Tuesday, January 31, 2017
031 - Shadows, 1959, United States. Dir. John Cassavetes.
John Cassavetes was an actor's director.
He created spaces, atmospheres, in which the actors could work, and then allowed them to explore.
He gave them the freedom to develop their characters.
He would improvise together with them and then film what came out of it. Then he would write a script. They would memorize their lines and film it again, while retaining the improvisational freedom they had before. They are now saying written lines but continuing to improvise their emotions and movements.
In the case of Shadows, his first film, he tried it the first way and screened it. The results were poor, so he went back and did it again, the second way. This developed into a technique.
The acting community has a word for this kind of approach. Take the noun workshop and turn it into a verb. To workshop. The actor engages in a process called workshopping. The actors workshop their characters to discover their objectives and relationships. The scene unfolds organically from that.
His wife, Gena Rowlands, called it "the pleasure of discovery."
Cassavetes was a successful actor in Hollywood.
We will see him as an actor in The Killers (1964) and Rosemary's Baby (1968). He also played in films such as The Dirty Dozen (1968) and Two-Minute Warning (1976), among many others.
However, he felt creatively stifled.
The way most movies are made--and it is still this way today--the director sets up the shot according to the lighting and camera angles first. Then he establishes marks that the actor must hit at a given moment. The actor must hit his mark at the given time while making it seem natural and spontaneous.
There is nothing wrong with doing it this way. In fact, it provides greater creative control for the director and precision for the other departments. Great actors hit their marks every day, and they make it seem natural and spontaneous.
However, Cassavetes wanted to explore the possibilities that might arise from reversing the order of priority. Instead of making the actors conform to the positions of the lights and camera, what if he made the lights and camera conform to the positions of the actors?
This meant that he had to create more generic lighting rather than specific lighting. He could not place a catch light in an actress's eyes or a hair light on the outlines of her head. Rather, he had to light the room and then allow the actors to roam about within that space.
This also limited him to using mostly a camera on a tripod in long takes of master shots or else a handheld camera following the actors around.
But it was a way of doing things, and it opened up a new world for actors and filmmakers to follow. The American independent cinema world, and in turn the international independent cinema world, owes a Cassavetes the honor of its gratitude.
In 1956 he was teaching an improvisational acting technique at his school, The Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop, and out of that workshop came the film Shadows.
Shadows takes place in New York City during the Beat Generation. It follows three African-American siblings--two brothers and a sister--as they go about their lives. One of the brothers is a jazz singer. The other brother is a jazz trumpeter. The singer, Hugh, is the only dark-skinned member of the family. The other two, Ben and Lelia, are light-skinned enough that strangers do not always know that they are African-American.
This makes a difference in 1959.
The sister dates three different men in the course of the film, two white and one black. One of the white men balks when he discovers that she has a black brother. This is the moment that came out of the improvisation exercise at the workshop.
Shadows fits in the cinema verité tradition. Watching it feels like watching a documentary, or better yet, like watching life happen spontaneously through a hidden camera.
The scenes are mostly ensemble, meaning that multiple people may be talking and moving at the same time, as in real life.
Shadows did not find distribution in the United States, but it got accepted into the Venice Film Festival. And won. It was then brought back to America as an import!
The actors who worked with Cassavetes speak of him in glowing terms. They love him. They talk of him as viewing everyone as a jewel, of being interested in love, and exploring through his filmmaking only love.
In the accompanying documentary, Peter Faulk states, "He was a wild animal, but at the same time the family was central to his universe."
The actress who plays the sister in Shadows, Lelia Goldoni, adds a beautiful story about him.
She says that he told his father he wanted to be an actor.
She asked him, "Did your father fight you about being an actor?" Cassavetes said, No.
His father said, "That's a very noble thing to do. But do you know what kind of responsibility that is? You are going to have to be truthful to each of those character's human natures."
Goldoni concludes, "He listened to his Daddy."
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Monday, January 30, 2017
030 - Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, United States. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick.
Monday, January 30, 2017
030 - Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, United States. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick.
Ah, the sweet smell of success.
Fecal. Squalid. Begrimed.
Those gangsters sure do know how to break people.
Not because you have crossed them. Not because you are competing with them.
But just because you, my sister, are dating someone I do not want you to date.
Or because you, my minion, were supposed to break up my sister's relationship and you did not do it.
How dare you.
I will now destroy you.
Wait.
What did you say?
Gangsters?
These are not gangsters. No, they are not gangsters. He is not a gangster.
He is a writer. A newspaper columnist.
A newspaper columnist?
A newspaper columnist.
The character of J. J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, loves his sister, a little too much maybe. So he does not want her to be dating jazz musician Steve Dallas.
Sidney Falco is a press agent. He needs Hunsecker to print items that support Falco's clients and help their careers. So Hunsecker uses this need as leverage to maintain power over Falco.
He demands that Falco break up his sister Susan Hunsecker's relationship to Dallas.
But so far Falco has been unable to do it. In fact, Dallas has now proposed to Susan, and they intend to inform J. J. tomorrow morning at breakfast.
So tonight Falco will run around New York City, from club to club, trying to work things out to save his career.
And he will go without an overcoat to keep from having to tip coat-check girls.
My how times have changed.
He will insinuate himself upon Hunsecker to try to get him to understand Falco's situation.
He will go to another newspaper columnist and try to bribe him with his wife to try to get him to print the items that Hunsecker will not print. That man will call his bluff and tell his own wife the dirt in order to remove the leverage.
He will go to yet a third newspaper columnist to see what that will do.
Falco is desperate.
As the evening progresses, Falco will play everyone to set Dallas up in front of Hunsecker so that Susan herself will leave him. He does a great job of it.
But then Susan will set Falco up so that Hunsecker will think ill of him and crush him.
Everyone depends on each other. Everyone is trying to destroy one another.
The stakes seem so low to us--who is dating whom--but to them the stakes are life and death. It is the politics of high school gossip in the hands of New York social climbers--who aspire to be power brokers.
This is starting to sound like an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about life in the Jazz Age.
But it is a Clifford Odets screenplay about life in the 1950s.
Some things just seem to come back around.
This film is shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe. The lights are light and the darks are dark, and the edges are as sharp as a paper cut.
Howe worked from the 1910s to the 1970s, beating out even Alfred Hitchcock for longevity. He was born in 1899 in Canton (Guangzhou), China, and he grew up in Pasco, Washington. At around 12 he bought a Kodak Brownie camera, and by the time he was 18 he was working for Cecil B. DeMille. He solved the problem of getting blue eyes to register on film, so he became the photographer that all blue-eyed stars would flock to. He would go on to shoot more than 130 movies and win two Oscars. He was the embodiment of the Great American Dream.
Meanwhile, the film was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, whom you know for practically nothing else, except perhaps for The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. In all he directed maybe eight pictures. He is now considered a great director with a sure hand, but Sweet Smell of Success was such a financial disaster that his career faded and he moved into teaching.
What makes this picture sing is the acting and chemistry of Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster. Tony plays the high-strung, fast-talking, nervous-energy, pretty boy for which we already know him, but Burt Lancaster plays against type, restraining all the virile strength of his large athletic body into a bespectacled, buttoned-up time-bomb, slowly ticking and destined to blow.
Odets has given them delicious lines to say, long lines filled with the wit and cunning of a top playwright, which they speak quickly and effortlessly as if seated at the Algonquin.
The film moves at a fast pace and is driven by the look of the city lights and the sound of a hot jazz score.
When you see the name Hunsecker, you may think of the Coen Brothers' 1994 comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. You can look up what influence this film may have had on their film.
This film was produced by Burt Lancaster with Harold Hecht (not Ben) and James Hill, with the unfortunate name Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions. The goal seems to have been to do for newspaper columnist Walter Winchell what Orson Welles did for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and others.
In an age without newspapers, it all now seems so historical to us.
My how times have changed.
030 - Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, United States. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick.
Ah, the sweet smell of success.
Fecal. Squalid. Begrimed.
Those gangsters sure do know how to break people.
Not because you have crossed them. Not because you are competing with them.
But just because you, my sister, are dating someone I do not want you to date.
Or because you, my minion, were supposed to break up my sister's relationship and you did not do it.
How dare you.
I will now destroy you.
Wait.
What did you say?
Gangsters?
These are not gangsters. No, they are not gangsters. He is not a gangster.
He is a writer. A newspaper columnist.
A newspaper columnist?
A newspaper columnist.
The character of J. J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, loves his sister, a little too much maybe. So he does not want her to be dating jazz musician Steve Dallas.
Sidney Falco is a press agent. He needs Hunsecker to print items that support Falco's clients and help their careers. So Hunsecker uses this need as leverage to maintain power over Falco.
He demands that Falco break up his sister Susan Hunsecker's relationship to Dallas.
But so far Falco has been unable to do it. In fact, Dallas has now proposed to Susan, and they intend to inform J. J. tomorrow morning at breakfast.
So tonight Falco will run around New York City, from club to club, trying to work things out to save his career.
And he will go without an overcoat to keep from having to tip coat-check girls.
My how times have changed.
He will insinuate himself upon Hunsecker to try to get him to understand Falco's situation.
He will go to another newspaper columnist and try to bribe him with his wife to try to get him to print the items that Hunsecker will not print. That man will call his bluff and tell his own wife the dirt in order to remove the leverage.
He will go to yet a third newspaper columnist to see what that will do.
Falco is desperate.
As the evening progresses, Falco will play everyone to set Dallas up in front of Hunsecker so that Susan herself will leave him. He does a great job of it.
But then Susan will set Falco up so that Hunsecker will think ill of him and crush him.
Everyone depends on each other. Everyone is trying to destroy one another.
The stakes seem so low to us--who is dating whom--but to them the stakes are life and death. It is the politics of high school gossip in the hands of New York social climbers--who aspire to be power brokers.
This is starting to sound like an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about life in the Jazz Age.
But it is a Clifford Odets screenplay about life in the 1950s.
Some things just seem to come back around.
This film is shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe. The lights are light and the darks are dark, and the edges are as sharp as a paper cut.
Howe worked from the 1910s to the 1970s, beating out even Alfred Hitchcock for longevity. He was born in 1899 in Canton (Guangzhou), China, and he grew up in Pasco, Washington. At around 12 he bought a Kodak Brownie camera, and by the time he was 18 he was working for Cecil B. DeMille. He solved the problem of getting blue eyes to register on film, so he became the photographer that all blue-eyed stars would flock to. He would go on to shoot more than 130 movies and win two Oscars. He was the embodiment of the Great American Dream.
Meanwhile, the film was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, whom you know for practically nothing else, except perhaps for The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit. In all he directed maybe eight pictures. He is now considered a great director with a sure hand, but Sweet Smell of Success was such a financial disaster that his career faded and he moved into teaching.
What makes this picture sing is the acting and chemistry of Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster. Tony plays the high-strung, fast-talking, nervous-energy, pretty boy for which we already know him, but Burt Lancaster plays against type, restraining all the virile strength of his large athletic body into a bespectacled, buttoned-up time-bomb, slowly ticking and destined to blow.
Odets has given them delicious lines to say, long lines filled with the wit and cunning of a top playwright, which they speak quickly and effortlessly as if seated at the Algonquin.
The film moves at a fast pace and is driven by the look of the city lights and the sound of a hot jazz score.
When you see the name Hunsecker, you may think of the Coen Brothers' 1994 comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. You can look up what influence this film may have had on their film.
This film was produced by Burt Lancaster with Harold Hecht (not Ben) and James Hill, with the unfortunate name Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions. The goal seems to have been to do for newspaper columnist Walter Winchell what Orson Welles did for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and others.
In an age without newspapers, it all now seems so historical to us.
My how times have changed.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
029 - Bigger Than Life, 1956, United States. Dir. Nicholas Ray.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
029 - Bigger Than Life, 1956, United States. Dir. Nicholas Ray.
Filmed in CINEMASCOPE!
Aspect ratio 2:55:1. That means really WIDE. Almost twice as wide as the standard Academy Ratio.
In glorious Color by De Luxe.
These are the specs for BIG PICTURES.
Epics!
The Bridge on the River Kwai. A Farewell to Arms. The Robe. The Egyptian. The Virgin Queen. The Gladiators. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Westerns!
River of No Return. Ride Lonesome. Broken Lance. The Burning Hills. Jubal. The Man from Laramie.
Big Studio Romantic Comedies and Dramas!
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Pillow Talk. How to Marry a Millionaire.
Grand Musicals!
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It's Always Fair Weather. Brigadoon. Oklahoma! Silk Stockings. April Love. Carmen Jones. There's No Business Like Show Business.
Action Films and Thrillers!
House of Bamboo. King of the Khyber Rifles. Battle Cry. World Without End. Bad Day at Black Rock.
Intimate Family Dramas About Mental Illness!
Wait.
What?
Intimate family dramas about mental illness. Or more specifically, a small family drama that takes place only inside the schoolroom, the hospital room, and the home, where most of the acting is internal and where the drama focuses on the father's steady decline into psychosis.
You could perform this story as a quiet play on a small stage in a black-box theatre with only 30 seats.
The setting and action are small.
The film is Bigger Than Life.
What a great idea, actually.
Would that more films were made to be presented in such a large format.
After all, this is not television.
This is the movies!
Imagine the emotional impact of a subtle expression in extreme close-up.
Bigger Than Life stars James Mason. You may know him as the bad guy Philip Vandamm, the one who kidnaps Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest, or in a similar kind of role opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict, or as the co-star with Judy Garland in A Star is Born. He also played Captain Nemo in that other CinemaScope picture listed above, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
James Mason is one of those actors whom, once you hear his voice, you want to keep hearing it for a very long time. His voice is made out of maple syrup spiked with bourbon. He does not merely speak. He taps the sap at the sugar shack and drips a slow flow of sweet aromatic maple with a toasted oak aroma, a cereal malt grain, and a brown cinnamon spice.
Thick. Rich. Sweet. And slow.
And what does he say with this rich voice?
He plays schoolteacher Ed Avery, and he begins the film by talking shop, the ordinary daily routine with his colleagues. When he leaves for the day, he goes to his moonlighting job at the cab company. He tells his wife he has a school board meeting. He is ashamed to tell her he works two jobs. He has a spending problem.
The first sign of disease occurs when they have some friends over. He spends time in the kitchen leaning over the refrigerator. He does not feel well. When the evening is over, he complains to his wife that they are dull, all of them, and that they never do anything interesting. Then he falls across the bed.
After being tested at the hospital, he is told that he has a terminal type of inflammation of the arteries and has only months to live. He is prescribed cortisone and suddenly feels great again. He indulges his manic feelings and takes the family out to dinner and on an excessive shopping spree. His own son whispers to his mother that Dad is acting foolishly.
Avery grows dependent on the pills. He begins taking them more frequently than his prescription allows. He reasons that a teacher is a doctor, so he convinces a pharmacist that he is a doctor and begins prescribing more pills for himself.
He grows excessively moodier. He speaks bluntly at the PTA meeting, insulting some of those present and causing them to walk out, while becoming a hero to one parent, who thinks he is the first teacher he has heard to describe things the way they really are.
He begins to push his son, yelling at him, forcing him to practice football during baseball season, and throwing the ball so hard and far that the boy falls and hurts himself in his efforts to catch it, only to be reprimanded all the more.
Avery starts to grow mad, reading the Genesis account of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as some kind of assignment for himself. He goes so far as to raise a pair of scissors above his son in his son's room before the boy escapes.
The film will end either badly or well.
It is an effort to educate the public on the challenges of mental illness and addiction to prescription drugs. And it is sympathetic. It portrays the family and friends as loving and patient.
Jerry Mathers has a great moment in it. He plays one of the school kids. His character Freddie has painted something that looks angry. Avery asks if it is a thunderstorm. He responds defiantly, "This is a man. He's just mad at his mother!" One year later he was starring on television in Leave It to Beaver.
James Mason wanted very much to make this movie, so when the studios balked he produced it himself. Nicholas Ray directed it, just one year after making Rebel Without a Cause.
029 - Bigger Than Life, 1956, United States. Dir. Nicholas Ray.
Filmed in CINEMASCOPE!
Aspect ratio 2:55:1. That means really WIDE. Almost twice as wide as the standard Academy Ratio.
In glorious Color by De Luxe.
These are the specs for BIG PICTURES.
Epics!
The Bridge on the River Kwai. A Farewell to Arms. The Robe. The Egyptian. The Virgin Queen. The Gladiators. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Westerns!
River of No Return. Ride Lonesome. Broken Lance. The Burning Hills. Jubal. The Man from Laramie.
Big Studio Romantic Comedies and Dramas!
Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Pillow Talk. How to Marry a Millionaire.
Grand Musicals!
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It's Always Fair Weather. Brigadoon. Oklahoma! Silk Stockings. April Love. Carmen Jones. There's No Business Like Show Business.
Action Films and Thrillers!
House of Bamboo. King of the Khyber Rifles. Battle Cry. World Without End. Bad Day at Black Rock.
Intimate Family Dramas About Mental Illness!
Wait.
What?
Intimate family dramas about mental illness. Or more specifically, a small family drama that takes place only inside the schoolroom, the hospital room, and the home, where most of the acting is internal and where the drama focuses on the father's steady decline into psychosis.
You could perform this story as a quiet play on a small stage in a black-box theatre with only 30 seats.
The setting and action are small.
The film is Bigger Than Life.
What a great idea, actually.
