Cabin in the Sky

Une cabane du Ciel

                                         

Vincente Minnelli's controversial first film Cabin in the Sky [1943] combines the Negro spiritual and the comedy juxtaposed somewhere between self-empowerment and minstrelsy. As Glenn Kenny writes in his fine capsule of the new Warner Blu-ray:

"The spectacle of Black excellence is gorgeously enveloping, but one never quite escapes the “but still…” feeling about the whole thing. That said, Minnelli was about as enlightened as white studio directors at MGM got in this era, and as dicey as the musical’s book may be (pardon the pun), the camera treatment of the performers is never less than square and appreciative. This is a fancy way of saying Minnelli demonstrates a form of anti-racism by shooting this cast as beautifully as any other ensemble in his filmography (see for instance the beautiful crane from the dance floor to immaculate Duke Ellington at the piano at in the nightclub scene in the last third). “Bogus but rather entertaining” James Baldwin said of this and Stormy Weather — they had, he stated, the advantage over similarly pitched fare of allowing the Black viewer to “at least […] listen to the music.” "

Cabin in the Sky lends Black audiences a kind of pandered-to vision for aspiration (avoid the devil's temptation; make it to heaven, that great cabin in the sky); other specifically white audiences can “relate” by easing into the mythic and back-patting runtime.

Minnelli begins his career in cinema with this film, after having directed the property to great success on the Broadway stage,— subsequently, recruited to adapt it by the head of MGM's musical division Arthur Freed with the provision that he himself direct. But Minnelli was, to put it mildly, a strange bird. I'd characterize his persona and psychology as "italo" — Italian-American, mostly queer, powdered face, svengali to Judy Garland with whom he later fathered Liza Minnelli. He was an outsider among insiders, and with Cabin in the Sky and presumably good intention, directed a 100% Black ensemble. A romance of poverty, Cabin in the Sky evinces from the get-go Minnelli as an art-director extraordinaire; his stage adaptations bring the stage to you, and not vice-versa.

All said, the film is a worthy fixture in the history of American cinema, with Lena Horne appearing at full-vixen-level command, and Louis Armstrong bringing on the exhibit of an ur-Tracy Morgan, alongside Duke Ellington and a small band. •

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Rat Film

Why, You No-Good Dirty –

The first feature-length work from Theo Anthony, Rat Film [2016] strikes me as one of the great films of the last ten years. Fabulous comprehensive essay in the booklet accompanying the new Memory release on Blu-ray by none other than Baltimore soldier-of-cinema and movie ambassador Eric Hatch, who in a cogent passage writes of the film's hometown premiere at the refurbished (albeit currently shuttered again) Parkway: "an auditorium that visibly preserved multiple layers of decades-past grandeur and decline while feeding present-day gentrification discussions only made more palpable the film's investigative power. ... continually finds new points of view from which to ponder rats, each sparking inquiries into much larger issues." Among these one must obviously count Baltimore's burgeoning rat population; the poverty line; the racial and economic gerrymandering of districts based on class variations; the preponderance of nooses and multiple echoes of their shape and knots; real vs. virtual spaces from the pre-tech-era nevertheless (tunnels and alleys and crawlspaces and backyard-jungle trails) to the present and beyond; and... in moments, hypnosis.... 

Hatch points out the film's "formal risks" and this is no joke: the Google Street View-sourced replication of the city on auto-glide, the opening of the cosmos and the abyss sighted past missing polygons and textures absent in the would-be congruity of an e-Baltimore simulacrum... virus evident in the presence of the disease-ridden rats and geo-re-spatialization clawing at the barrier of Utopia.Two domestics in their owner's living room attempt to grip up or down on the fabric of his clothes, as he sits in this pose on the sofa, his eyes staring directly into the lens. This portraiture interlude might sit clever and stupid in the work of a lesser filmmaker; Rat Film, on the contrary, provides us such moments to ponder the complexity inherent to point-of-view. •

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Writings at Cinemasparagus about the films of Theo Anthony:

Chop My Money [2015]

Peace in the Absence of War [2016]

Rat Film [2016]

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Peace in the Absence of War

Baltimore 2015, 4/27 – 5/2, Encompassing May Day

Baltimore 2015, a few days between the end of April and the start of le joli mai. A mass gathering in a public space hosts an ongoing parade... or a peaceful demonstration? A loudspeaker calls for a celebration free of political trappings or the regular speechifying. (This 'means well.') Police or National Guard are on hand to keep the peace, so to speak — how far we've come in the near decade since this documentation, in that the armed authorities of Theo Anthony's 2016 film look only lightly suited-up pre-Labor Day for potential action/reaction. You can view Anthony's film (5 minutes in length) at his site here, or as an inclusion on the new Memory Blu-ray release of his next picture, the opus Rat Film. •

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Writings at Cinemasparagus about the films of Theo Anthony:

Chop My Money [2015]

Peace in the Absence of War [2016]

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Elvis

"Elvis Was a Hero to Most"

I shared some of the Cinephile-Rock shock when Shout! Factory's Shout Select line bugled a new restoration on Blu-ray of the near-3-hour 1979 made-for-hire TV-movie: Elvis — directed by none-other than Master of Horror John Carpenter, who had just achieved brilliant success with his blockbuster of one year prior, Halloween. Supplements on-disc explain the circumstances around the project's genesis. 

So: Why Elvis? I mean to ask, not so much, why did Presley receive (or project) the mania specific to his prime, but rather, aside from the gyrating pelvis and backbeat knee-bends: Why Elvis?  The black-mascara'd, fairy'ish alien ready to reintroduce (if only subconsciously) a strain of dandyism unique to our American gossamer: a natural outcome following the century's breakthroughs in the novel, poetry, painting, jazz music, and a general avant-garde. The film exists consciously to capitalize not only on "the King"'s 1977 passing but also on the success of 1978's The Buddy Holly Story by Steve Rash.

Carpenter's direction / mise-en-scène in Elvis registers as 'flat' in a good way: Carpenterian straightforwardness, not to a fault. Part of the reason I love John Carpenter comes down to his tendency, or method, of burying the metaphors within the symbols — like, say, in the pleasurable but admittedly demanding works of Wallace Stevens.

The Kurt Russell-starring Elvis is oddly moving, in a way that Baz Luhrmann's recent Elvis vehicle of 2022 can't possibly match given, as it were, the fact that Luhrmann's movie was developed in pure bad faith. Carpenter's version exists now as a picture far superior to the latter-day trash-can Baz-baroque, even on the Russell-level alone: he incarnates the King magnificently, and reminds us just how underrated this performer, a Carpenter fétiche, has been to the mass and cinephile populations over the years. But I could have sworn upon even the opening hour of the film that Russell was doing his own singing vocals, so great is the looping and syncing of the actual and uncanny Ronnie McDowell's belting pitch-perfection. 

Let's refresh our minds with a recent photo of Baz Luhrmann, who in one second given the opportunity would make a musical number out of Oswald's assassination at the pistol of Jack Ruby. •

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More writing on the films of John Carpenter at Cinemasparagus:

Elvis [1979]

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