimino.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
7582
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 4:17pm
Subject: Re: Terrence Malick's new film
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jerome_gerber"
wrote:
> Malick fans
>
>
> Just been announced that Terrence Malick will be directing
> "Che"...a biopic of later life of Che Guevara. It will star Benicio
Del
> Toro....and Javier Bardem in supporting role...(Castro?)...Variety
> story below.
>
>
>
> Malick in 'Che' revolution
>
> Bardem expected to take supporting role; film to lense in July
>
> By ALISON JAMES, DANA HARRIS
>
> Terrence Malick will direct "Che," a biopicbiopic that will star
> Benicio Del Toro as Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che"
> Guevara. Malick also wrote the script.
>
> Budgeted at $40 million, the film is produced by River Road
> Entertainment, VIP/Rising Star, Morena Films, Laura
> BickfordLaura Bickford, Steven SoderberghSteven Soderbergh
> and Del Toro. Philip Elway and Andreas Schmid are executive
> producers. Film is being financed by River Road and VIP,
> contingent on sales closing at the American Film Market next
> week.
>
> The film is scheduled for a four-month South American shoot to
> begin in July.
>
> Javier Bardem is planning to take a supporting
> role in the pic.
>
> At AFM, former Studio Canal subsid Wild Bunch will reprep "Che"
> in all territories except the U.S. and Spain. It's the
> shingleshingle's biggest pic as an indie outfit.
>
> Bill Pohlad's River Road retains North American rights, with
> Spanish distribution going through Morena.
>
> Malick brings a certain firsthand experience to the project. When
> the Bolivian army murdered the 39-year-old Guevara in 1967,
> Malick was in the country to write a piece on Guevara's guerrillas
> for the New Yorker.
>
> Walter SallesWalter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," which
> bowed at the recent Sundance Film Festival, starred Gael Garcia
> BernalGael Garcia Bernal as the pre-revolutionary Guevara.
> Malick's pic will focus on the last part of Guevara's life.
>
> River Road has a first-lookfirst-look deal with Focus Features,
> which acquired "Motorcycle Diaries" at the festfest.
>
> The radical is also the subject of "Traveling With Che Guevara," a
> documentary directed by Gianni Mina. Made during the
> production of "The Motorcycle Diaries," it focuses on Guevara's
> traveling companion, Alberto Granado. Now 81, he served as a
> technical adviser on the Salles film, in which he was portrayed by
> Rodrigo de la Serna.
>
> "Traveling With Che Guevara" screened in the Panorama section
> at the recent Berlin Film Festival.
During the shooting of Traffic, Soderbergh, Del Toro and Bickford,
began discussing their next project: Che. Last year in March, Malick
approached Soderbergh with interest in Che, and as Soderbergh more or
less had begon his sabbat year, he gave the project to Malick, who
then, from around April, began initial preproduction and script work.
But its nice that Variety finally has made it official :)
This is a dream project for Malick, as he expressed to Soderbergh, and
given Malick's auteurist signature regarding his protagonists, Che
will be right up his alley.
I, for one, am very excited.
Henrik
7583
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 5:52pm
Subject: Re: Re: 2001 and the American avant-garde (att: Fred)
Sorry, I've gotten way behind on posts, and to be honest, I have trouble
bringing myself to read posts about Kubrick! I've not even seen all of
his films, but the same thing strikes me about them every time: lots of
ideas, lots of calculations, but a completely lack of cinematic
"architecture": I never feel the compositions adding up one after the
other spatially, visually. The word "emptiness" keeps coming to mind.
Perhaps this is a blind spot of mine, and I write this in ignorance of
most of the recent posts here, so I'll try to get caught up over the
next few days.
But one thing struck me in Bill's post: the reference to the "Dark
Tower." There's a very short Brakhage film, 'The Dark Tower," on the DVD
that does in fact have a "dark tower" that I find hugely more powerful
than Kubrick's. The film is handpainted. And when I asked him the source
of the title, he cited a line from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"
-- "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came." Presumably the Browning poem
is a reference to the Byron line?