Would that more films were made to be presented in such a large format.
After all, this is not television.
This is the movies!
Imagine the emotional impact of a subtle expression in extreme close-up.
Bigger Than Life stars James Mason. You may know him as the bad guy Philip Vandamm, the one who kidnaps Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest, or in a similar kind of role opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict, or as the co-star with Judy Garland in A Star is Born. He also played Captain Nemo in that other CinemaScope picture listed above, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
James Mason is one of those actors whom, once you hear his voice, you want to keep hearing it for a very long time. His voice is made out of maple syrup spiked with bourbon. He does not merely speak. He taps the sap at the sugar shack and drips a slow flow of sweet aromatic maple with a toasted oak aroma, a cereal malt grain, and a brown cinnamon spice.
Thick. Rich. Sweet. And slow.
And what does he say with this rich voice?
He plays schoolteacher Ed Avery, and he begins the film by talking shop, the ordinary daily routine with his colleagues. When he leaves for the day, he goes to his moonlighting job at the cab company. He tells his wife he has a school board meeting. He is ashamed to tell her he works two jobs. He has a spending problem.
The first sign of disease occurs when they have some friends over. He spends time in the kitchen leaning over the refrigerator. He does not feel well. When the evening is over, he complains to his wife that they are dull, all of them, and that they never do anything interesting. Then he falls across the bed.
After being tested at the hospital, he is told that he has a terminal type of inflammation of the arteries and has only months to live. He is prescribed cortisone and suddenly feels great again. He indulges his manic feelings and takes the family out to dinner and on an excessive shopping spree. His own son whispers to his mother that Dad is acting foolishly.
Avery grows dependent on the pills. He begins taking them more frequently than his prescription allows. He reasons that a teacher is a doctor, so he convinces a pharmacist that he is a doctor and begins prescribing more pills for himself.
He grows excessively moodier. He speaks bluntly at the PTA meeting, insulting some of those present and causing them to walk out, while becoming a hero to one parent, who thinks he is the first teacher he has heard to describe things the way they really are.
He begins to push his son, yelling at him, forcing him to practice football during baseball season, and throwing the ball so hard and far that the boy falls and hurts himself in his efforts to catch it, only to be reprimanded all the more.
Avery starts to grow mad, reading the Genesis account of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as some kind of assignment for himself. He goes so far as to raise a pair of scissors above his son in his son's room before the boy escapes.
The film will end either badly or well.
It is an effort to educate the public on the challenges of mental illness and addiction to prescription drugs. And it is sympathetic. It portrays the family and friends as loving and patient.
Jerry Mathers has a great moment in it. He plays one of the school kids. His character Freddie has painted something that looks angry. Avery asks if it is a thunderstorm. He responds defiantly, "This is a man. He's just mad at his mother!" One year later he was starring on television in Leave It to Beaver.
James Mason wanted very much to make this movie, so when the studios balked he produced it himself. Nicholas Ray directed it, just one year after making Rebel Without a Cause.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
028 - Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, United States; Dir. Robert Aldrich.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
028 - Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, United States. Dir. Robert Aldrich.
A young woman walks down the middle of the highway in the middle of the night.
She is barefoot and wearing only a trenchcoat.
She appears to be in great distress.
A man speeds down the highway in his speedster in the middle of the night.
He is in a hurry and does not wish to be detained.
The woman stands in front of him.
He sees her in his headlights.
She will not budge.
At the last moment, he must swerve to avoid her.
He stops violently on the side of the road in the brush.
She approaches the car.
He is agitated. He does not wish to pick up a strange woman, even one naked under her trenchcoat. He wishes to be left alone.
But he lets her in. And they drive.
Down the long, dark, two-lane highway in the middle of the night.
The credits begin to scroll. From top to bottom. Reversed. Widening as they come down the screen.
Like white signs painted on the road. Growing larger as they approach.
This is film noir.
Dark. Violent. Hard-boiled. Hard-bitten. Cold.
In 1955 two French film critics (Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton) wrote an essay entitled "Towards a Definition of Film Noir." It is one of the few pieces written about film noir, and calling it film noir, while film noir was still being made. Most commentary came afterwards, looking back. So having anything written about it contemporaneously is important.
In their essay they describe the impact of American films that came to France in the summer of 1946. During World War 2 France did not have access to American films, so when the war was over and they received them, it was like a revelation.
Before the war, they knew American films in the vein of William Wyler, John Ford, and Frank Capra. After the war, they saw "a strange and violent tone, tinged with a unique kind of eroticism." It was as if everything had changed overnight.
The critics list the following films that came to them in a 6-week period:
John Huston's The Maltese Falcon
Otto Preminger's Laura
Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity
Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window
A few months' later, the following films came to them:
Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire
Robert Siodmak's The Killer's
Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake
Charles Vidor's Gilda
Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep
"A new 'series' had emerged in the history of film."
Notice that every film they list is by a different director. The films also represent all the studios.
This new phenomenon was so new, so sudden, and so wide-sweeping, that it caught the world by surprise.
And it is still being talked about.
The film noir period lasted for about twenty years, essentially during the 1940s and 1950s, and then it went away.
Every once in awhile someone will make one again, and it will be referred to as neo noir, but as a movement it is contained in this particular time in history. People are still trying to understand it. And people are still watching these movies.
The films in this canon are some of the most exciting, thrilling, tension-filled movies ever made. They deal with the dark side of human nature, but also with nobility, and they are visually, sometimes breathtakingly, beautiful to behold.
This film, Kiss Me Deadly, was directed by Robert Aldrich. Robert Aldrich is known for films such as The Big Knife (1955), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Longest Yard (1974), and The Frisco Kid (1979). In 1956, Aldrich was photographed on set holding a copy of a book in his hands entitled Panorama du Film Noir. That early. He was onto something.
The driver of our car is Mike Hammer, the hero of a series of books written by Mickey Spillane.
Spillane worked in a genre of novels we call hard-boiled detective fiction. Others include the characters Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler and Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett,
These men were tough, no-nonsense, men of action. Women wanted them. Men wanted to be them.
They took the law into their own hands. They operated by their own code. Sometimes they were modern-day knights. Sometimes they were as lost as the criminals they were fighting.
As Mike Hammer drives our mysterious woman, played by a young Cloris Leachman, she tells him that they are after her. Who? They. And they are after something. What? Something. Later we will call it the Whatsit.
She tells him, "If I happen to make it alive, forget me. But if I don't make it, remember me."
What does that mean?
Maybe our poet Christina Roessetti can help us. Remember?
She does not make it.
Someone pulls out in front of them and causes them to crash.
He wakes up tied up somewhere and witnesses them torturing her.
He passes out again. They push the car over a cliff with the two of them in it.
He wakes up in the hospital room.
What happened?
Who are they?
What is the Whatsit?
He thinks it must be something big. He cannot leave it alone. He must get involved.
His police lieutenant friend takes away his detective license and his gun permit. He is not allowed to get involved.
Do you think that will stop him?
Mike sticks his nose where it does not belong.
And he gets into trouble.
And he goes throughout our city to do it.
Our city.
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula.
Los Angeles.
The home of hardboiled detective fiction. The home of crime dramas. The home of the movies. The home of film noir.
If you know the city, then you will have a feast watching this film. It is a practical tour of the town.
Malibu Canyon, Kaiser Hospital, Olive Street, Flower Street, 10401 Wilshire Boulevard, Rampart, Bunker Hill, Doheny, Cahuenga, Angel's Flight (operating!), Figueroa, the Hollywood Athletic Club, Sunset Blvd.
Yes, Sunset Blvd.
Some things just keep coming back.
Again.
And again.
How many girls will he kiss? How many girls will die? How many men will die? Will he himself die?
The plots in these films are often complicated. The characters are often complex. And there are often lots of characters.
They are puzzles to solve. Sometimes they end unsolved.
These are intelligent films for intelligent people. Disguised as B pictures. Cheap thrillers. Pulp fiction.
They tell the truth about the human condition.
Depravity. Evil. Original sin.
There is no one good. No, not one.
And in the end . . .
They entertain.
This one is explosive.
Keep away from the windows.
Someone might blow you a kiss.
028 - Kiss Me Deadly, 1955, United States. Dir. Robert Aldrich.
A young woman walks down the middle of the highway in the middle of the night.
She is barefoot and wearing only a trenchcoat.
She appears to be in great distress.
A man speeds down the highway in his speedster in the middle of the night.
He is in a hurry and does not wish to be detained.
The woman stands in front of him.
He sees her in his headlights.
She will not budge.
At the last moment, he must swerve to avoid her.
He stops violently on the side of the road in the brush.
She approaches the car.
He is agitated. He does not wish to pick up a strange woman, even one naked under her trenchcoat. He wishes to be left alone.
But he lets her in. And they drive.
Down the long, dark, two-lane highway in the middle of the night.
The credits begin to scroll. From top to bottom. Reversed. Widening as they come down the screen.
Like white signs painted on the road. Growing larger as they approach.
This is film noir.
Dark. Violent. Hard-boiled. Hard-bitten. Cold.
In 1955 two French film critics (Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton) wrote an essay entitled "Towards a Definition of Film Noir." It is one of the few pieces written about film noir, and calling it film noir, while film noir was still being made. Most commentary came afterwards, looking back. So having anything written about it contemporaneously is important.
In their essay they describe the impact of American films that came to France in the summer of 1946. During World War 2 France did not have access to American films, so when the war was over and they received them, it was like a revelation.
Before the war, they knew American films in the vein of William Wyler, John Ford, and Frank Capra. After the war, they saw "a strange and violent tone, tinged with a unique kind of eroticism." It was as if everything had changed overnight.
The critics list the following films that came to them in a 6-week period:
John Huston's The Maltese Falcon
Otto Preminger's Laura
Edward Dmytryk's Murder My Sweet
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity
Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window
A few months' later, the following films came to them:
Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire
Robert Siodmak's The Killer's
Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake
Charles Vidor's Gilda
Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep
"A new 'series' had emerged in the history of film."
Notice that every film they list is by a different director. The films also represent all the studios.
This new phenomenon was so new, so sudden, and so wide-sweeping, that it caught the world by surprise.
And it is still being talked about.
The film noir period lasted for about twenty years, essentially during the 1940s and 1950s, and then it went away.
Every once in awhile someone will make one again, and it will be referred to as neo noir, but as a movement it is contained in this particular time in history. People are still trying to understand it. And people are still watching these movies.
The films in this canon are some of the most exciting, thrilling, tension-filled movies ever made. They deal with the dark side of human nature, but also with nobility, and they are visually, sometimes breathtakingly, beautiful to behold.
This film, Kiss Me Deadly, was directed by Robert Aldrich. Robert Aldrich is known for films such as The Big Knife (1955), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Longest Yard (1974), and The Frisco Kid (1979). In 1956, Aldrich was photographed on set holding a copy of a book in his hands entitled Panorama du Film Noir. That early. He was onto something.
The driver of our car is Mike Hammer, the hero of a series of books written by Mickey Spillane.
Spillane worked in a genre of novels we call hard-boiled detective fiction. Others include the characters Philip Marlowe by Raymond Chandler and Sam Spade by Dashiell Hammett,
These men were tough, no-nonsense, men of action. Women wanted them. Men wanted to be them.
They took the law into their own hands. They operated by their own code. Sometimes they were modern-day knights. Sometimes they were as lost as the criminals they were fighting.
As Mike Hammer drives our mysterious woman, played by a young Cloris Leachman, she tells him that they are after her. Who? They. And they are after something. What? Something. Later we will call it the Whatsit.
She tells him, "If I happen to make it alive, forget me. But if I don't make it, remember me."
What does that mean?
Maybe our poet Christina Roessetti can help us. Remember?
She does not make it.
Someone pulls out in front of them and causes them to crash.
He wakes up tied up somewhere and witnesses them torturing her.
He passes out again. They push the car over a cliff with the two of them in it.
He wakes up in the hospital room.
What happened?
Who are they?
What is the Whatsit?
He thinks it must be something big. He cannot leave it alone. He must get involved.
His police lieutenant friend takes away his detective license and his gun permit. He is not allowed to get involved.
Do you think that will stop him?
Mike sticks his nose where it does not belong.
And he gets into trouble.
And he goes throughout our city to do it.
Our city.
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula.
Los Angeles.
The home of hardboiled detective fiction. The home of crime dramas. The home of the movies. The home of film noir.
If you know the city, then you will have a feast watching this film. It is a practical tour of the town.
Malibu Canyon, Kaiser Hospital, Olive Street, Flower Street, 10401 Wilshire Boulevard, Rampart, Bunker Hill, Doheny, Cahuenga, Angel's Flight (operating!), Figueroa, the Hollywood Athletic Club, Sunset Blvd.
Yes, Sunset Blvd.
Some things just keep coming back.
Again.
And again.
How many girls will he kiss? How many girls will die? How many men will die? Will he himself die?
The plots in these films are often complicated. The characters are often complex. And there are often lots of characters.
They are puzzles to solve. Sometimes they end unsolved.
These are intelligent films for intelligent people. Disguised as B pictures. Cheap thrillers. Pulp fiction.
They tell the truth about the human condition.
Depravity. Evil. Original sin.
There is no one good. No, not one.
And in the end . . .
They entertain.
This one is explosive.
Keep away from the windows.
Someone might blow you a kiss.
Friday, January 27, 2017
027 - The Night of the Hunter, 1955, United States; Dir. Charles Laughton.
Friday, January 27, 2017
027 - The Night of the Hunter, 1955, United States. Dir. Charles Laughton.
Most horror movies are not very scary.
The Night of the Hunter is terrifying.
It is also exciting, thrilling, dramatic, beautiful, sweet, nostalgic, soul-stirring, and comforting.
It is a great film.
It is terrifying in that it is not a horror film but a crime thriller, and rather than dealing with creatures and situations that are fantastical and unreal--such as slashers, chainsaw wielders, zombies, vampires, mummies, witches, ghosts, and monsters--it deals with something far more dark and evil--
People.
In this case, a single person, a man who will go to any length--including deception, sacrilege, false marriage, psychological abuse, murder, and going after children--to get what he wants, a false prophet, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Lilian Gish begins the film by warning the children about such a man, as she quotes from the scriptures. She reminds them of three verses in Matthew that she has taught them and then introduces the fourth one:
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:18)
King Solomon in all his glory was not as beautiful as the lilies of the field. (Matthew 6:19)
Judge not lest you be judged. (Matthew 7:1)
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-16)
Her warning, from an imaginary heaven to them, as angelic, proves true.
Some children playing hide and seek find the body (we see the legs) of a woman in the steps to the basement.
Meanwhile, Harry Powell is coming, in an old convertible roadster, driving over the countryside, singing a hymn. "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." He wears a hat on his head. He prays, but it is not clear what his relationship to God is. Later, in prison, he will tell a man his religion is one that he and the Lord worked out "betwixt ourselves." It is made up.
He asks God how many has it been. Six? Twelve? He cannot remember. We understand what he is counting. He stops at a burlesque show. He seems agitated by the performer. He speaks to himself. She needs taking care of. We see the letters on his left knuckles: H-A-T-E. The police enter and arrest him for stealing the car he is driving.
Meanwhile, the Harper children are playing in the yard when their father comes home.
"Daddy!" shouts John Harper, played by Bill Chapin in a fantastic performance. We hear love in his voice. He jumps up and runs towards the car. He is happy to see his father. But everything is different forever. His father has robbed a bank and needs somewhere to hide the money before the police arrive and arrest him. He hides the money. He makes the children swear not to tell. The police arrive and he is arrested.
John and his little sister Pearl watch as their father is taken away in handcuffs.
Ben Harper will bunk with Harry Powell in prison. Powell will learn of Harper's family. After Harper is hanged and Powell is released, he will come in the guise of a preacher to insinuate himself into the life of the community and for the rest of the film his only objective will be to do everything it takes to find that money.
He will win over the Spoons, Walt and Icey, as he tells those present at their ice cream parlor the story of good and evil, and we see that the letters on his right knuckles spell L-O-V-E. Icey Spoon is captivated. She demands he come to the upcoming picnic, and she pressures the children's mother, the widowed Willa Harper, to go for Harry Powell.
Willa Harper, played by Shelley Winters, will end up in the car at the bottom of the river.
The children will be on their own.
And their task will be to keep the money hidden and to stay alive.
We will spend the movie cheering for them, wanting to protect them, and adjuring them to run.
What will happen?
Watch this movie to find out.
And sit on the edge of your seat.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
FLAPDOODLE
When I was younger I was looking through the dictionary and came upon the word flapdoodle. I adopted it because I thought it such a great word, and I had never heard it spoken or seen it in print. I began to use it steadily.
Since then I have encountered it exactly once--in this movie.
The Night of the Hunter is the only text, printed or spoken, in which I remember encountering this word.
Evelyn Varden as the delicious Icey Spoon says,
That wasn't love. That was just flapdoodle. Have some fudge, lambs.
And this is shortly after she uses the word shilly-shallying.
Delicious.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE PLAYERS
The Night of the Hunter came about due to the talents of an extraordinary group of people. Let us get to know some of them a little better.
JAMES AGEE - Screenwriter
As for language, the screenplay was written by James Agee, the first literary writer I believe we have had in our list of films so far--meaning, a professional journalist, poet, and novelist. Most of the films we have seen have been written by either the director or professional screenwriters. Some were based on novels; others were original screenplays. If you want to check out James Agee, read his novel A Death in the Family. It is one of the great American novels. Agee also wrote the screenplay of The African Queen and the non-fiction work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
STANLEY CORTEZ - Cinematographer
As for images, this film was shot by cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a prolific cameraman who worked from the 1920s to 1980. Most notably, he lensed Orson Welles' second masterpiece after Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons. The Night of the Hunter contains a mixture of crisp, light exterior shots, including daylight landscapes and deep-black night shots, beautiful underwater shots, and deep-focus, high-contrast film noir interiors. The second unit photography includes sweeping overhead helicopter shots, multiple looks at rivers and rippling water, and looks at animals, such as a frog, a turtle, rabbits, and a tree fox. The film-noir portions, between him and Art Director Hillyard Brown, look incredible. Chiaroscuro lighting and shadows abound.
ROBERT MITCHUM - Harry Powell
Robert Mitchum was a man's man. He played in Westerns, war movies, and films noir. He had a long and steadily successful career, working in a range of styles and periods. He worked from the 1940s to the 1990s. His film noir work alone includes Out of the Past, Crossfire, The Racket, His Kind of Woman, Angel Face, Macao, Where Danger Lives, The Big Steal, Undercurrent, The Locket, Pursued, Thunder Road, Farewell My Lovely, the remake of The Big Sleep, and his most chilling performance, Cape Fear. He was one of the most watchable movie stars we have ever had. If you have an opportunity to watch a Robert Mitchum movie, take it.
LILLIAN GISH - Rachel Cooper
Lillian Gish was The First Lady of American Cinema. She, along with her sister Dorothy, was one of the first movie stars, in the silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. As children they were next-door neighbors of Mary Pickford. Lillian starred in D. W. Griffith's most famous films, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm. She had a long career on the stage, in film, both in silent and talkies, and as a director. She worked through to 1987, in The Whales of August, starring next to Bette Davis, when they were 94 and 89 respectively.
In The Night of the Hunter, Lillian plays Rachel Cooper, a caretaker of orphans who takes in Johnny and Pearl.
CHARLES LAUGHTON - Director
Charles Laughton was a giant of a man. He was a writer, producer, stage director, and an actor's actor. Daniel Day-Lewis credited him as being one of the greatest actors of his generation. He may be best known by filmgoers for playing Quasimodo, the Hunchback in 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was nominated for three Oscars for acting and won for playing Henry VIII.
He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked at the Old Vic, in West End, and on Broadway. He performed roles by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Agathie Christie, among others. He was especially known for his meticulous work in creating the character of Galileo for Brecht's Galileo.
As an actor he starred in films from 1929 to 1962. Look at this list of significant roles in significant films--Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls (1932), Emperor Nero in The Sign of the Cross (1932), Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Edward Moulton-Barrett in The Barretts of Whimple Street (1934), Ruggles in The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Javert in Les Miserables (1935), Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt in Rembrandt (1936), Claudius in I, Claudius (1937), Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Sir Canterville and The Ghost in The Canterville Ghost (1944), Captain Kidd in Captain Kidd (1945), Captain Kidd again in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), King Herod in Salome (1953), Henry Hobson in David Lean's Hobson's Choice (1954), Sir Roberts in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Gracchus in Spartacus (1960), and Senator Cooley in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962).
The Night of the Hunter is the only film Charles Laughton directed, and it is one of the great films. Oh, that he had directed more.
027 - The Night of the Hunter, 1955, United States. Dir. Charles Laughton.
Most horror movies are not very scary.
The Night of the Hunter is terrifying.
It is also exciting, thrilling, dramatic, beautiful, sweet, nostalgic, soul-stirring, and comforting.
It is a great film.
It is terrifying in that it is not a horror film but a crime thriller, and rather than dealing with creatures and situations that are fantastical and unreal--such as slashers, chainsaw wielders, zombies, vampires, mummies, witches, ghosts, and monsters--it deals with something far more dark and evil--
People.
In this case, a single person, a man who will go to any length--including deception, sacrilege, false marriage, psychological abuse, murder, and going after children--to get what he wants, a false prophet, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Lilian Gish begins the film by warning the children about such a man, as she quotes from the scriptures. She reminds them of three verses in Matthew that she has taught them and then introduces the fourth one:
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Matthew 5:18)
King Solomon in all his glory was not as beautiful as the lilies of the field. (Matthew 6:19)
Judge not lest you be judged. (Matthew 7:1)
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:15-16)
Her warning, from an imaginary heaven to them, as angelic, proves true.
Some children playing hide and seek find the body (we see the legs) of a woman in the steps to the basement.
Meanwhile, Harry Powell is coming, in an old convertible roadster, driving over the countryside, singing a hymn. "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." He wears a hat on his head. He prays, but it is not clear what his relationship to God is. Later, in prison, he will tell a man his religion is one that he and the Lord worked out "betwixt ourselves." It is made up.
He asks God how many has it been. Six? Twelve? He cannot remember. We understand what he is counting. He stops at a burlesque show. He seems agitated by the performer. He speaks to himself. She needs taking care of. We see the letters on his left knuckles: H-A-T-E. The police enter and arrest him for stealing the car he is driving.
Meanwhile, the Harper children are playing in the yard when their father comes home.
"Daddy!" shouts John Harper, played by Bill Chapin in a fantastic performance. We hear love in his voice. He jumps up and runs towards the car. He is happy to see his father. But everything is different forever. His father has robbed a bank and needs somewhere to hide the money before the police arrive and arrest him. He hides the money. He makes the children swear not to tell. The police arrive and he is arrested.
John and his little sister Pearl watch as their father is taken away in handcuffs.
Ben Harper will bunk with Harry Powell in prison. Powell will learn of Harper's family. After Harper is hanged and Powell is released, he will come in the guise of a preacher to insinuate himself into the life of the community and for the rest of the film his only objective will be to do everything it takes to find that money.
He will win over the Spoons, Walt and Icey, as he tells those present at their ice cream parlor the story of good and evil, and we see that the letters on his right knuckles spell L-O-V-E. Icey Spoon is captivated. She demands he come to the upcoming picnic, and she pressures the children's mother, the widowed Willa Harper, to go for Harry Powell.
Willa Harper, played by Shelley Winters, will end up in the car at the bottom of the river.
The children will be on their own.
And their task will be to keep the money hidden and to stay alive.
We will spend the movie cheering for them, wanting to protect them, and adjuring them to run.
What will happen?
Watch this movie to find out.
And sit on the edge of your seat.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
FLAPDOODLE
When I was younger I was looking through the dictionary and came upon the word flapdoodle. I adopted it because I thought it such a great word, and I had never heard it spoken or seen it in print. I began to use it steadily.
Since then I have encountered it exactly once--in this movie.
The Night of the Hunter is the only text, printed or spoken, in which I remember encountering this word.
Evelyn Varden as the delicious Icey Spoon says,
That wasn't love. That was just flapdoodle. Have some fudge, lambs.
And this is shortly after she uses the word shilly-shallying.
Delicious.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE PLAYERS
The Night of the Hunter came about due to the talents of an extraordinary group of people. Let us get to know some of them a little better.
JAMES AGEE - Screenwriter
As for language, the screenplay was written by James Agee, the first literary writer I believe we have had in our list of films so far--meaning, a professional journalist, poet, and novelist. Most of the films we have seen have been written by either the director or professional screenwriters. Some were based on novels; others were original screenplays. If you want to check out James Agee, read his novel A Death in the Family. It is one of the great American novels. Agee also wrote the screenplay of The African Queen and the non-fiction work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
STANLEY CORTEZ - Cinematographer
As for images, this film was shot by cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a prolific cameraman who worked from the 1920s to 1980. Most notably, he lensed Orson Welles' second masterpiece after Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons. The Night of the Hunter contains a mixture of crisp, light exterior shots, including daylight landscapes and deep-black night shots, beautiful underwater shots, and deep-focus, high-contrast film noir interiors. The second unit photography includes sweeping overhead helicopter shots, multiple looks at rivers and rippling water, and looks at animals, such as a frog, a turtle, rabbits, and a tree fox. The film-noir portions, between him and Art Director Hillyard Brown, look incredible. Chiaroscuro lighting and shadows abound.
ROBERT MITCHUM - Harry Powell
Robert Mitchum was a man's man. He played in Westerns, war movies, and films noir. He had a long and steadily successful career, working in a range of styles and periods. He worked from the 1940s to the 1990s. His film noir work alone includes Out of the Past, Crossfire, The Racket, His Kind of Woman, Angel Face, Macao, Where Danger Lives, The Big Steal, Undercurrent, The Locket, Pursued, Thunder Road, Farewell My Lovely, the remake of The Big Sleep, and his most chilling performance, Cape Fear. He was one of the most watchable movie stars we have ever had. If you have an opportunity to watch a Robert Mitchum movie, take it.
LILLIAN GISH - Rachel Cooper
Lillian Gish was The First Lady of American Cinema. She, along with her sister Dorothy, was one of the first movie stars, in the silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. As children they were next-door neighbors of Mary Pickford. Lillian starred in D. W. Griffith's most famous films, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm. She had a long career on the stage, in film, both in silent and talkies, and as a director. She worked through to 1987, in The Whales of August, starring next to Bette Davis, when they were 94 and 89 respectively.
In The Night of the Hunter, Lillian plays Rachel Cooper, a caretaker of orphans who takes in Johnny and Pearl.
CHARLES LAUGHTON - Director
Charles Laughton was a giant of a man. He was a writer, producer, stage director, and an actor's actor. Daniel Day-Lewis credited him as being one of the greatest actors of his generation. He may be best known by filmgoers for playing Quasimodo, the Hunchback in 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was nominated for three Oscars for acting and won for playing Henry VIII.
He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked at the Old Vic, in West End, and on Broadway. He performed roles by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Agathie Christie, among others. He was especially known for his meticulous work in creating the character of Galileo for Brecht's Galileo.
As an actor he starred in films from 1929 to 1962. Look at this list of significant roles in significant films--Dr. Moreau in Island of Lost Souls (1932), Emperor Nero in The Sign of the Cross (1932), Henry VIII in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Edward Moulton-Barrett in The Barretts of Whimple Street (1934), Ruggles in The Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Javert in Les Miserables (1935), Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt in Rembrandt (1936), Claudius in I, Claudius (1937), Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Sir Canterville and The Ghost in The Canterville Ghost (1944), Captain Kidd in Captain Kidd (1945), Captain Kidd again in Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), King Herod in Salome (1953), Henry Hobson in David Lean's Hobson's Choice (1954), Sir Roberts in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Gracchus in Spartacus (1960), and Senator Cooley in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962).
The Night of the Hunter is the only film Charles Laughton directed, and it is one of the great films. Oh, that he had directed more.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
026 - Foreign Correspondent, 1940, United States; Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
Thursday, January 26, 2017
026 - Foreign Correspondent, 1940, United States. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent was nominated for six Academy Awards.
But Alfred Hitchcock lost.
To Alfred Hitchcock.
The same year his film Rebecca was nominated for eleven Academy Awards.
And won.
For Best Picture and Best Cinematography--Black & White (George Barnes).
Alfred Hitchcock is the king of cinema, the Master of Suspense. He directed movies from the 1920s to the 1970s.
He began at age 20 in England as a title card designer for silent films. He then worked as an Art Director, Set Decorator, Production Designer, and Assistant Director.
After attempting to direct a failed project at age 22 and directing a short film at 23, he directed his first feature-length film, The Pleasure Garden, at age 25. He made his 54th and last feature, Family Plot, at 76.
Foreign Correspondent was his second film made in the United States. Rebecca was his first. So with his first two films in his new country he was nominated for a combined 17 Academy Awards. You might call that an auspicious beginning.
Hitchcock knows how to tell a story. With the help of his wife, Alma Reville, who co-wrote about 18 of his screenplays, he knows how to create tension and suspense and keep the viewer on the edge of his seat. He knows where to place a camera and how to edit. He uses highly visual set-pieces, highly dramatic musical scores, and finely detailed storyboards. He would say that the film was already made before he started directing it. By then, all he had to do was shoot it.
Foreign Correspondent takes place just before the beginning of World War 2.
Johnny Jones works for the New York Globe. He is sent undercover, as Huntley Haverstock, to England to meet a Dutchman, "Holland's strong man," named Mr. Van Meer and find out what is going on. He is assigned to the British Stephen Fisher to help him. They move on to Holland.
He falls for Fisher's daughter Carol.
He watches as Van Meer is shot on the steps of the building.
It is raining and everyone on both sides of the steps stands beneath black umbrellas. The image reminds us of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964, and Jacques Tati's Trafic, 1971, which we discussed on January 10. (Here in 1940, this one came first!) The assassin escapes beneath the umbrellas, creating an entertaining visual image.
He chases the assassin and winds up in the car of Scott ffolliott--the man with that delicious last name beginning with two lower-case ffs and with two lls and two tts.
Those familiar with Agathie Christie's novel or play Murder on the Nile may remember the character of Miss Helen ffoliot-ffoulkes (one l, one t, but two names with two lower-case ffs!).
Scott ffolliott is played by the wonderful British character actor George Sanders, who also played in Hitchcock's other movie that year, Rebecca. You may also remember him from his Oscar-winning performance as the venomous Addison DeWitt opposite Bette Davis in All About Eve. Here he will prove to be a loyal comrade of Johnny Jones, aka Huntley Haverstock.
They chase the getaway car to the windmills. It disappears!
He climbs inside a windmill. There are bad guys in there. He has to hide. He could get caught in the giant gears. He finds . . . someone. They climb the stairs. He could get caught!
Fisher hires a body guard for him, a man named Rowley. Rowley is played by Edmund Gwenn. You know him as Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34th Street. He does not wear a white beard here. He looks younger.
They go to the top tower of Westminster Cathedral. Someone falls off.
Scott and Johnny decide to kidnap Carol.
They get on a sea plane. They are shot at. They are shot down. Will they be rescued? Or will they drown?
Foreign Correspondent contains the ingredients that made Hitchcock so great--unforgettable visual set-pieces, tension and suspense, humor, taught writing, and economy of storytelling.
Its star Johnny Jones (Huntley Haverstock) is played by Joel McCrea, whom we will see later in two Preston Sturges films.
And it ends with a call to support the War effort.
Hello, America. Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world.
026 - Foreign Correspondent, 1940, United States. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent was nominated for six Academy Awards.
But Alfred Hitchcock lost.
To Alfred Hitchcock.
The same year his film Rebecca was nominated for eleven Academy Awards.
And won.
For Best Picture and Best Cinematography--Black & White (George Barnes).
Alfred Hitchcock is the king of cinema, the Master of Suspense. He directed movies from the 1920s to the 1970s.
He began at age 20 in England as a title card designer for silent films. He then worked as an Art Director, Set Decorator, Production Designer, and Assistant Director.
After attempting to direct a failed project at age 22 and directing a short film at 23, he directed his first feature-length film, The Pleasure Garden, at age 25. He made his 54th and last feature, Family Plot, at 76.
Foreign Correspondent was his second film made in the United States. Rebecca was his first. So with his first two films in his new country he was nominated for a combined 17 Academy Awards. You might call that an auspicious beginning.
Hitchcock knows how to tell a story. With the help of his wife, Alma Reville, who co-wrote about 18 of his screenplays, he knows how to create tension and suspense and keep the viewer on the edge of his seat. He knows where to place a camera and how to edit. He uses highly visual set-pieces, highly dramatic musical scores, and finely detailed storyboards. He would say that the film was already made before he started directing it. By then, all he had to do was shoot it.
Foreign Correspondent takes place just before the beginning of World War 2.
Johnny Jones works for the New York Globe. He is sent undercover, as Huntley Haverstock, to England to meet a Dutchman, "Holland's strong man," named Mr. Van Meer and find out what is going on. He is assigned to the British Stephen Fisher to help him. They move on to Holland.
He falls for Fisher's daughter Carol.
He watches as Van Meer is shot on the steps of the building.
It is raining and everyone on both sides of the steps stands beneath black umbrellas. The image reminds us of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964, and Jacques Tati's Trafic, 1971, which we discussed on January 10. (Here in 1940, this one came first!) The assassin escapes beneath the umbrellas, creating an entertaining visual image.
He chases the assassin and winds up in the car of Scott ffolliott--the man with that delicious last name beginning with two lower-case ffs and with two lls and two tts.
Those familiar with Agathie Christie's novel or play Murder on the Nile may remember the character of Miss Helen ffoliot-ffoulkes (one l, one t, but two names with two lower-case ffs!).
Scott ffolliott is played by the wonderful British character actor George Sanders, who also played in Hitchcock's other movie that year, Rebecca. You may also remember him from his Oscar-winning performance as the venomous Addison DeWitt opposite Bette Davis in All About Eve. Here he will prove to be a loyal comrade of Johnny Jones, aka Huntley Haverstock.
They chase the getaway car to the windmills. It disappears!
He climbs inside a windmill. There are bad guys in there. He has to hide. He could get caught in the giant gears. He finds . . . someone. They climb the stairs. He could get caught!
Fisher hires a body guard for him, a man named Rowley. Rowley is played by Edmund Gwenn. You know him as Kris Kringle from Miracle on 34th Street. He does not wear a white beard here. He looks younger.
They go to the top tower of Westminster Cathedral. Someone falls off.
Scott and Johnny decide to kidnap Carol.
They get on a sea plane. They are shot at. They are shot down. Will they be rescued? Or will they drown?
