Cinemasparagus

Jean-Luc Godard, On Authors' Rights (2012)

2012-01-29T14:29:00.004-05:00

(Click the full-screen icon on the video to view large.)

Via Kassandre, a not-for-profit organization that aims to promote and support a free and open cinema. Discovered this weekend on the Twitter for Les Films du Losange.

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Bob Dylan Interview with John Elderfield, 2012: In the Films of the '40s and '50s, "Individuals Overcame Problems Instead of Merely Surviving Them"

2012-01-24T20:25:00.005-05:00

ELDERFIELD: An area of American visual art of great interest to you is, I know, movies of the 1950s, such as A Face in the Crowd, Ace in the Hole, and Sweet Smell of Success. What is it about these that attract you? And do you see a relationship between them and the kind of narrative dramas you have painted — more in The Brazil Series, though, than in The Asia Series?

DYLAN: Face in the Crowd — that's so current, isn't it? You can watch any of those TV personalities, and if you've seen Face in the Crowd, you know there's probably some Lonesome Rhodes in all of them. The whole country is like their flock of sheep. I grew up in a small town hidden from the outside world, and the films from the '40s and '50s were like a window into the future, like classic literature, and had great meaning. It's hard to explain that, especially in this age of narcissism and self-surveillance. A lot of people wouldn't know they are alive unless they have photos of themselves to prove it — from the cradle to the grave, actually. The movies that we grew up watching seemed to be tuned to a higher vibration. They weren't about us, they were about people bigger than us, living more on the edge than us — strange morality tales, more like Greek theater. Individuals overcame problems instead of merely surviving them, so you knew you could do that too. The people we saw on the screen were more real than real people. They were exemplary. Cult figures. Heroes and heroines. Anti-heroes. Top of the world. Brute force. Themes of salvation. Echoes of Shakespeare and of Aeschylus. Those films had a powerful effect on all of us who grew up with them. Like schoolboy lessons. Sure, I see a relationship. There's always been a relationship.

—from a new interview with John Elderfield, here

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Marriage Material + Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011

2012-01-16T21:28:00.014-05:00

Watch in Full and for Free

Marriage Material by Joe Swanberg, 2012:

Today Joe Swanberg premiered his latest and never-before-seen 55-minute feature, Marriage Material, at Vimeo, where it's available for viewing until the end of the month. It comes on the occasion of the release by Factory 25 of the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 box set, the first installment of which bows this week, and which will ultimately be comprised of the collectively amazing Silver Bullets, Art History, The Zone, and the still-unpremiered Privacy Settings. I haven't seen Privacy Settings yet, but I personally consider both Art History and The Zone, alongside the 2009 Alexander the Last, as maybe Swanberg's very best films to date. Joe gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times blog a few days ago about the newest film and the box set here. You can order Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 here.

About Marriage Material: pic stars Kentucker Audley and Caroline White as they babysit Joe and Kris's son Jude Huckleberry Swanberg over the course of a day or two at their Memphis home. The presence of the baby occasions a hard look at the possibility of starting a family and a serious conversation about when/if/why to get married. Tensions boil, but never boil over, via such touchstones as diverse and oblique as government aid, Béla Tarr, and Mac vs. PC. The long central conversation between Kentucker and Caroline that takes place on the couple's bed with the family dog at their feet qualifies as one of the most intimate and powerful scenes Swanberg has presented to date. The entire film (beautiful, as these frames attest to, with Adam Wingard as DP) sort of represents a kind of prologue, epilogue, or companion-piece to Audley's own forthcoming — and unbelievable — Open Five 2, which should well be regarded as one of the most anticipated films of 2012.

You can watch Marriage Material right now, right here. Go full-screen, and plug in your earbuds.

Marriage Material by Joe Swanberg, 2012:

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Posts on Silver Bullets and Art History at Cinemasparagus:

Silver Bullets [2011]

Art History [2011]

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Scattered Junk

2012-01-08T00:31:00.000-05:00

What's in a Name?

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:

They say you bring what you know to a movie. Holds for the filmmaker, holds for the audience. If you didn't take the picture as a kind of documentary, you might proclaim Scattered Junk, in your sick little poll, winner of Best Production Design of any film of 2011. But the revolution is not a craft-service table, and Scattered Junk is the true document of real revolutionaries: this cell of dreamers, plotters, enact the same gestures of Carlos, transposed to an apartment not so much lived-in as occupied, embedded-within, just beneath the apex of a clapboard that recalls a similar form similarly haunted, halfway through The Night of the Hunter. Too real? Or just too earnest for a world (or movie landscape) where all is statecraft and lies?

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:

Everyone will be cruel to this film — let's have no illusions that the critics are anything other than animals. The title of the picture applies to settings — to a final mixtape by subject Tim Cushing — to fragile emotions of fragile moments — to the approach by director Timothy Morton which might be characterized as junkle-rough, its thick-stitched and very kinetic patchwork the jigsaw signature of some second-, third-cousin to Trash Humpers, Gummo, or the recent films by HK's pal Jonas Mekas. Scattered Junk defies the viewer (it doesn't matter what his 'class' is or where she lays her regional roots) to reckon the whole affair sad, to deem the self-constructed squalor, the morning misery windshields, the implied prospectlessness, the suicide absent and central to the matters at hand, as all so sad. And this Whole is sad, and Morton celebrates its beauty accordingly with just about as little use for patronizing-"sad" as one might any slice of time.

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:

Aside from his talents as a filmmaker, Timothy Morton is one of the most interesting actors/personalities in movies today: see his notable appearances in Kentucker Audley's Team Picture, Ginger Sand, Family Tree (playing Lena Dunham's brother), or the great Holy Land. You can watch Scattered Junk in its entirety on your laptop, desktop, iPad, or phone for free at Audley's excellent No Budge site here. (Just be good and watch in full-screen mode if you can, and plug in some headphones.)

Scattered Junk by Timothy Morton, 2011:

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Other pieces at Cinemasparagus about films involving Timothy Morton:

Team Picture

Ginger Sand

Family Tree

Holy Land

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The Winter's Tale

2011-12-24T00:17:00.005-05:00

[c. 1610]

I.ii

HERMIONE
Come, I'll question you / Of my lord's tricks, and yours, when you were boys: / You were pretty lordlings then?

POLIXENES
We were, fair Queen, / Two lads that thought there was no more behind / But such a day tomorrow as today, / And to be boy eternal.

HERMIONE
Was not my lord / The verier wag o' th' two?

POLIXENES
We were as twinned lambs, that did frisk i' th' sun, / And bleat the one at th' other; what we changed / Was innocence for innocence; we knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed / That any did; had we pursued that life, / And our weak spirits ne'er been higher reared / With stronger blood, we should have answered heaven / Boldly, "not guilty"; the imposition cleared, / Hereditary ours.

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I.ii

LEONTES
Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?

MAMILLIUS
Ay, my good lord.

LEONTES
I' fecks! / Why, that's my bawcock. What, hast smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, Captain, / We must be neat — not neat, but cleanly, Captain: / And yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf, / Are all called neat. Still virginaling / Upon his palm? How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?

MAMILLIUS
Yes, if you will, my lord.

LEONTES
Thou want'st a rough pash, and the shoots that I have / To be full like me: yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs; women say so, / That will say anything. But were they false / As o'er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters; false / As dice are to be wished, by one that fixes / No bourn 'twixt his and mine — yet were it true / To say this boy were like me. Come, Sir Page, / Look on me with your welkin eye. Sweet villain, / Most dear'st, my collop! Can thy dam, may 't be? / Affection! Thy intention stabs the center. / Thou dost make possible things not so held, / Communicat'st with dreams — how can this be? — / With what's unreal thou coactive art, / And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent / Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost, / And that beyond commission, and I find it, / And that to the infection of my brains, / And hardening of my brows.

===

I.ii

LEONTES
Gone already! / Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a forked one! / Go play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I / Play too — but so disgraced a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamour / Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been, / Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now, / And many a man there is, even at this present, / Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th' arm, / That little thinks she has been sluiced in 's absence, / And his pond fished by his next neighbour, by / Sir Smile, his neighbour; nay, there's comfort in 't, / Whiles other men have gates, and those gates opened, / As mine against their will. Should all despair, / That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind / Would hang themselves. Physic for 't there's none; / It is a bawdy planet, that will strike / Where 'tis predominant, and 'tis powerful, think it, / From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded, / No barricado for a belly. Know 't / It will let in and out the enemy, / With bag and baggage. Many thousand on 's / Have the disease, and feel 't not. How now, boy!

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I.ii

LEONTES
Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible / Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that's in 't is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.

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III.iii

SHEPHERD
I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. Hark you now! Would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master; if anywhere I have them, 'tis by the seaside, browsing of ivy. Good luck, an 't be thy will, what have we here? Mercy on 's, a barne! A very pretty barne; a boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one; sure, some scape; though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work; they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here.

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IV.iii

AUTOLYCUS (THE THIEF)

My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. My father named me Autolycus, who being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With die and drab, I purchased this caparison, and my revenue is the silly cheat. Gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway. Beating and hanging are terrors to me; for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.

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IV.iv

POLIXENES
Shepherdess — / A fair one are you — well you fit our ages / With flow'rs of winter.

PERDITA
Sir, the year growing ancient, / Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth / Of trembling winter, the fairest flow'rs o' th' season / Are our carnations, and streaked gillyvors, / Which some call Nature's bastards; of that kind / Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not / To get slips of them.

POLIXENES
Wherefore, gentle maiden, / Do you neglect them?

PERDITA
For I have heard it said, / There is an art, which in their piedness shares / With great creating Nature.

POLIXENES
Say there be; / Yet Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that means; so over that art, / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art, / That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race. This is an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature.

PERDITA
So it is.

POLIXENES
Then make your garden rich in gillyvors, / And do not call them bastards.

PERDITA
I'll not put / The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them; / No more than were I painted, I would wish / This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me. Here's flow'rs for you: / Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, / The marigold that goes to bed wi' th' sun, / And with him rises, weeping; these are flow'rs / Of middle summer, and I think they are given / To men of middle age. You're very welcome.

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IV.iv

SERVANT
He sings several tunes faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men's ears grew to his tunes.

CLOWN
He could never come better; he shall come in; I love a ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down; or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.

SERVANT
He hath songs for man or woman of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings: "Jump her, and thump her"; and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, "Whoop, do me no harm, good man"; puts him off, slights him, with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man."

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IV.iv

POLIXENES
Mark your divorce, young sir, / Whom son I dare not call; thou art too base / To be acknowledged. Thou, a scepter's heir, / That thus affect'st a sheep-hook! Thou, old traitor, / I am sorry that by hanging thee, I can / But shorten thy life one week. And thou, fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know / The royal fool thou cop'st with —

SHEPHERD
O my heart!

POLIXENES
I'll have thy beauty scratched with briers and made / More homely than thy state. For thee, fond boy, / If I may ever know thou dost but sigh / That thou no more shalt see this knack — as never / I mean thou shalt — we'll bar thee from succession; / Not hold thee of our blood, no not our kin, / Farre than Deucalion off. Mark thou my words. / Follow us to the court. Thou, churl, for this time, / Though full of our displeasure, yet we free thee / From the dead blow of it. And you, enchantment, / Worthy enough a herdsman — yea him, too, / That makes himself, but for our honour therein, / Unworthy thee — if ever henceforth thou / These rural latches to his entrance open, / Or hoop his body more with thy embraces, / I will devise a death as cruel for thee / As thou art tender to 't.

PERDITA
Even here undone!

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IV.iv

AUTOLYCUS
I understand the business, I hear it. To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cutpurse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for th' other senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here, with this exchange! Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore.

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V.ii

CLOWN
Give me thy hand. I will swear to the Prince thou art as honest a true fellow as any is in Bohemia.

SHEPHERD
You may say it, but not swear it.

CLOWN
Not swear it, now I am a gentleman? Let boors and franklins say it, I'll swear it.

SHEPHERD
How if it be false, son?

CLOWN
If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend; and I'll swear to the Prince thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk; but I'll swear it, and I would thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands.

AUTOLYCUS
I will prove so, sir, to my power.

CLOWN
Ay, by any means prove a tall fellow. If I do not wonder how thou dar'st venture to be drunk, not being a tall fellow, trust me not.

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Cymbeline

2011-11-28T21:09:00.006-05:00

[c. 1609]

I.iv

IACHIMO
You must not so prefer her 'fore ours of Italy.

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
Being so far provoked as I was in France, I would abate her nothing, though I profess myself her adorer, not her friend.

IACHIMO
As fair and as good — a kind of hand-in-hand comparison — had been something too fair and too good for any lady in Britain. If she went before others I have seen, as that diamond of yours outlusters many I have beheld, I could not but believe she excelled many; but I have not seen the most precious diamond that is, nor you the lady.

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
I praised her as I rated her. So do I my stone.

IACHIMO
What do you esteem it at?

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
More than the world enjoys.

IACHIMO
Either your unparagoned mistress is dead, or she's outprized by a trifle.

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
You are mistaken. The one may be sold or given, or if there were wealth enough for the purchase or merit for the gift. The other is not a thing for sale, and only the gift of the gods.

IACHIMO
Which the gods have given you?

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS
Which by their graces I will keep.

IACHIMO
You may wear her in title yours, but you know strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds. Your ring may be stol'n too. So your brace of unprizable estimations, the one is but frail and the other casual. A cunning thief or a that-way-accomplished courtier would hazard the winning both of first and last.

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II.v

POSTHUMUS LEONATUS

Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers? We are all bastards, / And that most venerable man which I / Did call my father was I know not where / When I was stamped. Some coiner with his tools / Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seemed / The Dian of that time. So doth my wife / The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance! / Me of my lawful pleasure she restrained / And prayed me oft forbearance — did it with / A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't / Might well have warmed old Saturn — that I thought her / As chaste as unsunned snow. O, all the devils! / This yellow Iachimo in an hour, was't not? / Or less? At first? Perchance he spoke not, but, / Like a full-acorned boar, a German one, / Cried "O!" and mounted; found no opposition / But what he looked for should oppose and she / Should from encounter guard. Could I find out / The woman's part in me! For there's no motion / That tends to vice in man but I affirm / It is the woman's part. Be it lying, note it, / The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; / Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; / Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, / Nice longings, slanders, mutability, / All faults that man may name, nay, that hell knows, / Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all. / For even to vice / They are not constant, but are changing still / One vice but of a minute old for one / Not half so old as that. I'll write against them, / Detest them, curse them. Yet 'tis greater skill / In a true hate to pray they have their will; / The very devils cannot plague them better.

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III.iv

IMOGEN

Some jay of Italy, / Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him. / Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion, / And, for I am richer than to hang by th' walls, / I must be ripped. To pieces with me! O, / Men's vows are women's traitors! All good seeming, / By thy revolt, O husband, shall be thought / Put on for villainy, nor born where't grows, / But worn a bait for ladies.

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V.iv

JAILER

A heavy reckoning for you, sir. But the comfort is, you shall be called to no more payments, fear no more tavern bills, which are often the sadness of parting, as the procuring of mirth. You come in faint for want of meat, depart reeling with too much drink; sorry that you have paid too much, and sorry that you are paid too much; purse and brain both empty; the brain the heavier for being too light, the purse too light, being drawn of heaviness. O, of this contradiction you shall now be quit. O, the charity of a penny cord! It sums up thousands in a trice. You have no true debitor and creditor but it; of what's past, is, and to come, the discharge. Your neck, sir, is pen, book, and counters; so the acquittance follows.

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André Bazin's 4th-Favorite Film

2011-11-17T04:04:00.004-05:00

Cum Memoriam Cordis Musei Tokugawa

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The Godfather: Parts I & II

2011-11-17T00:53:00.005-05:00

The Godfather: Parts I & II by Francis Ford Coppola

"I dedicate my performance as Connie to Nicholas Dean Des Barres."
—Talia Shire

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Chapter Seventeen: Icarus

2011-11-07T22:25:00.002-05:00

"Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. 'You guys didn't want to run "1984" last year,' one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow added, 'I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.' When the filmed version, done by Ridley Scott's brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow White song 'Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,' and the dreary filmmaking made it even more depressing than the storyboards portended. 'I can't believe you're going to insult businesspeople across America by running that,' Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she hated it. 'I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop publishing.' "

— from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, p. 187.

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The Prague Orgy

2011-11-04T03:45:00.006-04:00

[1985]

" 'Yes! Yes! I would iron your shirts all day long.'

" 'That would be the first week,' Bolotka says. 'Then would begin the second week and the excitement of being Mr. Olga.'

" 'That isn't true,' she says, 'I would leave him alone.'

" 'Then would begin the vodka,' Bolotka says. 'Then would begin the adventures.'

" 'Not in America,' weeps Olga.

" 'Oh,' says Bolotka, 'you would not be homesick for Prague in New York City?'

" 'No!'

" 'Olga, in America you would shoot yourself.'

" 'I will shoot myself here!'

" 'With what?' asks Bolotka.

" 'A tank! Tonight! I will steal a Russian tank and I will shoot myself with it tonight!' "

•••

"Someone stares at me from a nearby table while I continue sizing up the floor and with it the unforeseen consequences of art. I am remembering the actress Eva Kalinova and how they have used Anne Frank as a whip to drive her from the stage, how the ghost of the Jewish saint has returned to haunt her as a demon. Anne Frank as a curse and a stigma! No, there's nothing that can't be done to a book, no cause in which even the most innocent of all books cannot be enlisted, not only by them, but by you and me. Had Eva Kalinova been born in New Jersey she too would have wished that Anne Frank had never died as she did; but coming, like Anne Frank, from the wrong continent at the wrong time, she could only wish that the Jewish girl and her little diary had never even existed."

