"Dents de lait dents de loup" / "Les Sucettes"
===
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Gall by Gainsbourg: An Anthology
"Gainsbourg's lyrics [as sung by France Gall] obviously have nothing to do with the worldview expressed by other teenage vocalists of the time; of course the world [of those vocalists] has its charms, but it has not a single atom of depth. In the lyrics of Gainsbourg's songs in general, and "Laisse tomber les filles" in particular, there is a startling lucidity coupled with a refusal to be taken in by "the great farce of love", defined in terms of "never" and "always". But, with "Laisse tomber les filles", we are not presented with a male narrator of thirty or thirty-five years, but rather a teenager." —Gilles Verlant, Gainsbourg [2000]
"Dents de lait dents de loup" / "Les Sucettes"
===
"Dents de lait dents de loup" / "Les Sucettes"
===
Monday, March 01, 2010
Never Mind the Leno Here's Pavement
"Trigger Cut"
"Elevate Me Later"
"Shady Lane"
"Father to a Sister of Thought"
"Rattled by the Rush"
"Perfume-V"
"Summer Babe"
"Kennel District"
"Silence Kit"
"Range Life"
"Unfair"
"Stop Breathin'"
"No Life Singed Her"
"Fight This Generation"
"Date w/ IKEA"
"Box Elder"
"Grounded"
"Gold Soundz"
"The Hexx"
"Give It a Day"
"Cut Your Hair"
===
"Stereo"
"Spit on a Stranger"
"Conduit for Sale!"
"Loretta's Scars"
"Here*"
===
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Obayashi - Lubitsch - Godard - Murnau - Lang - Sirk: MoC January + February 2010 Releases
House [1977] by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Available in a DVD edition, with an anamorphic presentation of its original 1.55:1 ratio. The cinema revival event of 2010 on both sides of the Atlantic is one of the purest author expressions ever detonated, the blood of the poet splashed through the cage of the Super Ape. It's relentlessly worked, and a truly free film: something on par with the masterpieces of Seijun Suzuki from 1980's Zigeunerweisen onward but of a worldview all Obayashi's own. A tremendous interior vision articulates the truth of the real sky, the perfect manor moonlit isolate, the eminence of the exurbs. House preserves, protects, and reaffirms the retardant: for a soul was on fire.
The original Japanese theatrical trailer accompanies the feature, along with ninety minutes of video interviews with Obayashi and associates that take the elegiac "we had such crazy ideas in the day" tack. A 40-page full-color booklet contains a 2009 essay by Paul Roquet and loads of production stills.
A selection of Ernst Lubitsch's excellent pre-Hollywood works have been brought together in a six-disc DVD boxset, Lubitsch in Berlin: Fairy-Tales, Melodramas, and Sex Comedies: Six Films by Ernst Lubitsch, 1918-1921. Each film is presented with optional English subtitles and in its original 1.37:1 ratio — German-language intertitles intact.
Ich möchte kein Mann sein [I Wouldn't Like to Be a Man, 1918] — A deleterious pore-ridden elder gets invited into the home of the young Ossi Oswalda (who anyway is never ingenuous) for discipline-and-punish. He ends up possessing her. We never find out what the absent uncle makes of it all. One of the first entries in a genre that Lubitsch alone invented and Fritz Lang proceeded to develop: the comedy of cigar-fucking.
Die Puppe. [The Doll., 1919] — The doll-girl (that is, Ossi again, here in imitation of an automaton) becomes an agent of freedom in a stilted, mechanistic social strata-sphere. This massively ironic picture is Lubitsch's most extreme early iteration of his obsessive "mistaken-identity" theme.
Die Austernprinzessin. [The Oyster Princess., 1919] — Several viewings might reveal this to be the strangest of the Ossi-Lubitsch collaborations: for all its kineticism (the movie's got an epic foxtrot scene in its center) one feels that the director has begun to explore the possibilities of equilibrium, of turning scenes into 'blocks,' of slowing things down, not keeping the machine so tightly wound. It's important: he'll need a new rhythm for the films that immediately follow, then again in '29.
Sumurun [1920] — Next to the following film in this set, one of the two circulating Lubitsch movies not many people can find a lot of love for. (His final silent, 1929's Eternal Love, might also share this dubious distinction.) It's worth revisiting, pocked as it is with stabs at ambiance — and more. For example: Imagine if there were a scene in a Star Wars film in which George Lucas had a band of traveling minstrels show up in a town, and one of the troupers is a hunchbacked lutist, and a crowd gathers, but then another member of the group starts performing a belly-dance in the immediate vicinity, and this distracts the crowd away from the original performer so that they all skirt off to watch the more provocative show. The hunchback gets mad, rushes over and slaps the belly-dancer in front of her spectators, who jeer as he drags her back inside one of the troupe's wagons. It would be a beautiful example of a perfect scenaristic episode. Except it doesn't happen in George Lucas. It happens in Ernst Lubitsch.
Anna Boleyn [1920] — The titular "Anna" being a Germanization of the historical "Anne." Maybe a little heavy, arguably a little too long, but still one of the great films about open secrets.
Die Bergkatze [The Mountain-Lion / The Wildcat, 1921] — This one's almost totally about shapes and forms. There's a part where the fortress commander's sitting down in his throne enjoying a smoke, flanked by swooping geometry and a pure sphere at rest atop a cylinder. It's a 'representation' or an 'indication' of artillery, but sublimated into form for the sake of form. Because ordnance, by its nature, is too idiotic to really deserve being filmed.
A sixth disc contains Robert Fischer's 2006 feature-length documentary Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood. The set also includes fantastic short essays for each of the films, written by David Cairns (Sumurun, Anna Boleyn), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Die Puppe., Die Austernprinzessin.), and Anna Thorngate (Ich möchte kein Mann sein, Die Bergkatze). A newly commissioned score written, performed, and recorded by Bernard Wrigley soundtracks Die Puppe., and is a great example of silent-film-accompaniment done (and recorded) with some sensibility — that is, it lacks histrionic piano plinky-plonk and chilly-razor digital tonality.
Une femme mariée, fragments d'un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc [A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White, 1964] by Jean-Luc Godard, newly reissued in a Blu-ray edition in its original 1.37:1 ratio, with a glorious 1080p image, exquisite grain-structure, and a truly robust uncompressed soundtrack. All of the features of the DVD edition have been retained and updated for the Blu-ray. In April I wrote here about the DVD edition:
[I]ncluded [...] is the original 3-1/2-minute trailer for the film (approx. two minutes longer than that listed in the filmography of the Centre Pompidou's 2006 volume Jean-Luc Godard: Documents), created and edited by Godard himself (presented in true 1080p HD, non-uprezzed, for the Blu-ray).
Accompanying the disc: an 80-page perfectly-bound book (cited by voters in the 2009 DVDBeaver year-end poll as among the best DVD 'extras' of the year) that contains:
— A carefully crafted cover.
— Film-credits for both the feature and the trailer.
— An editorial preface on the release, on "Godard-style" graphic pastiches in JLG-related media collateral, and on the commodification of cinema and physical/virtual "home video" media.
— A short inquiry into the nature and use of "production stills" in media and press.
— A new two-page 'overture' to the film by Luc Moullet....
— A new 20-page roundtable discussion on the film, and its relationship to the entirety of Godard's oeuvre from the '60s to the '00s, between Luc Moullet, Bill Krohn (of "Kinbrody and the Ceejays" notoriety), and me.
— A new 21-page investigation into and analysis of the film, by Bill Krohn.
— A new statement about the film by its star, Macha Méril.
— A new and exclusive English translation by me, running 12 pages, of Godard's genius 1978 lecture on the film, and its relationship to Ingmar Bergman's work, to Flaherty's Nanook of the North, to Rossellini's Francesco giullare di Dio, and to the world and the Image at large, as originally transcribed and presented in the long-unavailable and absolutely vital Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma.
— JLG's Hitchcock collage.
— The relevant excerpts from Jean Racine's Bérénice, presented in the original French, with new parallel English translations by me.
— Endnotes, featuring remarks by myself and Andy Rector.
This is the Godard film (a) in which time tends to stand still the most (as always in Godard, both analysis and sensuality are being presented and are occurring; moreover, in Une femme mariée we get the sensuality of this analysis alongside the analysis of sensuality); (b) in which JLG proves (in the mathematical sense) 'documentary' ≠ 'acting', that is, he reveals the precise moments when the former reveals, in turn, its subsumption of the latter.
City Girl [1930] by F. W. Murnau. Available in a Blu-ray edition, in a 1080p presentation with original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. The most overlooked late-Murnau film has been given new life in high-definition, and the results are stunning. It seems to me impossible from here on out to relegate City Girl to "minor" status; it could very well come down to the Blu-ray format's bringing us as close to celluloid as we're ever likely to experience in a home setting (on a TV/display-esque device) that the strengths even of the Fox-imposed sequences alone have been made freshly and powerfully evident. (Yes, Blu-ray might well be the site of the first truce between the projection purists and the home-theater'acs.) To speak briefly of the qualities of the film as a whole: It's the sequel of sorts to 1927's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, insofar as Murnau takes the denuded premise — a 'simple' man and a 'simple' woman love each other, have their love tested across the milieux of city and country, and in the end achieve an apotheosis or platonic ideal of Love and are thus redeemed (thus "Love Is All," a sentiment not unfamiliar to those who've seen the close of the director's Faust) — and hones it further at the level of story and a newly linear mise-en-scène, thereby accessing previously untapped and soaringly lyrical modulations in the emotional array. This latest viewing also revealed to me something I hadn't picked up on in previous screenings: a mystical 'transference' of blame and guilt that leaps from one character to another in the course of the proceedings like an electrical charge (articulated by the postures of the bodies), or as though these people are connected by a psychic chain, with each successive manifestation of the transference betraying a 'prime,' then 'double-prime' (etc.) set of characteristics at the "leap". To diagram all the permutations of this phenomenon in detail will require its own blog-post — but I did just want to make a public note of the fact, which will also hopefully serve as a reminder for me to explicate it when a few free hours come my way.
The disc also includes a new and exclusive audio commentary by David Kalat, and a production-still-heavy 28-page booklet with a 2003 essay by Adrian Danks.
M [1931] by Fritz Lang. Available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions — with a to-die-for 1080p presentation on the former, and a high-def progressive transfer on the latter, the film appearing on both in its restored form and with its original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. M is linked to Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse in the same way that the end of each scene in both films is linked (or rather, 'rhymes') with the opening image or sound of the scene directly following. While this internal architecture is fairly pronounced in both works, I only reiterate here its existence to forefront the idea that these two films constitute as concerted a diptych in the Lang oeuvre as the bi-fold structures of Die Spinnen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., Die Nibelungen, or the Indian Epic. (M and Das Testament even share a common character in Otto Wernicke's Herr Kommissar Lohmann.)
Two separate audio commentaries supplement the feature: one with Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler; the other with Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Koerber, Torsten Kaiser, and intermittent excerpts from Bogdanovich's 1965 audio interview with Fritz Lang. Also included: the rarely seen 1932 British release version of M created by committee after Lang's original had left German theaters — this version features different actors, takes, and Peter Lorre's first English-language performance. Last but not least, Erwin Leiser's fascinating 1968 documentary Zum Beispiel Fritz Lang [For Example: Fritz Lang], in which Lang discusses his career at Ufa. A 48-page booklet contains Fritz Lang's 1931 essay "My Film M — A Factual Report"; a 1963 interview with Lang; detailed notes by Anton Kaes and the relevant script excerpt pertaining to a scene still missing from the restored version of the film; an essay by Robert Fischer titled "Mörder — Meurtrier — Murderer: The Multi-Language Versions of Fritz Lang's M"; and a massive amount of production stills and original production artwork.
There's Always Tomorrow [1956] by Douglas Sirk. Available in a DVD edition, with a high-definition anamorphic transfer of the film presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Sirk was one of the two or three greatest film-namers in cinema history — I mean, the titles of his films throughout the Hollywood phase are exceptional and stand as doubly, sometimes trebly ironical commentary upon the events their pictures disclose. — ALL I DESIRE. — MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. — ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. — THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW. — WRITTEN ON THE WIND. — THE TARNISHED ANGELS. — A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. — IMITATION OF LIFE. And the titles are all the more extraordinary, or surprising — or magnificent — because the vision of the cinema that they would seem to 'advertise' (for so often in Hollywood cinema, especially that of the '40s and '50s, the titles were like circus-barkers) not only lives up to but exceeds the promotion. "THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW" is one of my favorites. In one sense, the title's hopeful, averring: "If not today, then the next day," and invoking the eternal promise of tomorrow. But listen closely and you can hear, as though under the breath: "It's never gonna happen" — because anyone who ever says "there's always tomorrow" never makes a move in the present — and reality is all only past-and-present. And the title is, therefore, shattering. Among the picture's other brilliant aspects there's Barbara Stanwyck, one of the greatest of all screen actresses in one of her greatest performances. And then there's the theme of the home as a prison, carried over from Sirk's 1949 Shockproof, and given form not only in the claustrophobic clouds of parlor furniture and a series of arbitrary dividing walls and screens (erected so as to 'define rooms' or, as was often explained unironically by the wise adults of my childhood years, to 'divide up space'), but in the candlesticks that rise from the dining room table like spears and (via Sirk's brilliantly shifting camera) unite and divide characters in tableau-like compartments, and would-be conspiratorial alliance versus one another. (Stanwyck and MacMurray positioned in the space between two candles, with the son in the segment demarcated to the right; then the camera shifts at the precise moment where dialogue constructs a new tension/alliance, and new demarcations form — etc. This occurs three or four times in the scene.)
Also included on the disc is a rough only-extant version of the original American theatrical trailer, a 1956 dialogue and continuity script (as an on-disc PDF file), and Pascal Thomas's and Dominique Rabourdin's incredible 61-minute 2008 documentary Quelques jours avec Sirk [A Few Days with Sirk]. A 40-page booklet contains an essay by Andrew Klevan and excerpts from a wonderful 1977 interview with Sirk by Michael Stern.
