Movie of the Week #20

Sette Canne, un vestito
(Seven Reeds, One Suit)
(Michelangelo Antonioni; 1949)

The industrialization of Northern Italy after the Second World War, and all its hideous consequences, was only one of the subtexts that informed, to one degree or another, a huge amount of Post-war Italian Cinema (not just the Neorealist cycle). In one of his early documentaries, Sette Canne, un vestito, Michelangelo Antonioni took his camera to a Rayon factory near Trieste and, through his determined emphasis on soulless machinery (almost to the exclusion of the workers) created the first of his oppressive environments without sacrificing the essential documentary character of the enterprise. Almost a decade later, Alain Resnais and Raymond Queneau would take this a step (or two) further with their plastic molding epic, Le Chant du Styrène, but Antonioni's film, even with the sumptuousness of its imagery, remains the more everlasting triumph in this small corner of the documentary canon.

Note: This film is presented in the original Italian, without English subtitles. Call it a poor guess or call it a shifty evasion, but it's my . . . belief . . . that the narration probably offers us little that the images can't handle on their own.

Movie of the Week #19

Karins ansikte
(Karin's Face)
(Ingmar Bergman; 1984)

For a director who sought time and again to restate a past he could only have known from hearsay, 1984's Karin's ansikte, one of the director's few shorter works and one of his most moving, represents the one occasion when Ingmar Bergman allowed that past to speak for itself.

Movie of the Week #19

Nerone
(Nero; or The Fall of Rome)
(Luigi Maggi; 1909)

Produced by Turin's pioneering Film Ambrosio, Luigi Maggi's Nerone may not be as formally elaborate as the epics of Mario Caserini and Giovanni Pastrone . . . what is, in fact, extraordinary about Italian filmmaking in that period is how its scale vaulted in such a short amount of time; less than a decade . . . but it is a nascent example of the Italian film industry's preoccupation with Imperial Rome (in this case the Nero-Poppea saga), a model it would return to, far less artfully, several decades later with the endless Hercules/Ursus/Maciste/Atlas cycle.

Movie of the Week #18

Sing, Bing, Sing
(Babe Stafford; 1933)

There's a lot of things one can say about Sing, Bing, Sing: You can say it's a perfect showcase for the formidable song stylings of Bing Crosby at the height of his powers; the last film Produced by Mack Sennett to carry a lone echo of Keystone (though I personally prefer Frank Tuttle's faux-Rene Clair work in 1932's The Big Broadcast); the only opportunity one may ever get to see how Franklin Pangborn wielded a shotgun.

All of it is true.

But above all, you can say with great confidence that Sing, Bing, Sing is one of the strangest Musicals ever made.

Movie of the Week #17

My Name is Oona
(Gunvor Grundel Nelson; 1969)

Far less critical of gender roles than her other work (that which I've seen at any rate), Gunvor Nelson's My Name is Oona emerged as one of the loveliest works in American cinema of the late 1960s (a time when you could use such terms as 'poetic' and 'cinema' in the same sentence and still maintain a straight face), and remains so to this minute. In writing about this film Amos Vogel judged Nelson 'the true poetess of visual cinema'; and while that may or may not be true . . . Vogel's declaration is too sweeping even for me, much as I incline towards it . . . no film of hers is at once so dazzling in form or effortless in its lyricism. And like all such films, it could not have been made in a time other than its own.

Movie of the Week #16

Pete Roleum and His Cousins
(Joseph Losey; 1939)

In 1939, Joseph Losey became a walking emblem of what is still a relentlessly paradoxical and fitful accomodation between the imperatives of art and progressive ideas. He was at that time a stage director who could cite as accomplishments a tour of duty with the Federal Theater Project's Living Newspaper series; awards from the National Child Labor Committee and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union . . . both bestowed for his 1938 staging of Francis Faragoh's child labor melodrama Sunup to Sundown (which, despite this honorable amen corner, ran seven performances); a stillborn attempt to produce Ernest Hemingway's hideous Spanish Civil War play, The Fifth Column; and little else. Attendant to this, he had been occupied since 1937 as Production Supervisor for the Progressive Education Association's Experimental Film Project (his sole involvement in motion pictures to that point). To call him a committed man of the Left, in short, would be to understate the matter.

