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Perhaps it's a side effect of the strict academic cast of my recent days -- grading without the burden of performing in the classroom — that finds me listing geeky. Apologies in advance to those who originally directed me to these links — your names have been lost in the mists of time but burn brightly in my heart. Or something.
First off, above, an hour-plus throwdown on Vertigo, featuring among others my former prof Richard Allen. To his credit, he is the ONLY one who returned, with comments, a paper I submitted to satisfy a long-in-the-tooth incomplete, which ultimately led to me finally garnering my cinema studies M.A. [So I guess it's partially his fault I'm saddled with grading now?] As it happens, that same paper was also the one I later presented at my SCMS debut [& triumphant return to Chicago] in 2006.
Speaking of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual throwdown — thanks to the 11th hour goading of the 'Fesser and Signore Serial Narrative, I proposed a paper to deliver at the conference in New Orleans in March. Motherfuckers accepted it, to my chagrin. So now I gotta write a goddamned paper.
First, though, I think I should probably check out this U Wisconsin P publication, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 by Tino Balio. An excerpt from the tnr review that persuaded me it'd be useful for said goddamned paper:
...A common phrase of the era—“well, it’s a foreign film”—could denote intellectual or sexual sophistication, and in both cases they were profitable. Through the 1950s, foreign films accounted for about 7 percent of total box office—a staggeringly high number that has never been duplicated.
By 1966, however, a convergence of developments would scuttle the armada of foreign films that had arrived continuously for twenty years. In 1952, the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to film, allowing the sex in European films to escape a good deal of the era’s censorship. Owing to Hollywood’s production codes, no studio would dare put that kind of eroticism in American movies. But the European monopoly on sex ended in 1966, when Hollywood altered the Production Code. Its replacement by a ratings system two years later allowed the packaging of sex in films by giving them an “R” rating. Foreign films were no longer unique in that most profitable of ways. Moreover, the studios began to lose interest in distributing foreign films, and instead made deals to bring talented foreign directors over to direct American productions.
Another new text I covet is Pamela Robertson Wojcik's latest, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975. And not just because Pam is pretty much the only double alum I know in film studies. Although that plays a role. But also, what a good, innovative/well, duh/so fucking smart approach to thinking about a certain era/genre. To wit:
Rather than an incidental setting, this book argues that the apartment functions as a particularly privileged site for representing an important alternative to dominant discourses of and about the fifties in America. The apartment plot offers a vision of home, centered on values of visibility, contact, density, mobility, impermanence, permeability, spontaneity, and porousness that contrasts sharply with more traditional views of home as private, stable, and family-based.
...I began looking into the films, I became aware of how much this dominant strand of film and popular culture had been ignored or denied by the dominant reading of the period. Most accounts of the fifties assume not only that everybody moved to the suburbs, but also that entertainment shifted its focus to the suburbs as well. Again and again, I would read that the housewife was the dominant image of women, the suburban breadwinner the dominant male, and that all movies and TV shows looked like Leave It to Beaver.
The films pointed in a different direction—an urban fifties. They also pointed toward a burgeoning singles culture. Against the typical stereotype of the mandate for early marriage in the fifties, they served as a reminder that this was also the era of Playboy magazine, Sex and the Single Girl, and queer urban pulp fiction.
So, I not only examined the films as a genre, locating formal and thematic affinities among them, but also started to look at them as documenting an urban reality, on the one hand, and urban fantasy, on the other, both reflecting the urban and imagining it.
When I'm not busy being a humorous/less feminist on the Interwebs, I also teach the yout'. This week's proud moment comes from favorite former student X's Facebook status update regarding his pal, fellow former student Y:
X:
Taking Y's Blues Brothers cherry tonight. Hard.
They grow up so fast!
The cinetrix also finds herself in the unfamiliar state of being sad the semester's over before the grading's done. Mostly cuz it'd be sweet to share the following from Manohla Dargis's review of Johnny To's Vengeance with the young'uns, so they'd know my yammering on about blocking and the frame etc. wasn't just something I made up:
If you want to know what great filmmaking looks like, watch how he aligns people inside his frame, creating first visual interest through their arrangement — he often places the three assassins in a triangle — and then visual excitement when they start to move. He likes fast edits and restless cameras, and dynamically mixes long shots with close-ups, but his images bristle with tension before he makes a single cut. There’s a near-geometric aspect to his mise-en-scène, even when bodies start flying across the screen amid the clouds of gun smoke and arterial sprays. It’s evidence of a rigor that was common in the old Hollywood studio system, when base levels of craft and technique were givens even in B movies.
More like, "if you want to know what great film criticism looks like," amirite?
Grady Hendrix writes in Slate about what will be lost with the passing of projectionist as a profession. The truly explosive ending:
With projectionists gone, another part of our lives will lose the human touch. During the Solidarity strikes in Poland in the early '80s, Rivierzo was working at a mom-and-pop theater and received a print for the night's show that smelled like vinegar. He began searching the reels of the innocuous Hollywood feature and found that a chunk of nitrate film stock had been spliced into middle of the film. Nitrate is an incredibly dangerous early film stock that is so flammable it will burn underwater. It is so volatile that playing it requires not only fireproof projection booths but special projectors equipped with multiple, built-in fire extinguishers. Projectionists are trained to treat it like the deadly explosive that it is, and Rivierzo, knowing it could catch the theater on fire, refused to play it.
First the manager begged and then he threatened, but Rivierzo wouldn't budge. Finally, the theater's owner showed up and promised Rivierzo that he would assume all responsibility if anything happened, but he insisted that the film be screened. Reluctantly, Rivierzo agreed, and he carefully threaded up the flammable stock. That night, the cinema hosted a private show for the owner and a crowd of Polish community leaders. The nitrate footage Rivierzo screened was some of the first film smuggled out of Poland, shot by film students on antiquated equipment, that showed police breaking up the Solidarity strikes with bullets. It was the first proof that the crackdown on the Solidarity movement was worse than anyone was being told, and that night's screening was designed to raise money from Polish expats for the cause.
Which prompts David Lowery to share his own story of the view from the booth:
It just so happened that, in February of 1998, on the east wing of the theater, in auditorium seventeen, the usher staff noticed a young man slumbering in his seat after the credits ended. We could see him from the booth, one slack head left in the empty auditorium. I don't remember how they figured out that he was dead, and I don't remember if they canceled the next show or not, but by the end of the night the theater was back up and running with an 'Out Of Order' cover placed over the seat the deceased had occupied. The film he'd shaken off during? Spice World. Which, if my memory serves correct, wasn't as bad a way to go as one might think.
To complete the cache-clearing before I turn back to end-of-semester grading, I gotta say I'm ten kinds of excited about Soft Skull's new film series, Deep Focus, edited by Sean Howe. It is taking a BFI-skewering, 33 1/3-inspired approach to film writing, as far as I can tell.
Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international cult classics, and more. Passionate and idiosyncratic, each volume of Deep Focus is long-form criticism that’s relentlessly provocative and entertaining.
The first batch of titles? Jonathan Lethem’s take on They Live, Matthew Specktor’s meditation on The Sting, Christopher Sorrentino’s examination of Death Wish, and Chris Ryan's closer look at Lethal Weapon. I regularly assign Lethem's Star Wars-centric "13. 1977. 21." to my lit students, so I can't wait to get my hands on Lethem going long form.
Q: So, which flick would you pitch?
What a disjointed, disappointing mess. Seriously, no rock n' roll fun. In a similar spirit, my disjointed, no doubt disappointing thoughts while watching dead-eyed K Stew assay Joan Jett last night...
Movies I wished I was watching while watching The Runaways:
Q: Why cast Alia Shawkat in essentially a nonspeaking role?
What Cherie Curry's sister Marie was stuck doing while she was on the road with the Runaways:
As Kim Fowley, Michael Shannon is Bill Hader playing Alan Cumming in Josie and the Pussycats. [That's good.]
There should be lots more girl-girl sex scenes set to "I Wanna Be Yr Dog."