On an unrelated note: I finally saw Casablanca for the first time ever. It's a film by Michael Curtiz, by the way, though the studio and the collective unconsciousness fails to acknowledge that it has an author — these Stadt-der-Arbeiter-esque entities often opt to credit it to "the genius of the system" instead, whatever that means. Anyway, there's a separate essay for that; right now, it's enough to say I thought it was great. (Or maybe not entirely enough to say such. Not to take the sentiment off the rails, but it's important to remark that I watched Casablanca on the Blu-ray that was a released a couple years ago — and that Blu-ray is awful. After viewing the movie, try though I might have, I couldn't find any indication about its awfulness in any of the reviews online; were reviewers at that point just too grateful to have Blu-ray technology in their hands at last? It's perplexing. It is very obviously awful. Here's how: The film grain has been scrubbed out of the image. Every shot looks flat, and every human being's skin casts a 'gleam' akin to light bouncing off a white plastic surface in Kubrick's 2001. I'll never watch this disc again, and can only hope it gets revisited for a re-re-re-re-remastering somewhere down the line. As it stands, the Blu-ray of Casablanca is a crime against film preservation.) (Quick sidenote: and another unremarked-upon awful Blu-ray release: The Godfather, in which a strange 'MotionFlow'-esque/frame-smoothing algorithm has been seemingly applied at some stage in the authoring, such that the film no longer appears to play back at 24-frames-per-second, but rather some 'inbetween-24-and-30' video standard. Again: unwatchable. And, from what I can tell, undetected! I swear I'm not losing my mind — and that my television settings are perfectly calibrated, from MotionFlow OFF to Full Pixel Mode and all the rest... Every other Blu-ray I've seen on my 'set-up' looks not only superb but downright just.)
So back to Casablanca by Michael Curtiz. It was delightful finally to glean some context for all the legendary lines from Julius Epstein's, Philip Epstein's, and Howard Koch's script that have permeated culture, from "Here's lookin' at you kid" through to "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" and on to the non-existence of "Play it again, Sam." But one extract sneaked up quietly... I'd never heard this line before seeing the film, and it struck me as maybe the most poetic and personally resonant of them all:
may be a little
difficult to arrange..."
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Godard on the Death of Rohmer
I woke up this morning to find an email from Andy Rector, via Samuel Bréan who wrote: "In this week's issue of Les Inrockuptibles (742, 17/2/2010), Jean-Marc Lalanne describes the recent evening that the Cinémathèque Française dedicated to Eric Rohmer, with onstage tributes by collaborators, a screening of Le genou de Claire, etc."
The article ends with the following (my translation appears below the French version) —
Mais le choc de la soirée vint de la découverte d'un petit film signé Jean-Luc Godard réalisé pour l'occasion. Sur un écran noir se succèdent les titres des plus célèbres articles de Rohmer dans les Cahiers. En voix off, Godard évoque des images sorties des limbes : deux jeunes amis, parlant ensemble dans la nuit ; les mêmes dans la cuisine de la mère de l'un, leur préparant à manger, débattant encore de films... Rarement on avait entendu Godard parler de choses si personnelles, très simples et très nues. Le film se clôt sur un plan furtif du cinéaste, un peu hagard face à sa webcam. Déjà il a disparu. On aimerait le retenir. On aimerait les retenir tous les deux.
But the shock of the evening came with the discovery of a small film by Jean-Luc Godard created for the occasion. Over a black screen, the titles of Rohmer's most famous articles from the Cahiers appear one after another. In voice-over, Godard evokes images pulled from the ether: two young friends, speaking to one another through the night; the same pair in the kitchen of one of their mothers, making food, going back and forth discussing films... Rarely have we heard Godard speak of such personal things, very simple and very exposed. The film closes with a furtive shot of the filmmaker, face slightly haggard in his webcam. With that, he's gone. You want to hold onto him. You want to hold onto both of them.
A piece I wrote about Rohmer on the day his death was announced appears here.
Tributes by Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet appear here.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The 'Dragnet' / Cinemasparagus Convergence
From Jack Webb's Dragnet. Episode 42: "The Big Departure" [1968]. (Transcript via Badge714.com.) —
FRIDAY: "Yeah, well, [the Pilgrims] had a few things going for them that you don't. They knew how to hunt. How to use an axe. How to build a house. Start a fire without matches and bank it at night so it wouldn't go out. You know how to do all that, of course. And you're going to grow this."
[Friday holds up a packet of asparagus seeds, which the kid claims he bought.]
MOBLEY: "Oh, yeah, I really dig fresh asparagus."
FRIDAY: "When do you think you'll eat it?"
MOBLEY: "This summer."
FRIDAY: "Asparagus takes two years. The Pilgrims could raise their own food — which you can't. And even so, half of them died the first year. But you prepared for that too, didn't you?"
MOBLEY: "I don't know what you mean."
FRIDAY: "You've got shovels."
MOBLEY: "Alright. Big deal. We're not the frontiersmen of all time. But Dennis and Paul are very bright people — mature, intelligent — "
FRIDAY: "And high-principled."
MOBLEY: "That's right."
FRIDAY: "What was that one about materialism?"
MOBLEY: "We've rejected material values."
FRIDAY: "Oh, yeah. Well, what are you going to do when the batteries run down?"
MOBLEY: "We've got a generator."
FRIDAY: "And when there's no more gas?"
MOBLEY: "Okay. So we won't listen to the radios."
WAGNER: "That's not vital!"
GANNON: "But food is. And you'll run out of it sooner than you think. Then you figure you'll start eating wild goat. Well, it's not prime rib. But maybe you'll acquire a taste for it. You'd better — three times a day."
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Vishnevetsky/Bujalski
A great interview with the great Andrew Bujalski by the great Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The Auteurs Notebook here.
Monday, February 01, 2010
iPad
I've had a bunch of conversations with friends since January 27th regarding the latest Apple device, and most of these chats have found me circling around the fact that the press and the 'commenters' are not grasping (yet) the profound implications and unison endgame of the iPad — are not drawing conclusions far enough out to the paradigm shift that the device certainly signals in terms of human beings' relationship to a 'computing interface' (and their potential and actual facility with a grammar of interface) and in terms of revenue acquisition for beleaguered publishers and 'content'-creators. Above all, the self-assumed pundits miss the base essence of the iPad's 'is'ness' as a kind of Athenian, or essentially Delphic — or, neo-platonic — ideal of mobility and fluidity, as a means of access to and connection (not even just 'interaction') with content, i.e., contemplatable stuff with which to interface, s'exposer. There's been so much hand-wringing instead over the "annihilation of the physical book," which I don't for a second believe in (because there's a pre-disposed compulsion in mankind toward tactility, and because 'computing' never did extinguish inscription — speaking for myself [though I'm sure millions would agree], not being able to underline or make notes in the margins of novels would amount to a totally unacceptable self-effacement, would basically incinerate a whole history of [re-]reads, of workings through aesthetic/intellectual schemata),.......... or over the lack of support for Flash, or the present absence of a built-in camera.
So that's a really brief abstract of my feelings re: the iPad. Due to lack of time and lots of work, I'll hand things over now to quotes from / links to a few articles I read today (on my iPhone, at dinner) that get to the codexical crux of the matter —
"By the time the bells, whooshes and clicks died down, I couldn’t say the future had arrived, but I’m pretty sure we can see it from here.
" 'It was like someone came back from five years into the future and handed this to us,' said John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a respected tech blog.
"The iPad’s promise was hinted at before Mr. Jobs hit the stage. The set was dominated by a large, comfy chair. Since the birth of the personal computer, we have been hunched over, squinting at screens — great big terminals, laptop displays, tiny screens on PDAs. With the iPad, the screen has come to us as we lean back in ease.
"Critics who suggested that Apple unveiled little more than an iPhone that won’t fit in your pocket don’t seem to understand that by scaling the iPhone experience, the iPad becomes a different species. Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way."
— David Carr, in The New York Times — the full piece is here.
"In the rush to slobber over one's self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions. To whit [sic] I submit this humble rejoinder to the hordes. At the end of the day, at the end of this decade, the iPad will be seen as the first device that collected all the media together in one truly portable place. The real power of the iPad model will thus come not from the monetization of any one thing but in the creation of a whole new form — a form of forms, if you will."
— Michael Conniff, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.
"The iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language of 'computing.' Or rather it extends that shift that was tested first in our pockets with the iPhone, and brings it to our desks, our coffee tables... everywhere else. The iPad is a huge change.
"We have lived for the past thirty-plus years in an engineer's universe of computing, where layers of implicit understanding — about file structures, multiple programs, menu idiosyncrasies, nomenclature — are required to figure out how to make your computer do what you want it to do. To many of us, these metaphors are completely embedded in our brains. So we can't understand how someone like, say, my mother, can't figure out how to use her scanner software. ....
"I don't know if the iPad will be commercially successful, but I believe it represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors of computing, as significant as the move from text to graphical interfaces."
— Hugh McGuire, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.
"What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
"For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
"Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
"Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. ....
"With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.
"Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here. ....
"The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get 'real work' done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the 'real work'.
"It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
"The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party."
— Fraser Speirs — the full piece is here.
Steve Jobs throughout the 1990s, in the NeXT years and his return to Apple in 1997 (his comments from a few years ago on 60 Minutes about The Beatles that I wanted to include are unembeddable):
Eléna et les hommes
Just released from the magnificent Versus Entertainment label in Spain: a gorgeous and beautifully designed new DVD edition of Jean Renoir's 1956 masterpiece Eléna et les hommes [Eléna and the Men], bearing the title Elena y los hombres.
Included across the two discs: Renoir's introduction of the film made for the 1962 series of French television broadcasts. — The extraordinary L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir [Jean Renoir's Family Album], Roland Gritti's 16-minute 1956 documentary screened in French cinemas with Eléna et les hommes at the time of the feature's original release, in which Renoir discusses his family and his father the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in particular. — And last but not least, the first part (of three) of Jacques Rivette's classic 1967 film made for Cinéastes de notre temps, Jean Renoir, le patron [Jean Renoir: The Boss]. The discs feature removable Spanish subtitles across all elements; in the case of L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir the removable Spanish subtitles appear on black bars to cover up... English subtitles burnt into the master.
The package's physical centerpiece is the perfect-bound, glossy, full-color 72-page book that contains a short 1995 essay about the film by Carlos Losilla; an extract from a 1998 essay by Àngel Quintana; and a full reprint of the conversation that Andy Rector and myself had about the film in 2008 at this blog and at Kino Slang, translated into Spanish by Stefan Ivancic and retaining all the original imagery from the version that appeared at Cinemasparagus. (Earlier today I caught word that Cahiers du cinéma España described the discussion in their review of the release as "a great lesson in cinema.")
You can read our conversation in its original English-language form —
(in the version with my image-selection)
or here
(in the version with Andy's image-selection)
Congratulations and sincere thanks to the entire Versus team who put together this outstanding release: Adrián Guerra, Gonzalo del Pozo, Juan Molero, Nuria Bermejo, Pepe Tito, and Alejandro Miranda.
Above all — if you haven't seen it, watch, rewatch, and rewatch again Eléna et les hommes! It's one of the most sublime films ever made, and must be at least 412 times more three-dimensional than Avatar.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Jerry
"I think that for years we have recognized the author by what he writes. An author will always — you will do the same, Chris — a writer tips his mitt. If a writer would like to be completely anonymous about the character and fabric of the man, don't write, 'cause you can't hide in writing. I just believe it. I'm sure there are people who will tell me that I'm crazy — 'Oh, well, what about J. D. Salinger?' That was J. D. Salinger. J. D. Salinger was Holden Caulfield. Don't tell me that was a fictitious character out of the mind of his deep deep deep imagination. Bullshit. He was Holden Caulfield."
—Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Chris Fujiwara, in the powerful 32-page 2003 interview transcribed in Fujiwara's new book, Jerry Lewis.
Lewis
"The stuff that I do that's really good is when I have the right intention. It's not necessarily the material as much as it is the intention and the material. When my intention was to make it soft and sensitive and loving, that's what I got out of it. Whether it belonged in the movie or not. You'll get your naysayers to say, 'What was that for?' What was it for when Chaplin sat at the edge of the street and just watched people walking by? I mean, what did that mean? It meant something: it meant he wasn't going anywhere.
[...]
"That statement ['nothing is more dramatic than comedy'] comes from doing comedy. In order to make your audience laugh, you have to dramatically change who you are. I won't trip over that piece of wood on the stage if it's me walking there. But Jerry [the character] will, or Stanley, or the Idiot, or whatever we call him in that moment. He has to trip over it. Now, he has to turn into something that isn't truly him, so we're taking a piece of vanity and rubbing it out, a little ego, burying it, sandpapering all that down, and bringing up all of the gargoyles. Because in England they say what he does is grotesque. The first time I read that, I was heartbroken, but they say, 'No, that's a compliment.' Okay. When I stand in front of an audience on New Year's Eve, let's say, years ago, and I see the young man and his girl, man and his wife, girl, boyfriend, couples, lovers, all that wonderful stuff ringside. I'm standing up there alone and making a fucking fool of myself to entertain all of them. There's nothing more dramatic than that moment, Chris. It's very dramatic. Because I have to call on something that's not what I want to be at that moment. I want to be there with my girl or my wife watching some other schmuck make a fool of himself. But I never ever thought of what I did as demeaning. What I thought of it was: other than me at that moment. So it's very dramatic."
—Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Chris Fujiwara, in the destined-for-the-ages 32-page 2003 interview transcribed in Fujiwara's new book, Jerry Lewis.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Skorecki and Mourlet on Eric Rohmer
Two tributes to Eric Rohmer I've translated, from the respective blogs of Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet:
On Rohmer
by Louis Skorecki
(original French version appeared here, on January 14, 2010)
That a man of that quality can pass away in the blink of an eye, without a peep, on tiptoe, says everything about his nobility... That the media, and TV especially, remain silent in the face of his death (he filmed hours and hours of pure leçons de cinéma for educational television) speaks volumes about the lack of culture in these same media-outlets... He was obviously the greatest French filmmaker after Bresson, and before Brisseau and Moullet, two of his most brilliant disciples... We're still going to try our hand at two or three other words (which will be added to the only decent text to have been published upon Rohmer's death — that of Philippe Azoury in Libération), but we can already put forward the notion, without fear of slipping up, that he was one of a kind in the cinema, and that he taught everything to Jean-Claude Biette, Marguerite Duras, Jean Eustache, and also a certain... Woody Allen (La Collectionneuse is from 1967, Annie Hall from 1977).
Regarding the quietude surrounding Eric Rohmer's death, we can already remark upon one thing: only his actors were faithful to him, humbly testifying about what they learned from him, with an intelligence and a modesty that compels admiration.
P.S.: Rohmer's death at last allows us to do away with the foundational heresy of Bresson's cinema, that sublime myopia that would hold theatre as the sole entity accountable for all the evils of the cinema — while he [Bresson] will go down by far as the most brilliantly theatrical of filmmakers, from his two inaugural films, Les Anges du péché (sublime incursion into the Mizoguchian porno), and Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (contamination of the narrative by way of a parallel sado-lesbian intrigue)... Rohmer on the other hand will linger, obliquely, upon the perversities of Les Petites filles modèles, Bresson holding to a more frontal, more Balthusian eroticism — but all this will, in the end, stand only as theater, sublime theater, and nothing more...
Eric Rohmer
by Michel Mourlet
(original French version appeared here, on January 21, 2010)
Starting off a new year with one man's passing which should scarcely provoke any optimism, and yet it must, as little as that might be, in order to nourish the ardor for writing. It's a syllogism, rather vicious, as with all syllogisms: I write whenever I despair; and yet to write is to have hope (to communicate, to endure, to be acknowledged, to find a solution, and to put the chaos of thoughts into order, etc.); therefore I have hope when I despair.
But to have hope when Eric Rohmer leaves us? To hope for something, yes, and I think I know what: that we'll still live long enough to see certain people, certain things, find their right place, a place for the the rectitude of the gaze, a place for approximation and error, a place for authentic creators, a place for impostors and snake-oil salesmen. A place for "that which is spoken," a place for truth.
An astonishing symptom of the era: the exclusion of one of the most singular and most startling films in French cinema, L'Anglaise et le Duc, rejected in 2008 [sic — I believe Mourlet means 2001. -CK] from the proposed selection at the Cannes Festival for reasons whose ideological stupidity could only belong to France — the official France, that of taboos and la Parole unique, goes along with the flow. It seems that every mishap of our arts and letters over these past forty years can be found sketched out in this episode, which explains in large part why, once so brilliant and admirable, these letters and these arts cut so drab a figure in the world today.
I came to know Eric Rohmer at the end of the Fifties. In name, he shared the post of editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du cinéma with André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. In reality, he was the group's kingpin. He worked there from morning till night. I was a very young cinephile itching to write about the movies. This cinephile had published two or three articles in a few inconsequential little periodicals of the sort that crop up all over the place, and he dreamt of seeing his prose sparkle upon the paper belonging to the prestigious revue in which a new body of cinematographic thought was being elaborated. Of that body of thought, one of the pillars was obviously Le Celluloïd et le marbre, which Rohmer pursued in serial publication and which seemed to us, along with the articles by Rivette, that which got closest to our own ideas.
Thanks to Rohmer, who among other gifts had that of knowing how to distinguish and bring talent back together, the Cahiers enjoyed at that time, and up to the point of his eviction (which I was told about in vague terms much later on, without being given any names or details) by apparatchiks whose obscurantism would have made comrade Zhdanov blush, enjoyed, as I was saying, its apex, as much in terms of the writing as in critical discoveries and analytical finesse. I'm not going to rehash once again the points of the little Story now familiar to the specialists: the Macmahonians landing at the Cahiers, my protest printed entirely in italics, the special issue dedicated to Losey, events only made possible by the tutelary presence of, and the exceptionally intelligent overture from, Rohmer.
After Jean Curtelin handed me the reins of Présence du cinéma, I lost touch with Eric Rohmer, although I'd often get word of him through his good friend Jean Parvulesco. (Bear in mind the scene from L'Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque.) I didn't see him again until 1985, when I was heading up a class at l'U.E.R. d'Art et d'Archéologie de Paris I where he was also teaching. He hadn't changed one iota: thin, elegant, the bony face à la Clint Eastwood, always a bit entrenched behind a smiling distance, the rapid, choppy, sometimes near-stammering elocution, betraying a shyness that he had held onto like a charm from his youth.
His first feature, Le Signe du Lion — in which I portrayed a patron at a café terrace! — didn't do much for me; neither did La Collectionneuse. The film that turned me on to his oeuvre and at the same time created a definitive bond with myself was Ma nuit chez Maud. This film and the ones that follow seemed to me like some paradoxical continuation of Marivaux in contemporary society, paradoxical essentially because this cinema shifted the focal point of the image onto the dialogue, and because the language of mise-en-scène became the mise-en-scène of language.
It's not deceiving oneself to make reference to Marivaux while considering this later man as a delicious draughtsman of verbal arabesques around the map of Tendre, an heir in some way to the amorous casuistry in fashion during the preceding century. Marivaux doesn't embroider marivaudages; he's an explorer of the freedom of will, and his plays are so many training manuals, sometimes cruel, for emotions in the light of reason. This was precisely the topic of Eric Rohmer, who defined across the Six Moral Tales the general theme of his films like such: "While the narrator (we can replace 'narrator' with 'hero') is in search of a woman, he meets someone else who captures his attention until the point that he rediscovers the first woman."
After this moral of coming-of-age and the primordial role of the verb — as though this Christian was telling us that "in the beginning was the verb" — as though speech is ever "theatrical" — a third characteristic allows us to place Rohmer's films in a category resolutely apart from that which gets made today: far from spraying them with the sociological foam of a present-day always threatened by obsolescence and removed from the deep permanence of a citizenry (as long as it's not replaced with another), this filmmaker didn't show the "legal" French society of the mediasphere, but the real French society of the second half of the 20th century. And he did it with a precision and, let's venture the word, a documentary joyousness that brings us back to his cinephilic and critical admirations, those he invokes in Le Celluloïd et le marbre: Flaherty, Murnau. Thirty years ago, I took the liberty of laying the cards on the table: "When our descendants seek out beneath the centuries' dust our true face, they'll find it more certainly in the reality of Rohmer's fictions than in the fiction of reportage and investigations."
Some thoughts I posted about Rohmer on the day he died can be accessed here.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Alexandra Duguay
Alexandra Duguay was a spokeswoman for the United Nations. For the past seven months, she had been living in Haiti with her boyfriend Marc-André Franche, an aid worker also employed by the U.N.
I met Alexandra and Marc-André two summers ago at a party thrown on the rooftop of their beautiful residence in Manhattan's Financial District. At the time, Alexandra had still been working as a U.N. press officer in New York. I'd been invited to attend the get-together by my friend Thoma, but wasn't acquainted with anyone else who was booked to be present. Cut then to me, lugging one or two contribution bottles of red wine in my satchel-thing for blocks and blocks. It was really sweltering out, glasses-down-the-nose hot. So, obviously, when I showed up at the designated address and rang the buzzer — and subsequently was greeted by the host, a beautiful Québecer woman-in-red-dress — I felt like a total asshole, very wet-towel-slapped, and certain the impression I was exuding matched that of any thirtysomething deciding to revisit the college swim-test on a lark. And yet: no break of cool from my host — she, Alexandra, couldn't have been more gracious. As Ms. Duguay ushered me inside and started commiserating re: the heat (sensing, I sensed, that I felt I was personally looking pretty shit and haggard), it was apparent that her sense of hospitality and sympathetic instincts were, in equal parts, enormous, and as the night wore on her poise and intelligence also made lasting impressions. The same applied for Marc-André. I remember being stationed near the laptop while he diligently YouTube-searched for footage of Serge Gainsbourg's 'incident' with Whitney Houston on French TV in the '80s — after that, for clips of SG's defiant recitation of "La Marseillaise"/"Aux armes" before that unwholesomely FN-populated crowd. I recall too that after the videos went off, Marc-André and I spoke for a little while about L'Homme à tête de chou — which was nice, as he's the only person I've ever met who not only knew what it is, but knows it. Needless to say: we hit it off. And although I haven't spoken to Marc-André, or Alexandra, since then, I'll remember that night for its beautiful atmosphere, a molecular sense of camaraderie, and the fact that there I came into first-contact with two dear-to-this-day-friends in Danielle DiGiacomo and Tina Rodriguez.
Two nights ago around 12am local time, after a nearly seven-day search, Alexandra's body was pulled from the rubble of the collapsed U.N. headquarters at the Christopher Hotel in Port-au-Prince. I've read that rescue workers said she was likely killed instantly in the tremor's upheaval. Small consolation, and maybe hardly any at all when I think about Marc-André's working across more than six days at the U.N. site to recover the woman he loved and lived for, who might have been either dead or alive — his persevering in the effort with the single-mindedness that is all that can, and must, exist. Until the end, and the full, the total, disaster.
Over the last week, those who were close to Alex and Marc-André and their families — and those like myself who had only known them at the distance of acquaintance, never thinking there was any 'finality' to the last time we'd passed one another by (surely there'd be more occasions for catching-up) — kept continual vigil at a page on Facebook that was open to the public, refreshing it every couple of hours or minutes for news on the Wall conveyed by Marc-André in Haiti to Alexandra's mother, resilient, determined... Her mom delivered the final news a few hours after the recovery.
1,500 people became members of this Facebook group as a show of solidarity with Alexandra, her loved ones, her family — and it's impossible to say just how many thousands more both on and off Facebook have viewed the page across the last week. These figures reflect the grief surrounding one individual, the life knocked out of her body, crumpled, by the quake. — There are 200,000 like her.
The numbers and the stories are a dumb-show for the dead, and they are a bitter poison for the living.
Mais c'est l'aimée non tourmentée. L'aimée.
L'air et le monde point cherchés. La vie.
—Etait-ce donc ceci?
—Et le rêve fraîchit.
My friend Danielle, mentioned above, sent a note around the other night regarding Alexandra which I've asked her to share here.
As many of you know, I lost a wonderful friend in the horrible tragedy that was the earthquake in Haiti. Alexandra Duguay was an amazing woman I met two years ago, when I was her teacher at NYU Continuing Education. She was brilliant and passionate and hard-working; my star student. But she also immediately became a good friend. She was open and generous and wonderful and beautiful. She took me to the U.N. for drinks, for parties, to her apartment for a barbecue with her incredible boyfriend, who also worked at the U.N. They were a truly madly in love, adorable couple who were incredible, full of life people. He would pick her up from the U.N. on his Vespa every day, and they would cook and train for the marathon at night.
The last time I saw her, she was volunteering her time to help me research the documentary about Cambodia that I am now producing. She told me she and her boyfriend were moving to Haiti, because they felt working at the U.N. in New York was ineffectual and they reallly wanted to make a change. That was about 7 months ago, and it was the last time I saw her.
I have been devastated to lose such an incredible person; but she is one of more than 200,000 people to have been lost to such a senseless tragedy. So it is in Alexandra's honor that I have set up a charity page to help all the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. It's what she would've wanted.
To donate, please click here:
And for more about Alexandra, here is her Facebook tribute page:
Monday, January 18, 2010
Pedro Costa at INDEPENDENCIA
Independencia have posted a three-part dossier (with introduction) (here) around Pedro Costa, on the occasion of the complete retrospective of his work currently being presented at the Cinémathèque Française, and in homage to the release of his latest feature Ne change rien [Change Nothing, 2009]. One of the pieces in the dossier is a November 2009 interview with Costa conducted by Francisco Ferreira. Independencia have just posted my English translation of the interview (from Daniel Dos Santos's and Karina Barros's French translation of Ferreira's and Costa's conversation in Portuguese) here.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
"Haydée... écoute, HAYDÉE..."
January 11, 2010: Eric Rohmer is dead at 89.
Rohmer's work extolled and exemplified the dignities of the human race — emotional, sensual, intellectual.
Rohmer embodied a series of paradoxes. He saw humanity as from a god's-eye-view, but no filmmaker ever shot at the level of the species itself, par la terre, quite like he did: the wind, the water, — and the wallpaper. He was a son of Pascal who advanced the scientific method toward the revelation and scrutiny of the longings and delights folded within the hearts of men and women — guided, the entire time, by the prospect of the miracle. He believed the miracle would come in the end and to show it he created it, as though action and belief were inextricable or, even, one and the same. He was touched by grace: accordingly, his touch was light; accordingly, his insights were profound. His productions were economical, and nothing he filmed was cheap, human beings were never cheapened. His classical moorings and scholasticism were the radical means by which he helped to create and vitalize continually the New Wave. His criticism on Hitchcock, Rossellini, and Nicholas Ray in the Cahiers du cinéma of the '50s suggested, like his films, the author's simultaneous presence in the 'here' of the current moment, and in the 'elsewhere' of a canonical antiquity. His scenario for the Six Moral Tales was his novel Six Moral Tales. He refused to acknowledge a difference between cinema and literature: and so the great filmmaker has died, and he will take celestial residence in the pantheon of Marivaux, Balzac, and Flaubert. This man of all seasons, for all centuries, filed dispatches imbued with a timelessness, documentary and aesthetic, and I think that when he published in 1977 his doctoral thesis The Organization of Space in Murnau's Faust he had unconsciously proposed an act of autocritique in the lines: "It is by the intensity of his presence that Nosferatu frightens us, not by the mystery of his absence, like the Vampyr of Dreyer." The intensity of his presence, and the mystery of his absence — Rohmer embodies a series of paradoxes.
A few personal notes:
— I hadn't seen any of Rohmer's films until 2002, when L'Anglaise et le Duc [The Englishwoman and the Duke, 2001 — released in the US as The Lady and the Duke] played in Seattle. I couldn't get over it: a total reinvention of the (still nascent) digital cinema, which he had placed at the service of a rigorous mise en scène with seemingly little effort, like these new cameras had been invented primarily for Eric Rohmer. It was as theatrical and trenchant as Renoir's The Golden Coach. It really impressed me. I recall going on about it for days after.
— A few months later: I remember I had been staying at my ex-girlfriend's parents' house for the weekend. During a time-out-for-naps I put the disc (her copy) of Le Rayon vert [The Green Ray, 1986] into the laptop and watched the film for the first time. (It had been in circulation for many years in the US in a bad transfer under the title Summer.) Like many others who see the picture, I couldn't believe the final scene. My mind was exploding. A director had presided over a miracle, and what's more had captured it on celluloid. I wanted to run through the house and tell everyone what I had witnessed. I opted just to pace instead; for once, perhaps, good sense prevailed. And the end of The Green Ray can't be told, it can only be shown. Someday I'd like to make a field recording: aim a microphone toward an audience watching the film in a theater. I imagine when that final moment arrives, one would hear two-hundred spectators gasp in unison, and then — the collective release of: "Ooooooooooh..."
— The boxset of Six Moral Tales from Criterion is one of the label's treasures. But it's worth hunting down for purchase or Netflixing even for one element alone: the 2006 video conversation between Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder, which represents a gloriously lucid look-back across Rohmer's career and the Six Moral Tales series. Within the same box comes Rohmer's (unsigned — but it is Rohmer's film) La Cambrure [The Curve, 1999], which is possibly, next to Dan Sallitt's All the Ships at Sea, the most beautiful film I've ever seen shot on (unmediated) miniDV.
— Another Rohmer treasure exists on Criterion, but I've never seen it publicized as such, and there's no indication of its authorship on the packaging: the unsigned film by Rohmer featuring himself and Jean Douchet in conversation on Renoir: Post-face à Boudu sauvé des eaux [Looking Back on Boudu sauvé des eaux, 1968], included on the Boudu Saved from Drowning release. It's one of the finest critical analyses of a film ever recorded and, again, is alone worth acquiring.
— To end on a non-commercial note: I find the wife's release at the end of L'Amour, l'après-midi [Love in the Afternoon, 1972 — it used to be called Chloe in the Afternoon in the US] to be among the most emotionally devastating moments in all of movies — but the emotions are so complicated, bittersweet, teetering at the cusp of relief, — borne by a sense of contrition in the face of hurt, they modulate a new key amid suspicion, terrible disappointment, and hopeful naïveté.
Over the years Eric Rohmer's films have immeasurably enriched my sense of who I am or should be.
Tomorrow's edition of Libération in France declares itself a "special issue" and gives the entire front page over to an image of Rohmer, with the headline: "Rohmer, at the Tale's End". Olivier Seguret penned the main piece. A condensed version of Philippe Azoury's own portrait is at the Libé site here. Also: the reprint of a 2004 interview from the time of release of his penultimate film, Triple Agent, accessible here.
Rohmer's passing also attains the main headline in tomorrow's edition of Le Monde. Jacques Mandelbaum writes here: "The transparency and the sobriety of the mise en scène, carried out by established actors (Jean-Claude Brialy, André Dussollier) or, more often, by those making their debuts (Fabrice Luchini, Pascal Greggory), the tenor of the dialogue, the attention paid to places, conspire here into the elaboration of a unique style bearing sentimental blindness, the sophistication of desire as the miracle of the true encounter with the highest degree of uncertainty and charm."
The website of Les Inrocks presents Rohmer's "last interview," from 2007, conducted at the time of release of his final film, Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon [The Romance of Astrea and Celadon], here. (Excerpt: "Some Like It Hot is a film I don't like whatsoever. I think it's horrible. Listen, I haven't interviewed many famous people in my time, but one of them was Buster Keaton. He was very old, and the film had just come out. He told me: 'Some liking it hot is exactly what I detest.' I thought that was very funny.") Jean-Marc Lalanne's appreciation is here.
Dave Kehr has written the New York Times obituary, which can be found here. Discussion about Rohmer carries over into the comments section of a post at Dave's blog here. (Kent Jones remarks: "After reading all this stuff about The Lady and the Duke and Astrea and Celadon, both of which are very beautiful, I am compelled to say how much I loved Triple Agent. Who else, in the entire world let alone French cinema, would have made this film?")
Criterion have posted a note about the director at their site, including an excerpt from the long 2006 video-interview mentioned above. Here.
Glenn Kenny reproduces a cogent quote by Rohmer at Some Came Running, here.
A number of public figures have given statements to mark Rohmer's passing. Two politicians from two milieux:
The inevitable Nicolas Sarkozy offering reads as follows: that Eric Rohmer was a filmmaker who created a "singular, unique" cinema, creator of a "style that will survive," which "contains literature, contains painting, contains theater and music." "It was his cinema alone, even in its tidy, minimalist economy, even in the titles of his films, joined together like collections. Classical and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the 'Rohmerian' style." The statement closes in recognition of the "talent and truth of a grand auteur."
Former French Minister of Culture Jack Lang says that Rohmer's "oeuvre will tower over French cinematographic history by way of its original and revolutionary stature. ... His writings and creations fell under the sign of necessity and rigor. He'll have been the man of all discoveries." Lang draws attention to "a cinematographic art with no other equal, the revelation of actors as-of-yet unknown, the marking-out of unsuspected philosophical and aesthetic universes."
Monday, January 04, 2010
Van Gogh's Ear, etc.
From the end of Adam Gopnik's essay on Van Gogh in the January 4, 2010 issue of The New Yorker —
"The turn toward moral luck puts modern art, however popular, at permanent odds with the society that delights in it. Whether in its benign, wishful form, or in its belligerent "Watch me!" aspect, the pursuit of moral luck remains alien to a liberal civilization that always, and usually intelligently, prefers compromise to courage, and morning meetings to evening dares. Even the shoppers and speculators who wager on the future value of a work of art are engaged at best in a kind of mimicry of the original risk. A society of sure things needs a mythology of long shots. To trust in luck is to be courageous, and courage, the one essential virtue, on which all others depend, is also the one ambiguous virtue, since it is morally neutral: jerks have it as often as gentlemen.
"Some stories in history we want to have neatly finished; some we like to have always in play. We accept without too much trouble the ambiguity of the old and new stories because they add up to something similar in the end. Van Gogh's ear makes its claim on the world's attention because it reminds us that on the outer edge of art there is madness to pity, meanness to deplore, and courage to admire, and we can't ever quite keep them from each other. Gauguin was a miserable moral gambler, and a maker of modernism; van Gogh was a self-mutilating madman, and a poet of all the visions. We accept an ambiguity in the story of van Gogh's ear because the act is itself ambiguous.
"It's true that the moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that's the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they're not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life."
Monday, December 21, 2009
MoC Year-End
I've more or less polished off a spate of work deadlines for the pre-New Year holiday stretch, so I can devote a few minutes to posting something — an overview, essentially, of what we've released on MoC over the course of the October to December timeline of this past year. But first, I'd like to tip the cursor toward Home Cinema Choice magazine in the UK as grateful acknowledgement for their having voted Masters of Cinema "DVD Label of the Year" in the publication's current issue — also, for their nod to our Blu-ray edition of F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans as "Best Remastering." On top of that, an equally flattered and collective thank-you goes out to Time Out London, who voted our editions of Maurice Pialat's La Gueule ouverte (which is accompanied by nine other Pialat films) and Al Reinert's For All Mankind as the #1 and #2 DVD releases of the year, respectively.
Soul Power [2008] by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions. Levy-Hinte's film assembles 93 minutes of the 16mm footage shot in 1974 by cameramen Albert Maysles, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, and Roderick Young to chronicle the Zaire '74 concert event organized in Kinshasa in tandem with the (subsequently postponed) Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle." A documentary, not a 'doc' (no voice-over narration, talking-head interviews, or animated-interlude window-dressing to muddy proceedings), that follows 'classical' narrative structure: there's a beginning and an end, but also the "will-they-pull-it-off-in-time?" second-act. A lynch-pin of modern television 'reality' programming, the device resides in Soul Power as a document of the logistics, imprecision, and magnitude of the task of concert-stage assembly. Made possible by cigarettes and rotary phones, Levy-Hinte's picture serves as aide-mémoire for a period when have-at-it haircuts and brute determination outshone 'organization' and the other panic-structures that would calcify into the slickly efficient, sedately productive, and woefully unobstreperous Modern. Included on-disc: an exclusive video-interview with Levy-Hinte; thirty minutes of deleted behind-the-scenes footage; more Zaire '74 performances by artists that appear (and do not) in the feature; the original theatrical trailer; and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired. A full-color, production-still-heavy booklet contains a director's statement from Levy-Hinte and a selection of remarks by Zaire '74-affiliated personages. Ali: "I've never felt so free in my life."
For All Mankind [1989] by Al Reinert, available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions. More footage largely enabled by Marlboros and rotary cradles, the shoestring props that catapulted man from his planet, onward through bent and vacuous space to the surface of another world for the first time documented and circulated on film. The Foley-enhanced soundtrack and several Brian Eno cuts lend a redundancy to the miracle; these are already, after all, the awesome images of the inconceivable event. (With the shots taken of nearby UFOs having been, conceivably, suppressed.) The film is maybe just as absorbing in its capacity as a study of the transition from Amateur to Professional and back, what with its context of the event that made a neophyte of every participant. Training is everything: new areas of expertise had to open, new specialties become concentrated, anyone can do anything with time and practice and steady application of the faculties. The honky-tonk loving Texas boys had to learn to operate 16mm cameras. This is the best Howard Hawks film never made by Howard Hawks, and it makes me wish he'd lived to direct The Right Stuff even though I've never seen the thing. Included on-disc: an audio commentary featuring Al Reinert and Eugene A. Cernan, the last man to have set foot on the moon to date; a making-of documentary featurette; a gallery of astronaut Alan Bean's artwork with commentary and a filmed introduction; liftoff footage and various audio clips courtesy of NASA; and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired (in addition to optional on-screen identification of the film's presiding figures). A full-color booklet includes essays by Reinert, a new interview with Brian Eno, and a bevy of production-stills and NASA imagery.
A double-feature/double-disc set containing Phantom [1922] and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs [The Grand Duke's Finances, 1924], both by F. W. Murnau. This coupling constitutes the pair of oft-overlooked Murnau works that happened to fall between the landmark Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens. and Der letzte Mann.
Phantom: A Germanic dream-rhapsody replete with 'suffusion': spilling forth l'amour fou and a woman in a double-role, Murnau teases out a template for both Vertigo and Eyes Wide Shut then carpetbombs the chamber with Thea von Harbou intertitles. It's an unusual and key work in the master's output, best viewed in the company of Lieder or Satie.
Die Finanzen des Großherzogs: One of the films about which almost everything that's ever been written in the out-of-print survey works or Internet message-board hiccups has turned out to be merciful hogwash. Sprightly-spry (an opposite of lowering Phantom) and sunbeam-dappled (an opposite of muslin-maculate Herr Tartüff.), Murnau's most undervalued gem has less to do with the vicissitudes of an audit than the ministrations of would-be parlor buccaneers. This is the most complete extant version of Murnau's stab at the serial adventurer — albeit one conceived as a single episode for feature-length. Recommendations for musical accompaniment: anything by Mulatu Astatqé, or Annie's "The Breakfast Song" set on repeat.
Both films include the original German intertitles (reconstructed), with optional English subtitles. Also on the Finanzen disc: a feature-length audio commentary by the engaging David Kalat. A 40-page booklet comes with the set, and features a new essay by Janet Bergstrom, titled "Murnau at the Crossroads: Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs" — the first extensive critical and historical treatment of both films, supplemented by numerous frames from the features. Also herein: a slew of publicity stills and collateral from the time of release of both productions.
It was a long-time dream of ours to bring together for a boxset the rights-scattered three films in Lang's "Mabuse" trilogy, and this past year we were finally able to do so via The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Boxset, with the pictures appearing in their integral, restored forms.
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler., 1922]: The four-and-a-half-hour dexter/sinister silent epic that owes as much to Louis Feuillade as Norbert Jacques — aside from the resurrectional structure, the heavy reliance upon the 'alcove room' (in addition to Feuillade cf. Lubitsch's Das fidele Gefängnis): the cubby punched non-periodically throughout the movie's temporal progression for the sake of secreting not scumbag-magician Mabuse but waxen moody toad von Wenk whose bodily procedural demeanor itself suctions lacunae out of accepted human vitality. (Lang provides the reverse-process a few years later with the character of Lohmann in M and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse.) Probably FL's most pornographic event, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. does something with Gertrude Welker's Dusy von Told that both can and cannot be sanitarily countenanced. Soundtrack recommended is La Mar Enfortuna's Conviviencia.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933]: One of the ones. Breakdown to the max, 1.19. Quintessence of paranoia film, Mabuse movie, makeshift-escape-piece ("against all odds"). An obvious double-feature with The Wizard of Oz, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse packs its witchcraft more densely, an absolute erasure of King Vidor's virtues. It's also the apotheosis of Langian enchaînement, which a keen spectator in '33 might have already felt fully activated and ritualized for M. The director will come back to the linking technique effortlessly in —
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, 1960]: The last Fritz Lang film — the one that outside of Testament or Die Nibelungen or Spione or M perhaps makes 'best' on the promise of the revival one-sheets for any uninitiated (including myself in 1995) of what the essence of the Fritz-Lang-Film will muster. If the opening titles had been the only finished element of the picture, they alone would have sufficed as the closure of the circle, or dilation of the pupil. Incredibly (incredibly only because things hardly ever work out for the happier) we have an entire movie, and one that needs to be presented as one-third of a triple-feature that includes Hitchcock's Psycho and Renoir's Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier — les trois films gris.
Included across all four discs: new and absorbing and exclusive feature-length audio commentaries for each film by David Kalat. On the Spieler release: three Transit Film-produced featurettes surveilling the '00s musical score affixed to the film; the Norbert Jacques lineage; and Mabuse-motifs. On the 1000 Augen release: a 2002 video interview by Uwe Huber with star Wolfgang Preiss, in addition to the alternative ending to the film taken from an original French-release print — which extends the duration of the last scene beyond the customary fade-to-black and sheds new dark on the heroine's fate. (It's never been clear whether this constituted Lang's "integral vision" for the close of the picture; in anticipation of the Nibelungen restoration, we might now take the opportunity to coin the phrase "Kriemhild's spear.") A 32-page booklet for Spieler includes an English-translation-from-the-French of Lang's 1924 lecture "Kitsch: Sensation-Culture and Film", along with excerpts of Lang remarks across the years. A 32-page booklet for Testament includes "The Silences of Mabuse", the major portion of a chapter in the great 1982 La Voix au cinéma by Michel Chion in Claudia Gorbman's translation, along with more Lang remark-excerpts. A 36-page booklet for 1000 Augen presents "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey", a new piece by David Cairns about Lang's toy chimpanzee Peter; more Lang-remarks still about the film; and a Lotte Eisner excerpt about the filmmaker's final, unrealized projects — a classification that sadly incorporates the biggie re: L S D. Needless to say all three booklets also contain a host of frame reproductions, production-stills, and then-contemporary marketing bric-à-brac; a note from Lang's friend Eleanor Rosé to the director's longtime partner Lily Latté at the time of his 1976 death closes things.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
