Video essay for U samogo sinyego morya/By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet). Featuring commentary by Nicole Brenez, author of Abel Ferrara (University of Illinois Press), professor of cinema studies at Université Paris I and programmer at the Cinémathèque Française. Produced by House contributor Kevin B. Lee, as part of Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.
[Editor's Note: Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday and Scarface play this weekend as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to Manny Farber. Click here (and on the film titles in the article) for more details. The lead image below is Farber's painting "Howard Hawks II" (1977).]
The auteurist debate is no longer a matter of dispute; the question critics should be asking is not if a director "writes" the film in cinematic terms, but how. Does he create a film in a way that can be told only through cinema, with many conflicting truths happening simultaneously? Or does he film a script, making a linear collection of words into something visible, connecting the dots with a standardized grammar of cinema that was developed in previous films? In the latter situation, one message is illustrated. However interesting this message may be, this is a waste of cinema. (Print conveys one voice in a linear order much less expensively.)
Manny Farber explained the elevated species of this second scenario more explicitly, under the banner of "masterpiece art" or "white elephant art." Continue Reading »
[Special opens today at Manhattan's Sunshine Cinema. Click here for more information. It is also playing on Time/Warner & Comcast Video-on-Demand. Check local listings.]
Special is good enough in various particulars that its token theatrical release—nearly three years after its Sundance Film Festival debut—is more than slightly bittersweet. Co-writers/co-directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore rest their depressive character study on the able shoulders of actor Michael Rapaport, who pushes the film forward even as its jittery, hand-held aesthetic frequently marks time.
As Les Franken, an introverted meterman convinced, after ingesting an experimental depression medication, that he has superpowers, Rapaport grounds Special's numerous flights of fancy within a painfully physical realm. Haberman and Passmore take a page from the cartoonist Bill Watterson, who noted of the tiger protagonist in his great Calvin & Hobbes, "The nature of [the character's] reality doesn't interest me, and each story goes out of its way to avoid resolving the issue. ... I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it." So when Les demonstrates his "ability" to run through walls, we see him do just that. But we also see some telling aftereffects (a bloody nose; a rapidly expanding bruise) or alternate character perspectives (say those of pot-smoking, comic book store-running brothers Joey (Josh Peck) and Everett (Robert Baker)) that throw the veracity of Les' beliefs into harsh relief. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
[Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where it Rules is playing Sunday 11/23 and Wednesday 11/25 as part of the Manny Farber Tribute at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Visit filmlinc.com for more info.]
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Only 50 minutes long but requiring at least two or three viewings to grasp, the debut feature of cinema's most dynamic husband and wife directing duo is quite possibly the most daunting and demanding work of the 60s New Wave. Adapting a novel by Nobel laureate and post-war German critic Heinrich Boll, Straub and Huillet radically reinvent conventional expository devices such as voiceover narration and scene transitions, transmogrifying D.W. Griffith's innovations with cinematic time (cf. Intolerance) to reflect a frightening state of national and political shell-shock. Upon initial viewings, half the time one doesn't know whether a scene is happening in the contemporary West Germany of the 1960s, the 1930s Third Reich, or the First World War. This disorientation reflects the haunted mental state of a family comprised of three generations of political outsiders, perpetually living under traumas suffered by their nation's history that those around them are eager to repress. What keeps this film from being dismissed as a pretentious high-brow aesthetic exercise is the sinuous mystery to its rhythms, made clean by a near-merciless precision to the film's Bresson-inspired cutting and framing schemes, and weighted with the emotional accumulation of oblique expressions of rage and cruelty, Teutonic blue notes played with cool ferocity. This is a puzzle film with jigs as sharp as shark's teeth, now as much as ever. _____________________________________ To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
[The Betrayal opens today at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Click here for screening information, here for the film's official website, and here for Lauren Wissot's review of the film, originally published on The House Next Door on June 14th, 2008 as part of our coverage of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]
INTRODUCTION
The day I interviewed famed cinematographer Ellen Kuras (who I'd always envisioned as a wishbone with Scorsese and Spike Lee pulling on either leg) and Thavisouk Phrasavath, co-directors of the 23-years-in-the-making labor of love The Betrayal, congratulations were in order. The film, about the fallout from U.S. foreign policy in Laos as told through the personal lens of Thavi and his immigrant family, had just made the doc shortlist for the Academy Awards (along with Man On Wire. Attention Werner Herzog, HND interviews are good luck!) But as we spoke about everything from the American government's refusal to fully own up to historical atrocities committed in its name (thereby repeating them) to the influence Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (on which Kuras was cinematographer) had on The Betrayal, I got a strong sense that the filmmakers were aiming higher than even Oscar. Sure, a statue would be nice, but influencing an Iraq pullout would be much more on point and gratifying.
Podcast is embedded after the break. It can also be found here as a downloadable mp3 file. Continue Reading »
[The Betrayal opens today at the IFC Center in Manhattan. Click here for screening information, here for the film's official website, and here for Lauren Wissot's audio interview with cinematographer/co-writer/co-director Ellen Kuras and co-writer/co-director/subject Thavisouk Phrasavath. This review was originally published on The House Next Door on June 14th, 2008 as part of our coverage of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.]
"I run between what I remember and what I've forgotten," Thavisouk Phrasavath says in his and acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras' co-directed debut feature The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), which follows Thavisouk (Thavi for short) and his family's series of betrayals, first at the hands of the U.S. government in Laos and then from within the family itself once he, his mother, and siblings reach American shores. A labor of love over twenty years in the making, the doc combines rich, elegiac images of the Laotians and their land, meditative music, prophetic folk wisdom told in voiceover, footage from the Vietnam era (from utter devastation to empty presidential speeches), Thavi as a teenage long-hair in Brooklyn, wayward youth framed metaphorically against a backdrop of moving trains—all stitched together like a patchwork quilt, like shards of a dream. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]
[The Carole Lombard retrospective runs at Manhattan's Film Forum from November 21st—December 2nd. Click here for more information.]
In at least seven movies, all of them comedies with serious undertones, the exuberant Carole Lombard became emblematic of the whole screwball comedy genre of the thirties, and she passed into folklore with her marriage to Clark Gable and her early death in a plane crash in 1942, at age 34. It's her centenary this year, so there have been tributes, including a "star of the month" program on the indispensable Turner Classic Movies. TCM showed her seven wonders, starting with Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934) and ending with Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). In between those very different peaks, Lombard was the archetypal madcap heiress in Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), a small town girl caught up in the publicity machine in the cutting Ben Hecht satire Nothing Sacred (1937), a manicurist on the make in Mitchell Leisen's Hands Across the Table (1935), a congenital liar in the overlooked True Confession (1937), and a demanding, hot-to-trot wife for Alfred Hitchcock in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941). Continue Reading »
["Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago. The research suggests that the first humans in New Zealand hunted the newly found Waitaha penguin to extinction by 1500, about 250 years after their arrival on the islands. But the loss of the Waitaha allowed another kind of penguin to thrive—the yellow-eyed species that now also faces extinction, Philip Seddon of Otago University, a co-author of the study, said Wednesday. The team was testing DNA from the bones of prehistoric modern yellow-eyed penguins for genetic changes associated with human settlement when it found some bones that were older—and had different DNA."] Continue Reading »
"Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)," directed by Jake Nava
"Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" doesn't really have verses or even a chorus, it's all-hook, moving from one high-energy Beyonce shout to another, never really letting up. The titular hook's rushed through in the same double-time as that keyboard line on-speed and Jake Nava's video similarly starts and doesn't stop. It's all performance on basically no set at all, Beyonce kinda lip-syncs, instead focusing on her and the other two dancers' Bob Fosse "Mexican Breakfast" walk-it-outs with minimal lighting tricks with minimal cuts. Continue Reading »
1. This Saturday sees The King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis, in conversation with Peter Bogdanovich at The Times Center in Manhattan. Information on the event can be found here. In conjunction, the Museum has commissioned an essay by Chris Fujiwara, now up at Moving Image Source.
["Lewis's films are adventures in multiplicity: things happen at the same time, and in the same space, that couldn't or shouldn't so happen (like the multiple Herberts rushing upstairs in panic in The Ladies Man). He loves to work with segmentation, to divide the frame into separate compartments (the line between stage and backstage in the prom scene of The Nutty Professor, the recording studio scene in The Patsy), to divide the narrative into blocks (the episodic structures of The Family Jewels and Hardly Working [1980]). Lewis's great originality as a filmmaker lies in his art of multiplying segmentation or segmenting multiplicity so as to produce a spiraling disorder that leads miraculously to a reassertion of order (as in the endings of The Family Jewels, Which Way to the Front?, and Cracking Up [1983]). His films take place in zones of indeterminacy and combinatorial freedom."] Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the commenters, and do not necessarily reflect the official policies, positions, or opinions of The House Next Door.]
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]
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The premise plays like a joke: a Marxist, a capitalist and a common worker stumble through four decades of post-World War II Italy, each pursuing their ideal of what modern society largely at the expense of the others. The joke is on all of them, as Ettore Scola and fellow writers Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli plot a bittersweet march from the exuberant hope following the end of Fascism to a 1970s dystopia of class stratification and red tape, where middle class families huddle overnight just to enroll their kids in schools while the rich idle away in comfortable seclusion. Scola and company trade in rough caricatures, betraying mild contempt for both the ineffectual intellectual (Stefana Satta Flores) who leaves his wife and child to pursue a pipe dream of socialism through cinema education, and the selfish industrialist (Vittorio Gassman) who spends a lifetime accumulating wealth and privilege while turning his back on those who love him. Their fellow war buddy, a hapless hospital orderly (Nino Manfredi) who remains steadfast to his principles as well as to their common love interest (Stefania Sandrelli), is left as the de facto hero of the middlebrow. _____________________________________ To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.
["Among the many recent conversations, this weekend I had a private talk with LA Film Fest director Rich Raddon, a Morman member of the film community who was drawn into the spotlight late last week after it was revealed that he donated $1500 to the campaign in support of California Prop 8. Rich is a longtime friend within the film community and I agreed to speak with him off the record, so I can't detail the substance of our conversation. However, I can relate that he is in the midst of a painful and emotional process as his personal and professional worlds collide rather publicly. During our talk, I expressed my own disgust over the tactics of his church and reiterated how offensive the campaign against equality is to so many people, especially within the film community. Rich Raddon is already hearing this first hand from many people around him, so I also listened carefully as he expressed his own hope that the goals of both sides can be achieved peacefully and harmoniously going forward."] Continue Reading »
[Author's Note: For more information, to browse earlier episodes, or to buy the book in time for Christmas, visit www.directorama.net.]
Click to enlarge:
__________________________________________ Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).
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