•••

"I board a trolley by the river, then jump off halfway to the museum where Bolotka is expecting me to pay him a visit. On foot, and with the help of a Prague map, I proceed to lose my way but also to shake my escort. By the time I reach the museum this seems to me a city that I've known all my life. The old-time streetcars, the barren shops, the soot-blackened bridges, the tunneled alleys and medieval streets, the people in a state of impervious heaviness, their faces shut down by solemnity, faces that appear to be on strikes against life—this is the city I imagined during the war's worst years, when, as a Hebrew-school student of little more than nine, I went out after supper with my blue-and-white collection can to solicit from the neighbors for the Jewish National Fund. This is the city I imagined the Jews would buy when they had accumulated enough money for a homeland. I knew about Palestine and the hearty Jewish teenagers there reclaiming the desert and draining the swamps, but I also recalled, from our vague family chronicle, shadowy, cramped streets where the innkeepers and distillery workers who were our Old World forebears had dwelled apart, as strangers, from the notorious Poles—and so, what I privately pictured the Jews able to afford with the nickels and dimes I collected was a used city, a broken city, a city so worn and grim that nobody else would even put in a bid. It would go for a song, the owner delighted to be rid of it before it completely caved in. In this used city, one would hear endless stories being told—on benches in the park, in kitchens at night, while waiting your turn at the grocery or over the clothesline in the yard, anxious tales of harassment and flight, stories of fantastic endurance and pitiful collapse. What was to betoken a Jewish homeland to an impressionable, emotional nine-year-old child, highly susceptible to the emblems of pathos, was, first, the overpowering oldness of the homes, the centuries of deterioration that had made the property so cheap, the leaky pipes and moldy walls and rotting timbers and smoking stoves and simmering cabbages souring the air of the semidark stairwells; second were the stories, all the telling and listening to be done, their infinite interest in their own existence, the fascination with their alarming plight, the mining and refining of tons of these stories—the national industry of the Jewish homeland, if not the sole means of production (if not the sole source of satisfaction), the construction of narrative out of the exertions of survival; third were the jokes—because beneath the ordeal of perpetual melancholia and the tremendous strain of just getting through, a joke is always lurking somewhere, a derisory portrait, a scathing crack, a joke which builds with subtle self-savaging to the uproarious punch line, 'And this is what suffering does!' What you smell are centuries and what you hear are voices and what you see are Jews, wild with lament and rippling with amusement, their voices tremulous with rancor and vibrating with pain, a choral society proclaiming vehemently, 'Do you believe it? Can you imagine it?' even as they affirm with every wizardly trick in the book, by a thousand acoustical fluctuations of tempo, tone, inflection, and pitch, 'Yet this is exactly what happened!' That such things can happen—there's the moral of the stories—that such things happen to me, to him, to her, to you, to us. That is the national anthem of the Jewish homeland. By all rights, when you hear someone there begin telling a story—when you see the Jewish faces mastering anxiety and feigning innocence and registering astonishment at their own fortitude—you ought to stand and put your hand to your heart.

"Here where the literary culture is held hostage, the art of narration flourishes by mouth. In Prague, stories aren't simply stories; it's what they have instead of life. Here they have becomes their stories, in lieu of being permitted to be anything else. Storytelling is the form their resistance has taken against the coercion of the powers-that-be."

•••

"No, one's story isn't a skin to be shed—it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you."

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Roth in 27-minute interview shortly after being awarded the Man Booker International Prize in May 2011:

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Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:

The Ghost Writer [1979]

Zuckerman Unbound [1981]

The Anatomy Lesson [1984]

2006 and 2007 Interviews

See also some of the Chaplin entries.

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The Anatomy Lesson

2011-10-24T02:39:00.008-04:00

[1984]

And Roth Still Hasn't Been Awarded the Nobel Prize

(And That's a Post for Another Night)

"Zuckerman's mother, a quiet, simple woman, dutiful and inoffensive though she was, always seemed to him a slightly more carefree and emancipated spirit. Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of Jewish history—all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life. A year after his death she developed a brain tumor. For months she'd been complaining of episodes of dizziness, of headache, of little memory lapses. Her first time in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed a minor stroke, nothing to leave her seriously impaired; four months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she would write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of 'Selma' wrote the word 'Holocaust,' perfectly spelled."

•••

"The sharp smells, the decisive noises, the American ideals, the Zionist zeal, the Jewish indignation, all that to a boy was vivid and inspiring, almost superhuman, had belonged to his father; the mother who'd been so enormous to him for the first ten years of his life was as diaphanous in recollection as the chiffon hood. A breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him, 'Be careful.' Then a long gap when there is nothing of her to remember, just the invisible somebody, anxious to please, reporting to him on the phone the weather in New Jersey. Then the Florida retirement and the blond hair. Neatly dressed for the tropics in pink cotton slacks and a monogrammed white blouse (wearing the pearl pin he'd bought years before in Orly Airport and brought home for her from his first summer in France), a little brown-skinned blond-haired woman waiting down at the end of the corridor when he gets off the elevator with his bag: the unconstrained grin, the encompassing dark eyes, the sad clinging embrace, instantly followed by the gratitude. Such gratitude! It was as though the President of the United States had arrived at the condominium to call upon some lucky citizen whose name and address had been drawn from a hat."

•••

"Out past the new condominium that had gone up next door, he saw a wide slice of the bay. So long as her husband was alive, they used to look at the bay ritually from the bedroom balcony every evening after dinner and the TV news. 'Oh, Nathan, you should have seen the colors last night at sunset—only you would have the words to describe it.' But after Dr. Zuckerman's death, she couldn't face all that ineffable beauty alone and just kept watching television, no matter what was on."

•••

"She sent the chauffeur all the way down to Allen Street for the stuffed peppers from Seymour's Parkway, and then came over in the car to heat them up for his dinner. She rushed into the little kitchenette in her red-fox Russian cossack coat and, when she came out with the steaming pot, was wearing only her heels. Gloria was nearing forty, a firm, hefty brunette with protruding circular breasts like targets, and electrifying growths of hair. Her face could have been a Spanish mulatto's: almond eyes, a wide, imposing jaw, and full rounded lips with peculiarly raised edges. There were bruises on her behind. He wasn't the only primitive she babied and he didn't care. He ate the food and he tasted the breasts. There was nothing Gloria didn't remember to carry in her bag: nippleless bra, crotchless panties, Polaroid camera, vibrating dildo, K-Y jelly, Gucci blindfold, a length of braided velvet rope—for a treat, on his birthday, a gram of cocaine. 'Times have changed,' said Zuckerman, 'since all you needed was a condom.' 'A child is sick,' she said, 'you bring toys.' True, and Dionysian rites were once believed to have a therapeutic effect on the physically afflicted. There was also the ancient treatment known as the imposition of hands. Gloria had classical history on her side. His own mother's means for effecting a cure were to play casino on the edge of the bed with him when he was home with a fever. So as not to fall behind in her housework, she'd set her ironing board up in his bedroom while they gossiped about school and his friends. He loved the smell of ironing still. Gloria, lubricating a finger and slipping it in his anus, talked about her marriage to Marvin.

"Zuckerman said to her, 'Gloria, you're the dirtiest woman I've ever met.'

" 'If I'm the dirtiest woman you've ever met, you're in trouble. I fuck Marvin twice a week. I put down my book, put out my cigarette, turn out the light, and roll over.'

" 'On your back?'

" 'What else? And then he puts it in and I know just what to do to make him come. And then he mumbles something about tits and love and he comes. Then I put on the light and roll on my side and light up a cigarette and get on with my book. I'm reading the one you told me about. Jean Rhys.'

" 'What do you do to make him come?'

" 'I make three circles this way, and three circles the other way, and I draw my fingernail down his spine like this—and he comes.'

" 'So you do seven things.'

" 'Right. Seven things. And then he says something about my tits and love, and he comes. And then he falls asleep and I can turn on the light again and read.' "

•••

"...'I've been so busy with my old man I haven't even had time to think about my mother. That'll come later, I suppose. What's it like for you, without them? I still remember your folks and your kid brother when they all came out to visit on the train.'

"The differences in their family predicament Zuckerman preferred not discussing right then—it could only promote further dismissive interpretations of his motives. Zuckerman was still stunned by how matter-of-factly Bobby had opposed him. His plan to change his life had seemed as absurd to Bobby as it had to Diana when he'd invited her to come out with him to Chicago and go to school.

" 'What's it like,' Bobby asked him, 'three, four years after they're gone?'

" 'I miss them.' To miss. To feel the absence of. Also, to fail to do, as to miss an opportunity.

" 'What'd they make of Carnovsky?'

" In the old days he would have told him the truth—back then Zuckerman would have kept Bobby up half the night telling him the truth. But to explain that his father had never forgiven the mockery that he saw in Carnovsky, of both the Zuckermans and the Jews; to describe his acquiescent mother's discomposure, the wounded pride, the confused emotions, the social embarrassment during the last year of her life, all because of the mother in Carnovsky, to tell him that his brother had gone so far as to claim that what he'd committed wasn't mockery but murder... well, he didn't consider it seemly, twenty years on, still to be complaining to his roommate that nobody from New Jersey knew how to read."

•••

" ...'Shirley Temper happens to be as bright as any actress working in the legitimate theater. Why is she doing it? She's doing it because she is pulling in a thousand dollars a day. My money. Is that debasing women? She's doing it because a Broadway play opens and closes in a week and she's back with the unemployed, while with me she works all the time, has the dignity of a working person, and gets the chance to play a whole variety of roles. Sure, some of them are the classic woman who is looking for a strong pimp to rob them blind. Some people are always going to be exploited and not take responsibility for their own lives. Exploiting goes on everywhere there are people willing to be exploited. But Shirley says fuck that. And she didn't belong to the college sorority with Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. Scranton PA, that was her college.' "

•••

"The last of the old-fashioned fathers. And we, thought Zuckerman, the last of the old-fashioned sons. Who that follows after us will understand how midway through the twentieth century, in this huge, lax, disjointed democracy, a father—and not even a father of learning or eminence or demonstrable power—could still assume the stature of a father in a Kafka story? No, the good old days are just about over, when half the time, without even knowing it, a father could sentence a son to punishment for his crimes, and the love and hatred of authority could be such a painful, tangled mess."

•••

"He'd been considered a great mocker once himself, but never as diabolically inspired as this. Even without the aid of his glasses, he understood that he didn't look like he was on the ball. He thought, Just don't make me write about it after. Not everything has to be a book. Not that, too.

"But back in bed he thought, The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is."

•••

[from Philip Roth's 1984 introduction to the Franklin Library limited-edition of The Anatomy Lesson]:

"In The Ghost Writer, young Zuckerman imagines himself morally rescued by marrying the martyred Anne Frank, shielded by that fantasied union from charges of betraying his family, and Jews generally, with his reckless, ill-considered fiction. In The Anatomy Lesson he imagines himself, with no less exuberance, as the owner of a pornographic dynasty grossing seven million a year, an antisocial desperado with a filthy mouth and a fourteen-thousand-dollar watch, about whom he thinks, '...maybe he is what makes one secretly proudest of being a Jew after all. The more he sits with me, the more I find to like.' Anne Frank's husband has come a long way. [...]

"The Anatomy Lesson is a comedy about searching for relief from all that binds, a comedy of disappointment and imprisonment and loss. Why pain of such proportions should be funny is something I'm unable to explain, except to say that only inasmuch as I can see it as comic do I believe that what I've written originates in motives I can trust."

===

Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:

The Ghost Writer [1979]

Zuckerman Unbound [1981]

2006 and 2007 Interviews

See also some of the Chaplin entries.

===

Occupy Wall Street: 2

2011-10-15T21:16:00.001-04:00

===

Occupy Wall Street: 1

2011-10-13T22:59:00.001-04:00

===

The Rink

2011-09-27T16:26:00.008-04:00

Moving

The Rink by Charles Chaplin, 1916:

• Charlie-as-waiter jots items on a patron's check: "spigitty", "mellon", "4 biers"

• Master of the physical universe.

• Why do men eat tools, impedimenta of men? 'Not anymore, Jack!'

• Chaplin's physical strength. When he tears the arms off chairs, there's no need to rig them in pre-production.

• A difficult film to follow, the mind skates along.

• You have seen nothing until you've seen Charlie on roller-skates. Anyone who watches Chaplin, from cinephile to 'popular spectator,' understands that he's the equal of Keaton. Aside from the tours-de-force of the two rink sequences, watch Charlie, seated on the bench next to Edna Purviance, use the lip of the moulding on the wall behind his head to make his hat "floop!" up repeatedly in expression of delight, as though it were attached to a string jerked by a grip in the rafters.

• The film's title becomes metaphor that you need not consciously comprehend, but you watch the film and you understand The Rink exactly.

===

===

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914] / His Musical Career [Chaplin, 1914] / His Trysting Places [Chaplin, 1914] / Getting Acquainted [Chaplin, 1914] / His Prehistoric Past [Sennett, 1914] / Tillie's Punctured Romance [Sennett, 1914]

===

He Who Awaits Dead Men's Shoes Dies Barefoot: A Cinematographic Proverb

2011-09-25T02:03:00.014-04:00

Sab-Hannah — Can You Hear Me?

Quem espera por sapatos de defunto morre descalço, um provérbio cinematográfico, Monteiro #2, begins with the remnants of a Nouvelle Vague-style film — the café scene out of Charlotte et Véronique, the girl with Chantal Goya bangs et son Jean-Pierre. No diegetic soundtrack to the footage — silent, except for the artificial layer of a projector-whirr. Rushes. The microscope and the scrutiny. Goya in a cab (or perhaps Cléo at 6pm). At last, JCM's voice-off cuts into l'écran sonore —

"In those days we led a hard life. We wanted to make films and, having just returned from London with our poor but suitably deluded minds, we were the classic figure of the enthusiast. The year was 1965, and many an innocence would in the meantime be ravished. This country, gentlemen, is a bottomless pit, an asshole one can't escape from. At any rate, a film, even though formless and sketchy as a stillborn, is a foretaste of our own history, the silent projection of our spectres. That is all. Let us move on without regrets."

Luís Miguel Cintra picks up in 1970 from the rushes-footage of the abandoned film — he and his friend sit at a table in a café, continuation of Masculin-Féminin. A roach falls from the ceiling into Cintra's water-glass. As always, the search for money.

It's as though João César's 1970 film — and its prologue made of rushes of the aborted 1965 feature — exist as records that attest to the fact: "Alas, once the world was young..."

JCM's tree (cf. Vai-e-vem...)

From the finagle of a newly deceased admiral's clothes in a pre-emptive estate sale (exchange), to the counter of a pawn-shop. To lunch (now affordable) with a bird — her purse leering in central position of the tableau. LMC recites from the collected works of Luís de Camões. But quotation, citation — dead men's shoes — this is not enough.

Cintra will sit in a rocking-chair and watch a couple beyond the threshold laze in bed and (of course) read Cahiers du cinéma. His voice-over narration declares: "In the end, crimes are things that keep repeating themselves."

A cinematographic proverb and an ethics. Yet nods to Alphaville and Vivre sa vie follow: with the negative exposure (repeat of a positive version, seconds before) of Cintra running on the platform at the train that pulls away with his love — the negative marks the shift to the event ("Cintra runs") as 'extra' to the woman's consciousness, the new P.O.V. (when Godard went negative in Alphaville, the citation was of Nosferatu by Murnau, the larger idea about the UFA cinema as metonym for the death camps) — trains. — This-all followed by an invocation of Poe's "The Oval Portrait", as re-poeticized by the doomed finale of JLG's Vivre sa vie. From there, a direct 'Godardian device': the hand that scrawls in a notebook as the camera films the act (and this hand inscribes an aphorism attributed to its master: "The cinema is a fraud (Godard), but that fraud might be overcome."

And then Mónica returns, Cintra sits at a café with her and her friend... João César intones a text over the soundtrack that begins like Cocteau (mirrors, two kingdoms) and gradually suggests the damnation in citation (mirror-people). — How to build the artform anew? beyond influences?

Remember too — the mirror-people are this boy, that girl. "You'd better leave..." he tells her twice across movie-time...

Remember too — the mirror is solipsism, and the cinephile mirror, well... inside and outside, how to escape such-kind of... terrible... self-portrait of the damned?

===

Previous pieces on João César Monteiro at Cinemasparagus:

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen [1969]

===

Zuckerman Unbound

2011-09-23T02:25:00.005-04:00

[1981]

"He was reminded of a story about Flaubert coming out of his study one day and seeing a cousin of his, a young married woman, tending to her children, and Flaubert saying, ruefully, 'Ils sont dans le vrai.' A working title, Zuckerman thought, and recorded in the white window of the composition book cover the words Dans le Vrai. These composition books Zuckerman used for his notes were bound in the stiff covers of marbled black-and-white design that generations of Americans envision still in bad dreams about lessons unlearned. On the inside of the front cover, facing the blue ruled lines of the first page, was the chart where the student is to enter his class program, period by period, for the school week. Here Zuckerman composed his subtitle, printing in block letters across the rows of rectangles provided for the subject, room, and instructor: 'Or, How I Made a Fiasco of Fame and Fortune in My Spare Time.' "

•••

"Pepler laughed his hearty appreciative laugh. God, he certainly seemed harmless enough. Dark glasses? A tourist indulgence. Going native. 'Whistle something else,' Pepler said. 'Anything. As far back in time as you want.'

