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Interrupting the interruption in service

In a few moments, I'm heading out for this:

Are you here to fix the cable? Do you see what happens, Larry? Are you surprised at my tears, sir? What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

You have received this invitation because you roll on Shabbos. You have the necessary means for a necessary means for a higher education. Racially, you are pretty cool. Your art has been commended as being strongly vaginal. Obviously, you are not a golfer.

Help me celebrate my special lady friend's 30th birthday! Enter a world of pain on Sunday June 29, as Harvard Square's historic Brattle Theater* graciously hosts our private screening of the Coen Bros. immortal 1998 classic The Big Lebowski.** We will start the film at 11:30 AM, but get there early so you can grab a slice of cake and pour yourself a White Russian. Yeah I know it's early for some of you, but you can get your goldbricking ass there. Don't make me send the Nihilists out to cut off your Johnson!

Admission is free, but if you'd like to pitch in I'll accept your personal check for $.69, made out to [redacted]. Also, there will be Creedence tapes, and other party favors that are as yet to be determined.

*While you're there you might consider making a small donation to the Brattle Film Foundation, and help save movies. Okay. Commercial over.

Flaherty 2008: Almost there

The cinetrix greeted the dawn this morning and is on pace to beat all previous records for sleep deprivation. Here's what we've been watching, and when:

Monday morning: The Backyard Border (2008), Lee Wang; Grossraum (2004-5), Lonnie van Brummelen; Sahara Chronicle (2006-7), Ursula Biemann

Monday afternoon: Lottery of the Sea (2006), Allan Sekula

Monday evening: From Alex to Alex (2006), Alison Kobayashi; Memories (2004), Sylvia Schedelbauer; The Betrayal (Nerakhoon, 2007), Ellen Kuras & Thavisouk Phrasavath

Tuesday morning: special sneak preview of The Exiles (1961) by Kent MacKenzie in a beautifully restored print thanks to Milestone. Out July 11th.

Tuesday afternoon: Shorts. Lessons of the Blood (work in progress), James T. Hong; Tarrafal (2007); Pedro Costa; Remote Intimacy (2007/8), Sylvia Schedelbauer; Life in Fog (1995), Bahman Ghobadi; 731: Two Versions of Hell (2006-7), James T. Hong

It's cookout-and-outdoor-screening night tonight. Pray the weather holds....

Pressed words

The cinetrix was about to make a Sing Along with Mitch reference and then realized she only feels--but is not actually--geriatric.

Anyway, for those of you interested in playing the Flaherty home game, there's a blog. See the parallel arguments develop in cyberspace here.

It's colossal!

Greetings from the 53rd annual Flaherty Seminar, the Age of Migration, curated by Chi-hui Yang. The cinetrix hasn't yet had her first cup of essential, life-sustaining coffee, so a word on what we've seen thus far. Not sure whether I've yet arrived at a place where I could say what I think anyhow, but perhaps releasing the pressure with this trephine they call the Internet will help.

Saturday evening saw only one session but three films: Q (2002) by Oliver Husain, Cargo (2001) by Laura Waddington, and God Is My Safest Bunker (2008) by Lee Wang.

Sunday morning we got into the full swing. Do note, it is Flaherty tradition not to announce the film you're about to see until asses are in seats in the theatre. Chi-Hui's upped the ante a bit more by not telling us the titles--only the running times. It is also traditional to screen a work by Robert Flaherty sometime during the seminar. And so it was that a rarely seen jawn he put together for the extension service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called The Land (1942) unspooled, followed by Ursula Biemann's Black Sea Files (2005), and, as a lagniappe, Skate Manzanar (2001), by Renee Tajima-Pena.

The afternoon began with another Oliver Husain piece, Shrivel (2005), a short by James Hong called The Form of the Good (2006), and our first feature, Bahman Ghobadi's Half-Moon (2006). [He'd been invited to attend but got tripped up by visa snarls.]

And then there was the evening screening. Given the presence of one Pedro Costa at the cocktail hour before dinner and our half-hour-earlier start time, my money was on Colossal Youth (2006). So it was written, etc. etc. It was the first Costa film I've seen, but not the last, I suspect, and it has been seeping slowly into the crenellations of my brain ever since.

By my count, that makes two mentions of the ol' cranium, which may be its subtle way of telling me it'd like some coffee. More anon.

I still don't understand how you knew I wanted lovebirds.

Oh, my.

Alfred Hitchcock + Barbie = Awesome
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Together at last! In a pairing nobody saw coming, Mattel married two classics together to make the Alfred Hitchcock The Birds Barbie Doll. As you can see, the doll is being assaulted by a trio of angry avian attackers, making this one of very few products to be both awesome and classy. We love it, and we're sure you-- or someone you know-- will, too!

Alfred Hitchcock The Birds Barbie Doll Description:
Based on the classic movie!
Includes real fake birds!
High-quality head looks scared and has awesome hair!
This Barbie is for The Birds! Actually, this Barbie from The Birds is for you! Celebrating Alfred Hitchcock's classic film, this incredible collector's doll features our heroine being attacked by a trio of fine feathered foes, just like in the movie. Will these plastic birds damage her delightful handbag or her carefully styled hair? We certainly hope not! Be sure to let Barbie into your home and pray that the birds don't come in with her! [via]

Flaherty countdown

The cinetrix is sure that SilverDocs, P-Town, and Nantucket are all very nice. That said, one more day....

The film teaches itself to you.

Roger Ebert uses Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to plug the benefits of shot-by-shot analysis:

I began in about 1970, on the advice of John West, a Chicago film exhibitor, teacher and historian. "You know how coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to go through game films?" he asked. "Do the same thing with a feature movie. You don't stop after every frame, of course, but you stop at anything interesting, and discuss it, and you can back up and look at it a frame at a time."

This I did, to begin with, during U of C classes. The rules were simple: Anyone in the audience shouted out "Stop!" and we did, and discussed why they wanted us to stop. Beginning with Hitchcock, who remains the most fruitful director for such analysis, I worked my way over the years through the work of Welles, Bunuel, Bergman, Herzog, Truffaut and many others. I found that with a large group, there would always be one member with the expertise to settle the question at hand: A Hungarian speaker, for example, or a psychiatrist, or a specialist on Japanese medieval history. The Colorado groups often numbered 1,000 students and locals, and over the years we formed a community.

Of course the introduction of the laserdisc, and later the DVD, made this process infinitely easier.

Amen. Allelujah!

White heat

You'll forgive the parochialism* if I say, "TOP OF THE WORLD!"

Made it, ma!

*It's what we do best. Also, fuck you, Judd Apatow.

Histoire(s) du Cinema

A stretch of travel has prevented the cinetrix from consuming anything cinematic,* but she did stumble into a fascinating conversation with the Fesser's uncle, also a professor [of French history], visiting the east coast from his home in northern California for his 50th reunion at Harvard. Which means he started in 1954, the year after the Brattle launched as an art house. He chuckled and said he'd actually written some film reviews for the student paper back in the day.

The subject of film originally came up because the Fesser's uncle mentioned working in a visit with his old pal Tom Scott while he was here. The same Tom Scott who pretty much designed the sound stuff at Skywalker Ranch and worked with Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now. Squee! And off we went.

Over the course of the conversation that followed, he asked me whether I thought Harvey and Haliday had modeled their theatre after the Cinematheque. Bien sur! Here's why he asked: Turns out after he graduated he headed to Paris to do graduate work and lived, you guessed it, across the street from the Cinematheque in the early 60s. Langlois in the maison! Good times.

Later, said uncle confessed to the Fesser that he'd enjoyed our talk but was used to teaching history, not being it.

*Though she ate lunch at a diner in Mayberry and toured the cash-strapped Twain house within a single 24-hour period.

Plague

There are so many awful stories coming out of Iowa that the cinetrix wanted to share this. Somewhere Rick Altman is smiling.

NATION
Rare Manuscripts Saved From Rising Floodwater

Listen Now [3 min 24 sec] add to playlist
All Things Considered, June 14, 2008 · A brigade of rescuers formed a human chain to protect a cache of rare manuscripts from rising waters at the University of Iowa. Film material used for cinema classes were also saved by the group. NPR's Andrea Seabrook talked with Nancy Baker, the university's director of libraries, who organized the rescue. According to Baker, hundreds of community volunteers showed up to help with the three-day effort.

UPDATE: A heartbreaking Flickr set, forwarded by FOC/U of I alum ...something slant, may be found here.