- Fred
7584
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:04pm
Subject: Shopping list from Europe
I know it doesn't mean much to post a list of films without commentary, but=
I
thought I would at least highlight some of the better films I saw during my=
trips
to Berlin and Paris before I have some time to comment further:
1st category - favorites
L'esquive, by Abdelatif Kéchiche
Unfinished (from M'as-tu vue), by Sophie Calle
Before Sunset, by Richard Linklater
2nd category - others I liked a lot
The Sign of Chaos, by Rogério Sganzerla
Samaritan Girl, Kim Ki-duk
South of the Clouds, Zhu Wen
Léo en jouant 'dans la compaignie des hommes', Arnaud Desplechin
La face cachée de la lune, Robert Lepage
Triple Agent, Eric Rohmer
3rd category - others I liked mildly
Demain, on déménage, Chantal Akerman
Chain, Jem Cohen
Feux rouges, Cedric Kahn
Pas sur la bouche, Alain Resnais
Return of Caligostro, Daniele Cipri and Franco Maresco
not very interesting:
Zebraman, Takashi Miike,
Ae Fond Kiss, Ken Loach
El Abrazo Partido, Daniel Burman
Trilogy I: The Weeping Meadow, Theo Angelopoulos
Folle embellie, Dominique Cabrera
Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat
duds:
Witnesses, Vinko Bresan
Confidences trop intimes, Patrice Leconte
Beautiful Country, Hans Peter Molland
still unseen by me (though on my list):
The Missing, Lee Kang-sheng
Head On, Faith Akin [golden bear winner]
Les sentiments, Noémie Lvovsky
Pas de repos pour les braves, Alain Guiraudie
Vert paradis, Emmanuel Bourdieu
Raja, Jacques Doillon
Paul s'en va, Alain Tanner
Gabe
7585
From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Tue Feb 17, 2004 6:39pm
Subject: jean rouch dead
Jean Rouch : cinéaste, ethnologue et poète
PARIS, 19 fév (AFP) - Cinéaste, ethnologue et poète, Jean Rouch a trouvé la
mort à 86 ans au Niger, dans cette Afrique qui le passionnait depuis les
années 1940 et à laquelle il avait consacré l'essentiel de ses quelque 120
films.
Mêlant fiction et documentaire, cet admirateur du cinéma-vérité avait
qualifié de "ciné-transe" son art de saisir des images en plein mouvement.
Certaines oeuvres de celui qui avait d'ailleurs dirigé la Cinémathèque
française (1987-1991) sont devenus des classiques de l'"anthropologie
visuelle", comme "les Maîtres fous" et "Moi, un Noir".
Né à Paris le 31 mai 1917, fils d'un ancien directeur du Musée
océanographique de Monaco, Jean Rouch découvre le cinéma à six ans en voyant
"Nanouk l'Esquimau" de Flaherty. Cette expérience bouleversante déterminera
plus tard sa vocation de cinéaste. Nanti d'un doctorat ès lettres, il
obtient, en 1937, à l'Ecole des ponts et chaussées, le diplôme d'ingénieur
civil.
Paradoxalement, c'est en détruisant des ponts afin de retarder l'avance
ennemie qu'il fera la guerre. De retour du front, il rencontre au Musée de
l'Homme, dans le Paris occupé, l'ethnologue Marcel Griaule, dont l'influence
sera décisive sur sa passion pour l'Afrique.
Ingénieur au Niger (1941), Jean Rouch se passionne pour l'éthnologie et le
cinéma après avoir assisté à une "merveilleuse et horrible" cérémonie
funéraire. "Je me suis dit : cela ne peut pas s'écrire, cela ne peut que se
filmer", racontait-il.
Son premier film, "Au pays des mages noirs" (1947), tourné avec une caméra
achetée d'occasion, naît d'une expédition en pirogue sur le Niger avec deux
amis. Viendront ensuite "Bataille sur le grand fleuve" (1952) et "les
Maîtres fous" (1954), un document sur les rites de possession qui obtient le
Grand prix du festival de Venise. En 1960, il réalise "Chronique d'un été"
en collaboration avec le sociologue Edgard Morin, une enquête-choc sur les
Parisiens.
