A prominent Brazilian film critic said that he was most excited for the nine Elia Kazan films screening at this year's Mostra. I said that the prints should be good, thinking about the complete Elia Kazan retrospective at New York's Film Forum in 2009, which included beautiful new prints of On the Waterfront and Wild River, and about the fact that Kazan's widow Frances was attending this year's festival in person. "Yes," he said, "I'm sure they're all on film."
The remark was surprising, until I considered it. I lived in New York for three years before moving to São Paulo last December, during which time I discovered a number of amazing films I would never have had exposure to otherwise, oftentimes on beautiful 35mm prints. Yet the city also instilled a kind of provincial thinking, leading me to assume that every other large city had the same resources. São Paulo is a wonderful place for filmgoing, with large series or retrospectives happening less than every two months, yet when you go to see an American or European film in repertory it's often an imported print with French or English subtitles, with additional Portuguese subtitles projected electronically beneath. This was certainly the case with complete retrospectives this year devoted to major filmmakers as various as Claire Denis, Alfred Hitchcock, Luc Moullet, and Béla Tarr; one of the programmers of last year's massive John Ford series told me he couldn't find a single Ford print in Brazil. Continue Reading »
Two Americans, Shane M. Bauer and Joshua F. Fattal, arrested while hiking along the Iran-Iraq frontier two years ago and sentenced to eight years for espionage were released Wednesday on $1 million bail by the Iranian authorities, news agencies reported.
B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo offer a few ways of seeing of Alfred Hitchcock's impossible object, Vertigo.
Please take a moment to sign the petition to help release the filmmakers arrested "for collaborating with BBC Persian."
Movie Geeks United! takes you on an in-depth odyssey through the career of the late, great Stanley Kubrick. Their eight-part podcast series, which includes brand new interviews with a panel of special guests (Matthew Modine and our own Keith Uhlich among them), premiered yesterday. For more information, click here.
David Edelstein has released his Top 10 of the year.
Christian Bale and Kermit the Frog have a lot in common.
Someone's onto Black Swan as a straight male fantasy:
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.
As the title suggests, A Letter to Elia, co-directed by Martin Scorsese and noted film critic Kent Jones, breathes with the intimacy of slow and purposefully written correspondence between two friends and confidants. This sort of delicacy has been attempted before, especially in documentaries, but often exudes an unpardonable insincerity. A recent exception would be Kurt Kuenne's devastating Dear Zachary: A Letter to His Son About His Father, and like that film, both A Letter to Elia'a power and negligible flaws come from the fact that the film's subject, the controversial filmmaker Elia Kazan, and co-director Scorsese were so close. Continue Reading »
The Mexican Revolution wasn't one rebellion, but several. Beginning in 1910, military parties grappled like wrestlers, the winner changing on a regular basis. Political stability needed more than a decade, and over two million casualties; till then, peasant armies clashed on fields day and night.
Guns, blood, shifting loyalties—all ripe for cinema, but Mexico's film industry didn't emerge until years after the chief battles. By the time Fernando de Fuentes, Mexico's best early filmmaker, addressed the Revolution (with a trilogy consisting of Prisoner 13, El Compadre Mendoza, and Let's Go with Pancho Villa), nearly a quarter-century had passed since the first uprising. The trilogy is showing at this year's New York Film Festival, in prints from Mexico City, in honor of the Revolution's 100th anniversary—and, coincidentally, the 200th anniversary of Mexico's War of Independence from Spain. To say that this is a rare treat would be understatement. Not only were these films unknown in the States when they were made; Mexican cinema didn't have an international reputation, period, until de Fuentes's later films.
The three films don't have common characters or a continuing storyline. Each focuses on a different sector of society—Prisoner 13 on the urban military rulership, Let's Go with Pancho Villa on the rural peasant rebels, and El Compadre Mendoza, the middle film, on the bourgeois civilian class torn between the two. Yet the films' strongest commonality is sympathy for the Revolution's casualties, regardless of which side is being spotlighted. I don't know what de Fuentes's personal politics were, but the trilogy's compassion for every group's victims offers a profoundly liberal—I mean humanist—perspective. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: In honor of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) ongoing Montgomery Clift series, we here present an altered version of a previous House article. Wild River screens today, Monday, March 22nd, at 6:50 and 9:15pm. And it's not on DVD.]
