Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Mabel's Married Life


Mercifully, Chaplin's Final One-or-Two-Reeler to Have Been Helmed by Sennett


Mabel's Married Life by Mack Sennett, 1914:



Chaplin plays married to Normand / Lovely gag where he gets more rye for his buck at the saloon / Walks out of the place and finds his wife being haloed by some lug / Several frantic foot-skids ensue (this gesture started gaining momentum in the previous picture, Mabel's Busy Day) / Mabel of Mabel's Married Life is dressed Brooklyn Flea smart / Chaplin heads back to the bar, heeding his devil's trill / Mabel goes to her room and imitates his schtick (it's a poor rendering) / Her husband rewards her with a bouquet of expired scallions, the film's most memorable touch / Especially since Mabel was addicted to scag

Mabel's Married Life by Mack Sennett, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914] / Caught in the Rain [Chaplin, 1914] / A Busy Day [Sennett, 1914] / The Fatal Mallet [Sennett, 1914] / The Knockout [Sennett, 1914] / Mabel's Busy Day [Sennett, 1914]


===

Mabel's Busy Day


Reptile-Brain Cinema


Mabel's Busy Day by Mack Sennett, 1914:



Another Keystone picture walloped by a zero-inspiration title (remember, it was only three films prior to this that Sennett gave the world A Busy Day) / Another auto-race picture / Now the men on-hand are documentary participants, cracking up at this man Chaplin; a good number of them might even have recognized him by this point / Sennett himself lumbers about / And Mabel Normand, she's 'just an actress' / The disparity in these early Keystone pictures is immense / It's not even a matter entirely born of the discrepancy between craftsmen and genius, it's to do with the cutting of scenes, with the relatively lame 'business' handed to the other leads in the presence of Chaplin's unencumbered rhythms / Yet, to the director's credit, and in spite of Normand's title billing, Mabel's Busy Day remains one of Sennett's most unabashedly energetic devotions to the Chaplin Machine / And like the others it concludes in a clatter of vestigial impulse

Mabel's Busy Day by Mack Sennett, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914] / Caught in the Rain [Chaplin, 1914] / A Busy Day [Sennett, 1914] / The Fatal Mallet [Sennett, 1914] / The Knockout [Sennett, 1914]


===

The Knockout


Don't Call It a Comeback for Mack Sennett


The Knockout by Mack Sennett, 1914:



Hangdog scarecrows in early 20th-century America / A one-sheet for Caught in the Cabaret presences the background — a poster for Love's Sacrifice, "A Mutual Movie," hangs above; the venue? a town-hall / More unfunny brick pitching, the gag relies on the physical reaction of the target, not much more to the premise than that / Staple and Fancy / At dinner parties did Sennett play raconteur, there freely exercise his wit? / Mack Sennett, Robert Evans? / Chaplin shows up at the 19-minute mark in the secondary role of boxing referee — extraordinary, he moves like slung taffy, bungee-limber and game / Fatty shoots pistols while wearing boxing gloves / It's got lots of little weirdnesses (it's an Arbuckle vehicle, after all), but guess how it ends? bunch of dummies falling in water

The Knockout by Mack Sennett, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914] / Caught in the Rain [Chaplin, 1914] / A Busy Day [Sennett, 1914] / The Fatal Mallet [Sennett, 1914]


===

Friday, February 18, 2011

A Radiohead Exercise




The new Radiohead record has come out one day earlier than expected, but I won't be listening to The King of Limbs, or reading anything about it, till tomorrow... I've got this whole "listening" "arrangement" planned, involving a forged dispensary license and a couple yoga blocks I stole from an estate-sale.

In the interim, while it's 66 degrees out and the planet's in the throes of geomagnetic gravitas, I thought it would be a fun game to take pause and share a list of, say, twenty (though it might as well be sixty) pre-Limbs Radiohead songs that could conceivably rank as my very favorites ever in the following, arbitrary, authoritarian (always subject-to-change) order. Tell me if you've got any.

(20) [tie]: "Kinetic" [B-side, "Pyramid Song"] + "Where Bluebirds Fly" [B-side, "There There"]

(19) [tie]: "Fog" [B-side, "Knives Out"] + "Talk Show Host" [B-side, "Street Spirit (Fade Out)"]

(18) [tie]: "Bangers & Mash" [Bonus Disc for In Rainbows] + "Just" [The Bends]

(17) [tie]: "Pearly*" [B-side, "Paranoid Android"] + "Fitter Happier" [OK Computer]

(16) "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" [The Bends]

(15) "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" [Amnesiac]

(14) "2 + 2 = 5 (or, The Lukewarm)" [Hail to the Thief]

(13) [tie]: "Weird Fishes / Arpeggi" [In Rainbows] + "Optimistic" [Kid A]

(12) [tie]: "A Punchup at a Wedding (or, No No No No No No No No)" [Hail to the Thief] + "Kid A" [Kid A]

(11) "Let Down" [OK Computer]

(10) "The National Anthem" [Kid A]

(9) [tie]: "How to Disappear Completely" [Kid A] + "Exit Music (For a Film)" [OK Computer]