"Moi, un Noir", qui recevra le Prix Louis-Delluc 1958, est un portrait d'une
bande d'amis nigériens. Il fera, selon Jean-Luc Godard, "l'effet d'un pavé
dans la mare du cinéma français".
Rouch tournera ensuite de nombreux documentaires parmi lesquels "La Chasse
au lion à l'arc", primé à Venise en 1965, "Paris vu par" (1965), en
co-réalisation, "Cocorico! Monsieur Poulet" (1974), road-movie africain
évoquant l'hilarante odyssée de trois amis sillonnant la brousse nigérienne
à bord d'une 2CV vétuste.
Directeur de recherche au CNRS, Jean Rouch s'était notamment employé à la
préservation et à la restauration des trésors cinématographiques qu'elle
détient. Ces derniers temps, il a milité activement contre la dispersion des
collections du Musée de l'Homme vers le futur Musée du Quai Branly à Paris
et le Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, à
Marseille.
"Honte à ces gouvernants qui osent détruire ce haut lieu de connaissance,
honte à ces spéculateurs qui ne reculent devant rien et veulent se saisir
des collections scientifiques pour les dénaturer à des fins mercantiles",
lançait-il.
Officier de la Légion d'honneur et officier des Arts-et-Lettres, Jean Rouch
laisse aussi plusieurs ouvrages sur les Songhay, peuple d'Afrique
occidentale. Veuf, il s'était remarié il y a deux ans avec une infirmière
guadeloupéenne, Jocelyne Lamothe, qui se trouvait à ses côtés au moment de
l'accident, mais qui "va bien" comme les autres passagers du véhicule.
7586
From: Fred Camper
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:44pm
Subject: Jean Rouch dies
Someone just posted this link to an avant-garde film email list I also get:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8737417%5E1702,00.html
There seems something horribly ironic about making it to 86 only to die
in a car crash! But then I'm rather anti-car. Rouch was an amazing
filmmaker whose work is under-represented in the U.S. His camera's
steely "gaze" had an, um, really penetrating quality.
- Fred
7587
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:46pm
Subject: Re: Shopping List from Europe
Gabe, was the Despeleschin the documentary or the film of the
play? The latter was shown at the Kennedy Center after we met
him in Cambridge.
7588
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:47pm
Subject: Re: Malick's Next Film
But CHE! was already made with Omar Shariff! What's there to
add?
7589
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:50pm
Subject: Re: Kubrick and Ophuls
Direct references that are kind of fun:
the pov of Alex jumping out the window in Orange: Le Plaisir
Lee Ermey's first scene in Jacket: Ustinov's first scene in Lola M.
the closeup of the dying sniper in Jacket: the last closeup of Lola
before she jumps (same function - derailing the master of
ceremony's infernal machine with a glimpse of Lola's humanity)
7590
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:57pm
Subject: re: 2001 (and American Avant-garde Cinema)
Fred, the quote is from the Browning poetic monologue, not the
Byron epic, but coincidentally, Clarke misquotes it (in "The Lost
Worlds of 2001") as "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower came." It's
very interesting to know that Brakhage was inspired by it, too,
unless he was responding to 2001and Clarke's published
variants, which make interesting reading.
The Dark Tower is the object of a quest by a band of
brother-knights, all of whom failed and perished. Roland, the
last, fails too. The poem, which the slobbering ranter I am foolish
enough to call mentor, Harold Bloom, has published at least ten
readings of, is arguably about poetic influence, and is certainly
one of the finest poems of the greatest - and most cinematic -
English poet of the Victorian era.
7591
From: programming
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:58pm
Subject: Jean Rouch dies
Hello All,
Legendary documentary/ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch was killed in a car
crash in Niger last night.
Rouch's work is really amazing and criminally unavailable in the U.S.
(perhaps 3 or 4 films out of well over 100).
Patrick Friel
7592
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 6:59pm
Subject: Re: Jean Rouch's Death
Scary - I was thinking about Rouch dying for some reason last
night. He is indeed one of the greats who is barely shown here.
Time to trot out the prints, somebody.
7593
From: Doug Cummings
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 7:08pm
Subject: Re: Jean Rouch's Death
>Scary - I was thinking about Rouch dying for some reason last
>night. He is indeed one of the greats who is barely shown here.
>Time to trot out the prints, somebody.
Very sad...
First Run distributes "Chronicle of a Summer" and even re-released it
in a few venues last year.
http://www.frif.com/new2003/sum.html
Doug
7594
From: Travis Miles
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 7:40pm
Subject: Re: Jean Rouch dies
This is tremendously sad news. I organized a large seminar and
semi-retrospective honoring Jean Rouch in London in 2000, and found him an
extraordinarily gracious and magnetic person. He was getting old, and was
wont to answer direct questions with long, rambling anecdotes seldom related
to the question asked. Through these stories, however, you learned much more
than you could think to ask. Something to note here: one of his dream
projects was to have been a Œmemoir-film¹ about his experiences before and
during WWII, his involvement with the intellectual resistance and how he was
required first to build bridges and later to destroy them. He hoped to make
this film with his friend, the brilliant cinematographer and filmmaker John
Marshall.
Rouch was a true bon vivant, and his films were part of his process of
living. Never elitist, resolutely tied to lived experience, some of them
still touch on unique and marvelous aesthetic qualities that I haven¹t seen
before or since. He often spoke of filming in a trance (like Brakhage?) and
inspiring trance both through the movements he produced on screen and
through the effect of the camera on the participants in the cultures he
filmed. Among the strongest cinematic moments of my life have been Rouch¹s
possession films (especially, Horendi, Pam Kuso Kar, Yenendi de Boukoki).
Many of his (pre-1980) ethnographic shorts are easily peers of Le Sang des
Betes, and would be as classic were they better seen. His feature films,
especially Chronique d¹un Ete, Moi, un Noir, Jaguar, Petit a Petit, La
Pyramide Humaine, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet are characterized by their
immediacy, good humor, and novelty of form. Far from being simply
influential, they are still miles ahead of anything resembling docu-fiction
that we¹re subjected to today. The distance between Nick Broomfield and Jean
Rouch is heartbreaking.
But influential he was. Rouch claims to have attended Cinematheque
screenings from their inception, and put on his own groundbreaking programs
at the Musee de l¹Homme. Truffaut and Godard attended editing sessions for
Moi, Un Noir (a film which, via an apocryphal camera function, exhibited the
first dramatic instance of a ³jump cut² as well as characters named Eddie
Constantine, etc.) and the majority of Rouch¹s crews in Africa went on to
become filmmakers themselves. That he died with his wife and with his old
friend Damoure Zika (a filmmaker and star of many of Rouch¹s films, going
back to Jaguar) is some small, small consolation.
I hope there will be all manner of tributes and screenings. He was one of
the greatest. He virtually embodied (with Joris Ivens, his hero) a whole
strain of filmmaking.
TM
On 2/19/04 1:44 PM, "Fred Camper" wrote:
> Someone just posted this link to an avant-garde film email list I also get:
>
> http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8737417%5E1702,00.html
>
> There seems something horribly ironic about making it to 86 only to die
> in a car crash! But then I'm rather anti-car. Rouch was an amazing
> filmmaker whose work is under-represented in the U.S. His camera's
> steely "gaze" had an, um, really penetrating quality.
>
> - Fred
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> * To visit your group on the web, go to:
> * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/
> *
> * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> * a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> <mailto:a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe>
> *
> * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service
> <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> .
>
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7595
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 7:48pm
Subject: Re: Re: Jean Rouch's Death
Rouch's importance cannot be underestimated. His short
"Les Maitres Fous" inspired Genet to wirt both "The
Blacks" and "The Balcony."
His "Petit a Petit" was a major inspuration for
Rivette's "Out 1"
His "Gare du Nord" episode of "Paris vu Par" is a
masterpiece.
And that's not to mention "Chronicle of a Summer" and
"La Pyramide Humaine."
No one like him.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Scary - I was thinking about Rouch dying for some
> reason last
> night. He is indeed one of the greats who is barely
> shown here.