Foreign Correspondent contains the ingredients that made Hitchcock so great--unforgettable visual set-pieces, tension and suspense, humor, taught writing, and economy of storytelling.
Its star Johnny Jones (Huntley Haverstock) is played by Joel McCrea, whom we will see later in two Preston Sturges films.
And it ends with a call to support the War effort.
Hello, America. Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
025 - City Lights, 1931, United States; Dir. Charles Chaplin.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
025 - City Lights, 1931, United States. Dir. Charles Chaplin.
Watching City Lights is pure joy.
The fact that is so funny is the icing on the cake. Beneath that is a movie that is all heart.
All heart.
The Tramp loves with the purest of love.
He loves a girl with devoted affection.
He loves a friend with honest friendship.
He meets a Blind Girl who sells flowers. Through a series of funny circumstances, she thinks he is a millionaire. He does not realize it. He just loves her.
He meets an alcoholic Eccentric Millionaire. Through a series of funny circumstances, he saves his life. The man treats him as best friends when he is drunk but does not remember him when he is sober.
Meanwhile, The Tramp just keeps loving.
And bumbling.
And seeking the means to provide surgery for the Girl's healing.
In 1931, The Tramp was the most recognized character in the world. Today, he continues to rank alongside Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald as being recognized by the majority of people in nearly every country.
Charlie Chaplin made his name on slapstick and pantomime. He was the king of the movies and had complete independence, owning his own studios. Would that change with the advent of sound?
Sound had now been available for three years, and Chaplin had chosen, on purpose, to make another silent movie--or at least a movie in which there is no talking. It had taken him two years and eight months to complete what had been his most difficult and arduous undertaking. On top of all that, the stock market had crashed.
Chaplin was taking a great risk.
When the movie came out it was an international critical and popular triumph, and it was the height of his career. He had done it again. And it was better than ever.
This movie does actually have sound, just not dialogue. It contains a musical score, which Chaplin wrote himself! And it contains sound affects, such as people talking in nonsensical sounds--which a later generation would recognize in the adult speech of Peanuts--and Chaplin hiccupping in whistles after having gotten a whistle stuck in his throat.
The sight gags abound.
City Lights opens with the unveiling of a new statue to progress and prosperity. The city's elite are present. They remove the sheet. The Tramp is asleep atop the statue, where he has presumably spent the night. The city's elders are shocked. In his polite efforts to come down, he gets his pants hooked on the statue's sword, and he stands and sits in positions that are witty in their imagery.
The Tramp meets the Blind Girl as she is selling flowers. He ducks into a car on one side and ducks out on the other. She hears the car door and believes he is the millionaire exiting the limousine. As he helps her find a dropped flower and realizes she is blind, he falls in love with her. He will seek her out and seek to help her for the rest of the movie.
The Tramp saves the life of the drunk Millionaire. As the Millionaire tries to tie a noose around his own neck, he gets it tied around The Tramp's neck, and The Tramp falls into the water. They will both end up in and out of the water before all is resolved.
The Tramp finds himself in a boxing match, where he uses the referee to block himself from the punches of the real fighter, in a highly choreographed, symmetrical dance of a scene.
The Tramp and the Millionaire attend a party where chairs are pulled out from under people, where he gets thwarted by cigars, eats a streamer as spaghetti, and gets into inadvertent fights over misunderstandings.
Chaplin was willing to do whatever it took to get the shot.
He would spend days on a single moment, weeks on a single scene. It was not indulgent. It was working to a standard. He did it until it was right. And good for us that his judgment was sure.
He used special effects that were ahead of their time, many of which he invented.
He also knew how to edit. He cut a scene from the movie which he had spent a week filming, because it did not fit the story.
When it was finished, he had spent 190 days of filming.
The filmmaking was challenging, but the film looks effortless. It flows steadily and smoothly, and it hits in all the right moments.
City Lights contains one of the greatest lines in the history of film, a line delivered on a card since it was not spoken, a line consisting of a single word.
"You?"
And with that line and the two that follow, a moment is realized that has moved the hearts of generations of people around the world.
Chaplin himself would watch it years later and be amazed, saying that he was not acting in that moment. Something else was going on.
City Lights is a movie of movies. Its emotional impact is why we go to the movies.
It is the definition of movie magic.
025 - City Lights, 1931, United States. Dir. Charles Chaplin.
Watching City Lights is pure joy.
The fact that is so funny is the icing on the cake. Beneath that is a movie that is all heart.
All heart.
The Tramp loves with the purest of love.
He loves a girl with devoted affection.
He loves a friend with honest friendship.
He meets a Blind Girl who sells flowers. Through a series of funny circumstances, she thinks he is a millionaire. He does not realize it. He just loves her.
He meets an alcoholic Eccentric Millionaire. Through a series of funny circumstances, he saves his life. The man treats him as best friends when he is drunk but does not remember him when he is sober.
Meanwhile, The Tramp just keeps loving.
And bumbling.
And seeking the means to provide surgery for the Girl's healing.
In 1931, The Tramp was the most recognized character in the world. Today, he continues to rank alongside Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald as being recognized by the majority of people in nearly every country.
Charlie Chaplin made his name on slapstick and pantomime. He was the king of the movies and had complete independence, owning his own studios. Would that change with the advent of sound?
Sound had now been available for three years, and Chaplin had chosen, on purpose, to make another silent movie--or at least a movie in which there is no talking. It had taken him two years and eight months to complete what had been his most difficult and arduous undertaking. On top of all that, the stock market had crashed.
Chaplin was taking a great risk.
When the movie came out it was an international critical and popular triumph, and it was the height of his career. He had done it again. And it was better than ever.
This movie does actually have sound, just not dialogue. It contains a musical score, which Chaplin wrote himself! And it contains sound affects, such as people talking in nonsensical sounds--which a later generation would recognize in the adult speech of Peanuts--and Chaplin hiccupping in whistles after having gotten a whistle stuck in his throat.
The sight gags abound.
City Lights opens with the unveiling of a new statue to progress and prosperity. The city's elite are present. They remove the sheet. The Tramp is asleep atop the statue, where he has presumably spent the night. The city's elders are shocked. In his polite efforts to come down, he gets his pants hooked on the statue's sword, and he stands and sits in positions that are witty in their imagery.
The Tramp meets the Blind Girl as she is selling flowers. He ducks into a car on one side and ducks out on the other. She hears the car door and believes he is the millionaire exiting the limousine. As he helps her find a dropped flower and realizes she is blind, he falls in love with her. He will seek her out and seek to help her for the rest of the movie.
The Tramp saves the life of the drunk Millionaire. As the Millionaire tries to tie a noose around his own neck, he gets it tied around The Tramp's neck, and The Tramp falls into the water. They will both end up in and out of the water before all is resolved.
The Tramp finds himself in a boxing match, where he uses the referee to block himself from the punches of the real fighter, in a highly choreographed, symmetrical dance of a scene.
The Tramp and the Millionaire attend a party where chairs are pulled out from under people, where he gets thwarted by cigars, eats a streamer as spaghetti, and gets into inadvertent fights over misunderstandings.
Chaplin was willing to do whatever it took to get the shot.
He would spend days on a single moment, weeks on a single scene. It was not indulgent. It was working to a standard. He did it until it was right. And good for us that his judgment was sure.
He used special effects that were ahead of their time, many of which he invented.
He also knew how to edit. He cut a scene from the movie which he had spent a week filming, because it did not fit the story.
When it was finished, he had spent 190 days of filming.
The filmmaking was challenging, but the film looks effortless. It flows steadily and smoothly, and it hits in all the right moments.
City Lights contains one of the greatest lines in the history of film, a line delivered on a card since it was not spoken, a line consisting of a single word.
"You?"
And with that line and the two that follow, a moment is realized that has moved the hearts of generations of people around the world.
Chaplin himself would watch it years later and be amazed, saying that he was not acting in that moment. Something else was going on.
City Lights is a movie of movies. Its emotional impact is why we go to the movies.
It is the definition of movie magic.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
024 - Repulsion, 1965, United Kingdom; Dir. Roman Polanski.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
024 - Repulsion, 1965, United Kingdom. Dir. Roman Polanski.
We are watching a British film made by Polish director, spoken in English.
So why does it feel at times as though we are watching a French film made in the early days of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) influenced by Godard or Truffaut?
It was released in 1965. The New Wave came on the scene in 1959 and 1960, when Polanski was acting and making shorts in film school. Perhaps he felt their influence then. By now Truffaut has directed five features, and Godard has directed at least eight. His film Band of Outsiders came out a year earlier, in 1964, and surely its fragrance is still in the air throughout Europe. Their influence on Polanski seems inevitable. It is something we can look up, so at some point let us do so.
At least four elements in Repulsion lead us to think this way. 1) It features scenes of young people walking the streets of the city to a score of jazz music. 2) It stars Catherine Deneuve. 3) It deals frankly with human sexuality and its effects on the psyche. 4) It experiments with technique.
Catherine Deneuve is not an actress who was strictly associated with the Nouvelle Vague, as Anna Karina or Jean Seberg might have been. In fact, she worked more with mainstream filmmakers such as Jacques Demy. But she had just made The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers, a joint film between Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, and she would later make at least two films for Francois Truffaut: Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro (which we have seen). But here, she fits the look and the essence.
She looks young here. When we saw her in The Last Metro, she was around 37--and looked amazing! She made Repulsion at around age 21.
Nevertheless, this is not a Nouvelle Vague movie. It is a British film made by a Polish director.
There are specific shots that give it away. Whenever we see establishing shots or insert shots of buildings or landmarks of the city, they are carefully crafted and well composed. They reveal the style of someone who went to film school and who is more technically proficient and less haphazardly intuitive in his camera placement.
Roman Polanski is one of our great directors. He made Chinatown, one of the finest films ever made, and Rosemary's Baby, one of the great horror films. He has made literary films, such as Macbeth, Tess (from Tess of the d'Urbervilles), and Oliver Twist. He has made thrillers, such as Frantic, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer. And he made The Pianist, that sweeping, haunting film about surviving the Holocaust, which put Adrien Brody on the map, winning him the Oscar, winning Polanski an Oscar, and winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood an Oscar.
The Pianist won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, BAFTA Awards in England for Best Film and Best Direction, seven Cesars in France, including Best Picture, eight Eagles in Poland, including Best Picture, the Japanese Academy for Best Foreign Film, the Czech Lion for Best Foreign Film, the Sant Jordi Awrd in Spain, the David di Donatello Award in Italy for Best Foreign Film, the European Film Award for Cinematographer, the Golden Globe in Italy, the Goya Award, the Harry Award, and many film society, critic, and festival awards.
The Pianist was personal for Polanski.
He is Jewish. His family lived in Krakow. His parents took him to the cinema before the War, but then the War came, and they were sent to the Krakow Ghetto. Roman was expelled from school at age five and not allowed back in school for six years. His mother was taken to Auschwitz and killed. He watched his father marched away to another camp. His father would survive the war, but it would be years before Roman would see him again. Roman fled the Ghetto, changed his name, and was raised as a Catholic by a Catholic family.
After the War, Polanski attended film school--the same school as Krzysztof Kieslowski, director of the Three Colors movies that we watched last week--and he received accolades for his work there.
Repulsion is his second feature film. His first is Knife in the Water, which we will see later.
Repulsion is about a woman who begins repressed and progressively moves in the direction of a mental break.
Carol, from Brussels, lives with her sister Helen in London. Colin is pursuing her, while Michael is dating Helen.
Carol recoils from men. She rebuffs Colin, forgets about their dates, responds to him emptily and with glazed eyes. She cringes when hearing Michael and Helen making love through the apartment walls, and she reacts against his being in her bathroom in the morning.
Carol works at a spa, giving manicures and supporting estheticians. She begins to daydream, starts to miss work, and eventually cuts a woman's finger while daydreaming in a botched manicure.
Helen and Michael will go on a vacation, leaving Carol on her own, which proves not to be good for her.
Carol progressively breaks down.
She experiences hallucinations. She stops going to work. She cuts the cord to the telephone. She irons a shirt with an unplugged iron. She stays in her nightgown anyway.
Colin comes over to find out what is going on.
She . . . does something about it.
The landlord comes over one last time to collect the delinquent rent.
She does nothing.
He tries to take advantage of her.
She does something.
When Michael and Helen return home, they discover an apartment different from the one they left. The neighbors get involved.
Watch the film to find out what happens.
Repulsion is an accomplished film. It feels accurate in its portrayal of a growing psychosis. I would like to know what mental health professionals think about it. Is it as accurate as it seems?
Catherine Deneuve plays against type--at least as we know her so far--not as the confident, beautiful blonde, but, as a pathologically inward person. In The Last Metro we saw her as a strong woman, the wife of a great artist, co-owner of a successful theatre, an established actress, a community leader. In Repulsion we see her as a tormented girl, emotionally repressed, psychologically troubled, locked in a downward spiral. Deneuve is committed to her performance. She exhibits the range of a great actress.
In the final shot of the film, Polanski has cinematographer Gilbert Taylor move the camera in a brilliantly choreographed shot down and around the room across the various objects that have been strewn in the process of the film.
We land on a family photograph. It shows a man, a girl, and a woman. The girl is glaring at the man, staring at him with a look of contempt. We zoom in on her.
The look in her eyes reveals the source of her troubles.
024 - Repulsion, 1965, United Kingdom. Dir. Roman Polanski.
We are watching a British film made by Polish director, spoken in English.
So why does it feel at times as though we are watching a French film made in the early days of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) influenced by Godard or Truffaut?
It was released in 1965. The New Wave came on the scene in 1959 and 1960, when Polanski was acting and making shorts in film school. Perhaps he felt their influence then. By now Truffaut has directed five features, and Godard has directed at least eight. His film Band of Outsiders came out a year earlier, in 1964, and surely its fragrance is still in the air throughout Europe. Their influence on Polanski seems inevitable. It is something we can look up, so at some point let us do so.
At least four elements in Repulsion lead us to think this way. 1) It features scenes of young people walking the streets of the city to a score of jazz music. 2) It stars Catherine Deneuve. 3) It deals frankly with human sexuality and its effects on the psyche. 4) It experiments with technique.
Catherine Deneuve is not an actress who was strictly associated with the Nouvelle Vague, as Anna Karina or Jean Seberg might have been. In fact, she worked more with mainstream filmmakers such as Jacques Demy. But she had just made The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers, a joint film between Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol, and she would later make at least two films for Francois Truffaut: Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro (which we have seen). But here, she fits the look and the essence.
She looks young here. When we saw her in The Last Metro, she was around 37--and looked amazing! She made Repulsion at around age 21.
Nevertheless, this is not a Nouvelle Vague movie. It is a British film made by a Polish director.
There are specific shots that give it away. Whenever we see establishing shots or insert shots of buildings or landmarks of the city, they are carefully crafted and well composed. They reveal the style of someone who went to film school and who is more technically proficient and less haphazardly intuitive in his camera placement.
Roman Polanski is one of our great directors. He made Chinatown, one of the finest films ever made, and Rosemary's Baby, one of the great horror films. He has made literary films, such as Macbeth, Tess (from Tess of the d'Urbervilles), and Oliver Twist. He has made thrillers, such as Frantic, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer. And he made The Pianist, that sweeping, haunting film about surviving the Holocaust, which put Adrien Brody on the map, winning him the Oscar, winning Polanski an Oscar, and winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood an Oscar.
The Pianist won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, BAFTA Awards in England for Best Film and Best Direction, seven Cesars in France, including Best Picture, eight Eagles in Poland, including Best Picture, the Japanese Academy for Best Foreign Film, the Czech Lion for Best Foreign Film, the Sant Jordi Awrd in Spain, the David di Donatello Award in Italy for Best Foreign Film, the European Film Award for Cinematographer, the Golden Globe in Italy, the Goya Award, the Harry Award, and many film society, critic, and festival awards.
The Pianist was personal for Polanski.
He is Jewish. His family lived in Krakow. His parents took him to the cinema before the War, but then the War came, and they were sent to the Krakow Ghetto. Roman was expelled from school at age five and not allowed back in school for six years. His mother was taken to Auschwitz and killed. He watched his father marched away to another camp. His father would survive the war, but it would be years before Roman would see him again. Roman fled the Ghetto, changed his name, and was raised as a Catholic by a Catholic family.
After the War, Polanski attended film school--the same school as Krzysztof Kieslowski, director of the Three Colors movies that we watched last week--and he received accolades for his work there.
Repulsion is his second feature film. His first is Knife in the Water, which we will see later.
Repulsion is about a woman who begins repressed and progressively moves in the direction of a mental break.
Carol, from Brussels, lives with her sister Helen in London. Colin is pursuing her, while Michael is dating Helen.
Carol recoils from men. She rebuffs Colin, forgets about their dates, responds to him emptily and with glazed eyes. She cringes when hearing Michael and Helen making love through the apartment walls, and she reacts against his being in her bathroom in the morning.
Carol works at a spa, giving manicures and supporting estheticians. She begins to daydream, starts to miss work, and eventually cuts a woman's finger while daydreaming in a botched manicure.
Helen and Michael will go on a vacation, leaving Carol on her own, which proves not to be good for her.
Carol progressively breaks down.
She experiences hallucinations. She stops going to work. She cuts the cord to the telephone. She irons a shirt with an unplugged iron. She stays in her nightgown anyway.
Colin comes over to find out what is going on.
She . . . does something about it.
The landlord comes over one last time to collect the delinquent rent.
She does nothing.
He tries to take advantage of her.
She does something.
When Michael and Helen return home, they discover an apartment different from the one they left. The neighbors get involved.
Watch the film to find out what happens.
Repulsion is an accomplished film. It feels accurate in its portrayal of a growing psychosis. I would like to know what mental health professionals think about it. Is it as accurate as it seems?
Catherine Deneuve plays against type--at least as we know her so far--not as the confident, beautiful blonde, but, as a pathologically inward person. In The Last Metro we saw her as a strong woman, the wife of a great artist, co-owner of a successful theatre, an established actress, a community leader. In Repulsion we see her as a tormented girl, emotionally repressed, psychologically troubled, locked in a downward spiral. Deneuve is committed to her performance. She exhibits the range of a great actress.
In the final shot of the film, Polanski has cinematographer Gilbert Taylor move the camera in a brilliantly choreographed shot down and around the room across the various objects that have been strewn in the process of the film.
We land on a family photograph. It shows a man, a girl, and a woman. The girl is glaring at the man, staring at him with a look of contempt. We zoom in on her.
The look in her eyes reveals the source of her troubles.
Monday, January 23, 2017
023 - The Red Shoes, 1948, United Kingdom; Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger.
Monday, January 23, 2017
023 - The Red Shoes, 1948, United Kingdom. Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger.
The ballet is about to begin.
A restless throng pounds on the balcony door.
"They're going mad, Sir. It's the students."
Someone behind the door shouts, "Down with tyrants!" The doorkeeper says to let them in. They rush up the stairs and out on to the balcony. They look like they are in their 40s, as college students back then did. They are well-dressed for the evening, and they are feisty.
One group has come to see the ballet. Another has come to hear the orchestra. They argue.
The first group shows snobbish favoritism for the lead dancer, Irina Boronskaja. They are incredulous that anyone would come to the ballet without coming specifically for her.
The second group shows patriotic enthusiasm for the composer, Prof. Palmer. He has written the music, Heart of Fire, for tonight's ballet. He is their professor, and they cheer for him.
As the orchestra begins one of the students, Julian Craster, recognizes the music. So do his friends, Ike and Terry, sitting on either side of him. It is his own composition! At first he gives him the benefit of the doubt, but as it continues he realizes that his own professor has stolen and published his work. He gets up and leaves. Terry follows. So does Ike.
This happens.
Lady Neston sits in a theatre box with her niece Victoria Page. She sends a card to Lermontov, in his box, inviting him to an after party. He does not wish to go but is persuaded by Professor Palmer, in the box with him, to attend, as she is a patron of the arts.
After the ballet, Palmer and Lermontov arrive at the party. Lady Neston welcomes them, congratulating Palmer for his composition and showing enthusiasm for Lermontov for his having come. Some men wheel in a piano. Lermontov is bothered. This is a set-up.
Sure enough, Lady Neston explains to him that her niece Vicky will be dancing. He calls it a shock. He asks her, "How would you define ballet?" She begins to answer, "One might call it the poetry of motion. . . . " He interrupts, "One might, but for me it is a great deal more. For me it is a religion. One does not care to see one's religion practiced in an atmosphere like this." He leaves the room.
As the pianist begins playing, Vicky passes through to the other room and approaches the bar, where Lermontov is now ordering a champagne cocktail. She affects an attitude of disdain and also orders a champagne cocktail. He notices her and speaks to her, thinking they will share in their disdain for the party. She has baited him. He tells her that it very nearly was a great deal worse. They were about to witness a horror.
She reveals, "I was that horror."
He is caught. It is too late to apologize but he does anyway. She confronts him and asks why he is not sorry she did not dance. He explains.
"If I accept an invitation to a party, I do not expect to find myself at an audition."
Touché.
But then he asks, "Why do you want to dance?"
She responds, "Why do you want to breathe?"
And with that, she now has his attention.
He says, "Come with me."
Meanwhile, Julian Craster has written a letter to Lermontov introducing himself, explaining that the music of Heart of Fire was his composition. He arrives the next morning at Lermontov's asking for it back. He is embarrassed and does not want Lermontov to read it. Too late. Lermontov has already read it.
Lermontov has him sit at the piano and play. The actor, Julian Goring, is really playing.
Lermontov hires him on the spot to be the new coach for the orchestra. He tells him to destroy the letter and forget about it, stating that "These things mostly happen unintentionally."
Then he observes--
"It is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from."
That is quite an observation. Read it again. What does it say about talent?
And with that we have set up the film. In the first twenty minutes of a two-and-a-quarter hour story, we have the young dancer and the young composer having met the great impresario and been invited to the next rehearsal.
What we are about to see is a meditation on the price of art.
Martin Scorsese has championed The Red Shoes as one of the great films in cinema history and one of the greatest color films ever made.
Gene Kelly used it to bring ballet into An American in Paris.
It has gone on to influence many artists and filmmakers.
Are you an artist?
Do you want to be one of the great ones?
How badly to you want it?
What price are you willing to pay?
Are there limits?
Are some prices too high?
023 - The Red Shoes, 1948, United Kingdom. Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger.
The ballet is about to begin.
A restless throng pounds on the balcony door.
"They're going mad, Sir. It's the students."
Someone behind the door shouts, "Down with tyrants!" The doorkeeper says to let them in. They rush up the stairs and out on to the balcony. They look like they are in their 40s, as college students back then did. They are well-dressed for the evening, and they are feisty.
One group has come to see the ballet. Another has come to hear the orchestra. They argue.
The first group shows snobbish favoritism for the lead dancer, Irina Boronskaja. They are incredulous that anyone would come to the ballet without coming specifically for her.
The second group shows patriotic enthusiasm for the composer, Prof. Palmer. He has written the music, Heart of Fire, for tonight's ballet. He is their professor, and they cheer for him.
As the orchestra begins one of the students, Julian Craster, recognizes the music. So do his friends, Ike and Terry, sitting on either side of him. It is his own composition! At first he gives him the benefit of the doubt, but as it continues he realizes that his own professor has stolen and published his work. He gets up and leaves. Terry follows. So does Ike.
This happens.
Lady Neston sits in a theatre box with her niece Victoria Page. She sends a card to Lermontov, in his box, inviting him to an after party. He does not wish to go but is persuaded by Professor Palmer, in the box with him, to attend, as she is a patron of the arts.
After the ballet, Palmer and Lermontov arrive at the party. Lady Neston welcomes them, congratulating Palmer for his composition and showing enthusiasm for Lermontov for his having come. Some men wheel in a piano. Lermontov is bothered. This is a set-up.
Sure enough, Lady Neston explains to him that her niece Vicky will be dancing. He calls it a shock. He asks her, "How would you define ballet?" She begins to answer, "One might call it the poetry of motion. . . . " He interrupts, "One might, but for me it is a great deal more. For me it is a religion. One does not care to see one's religion practiced in an atmosphere like this." He leaves the room.
As the pianist begins playing, Vicky passes through to the other room and approaches the bar, where Lermontov is now ordering a champagne cocktail. She affects an attitude of disdain and also orders a champagne cocktail. He notices her and speaks to her, thinking they will share in their disdain for the party. She has baited him. He tells her that it very nearly was a great deal worse. They were about to witness a horror.
She reveals, "I was that horror."
He is caught. It is too late to apologize but he does anyway. She confronts him and asks why he is not sorry she did not dance. He explains.
"If I accept an invitation to a party, I do not expect to find myself at an audition."
Touché.
But then he asks, "Why do you want to dance?"
She responds, "Why do you want to breathe?"
And with that, she now has his attention.
He says, "Come with me."
Meanwhile, Julian Craster has written a letter to Lermontov introducing himself, explaining that the music of Heart of Fire was his composition. He arrives the next morning at Lermontov's asking for it back. He is embarrassed and does not want Lermontov to read it. Too late. Lermontov has already read it.
Lermontov has him sit at the piano and play. The actor, Julian Goring, is really playing.
Lermontov hires him on the spot to be the new coach for the orchestra. He tells him to destroy the letter and forget about it, stating that "These things mostly happen unintentionally."
Then he observes--
"It is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from."
That is quite an observation. Read it again. What does it say about talent?
And with that we have set up the film. In the first twenty minutes of a two-and-a-quarter hour story, we have the young dancer and the young composer having met the great impresario and been invited to the next rehearsal.
What we are about to see is a meditation on the price of art.
Martin Scorsese has championed The Red Shoes as one of the great films in cinema history and one of the greatest color films ever made.
Gene Kelly used it to bring ballet into An American in Paris.
It has gone on to influence many artists and filmmakers.
Are you an artist?
Do you want to be one of the great ones?
How badly to you want it?
What price are you willing to pay?
Are there limits?
Are some prices too high?
Sunday, January 22, 2017
022 - Chungking Express, 1994, Hong Kong; Dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
022 - Chungking Express, 1994. Dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Yesterday, with Tokyo Story, we saw a movie where the camera sat on a tripod and never moved.
Today, with Chungking Express, we are watching a movie where the camera is handheld and never stops moving.
Kar-Wai Wong is one of so many directors who began as a writer. He wrote at least fifteen screenplays for other directors before directing himself. Once he began writing and directing, he never looked back. This is his third film to direct.
The title refers to two locations: The Chungking Mansions, which is an indoor mall filled with family-owned shops and restaurants, and The Midnight Express, which is a family-owned lunch counter where much of the action occurs.
The film is broken into two stories, each involving a lovelorn police officer who pines over the loss of a girlfriend.
What do you do after a breakup?
The first police officer is He Qiwu, Badge Number 223. He has had a breakup with a girl named May. They broke up on April Fool's Day, so he considers the break-up a joke. He will go for 30 days waiting and looking for her, and then on his birthday, on May 1, he will try to move on.
He Qiwu cannot move on.
He thinks about May constantly. He has an answering service, and he calls them constantly to see if May has left him a message. He has a pager, and he checks it constantly to see if May has called. He calls May's family. He calls her friends, to check on her and to let them know that he is available if she needs anything.
He Qiwu buys a can of pineapple a day with an expiration date of that day--because May liked pineapple. When he has thirty cans of pineapple, then he will know that it is over. He has to scour convenience stores throughout the area to find a can with such a late date, because the stores keep restocking fresher cans. The clerks wonder about him.
He Qiwu takes up jogging. He believes that if he sweats out the water in his body, he will cry less. When he finds that a woman is running a race, he is incredulous. Why would you run if you are not trying to sweat the tears out of you?
Meanwhile, a woman has been installed in the Chungking Mansions to move a large stash of drugs for a drug lord. She wears a trenchcoat, a blonde wig, and sunglasses, indoors and at night. She speaks English. She is tough.
She hires an inexperienced Indian family to carry the drugs. She tailors clothes for them. It appears to be the first time they have ever worn a suit. She hides drugs in the shoe heels, teddy bear, boom box, and baby bump.
The family betrays her.
They take the money. They take the drugs. They disappear.
She searches the stores and stalls for information. One man says he does not know, so she takes his daughter. She buys the girl ice cream, lots of ice cream, from another store, while calling him and demanding ransom. He caves. He gets his daughter. She tells us, in voice-over--all the characters speak to us in voice-over--that "some men might sacrifice their own kid for money, but he wasn't one of them."
The film begins with He Qiwu on the job, as a police officer. He is chasing a man with a brown paper bag on his head. (We Americans are thinking, "It's the Unknown Comic!") He brushes past the woman in the wig and sunglasses.
He tells us he brushed past her .01 cm away, and that 57 hours later he will fall in love with her.
On his birthday, May has not called. He eats all thirty cans of pineapple. He goes running in the rain. He decides to find someone else.
So he calls old friends. Lulu is asleep. He has awakened her. Sorry.
The next one has been married five years. Oh, you mean we haven't spoken in over five years? She has two children. Sorry.
We went to fourth grade together. You remember? You don't? It doesn't matter.
It is a humorous moment that evokes sympathy.
What have you done when you were desperate and lonely?
You may laugh at his behavior because it is familiar to you, and you ache with his loneliness.
He goes to a bar. The woman with the wig and sunglasses goes to the bar. He tries to pick her up. She rebuffs him.
Watch to see what happens next.
The other story stars the great Asian actor Tony Leung. He plays Badge Number 633. He frequents The Midnight Express, and orders coffee. A girl named Faye works there, cousin to the boss, and she plays The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" loudly and non-stop.
The cop is dating a flight attendant. They play games together. They make innuendo involving flight terms. She leaves him.
She puts a letter and his keys in an envelope and leaves it with The Midnight Express, asking them to pass it on to him.
Have you ever had someone return your keys?
It hurts.
It hurts Cop Number 633.
The Cop does not read the letter. He does not collect it. The boss steams open the envelope. He reads the letter. Faye reads the letter. She takes the keys.
This could get complicated.
Watch to see what happens next.
Chungking Express stands out for its style.
People in the background move faster than the main characters, or in slow motion. The camera races down hallways, pans across rooms, looks up and down in rapid pace, and cuts quickly. We look through doorways, windows, around corners. The action may take place in one-third of the screen. The rest may be a wall, or other people, or a blur. Montages abound.
Music is important. A classic jukebox stands prominently in The Chungking Mansions, with CDs rotating in mesmerizing fashion. An old-school boom box sits behind the counter at The Midnight Express. Cop 633 plays CDs in his apartment.
Words are important. Wong's background as a writer is evident. The voice-overs are poetic. The two men are romantic. He Qiwu speaks poetically about expiration dates. Cop 633 talks to physical objects in his apartment. They handle their jobs with professionalism, but their hearts are aching.
When Wong gives interviews, he does not refer to other filmmakers so much as he refers to writers and literature.
Which is not to say that this movie feels like some kind of literary adaptation. It feels like an action movie, like a film of its time, like contemporary independent world cinema. It feels like youth. Indeed, Quentin Tarantino fell in love with it and picked it up for distribution in America.
If you want to check your messages, the password is "Love You for 10,000 Years."
022 - Chungking Express, 1994. Dir. Wong Kar-wai.
Yesterday, with Tokyo Story, we saw a movie where the camera sat on a tripod and never moved.
Today, with Chungking Express, we are watching a movie where the camera is handheld and never stops moving.
Kar-Wai Wong is one of so many directors who began as a writer. He wrote at least fifteen screenplays for other directors before directing himself. Once he began writing and directing, he never looked back. This is his third film to direct.
The title refers to two locations: The Chungking Mansions, which is an indoor mall filled with family-owned shops and restaurants, and The Midnight Express, which is a family-owned lunch counter where much of the action occurs.
The film is broken into two stories, each involving a lovelorn police officer who pines over the loss of a girlfriend.
What do you do after a breakup?
The first police officer is He Qiwu, Badge Number 223. He has had a breakup with a girl named May. They broke up on April Fool's Day, so he considers the break-up a joke. He will go for 30 days waiting and looking for her, and then on his birthday, on May 1, he will try to move on.
He Qiwu cannot move on.
He thinks about May constantly. He has an answering service, and he calls them constantly to see if May has left him a message. He has a pager, and he checks it constantly to see if May has called. He calls May's family. He calls her friends, to check on her and to let them know that he is available if she needs anything.
He Qiwu buys a can of pineapple a day with an expiration date of that day--because May liked pineapple. When he has thirty cans of pineapple, then he will know that it is over. He has to scour convenience stores throughout the area to find a can with such a late date, because the stores keep restocking fresher cans. The clerks wonder about him.
He Qiwu takes up jogging. He believes that if he sweats out the water in his body, he will cry less. When he finds that a woman is running a race, he is incredulous. Why would you run if you are not trying to sweat the tears out of you?
Meanwhile, a woman has been installed in the Chungking Mansions to move a large stash of drugs for a drug lord. She wears a trenchcoat, a blonde wig, and sunglasses, indoors and at night. She speaks English. She is tough.
She hires an inexperienced Indian family to carry the drugs. She tailors clothes for them. It appears to be the first time they have ever worn a suit. She hides drugs in the shoe heels, teddy bear, boom box, and baby bump.
The family betrays her.
They take the money. They take the drugs. They disappear.
She searches the stores and stalls for information. One man says he does not know, so she takes his daughter. She buys the girl ice cream, lots of ice cream, from another store, while calling him and demanding ransom. He caves. He gets his daughter. She tells us, in voice-over--all the characters speak to us in voice-over--that "some men might sacrifice their own kid for money, but he wasn't one of them."
The film begins with He Qiwu on the job, as a police officer. He is chasing a man with a brown paper bag on his head. (We Americans are thinking, "It's the Unknown Comic!") He brushes past the woman in the wig and sunglasses.
He tells us he brushed past her .01 cm away, and that 57 hours later he will fall in love with her.
On his birthday, May has not called. He eats all thirty cans of pineapple. He goes running in the rain. He decides to find someone else.
So he calls old friends. Lulu is asleep. He has awakened her. Sorry.
The next one has been married five years. Oh, you mean we haven't spoken in over five years? She has two children. Sorry.
We went to fourth grade together. You remember? You don't? It doesn't matter.
It is a humorous moment that evokes sympathy.
What have you done when you were desperate and lonely?
You may laugh at his behavior because it is familiar to you, and you ache with his loneliness.
He goes to a bar. The woman with the wig and sunglasses goes to the bar. He tries to pick her up. She rebuffs him.
Watch to see what happens next.
The other story stars the great Asian actor Tony Leung. He plays Badge Number 633. He frequents The Midnight Express, and orders coffee. A girl named Faye works there, cousin to the boss, and she plays The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" loudly and non-stop.
The cop is dating a flight attendant. They play games together. They make innuendo involving flight terms. She leaves him.
She puts a letter and his keys in an envelope and leaves it with The Midnight Express, asking them to pass it on to him.
Have you ever had someone return your keys?
It hurts.
It hurts Cop Number 633.
The Cop does not read the letter. He does not collect it. The boss steams open the envelope. He reads the letter. Faye reads the letter. She takes the keys.
This could get complicated.
Watch to see what happens next.
Chungking Express stands out for its style.
People in the background move faster than the main characters, or in slow motion. The camera races down hallways, pans across rooms, looks up and down in rapid pace, and cuts quickly. We look through doorways, windows, around corners. The action may take place in one-third of the screen. The rest may be a wall, or other people, or a blur. Montages abound.
Music is important. A classic jukebox stands prominently in The Chungking Mansions, with CDs rotating in mesmerizing fashion. An old-school boom box sits behind the counter at The Midnight Express. Cop 633 plays CDs in his apartment.
Words are important. Wong's background as a writer is evident. The voice-overs are poetic. The two men are romantic. He Qiwu speaks poetically about expiration dates. Cop 633 talks to physical objects in his apartment. They handle their jobs with professionalism, but their hearts are aching.
When Wong gives interviews, he does not refer to other filmmakers so much as he refers to writers and literature.
Which is not to say that this movie feels like some kind of literary adaptation. It feels like an action movie, like a film of its time, like contemporary independent world cinema. It feels like youth. Indeed, Quentin Tarantino fell in love with it and picked it up for distribution in America.
If you want to check your messages, the password is "Love You for 10,000 Years."
Saturday, January 21, 2017
021 - Tokyo Story, 1953, Japan; Dir. Yasujiro Ozu.
Saturday, January 21, 2017
021 - Tokyo Story, 1953, Japan. Dir. Yasujiro Ozu.
We have talked about "every frame a Rembrandt" and "every frame a Vermeer."
How about "every frame an Ansel Adams."
I do not know if Adams is the precisely the right photographer to use, but he is the one I know. There is something about the black-and-white cinematography of Yuharu Atsuta that I cannot explain, but it is just right. The blacks are blacks, the whites are white, the grays are gray, and the lines are sharp. Very sharp.
The framing also seems just right in just about every shot. Imagine having to decide where to place the camera. Some filmmakers place it wherever. Some use math. Some use intuition. Some are sloppy. Some are super precise. Atsuta finds the sweet spot. The sweetest of sweet spots.
Everything about his compositions looks right.
The camera is where it should be. The actors are where they should be. The landscapes and buildings are where they should be.
The camera so often seems to be just a few feet above the floor, but looking straight ahead, as if at people's waists or above their knees. It is as though we are sitting down as they do. When he uses close-ups, the actors look so much more closely towards the camera that it is almost as though they are looking in it.
It is a strange thing watching this film. It is as though you have spent your life around college-level and professional artists, and then suddenly you meet a master.
And you wonder what you were doing before. And where has he been? And why were you not with him all along?
And is this really 1953? It feels so contemporary.
Tokyo story is about a beautiful, warm, older couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children and grandchildren, who are in turn too busy for them.
They live in a town in Japan name Onomichi. They have four children and two grandchildren. Their youngest daughter, Kyoko, lives with them. Their youngest son, Keizo, lives in Osaka. But their oldest son and daughter, Koichi and Shige, live in Tokyo, and it is they whom they are going to visit.
They also had a fifth child, a middle son Shoji. He has been MIA for 8 years from the War. His presumed widow, their daughter-in-law Noriko, also lives in Tokyo, and they will visit her as well.
The film will find the children busy, too busy for their parents, and the parents politely adjusting. Their oldest son Koichi is about to take them out on a Sunday, but he is a pediatrician and has an emergency case come up, so they stay in.
The oldest daughter Shige runs the Ooh La La Beauty Parlor, and she is busy cutting hair and having meetings. When her parents pass through the salon and someone inquires about them, she tells them they are just some people she knows. She does not even acknowledge that they are her parents.
They visit Noriko. She, the daughter-in-law, is the kindest to them.
The two older children send them to a spa at a hot springs to get them out of the way. They do not fit in. They come back.
The father meets up with some old friends and they go out and get drunk. The mother goes back to Noriko's house and they talk about her missing husband. The mother encourages her to let him go and to remarry.
They feel that they are in the way, so they decide to go home. They make it to Osaka and must leave the train because the mother is ill. They get to see their youngest son, Keizo, but he is busy also.
When they arrive home, the mother will die, and this time all of the children will come and visit them. Everyone will regret that they did not spent more time together.
Tokyo Story does not dwell in emotion. It presents life as it is. People marry and have children. The children grow up and marry and have children. The adult children grow away from their parents.
There is no judgment in it, and no pulling of the heartstrings--just telling the story.
The performances are superb. The actors work in control and restraint. They say one thing when they mean another, and we understand what they mean.
This is a beautiful movie to watch. The pacing is also just right. The characters are true--people with depth, layers, people who speak such simple, polite, appropriate things but who have a sea of feeling underneath.
Tokyo Story moves not like the train they take from Onomichi to Japan, but like the river that crawls outside their house in Tokyo, sitting there, being, moving like life, ever steadily to the sea.
021 - Tokyo Story, 1953, Japan. Dir. Yasujiro Ozu.
We have talked about "every frame a Rembrandt" and "every frame a Vermeer."
How about "every frame an Ansel Adams."
I do not know if Adams is the precisely the right photographer to use, but he is the one I know. There is something about the black-and-white cinematography of Yuharu Atsuta that I cannot explain, but it is just right. The blacks are blacks, the whites are white, the grays are gray, and the lines are sharp. Very sharp.
The framing also seems just right in just about every shot. Imagine having to decide where to place the camera. Some filmmakers place it wherever. Some use math. Some use intuition. Some are sloppy. Some are super precise. Atsuta finds the sweet spot. The sweetest of sweet spots.
Everything about his compositions looks right.
The camera is where it should be. The actors are where they should be. The landscapes and buildings are where they should be.
The camera so often seems to be just a few feet above the floor, but looking straight ahead, as if at people's waists or above their knees. It is as though we are sitting down as they do. When he uses close-ups, the actors look so much more closely towards the camera that it is almost as though they are looking in it.
It is a strange thing watching this film. It is as though you have spent your life around college-level and professional artists, and then suddenly you meet a master.
And you wonder what you were doing before. And where has he been? And why were you not with him all along?
And is this really 1953? It feels so contemporary.
Tokyo story is about a beautiful, warm, older couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children and grandchildren, who are in turn too busy for them.
They live in a town in Japan name Onomichi. They have four children and two grandchildren. Their youngest daughter, Kyoko, lives with them. Their youngest son, Keizo, lives in Osaka. But their oldest son and daughter, Koichi and Shige, live in Tokyo, and it is they whom they are going to visit.
They also had a fifth child, a middle son Shoji. He has been MIA for 8 years from the War. His presumed widow, their daughter-in-law Noriko, also lives in Tokyo, and they will visit her as well.
The film will find the children busy, too busy for their parents, and the parents politely adjusting. Their oldest son Koichi is about to take them out on a Sunday, but he is a pediatrician and has an emergency case come up, so they stay in.
The oldest daughter Shige runs the Ooh La La Beauty Parlor, and she is busy cutting hair and having meetings. When her parents pass through the salon and someone inquires about them, she tells them they are just some people she knows. She does not even acknowledge that they are her parents.
They visit Noriko. She, the daughter-in-law, is the kindest to them.
The two older children send them to a spa at a hot springs to get them out of the way. They do not fit in. They come back.
The father meets up with some old friends and they go out and get drunk. The mother goes back to Noriko's house and they talk about her missing husband. The mother encourages her to let him go and to remarry.
They feel that they are in the way, so they decide to go home. They make it to Osaka and must leave the train because the mother is ill. They get to see their youngest son, Keizo, but he is busy also.
When they arrive home, the mother will die, and this time all of the children will come and visit them. Everyone will regret that they did not spent more time together.
Tokyo Story does not dwell in emotion. It presents life as it is. People marry and have children. The children grow up and marry and have children. The adult children grow away from their parents.
There is no judgment in it, and no pulling of the heartstrings--just telling the story.
The performances are superb. The actors work in control and restraint. They say one thing when they mean another, and we understand what they mean.
This is a beautiful movie to watch. The pacing is also just right. The characters are true--people with depth, layers, people who speak such simple, polite, appropriate things but who have a sea of feeling underneath.
Tokyo Story moves not like the train they take from Onomichi to Japan, but like the river that crawls outside their house in Tokyo, sitting there, being, moving like life, ever steadily to the sea.
Friday, January 20, 2017
020 - Amarcord, 1973, Italy; Dir. Federico Fellini.
Friday, January 20, 2017
020 - Amarcord, 1973, Italy. Dir. Federico Fellini.
Ah, Fellini!
Welcome to Italy.
Or Rimini, to be precise. The land of Fellini's birth.
For the first time in his career, at 53, he has decided to go home.
Fellini is the giant of Italian cinema. He released this movie in 1973, 31 years after he began as a writer for directors such as Mario Bonnard and the great Roberto Rossellini, and 22 years after he broke out as a director with Variety Lights.
His three great masterpieces, La Strada, La Dolce Vida, and 8-1/2, came out in 1954, 1960, and 1963 respectively, so this one is still ten years out. (We will watch these three and others later this year.)
Amarcord means "I remember," so it has to do with Fellini's memories from childhood.
Well, actually, in standard Italian, "I remember" is "Io ricordo" in the present indicative, or "(Io) Mi ricordo" in the present indicative reflexive. I think.
So Amarcord must be in the dialect of the region in which Rimini is located, the Emilia Romagna. At least one native speaker has suggested it derives from pronunciation:
Io-mi-ricordo ---> Amarcord
Either that or the word never existed and Fellini just made it up.
After all, Fellini is a born liar.
Regardless, because of the movie it is a word now, and it is used throughout Italy as a noun denoting memories of the past, or "old times."
The film is about Fellini's memories from childhood.
Whether they happened or not.
Who said they had to happen for him to remember them?
He remembered a lot of things that he made up. Just ask him.
This is a year in the life of a town.
The town is Rimini, on the Adriatic Coast, in the northeast section of Italy, northeast of Florence, southeast of Bologna.
We are about to travel through the four seasons. Ready? Here we go.
The Spring brings puffballs. Or when the puffballs come, you know it is Spring. The children leap at them like snowflakes. So do the adults.
Now, what are puffballs?
It is time for the annual ritual to mark the beginning of Spring--the Burning of the Witch of Winter.
It is like Burning Man, only with a witch as the effigy.
And all the town comes out--every age, race, shape, size, economic class, and IQ level.
Would you like to be an extra in this town?
Casting Call For Amarcord!
Must appear as though you have just escaped from the circus.
We need--
Bald men with large bumps on their heads. Women with giant bottoms. Women with giant tops. Very tall men. Very short men. Fat boys. Ugly girls. Big noses. Crazy hair. A blind accordion player. A dwarf nun. A schizophrenic nymphomaniac. Coke-bottle glasses. Must be willing to pee on camera. Or stand up in a bathtub. Or flatulate. Or self-consolate.
In other words, the usual for a Fellini film.
Yet it all comes across as celebratory.
Not lurid or vulgar or embarrassing, but bawdy. Like The Canterbury Tales. Like parts of Shakespeare.
These are people of the earth. Fleshly. Physical. They live in their bodies. They eat. They drink. They fight. They fart. They are not sitting around discussing Plato's conceptualization of invisible forms. They are living.
A man climbs atop the pyre so that folks can throw the witch and a wooden chair up to him. Gradisca, the town beauty, lights the fire. Someone removes the ladder--as a joke! The man now sits atop the blazing bonfire without a way down. No one worries. No one pays any attention. It is just another day in Rimini. The film does not even follow him. We simply assume he jumps off the back of the pyre. Some boys pick up Volpina, the town nymphomaniac, and swing her back and forth toward the fire as if they are going to toss her in. These folks sure do like to horse around.
When it is over, after Volpina has left, after the motorcyclist has driven through the hot coals, after the women have carried the coals away in buckets to their homes, a man approaches us in camera in the empty streets and begins to pontificate about the grandeur of their heritage. Someone off camera blows a raspberry. He turns, upset, frustrated by the irreverence, and quits.
We see children at school. Bored. Creating pranks and games to tease their teachers and one another.
If you have seen Woody Allen's Annie Hall, then you may remember the flashback where Alvy Singer is a boy in school, and Allen shows how much he hated it.
If you have seen Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (we will later), then you may remember the scenes where Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a boy in school, and Truffaut shows how much he hated it.
When you see Amarcord, you will see the scenes of young people in school, and Fellini will show you how much he hated it.
The boys in school roll up papers and put them together to form a long pipe. Titta, the young man who becomes the kind-of protagonist in this ensemble film, pees into it, and it travels all the way to the front of the class. When the teacher sees it, he thinks the boy standing up front did it.
Titta will get in trouble with his father. His father is a passionate man, and dinner at home is an event. If you can survive dinner without dying by blunt force trauma, then you have a shot at life.
Titta's father, Aurelio, will himself get into trouble with the Fascists. It is dangerous living in this town.
Mussolini was in power, and the teachers, according to Fellini's memory, were sympathetic to the Fascists. This made him hate it all the more.
The film makes plenty of fun of Fascism. A parade comes to town, and the marchers carry a giant image of Mussolini's head, as a woman proclaims the propaganda, and as a man announces that Mussolini has balls this big.
During the Summer the family goes to get Uncle Teo. Uncle Teo lives in an asylum. He loves his family and is thrilled to see them. They ride out to the country. Uncle Teo gets out to pee but forgets to unzip, so he pees on himself. Then he climbs to the top of a great tree and refuses to come down, shouting, "I want a woman!" When they try to climb up after him, he pelts them with nuts. So the back-ups arrive, and the dwarf nun somehow manages to bring him down.
The whole town goes out to see the great ship pass by, the SS Rex. They leave in their small boats. One man misses the embarkation, so he jumps in the sea in his underwear and swims out to join them. He gets in one of the boats and announces that the cold water has shrunk his balls this little.
They fall asleep. In the middle of the night, in the fog, the ship's foghorn awakens them. They celebrate. They capsize in its wake.
The people who grew up with Fellini saw the movie and remembered this event with great fondness. Oh, yes. I remember (Io mi ricordo, amarcord) that time the SS Rex came by and we went out to see it. Except it never happened. Fellini made it up.
So many of these great movies we are watching celebrate the movies. Many of them have cinemas in their story lines. Here, Titta goes to the Cinema Fulgor, and Gradisca is the only other person in the audience. So he sits next to her. And he makes a move on her. He is a teenager. She is a grown woman. She rebuffs him. No worries--another woman, one of those with a giant top, will put the moves on him later, and all he wanted was a cigarette.
Other nods to the movies include Norma Shearer poster and an Abbott and Costello cardboard cut-out.
The Fall will come. The Winter will come again.
The snow banks will be so high that they are shoveled into giant walls in the town square, creating a life-sized maze, like the hedges in The Shining, only not quite as terrifying.
At this moment Fellini stops the action as all the townspeople present witness the landing of the bright peacock in the white snow.
A single image.
Arresting in its beauty.
Gadisca will finally marry and Spring will come again.
Along with the puffballs.
020 - Amarcord, 1973, Italy. Dir. Federico Fellini.
Ah, Fellini!
Welcome to Italy.
Or Rimini, to be precise. The land of Fellini's birth.
For the first time in his career, at 53, he has decided to go home.
Fellini is the giant of Italian cinema. He released this movie in 1973, 31 years after he began as a writer for directors such as Mario Bonnard and the great Roberto Rossellini, and 22 years after he broke out as a director with Variety Lights.
His three great masterpieces, La Strada, La Dolce Vida, and 8-1/2, came out in 1954, 1960, and 1963 respectively, so this one is still ten years out. (We will watch these three and others later this year.)
Amarcord means "I remember," so it has to do with Fellini's memories from childhood.
Well, actually, in standard Italian, "I remember" is "Io ricordo" in the present indicative, or "(Io) Mi ricordo" in the present indicative reflexive. I think.
So Amarcord must be in the dialect of the region in which Rimini is located, the Emilia Romagna. At least one native speaker has suggested it derives from pronunciation:
Io-mi-ricordo ---> Amarcord
Either that or the word never existed and Fellini just made it up.
After all, Fellini is a born liar.
Regardless, because of the movie it is a word now, and it is used throughout Italy as a noun denoting memories of the past, or "old times."
The film is about Fellini's memories from childhood.
Whether they happened or not.
Who said they had to happen for him to remember them?
He remembered a lot of things that he made up. Just ask him.
This is a year in the life of a town.
The town is Rimini, on the Adriatic Coast, in the northeast section of Italy, northeast of Florence, southeast of Bologna.
We are about to travel through the four seasons. Ready? Here we go.
The Spring brings puffballs. Or when the puffballs come, you know it is Spring. The children leap at them like snowflakes. So do the adults.
Now, what are puffballs?
It is time for the annual ritual to mark the beginning of Spring--the Burning of the Witch of Winter.
It is like Burning Man, only with a witch as the effigy.
And all the town comes out--every age, race, shape, size, economic class, and IQ level.
Would you like to be an extra in this town?
Casting Call For Amarcord!
Must appear as though you have just escaped from the circus.
We need--
Bald men with large bumps on their heads. Women with giant bottoms. Women with giant tops. Very tall men. Very short men. Fat boys. Ugly girls. Big noses. Crazy hair. A blind accordion player. A dwarf nun. A schizophrenic nymphomaniac. Coke-bottle glasses. Must be willing to pee on camera. Or stand up in a bathtub. Or flatulate. Or self-consolate.
In other words, the usual for a Fellini film.
Yet it all comes across as celebratory.
Not lurid or vulgar or embarrassing, but bawdy. Like The Canterbury Tales. Like parts of Shakespeare.
These are people of the earth. Fleshly. Physical. They live in their bodies. They eat. They drink. They fight. They fart. They are not sitting around discussing Plato's conceptualization of invisible forms. They are living.
A man climbs atop the pyre so that folks can throw the witch and a wooden chair up to him. Gradisca, the town beauty, lights the fire. Someone removes the ladder--as a joke! The man now sits atop the blazing bonfire without a way down. No one worries. No one pays any attention. It is just another day in Rimini. The film does not even follow him. We simply assume he jumps off the back of the pyre. Some boys pick up Volpina, the town nymphomaniac, and swing her back and forth toward the fire as if they are going to toss her in. These folks sure do like to horse around.
When it is over, after Volpina has left, after the motorcyclist has driven through the hot coals, after the women have carried the coals away in buckets to their homes, a man approaches us in camera in the empty streets and begins to pontificate about the grandeur of their heritage. Someone off camera blows a raspberry. He turns, upset, frustrated by the irreverence, and quits.
We see children at school. Bored. Creating pranks and games to tease their teachers and one another.
If you have seen Woody Allen's Annie Hall, then you may remember the flashback where Alvy Singer is a boy in school, and Allen shows how much he hated it.
If you have seen Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (we will later), then you may remember the scenes where Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is a boy in school, and Truffaut shows how much he hated it.
When you see Amarcord, you will see the scenes of young people in school, and Fellini will show you how much he hated it.
The boys in school roll up papers and put them together to form a long pipe. Titta, the young man who becomes the kind-of protagonist in this ensemble film, pees into it, and it travels all the way to the front of the class. When the teacher sees it, he thinks the boy standing up front did it.
Titta will get in trouble with his father. His father is a passionate man, and dinner at home is an event. If you can survive dinner without dying by blunt force trauma, then you have a shot at life.
Titta's father, Aurelio, will himself get into trouble with the Fascists. It is dangerous living in this town.
Mussolini was in power, and the teachers, according to Fellini's memory, were sympathetic to the Fascists. This made him hate it all the more.
The film makes plenty of fun of Fascism. A parade comes to town, and the marchers carry a giant image of Mussolini's head, as a woman proclaims the propaganda, and as a man announces that Mussolini has balls this big.
During the Summer the family goes to get Uncle Teo. Uncle Teo lives in an asylum. He loves his family and is thrilled to see them. They ride out to the country. Uncle Teo gets out to pee but forgets to unzip, so he pees on himself. Then he climbs to the top of a great tree and refuses to come down, shouting, "I want a woman!" When they try to climb up after him, he pelts them with nuts. So the back-ups arrive, and the dwarf nun somehow manages to bring him down.
The whole town goes out to see the great ship pass by, the SS Rex. They leave in their small boats. One man misses the embarkation, so he jumps in the sea in his underwear and swims out to join them. He gets in one of the boats and announces that the cold water has shrunk his balls this little.
They fall asleep. In the middle of the night, in the fog, the ship's foghorn awakens them. They celebrate. They capsize in its wake.
The people who grew up with Fellini saw the movie and remembered this event with great fondness. Oh, yes. I remember (Io mi ricordo, amarcord) that time the SS Rex came by and we went out to see it. Except it never happened. Fellini made it up.
So many of these great movies we are watching celebrate the movies. Many of them have cinemas in their story lines. Here, Titta goes to the Cinema Fulgor, and Gradisca is the only other person in the audience. So he sits next to her. And he makes a move on her. He is a teenager. She is a grown woman. She rebuffs him. No worries--another woman, one of those with a giant top, will put the moves on him later, and all he wanted was a cigarette.
Other nods to the movies include Norma Shearer poster and an Abbott and Costello cardboard cut-out.
The Fall will come. The Winter will come again.
The snow banks will be so high that they are shoveled into giant walls in the town square, creating a life-sized maze, like the hedges in The Shining, only not quite as terrifying.
At this moment Fellini stops the action as all the townspeople present witness the landing of the bright peacock in the white snow.
A single image.
Arresting in its beauty.
Gadisca will finally marry and Spring will come again.
Along with the puffballs.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
019 - Three Colors: Red, 1994, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
019 - Three Colors: Red, 1994, France, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
People have a right to their secrets.
Valentine makes this assertion to the Judge who sits before her. She is judging him.
The Judge is retired. He uses technology to eavesdrop on his neighbors. Everyone needs a hobby.
They have just heard a live telephone conversation between a man and his lover, a man, upstairs in the house next door, as his wife cooks dinner downstairs, and, we find later, his daughter downstairs listens in on another phone.
Valentine is disgusted. The Judge asserts that it will all come out in the open anyway.
He is bitter. He spent a lifetime sitting on the bench, sending people away, now unsure whether he was on the side of right or wrong. At least when he listens to people's conversations, he knows what the truth is. So he says.
Once he freed a man who turned out to be guilty. The man went on to live a good life. Valentine encourages him. You did the right thing. He challenges her. How many other times did he get it wrong? How many good people did he send away? How many bad people did he set free? Who is good and who is bad anyway?
Film is a kind of voyeurism. The viewers view the lives of other people, as the characters are living it, as though we are peeking in. What about an audio voyeur (an entendrer!)? What about hearing the lives of other people?
Listen.
Valentine is standing in his den because she brought his dog to him. She hit the dog with her car and took it to the vet. Then she brought it to him and he gave it to her. She took it for a walk and it broke free and returned home. She went looking for it and found herself back here.
The dog's name is Rita.
Later this year we will watch the David Lynch film Mulholland Dr. In that movie there has been a car crash, and a woman takes refuge in an apartment. She has amnesia and cannot remember her name. So when she sees a poster of Rita Heyworth as Gilda, she adopts the name Rita.
I hear that German Shepherds are loyal to their owners. Rita is loyal. She returns to The Judge.
Valentine is also loyal. She is a model. In one day she has a photo shoot, ballet classes, and a runway show. The photo shoot produces a billboard for chewing gum. It is large. The photographer hits on her. She rebuffs him. She is loyal to her boyfriend Michel.
Michel does not seem to understand or appreciate her loyalty. He calls her frequently. He is never around. She keeps missing the phone. He accuses her of being with someone else. She is not.
Valentine listens to music at a CD store. She is also a listener. This is at least the third movie out of the first 19 we have been watching where a music store has come into play. She asks for CD number 432, Van den Budenmayer. They have just sold the last one. Timing matters in this movie.
Standing next to her, without her knowing it, is her neighbor Auguste, the one who drives the red Jeep, the one who dates the woman who is the neighbor of the judge. He and his girlfriend are also listening to CDs. Throughout the movie Valentine and Auguste, who live so near each other, pass but never meet. If only they knew each other. If only they would meet.
Where Three Colors: White focuses on human choice, free will, Three Colors: Red seems to allow for fate, circumstance, near hits, near misses.
Have you seen the movie Sliding Doors? It follows Gwyneth Paltrow in two different possible lives. She walks down the stairs to the subway, and the doors close. In one story the doors close ahead of her and she misses the train. In the other story the doors close just behind her and she catches her train. We watch both stories play out, showing how vastly different, and yet strangely similar, her life would be based on the outcome of a split second.
Three Colors: Red has a similar feel. Valentine keeps missing her boyfriend's phone call, by a split second. What if she had picked up the phone? She keeps missing her neighbor Auguste by split seconds. What if they had met?
She is loyal to her boyfriend, but he mistrusts her and so mistreats her. Auguste is loyal to his girlfriend, but she cheats on him. The good people are dating the bad people. What if they were with each other? Auguste drives past Valentine's billboard and smiles at it. He likes her. If only he knew she was his neighbor.
Kieslowski explores the doppelganger. A doppelganger is a spiritual double. It is like having a twin in the world, only instead of a biological twin, it is a spiritual twin.
We will see it played out more literally in The Double Life of Veronique, his film also starring Irene Jacob, who plays Valentine here. There she is like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, only instead of living different lives based on the split second of the doors closing, she lives different lives in two different countries--Veronique in France, Weronika in Poland. In other words, what if the same person, or two of the same type of person, or two spiritual twins, grew up in different countries? How would that affect the outcome of his life?
Here the spiritual doubles, the doppelgangers, are of separate ages.
Auguste and the Judge are living the same life but in different generations. Both are in law school. Both drop their books and look down to pick them up. Both see the answer to the prime question they will be asked on their law exam. Both pass their law exam because this accident happened. Both get a special pen they use throughout their careers. Both love a woman who cheats on them.
Will Auguste grow bitter, as the Judge has? Will he become an apathetic, eavesdropping recluse? Or will his life take a different turn, passing through a different door?
Auguste's girlfriend has started a business where she gives you personalized weather when you call her on the phone. She is a living Siri. When called about the weather in the English Channel this weekend, she states that it will be excellent. She giggles. She herself will be crossing the Channel this weekend, with her boyfriend, not Auguste, but the one with whom she is cheating on Auguste.
The weather is cross.
A storm arises. It beats against the world. The ferry capsizes. 1,435 people were aboard. Only seven survive.
Only seven.
Who are the survivors?
Not Auguste's girlfriend. Not the man with whom she is cheating.
Who?
One is the ship's bartender.
Who are the other six? Three pairs. Not necessarily couples. They did not all take the ferry together. But three pairs.
Who?
Watch and see.
Listen and hear.
And discover the Three Colors.
019 - Three Colors: Red, 1994, France, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
People have a right to their secrets.
Valentine makes this assertion to the Judge who sits before her. She is judging him.
The Judge is retired. He uses technology to eavesdrop on his neighbors. Everyone needs a hobby.
They have just heard a live telephone conversation between a man and his lover, a man, upstairs in the house next door, as his wife cooks dinner downstairs, and, we find later, his daughter downstairs listens in on another phone.
Valentine is disgusted. The Judge asserts that it will all come out in the open anyway.
He is bitter. He spent a lifetime sitting on the bench, sending people away, now unsure whether he was on the side of right or wrong. At least when he listens to people's conversations, he knows what the truth is. So he says.
Once he freed a man who turned out to be guilty. The man went on to live a good life. Valentine encourages him. You did the right thing. He challenges her. How many other times did he get it wrong? How many good people did he send away? How many bad people did he set free? Who is good and who is bad anyway?
Film is a kind of voyeurism. The viewers view the lives of other people, as the characters are living it, as though we are peeking in. What about an audio voyeur (an entendrer!)? What about hearing the lives of other people?
Listen.
Valentine is standing in his den because she brought his dog to him. She hit the dog with her car and took it to the vet. Then she brought it to him and he gave it to her. She took it for a walk and it broke free and returned home. She went looking for it and found herself back here.
The dog's name is Rita.
Later this year we will watch the David Lynch film Mulholland Dr. In that movie there has been a car crash, and a woman takes refuge in an apartment. She has amnesia and cannot remember her name. So when she sees a poster of Rita Heyworth as Gilda, she adopts the name Rita.
I hear that German Shepherds are loyal to their owners. Rita is loyal. She returns to The Judge.
Valentine is also loyal. She is a model. In one day she has a photo shoot, ballet classes, and a runway show. The photo shoot produces a billboard for chewing gum. It is large. The photographer hits on her. She rebuffs him. She is loyal to her boyfriend Michel.
Michel does not seem to understand or appreciate her loyalty. He calls her frequently. He is never around. She keeps missing the phone. He accuses her of being with someone else. She is not.
Valentine listens to music at a CD store. She is also a listener. This is at least the third movie out of the first 19 we have been watching where a music store has come into play. She asks for CD number 432, Van den Budenmayer. They have just sold the last one. Timing matters in this movie.
Standing next to her, without her knowing it, is her neighbor Auguste, the one who drives the red Jeep, the one who dates the woman who is the neighbor of the judge. He and his girlfriend are also listening to CDs. Throughout the movie Valentine and Auguste, who live so near each other, pass but never meet. If only they knew each other. If only they would meet.
Where Three Colors: White focuses on human choice, free will, Three Colors: Red seems to allow for fate, circumstance, near hits, near misses.
Have you seen the movie Sliding Doors? It follows Gwyneth Paltrow in two different possible lives. She walks down the stairs to the subway, and the doors close. In one story the doors close ahead of her and she misses the train. In the other story the doors close just behind her and she catches her train. We watch both stories play out, showing how vastly different, and yet strangely similar, her life would be based on the outcome of a split second.
Three Colors: Red has a similar feel. Valentine keeps missing her boyfriend's phone call, by a split second. What if she had picked up the phone? She keeps missing her neighbor Auguste by split seconds. What if they had met?
She is loyal to her boyfriend, but he mistrusts her and so mistreats her. Auguste is loyal to his girlfriend, but she cheats on him. The good people are dating the bad people. What if they were with each other? Auguste drives past Valentine's billboard and smiles at it. He likes her. If only he knew she was his neighbor.
Kieslowski explores the doppelganger. A doppelganger is a spiritual double. It is like having a twin in the world, only instead of a biological twin, it is a spiritual twin.
We will see it played out more literally in The Double Life of Veronique, his film also starring Irene Jacob, who plays Valentine here. There she is like Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors, only instead of living different lives based on the split second of the doors closing, she lives different lives in two different countries--Veronique in France, Weronika in Poland. In other words, what if the same person, or two of the same type of person, or two spiritual twins, grew up in different countries? How would that affect the outcome of his life?
Here the spiritual doubles, the doppelgangers, are of separate ages.
Auguste and the Judge are living the same life but in different generations. Both are in law school. Both drop their books and look down to pick them up. Both see the answer to the prime question they will be asked on their law exam. Both pass their law exam because this accident happened. Both get a special pen they use throughout their careers. Both love a woman who cheats on them.
Will Auguste grow bitter, as the Judge has? Will he become an apathetic, eavesdropping recluse? Or will his life take a different turn, passing through a different door?
Auguste's girlfriend has started a business where she gives you personalized weather when you call her on the phone. She is a living Siri. When called about the weather in the English Channel this weekend, she states that it will be excellent. She giggles. She herself will be crossing the Channel this weekend, with her boyfriend, not Auguste, but the one with whom she is cheating on Auguste.
The weather is cross.
A storm arises. It beats against the world. The ferry capsizes. 1,435 people were aboard. Only seven survive.
Only seven.
Who are the survivors?
Not Auguste's girlfriend. Not the man with whom she is cheating.
Who?
One is the ship's bartender.
Who are the other six? Three pairs. Not necessarily couples. They did not all take the ferry together. But three pairs.
Who?
Watch and see.
Listen and hear.
And discover the Three Colors.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
018 - Three Colors: White, 1994, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
018 - Three Colors: White, 1994, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
The film opens on a piece of luggage--a hard-shell burgundy suitcase--travelling on a conveyer belt through the airport, going from the airplane to baggage claim.
What is in the suitcase? Who owns it? Where is it going? Why?
Some people really are that desperate.
She wants a divorce.
Why?
Has he been unfaithful? No.
Is he abusive? No.
Is he an addict? No.
Does he fail to provide for her? No.
Has he stopped giving her attention? No.
Has he stopped loving her? No. He loves her very much.
Has she stopped loving him? No! She loves him still.
So, why?
He cannot perform.
Really?
She wants him. She wants to be close to him. She wants to be intimate with him. She has needs.
He is Polish. She is French. The divorce proceedings require an interpreter.
Two married people require an interpreter at their divorce proceedings.
Could communication be an issue?
In yesterday's movie, Three Colors: Blue, Julie, played by Juliette Binoche, goes to the courthouse in search of another woman. She stumbles upon a court proceeding but is asked to leave.
This is that court proceeding--the divorce trial in Three Colors: White.
The films begin to connect to one another.
Dominique is granted her divorce.
Outside the court, he chases her to her car. She leaves the burgundy suitcase on the pavement. She drives away. He is left with it.
He finds himself on the floor of the Metro, playing his comb like a musical instrument, blowing through it, wrapped in a handkerchief.
A man approaches. They talk. They become friends. The man knows he is Polish.
In The Wages of Fear, two Frenchmen became friends in South America because one heard the song being hummed by the other and recognized it as a song of his country.
In Three Colors: White, two Polish men become friends in France because one hears the song being hummed by the other, through a comb, and recognizes it as a song of his country.
But then there is that burgundy suitcase. He has it now with him in the subway.
The new friend offers to hire him on behalf of someone to kill that person. Karol, our protagonist, does not need money that badly.
What a horrifying request.
But he does want to return to Poland, now that he has lost his reason for living in Paris.
He arrives home, and we see that he is a barber who owns his own barbershop. His name is on the sign. How long have they kept the place going without him?
Karol needs a job, and he gets one in an area where he is less than competent--a security guard. He rides with his new colleagues in the car one day, and he overhears their conversation when they think he is asleep.