(8) "Life in a Glasshouse" [Amnesiac]

(7) "Paranoid Android" [OK Computer]

(6) "Jigsaw Falling into Place" [In Rainbows]

(5) [3-way tie]: "Morning Bell" [Kid A] + "Morning Bell" [I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings] + "Like Spinning Plates" [I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings]

(4) "Airbag" [OK Computer]

(3) "Sit Down. Stand Up. (or, Snakes & Ladders)" [Hail to the Thief]

(2) "Everything in Its Right Place" [Kid A]

(1) [tie]: "Like Spinning Plates" [Amnesiac] + "Reckoner" [In Rainbows]





===

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Cleopatra


1934: The Year of The Scarlet Empress by Josef von Sternberg


Cleopatra by Cecil B. DeMille, 1934:



In the wake of one of the most electrifying title-screens of all time, DeMille indulges whenever possible his desire to see the human body folded and bound struggling-acquiescent before an unbridled exhibitionism; slaves will asphyxiate, black out /




Claudette Colbert is a Cleopatra who might have taken up residence at the drinking end of some pianoforte on Broome / It's not a pleasure-garden without a peacock / DeMille imbues the Roman party with contemporary cadence, a surface equality of sexes in the scheduled ease and amphilogy among his women, just as one might witness in the era of Antonioni (that is, in Antonioni's oeuvre, and in the era of il boom) / "A woman's a woman." / Ritual tableaux / The flex of fake-submission — as performed by extras / DeMille stages this so well / X /




The sirens raised from the sea-floor net for proffering oyster-jewels / Leopard-skin retainers whipped by a male consul /






A women's clothing store in Avoca, PA, before the Internet / "Women should be but toys for the great; it becomes them both." / "I could fall in love with you, but I don't intend to." / Brilliant shot where a foreground-stationed harpist 'caresses' Cleopatra's near-naked figure /




Cleopatra's hippie garment, because 'hip' felt 'hip' always, the actors couldn't hear the crusty trumpets and trombones of the soundtrack telegraphing each Sexy Gesture /





Diamond-facet cuts in the astonishing war sequence, an orgy of trick-shot mayhem around the shatter of prows and the letting of jugular blood, the war machines of the Romans at full employ (the catapults and spring-loaded chevaux-de-frise which, earlier in the film, in the form of prototypes scaled down for Caesar's inspection, were 'played' as devices customized for sexual torture) /









No less baroque than Metropolis, it stands to reason that DeMille's Cleopatra = the greatest Cleopatra-picture that ever will be made / Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra treated as Little Golden Book mashup, Crowley and Anger




===


"What we knew

about the blood's map

went back to the court

of King Zoser."


—from "Imhotep" by Yusef Komunyakaa, 2004.

===

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Army of Shadows


The Celibates


L'Armée des ombres [Army of Shadows] by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969:



Let legends emerge with legends' due (Meurisse, Signoret) (let legends enter onto Beethoven anywhere) / "...but only with whom I share nothing but memories." / Moonlight fantasia / Every old trick-shot in the book — '68, '42 / Lino Ventura's character, Philippe Gerbier, a man fiercely of the present, no wasted gesture, exuding a... moral goodie-two-shoes-ism — one note played exceedingly well — that is: the Résistance, the maquisards, were a kind of cult, and adepts were as much in search of a fraternity both for its own sake and as a permissive space where solitary ruminations upon (a) 'abstract' concepts surrounding Freedom (i.e., existentialism in the hottest pitch of historical relevance), and (b) the why-and-the-wherefore with regard to extents of respective sexual dry-spells, could be folded into the same set and elevated to the realm of a practical Philosophy / After renewing his vows with Adulthood, Gerbier, in London, once, glimpsed Youth

L'Armée des ombres [Army of Shadows] by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969:






The waiting, endless waiting that pervades the movement, and the film / Save Jean-François (Jean-Pierre Cassel), save Félix (Paul Crauchet), rescue with effort, without suspense, — all's green angled planes / The Nazi guards peer into Mathilde's face as if to ask this visiteur du soir: "Are you Simone Signoret?" / And then there's Meurisse, the other tentpole, in the role of Luc Jardie, leader of the cell, he, for the résistants, in whom personal investment accounts for more than personal survival / Upon Jardie's sudden appearance at the hideout, Gerbier, who has caressed as though they were artifact-scripture the five NRF texts on mathematics and philosophical inquiry written by the leader, greets him shawled in a throw worn like a monk's cowl; Jardie enters the domicile bathed in the Light of the Valley / After the crucial betrayal (and reversal of the network's progression), Le Bison (Christian Barbier) says of Mathilde: "Let her sell us all out if she wants..." — in these cells, or in this cell, is self-sacrifice, or self-preservation, the miraculous act? / Euthanasia / Gerbier to Jardie: "You, in a car full of killers. Nothing's sacred anymore." / Nothing more than corpses / Every Melville film charts preparation for protagonists' deaths / And one may say this picture's got the dullest title in the Melville opus / But that would ignore the note of double-suggestion only a few degrees away from, or indeed encapsulated by, "ombres"/"shadows": The Army of Shades

L'Armée des ombres [Army of Shadows] by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969:






===


Soem of the most recent videos produced by Abel Ferrara at abelferrara.com:

--Abel at Anthology's Abel Ferrara in the 21st Century retrospective, discussing some in-the-works/future projects.