It is terribly odd, then, that the first film to bear the name of this future Blacklistee, Pete Roleum and His Cousins, was a deliberate work of propaganda produced for and financed by America's Petroleum industry for exhibition at the legendary New York World's Fair of 1939. Like all such works, its primary message is simple (if immodest): We . . . you, me, and everyone not reading this . . . would be nothing without Oil companies. Oil molds life as we know it; it makes the wheels of civilization turn with deceptive ease; it is as necessary to human existence as sunshine, or oxygen. With a panoply of animated oil drops (created by one of the early masters of stop-motion animation, Charles Bowers) preaching an industrial evangel that makes the average George Pal Puppetoon, by comparison, look like a Santiago Alvarez newsreel, Losey evinces a shift in values so drastic as to invite dark retrospective speculation about blackmail, extortion, moral compromise, all kinds of horror. Why else would this man, who would go on to direct such films as The Boy With Green Hair and The Assassination of Trotsky, leap head first into the hip pocket of Oil interests?

As usual, the answer is no less prosaic (and no less sinister) than a substantial payday. He was paid $10,000 out of the film's rather lavish $115,000 budget for this 15-minute Technicolor shill job and, personally, I find it hard to begrudge him a nickel of it. By his own account, none of the early work he had done in theater or film (with the exception of this, and his work on behalf of the Progressive Education Association . . . an organization which received its funding from the John D. Rockefeller Foundation) brought him more than a pittance. The life of a hardcore Progressive, staging dramas about social blight that won prizes given by Labor Unions, may have been . . . great. On paper. And it was certainly noble. But unless your name was Orson Welles, and you had enough of an instinct on how to turn a WPA poverty gig into something that eventually paid off (if only for a time), then the weight of that Great (and still ongoing) Depression was no less heavy on your shoulders than it was on any out of work mill-hand or any ex-banker reduced to pawning old suits and selling apples on 79th street.

I wish I could say that Pete Roleum and His Cousins is a slyly subversive film; a feast of subtle, undermining touches that reflect Losey's own anti-capitalist bent. It's not (according to Losey's biographer, David Caute, there is some evidence that the filmmaker in fact excised potentially ambiguous lines from the script). This is as straightforward an encomium for a multinational industry as one could ever dread. But it is an engaging piece, nonetheless.

Movie of the Week #15

Max reprend sa liberté
(Troubles of a Grass Widower)
(Max Linder; 1912)

The beauty of this affable domestic morality play by Max Linder rests entirely with the actor/director's seemingly inexhaustible ability to balance his ineffably graceful screen presence against the stock character of a less than competent husband, consigned to his own dysfunctional devices after the wife runs home to Mother. Linder's comedies were always like this; forever two steps less unhinged, even in their slapstick elements, than the lovely knockabout grotesquerie of Keystone; and with a shade more emphasis on character. Though never as wildly successful in the States as the pantheon comics (Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Lloyd, etc), each of these eminences nevertheless took away something from Linder's work, without which their work, indeed the soul of American screen comedy itself, would have assumed a very different, possibly less charming form.

Movie of the Week #14

Vienna
(Orson Welles; 1968-1969)

What transpires when a world-class film artist is consigned to his or her own devices indefinitely? If your name is Orson Welles you do guest shots on Variety shows, wax nostalgic on a once glorious past on chat shows, lend your weight as an actor (physical as well as spiritual) to whatever godforsaken film project your agent can peel off the bottom of a very slimy barrel and, hopefully, pick up a camera when you find time and the money in whatever meager quantities fortune sees fit to provide.