" 'I really have to be off.'

" 'Please, Nathan. Just to test me out. To prove to you I'm on the level. That I am Pepler in the flesh!'

"Well, the war was on, the sirens had sounded, and his father, the street's chief air-raid warden, was out of the house in the prescribed sixty seconds. Henry, Nathan, and their mother sat at the rickety bridge table in the basement, playing casino by candlelight. Only a drill, not the real thing, never the real thing in America, but of course, if you were a ten-year-old American you never knew."

•••

" 'Look,' said Zuckerman, you want the whole truth?'

" 'Yes!' Eyes big, eyes bulging, eyes asizzle in a glowing red face. 'Yes! But the truth unbiased, that's what I want! Unbiased by the fact that you only wrote that book because you could! Because of having every break in life there is! While the ones who didn't obviously couldn't! Unbiased by the fact that those hang-ups you wrote about happen to be mine, and that you knew it—that you stole it!'

" 'I did what? Stole what?'

" 'From what my Aunt Lottie told your cousin Essie that she told to your mother that she told to you. About me. About my past.'

"Oh, was it time to go!

"The light was red. Would it never be green again when he needed it? With no further criticism to make or instruction to give, Zuckerman turned to leave.

" 'Newark!' Pepler, behind him, delivered the word straight to the eardrum. 'What do you know about Newark, Mama's Boy! I read that fucking book! To you it's Sunday chop suey downtown at the Chink's! To you it's being Leni-Lenape Indians at school in the play! To you it's Uncle Max in his undershirt, watering the radishes at night! And Nick Etten at first for the Bears! Nick Etten! Moron! Moron! Newark is a nigger with a knife! Newark is a whore with the syph! Newark is junkies shitting in your hallway and everything burned to the ground! Newark is dago vigilantes hunting jigs with tire irons! Newark is bankruptcy! Newark is ashes! Newark is rubble and filth! Own a car in Newark and then you'll find out what Newark's all about! Then you can write ten books about Newark! They slit your throat for your radial tires! They cut off both balls for a Bulova watch! And your dick for the fun of it, if it's white!'

"The light went green. Zuckerman made for the mounted policeman. 'You! Whining about Mama back in Newark and how she wouldn't wipe your ass for you three times a day! Newark is finished, idiot! Newark is barbarian hordes and the Fall of Rome! But what the hell would you know up on the hoity-toity East Side of Manhattan? You fuck up Newark and you steal my life—' "

===

Previous posts on Philip Roth at Cinemasparagus:

The Ghost Writer [1979]

2006 and 2007 Interviews

See also some of the Chaplin entries.

===

Titicut Follies

2011-09-15T00:45:00.004-04:00

Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, 1967:

Late cross-posting this here, but two weeks ago my first essay in a series called 300 Million Milliseconds covering every one of Frederick Wiseman's forty films from 1967 to present, and beyond, in chronological order of release, went up at The MUBI Notebook here, on Wiseman's earth-shaking debut, Titicut Follies.

Next in the series is 1968's High School, which will be posted shortly.

===

Endless Pavement

2011-09-15T00:39:00.005-04:00

The Greatest Naruse Silent

Kagirinaki hodô [Endless Pavement] by Mikio Naruse, 1934:

This film, Kagirinaki hodô, is known now, because of the Eclipse set, has been known, as Street Without End; a better translation might be Endless Pavement...

Refrain of the streetlights, of the bulbs of building interiors, in the opening act... A constant, constant music...

Sugiko is hit by a car (third accident of this sort in the first five extant Naruse films) — sickbed — any injury in the Japanese cinema of this period tends to plunge the victim into a coma...

Comedy and melodrama, two pairs of suitors, two pairs of rich men offering Sugiko a leg-up, two mothers who object to their sons' desire to marry the girl, two girls (co-workers and friends), Sugiko and Kesako, are offered jobs from the same studio as movie actresses...

They go to the movies to watch Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant...

The surface is barely scratched here. A great film, one of Naruse's greatest. Too much to say. But less talk for now. Autumn approaches at last...

===

Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:

Flunky, Work Hard [1931]

No Blood Relation [1932]

Apart from You [1933]

Every-Night Dreams [1933]

===

ADIEU AU LANGAGE / Jean-Luc Godard / 5 x 45-Minute Interview This Week

2011-09-13T00:15:00.007-04:00

Godard Speaks this Week for Hours
on His New Feature Adieu au langage, et caetera

From Monday, September 12th, 2011 till Friday, September 16th, 2011, Jean-Luc Godard discusses his forthcoming feature Adieu au langage [Farewell to Language] with Laure Adler on her radio program Hors-Champs on France Culture.

Either listen by streaming on France Culture's site;

— go to the iTunes Store and search for "Hors-Champs" and subscribe for free, for the program as podcast instant-downloads. Monday's episode runs 45 minutes;

— or, best still, to go directly to the iTunes Store podcast download/subscription page, click here.

===

Every-Night Dreams

2011-09-10T18:37:00.001-04:00

Not Wistful — A Recurring Consternation

Yogoto no yume [Every-Night Dreams] by Mikio Naruse, 1933:

The home is a home-base for the narrative, the recurring center both within this film and from one entry to the next in Naruse's filmography.

Every young filmmaker should put internal vision on hold for one outing and try to make a film in the style of Naruse.

There's a cozy, lovely ambiance to the dwelling of Omitsu (a woman who entertains docked sailors, she's played by Sumiko Kurishima), the room she shares with the couple that babysits her son Fumio (Teruko Kojima) — wood-paneled and papered walls... Mizuhara (Tatsuo Saitô, the stork in Ozu films and others at Shochiku) returns one day to his family so that he might see his son. He convinces Omitsu to reconcile. He takes his boy out to play (in the Shochiku-'backlot'-barrows), during this period of unemployment.

Fumio, out playing one day, gets hit by a car (cf. Flunky, Work Hard, where a train delivered the blow). Following the accident, Mizuhara commits a robbery, ostensibly to send the boy to a good hospital (still unemployed, he tells Omitsu he's borrowing money from old friends), — an alarm is triggered, and a frenzied pursuit occurs through the night streets of the town: canted angles; the effect of limitless motorcycle cops emerging from around building corners...

There's lots of play with mirrors in interior moments: they exist for the characters to confront themselves, to 'reflect' — before evading themselves once again...

We learn that, the morning after Mizuhara hands Omitsu the stolen money and departs, he has drowned himself: a powerful cut to an upside-down shot of water. Omitsu is disgusted by an act she sees as the pinnacle of his cowardice. "Where's Daddy?" — successive tracks-into.

The film ends on a montage of life around the port. In the beginning of Every-Night Dreams, Omitsu comes back from 'away' — Mizuhara comes back from 'away'. Away: the America of No Blood Relation, the countryside village of Apart from You... Mikio Naruse had a way with away...

===

Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:

Flunky, Work Hard [1931]

No Blood Relation [1932]

Apart from You [1933]

===

Apart from You

2011-09-10T18:00:00.000-04:00

The Story Might Go On Forever, But the Film Ends Where It Does

Kimi to wakarete [Apart from You] by Mikio Naruse, 1933:

Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) works as a geisha, wears a modest wedding ring; her friend Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo) helps her pluck grey hairs. Kikue's son Yoshio (Akio Isono), a schoolboy, might be taken first for her husband, or lover, given the absence of another male in the household — it's 21 minutes into the film before the nature of their relationship is made clear.

Yoshio runs out after an argument with his mother and accompanies Terugiku — much closer to his own age — on a visit to her home village and family's house, at which point the film unloosens topographically, varying heights and vantages. It's revealed that Terugiku's geisha duties support her family — who register disappointment when their daughter asserts that she doesn't want sister Misako (old enough to have had her own baby) to become a geisha.

(The insert-shot and cut to the return-P.O.V., a face with a smile: a hallmark of the Japanese cinema.)

Upon return Yoshio is upbraided by his "gang" for his absence; a train passing in the background provides a grace note of remembrance for his time in the country with Terugiku.

The Shochiku sickbed motif is twice invoked — the second time, with superimposed (memory) montage, recalling the ghost-plane scene of Flunky, Work Hard.

Final grace note: at the end of the film, a cut to the clock in the train station displaying the time as 11:20am. There's no plot reason for the shot — Naruse is only showing us that when the train arrives, it's 11:20am.

===

Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:

Flunky, Work Hard [1931]

No Blood Relation [1932]

===

I Shot Jesse James

2011-09-08T19:07:00.009-04:00

"It Was Legal." "It Was Murder."

Samuel "Flashback" Fuller, reliving the nightmare, the trauma (cf. Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, The Big Red One, etc.): Bob Ford (John Ireland) can't bring himself to pull the trigger in the re-enactment of Jesse's murder (Jesse played by Reed Hadley), and he's being paid to do so, before an audience.

A film about what happens when action passes into mythology...

After Bob Ford retreats from the stage, in quick succession he
— is serenaded by an unwitting troubadour with the ballad of "the coward Robert Ford"
— is shot at by a young boy who, once Ford returns fire, relents and claims he only wanted to be the one who killed the most notorious gunman in the land
— spins to take in a prospect-messenger galloping through the street, firing his revolver skyward (Ford's shot nerves recoil once more) and announcing to the townsfolk: "Silver! Silver!", thus completing the nightmarish tripartite-sequence with an echo of Judas's betrayal.

After he strikes it silver-rich, to set the scene for a proposal of marriage to Cynthy (Barbara Britton), a trouper of modest talent, Bob Ford takes rooms done up as a floral hell — a camp Gethsemane.

I Shot Jesse James by Samuel Fuller, 1949:

Much has been made of the homoeroticism of the washtub scene, but a gay lust in-and-of-itself never motivates the characters of James and Ford, nor does such a subtext drive any concrete aspect of the story. What the tub sequence accomplishes is to make The Homoerotic Suggestion a symbol for the mutually admiring, near-brotherly love shared between the two men (oblivious in part to the existence of Jesse's actual kin, the intermittent Frank, portrayed by Tom Tyler); The Homoerotic Suggestion serves too to encapsulate crudely (of course crudely: a Sam Fuller film) the resentment felt by Bob Ford in what he determines to be an unequal power-relationship with the leader of the gang.

I Shot Jesse James by Samuel Fuller, 1949:

Near the end, two pivots:

(1) Frank James walking backward out of the saloon with his shotgun pointed at Ford the entire time.

(2) Kelly (the wonderful Preston Foster) refusing at first to turn to stymie Ford in the showdown, and complete the motif: Ford now cannot shoot a man with his back turned. At the fatal moment, Kelly blows Ford away and the latter admits his regret over killing, betraying, a man he loved.

All this business with backs, of course — from Ford's gaze upon Jesse in the washtub, to the moment of the boss's assassination — completes the "symbolic suggestion" of the film, and represents, within Ford's mind, guilt over having committed, metaphorically, anal rape.

And so begins this oeuvre of fuller symbology: with a flash back.

I Shot Jesse James by Samuel Fuller, 1949:

===

"Vanessa" by Grimes

2011-09-08T01:19:00.004-04:00

From the Darkbloom EP. Directed by and starring Grimes (Claire Boucher). She released her first two albums in 2010, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, each written/composed/produced, like the Darkbloom tracks, by Boucher. Both masterpieces. Listen to them now. Most exciting new records in forever. New one coming out soon.

A genuine genius.

Grimes - Vanessa (Arbutus/Hippos and Tanks 2011) from Grimes69 on Vimeo.

===

The Ghost Writer

2011-09-05T11:54:00.004-04:00

[1979]

"Throughout breakfast, my father, my mother, the judge and Mrs. Wapter were never out of my thoughts. I'd gone the whole night without sleep, and now I couldn't think straight about them or myself, or about Amy, as she was called. I kept seeing myself coming back to New Jersey and saying to my family, 'I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married.' 'Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?' 'Yes, she is.' 'But who is she?' 'Anne Frank.' "

•••

" 'Amy, you want to split an egg with me?'

"His invitation for her to speak gave me my first opportunity to turn her way without embarrassment. It was so. It could be. The same look of unarmored and unimpaired intelligence, the same musing look of serene anticipation... The forehead wasn't Shakespeare's—it was hers.

"She was smiling, as though she too were in the best of spirits and his refusal to kiss her breasts the night before had never happened. 'Couldn't do it,' she said to him.

" 'Not even half?' asked Lonoff.

" 'Not even a sixteenth.'

"This is my Aunt Tessie, this is Frieda and Dave, this is Birdie, this is Murray... as you see, we are an enormous family. This is my wife, everyone. She is all I have ever wanted. If you doubt me, just look at her smile, listen to her laugh. Remember the shadowed eyes innocently uplifted in the clever little face? Remember the dark hair clipped back with a barrette? Well, this is she.... Anne, says my father—the Anne? Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken we have been!

" 'Scramble an egg, Hope,' said Lonoff. 'I'll eat half if you'll eat half.'

" 'You can eat the whole thing,' she replied. 'Just start taking your walks again.'

"He looked at me, imploringly. 'Nathan, eat half.'

" 'No, no,' said his wife and, turning to the stove, announced triumphantly, 'You'll eat the whole egg!' "

•••

" 'Fondling those papers of yours! Oh, she'll see! I got fondled more by strangers on the rush-hour subway during two months in 1935 than I have up here in the last twenty years! Take off your coat, Amy—you're staying. The classroom daydream has come true! You get the creative writer—and I get to go!'

" 'She's not staying,' Lonoff said, softly again. 'You're staying.'

" 'Not for thirty-five more years of this!'

" 'Oh, Hopie.' He put a hand out to her face, where the tears were still falling.

" 'I'm going to Boston! I'm going to Europe! It's too late to touch me now! I'm taking a trip around the world and never coming back! And you,' she said, looking down at Amy in her chair, 'you won't go anywhere. You won't see anything. If you even go out to dinner, if once in six months you get him to accept an invitation to somebody's home, then it'll be even worse—then for the hour before you go your life will be misery from his kvetching about what it's going to be like when those people start in with their ideas. If you dare to change the pepper mill, he'll ask what's the matter, what was wrong with the old one? It takes three months for him just to get used to a new brand of soap. Change the soap and he goes around the house sniffing, as though something dead is on the bathroom sink instead of just a bar of Palmolive. Nothing can be touched, nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up, their friends must stay away until four— There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of! And you will now be the person he is not living with!' "

===

No Blood Relation

2011-09-03T22:36:00.011-04:00

Careering

Nasanu-naka [No Blood Relation] by Mikio Naruse, 1932:

No Blood Relation resembles 'the experimental film,' here Naruse displays the same audacious exuberance of Jean Epstein ten years earlier... Cœur fidèle meets Naniwa Elegy meets Kubrick's The Killing... The camera dollies in, tracks like a missile in trajectory; two-fold result: spatial disorientation, and a sense of time's elasticity, of consciousness (being, experiencing, in-the-moment) as something set to beats.

The first worm's-eye shot — a barren tree in relief against a blanket of clouds rippling in the sky — poeticizes an emotion; this will come to be known as the style of Ozu.

A great soulfulness belongs to Shigeko (Hisako Kojima); she brings to mind Takamine the child-actress.

The importance of clocks: 4:55, 6:30... It takes the wife an hour and a half to get home from her department store job.

Panning insert-shots, camera movements in rhyme, the camera whirling so furiously it's as though no 'center' of the story can take hold, as though the film world and plot are only abstracted surfaces for the slide of the lens... It's perhaps the closest Naruse gets to F. J. Ossang... And the camera outrageously continues hurtling, practically slaps the faces of its subjects — really, the No Blood Relation camera moves beyond all proportion...

Strange arrangement of relationships — the man who was left by the mother of his child (oh, she went off to a career in Hollywood, a neither-here-nor-there Anna May Wong, probably, or something), who remarries another woman (Masako) — when he's sent to prison, Masako is courted by a tall-dark-handsome old-friend now back from Manchuria who acts out of love to attempt reacquiring the child kidnapped — assisted by the mother-in-law/grandmother, who leaves the original household to take up with the kidnappers. It turns out, the emotional center is Shigeko, the child...

The brilliant opening scene with the con dovetails into the wider and completely unbelievable premise, as though Naruse and screenwriter Noda set out to invent new domestic possibilities specifically, and to test a method of mad, rhyming repetitions which — albeit less anchored in reality — we won't see again till Pialat's Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble.

Film ends with a farewell to culprits. On one hand suggests that all parties have moved on, grown from their experience — on the other, foments an undertone of good riddance and relief, as the gangsters' ship sets sail for... America.

===

Previous pieces on Naruse at Cinemasparagus:

Flunky, Work Hard [1931]

===

Finding the Criminal

2011-08-22T16:29:00.008-04:00

"Lots of Cigarette Play, Like in Donovan's Reef." —Tag Gallagher

Finding the Criminal by Craig Keller, 2010:

"The story is told — ancient and told." —Pedro Costa

My film Finding the Criminal is out today, included in the DVD release for Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth from The Masters of Cinema Series.

Finding the Criminal runs 118 minutes and documents a conversation that took place among Pedro Costa, Andy Rector, and me in November 2008 on the history of cinema, cinema aesthetics, politics, music, etc. Lighting and sound-recording were provided by Jason Murphy and the late, great Sam Wells. Music is by Nick Wrigley and Jonathan Lomax.

Colossal Youth is accompanied by Costa's three shorts Tarrafal [2007], The Rabbit Hunters [Portuguese title: A caça ao coelho com pau, or Hunting the Rabbit with a Stick, 2007], and his recent O nosso homem [Our Man, 2010].

A 56-page full-color booklet contains a facsimile of Ventura's letter, and writing by Jacques Rancière, João Bénard da Costa, Arthur Mas, José Oliveira, Martial Pisani, and Andy Rector.

You can buy it from Amazon UK here.

PRESS FOR AND WRITING ON FINDING THE CRIMINAL

"A fascinating shambolic 2 hours where Costa reminds us that 3 secs of a John Ford western is equal to 3 hours of some less illuminating contemporaries." —Andrew Lucre

1 2 3 —Matthew Flanagan

===

Raúl Ruiz: 1941-2011

2011-08-21T02:10:00.003-04:00

===

The Bowery

2011-08-13T21:45:00.006-04:00

Although work prohibited me from submitting my piece at the time the post was to go live, Danny Kasman was nice enough to append my 'essaylet' about Raoul Walsh's extraordinary 1933 film The Bowery to the final installment here of the Notebook's series highlighting Film Forum's Essential Pre-Code retrospective (which ended this past Thursday).

This Notebook entry also includes writing by Ben Sachs, Matthew Flanagan, David Cairns, Miriam Bale, Adrian Martin, and Zach Campbell.

===

Flunky, Work Hard

2011-08-13T21:34:00.003-04:00

The Earliest Surviving Naruse Film

Koshiben ganbare [Flunky, Work Hard] by Mikio Naruse, 1931:

• Ragged cutting, which attains a lyricism in the shots of a toy plane gliding through the air.

• The same blighted suburban landscapes that appear in other Shochiku output of the period, specifically Ozu's I Was Born, But... (one year after) and Passing Fancy (two years after).

• Kaleidoscopic effects, and in the most beautiful image, the toy planes have been transformed into 'ghost planes' by virtue of crude superimposition across the would-be deathbed. (In a roundtable at the Notebook site here, Dan Sallitt writes: "The really interesting thing about the 'montage of inner revelation' is that the last montage interlude occurs as the child is coming around. It seems to suggest that the protagonist's anguish has staying power even in the face of a relatively happy ending.")

• The 'sick child' motif, also found in Ozu's 1931 Tokyo Chorus and Passing Fancy, among other films.

• "Flunky, Work Hard": One of the most beautiful titles in cinema — an adept and inspired translation of "Koshiben ganbare".

===

Happy 90th Birthday, Chris Marker

2011-07-31T18:00:00.003-04:00

L'Héritage de la chouette [The Owl's Legacy] by Chris Marker, 1989:

Now open for business:

Chris Marker's work-in-progress Gorgomancy.net.

Presently on the menu:

L'Héritage de la chouette [The Owl's Legacy, 1989]

A web/Flash conversion of the Immemory CD-ROM [1997]

Ouvroir: A Second Life Wandering with Guillaume-en-Egypte [2010]

Stopover in Dubai [2011]

A Day to Remember by Liu Wei [2005]

===

Blonde Venus

2011-07-30T01:37:00.005-04:00

I wrote a short piece about Josef von Sternberg's great 1932 Blonde Venus at The MUBI Notebook here. It's part of a slate of capsules about the films projecting during Week 3 of Film Forum's excellent Essential Pre-Code series. (Details and full schedule here.) Blonde Venus plays on Sunday July 31st and Monday August 1st as part of a double-bill with John Francis Dillon's 1932 Call Her Savage.

The MUBI Notebook entry also includes pieces by Gina Telaroli, David Cairns, Ben Sachs, Zach Campbell, Glenn Kenny, and Jaime Christley.

===

Letter from a Friend

2011-07-28T00:47:00.002-04:00

this is the only song i ve listened today
my mom invited like thirty people
a traditional middle eastern welcome party to [redacted]
lots of tea lots of deserts [sic]
and me with my lovely dress smiling to everyone and at the same time thinking about the dream i had last night
burning houses with my mom ...
sometimes i want to burn everything around me
i wish i could do it one day burning a chair burning all of my books burning curtains
burning a palm tree
:)
this song is so beautiful

i hope you re doing well
lots of love from
mersin

Touch of Evil

2011-07-21T14:25:00.005-04:00

Out This November on The Masters of Cinema Series

LIMITED EDITION 2 x BLU-RAY ONLY

• Six versions of Welles’ Touch of Evil: the 1998 reconstruction; the 1958 preview version rediscovered in the mid-1970s; and the 1958 theatrical version — each presented in both 1.85:1 and 1.37:1 aspect ratios

• English SDH subtitles on all versions

• A host of extras presented for the first time in the UK

• A lavish 80-PAGE illustrated book containing the words of Orson Welles, and much more

Click here for more details, or go here to Amazon UK to pre-order.

===

Cassavetes in 1978

2011-06-24T23:05:00.001-04:00

===

Twin Peaks

2011-06-24T04:04:00.012-04:00

Episode 18

Twin Peaks: Episode 18 by David Lynch / Duwayne Dunham, et al., 1990:

It's incredible to think that even twenty-one years ago the precepts of Mac OS GUI were in place (the window, the bar, the scroll) and embedded within this device: the Macintosh Portable. An Apple computer displayed in Twin Peaks, whether product-placed or not, in the post-(+pre-)Jobs, John Sculley era, as a kind of totem of technoliteracy.*

*["In 1987, Sculley made several famous predictions in a Playboy interview. He predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and claimed that optical storage media such as the CD-ROM would revolutionize the use of personal computers. Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator would eventually be fulfilled, not by Apple itself, but by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Condé Nast Portfolio ranked Sculley as the 14th worst American CEO of all time." —Wikipedia]

After the climactic Episode 14 of Twin Peaks — directed by Lynch himself, and obviously steeped as a most personal concoction... it represents one of the artistic high-points of Lynch's entire oeuvre, a work of power in thrall to beyond... — the wisdom is that the show (a series that remarked upon "noir," and as enough time passed, by 2011, simply exists as "noir") 'falls off', Lynch claiming to have lost interest after Ep. 14 (until the final episode of the series)... but even in an episode such as 18, technically directed by Duwayne Dunham, 102,000 things exist to be discussed... it's by no means bad... rather excellent... nothing is stupid, or 'off'... It's exciting to watch the characters be pushed into a register and idiom "post-" the ignitional narrative-arc of Laura Palmer's death... to watch Lara Flynn Boyle and Wendy Robie (a satirical self-reflexive proxy w/r/t the casting's over-aged teens) reciting lines against high-school lockers poised seven inches higher than appropriate... to watch Kyle MacLachlan perform his Agent Cooper schtick in freer berth, the soap-thread flung in a distant dugout...

Sherilyn Fenn, woman of cinema, avatar to justify fortune and zealous Ideal...

There's nothing to complain about!

["David Lynch, who had experienced previous success with the acclaimed The Elephant Man (1980) and Blue Velvet (1986), was hired by a Warner Bros. executive to direct a film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the best-selling book The Goddess. Lynch recalls being 'sort of interested. I loved the idea of this woman in trouble, but I didn't know if I liked it being a real story'." —Wikipedia]

===

Tillie's Punctured Romance

2011-06-22T23:42:00.004-04:00

À propos de Green and The Color Wheel (Roth's My Favorite Living Writer Too!)

Tillie's Punctured Romance by Max Sennett, 1914:

The final Chaplin Keystone film marks a final return by Mack Sennett to directing Charlie, also is the first feature-length production with Chaplin's involvement. It is one of the vulgar-worst of the Chaplin-Keystone films, a histrionic, 81-minute tit-flap notable only for its historical status as Chaplin's send-off from the studio. But no harm done — from here, Chaplin was free. If you know this film, neutralize your ghastly shivers in remembrance with passages from two of the recent Roth novels, high-summit controls against kitsch which rank among his concentrated-best work. (I've been especially 'indignant' about contemporary critical reception of 2009's 140-page-long The Humbling, which only testified to the fact that most American book critics don't know how to closely read: wands, magick, performance surely aren't the stuff of most marble kitchen-islands, but they are transforming motifs within Roth's novel; Milton Glaser's brilliant sleeve art for the U.S. hardcover unifies the lot. An essential Roth novel, and one of the finest American artworks of the last five years.)

"Here she took me in those arms of hers, arms as strong as mine, if not stronger, and she said, 'You are an emotional boy. Emotional like your father and all of his brothers. You are a Messner like all the Messners. Once your father was the sensible one, the reasonable one, the only one with a head on his shoulders. Now, for whatever reason, he's as crazy as the rest. The Messners aren't just a family of butchers. They're a family of shouters and a family of screamers and a family of putting their foot down and banging their heads against the wall, and now, out of the blue, your father is as bad as the rest of them. Don't you be. You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you—life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again. Feelings can be life's biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks. They played them on me when I came to you and said I was going to divorce your father. Now I have dealt with those feelings. Promise me you will deal the same with yours.' "

— Philip Roth, Indignation

+

"He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center—it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill—and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth. He couldn't do low-intensity Shakespeare and he couldn't do high-intensity Shakespeare—and he'd been doing Shakespeare all his life. His Macbeth was ludicrous and everyone who saw it said as much, and so did many who hadn't seen it. 'No, they don't even have to have been there,' he said, 'to insult you.' A lot of actors would have turned to drink to help themselves out; an old joke had it that there was an actor who would always drink before he went onstage, and when he was warned 'You mustn't drink,' he replied, 'What, and go out there alone?' But Axler didn't drink, and so he collapsed instead. His breakdown was colossal."

— Philip Roth, The Humbling

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914] / His Musical Career [Chaplin, 1914] / His Trysting Places [Chaplin, 1914] / Getting Acquainted [Chaplin, 1914] / His Prehistoric Past [Sennett, 1914]

===

His Prehistoric Past

2011-06-22T23:23:00.004-04:00

À propos de Green and The Color Wheel (Roth's My Favorite Living Writer Too!)

Getting Acquainted by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"The neurologist was not suggesting that migraines were necessarily symptomatic of a neurotic personality disturbance; rather he was responding, he said, to what he took to be 'a Freudian orientation' in the questions I asked him and in the manner in which I had gone about presenting the history of the disorder.

"I did not know that it was a Freudian orientation so much as a literary habit of mind which the neurologist was not accustomed to: that is to say, I could not resist reflecting upon my migraines in the same supramedical way that I might consider the illnesses of Milly Theale or Hans Castorp or the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, or ruminate upon the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, or search out the 'meaning' in Gogol's short story of Collegiate Assessor Kovalev's temporary loss of his nose. Whereas an ordinary man might complain, 'I get these damn headaches' (and have been content to leave it at that), I tended, like a student of high literature or a savage who paints his body blue, to see the migraines as standing for something, as a disclosure or 'epiphany,' isolated or accidental or inexplicable only to one who was blind to the design of a life or a book. What did my migraines signify?"

— Philip Roth, My Life as a Man

+

"Yes, almost nothing is necessary to set me in pursuit of a perfect stranger, nothing, say, but the knowledge that while taking notes from the encyclopedia with her right hand, she cannot keep the index finger of her left hand from tracing circles on her lips. I refuse — out of an incapacity that I elevate to a principle — to resist whatever I find irresistible, regardless of how unsubstantial and quirky, or childish and perverse, the source of the appeal might strike anyone else. Of course this leads me to seek out girls I might otherwise find commonplace or silly or dull, but I for one am convinced that dullness isn't their whole story, and that because my desire is desire, it is not to be belittled or despised.

" 'Please,' they plead, 'why don't you just talk and be nice? You can be so nice, if you want to be.' 'Yes, so they tell me.' 'But don't you see, this is only my body. I don't want to relate to you on that level.' 'You're out of luck. Nothing can be done about it. Your body is sensational.' 'Oh, don't start saying that again.' 'Your ass is sensational.' 'Please don't be crude. You don't talk that way in class. I love listening to you, but not when you insult me like this.' 'Insult? It's high praise. Your ass is marvelous. It's perfect. You should be thrilled to have it.' 'It's only what I sit on, David.' 'The hell it is. Ask a girl who doesn't own one quite that shape if she'd like to swap. That should bring you to your senses.' 'Please stop making fun of me and being sarcastic. Please.' 'I'm not making fun of you. I'm taking you as seriously as anybody has ever taken you in your life. Your ass is a masterpiece.' "

— Philip Roth, The Professor of Desire

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914] / His Musical Career [Chaplin, 1914] / His Trysting Places [Chaplin, 1914] / Getting Acquainted [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Getting Acquainted

2011-06-22T22:49:00.003-04:00

À propos de Green and The Color Wheel (Roth's My Favorite Living Writer Too!)

Getting Acquainted by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"Stuck into her English book, right there on the floor, was the essay she had written on 'Ozymandias.' B-plus and across the front the professor had written, 'Excellent paragraph development; good understanding of meaning; good use of quotations; but please don't stuff your sentences so.' And maybe she had overdone the main topic sentence somewhat, but her intention had been to state at the outset all those ideas that she would later take up in the body of the essay. 'Even a great king,' her paper began, 'such as Ozymandias apparently had been, could not predict or control what the future, or Fate, held in store for him and his kingdom; that, I think, is the message that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, means for us to come away with from his romantic poem "Ozymandias," which not only reveals the theme of the vanity of human wishes — even a king's — but deals also with the concept of the immensity of "boundless and bare" life and the inevitability of the "colossal wreck" of everything, as compared to the "sneer of cold command," which is all many mere mortals have at their command, unfortunately.' "

— Philip Roth, When She Was Good

+

"Why he brought her home, he said, was 'for a real Jewish meal.' For weeks he had been jabbering about the new goyische cashier ('a very plain drab person,' he said, 'who dresses in shmattas') who had been pestering him — so went the story he couldn't stop telling us — for a real Jewish meal from the day she had come to work in the Boston & Northeastern office. Finally my mother couldn't take any more. 'All right, bring her already — she needs it so bad, so I'll give her one.' Was he caught a little by surprise? Who will ever know.

"At any rate, a Jewish meal is what she got all right. I don't think I have ever heard the word 'Jewish' spoken so many times in one evening in my life, and let me tell you, I am a person who has heard the word 'Jewish' spoken.

" 'This is your real Jewish chopped liver, Anne. Have you ever had real Jewish chopped liver before? Well, my wife makes the real thing, you can bet your life on that. Here, you eat it with a piece of bread. This is real Jewish rye bread, with seeds. That's it, Anne, you're doing very good, ain't she doing good, Sophie, for her first time? That's it, take a nice piece of real Jewish rye, now take a big fork full of the real Jewish chopped liver' — and on and on, right down to the jello — 'that's right, Anne, the jello is kosher too, sure, of course, has to be — oh no, oh no, no cream in your coffee, not after meat, ha ha, hear what Anne wanted, Alex — ?'

"But babble-babble all you want, Dad dear, a question has just occurred to me, twenty-five years later (not that I have a single shred of evidence, not that until this moment I have ever imagined my father capable of even the slightest infraction of domestic law... but since infraction seems to hold for me a certain fascination), a question has arisen in the audience: why did you bring a shikse, of all things, into our home? Because you couldn't bear that a gentile woman should go through life without the experience of eating a dish of Jewish jello? Or because you could no longer live your own life without making Jewish confession? Without confronting your wife with your crime, so she might accuse, castigate, humiliate, punish, and thus bleed you forever of your forbidden lusts! Yes, a regular Jewish desperado, my father. I recognize the syndrome perfectly. Come, someone, anyone, find me out and condemn me — I did the most terrible thing you can think of: I took what I am not supposed to have! Chose pleasure for myself over duty to my loved ones! Please, catch me, incarcerate me, before God forbid I get away with it completely — and go out and do again something I actually like!

"And did my mother oblige? Did Sophie put together the two tits and the two legs and come up with four? Me it seems to have taken two and a half decades to do such steep calculation. Oh, I must be making this up, really. My father... and a shikse? Can't be. Was beyond his ken. My own father — fucked shikses? I'll admit under duress that he fucked my mother... but shikses? I can no more imagine him knocking over a gas station."

— Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914] / His Musical Career [Chaplin, 1914] / His Trysting Places [Chaplin, 1914]

===

His Trysting Places

2011-06-22T03:36:00.002-04:00

Reference

His Trysting Places by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"With that unhasteful celerity Mrs. Hait turned and set the scuttle down on the brick coping of the cellar entrance and she and old Het turned the corner of the house in time to see the now wraithlike mule at the moment when its course converged with that of a choleric-looking rooster and eight Rhode Island Red hens emerging from beneath the house. Then for an instant its progress assumed the appearance and trappings of an apotheosis: hell-born and hell-returning, in the act of dissolving completely into the fog, it seemed to rise vanishing into a sunless and dimensionless medium borne upon and enclosed by small winged goblins.

" 'Dey's mo in de front!' old Het cried.