Watch more on abelferrara.com



--This guy, Johnny, plays the one bartender in Go Go Tales. He was also the bartender at the place in SoHo where I used to run into Abel all the time before it closed down a year or two ago.

Watch more on abelferrara.com



I commissioned Abel to shoot a piece for us (The Masters of Cinema Series) introducing Murnau's Nosferatu when he was making Chelsea on the Rocks. It's about eight minutes long (and was shot in the Chelsea Hotel). The miniDV tape arrived slightly damaged, but my associate managed to make a low-res QuickTime vid. Because of logistics, etc., the tape's still sitting on my shelf — and it needs to be repaired, and then properly transferred. Anybody who knows a good impaired-miniDV-tape repairman/reverse-engineer in the NJ/NYC area, please let me know.

===

The Fatal Mallet


The Fatal Mullet Would Have Been the Funnier Movie (Maybe)


The Fatal Mallet by Mack Sennett, 1914:



Chaplin and Sennett square off, trading open-palm slaps over the love of Mabel Normand who resembles Jane Adams / How does Chaplin time the whiplash from taking a wooden plank to the mouth so well? / More brick-throwing, as in Normand's Mabel at the Wheel / More two loves disrupted outdoors as in every Keystoner / More fisti-pinwheels into ponds on right-of-frame (cf. Twenty Minutes of Love) / This isn't exactly Claire Denis / Although it shares groin-thrusts and ass-kicks / It's got a mallet (cf. Caught in a Cabaret) that like Mjǫlnir expends untold joules / (Thirty years of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes)

The Fatal Mallet by Mack Sennett, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914] / Caught in the Rain [Chaplin, 1914] / A Busy Day [Sennett, 1914]


===

A Busy Day


Interchangeable Keystone Titles


A Busy Day by Mack Sennett, 1914:



Chaplin in drag / A half-reeler / Sennett lowjinks / The parade has changed in the Twentieth Century / Machines, autos among men, and always filmed / In their early picture Sennett and Chaplin are out to destroy 'that' shot produced, to ruin the purely passive record / Chaplin-in-drag gambols like a clockwork hen / Film ends on a cheery drowning

A Busy Day by Mack Sennett, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914] / Caught in the Rain [Chaplin, 1914]


===

Caught in the Rain


The First Film by Charles Chaplin, Non-Co-Directed


Caught in the Rain by Charles Chaplin, 1914:



A reboot of Chaplin's and Maddern's Twenty Minutes of Love / The figures are larger in the frame than they ever were before now, in the first film of which Chaplin can boast full authorship / Try to open a lock with a cigarette (brilliant) / A cane in the jacket pocket / The way you go to bed after drinking: stagger before the mattress, peel off and hurl your clothes, then stare into the imaginary camera / What did Brando think of Chaplin? / Go to bed drunk in window-decurtained early-morning exposure / No vindication

Caught in the Rain by Charles Chaplin, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914] / Caught in a Cabaret [Chaplin and Normand, 1914]


===

Caught in a Cabaret


Don't Call It Chaplinesque


Caught in a Cabaret by Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand, 1914:



Chaplin at the co-helm again, but Caught in a Cabaret speaks more to the Normand sensibility, such as it ever was / I can take it or leave it / It's Charlie vs. Mike the Barber, if Charlie lived a hundred years later in Princeton / The film finds Mabel and Charlie in a go at harmony / There's some slumming / A bust-up / Reverse-shots are taken on the same lateral plane, on a different set / One or two framings remind me of my favorite qualities of Puce Moment and Diary of a Lost Girl / But overall, with a picture like this, if I were alive in 1914, I'd probably need more evidence than Caught in a Cabaret can produce for the case that photoplays are time well spent

Caught in a Cabaret by Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914] / Twenty Minutes of Love [Chaplin and Maddern, 1914]


===

Twenty Minutes of Love


Charlie at the Wheel


Twenty Minutes of Love by Charles Chaplin and Joseph Maddern, 1914:



At last: Charles Chaplin's directorial debut (co-directorship with Joseph Maddern) / Night-and-day, compared with the Lerhmans and Normands and Nichols and Sennetts / This film has a structure: repetition, motifs... / All to ask the first — and one of the foremost — of moral questions in Chaplin: What is property?

Twenty Minutes of Love by Charles Chaplin and Joseph Maddern, 1914:




===


Previous pieces on Chaplin at Cinemasparagus:

Making a Living [Lehrman, 1914] / Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. [Lehrman, 1914] / Mabel's Strange Predicament [Normand, 1914] / Between Showers [Lehrman, 1914] / A Film Johnnie [George Nichols, 1914] / Tango Tangles [Sennett, 1914] / His Favorite Pastime [George Nichols, 1914] / Cruel, Cruel Love [George Nichols, 1914] / The Star Boarder [George Nichols, 1914] / Mabel at the Wheel [Normand and Sennett, 1914]


===