Maybe the shortest Shaggy Dog story ever committed to film, Vienna finds Orson Welles' filmmaking at its most delighted, its most giddy. But for the panoply of locations where it was shot (from the eponymous Old World capitol to a stage in Hollywood), one would almost think it a home movie; not too different from those odd bagatelles Charles Chaplin used to whip up in his First National days when distinguished visitors stopped by.

Though nowhere near as formally elaborate or rigorous, the gleeful tone of Welles' Vienna directly anticipates that screwball comedy of montage, F for Fake. And like all of Welles' home-grown product (only errant moments of which saw the light of day in his lifetime), it has an unbeatable juvenile spirit, but with none of the cringe-inducing amateurishness that condition implies.

Movie of the Week #13

Meetin' WA
(Jean-Luc Godard; 1986)

One of the least remarked upon attributes of Jean-Luc Godard is how thoroughly he mastered the medium of video production. For him Video was not a mere substitute for film, but something separate and distinct, an aesthetic platform all its own to which he brought a heretofore unrevealed dimension in his art; one that subtly informed the work he would later do once he returned to Cinema.

It is, however, somewhat understandable that this pocket of his career should be so little known, given that his extended video works of the 1970s . . . Six fois deux, for example, or the remarkable France/Tour/Detour/Deux/Enfants . . . continue to languish in the limited access obscurity into which they landed with a thud virtually from the hour of their creation. There are those in the fundamentally class-based universe of cinephilia who would not have it any other way, however. I mean, don't let's kid ourselves here. There is, and always has been, a vast amount of social comfort to be derived for Us (the cinephile class) if They (the vulgar herd) have no access to the works we get to see in the cinephile dungeons of large urban centers (after all, if we can't use film to construct a bizarro-world recreation of High School where we are no longer the geeks we once were then, I ask you, what is the point?).

So Jean-Luc Godard's video creations remain militantly inaccessible to all but the small number who've been fortunate enough to see them. And more than any of these works, 1986's Meetin' WA stands as testament to the extraordinary facility he developed with this sub-medium; a faciility harder-achieved in the 70s, when video production was a far more dolorous and taxing enterprise than it is today.

At once sublime and witty, the 26 minutes of Meetin' WA consist of an interview Jean-Luc Godard conducted in 1986 with Woody Allen, the director of What's Up, Tigerlily and Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (and soon to be featured in the final moments of Godard's abortive Cannon Pictures' King Lear). The chat itself is amiable enough; certainly avoiding any conceivable adversarial notes; but this, along with the New York setting (giving Allen the home field advantage as it were) does nothing to prevent a visible anxiety from growing on the part of the filmmaker as the interview goes on.

It's as if it dawned on Allen, right in the middle of everything, that this tape could be . . . used . . . in some way he would not be able to control, that he was talking to a man who long ago demonstrated that he would never be bound to a standard not his own. Gradually, almost anticipating this development, Godard's camera moves in closer and closer, Allen's eyes dart back and forth between Godard and his translator (no less than film scholar and author Annette Insdorf) while questions are asked, the expression on his face bordering at times on open worry; like he's waiting, with only marginal patience, for some sign of what it is he's gotten himself into to manifest itself. It is, perhaps, the only occasion where Woody Allen seems as neurotic as the persona he wrote for himself was always said to be.

The Music is by Count Basie & His Orchestra; from their amazing 1961 Roulette LP The Legend (from the Pen of Benny Carter)

Movie of the Week #12

L'Idée
(The Idea)
(Berthold Bartosch; 1930-1932)

You might not think it true, but film adaptations of so-called Graphic Novels . . . which some may avow is just a modish, jumped-up substitute for the term Comic Book . . . are not without precedent. Beginning in 1930, to cite the most extraordinary case, the animator Berthold Bartosch spent the better part of two years directly adapting L'Idée, a 1920 volume by Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel, into one of the most poignant expressions in all animated film. It is our offering today.

Not the first film to be drawn from one of his 'novels in woodcut' (Walter Ruttmann had taken much of the visual inspiration of his film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt from Masereel's 1925 book, Die Stadt), Masereel had been connected with the project in the beginning, but soon withdrew, reportedly after getting a taste of how painstaking and protracted the creation was going to be. As an artist committed to the spirit, if not exactly the forms of Anarchist social belief, Masereel (I'm guessing) felt he had not the time to stand around and watch Bartosch fuss with layer after layer of transparent paper and glass plates and common soap and cardboard; forging the more than 40,000 separate, exquisite images that breathed abundant life and lyric into Masereel's already remarkable series of woodcuts. He no doubt wanted immediate action (or its closest equivalent), but Bartosch was more intent on pouring into the work everything he had . . . from his formal training as an architect to his apprenticeship in film under Lotte Reiniger in the 1920s . . . as if he somehow knew in advance that it would be the only film bearing his name that would survive him.

Which, sadly, is exactly what it is.

Movie of the Week #11

The Existentialist
(Leon Prochnick; 1963)

I suppose, in introducing Leon Prochnik's The Existentialist, I could pound out a few hundred words on form, draw a parallel or two with earlier works, toss in the names Buñuel and Keaton, render some empty judgment on the film's place in the Cinema of its day; I could do all of those things. I guess. But . . . really, all you need to know about today's offering is this:

No film of its time or any other encapsulated so neatly, so lyrically, the attitude lurking in the heart of what used to be known as The New American Cinema.

You'll see what I mean.

Movie of the Week #10

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film
(Richard Lester; 1959)

That small charming pocket of cinematic joy known as The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film is said to have begun with no more ambitious intent than Peter Sellers' desire to give a 16mm Bolex camera he'd purchased a work-out. A few months after shooting for one day with fellow Goon Show mastermind Spike Milligan in the summer of 1958, Sellers enlisted a group that included Joseph McGrath and Graham Stark, David Lodge, Richard Lester and Leo McKern (all of whom had been involved at one time or another with the Goons' television incarnations), along with a few non-professionals and his own Chauffer. He then hauled them out on location one day to finish . . . whatever it was he and Milligan had started. There was nothing you could call formal about this shoot. But for the results and the cumulative talent of those involved, it was not very different from any occasion when a group of people, for a lark, screw around with a camera. They brought a few props and some loosely premeditated gags (most of which were devised by Sellers); that was all. They had no script. What would be the point? As it was, the whole thing cost £70-80, tops. You could then argue that if the stakes hadn't been so small the potential for chaos would have been exceeded only by the possibility of disaster.

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film represented Richard Lester's first effort as a film director. At 27, he was an overeducated American-born whiz kid and pop culture polymath who'd made good across the Atlantic (he was already a veteran television director by this time) and would soon have as defining an impact on the development of Cinema in the 1960s as anyone you can name. He did not, as so many believed, coldly wield a deadpan humor and an arsenal of technique carried over from television commercials . . . or the avant-garde (depending on which critic you were reading) . . . to assault the viewer with sensation. He sought, rather anarchically in retrospect, to break through the formal conventions of narrative film without fundamentally altering its nature. His 1966 adaptation of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, for example, almost gleefully toyed with every idea moviegoers ever had, good or ill, about what a Musical was supposed to look like while remaining at the end a fundamentally solid exercise in that mode. The balance he could strike between subversion and fidelity on these occasions was bewildering; and the sheer exhilaration with which he carried it out made whole enterprise irresistable. In the 1970s Lester's methods became more understated, the balance so commonplace as to be invisible; his genre subversion in that decade grew incredibly nuanced and, almost as a result, his star fell somewhat with each (often brilliant) film. Few could see what he was up to; fewer cared. By the mid-1980s he had more or less walked away from filmmaking entirely.

But when he went out into the field to direct and act in today's offering, he could still afford to pretend that the horizons were limitless. And if his ambitions at this moment included a career directing motion picures, he could scarcely have begun with a more modest triumph.

Movie of the Week #9

The Town
(Josef von Sternberg; 1945)

Produced under the imprimatur of the U.S. Office of War Information, The Town was the only film directed in its entirety by Josef von Sternberg between 1941's The Shanghai Gesture and 1953's Anatahan, and it is in every respect an expert work of state propaganda. It's purpose was to illustrate no less than the full American ideal of Democracy through images of everyday life in what used to be known as a typical small town in the Midwest. But while it's one of the very few occasions in the Sound era where Sternberg dealt with a specifically American setting (the others being slightly more baroque works such as An American Tragedy, Blonde Venus and Sergeant Madden), it stands far outside whatever themes might have been established by those films.

Of necessity, it's an entirely rhetorical work (that was simply the nature of the enterprise), with an eleven minute running time that afforded Sternberg scant opportunity to do anything more than deliver the film's message with as much artistry as he could bring to it. But the small lumps of sensibility he does deliver on this occasion are sufficient to place this film alongside similarly artful propaganda evocations such as John Ford's Battle of Midway and William Wyler's The Memphis Belle. From the evidence of his fluid, disciplined camera gliding through public libraries, corner drugstores, schoolrooms and the like, the odd striking composition (not to mention a rather odd montage of closeups featuring prepubescent girls at a public swimming pool . . . Busby Berkeley by way of Roman Polanski, one might suggest), you could not easily or for very long mistake this film for the work of another director.

The paradigmatic American town of Sternberg's film . . . Madison, Indiana . . . is, we are told, forged out of the lives and experiences of its people; a good many of them immigrants from the Old World. It is they who keep democracy afloat through their labor. It is they who run the shops, sit on juries, participate at all levels in the well-oiled class-less system which is the true focus of the film's celebratory intent. By way of direct contrast, over a decade later . . . in his melancholic adaptation of James Jones' godawful Some Came Running . . . Vincente Minnelli would regard the very same locale and see a landscape of frustrated passions and vague ennui, proffering it almost in the same rhetorical fashion as the real fruit of post-war American life. It would have been foolish to expect Sternberg to assume even a tacitly critical stance in a propaganda film paid for by the United States government, but that only makes the question of whether Sternberg really believed the message of this marginally jingoist enterprise, beautifully wrought as it is, all the more perplexing.

Movie of the Week #8

Television Delivers People
(Richard Serra & Carlotta Fay Schoolman; 1973)

There's nothing in Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman's Television Delivers People that we don't already know, but in 1973 it was a bit more novel. Which is deliberately subjecting the matter to understatment. Prior to this deceptively simple (by any standard) video work, the closest anyone had come to offering a highly charged critique of the televisual medium was in 1961, when then-FCC Chairman Newton Minnow derided commercial Television as "a vast wasteland", largely because people did not watch programs that he thought were good for them. What was always beneath Minnow's pronouncement was the implication that he . . . not the networks and certainly not the viewers . . . had a better instinct for elevating the tone of popular culture than those who were in a position to actually do it. Never mind that the kind of programming he thought warranted broadcast was (and is) middlebrow pap of a similarly dismal (albeit more liberal) cast than the worst of that which he condemned. The important thing is that he never seemed to question his judgement about what really constituted his vast wasteland. It wasn't that the system was fundamentally pernicious, as he saw it; it was just headed in the wrong direction.

Television Delivers People strikes at the matter more directly, by questioning the wisdom of having a medium this powerful rest entirely in the control of vast corporations; those whose only responsibility is to deliver greater and greater revenues to stock-holders. This is, of course, a line of attack no FCC Chairman could ever (or would ever) adopt. And, a full two decades before Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent or such ancillary works as Elizabeth Fones-Wolf's amazing history of corporate propaganda, Selling Free Enterprise, Serra and Schoolman brought forth the seed of what would later blossom into a veritable cult of media criticism and set it to the soothing sound of Muzak.

Movie of the Week #7

Taris, roi de l'eau
(Jean Vigo; 1931)

On its face, Taris, roi de l'eau was a short film about French Swimming Champeen Jean Taris . . . not too different in conception from any number of Pathe or Movietone newsreel items . . . but for its brevity if nothing else, Jean Vigo's second creation was possibly his boldest statement. With its repeated employment of purely cinematic devices, its own grace seeming in conflict with the order of that which it documents, the film almost ridicules, rather than celebrates, the physicality of its subject; rendering a perfect before-the-fact antidote to Riefenstahl's fetish opus, Olympiad.

I've often wondered . . . and I fear I'll never know the answer to this . . . whether Busby Berkeley, who made a career of using cinema to transcend the purely physical, had this film at least partly in mind when he created the By a Waterfall sequence of Footlight Parade. Probably not. Like Vigo, he just had an innate understanding of the medium's potential.

What more does any filmmaker really need?

Movie of the Week #6

Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations
(Willard Maas; 1966)

In April of 1966, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York opened an exhibit by the true Jay Gatsby of American art, Andy Warhol. Silver Clouds, as it was called, consisted in its entirety of a roomful of silver, metalized plastic pillow-shaped balloons inflated with helium and oxygen. They floated . . . that's all they did . . . held aloft by the gallery's own air vents. In comparison to Warhol's yellow and pink Cow wallpaper exhibit then-ongoing in another part of the gallery, this was a dynamic work, but it was not without its charm for some.

Willard Maas, the poet, filmmaker and off-camera star of Warhol's 1964 film Blowjob, was so taken by the installation that he decided to put these inflated bags of air on film (perhaps, who can say, sensing a theme in light of his fellatory participation in the earlier work). The result, Andy Warhol's Silver Flotations was his enduring contribution to the Warholian ether all New York seemed to be floating in in those days, and it is our offering today.

Movie of the Week #5

Bimbo's Initiation
(Dave Fleischer; 1931)

With the release of Richard Linklatter's feature-length cartoon version of a Philip K. Dick novel, I thought it a good opportunity to turn, however briefly, to what is still, to me, the gold standard in animated cinema.

People who apply the term 'Surreal' to films produced in the early 30s by Max and Dave Fleischer are really missing the point. Indeed there are elements that correspond to that swell in the tidepool of European formalism, but to say that it's a defining characteristic (or even an important one) is to, in the same breath, dismiss everything that made their work so unique.

As is plain in even a gem as dark as their 1931 film Bimbo's Initiation, the Fleischers were not following the aesthetic footprints of Old World models, they were running on the freedom granted them by the knowledge that the only restraint on their vision was the limits of their ability. Nothing else accounts for the exhilaration in the center of their finest work. This was a time when popular art accomodated the strange and the unkempt and the lurid and the beautiful far more easily than any point since, a circumstance that brought forth the wild ether in which something like Bimbo's Initiation could be created.

There's more joy and horror in these seven minutes than in all the latter-day cartoon emanations of the last quarter-century.

Movie of the Week #4

Now!
(Santiago Alvarez; 1965)

Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and an amazing (if slightly over-arranged) recording by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off Now!, one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s. Not intended as a work of great subtlety, Alvarez wields other people's images with perhaps more artistry than those who created them, and builds a remarkable piece of rhetorical cinema in the process. It's target -- the then-current racial conflagration in the United States -- is an easy one. But it is perhaps this very fact that most fuels the scorn and rage in the marrow of this film. If there was any room for nuance, he might have gone a little easier.

Now! is strident, yes; but breathtaking.

Movie of the Week #3

Wintercourse
(Paul Sharits; 1962)

Movie of the Week #2

Thanatopsis
(Ed Emshwiller; 1962)