" 'Them sons of bitches,' Mrs. Hait said, again in that grim, prescient voice without rancor or heat. It was not even the owner of them. It was her whole town-dwelling history as dated from that April dawn ten years ago when what was left of Hait had been gathered from the mangled remains of five mules and several feet of new Manila rope on a blind curve of the railroad just out of town; the geographical hap of her very home; the very components of her bereavement—the mules, the defunct husband, and the owner of them. His name was Snopes; in the town they knew about him too—how he bought his stock at the Memphis market and brought it to Jefferson and sold it to farmers and widows and orphans black and white, for whatever he could contrive—down to a certain figure; and about how (usually in the dead season of winter) teams and even small droves of his stock would escape from the fenced pasture where he kept them and, tied one to another with sometimes quite new hemp rope (and which item Snopes included in the subsequent claim), would be annihilated by freight trains on the same blind curve which was to be the scene of Hait's exit from this world; once a town wag sent him through the mail a printed train schedule for the division. A squat, pasty man perennially tieless and with a strained, harried expression, at stated intervals he passed athwart the peaceful and somnolent life of the town in dust and uproar, his advent heralded by shouts and cries, his passing marked by a yellow cloud filled with tossing jug-shaped heads and clattering hooves and the same forlorn and earnest cries of the drovers; and last of all and well back out of the dust, Snopes himself moving at a harried and panting trot, since it was said in the town that he was deathly afraid of the very beasts in which he cleverly dealt."
— William Faulkner, "Mule in the Yard"

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914] / His Musical Career [Chaplin, 1914]

===

His Musical Career

2011-06-22T03:29:00.003-04:00

Reference

His Musical Career by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"It had an effect on him — he stood staring. The subject of their contention had finished singing; he left the piano, and his recognition of what — a little awkwardly — didn't take place in celebration of this might nevertheless have been an acclaimed operatic tenor's series of repeated ducks before the curtain. So he bowed himself over to Daisy. 'Won't you come to the other room and have some tea?' he asked — offering Mrs. Walker's slightly thin refreshment as he might have done all the kingdoms of the earth."
— Henry James, Daisy Miller

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914] / Gentlemen of Nerve [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Gentlemen of Nerve

2011-06-22T03:18:00.002-04:00

Reference

Gentlemen of Nerve by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"There came an evening during my novitiate when, after being fed but lightly, I was taken to a Chamber, and there laced into an expensive Corset, black as Midnight, imported, I was told, from Paris, from the very workshop of the Corsetier to the Queen. They painted my face into a wanton Sister of itself, showing me, in a Hand-Mirror,— 'twas a Woman I'd never seen before,— whom, upon the Instant, sinfully, I desir'd."
— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914] / Dough and Dynamite [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Dough and Dynamite

2011-06-22T03:12:00.002-04:00

Reference

Dough and Dynamite by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"Here it is impossible to tell whether sexual assault took place as well as murder. The undressing, again, may have been the work of cops or physicians."
— Luc Sante, Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914-1918

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914] / Those Love Pangs [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Those Love Pangs

2011-06-22T03:07:00.002-04:00

Reference

Those Love Pangs by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"So we sat there quiet with her hands against my hands like Colonel Sanders and his wife at LI 87345, where he is in jail for refusing to give up the recipe for KFC Haitian MiniBreasts, and then Carolyn said, I didn't mean that thing about the rabbit, and I scrinkled up my nose rabbit-like to make her laugh."
— George Saunders, "Jon", In Persuasion Nation

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914] / The New Janitor [Chaplin, 1914]

===

The New Janitor

2011-06-22T03:00:00.002-04:00

Reference

The New Janitor by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"Did you go to't so young? Were you a gamester at five, or at seven?"
— William Shakespeare, Pericles

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914] / The Rounders [Chaplin and Arbuckle, 1914]

===

The Rounders

2011-06-22T02:53:00.003-04:00

Reference

The Rounders by Charles Chaplin and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, 1914:

"En mars 1972, Resnais fit un voyage aux Etats-Unis de Providence (Rhode Island), à Newport, Salem et Marblehead sur les traces de Howard Philipp [sic] Lovecraft, sur lequel il voulait réaliser une espèce de documentaire."
— Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l'imaginaire: de Hiroshima à Mélo

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914] / His New Profession [Chaplin, 1914]

===

His New Profession

2011-06-22T02:39:00.002-04:00

Reference

His New Profession by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

" 'Thinks she's like something in the works of Tennyson. You know, chemically pure. ...' "
— Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914] / The Masquerader [Chaplin, 1914]

===

The Masquerader

2011-06-22T02:33:00.004-04:00

Reference

The Masquerader by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

"Palm Springs. Deciding about God."
— Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks: 1947-1963

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914] / Recreation [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Recreation

2011-06-22T02:10:00.007-04:00

The Last Chaplin Film Is A Countess from Hong Kong

Recreation by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

Split-reel, 6 minute 22 second runthrough of various Keystone motifs: meeting a woman in a park, sitting on a bench, ducking a blow so the lady takes the punch, winging a brick (across cuts — the long shot wasn't in the vocabulary yet), people falling in water... the cop on the scene / Charlie wears the same sportcoat as in The Face on the Barroom Floor, paint splotch on the rear / Recreation is phoned-in, but the compositions (once the non-duped footage kicks in, fairly pristine) are a definite refinement over previous Keystone efforts, the natural setting here alive and charged

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914] / The Face on the Barroom Floor [Chaplin, 1914]

===

The Face on the Barroom Floor

2011-06-22T02:05:00.003-04:00

The Last Chaplin Film Is A Countess from Hong Kong

The Face on the Barroom Floor by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

Based on the poem / The tale of a fine-artist turned drunk, The Face on the Barroom Floor marks a progression toward storyline rather than premise, arc of development / Splatter of paint on his shirttail, he sees the woman who left him for the portrait sitter, pushing a carriage in a park, their children trailing them — a remarkable response crosses Charlie's face / The pathos of his attempt to draw Medeline's face in chalk on the barroom floor, the pathetic scribble, the birth of Chaplin

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914] / The Property Man [Chaplin, 1914]

===

The Property Man

2011-06-22T01:46:00.003-04:00

The Last Chaplin Film Is A Countess from Hong Kong

The Property Man by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

Hides a pitcher of beer in his sagging overalls, then bends over to pick up the purse a dame has dropped / Have to define oneself as one thing — the property master: part of the story doesn't get underway till the end of the first reel / There's more continuity across cuts here than in any of the Sennett-Chaplin films / Get out there and make my voice listenable / When a star rises up to his boss — 'Do you know who that was? — Jack Dempsey' / Ends in another chaos blitz, well-executed, well-executed / I hate clever comedians / Comedians who entertain the eyebrows, coax your grin / Chaplin was no Reggie Watts

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914] / Laughing Gas [Chaplin, 1914]

===

Laughing Gas

2011-06-22T01:34:00.004-04:00

The Last Chaplin Film Is A Countess from Hong Kong

Laughing Gas by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

Charlie, assistant to the dentist "Dr. Pain" / Hits two men in the face with Keystone bricks; they consequently drool broken teeth / Has a day ever passed in the United States where no citizen bashed the tooth of another? / The end goes back to the beginning — in and out of rooms, A Countess from Hong Kong, the final Chaplin film, the one sanctioning bodies don't acknowledge

===

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 Married Life [Sennett, 1914]

===

There Was a Father

2011-06-19T02:23:00.023-04:00

Scale

Le Salaire du zappeur from José Oliveira on Vimeo.

The condition of "early Ozu" which in parlance = "before Late Spring" / The father and son close the shôji simultaneously, the bond that cannot be broken
will the end / An incredible encapsulation of time / A funeral of all events
d

The angle and the paradise / Begins, in the second shot, after credits, by repeating with the women the angle and parade of the opening Only Son / Like Ryôsuke in that film / _____ / Horikawa (Chishû Ryû) teaches geometry / on a class excursion, / the student Yoshida disobeys / teacher's orders to stay
Lifeboat [Alfred Hitchcock, 1944]
he; /

"Pillow shot" as teens yell out onto the lake / the soundtrack

the Iowa Writers' Workshop

one of the Buddhist markers / capsized boat /

Horikawa, Hirata sit and talk, Horikawa announcing his resignation from the school deflecting Hirata's advice to the contrary: a tree bound to support stake in background echoes chalkboard image from schoolroom lesson of circumscribed forms, angles,
what is between these men /

"The grave next to your mother's is your grandfather's.
He sold that house to put me through school." /

Holidays alone without a wife

Dad went through the roof, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky on Alex Ross Perry

the sewing and son, synchronously fishing: the Tale of Floating Weeds / The spinning wheels, The Only Son, Horikawa, Tokyo job, overseer at a textile plant, Ryôhei's boarding-highschool, / The Only Son, the mother's occupation — now automated wartime,
and jobs for men /

He meets Hirata in a go — thirteen years since, and Hirata's daughter grown —

but he is a YOUNG SON, SEIICHI (where is mother?) /

Ryôhei is leading! = teaching chemistry — specifically, manufacture molecular makeup of TNT / First event mentor: "Your older brother was drafted, wasn't he?" /
The son offers the father spending money, the father's pledge to offer it to the dead mother's and wife's
star altar /
Old students a former teacher no longer recognizes by face, but honors their call / Ryôhei's shaved his head for the draft / At the dinner for Horikawa and Hirata:
"Sensei, remember how you punished Iwamoto and me for fighting in third grade?"

"I'm afraid I don't." /

The shot past these same former students, into the hospital room and deathbed of Horikawa, surrounded by family and friends, his head, face, dim / "It's nothing to be sad about. I did the very best I could."

— not entirely definitively ring, though perhaps they do, — "I am happy."

After the father passes, the son Ryôhei tells Fumiko his new wife that the time he spent together with his father was "the best week of [his] life" / She buries her face in a handkerchief and weeps, / and Ryôhei off to war

Chichi ariki [There Was a Father] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1942:

===

Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat [1929]

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style [1929]

Tokyo Chorus [1931]

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... [1932]

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone? [1932]

Passing Fancy [1933]

A Tale of Floating Weeds [1934]

Kagamijishi [1936]

The Only Son [1936]

===

Sam Wells

2011-06-13T03:18:00.011-04:00

November 4th, 1950 - June 3rd, 2011

A little over a week ago, Sam Wells died. Sam, ever humble and self-effacing, was a gifted filmmaker and photographer; a lifelong and devout cinephile; an expert on movie and Mac tech; a fellow Princetonian and friend. With Jason Murphy, Sam did the image-lighting and sound-recording on my film Finding the Criminal, a two-hour conversation-picture featuring Pedro Costa, myself, and Andy Rector, which was shot in late 2008, and which I was finally able to finish work on only a few months ago.

I first encountered Sam on an online listserv in the early '00s. I remember him expressing at times his admiration for the work of Stan Brakhage and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and, when called for, demonstrating a far-reaching grasp of the science and (im)practical limitations of optics, lighting, the apparatus of filmmaking.

When it came time to assemble a crew for Finding the Criminal, Dan Sallitt suggested Sam, noting his Princeton vicinity. As it so happened, Sam was the same guy I'd spotted a couple times a week for the last few years, hanging out in front of Small World on Witherspoon, drinking coffee, chain-smoking, chatting with passing acquaintances, and whom I'd catch sight of at some of the (rare) film screenings on campus: Gehr, Kluge, Kiarostami, Bresson.

Sam was thrilled to take part in the shoot. When I told him in no more than forty-five seconds what I wanted in the way of lighting and sound, he replied with a refreshing matter-of-factness assuring me there would be no problems, suggesting we use this, that, and the other. Perfect. No bullshit, no film-technician preciousness. Three days later, we filmed in a single session lasting from 8 at night until 4 in the morning. An hour setup, hour break-down; the only difficulties arose from minor paranormal incidents at the start of the shoot. (We filmed in a friend's studio loft which had once been part of an enormous 'funeral home complex' on the outskirts of Williamsburg.) We got everything exactly as we'd set out to. During the car-ride back to Jersey, Sam raved about various things that Pedro had said in the course of the filming, exclaiming that finally someone gets it, how finally someone had put a certain idea into words.

One evening last summer I ran into Sam outside the A&B. He told me he had finally caught up with watching both In Vanda's Room and Ne change rien, and clearly he was blown away: the ideas in both films moved way beyond words. Sam said: "Goddammit, he cracked it. Someone finally cracked the fucking digital video thing. Before it was only Godard, but now it's Costa too." He said: "Those images are as beautiful as Rembrandt. There's a Rembrandt living in our time. Now I've seen Ne change rien, and I can say I helped make a film in the presence of Rembrandt." It wasn't just that Sam was emotionally overwhelmed by the film itself — and he was, obviously — it's that Ne change rien had confirmed for him, shown him, the existence of New Possibilities that he was desperately eager to begin exploring in his own films, specifically the recent work(s)-in-progress he'd been shooting for several years.

A word about those films: I don't know what the status is of the materials or work(s)-in-progress that Sam has left behind. Hopefully he had time to prepare some kind of direction for their archiving and preservation. He had been hoping to screen his 1999 film Wired Angel in an outdoor park in town at some point last September, but various obstacles rose surrounding the availability of necessary equipment for the projection.

Because Sam was a fan of this blog, and because for Sam cinema was life (and often better), I'll post the following epitaph: the artists he loved:

Stan Brakhage

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Robert Bresson

Gregory Markopoulos

Kenji Mizoguchi

Peter Kubelka

Nathaniel Dorsky

Jean-Luc Godard

Josef von Sternberg

Abbas Kiarostami

Ernie Gehr

Jacques Rivette

Yasujirô Ozu

Jean Cocteau

Sergei Eisenstein

Fritz Lang

Chris Marker

Alfred Hitchcock

Douglas Sirk

Stanley Kubrick

Andrei Tarkovsky

Pedro Costa

I'm probably leaving out many others, but those are the names I'd heard him passionately invoke.

Ah: and one more: he had a special place in his heart for Bulle Ogier.

===

Sam Wells on Wikipedia

Sam Wells' Website

ABOVE: Frame from Finding the Criminal. Left to right: Sam Wells, Andy Rector, Pedro Costa.

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2011-06-07T02:19:00.001-04:00

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2011-05-29T17:12:00.001-04:00

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Pylon

2011-04-29T14:46:00.003-04:00

"—the man whom the editor believed (certainly hoped) to be unmarried, though not through any knowledge or report but because of something which the man's living being emanated—a creature who apparently never had any parents either and who will not be old and never was a child, who apparently sprang fullgrown and irrevocably mature out of some violent and instantaneous transition like the stories of dead steamboatmen and mules: if it were learned that he had a brother for instance it would create neither warmth nor surprise anymore than finding the mate to a discarded shoe in a trashbin—of whom the editor had heard how a girl in a Barricade Street crib said that it would be like assessing the invoked spirit at a seance held in a rented restaurant room with a covercharge."

•••

"—one day Hagood looked up and watched a woman whom he had never seen before enter the city room. 'She looked like a locomotive,' he told the paper's owner later with bitter outrage. 'You know: when the board has been devilled and harried by the newsreels of Diesel trains and by the reporters that ask them about the future of railroading until at last the board takes the old engine, the one that set the record back in nineteen-two or nineteen-ten or somewhere and sends it to the shops and one day they unveil it (with the newsreels and the reporters all there, too) with horseshoe rose wreaths and congressmen and thirty-six highschool girls out of the beauty show in bathing suits, and it is a new engine on the outside only, because everyone is glad and proud that inside it is still the old fast one of nineteen-two or -ten. The same number is on the tender and the old fine, sound, timeproved workingparts, only the cab and the boiler are painted robin'segg blue and the rods and the bell look more like gold than gold does and even the supercharger dont look so very noticeable except in a hard light, and the number is in neon now: the first number in the world to be in neon?' He looked up from his desk and saw her enter on a blast of scent as arresting as mustard gas and followed by the reporter looking more than ever like a shadow whose projector had eluded it weeks and weeks ago—the fine big bosom like one of the walled impervious towns of the middleages whose origin antedates writing, which have been taken and retaken in uncountable fierce assaults which overran them in the brief fury of a moment and vanished, leaving no trace, the broad tomatocolored mouth, the eyes pleasant shrewd and beyond mere disillusion, the hair of that diamondhard and imperviously recent luster of a gilt service in a shopwindow, the goldstudded teeth square and white and big like those of a horse—all seen beneath a plump rich billowing of pink plumes so that Hagood thought of himself as looking at a canvas out of the vernal equinox of pigment when they could not always write to sign their names to them—a canvas conceived in and executed out of that fine innocence of sleep and open bowels capable of crowning the rich foul unchaste earth with rosy clouds where lurk and sport oblivious and incongruous cherubim."

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Bruno Dumont on Stanley Kubrick

2011-04-28T03:06:00.004-04:00

Bruno Dumont parle de Stanley Kubrick by lacinematheque

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Previous pieces on Bruno Dumont and Stanley Kubrick at Cinemasparagus:

La Vie de Jésus by Bruno Dumont [1997]

Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick [1957]

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Final Cut Pro X

2011-04-13T21:52:00.003-04:00

April 12th, 2011:

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Certified Copy

2011-04-09T23:27:00.002-04:00

'I Live You'

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2011-03-14T03:25:00.000-04:00

Art History

2011-03-11T01:03:00.005-05:00

Email from September 30, 2010

Hi Joe,

Some thoughts on Art History...

I think it's an amazing, complex film. First of all, it's undeniably beautiful — the light, the framings, the colors. There's such an attention to texture, and to the rhythm of particular moments. From the vase of sunflowers that appears in a few shots, to the (extraordinary) pool scenes. The natural world has a real presence even in this completely circumscribed environment: a house somewhere in LA, the confines of which we never leave or see beyond, as though the property lies outside of contiguous space and time. Despite the single location, there's no claustrophobia — e.g., the scene set around the table during breakfast, or the one shot through the window, where you and Kent sit on the step, and his character thanks yours for casting him in the movie... — it's like an 'inner-and-outer-chamber drama'. At the same time it's kind of a planet unto itself, this 'temporary' place where a group arrives to partake in a short ritual before vacating the premises. If spaces have an aura or force, haunted once and maybe emitting certain energies (cf. The Shining), then the tensions at play between the characters and the entire act of making the film / interacting seem to me that much more unsettling.

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

In line with this, the bedroom strikes me as the most uncanny space of the 'set'. It's bare, blanched, stripped, has the ambiance of an interrogation room; appears (at least through the editing) to be an "off" space relative to the geography of the rest of the house. When it's recorded in long-shot, it constitutes a frame (closer to 1.33) within the 1.78 frame, and this serves all the more to establish the room as a netherzone, with the camera (which in turn shoots the camera shooting the sex scenes) taking on the feeling of an omniscient-eye-view, some p.o.v. "outside" the drama but watching steely-eyed...

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Which leads to one of the central issues in the mix: what exactly is the film-within-the-film that's being made? As always, documentary and fiction have a slippery/tenuous dividing line, and it's meaningfully explored throughout the course of Art History... Is the film-in-progress-within-the-film a quote-unquote "Joe Swanberg film"? Or is it a straightforward porn, or porn with artistic pretensions? At first it seems the whole of the director's footage (as far as we're allowed to see) might consist purely of sex scenes — then, later on, there's indication that this may not be the case, from the moment of the conversation scene between Kris and Josephine. At this point another question is raised: Was this outside-of-sex-on-(the director character's)-camera conversation between Kris & Josephine always planned by your character to be shot, or is it a semi-spontaneous addition on his part only after the 'situation at the house' began to develop? —

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

So: what exactly is happening? There seem to be levels of removal that keep attempting to crop up (on the part of the director + of their own accord?), as though to establish some distance from the situation at-hand. And yet: what's taking place within the characters psychologically, and on either side of these borderlines of remove that the director character is attempting to stake out (while at the same time using the remove as an anchoring point for his manipulation of the actors/drama), can no longer, by film's end, be sustained. The same omniscient-eye-view from the doorway to the bedroom finds its echo in the blank gaze of your character staring at the screen while editing.

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

In fact, there are at least two moments where we're not exactly sure whether:

(1) the cross-cutting that occurs here is action simultaneously occurring within the film-world —

i.e., (a) shot of your and Adam Wingard's characters at the screen;

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

(b) shot of Kent and Josephine talking, getting close, in the other room next to the one you're sitting in

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

— or:

(2) whether it's a shot-reverse-shot of (a) your character at the screen looking at (b) footage from the shoot. Eventually we have the sense it's the former, but this blurring only underscores another level of removal, that the film-being-made's action and the framing film-world's action are both in some strange (and real) sense intermingled — and that the intermingling is the film Art History being overseen of course by you, JS. (Thus levels of removal happening 'of their own accord'.)

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

In this sense, Art History, in line with one of the (two) suggestions of its title, is an essay-film: something "other" than what it's showing on-screen, something "other" than a narrative, something "other" than a "meta" narrative-within-a-narrative-movie. It's an essay on creation, on danger, on what's 'portrayable' without repercussion (cf. Alexander the Last): just because the in-film camera has stopped rolling, doesn't mean that the film's stopped coming into creation of its own accord (beyond just the will of the creator: rather, as though a film itself possesses its own almost sentient 'force' — something I believe) —

— doesn't mean the 'film' hasn't stopped for the characters, or, I suspect, for (here the other suggestion of the title comes into play) the actors/crew at various times in your past works.

Another "slippage," or intermingling, that I found really fascinating, and which upsets the viewer's equilibrium or 'anchor' of what's been playing out is the announcement for the first time of your character's name — "Sam" — only near the very end of the film — a pretty canny move, because it pulls the rug out from the normal strategy in "films about films" where, if we'd heard "Sam" at the beginning we'd tend to settle in right away to some on-the-nose framework/expectation that "oh, this is basically a film-à-clef, and Swanberg is basically playing Swanberg, but the names have changed." [Or, to use a different example: "Woody Allen is playing Woody Allen making a story that takes as its material his own history and process of creation, except here he's a 'novelist' instead of a filmmaker", etc.] And still more (really brilliant) slippage: the characters are improvising their Sam's-film dialogue — tender, honest, reflective — based on previous life experience. But the actors playing the characters are, I'm assuming, the real figures reciting these stories and feelings: it's Josephine & Kris or Josephine & Kent speaking for themselves...

— Documentary or fiction? Are they being filmed by Sam for Sam's-film or being filmed by Swanberg for Art History? And is there a difference? And can these things even be kept straight, or delineated...? —

— So, by film's end, the blank gaze has been unmoored from a camera in a doorway, unmoored from its attachment to a director (Sam) looking at and in-control-of a "scene on a screen": by this point, his gaze no longer has any tangible target beyond a kind of internal abyss, — and so Sam floats, adrift, no-screen, — dislodged water-logged scarecrow. (All of the metaphorical resonances of which, throughout the film, it would be unnecessary, in bad taste, superfluous, to even mention.)

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

It goes without saying that even as Art History confronts (spectacularly) many of the questions around your own past films (and the cinema in general), it reframes all expectations of a 'type' of movie that you've been associated with making (for better or for worse, depending on the associator). Even while Art History goes full-charge, and fearlessly, back into semi-hardcore on-camera depictions of sex — sequences which, however, now seem framed by brackets, or quotation marks.

As Art History unfolds, it poses the following questions:

a. "Close-ups on aroused body parts, putting on a condom, straddling and fucking — is there actual penetration or isn't there? A question that rises so that one might go further and ask: what are the borders of intimacy?"
b. "What's off-limits, that is, what, necessarily, demands privacy from the screen?"
c. "Is 'off-limits' purely vaginal breaching — and rightly so? And if so, why? — that is: why is penetration the 'money-shot', not in the sense of ejaculation, but as the demarcation line of 'having borne it all'?"
d. "And why shouldn't this line exist?"

+

e. "What does it mean to show sexual intimacy?"
f. "What happens to actors in these contexts?"
g. "How do you shoot a sex-scene?"
h. "What does it take to 'pull off' this kind of material?"
i. "What constitutes, with regard to the resulting material, a 'success'?"
j. "How do you shoot emotional intimacy?"
k. "Where does the body end and the soul begin?"
l. "WHAT IS A PERFORMANCE?"

Last things to mention: the 'train' scene is incredible (especially Kent's reaction), as is the whole (masterful) final section, from Josephine's gaze into the camera / at Sam/you, on into the pool, and the (shocking) outburst.

Art History by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

As I said: fucking amazing.

Everyone should see this.

It's an important film.

best,
ck.

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Previous pieces on Joe Swanberg at Cinemasparagus:

Kissing on the Mouth [2005]

Hissy Fits [2005]

Young American Bodies: Season 1 [2006]

LOL [2006]

Uncle Kent [2011]

Silver Bullets [2011]

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Silver Bullets

2011-03-08T00:07:00.007-05:00

"Screening"

Joe Swanberg's most nervous light-sleeper film manages to harness the slow leak of energy from its relatively lengthy gestation and distribute it across a 70-minute drift-off twitch of a movie: a picture hinged on the dead-time in rehearsals and the getting-to-know-each-other period that makes directing a film a courtship with myriad foregone conclusions. The result is a cult extravaganza that will either enervate or excite viewers, — an encounter with toxic greens and moor-mist blues applied on planar mise-en-scène which in its shucked totality affirms the possibilities of cinema on any narrative or economic scale, and asserts the spontaneous heed of one's inner dæmon as never less than crucial.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

"You're just ignoring the fact that it's completely provocative. You're saying: 'Hey. Guess what. I wanna cast your best friend Charly who I just met three hours ago to play my girlfriend in my next movie. My next movie which I care so much about. My next movie which is such a huge part of my life. I think I'd just like to cast Charly as my girlfriend — as you.' "

"She wouldn't be playing you."

"No, she'd be playing herself. Your new girlfriend."

The key phrase that reverberates across the picture, as a warning and a credo: is all this "Worth it to you".

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

"There's no thing that the movies could get me. They get me close to people. That's all that's left."

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Kate practicing with the gun in the mirror; Joe's bodkin stare. Kill the fiction / euthanize this process of a film: Silver Bullets, set against Ti West's work-in-progress. Contempt, dangerous game.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Fake out: the silver bullet, device real enough to put a movie to its salt-on-a-slug end. / Hey what's true and false / Hey what's the big put-on

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

A desperate film. Its hero fetches references, lunges for something, anything to hold on to, from the 1997 David Foster Wallace footage from Charlie Rose, to concocting a loose parallel (concoct your actions in life, as you fabricate art) to Chekhov's The Seagull. Kissing-cousins: Silver Bullets, Abel Ferrara's Mary.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Third-party photographer entwines a couple: makes an image: study of how the two relate (cf. Nights and Weekends).

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

A monograph on the qualities of images ('degraded' 8mm, low light), surfaces of mystery, the aureole around Kate's head — suddenly Swanberg-Seimetz footage appears like Super 8.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

The editing room (the laptop screen) is a space for revelation, the transfixing oracle — or, as Danny Kasman suggested in his piece at The MUBI Notebook (here): between this and Art History, grained (blackout) shore of nocturnal possibility. Claire (Kate) watching the footage featuring Swanberg and Seimetz — in warm colors, neon Tron'd-out red and Halloween III orange.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Put on masks, make kabuki theater (how many permutations of Kate Sheil's face throughout Silver Bullets?) — that's what cinema wants even if an audience rejects the asymmetry in-course. The matter here is not the trajectory of the bullet, but ballistics in the ricochet.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Fever-sequence where footage/circumstances imagined and the emotions of all the scenes and possible scenes of all the films in Silver Bullets, including Silver Bullets, get mixed up in a flourish of arrested-chin sex and B-violence.

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

And in the end, an epilogue: 2 Years Later (the bookend of the excellent Jane Adams / Larry Fessenden opening) — the discussion on being even matches in a couple, the feeling upon finding someone who's your "equal, or even better" —

(I think this is the most poignant, powerful moment in Swanberg's work to date...)

"Is the work that we made together enough to justify all this?"

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Final shot reveals actual wolf: precursor of Art History's astonishing close, Sheil's desiccated stare at-camera, which is simultaneously the gaze directed upon the filmmaker at the moment of editing. / Thus a movement outward and in. / At the moment of justification, / of validation, / you will and you / must feel everything has been / lost otherwise, / otherwise, / otherwise, / otherwise, was worth fucking shit

Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

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Previous pieces on Joe Swanberg at Cinemasparagus:

Kissing on the Mouth [2005]

Hissy Fits [2005]

Young American Bodies: Season 1 [2006]

LOL [2006]

Uncle Kent [2011]

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Black Narcissus

2011-03-07T22:56:00.005-05:00

"Beautiful Cinematography," or: It Takes Life-Problems to Make an Actual Image

Black Narcissus by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947:

Sunday afternoon film / Ghastly-kitsch / All that shit in old anglophone films where a child says something-whatever and the movie cuts to a reverse-shot of an adult wide-eyed putting forth words in response to the patronizing effect of "Oh, is that so?" before a quick cut out / There are a load of dead spans in this film — I wish I saw it as replete as other viewers claim to have done, and yet moments still interest me / For instance: Kerr is erotic before Clodagh's erotic / :a menstruating Sound of Music / :the wind that incessantly whips, blows in the pathogens / :Sister Ruth's glee in ringing a church bell hung over an abyss / :"No, I don't want to go away — I want to stay here like this for the rest of my life." / Beyond that, other moments demand some remark... / 'Beauty''s face smeared with inedible chemicals / "Sister, may I congratulate you on the birth of Christ?" / Glorious Christmas scene, the holiday as the calm offering / Sweat droplets on Sister Ruth's fevered brow like the eyes of a spider / Insufferable cloying delivery of "Lemini" 119 times / Twice-seen, Black Narcissus strikes me as a camp, technically complicated, gorgeous, morally offensive, admirably garish and ultimately shallow Crappy Film by two photoplaywrights I like quite a bit / No, they're cinéastes in other works, but to compare Black Narcissus to another adaptation of Rumer Godden, one goes back to the language of notices

Black Narcissus by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947:

The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet, as no means of capturing stills from a Blu-ray presently exist on the Mac platform.

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Previous pieces on Michael Powell (solo), and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, at Cinemasparagus:

Red Ensign [1934]

The Phantom Light [1935]

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Mabel's Married Life

2011-02-22T01:46:00.003-05:00

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:

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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]

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Mabel's Busy Day

2011-02-22T01:13:00.004-05:00

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:

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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]

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The Knockout

2011-02-22T00:12:00.003-05:00

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:

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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]

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A Radiohead Exercise

2011-02-18T16:39:00.007-05:00

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]

===

Radiohead's New Album THE KING OF LIMBS Is Revealed, Out on Saturday

2011-02-14T12:56:00.004-05:00

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Cleopatra

2011-02-13T00:44:00.010-05:00

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

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"What we knew

about the blood's map

went back to the court

of King Zoser."

—from "Imhotep" by Yusef Komunyakaa, 2004.

===

Army of Shadows

2011-02-10T22:09:00.008-05:00

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:

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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.

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The Fatal Mallet

2011-02-10T17:50:00.005-05:00

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:

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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]

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A Busy Day

2011-02-10T17:17:00.004-05:00

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:

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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]

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Caught in the Rain

2011-02-10T16:59:00.003-05:00

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:

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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]

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Caught in a Cabaret

2011-02-10T15:58:00.008-05:00

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:

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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]

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Twenty Minutes of Love

2011-02-10T15:06:00.004-05:00

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:

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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]

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Mabel at the Wheel

2011-02-10T14:42:00.003-05:00

"BriiiiiiiiIIIICK FIIIIIIIIIiiiiiight!"

Mabel at the Wheel by Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett, 1914:

Goatee divided in two patches with the vectors of a dowsing rod / Chaplin hated this film / But he's the only one you watch in it / Certain filmmakers of this period, they have their actors point at things out-of-frame, and you have no idea what they're indicating / Mabel at the Wheel is yet another auto-race picture, again from the same year as Dubliners and "After the Race" / The best thing about this film teeming with stupidities: the movements of the vehicles in the race / The cutting is mesmerizing / Cinema's debut car-chase

Mabel at the Wheel by Mabel Normand and Mack Sennett, 1914:

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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]

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Vengeance

2011-01-30T02:03:00.003-05:00

"And the Oscar goes to... Cheng Siu-keung."

"And the Oscar goes to... Wai Ka-fai."

"And the Oscar goes to... Johnny Hallyday."

"And the Oscar goes to... Johnnie To."

"And the Oscar goes to... Vengeance, Milkyway Image."

Vengeance / Fuk sau by Johnnie To, 2009:

I overheard a conversation tonight / A husband telling his wife: " 'R.E.D.' stands for 'Retired Extreme Danger'." / Every person alive on this earth who likes movies, from my Aunt Beverley to Yuri Tsivian, from Olivia Munn to ~~Milton M. Levine~~, should extol the name "Johnnie To" / All three syllables should be recited over the loudspeaker during homeroom / This would be a great victory, symbolic, as when the class rebel has finally succeeded in commandeering the control-board, and swapped out Whitney Houston's 1991 rendition of the national anthem for "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes / Johnnie To is a man who has an oeuvre five times the size of Sergio Leone's / He is a man who, with Wai Ka-fai at his side, will someday stage a paranoiac, electrifying, moral, scene, handlers present for a giraffe / His movies would bewitch a mass, global public / If only there were protesters against our state television............... / The film begins with the reflection, backwards-Cocteau, of a killer in a window, on the other side of things, the flip of the Three Men and a Baby ghost / Shots of hands and fingernails, Francis Costello (Johnny Hallyday), this stitched-together entity, marker-ing "VENGEANCE" on post-mortem photos / The 'black market arms dealer' who lives in a triage junk-camp / Confronting the killers in the family-reunion-ready picnic-ground at night amid the smoke (of course) and illumination from Kliegs, the three assassins — same as Hallyday's hired three, also paid assassins — eat Pringles with their hot wives — and these assassins have children, same as the two grandchildren of Francis Costello they murdered / Costello's restaurant is called "Les Frères" — brothers and brothers... / When the hitmen's families go home, the shootout begins, leaves fluttering from the trees throughout / Slow-motion, extended, dreamlike, you take a shot, and you just stand there in your own red mist, still loading your gun / As he's being operated on, Costello reveals that a bullet lodged in his brain from a previous shooting will, according to his doctors, result in eventual total-memory-loss — thus he must take revenge before it's too late — hence the photographs snatched at the crime scene, and of his accomplices / Classic To/Wai ingenuity of pacing, shape, structure — withhold this plot-point till nearly an hour in, make the waves on the whip increase frequency / Pursuers in black ponchos / Losing them: the amazing scene where Costello gets separated from his cohorts and stands in the rain trying to match Polaroids to faces... / Bullets are a way of connecting one shot to another, this piece of space and movement to that one / The picture culminates in an exceptional tableau / Common-law wife / All her children are mixed / Francis Costello, a man out of Paris who one day just appears, then stays in paradise, it's like his arrival was out of paradise, man in a suit, with plate and cutlery, mama has another baby-bump

Vengeance / Fuk sau by Johnnie To, 2009:

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The Star Boarder

2011-01-30T00:16:00.004-05:00

All These People Every Place

The Star Boarder by George Nichols, 1914:

Sometimes in life you have questions / And among those questions — / How to make love to your landlady? / Pine leaves remodel Charlie into Greek statue / Drunk, addresses camera / When the cinema was still novelty / The young projectionists controlled the action / Built a room around a man

The Star Boarder by George Nichols, 1914:

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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]

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Uncle Kent

2011-01-21T01:33:00.025-05:00

Email, August 20, 2010

Uncle Kent by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Hey Joe,

I watched Uncle Kent for the second time the other night. Really impressed by it, once again, — like all good movies, it's better still the second time through.

This time around, for me, it really solidified into a film about Getting Old — that is, aging in the context of still being 'young' and hunched on the precipice of 'old,' (which is to say 'older'). Kent's hitting 40, and there's a kind of alienation that comes with the program or, less severe sounding (though tell anyone in such a particular spot in life that it won't feel severe in ceiling-stare moments), there's that sort of struggle that comes along with trying to relate 100% with 20-year-old friends, with still being single, with still seeking some kind of anchor in life. The old habits persist — full-on bongs and the work that goes along with the career you managed to carve a niche out of when you were in your 20s or 30s, — the trying to ward off the loneliness, — the feeling of being kind of adrift, out-to-sea, what-next. Numb anxiety.

Now, I should say, I never thought of "40" as being old (I'm 32) [as of THIS VERY DAY I'm 33 —ck.], but the landscape of adulthood has, obviously, shifted in 2010. It's all much less easily definable than it was, I don't know, fifteen years ago.

There's an anecdote I've been thinking about a lot recently after I watched Peter Bogdanovich speak on the Make Way for Tomorrow piece he sat down for; this was on the Criterion disc; we just licensed the video for our upcoming Blu-ray of the film. He talks about having once visiting Allan Dwan, years back, when Dwan was, by then, 92. Bogdanovich asked him: "What does 92 feel like?" And Dwan replied: "Well, it doesn't feel any different than 32." (There's that number again...) "But every time I walk past a mirror I get startled, and I say: — Who is that old man?"

I think this picture is your most melancholy film so far. Or maybe not "most" — but there's a kind of dark cloud hanging over the proceedings, same as in Nights and Weekends, and Alexander the Last too. That sense of: "Little man (or little woman) — what now?" Maybe I say "most melancholy" because this picture is so focused upon a single individual, and this solitary, island-of-one thing has become more pronounced — like all the events around Kent circulate in a kind of orbit, or a current,... and things are starting to feel untouchable. There's the Chatroulette business on one hand, which is weirdly 'social' while at the same time just emphasizing YOU ARE ALONE. ("Only connect.") Everything that comes out of that phenomenon, in fact, — and the way Chatroulette gets presented in the movie — plays like a kind of fantasy (which is at least 60% of what meeting people on these things online is like anyway). Kent (Kent Osborne) meets this Kate (Jennifer Prediger) on Chatroulette (somehow — 'somehow'-in-quotes as anyone who's ever dipped into Chatroulette will understand), the two strike up a bond from the encounter, and Kate flies out to visit Kent in LA to spend a weekend. There's a bizarre hand-off, an unstable back-and-forth, between supposed documentary (cf. all the foregrounded documentary elements of the film) and fiction: again, the essential 'impossibility' of this encounter. The insane fucking brightness of the LA light only intensifies all this strange unreality cast upon things...

Uncle Kent by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

Two favorite shots: a close-up of Kent's face while he's talking to Kate on the first night, where it's obscured by shadow, in relief against the yellow-lit wall. Another: after Kate leaves, overhead shot of Kent on the bed, reviewing the videos he's captured ('captured' is the right word) which he can only view by popping on his reading-glasses...

Uncle Kent by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

The title: Uncle Kent — it's really perfect. It conveys everything about the film.

The whole botched threesome business, and the next-morning guilty make-up play by Kate — it's all a really brilliant scenario, and you've modulated it perfectly. The rhythm of the film is also superb, but that's something you've managed to nail from at least Hannah Takes the Stairs onward...

I think the thrown-out-there "Write on my wall" from Kate, at the end, is positively crushing.

(She has a really nice voice, btw.)

And I love the full-circle that the film arrives at with the ending. From the cat's nestling with the "I Heart Kent Osborne" button at the opening shot, to a couple crabby paw-swipes at its papa (or uncle, I guess) at the end. Kent's 'heart''s sort of gone away by that point — or, at least, has taken a leave of absence. Live to go-on another day.

Uncle Kent by Joe Swanberg, 2011:

So: excellent, excellent work. You're hitting a stride. UK's a more pared-down work than Nights and Alexander, something in a more 'minor' mode, — but just as deep and fleshed-out. In some ways, like I said, it seems like a kind of response (not going so far as to say 'corrective') to LOL. In line with that, I'll say Kevin Bewersdorf always strikes me as representing a kind of chaotic, but grounding variable (if that makes any sense, but anyway, that's my sense), and I think his persona, or presence, kind of speaks for itself; thus far you've always used him to bring things to a kind-of bust-up point, both in the end section of LOL, and also by means of the trailer-party/cock-trick section of Kent. I'm always happy to see him in your films.

You said: "I hope it's a movie that people feel like popping in the DVD player every once in a while and just hanging out with." That's exactly how I feel about this movie, among others you've made. For me, Uncle Kent's a kind of mood-booster — hard to explain. It's there in the atmosphere, the pace, the length, the story... Things here to keep coming back to, — till I hit 40 in seven years, — and then probably after too? I really love this film.

best,
ck.

===

Uncle Kent premieres today (January 21, 2011) at Sundance, and on cable-TV on-demand with providers across the US, via IFC. Check your local listings.

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Gabi on the Roof in July

2011-01-20T01:17:00.007-05:00

reRun Gastropub Theater,
Friday January 21st - Thursday January 27th

Gabi on the Roof in July by Lawrence Michael Levine, 2010:

If you're in the NYC area, you should make some time over the next couple days to see my friend Larry's film, Gabi on the Roof in July, which is playing for a week at the new reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo.

It's a beautiful, thoughtful piece of work, and sports one of the most unusual (in a good way) paces I've seen in a recent film: the scenes unfurl with a calm at once enchanted and unnerving, and gradually accumulate into a recursive structure that suggests development, emotional progress, lies just beyond the characters' present reach. The drifting camerawork seems calibrated to a daydream, and lends the ambiance requisite to a portrayal of 2010 Brooklyn as a kind of mass performance space.

Gabi on the Roof in July by Lawrence Michael Levine, 2010:

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R.I.P. Trish Keenan

2011-01-14T13:00:00.003-05:00

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When They Want To Movies Can Still Blow Your Fucking Mind

2011-01-13T23:41:00.008-05:00

On the Occasion of Having Recently Watched Johnnie To's Latest Film, Vengeance

Today David Bordwell wrote a great post on his blog, here. It's one entry in a series-in-progress pertaining to the PDF publication of the second edition of his excellent book Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, which you can buy here. Bordwell's blog post contains the following passage:

"Yet all signs of life haven’t been muffled. In the current restrictive climate, Johnnie To can make eccentric, occasionally shocking films like Running on Karma (2003) and Throw Down (2004). I take comfort in learning just last weekend what terminated Stephen Chow’s directorship of The Green Hornet. According to one report he proposed to plant a microchip in the hero’s brain and have Kato control him with a joystick. In an Entertainment Weekly article not online, director Michel Gondry claims that Chow’s plans were too far out. 'Really, really crazy ideas that you would not dare bring to a studio. AIDS was involved. Plastic boobs were involved too.' That Gondry, one of Hollywood’s approved Wild Things, can find something Chow proposed over the top gives you hope.

"A couple of months before the handover, I was in Kowloon talking with a cab driver. He told me confidently, 'Chinese people are born capitalists. We know very well how to make money. We will never accept Communism.'

" 'But,' I said, 'the Mainland has had a Communist government for forty years.'

"He shrugged. 'Forty years is not a long time.' "

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The Only Son

2011-01-07T03:32:00.010-05:00

Praise, Sing Out

Hitori musuko [The Only Son] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:

David Bordwell said the following in the video piece on the Criterion DVD featuring him and Kristin Thompson: "I think that Ozu is the greatest director ever to work in the history of cinema. And if I had to choose his competitor, it'd be Mizoguchi. And if I lived on a desert island I would just take all their films with me and that would be fine — that's cinema as far as I'm concerned." / Among the '30s films that really worked sound we can count M, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Modern Times, Vampyr, The Lady Vanishes, The Only Son... / Ozu uses sound in The Only Son to concatenate shots, environments, 'memes' — sounds carry over on top of the shots, effectively glue together scenes or spaces; at times they give way to a sound-form that rhymes with the original — Ozu employs the soundtrack in this film, his second talkie (following the documentary/essay Kagamijishi), the same way he uses image-forms to carry the viewer deeper into the environment of the story and the network of resonances that orbit the star-protagonists / He suggests the metaphorical (sometimes gently symbolic, often metonymic) import of forms usually by way of the "pillow shots" which 'cleanse the palate' of the viewer between scenes that overtly advance the narrative — these pillow shots also ground the action geographically — however, as in a film like The Only Son, the pillow shots frequently reveal themselves as the set-up (the Shot A) to a series of 'establishing shots,' all of which are understood by the viewer, even as quickly as by the point of, say, Shot B, to represent the further 'penetration' into a place, keeping aloft a form evoked in Shot A / Sometimes the form may be a sound / Ozu and Lang / The tick-tocks of the clock(s) at the beginning (two clocks which ring the hour, several moments out of synch: the profound implications of Ozu-ian metaphysics) morph into the factory sounds outside the house / The factory sounds give way to the spinning wheels at the silk mill / The lantern in the opening shot finds its partner first in the lantern hanging near a wagon-wheel, as the silkworm-delivery-squadron parades through the background (the wheel itself linking the spinning wheels of the mill; more wheels than in early Eisenstein... you can read a bit more about this in my post on Ozu's A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... here), then in the pile of bric-à-brac (here to inform us that the action has moved back into a household) / In Ozu scene-movement comes sidelong, absolutely oblique, totally clear / Baby chicks topple from and hop about some steps / Their chirps carry over / And Otsune (Chôko Iida) grinds a wheel picking up the circular action (literal/metaphorical) from her day at the mill, while her own offspring sits nearby, on the floor of the ramshackle home of the deceased father, a workplace away from the workplace, the domicile itself an abandoned mill / Thirteen years later, after Otsune has committed herself to putting her son through school, and this son, Ryôsuke (Shin'ichi Himori), has moved to Tokyo and taken a wife, Sugiko (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), the mother will at last take a break from the job to visit her son — presumably their first contact in years (his wife and his baby come as a surprise), in any case her first glimpse of Tokyo / Ozu films the prosperous capital with a camera mounted upon the running-board of an automobile — low-angle, overwhelmed, slightly abstract shots of a world that exists nebulously for the mother and for the son as well / The pair remove to Ryôsuke's house, located in a patch of bungalows which no road or path accesses directly — you have to cross an overgrown lot to arrive at the front door / A blighted district in Tokyo, where chimney smoke tricks the eye into spotting arson / When Ozu first moves us into the family's home (in the 'prelude') or into the son's home (in the film's 'body-proper'), we note that every coordinate of the frame has been appointed / A life that leaves its mark on, and by, the objects... the objects of production / Ryôsuke never smiles when he talks to his wife / What year did Japan learn geometry / Ozu-Antonioni-Tokyo (down to the cable spools from Il grido) / A caged bird leaps in the background of Ookubo's (Chishû Ryû's) restaurant / At the same time: Ryôsuke: "But in Tokyo you can hear cuckoos brought from the mountains in Nagano." / In Ookubo's tonkatsu joint, he remarks that his son Jirô ("Bakudan Kozô") has been giving him a lot of grief — cut to: long shot with sake cup in foreground, then Ryôsuke/Otsune POV angle of bottles propped on the counter — cut to: Ryôsuke: "Aren't you busy?" — Ookubo with a smile: "Not really." / On the walls of Ryôsuke's home: Joan Crawford — the "Germany" poster (ewige getaway — given the film being watched by mother and son, the 'talkie') — an upside-down charm against the baby's crying which, as it turns out, either does seem to work, or the baby... just isn't much of a wailer (one of the film's lovely grace notes) / Grace: the repeated shots of the mother dozing off, head bobbing, seated at the theater in front of the film, in correspondence with the rhythm of the music, an early precursor of the Martin child's dream of music in Film Socialisme / In his interesting booklet-essay, "Japan, 1936", which accompanies the Criterion disc, Tony Rayns identifies the talkie as Willi Forst's 1934 Unfinished Symphony / Rayns calls the footage "florid", but I think that Ozu's selections from the picture highlight the paradise for a Ryôsuke, any proletarian viewer, or any viewer, of the kitsch-dream / The movies were their getaway, their Lufthansa / In Japan, 1936, America, 1936, entertainment was exactly that and that was the movies / When Mártha Eggerth rushes through the grass it's almost as good as City Girl, and more desperate / Anyway, you can see ten-thousand films in this Only Son from before and after, it is as definitive as it is open (n.b.: Bordwell articulates the crucial point that in Ozu a pillow shot of a window, taken from inside a structure, is highly charged: the succeeding shot might present a wider-shot of a room inside of the domicile, or might move to the world outside the window — calm/anxiety at once) — for example, look at the cut from the film-within-the-film footage, the insert-shot of the tossed kerchief, to the fade-to-black, which picks up again back in the 'film world,' — this is pure Godard, pure Vivre sa vie / From that very fade-to-black, Ozu cuts back into, in fact, a sleeping-pillow in the foreground: Ryôsuke's gift to (just-dozing) Otsune / The mother built of sacrifice and expectation costs (no, really costs) a son a great deal / When Ryôsuke juts his head through his neighbor's window: intro to the Tomio (Tomio Aoki) thread — it's like Costa's Fontaínhas / And the sound of the pork vendor's clarion... / And it's an amazing scene when Ryôsuke remarks to his mother, the two exposed in the afternoon light: "The skylarks are singing so loud and clear." — cut to: angle, empty sky, bird-chirps on the soundtrack — repeat with Otsune — she looks up — cut to: angle, empty sky — (Chaplin's The Great Dictator: "Hannah, look to the sky...!") / Ryôsuke the geometry teacher, trapped in geometry / Otsune before the rice cauldron, as Otsune before the grinder thirteen years prior / (I love when Ozu returns to a specific shot setup, or a slight variation thereof, throughout a film but each time inflects it to a new focal point, literally by altering the plane of focus, a once prominent detail present only as a blur, like purely now a detail of 'landmark'; the Joan Crawford irasuto is just such one of these anchors) / "Here we're all the same. That's Tokyo." / The gravity of emotions pushes down on the skull and makes the head bow / Peaceful-sleeping baby is the counterpoint to the gravity, horizontal on the floor, prone (calm/anxiety; "an equal and opposite reaction") / The mother (a grandmother) holds her grandson, the breeze blows her kimono as she bobs, dancing and soothing the boy, echoing the movement of the drying laundry, while the wheels of an adjacent wagon, blocked in part by the window, recall the wheels of the silkspinners, thirteen years before — a connection between all generations / Tomi-chan appears before Otsune here like a spirit of premonition, before his accident (i.e., when he gets kicked by a horse) / The Tomio episode seems at first to represent an extreme tonal shift from the main story of the mother and the son — its connection to that thread is in remission until the accident / Two successive epilogues to the film, Ozu's most uniquely structured film to date / (The episode with the horse — precursor to something out of Fellini) / Ryôsuke — standing in the hospital before the anatomical model, the half-flayed man (cf. Ray's Bigger Than Life and the x-ray machine) / Crossing the field / "Think about it — would we be happy if we visited Gi'ichi many years from now, and saw that he was just a night-school teacher?" / At the end — the ineffable image of the mill gate, — the weeds that sway in the wind, as the trees before the mountain / To return to Bordwell, sidelong: The Only Son is cinema of the highest order / The work of a kami/creator who in Japan-'36 hasn't yet advanced into his three final decades of work / Each richer than the preceding

Hitori musuko [The Only Son] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:

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Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat [1929]

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style [1929]

Tokyo Chorus [1931]

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... [1932]

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone? [1932]

Passing Fancy [1933]

A Tale of Floating Weeds [1934]

Kagamijishi [1936]

===

The Face

2010-12-30T17:10:00.015-05:00

On Bergman's First Summary-Masterpiece

Ansiktet [The Face] by Ingmar Bergman, 1958:

In the opening scene, a troupe of wandering charlatans emerges, primordial, from the earth — the images, from the presence of the carriage to its distant traversal across a wide horizon, recall the travelers of The Seventh Seal / An old gypsy woman (Naima Wifstrand) spits on a raven (the group's family surname Vogler suggests fågel, or bird) / The scream that does not register on the soundtrack — a theater of the mind / As Granny paints the picture (Bergman's eminence of language and dialogue-image) — "A fox on two emaciated legs, covered in blood, with its head hanging by a few sinews. A fox with no eyes, and a rotten hole for a mouth." — the head of Albert Vogler (Max von Sydow) enters the frame in close-up, an artificial visage, constructed out of fake beard, ersatz locks, perched top-hat — a first expression, then, of the title, The Face, and all this might imply / (The film has forever circulated in the U.S. on prints and in the recent Criterion release under the less abstract The Magician) / But the title is not only a call to examine Albert's face, or the faces of any characters in particular — it's a signal to take note of the human face in general, both inside the film and beyond it — the phenomenon of the face / The man found in the woods, "Johan Spegel" (the actor is Bengt Ekerot), bears a name which extends this theme — "spegel" the Swedish word for "mirror" / Albert gets in close to better hear the man's murmur, and the two come face-to-face (another apt Bergman title from later in the oeuvre), and with this image a potential fate is suggested for Albert Vogler specifically as for any man / After Spegel calls Albert out on his dummy beard and wig, the two venture to cross a small stream, and when Spegel stumbles it's because Albert — expert framing here by Bergman, ambiguity of action — has tossed him down / Albert is not the passive entity that a first impression might insinuate / And Spegel's facial hair, plotted in haggard patches, is no less a formulation / The 'capital of the state' is some zone on the outskirts of a woods / Kakfa / The troupe has been summoned to a castle, as it were, in the drawing-room of which they are greeted by Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson), while a police commssioner, Starbeck (Toivo Pawlo), and a "medical advisor," minister of health Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), hover on standby, each figure armored in wigs and slathered makeup / Surnames which recur — menacingly, by virtue of the fact — from earlier Bergman films: "Egerman," "Vergerus," etc. / Manda Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), Albert's wife, takes cover as a man, named "Aman" (we will learn later on that the couple have assumed these disguises as a means of facilitating their survival as fugitives on the run) / 'Identity' is humored by the observers: "Aman" is a theatrical trope — Aman is not 'realistically' perceived as actually being a boy, any more than Vogler's beard and moustache, once Dr. Vergerus compels him to submit (as though by the 'suggestion' of authority — again, everything here involves a suspension of disbelief) to an up-close "oral" examination, cannot possibly be taken for genuine / Everyone, in their makeup and get-up, is a performer in the comedy / The autopsy that Vergerus wishes upon Vogler in his initial examination, complete with the removal of the eyes (the organs of control — and of the cinema, and of the spectator — the 'see' of the face), will in fact come to pass later in the film / We have the sense of actors exiting a stage as the troupe withdraws from the interrogation and passes into the antechamber, dark as the wings, while on the soundtrack the examiners' laughs resound, bizarre, hollow, echoes inside the soul / When troupe-member Tubal (Åke Fridell) sells chambermaid Sofia Garp (Sif Ruud) the "love potion," he consults with Granny on how to make do given their exhausted supply — the two address one another in 'stage whispers,' the para-diegetic quality of which is accentuated + nullified by the presence of two common chairs placed on top of the table — they converse through the footrests — of course this is very funny to watch, but it also highlights Bergman's visual brilliance and magnificent aptitude for blocking his actors in a manner, with a solution, that is always, always interesting / Love potions, gulped in tandem by trouper Simson (Lars Ekborg) and Sara (Bibi Andersson) are another facilitator, agent, of 'disbelief-suspension,' self-suggestion, pretense, a precursor to the bonbons of Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating / The camera moves and faces come into frame like discrete beats, shocks, a montage without montage / "There's a bird's nest in the window." — omniscience of the Voglers — a second-sight that spreads: Sara looking out of frame in the laundry-room where her tryst with Simson's underway announces that she can see (a framing invisible to us) simultaneously the two men in the kitchen, and the light in Vogler's and Aman's bedroom / The magic lantern, the autobiographical touchstone of Bergman, — the magician the filmmaker, the filmmaker deemed a fraud, not solely out of the artifice of his method (though that too — reality comes into focus at what proximity?) but out of the efficacy of his acknowledged charlatanism, too / Vogler's nails bloodied after digging into his palm — Vogler smashing his head off the table — Vogler striking the back of his skull against a closed door: the terrible limits of the body, of this very physical reality, for the being that thinks and feels / "A shadow of a shadow." / And: "The movement itself is the only truth." / Spegel resurrected in his ragged mockery of a 'magician's top-hat,' returned back to death in a coffin with a seal like a labial slit / Dr. Vergerus to Aman-Manda, as he drunkenly invades her bedroom with the hope of seduction: "Because you represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable." / "Pretenses, false promises, double-bottoms." / Vogler, a golem (see, later, Fanny and Alexander) / Manda asks Vogler in their bed: "Remember when..." but of course this is more or less a soliloquy, life cannot yet have progressed into this realm of historical, immemorial distance for the young, middle-aged couple; what Manda recounts are episodes, created for the expostulation / The chimes of the clock / The parts of Vogler's disguise which will shift to the corpse of his double, Spegel, for the autopsy carried out by Vergerus, likewise his "V"-twin — Vergerus will not recognize the unidentical anatomy, physiognomy of the decoy, in the same way he didn't recognize the artifice of the beard and wig close-up during the initial examination of "V"-twin Vogler when the two first went face-to-face / How the coffin makes its way up to the attic (this contains Vogler, alive) as the black trunk containing 'Vogler's corpse' (i.e., Spegel) is carried up at the behest of the police commissioner — the move, the swap... a certain suspension of disbelief, or suspension of peering too deeply into the logistics, is required now on the part of the spectator / For in The Face 'real' magic is possible, and in Bergman, trunks possess an eldritch capacity (again see Bergman's second and final 'summary-work,' the prism-work which consciously recalls so many of the earlier films — Fanny and Alexander) / "Please stop the clock." / Vogler can 'be' in two places at once, as he bids A(Man-da) within her own room to lock the door to the attic (where he's already present) / Vergerus to Vogler at the climax of their magickal, virtuoso confrontation in the attic: "You induced a momentary fear of death — nothing more — nothing else." — Yet is that not the sum totality at the cusp of actual death? / "I've never seen you before." "I was in disguise — does that make a difference?" / Personae / And then at the ending, we're graced with one of the great final dialogues in movies (after, of course, the deus ex machina of the happy-end swoops in at whose accord but... the magician's, i.e., Bergman's):

"Gather my apparatus and send them to the palace. But be careful — they're very valuable."

Ansiktet [The Face] by Ingmar Bergman, 1958:

The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet, as no means of capturing stills from a Blu-ray presently exist on the Mac platform.

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Previous pieces on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Ingmar Bergman Taught Us Pragmatism Was No Virtue
(On the Death of Ingmar Bergman)

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Le Coup du berger

2010-12-30T00:54:00.005-05:00

Brief Look / Effective Debut

Le Coup du berger [Shepherd's Mate / Scholar's Mate] by Jacques Rivette, 1956:

Behold "the night of the third full moon..." — ?... a phrase from Jacques Rivette's earliest surviving/released film, the half-hour-long Le Coup du berger from 1956... a phrase which joins full-circle with the last image that will ever be signed "Rivette," the one at the close of his 2009 small, gentle, precious masterpiece 36 Views of the Pic Saint-Loup / A brief word about the title: "le coup du berger" translates literally as "shepherd's mate," which refers to a particular chess stratagem — I know nothing about chess (despite my love for Nabokov, for Kubrick, but that's the way it goes), I've devoted at least fifteen minutes, three times, to trying to learn the moves and how anyone even wins, but I've forgotten the moves every time and have never been able to make sense of how these moves all add up into a rule-set or a winning move — obviously I'm just not wired for the game — anyway, my understanding is that the "shepherd's mate" is the French term for something referred to as the "scholar's mate" in the U.S. and England and whatever — I learned this years and years back from someone, I can't remember whom, who in any case also struck out the caveat that the translation of the title in English as "Fool's Mate" was a false equivalency based on a misunderstanding of what the specific set of moves was, and he swore that le coup du berger — the shepherd's mate — was in fact equal to the scholar's mate, and not the fool's mate, and if whoever said this was who I think it was I take his word for it / Anyway, the cuckolded husband in the movie, Jean, is played by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (one of the founders of the Cahiers du cinéma... of course the film contains the requisite shot of a yellow Cahiers, laid on a nightstand and sporting a Magnani cover): thus, when we encounter the character portrayed by the same actor in 1971's Out 1 (one of the movies in the diagram I might draw showing the power-relationship among the works I consider the three greatest films ever made), we witness him hunched over a chessboard / Claire [Virginie Vitry] mentions to her husband Jean the ticket she claims to have found by chance... Jean (blankly suspicious of Claire's goings-on) claims to have no interest in the matter... this ticket would unlock the compartment in the station where she and her lover Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) have 'planted' a fur that Claude has amorously gifted Claire — the idea being, with this ticket announced as merely 'found,' she can retrieve whatever 'turns out to have been left' inside the station-locker — from then on, she'll ostensibly be able to wear the fur around her husband with impunity / As Claire spins the yarn to Jean back in their apartment, his gaze shifts to the wall where hangs a painting built around his wife's body's nudity / Upon retrieval of the fur by the couple, Jean delivers the crushing blow: "A rabbit-skin." / Claire returns to Claude later on to tell him... that the suitcase was empty / And so the camera dollies back in wide long shot as Claire says goodbye to Claude, the long dining room table become an abstract figure, a gameboard / Cut to: — the evening party at Claire's and Jean's — the attendees include Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Robert Lachenay, etc. / Claire's sister (Anne Doat) arrives with the fur / Jean has played the winning move / — Rivette's film deals in admirably clear, 'contiguous' geography of space, despite its character austere and bourgeois, alternating shots held for a long duration with those that only fleetingly show, an effortless and unpretentious shuffle between master-shot and insert / My personal favorite among the film's lengthier shots appears within the party scene, where a young '56 Truffaut, cigar dangling from his mouth in the manner of miston pantomiming grown-up, begins to chuckle, overcome by the camera's presence

Le Coup du berger [Shepherd's Mate / Scholar's Mate] by Jacques Rivette, 1956:

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The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet; I couldn't get my DVD to correctly rip-for-grab. I'd have liked to present images from the party scene, particularly the image of Truffaut.

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Previous pieces on Jacques Rivette at Cinemasparagus:

L'Amour fou [1968]

La Belle noiseuse [1991]

Jacques Rivette: March 2007

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Bigger Than Life

2010-12-29T23:09:00.002-05:00

Unloveable

Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray, 1956:

A strong opening replete with classic Nick Ray elements: a tracking shot toward the school, past the seesaw, past the Stars and Stripes / This elementary school does not reside far from the opening of Ray's 1955 Rebel Without a Cause; a more explicitly 'juvenile' locale in Bigger Than Life, but built around strictures not far removed from those of the police station in the previous film — the desks, the corridors, telephones, mahogany / And at a certain rewatch we have to ask ourselves: What are the "extra bills" that this particular teacher, Ed Avery (James Mason), has hanging over his head? — ...he exists in a familial situation not at all unlike those of his fellow colleagues... so...? / He supplements his income working as a dispatcher for the local cab company — he's not even a cabbie — but which is the cushier spot? / And by the way, the amount of business experienced in this workplace would seem to surpass in its degree of frenzy anything that a small town would normally, reasonably, realistically expect / In many ways the world of this film seems tailored, manufactured specifically for Ed Avery, bigger than life, or gross exaggeration of a land and a time in which a purpose might appear for every man? / In reality, or in illusion... / Possibility and want / And when is want "lack" and when is it "need"? / A land and a time in which the suburban American home takes the shape of a Gothic contraption (cf. Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow) / The bizarre modulation between the reason and the logic of Ed Avery's professorial bearing and that of his pedantic 'intellectual' athleticism, the very specimen of Man careening into a wreck of identity / The marvelous scene in which the 'very' x-ray of the Man is measured / "You've always been ten feet tall to me!" / Or Ed in the classroom, prodding his pupils: "Why did Cassius refer to Julius Caesar as 'a colossus'?" / "A cow with five legs?" "It can stand better." / The shopping scene Hitchcock stole for Vertigo the year after / (Again, Ray might have counted among his inspirations for Bigger Than Life the beautiful Sirk tragedy There's Always Tomorrow) / How 'accidental' is the quick glimmer of Nick Ray at the side of the camera as Ed's medicine cabinet mirror swings on its hinge? / All is vanity, or identification / Bigger Than Life examines medicines (of course, the bathroom mirror serves as the perfect symbolic totem of drugs and the man in their grasp) not as the pretense or artificial mechanism for the plot to exist, like a fucking sci-fi film — neither does it shade the proceedings as a cautionary tale re: the horrors of experimental treatment — but rather does so in the context of a means for amplifying the traits that exist on the surface of the specimen already, ranging from vanity to the sense that he, or any of us, 'only have so much time' (so goes the saying, and: literally, in the scope of the fatality countdown of Ed Avery's respective heart-condition), does so in the context of a means for escape from the barricade of one's own routine (note those sad travel posters hanging throughout the house, which Godard will borrow for 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her) / The precariousness of ego... the magical thinking... the fragile construction that is Persona / "Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it!" / Scrutinize Ed's personality before his abuse of the drug cortisone, and contrast it with the 'during' — isn't all the 'archness' only latent? / Once the cortisone has him in its grip is it not too outlandish to repeatedly mishear "Ed" as "id"? / The dye on the edges of the Bible's pages suggest the dislocation of a primal wound, or gash, as Ed goes head-to-head with his wife on the dark staircase of their home / His wife Lou (Barbara Rush, who turns 84 in January) cannot rejoinder theological argument against the proposed sacrifice of Richie (Christopher Olsen, a kind of fetal Rebel-James Dean in his identical red jacket; the staircase the domestic blood-altar in both Ray films), their innocent son, with regard to the murdering parent('s/s') ostensible assumption of all the guilt and damnation circulating the lad / And It's true, hard as it might be for the players to admit, — in this 'married couple,' Ed's the intellectual superior / Yet Lou positions herself before the scissor-blades on the staircase in order to impede the husband's murderous plot / Vertigo blood-visions, Strangers on a Train calliope / Nick Ray detail: Following Ed's hospitalization we see a black janitor mopping up the hospital waiting-room — Richie remarks: "Some people work awful late, don't they?" / This Ray film really dips in and out of Hitchcock, to a more patchwork — or let's say, network-of-testings-out — effect (cf. the entire cortisone 'macguffin', the clinical diagnosis and subsequent explication of the 'pathology') / "It was only Ed's misuse of the drug that brought about this condition." / Prison-cell mise-en-scène in Ed's recovery room, — but who in this menagerie represents the jailer? (the doctors? science? Lou and Richie [cf. the banister/prison-bar trope of the household, which, again, recalls There's Always Tomorrow]? Ed himself?) / One of the most ambiguous of Ray's films, or, we might say, a film that places blame every which way and eradicates the concept / It's got a lame ending, I guess / (I hate when Abe Lincoln's referred to as "ugly") / Outsized themes and their fictional consequences... on-the-nose but beautiful and weird (B. Kite in his brilliant essay that accompanies the Criterion disc cites Ray's best films' "flailings and failings"*) but not bigger than Wuthering Heights or my own life

*You can read Kite's essay here.

Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray, 1956:

The frames from the film (not 'production-stills') placed above are stolen from various sites around the Internet, as no means of capturing stills from a Blu-ray presently exist on the Mac platform.

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Previous pieces on Nicholas Ray at Cinemasparagus:

They Live by Night [1948]

In a Lonely Place [1950]

On Dangerous Ground [1952]

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Kagamijishi

2010-12-29T02:01:00.002-05:00

Ozu and Theater: 2

Kagamijishi by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:

The opening narration of Ozu's single documentary/essay, Kagamijishi, characterizes its subject, the legendary kabuki performer Kikugorô Onoe VI, with the following: "His corpulence was a great aide to playing young, ingenuous girls with generous curves." / The film opens with an abstract of kabuki vs. nô, then proceeds to detail in brief some of the actor's famous parts to date (Ozu cuts between stills of the performer and black-and-white presentations of paintings which detail the various roles), in the process glossing the history of the early 20th-century Japanese stage / From there we move on to contemporaneous footage shot by the filmmaker of the "lion dance" (one of many lion dances in the annals of kabuki), the Kagamijishi as it's called — and which I wouldn't know how to translate that well; maybe something like "the little lion with the concussive head" / I do know I've never seen such vigor on the screen / I dreamt of this film at the top of an intermediate slope while skiing at age 14 / Later I dreamt I was trying to explain Budd Boetticher to Paul Krugman / What is the distance of The Triumph of the Will from kabuki? / Life is the sadness of gesture / With kabuki, etc., you must know the story before you attend the performance / Every auteur-movie about theater is superb / Each one is at once more inviting to a popular audience than most of the other films in the directors' oeuvres while displaying glimmers, as by revealing the flip-side of a fan in quick snaps, the most obscure technique / Constantly Kagamijishi exemplifies mise-en-scène / The tree-decor whacked by the lion's mane shall sway / The dynamism of a late-night talk-show set / The curtain drops, one is speechless and thoughtless / At the close of what is possibly the most serious of all the movies by Yasujirô Ozu

Kagamijishi by Yasujirô Ozu, 1936:

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Previous pieces on Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style

Tokyo Chorus

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But...

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone?

Passing Fancy

A Tale of Floating Weeds

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