That conversation will change his life.
Karol has a plan. He still misses his wife, longs for her, but now he has a plan. He works hard. Things begin to change. He becomes successful. He enacts his plan.
The story takes a path that will surprise you.
And surprise you again.
In the end, how do you feel?
How does she?
How does he?
You may respond one way and then another.
Choices have consequences.
And they are living them.
018 - Three Colors: White, 1994, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
The film opens on a piece of luggage--a hard-shell burgundy suitcase--travelling on a conveyer belt through the airport, going from the airplane to baggage claim.
What is in the suitcase? Who owns it? Where is it going? Why?
Some people really are that desperate.
She wants a divorce.
Why?
Has he been unfaithful? No.
Is he abusive? No.
Is he an addict? No.
Does he fail to provide for her? No.
Has he stopped giving her attention? No.
Has he stopped loving her? No. He loves her very much.
Has she stopped loving him? No! She loves him still.
So, why?
He cannot perform.
Really?
She wants him. She wants to be close to him. She wants to be intimate with him. She has needs.
He is Polish. She is French. The divorce proceedings require an interpreter.
Two married people require an interpreter at their divorce proceedings.
Could communication be an issue?
In yesterday's movie, Three Colors: Blue, Julie, played by Juliette Binoche, goes to the courthouse in search of another woman. She stumbles upon a court proceeding but is asked to leave.
This is that court proceeding--the divorce trial in Three Colors: White.
The films begin to connect to one another.
Dominique is granted her divorce.
Outside the court, he chases her to her car. She leaves the burgundy suitcase on the pavement. She drives away. He is left with it.
He finds himself on the floor of the Metro, playing his comb like a musical instrument, blowing through it, wrapped in a handkerchief.
A man approaches. They talk. They become friends. The man knows he is Polish.
In The Wages of Fear, two Frenchmen became friends in South America because one heard the song being hummed by the other and recognized it as a song of his country.
In Three Colors: White, two Polish men become friends in France because one hears the song being hummed by the other, through a comb, and recognizes it as a song of his country.
But then there is that burgundy suitcase. He has it now with him in the subway.
The new friend offers to hire him on behalf of someone to kill that person. Karol, our protagonist, does not need money that badly.
What a horrifying request.
But he does want to return to Poland, now that he has lost his reason for living in Paris.
He arrives home, and we see that he is a barber who owns his own barbershop. His name is on the sign. How long have they kept the place going without him?
Karol needs a job, and he gets one in an area where he is less than competent--a security guard. He rides with his new colleagues in the car one day, and he overhears their conversation when they think he is asleep.
That conversation will change his life.
Karol has a plan. He still misses his wife, longs for her, but now he has a plan. He works hard. Things begin to change. He becomes successful. He enacts his plan.
The story takes a path that will surprise you.
And surprise you again.
In the end, how do you feel?
How does she?
How does he?
You may respond one way and then another.
Choices have consequences.
And they are living them.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
017 - Three Colors: Blue, 1993, France, Poland; Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
017 - Three Colors: Blue, 1993, France, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
We begin in the undercarriage of the car, positioned just behind the right-front wheel, travelling briskly down the French freeway. We hear the sounds of traffic and the sound of our own car.
The headlight beams shine in the tunnel.
A girl's hand reaches out the back-left window. She is holding an empty sucker wrapper. It flaps in the breeze. It escapes her clutch and flies away.
The car stops for her to relieve herself in the woods. We are under the car again, watching the brake line leaking as the girl comes back to the car.
A boy sits beside the open road, playing with his wooden game. He hears the sounds of a great crash. The car has run into a tree. A beach ball falls out the open rear passenger door. It rolls around behind the car.
When a ball rolls out from behind something, it means something.
We will watch M later this year, the classic 1931 German film directed by Fritz Lang and starring future Warner Bros. character actor Peter Lorre.
In that film, we see little Elsie Beckmann's ball roll out from behind a bush, and we know what has happened to her.
In this film, released 62 years later, we see little Anna de Courcy's ball roll out from inside the car,
and we know what has happened to her.
Julie de Courcy's eye is open. We watch the man's reflection in her eyeball. He stands. She stares. She lies in the hospital bed. He delivers the news. Your husband and daughter are dead. She sinks.
Julie smashes open a window. She hides. The nurse comes running. We see the nurse's reflection in the hallway on both sides, in the interior windows on the right and in the exterior windows on the left. Julie sneaks into the lab and takes a handful of pills. She shoves them into her mouth. The nurse catches her. She cannot do it. She spits them out.
She is back in bed. Her friend comes, Olivier, a composer with her husband. He brings her a small, portable television. Men are skydiving. She watches the funeral on TV. Her finger caresses the little casket of her daughter.
Krzysztoff Kieslowski is one of the great European directors. He made ten one-hour-long films loosely based on the Ten Commandments, called The Dekalog. He made a trilogy loosely based on the three colors of the French flag, beginning with this one. He made several other features, all of them well-written, well-acted, and beautifully filmed.
He deals with free will, human freedom, choices and their consequences, relationships and crossing paths, doppelgangers, sin and forgiveness, grief and healing, death and resurrection, God and love.
He shoots reflections--in mirrors and windows, spoons and TV screens, walls and faces, water and eyeballs. At the nursing home, she looks through the window, and we see her mother through the window and at the same time the reflection of two people walking behind us. At a restaurant, she looks through the window and we see the mistress and at the same time, Julie's reflection.
He plays with light--deep, rich, beautiful light, shining, bending, reflecting, refracting, flickering, falling, spilling, stopping. And blackouts.
He uses different cinematographers for different films to get different looks.
For this movie, he uses Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who also shot his 1991 film The Double Life of Veronique, which we will watch later this year, as well as films such as Gattaca (1997), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).
We look through stacks of rolled-up sheet music, like tubes, from one aisle to the other. We look at Julie through a wrought-iron fence.
He uses music. The composer does not merely compose the score, but three actors in this film play composers, and they are all working on the same score, and they have different styles, and we hear it as they compose it. Play the strings. Reduce the percussion. Remove the trumpets. Change the piano to a flute.
Yesterday, with The Last Metro, we saw how two different theatre directors had such distinct styles that a theatre critic could notice it and grow suspicious.
Today, with Three Colors: Blue, we see how two different composers have different styles, so that as they try to complete the work of the deceased composer, they have to choose which direction they will take.
The camera scans the music as if caressing it, and we hear what the camera sees.
In her grief Julie throws a concerto into a garbage truck, and as the sheet music folds over and tears, we hear the real music do the same.
It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking.
This film is about Julie's movement through grief, trying to complete her late husband's final composition, discovering hidden secrets, choosing to forgive, finding love.
And everyone, from all walks of life, of all ages, from every kind of profession, is given the opportunity, the choice, to love and to be loved.
In the film Jour de Fette, Jacques Tati featured an old woman bent over who gave commentary throughout the film. She looked like the little old lady who lived in a shoe--or Mother Goose herself--and her commentary resembled the comedic relief of the Fool from the English Renaissance.
In the film Three Colors: Blue, Kieslowski also features an old woman bent over, but it portrays the struggle of life. She is walking slowly down the sidewalk, carrying a single large glass bottle, taking it to a recycle bin. When she arrives, the slot is higher up than she can reach. She makes great effort to get it in.
While the one brings comedic relief, the other points to a hard-earned awareness of the world we inhabit--that it is difficult, that people are fragile and require help, that help may seem unavailable. Does someone love this old woman?
One night Julie hears a great noise outside her apartment window. She looks down at the street and sees three men abusing another man, throwing him to the ground and kicking him. He escapes their clutches and runs into the lobby of her building below. She hears him climbing the stairs and desperately pounding on every door on the way up, trying to find sanctuary from his pursuers. He makes it to her door. He pounds loudly. He pleas. He cries for help. She stands and listens, as if trying to know what to do, but ultimately protecting herself from her own vulnerability. She hears the attackers apprehend him outside her door and carry him back down the stairs, standing frozen in her own helplessness. Does someone love this abused man?
A man plays music on the street, with a recorder. It sounds as if he knows the tune Julie and Olivier are completing for her husband. She asks the homeless man where he learned the tune. He says he makes things up. She catches him later arriving in an expensive car, getting out and kissing his beautiful wife, taking his place on the sidewalk to begin his work for the day--playing music, busking for money. Who is this man? Does someone love him?
Julie dips a sugar cube in her coffee, and we watch the liquid as it seeps up the cube and reaches her fingertips.
Julie visits her mother in the nursing home. Her mother is played by the great Emmanuelle Riva, whom we just saw in the film Leon Morin, Priest, and whom we will see in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Riva was 32 when she burst on the scene with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and she was 34 in Leon Morin, Priest. She is now 66 in Three Colors: Blue, but they have made her up to look much older.
Her mother thinks she is her own sister. Then she thinks she is Julie's sister. She never does understand that she is Julie. Does she still love her?
Antoine, the boy who witnessed the crash, brings Julie her cross necklace. He found it at the crash site. He gives it to her. She gives it back to him, an act of love, a moment of grace.
The man with the recorder says, "You gotta always hold on to something."
Her mother says, "One can't give up everything."
Julie's neighbor works at a sex club. She likes what she does, but she is shaken when her own father comes in as a paying customer. Does someone love him? Does someone love her?
Julie finishes her husband's composition. It plays. We hear it. We see the people who have crossed her path--the boy, her mother, Lucille, the mistress, the ultrasound, the baby, Julie herself--and we think of the words of the song as we see the people and hear the words.
Imagine all the main characters coming back in images, in their lives, in their worlds, as you hear these words being sung by the symphonic chorale.
Though I speak / In tongues of men and of angels
If I have not love / I am like a noisy gong / Or a clanging cymbal
And though I have / The gift of prophecy / And can fathom all mysteries
And have faith to move mountains
If I have not love / I am nothing
Love is patient / Love is kind
It is not jealous or boastful / Love is not proud
Love bears all things / Believes all things / Hopes all things / Endures all things
Love never fails
For prophecies shall fade away / Tongues shall be stilled / And knowledge shall come to an end
But these shall remain / Faith, hope, and love
But the greatest of these is love.
This is available to all of them.
This is available to all of us.
017 - Three Colors: Blue, 1993, France, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.
We begin in the undercarriage of the car, positioned just behind the right-front wheel, travelling briskly down the French freeway. We hear the sounds of traffic and the sound of our own car.
The headlight beams shine in the tunnel.
A girl's hand reaches out the back-left window. She is holding an empty sucker wrapper. It flaps in the breeze. It escapes her clutch and flies away.
The car stops for her to relieve herself in the woods. We are under the car again, watching the brake line leaking as the girl comes back to the car.
A boy sits beside the open road, playing with his wooden game. He hears the sounds of a great crash. The car has run into a tree. A beach ball falls out the open rear passenger door. It rolls around behind the car.
When a ball rolls out from behind something, it means something.
We will watch M later this year, the classic 1931 German film directed by Fritz Lang and starring future Warner Bros. character actor Peter Lorre.
In that film, we see little Elsie Beckmann's ball roll out from behind a bush, and we know what has happened to her.
In this film, released 62 years later, we see little Anna de Courcy's ball roll out from inside the car,
and we know what has happened to her.
Julie de Courcy's eye is open. We watch the man's reflection in her eyeball. He stands. She stares. She lies in the hospital bed. He delivers the news. Your husband and daughter are dead. She sinks.
Julie smashes open a window. She hides. The nurse comes running. We see the nurse's reflection in the hallway on both sides, in the interior windows on the right and in the exterior windows on the left. Julie sneaks into the lab and takes a handful of pills. She shoves them into her mouth. The nurse catches her. She cannot do it. She spits them out.
She is back in bed. Her friend comes, Olivier, a composer with her husband. He brings her a small, portable television. Men are skydiving. She watches the funeral on TV. Her finger caresses the little casket of her daughter.
Krzysztoff Kieslowski is one of the great European directors. He made ten one-hour-long films loosely based on the Ten Commandments, called The Dekalog. He made a trilogy loosely based on the three colors of the French flag, beginning with this one. He made several other features, all of them well-written, well-acted, and beautifully filmed.
He deals with free will, human freedom, choices and their consequences, relationships and crossing paths, doppelgangers, sin and forgiveness, grief and healing, death and resurrection, God and love.
He shoots reflections--in mirrors and windows, spoons and TV screens, walls and faces, water and eyeballs. At the nursing home, she looks through the window, and we see her mother through the window and at the same time the reflection of two people walking behind us. At a restaurant, she looks through the window and we see the mistress and at the same time, Julie's reflection.
He plays with light--deep, rich, beautiful light, shining, bending, reflecting, refracting, flickering, falling, spilling, stopping. And blackouts.
He uses different cinematographers for different films to get different looks.
For this movie, he uses Polish cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who also shot his 1991 film The Double Life of Veronique, which we will watch later this year, as well as films such as Gattaca (1997), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).
We look through stacks of rolled-up sheet music, like tubes, from one aisle to the other. We look at Julie through a wrought-iron fence.
He uses music. The composer does not merely compose the score, but three actors in this film play composers, and they are all working on the same score, and they have different styles, and we hear it as they compose it. Play the strings. Reduce the percussion. Remove the trumpets. Change the piano to a flute.
Yesterday, with The Last Metro, we saw how two different theatre directors had such distinct styles that a theatre critic could notice it and grow suspicious.
Today, with Three Colors: Blue, we see how two different composers have different styles, so that as they try to complete the work of the deceased composer, they have to choose which direction they will take.
The camera scans the music as if caressing it, and we hear what the camera sees.
In her grief Julie throws a concerto into a garbage truck, and as the sheet music folds over and tears, we hear the real music do the same.
It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking.
This film is about Julie's movement through grief, trying to complete her late husband's final composition, discovering hidden secrets, choosing to forgive, finding love.
And everyone, from all walks of life, of all ages, from every kind of profession, is given the opportunity, the choice, to love and to be loved.
In the film Jour de Fette, Jacques Tati featured an old woman bent over who gave commentary throughout the film. She looked like the little old lady who lived in a shoe--or Mother Goose herself--and her commentary resembled the comedic relief of the Fool from the English Renaissance.
In the film Three Colors: Blue, Kieslowski also features an old woman bent over, but it portrays the struggle of life. She is walking slowly down the sidewalk, carrying a single large glass bottle, taking it to a recycle bin. When she arrives, the slot is higher up than she can reach. She makes great effort to get it in.
While the one brings comedic relief, the other points to a hard-earned awareness of the world we inhabit--that it is difficult, that people are fragile and require help, that help may seem unavailable. Does someone love this old woman?
One night Julie hears a great noise outside her apartment window. She looks down at the street and sees three men abusing another man, throwing him to the ground and kicking him. He escapes their clutches and runs into the lobby of her building below. She hears him climbing the stairs and desperately pounding on every door on the way up, trying to find sanctuary from his pursuers. He makes it to her door. He pounds loudly. He pleas. He cries for help. She stands and listens, as if trying to know what to do, but ultimately protecting herself from her own vulnerability. She hears the attackers apprehend him outside her door and carry him back down the stairs, standing frozen in her own helplessness. Does someone love this abused man?
A man plays music on the street, with a recorder. It sounds as if he knows the tune Julie and Olivier are completing for her husband. She asks the homeless man where he learned the tune. He says he makes things up. She catches him later arriving in an expensive car, getting out and kissing his beautiful wife, taking his place on the sidewalk to begin his work for the day--playing music, busking for money. Who is this man? Does someone love him?
Julie dips a sugar cube in her coffee, and we watch the liquid as it seeps up the cube and reaches her fingertips.
Julie visits her mother in the nursing home. Her mother is played by the great Emmanuelle Riva, whom we just saw in the film Leon Morin, Priest, and whom we will see in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Riva was 32 when she burst on the scene with Hiroshima Mon Amour, and she was 34 in Leon Morin, Priest. She is now 66 in Three Colors: Blue, but they have made her up to look much older.
Her mother thinks she is her own sister. Then she thinks she is Julie's sister. She never does understand that she is Julie. Does she still love her?
Antoine, the boy who witnessed the crash, brings Julie her cross necklace. He found it at the crash site. He gives it to her. She gives it back to him, an act of love, a moment of grace.
The man with the recorder says, "You gotta always hold on to something."
Her mother says, "One can't give up everything."
Julie's neighbor works at a sex club. She likes what she does, but she is shaken when her own father comes in as a paying customer. Does someone love him? Does someone love her?
Julie finishes her husband's composition. It plays. We hear it. We see the people who have crossed her path--the boy, her mother, Lucille, the mistress, the ultrasound, the baby, Julie herself--and we think of the words of the song as we see the people and hear the words.
Imagine all the main characters coming back in images, in their lives, in their worlds, as you hear these words being sung by the symphonic chorale.
Though I speak / In tongues of men and of angels
If I have not love / I am like a noisy gong / Or a clanging cymbal
And though I have / The gift of prophecy / And can fathom all mysteries
And have faith to move mountains
If I have not love / I am nothing
Love is patient / Love is kind
It is not jealous or boastful / Love is not proud
Love bears all things / Believes all things / Hopes all things / Endures all things
Love never fails
For prophecies shall fade away / Tongues shall be stilled / And knowledge shall come to an end
But these shall remain / Faith, hope, and love
But the greatest of these is love.
This is available to all of them.
This is available to all of us.
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