> Time to trot out the prints, somebody.
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want.
http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
7596
From:
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 2:58pm
Subject: Re: Re: Malick's Next Film
Bill Krohn wrote:
>But CHE! was already made with Omar Shariff! What's there to
>add?
Does anyone want to actually make a case for the above film, directed by my
man Richard Fleischer? Seriously, I've not seen it and am really interested!
Stupendous news that Malick is directing again.
Peter
7597
From:
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 3:33pm
Subject: Mulligan's The Nickel Ride
I recently had the opportunity to see a letterboxed tape of Robert Mulligan's
"The Nickel Ride." I thought it was a phenomenal film, rather atypical in
its subject matter for Mulligan, but with his usual incredible sense of space
and movement. Indeed, I would put it forth as one of the great 'Scope films of
the 1970s and perhaps my second favorite Mulligan film after that great last
film, "The Man in the Moon."
I find that Mulligan's work in general is very often neglected (except for
the canonized "To Kill A Mockingbird" - and, by the way, we shouldn't let its
popular canonization get in the way of our appreciating a truly wonderful
movie!), but "The Nickel Ride" is a film I don't think I have >ever< heard mentioned
before as a great film, an essential film. So I wonder aloud to the group:
has anyone here seen it?
Incidentally, another Mulligan film I've not seen (and which has, so far as I
know, no real rep) is due for release on DVD this spring: "Same Time, Next
Year," released the same year (1978) as a great Mulligan film which I have seen,
"Bloodbrothers."
Peter
7598
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 8:36pm
Subject: Fw: Forum on Arts and Civil Liberties
Apologies for cross-posting, but this looks like an important event for most of us.
g
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
----- Original Message -----
From: Udi Ofer
To: Udi Ofer
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 1:50 PM
Subject: Forum on Arts and Civil Liberties
Open Proposition: A Forum on Civil Liberties and the Arts
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, corner 34th Street
Tuesday, February 24 @ 6:30-8:30pm
Artists have historically been at the forefront of the effort to protect civil liberties from the misuse of government powers. How are contemporary artists responding to the erosion of some of our most basic freedoms, and is their impact measurable? Can more be done to educate the public through the arts?
"Open Proposition: A Forum on Civil Liberties and the Arts" seeks to address these questions and to encourage a dialogue between the arts community and the public. Panelist include Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Francis M. Naumann, Udi Ofer, Marc Ribot, and Tom Schreiber.
Suggested Donation: $10; $5 students and low income
Cosponsored by the New York Bill of Rights Defense Campaign, Artists for the Bill of Rights, and the CUNY Graduate Center
For more information, call 212-817-8215 or visit www.ArtistsForTheBillofRights.org
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
7599
From: George Robinson
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 8:44pm
Subject: Interesting animation site
This from Tara Calishain's wonderful "ResearchBuzz" newsletter:
* A Chronology of Animation that Goes Back to the 1800s
Don't visit this site if you just think animation is
sorta neat and you occasionally watch Smurfs. Okay?
Visit this site if you think the whole concept of
animation is super-cool and you visited that LOC
site on early animation when I wrote it up and
you're really into timelines. It's the Chronology of
Animation at
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~rllew/chronst.html .
This site spans the 1880s to 2004. Pick an era and
you'll get a timeline, but the timeline is divided
by region. So when you go to look at 1972 (Fat
Albert, Sealab 2020, and -- a BC Thanksgiving
special?) you'll see that it's divided into US; the
Americas excluding the US; Europe, Middle East, and Africa;
Japan; and Australasia excluding Japan.
Animation projects are listed by month and include
name, what kind of project it was (TV, film, etc.)
the producers, and what kind of animation it was
(drawn, live, cgi animation.) There are also notes
here for when notable figures in the animation world
were born and died, and company information. Extensive.
g
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith
7600
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Feb 19, 2004 8:57pm
Subject: Re: Blood Brothers
Oudart wrote a great article on this film, which I also like. Wasn't
it Richard Price's first script?
a_film_by Main Page
Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact