Cinemasparagus

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Cleopatra

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

Cleopatra by Cecil B. DeMille, 1934:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Army of Shadows

The Celibates

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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:

Caught in the Rain

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

Caught in the Rain by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

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

Caught in the Rain by Charles Chaplin, 1914:

Caught in a Cabaret

Don't Call It Chaplinesque

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

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

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

Twenty Minutes of Love

Charlie at the Wheel

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

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

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

Mabel at the Wheel

"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:

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Vengeance

"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: