Friday, May 30, 2008

Happy 80th, Agnès V.


Une bonne soeur


Today Agnès Varda turns 80. I suppose I don't know how to salute with sufficient gratitude this genius, this sage, who draws inspiration out of every single life's heartbeat — anyone who's seen Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse [The Gleaners and the Gleaness, 2000] or Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse... deux ans après [The Gleaners and the Gleaness... Two Years Later, 2002] or Uncle Yanco [1967] already knows the shape of the jigsaw piece I'm considering. All I can say, maybe, is — Agnès, today I covered my west-facing living room windows in colored Reynolds Wrap because the 2pm-6:30pm hours have been far too white; makeshift gel filters, then, and giant 3D glasses, too. Probably your salute to the sun, Uncle Yanco, was in my mind. And in my heart, as well.

-ck.

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Bientôt sur cet écran, 2008:




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And, in other news:






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Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Bullying Turkey


A Final Fable


"On a farm where life seemed to pass quietly, once upon a time there was a turkey that, exploiting his imposing voice, tyrannized roosters, hens, ducks, geese. All of them, even the cows, were scared of him. He commanded the community ruthlessly. He ruled its life." — So proceeds the opening narration for Rossellini's third fauna-fantasia: The Bullying Turkey [Il tacchino prepotente, 1940].

Il tacchino prepotente [The Bullying Turkey] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:



A peacocking turkey orders around the animals on a square of barnyard — until he's spotted, upon retiring one evening to his residence, "deflating" (molting) into just another sleepy, insignificant thing. The next day, the turkey finds his commands are going unheeded and, in the midst of gobbling orders, he gets slammed unawares by two roosters who, now empowered by a realization of the turkey's prosaic nature, have set forth in desperate attack. Rossellini presents the revolt in a series of incredible, kinetic close-ups of the fray, all intercut with the gaze of the other, passive spectators — the cows, hens, etc.

Il tacchino prepotente [The Bullying Turkey] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:







"He's lost his pretty feathers that gave him such importance. Geese, roosters and hens celebrate the defeat of the oppressor. — And now, as is natural, the roosters direct the life of the chickenyard. And the bullying turkey has become their most humble servant."

One last shot, further imbued with poetic punctuation by step-process into slow-motion (as in the finale of Lively Teresa [La vispa Teresa, 1940]), heralds the ascent of the rooster — a victory for (ostensible) benevolence and, as invocation of the logo of Pathé, a subtle inference that the cinema's transfigurational power might be brought to bear upon a conflict; in the process, might assist in change, even. Transcendence.

Il tacchino prepotente [The Bullying Turkey] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:



Source unknown.



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Photo by CK.



Louis and Philippe, this week at Cannes. (Photographer unknown.)



Photo by CK.



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An excerpt from Philippe Garrel et al's press conference at the premiere of La Frontière de l'aube [Frontier of Dawn] at Cannes this week: here.

And an excerpt from Abel Ferrara et al's press conference at the premiere of Chelsea on the Rocks at Cannes this week: here. And a roundtable with Ferrara and company for a Cannes magazine-show here.

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Photo by CK.



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Lively Teresa


Planet Earth Year Zero


Named after a common Italian children's song, and shot by Mario Bava, this second (surviving) film in Rossellini's series of documentary-essays on the lives of creatures employs the same kind of revelatory, Cocteau-esque narration that the director used in Undersea Fantasy [Fantasia sottomarina, 1938] to invite, here as there, a fairy-tale scenario to enter the images. The opening titles of Lively Teresa [La vispa Teresa, 1940] even seem to foreshadow Cocteau's later cinema...

La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:



Le Testament d'Orphée, ou Ne me demandez pas pourquoi [The Testament of Orpheus, or: Don't Ask Me Why] by Jean Cocteau, 1959:



Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen] by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963:



Prière pour refuzniks (1) [Prayer for Refuzniks (1)] by Jean-Luc Godard, 2006:




A utopia: bugs and gastropods live in the vicinity of one another, and abundantly. A little girl, a human, has invaded their field and snatched a butterfly out of the air; she has it between her thumb and forefinger, pinched at the wings. And so: "Beetles, scarabs, weevils spread the word and all together cry help. [...] From every hidden forest corner reinforcements rush, and each urges the other to follow. [...] Ranks thicken. Warcamps form boldly." As Rossellini goes down to the level of the microcosmos, speed seems also to decrease, in illustration of the elastic and proportional relationship between space and time; as though this slowing-down, this act of pausing to magnify, could alone accelerate a harmony for all beings.

La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:



Throughout my life, I've known a practical parade of T(h)eresas; in first- or middle-name position, the appellation is recurrent enough to assume a mercurial, maybe mythical / maybe mystical, significance chez Keller. Funny that the "lively" one of Rossellini's film is presented as an almost exclusively static entity — but in apportioning this stasis across each shot that features Teresa, Rossellini reconceives his human as something from Planet Olympus, whose monumental grandeur alone (at the level of the insects' eyes and that of our own as spectators), never mind external action, emanates a challenge for the microcosmos.

La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:






Teresa can be said to be "lively," in fact, in only one shot: a long-shot of her entrance onto the scene of the dispute. But even then Teresa is fixed compositionally at the same spot within the frame, like some axiom, or axis. The camera pans in perfect synchronicity with her gambol / act-of-war.

La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:





Casus belli. The entire bug-kingdom bombards her white-bright shoes, which nonetheless remain immobile. No girl's feet actually fill them, of course; the result is as beautiful and surreal a sequence of images as Rossellini (oh, eminent "realist"!) has ever filmed. Over this segment flows Rossellini's narration: "No-one dares venture onto the girl's legs. The warm white skin disgusts everyone."

La vispa Teresa [Lively Teresa] by Roberto Rossellini, 1940:





Tune in to Roberto Rossellini's India, matri bhumi [1959] for the exciting conclusion!!!

Photo by CK.



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Undersea Fantasy


In the Clear with Rossellini


Roberto Rossellini's first film is a work of deceptive transparency. In its initial moments the film appears to be a documentary about underwater, even deep-sea, species. But soon after, the narration, in the manner of Cocteau, unleashes a powerful "dual reality" onto the images, imbuing them not only with a narrative logic, but a kind of magic. (Let's be clear, for Rossellini there are basically no precedents; or about those that can at least "be said to" exist this filmmaker would always be willing in turn to rejoinder, and pointedly, that the material influences for any film of merit hail from life itself and the powers of the observer; correspondences between films might exist — but why shouldn't they, since audiences and filmmakers are all, ostensibly, alive.) Magic always resides within reality; maybe it's better to say Rossellini "imbues" less than he unlocks. So I ask, at no-one in particular: Is the difference in method (imbue vs. unlock) why Rossellini (or Vigo, or Renoir) have, insanely, been perpetually categorized as (excruciatingly loaded, extraordinarily wish-fulfilling and villainous phrase) "master realists," as though they were closer in form and temperament to the aggressions of a Chernyshevsky than to the "specific details" of a Nabokov? As though Picasso's famous assertion — "I do not seek — I find" — were, after all, too "oracular" (read as: foolish, mad, cavalier, unsuitable for We 2.0) and, therefore, too domineering in service of the cause of the Individual (too self-involved!), rather than that of the marxist-christianic Social Fabric (just communist/grown-up enough!)? It is my belief that whenever imagination and freedom stand as the core precepts of one's aesthetic, no intrusions (invited or repressed) of "political" or "social" "realities," either as plot-element, backdrop, or general milieu, can grant Possession and Control of that work to the envious workaday critics, hack bloggers, or majordomo Ideologians. All great artists know, and from head to toe, that the big picture is the Individual and his interior perceptions of the outside world — and that artistic generation is simply the mimetic representation, mise en abyme, of this graceful essence and its occasionally ancillary residue (i.e., external action). For Rossellini, social realities exist in counterpoint to knowledge and fantasy, and Rossellini's Undersea Fantasy [Fantasia sottomarina, 1938] is an essay upon man's only material reality: his origin, and the circumstances of his end.

Tag Gallagher: "[The film] was shot in an aquarium on the porch of [Rossellini's] cottage in Ladispoli, twenty kilometers up the coast from Rome, in the summer of 1938. The director filled dead fish with lead and manipulated them with long hair from his wife's head."

Needles(s) to say: all instances of the "LUCE" logo at the top-right of the frames below are not native to the film's negative, but were imposed on the master for the film's Italian DVD release, which is the source for my personal copy of the film.


Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:




So the setting for Undersea Fantasy's action is neither actual undersea environs or ocean floor, nor that kind of aquarium staging wherein the camera floats in some yellow cage amid zigzag schools of glittering fish. From Rossellini-Film-1: "neorealism." The 'fourth wall' is re-established, is not retractable; we're only made aware it's there at all at the astonishing moment when the predatory octopus's tentacles lash forward at the camera — and its suction-cups splatter in attachment to what we now realize is a glass wall positioned between the plateaus on the inside and the camera on the outer side — not quite 'our, the spectators', side'. For there exists an envelope of non-aquatic space between the onscreen set and the camera, which, in the battle sequence centered around the octopus's sudden and shocking circumscription, reinforces the Rossellinian concern of an ideal freedom being hemmed in by an absolute, initially invisible boundary of control.

Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:



In the narration's 'anthropomorphisization' of the sea-animals and its reconstitution of many of our own movements within the events of this small marine kingdom (the twitch of a lobster's antennae are said here to emit radio signals for aid in the fight against the predator; a carefully constructed montage bolsters the soundtrack's relation of the betrayals and loneliness afflicting a lovelorn fish), Rossellini leads us, implicitly, undidactically, to consider nothing less than man's aquatic origins, our collective crawl out of the primordial filth, and in so doing he proclaims our daily struggles as embodying stuff already-imbued with the primacy of Truth. And in filming along the way the combat that ensues between the terrorizing octopus and the ingenious and resistant fish, Rossellini crafts as elegant a depiction as any of the notion that "man," to use the words of Orson Welles in that Dick Cavett interview, "is a crazy animal." Love, jealousy, hate, determination, obsession, ambivalence, compulsion, contradiction, redemption, transcendence: We'd do well to recall that The Beatles' album Help! was initially intended to be released with the title Eight Arms to Hold You...

Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:






Resistance against the confines of control finds its correlative in another undersea filmmaker: Jean Painlevé, who six years after Rossellini's Undersea Fantasy would direct with Jean Grémillon the first film on the 'overgrounding' of the French Resistance, when Paris was seized back at the end of the war from the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. Organized from footage shot with handheld camera in the heat of the conflict by an ad hoc crew, and created as documentary revelation for an international audience, the film, Le Journal de la Résistance [1944] (narration in English, and French title retained for its screenings in the UK, US, Canada, etc.), was recently released on Criterion's DVD edition of Melville's Army of Shadows [L'Armée des ombres, 1969] — with little indication on the disc's packaging of its presence, and even littler fanfare from critics over such. As these frames attest, Painlevé's and Grémillon's picture is a remarkable document that deserves at least as large a portion of the public as greeted the celebrated re-emergence of Melville's (equally excellent) film.

Le Journal de la Résistance by Jean Painlevé and Jean Grémillon, 1944:








Rossellini, proving himself a thinker of maximally poetic and imaginative breadth, even uses his film to contemplate the seldom-considered reality of animals in the wild suffering accidental deaths.

Fantasia sottomarina [Undersea Fantasy] by Roberto Rossellini, 1938:





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Thursday, May 15, 2008

Gego / Gertrud Goldschmidt


June Wayne + image chokes us up

cf. Virgin Insanity: "Bright New Golden Day" (Demo) (from Toad Frog and Fish Friends [1971])

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Monday, May 12, 2008

ENTR'ACTE


Four American Masters


Abel Ferrara talks about John Cassavetes at the September 2007 press-conference for the New York Film Festival screening of Ferrara's Go Go Tales [2007], with cast-members Willem Dafoe and Sylvia Miles, and Richard Peña —



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John Cassavetes, with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, on The Dick Cavett Show in September 1970 (parts 3 and 4 out of four), promoting Cassavetes' soon-to-be-released Husbands [1970] —





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Orson Welles, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in July 1970 —



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Jerry Lewis, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show in January 1973; and on Later with Bob Costas in June 1993 —













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