If 1960's Wild River is director Elia Kazan's most successful film, it's because this is the most successful example of how Kazan liked to contrast actors. The wrestling matches are the most exciting parts of his movies: Carroll Baker paddling her husband's neck flab in Baby Doll, or James Dean throwing his brother at their mother in East of Eden, or Brando shoving the door in to get to Eva Marie Saint, say far more about characters' relationships than the film's overwritten scripts do. The best moments in Kazan's films are inevitably full two-shots, bespeaking his theatrical training. Unlike the work of the great film stylists, we watch Kazan not for the shots but for the struggles in them. The acting style he favored doesn't work in abstraction—the actors need something concrete to push against.
In River, he gets two performers that are as concrete as they come. Montgomery Clift plays a 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority rep who comes to a small town to buy out a family's home so the TVA can build a dam. The family lives on an island that he has to row to, and as he's pulling away after a visit, one of the group's young women (Lee Remick) leaps onto his raft. He stares at her, amazed, and she explains hurriedly: She barely ever leaves, and she's lonely. Continue Reading »
Just this week I watched and reviewed Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (2009) and in my review I referred to Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery (1948). Now I am commenting on Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, Le Corbeau (1943)—which another reviewer has called a "distant cousin" to The White Ribbon—and which makes me think of Shirley Jackson yet again; this time, her short story, The Possibility of Evil (1965). I categorized The White Ribbon as a "poison-in-the-well" piece. Others may or may not find this categorization convincing, but there can be no debate that Le Corbeau is a poison-in-the-pen piece.
As with Jackson's story, the plot has to do with an individual anonymously sending hateful gossip to all and sundry in town in order to satisfy what can only be a nefarious purpose. The crucial difference between the story and the film, however, is that the audience knows from the outset who the culprit is in the former but only finds out at the very end of the latter. Jackson's is a critical character study that lays bare a sociopath who perversely sees herself as a righteous pillar of the community. Clouzot's is a whodunit mystery that would be trite if not for its penetrating investigation of parochial hypocrisy and the dark underbelly of those next door neighbors we thought were nice...but little did we know. Continue Reading »
Andrew Sarris wrote of Elia Kazan in The American Cinema that "his career as a whole reflects an unending struggle between a stable camera and a jittery one." Historically that's more or less been the rap on Kazan—a highly-acclaimed filmmaker with many strong titles, but one whose work was too simultaneously bland and conflicted for the critical establishment to elevate him to auteur. The son of Greek immigrants and eventually a famed Broadway director, Kazan began filmmaking with a group-directed short called People of the Cumberland, broke into feature directing with 1945's adaptation of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and left it 18 films later with a version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. He came close to greatness on film, though rarely reached it: At his peak period he was at the high end of the middle bracket of several frankly liberal directors, many of whom had crossed over into movies from film and TV. He's lighter and earthier than the leaden, sententious cinema of Stanley Kramer and Richard Brooks, though he never achieves the pure ecstasy and reverie of the best Nicholas Ray. Continue Reading »
The 1954 drama On the Waterfront kicks off Film Forum's Elia Kazan series, running Oct. 9-29.
_________________________________ On the Waterfront is a masterpiece with an asterisk. The asterisk refers to the film's storyline. It's widely described as a self-justification by artists who gave the names of suspected Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The most prominent of the informers was On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan.
In 1952, Kazan, already a famous and influential theater and film director, was pressured by HUAC to supply the names of colleagues suspected of Communist affiliation. After previously refusing to cooperate, Kazan eventually caved in and named names. From the instant he cooperated, Kazan's legacy was tarnished, and in some quarters negated, by his stool pigeon status. Though he expressed ambivalence and even outright remorse, he never officially apologized for the damage he inflicted. And he sometimes defended himself on the grounds that the American Communist Party's defense of Stalinist Russia's brutality was a greater sin than his decision to inform.
It seems strangely fitting, then, that On the Waterfront would prove to be Kazan's most compelling and durable film.
____________________________________ To view the essay on The L Magazine's web site, click here. To read an expanded transcript of the essay's narration, click here.
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