Your pal the cinetrix will be paying her obeisance to his Purpleness tonight, at long last, but there's no reason why you who are New Yorkers can't enjoy this FREE event.
Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else? Mixed-Race in Science Fiction Movies
March 28, 2011 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center 50 West 4th Street New York, NY
Join BAMSA, The Center, and the A/P/A Institute for another installment of the Multiple Identity Speaker Series: Monsters, Messiahs, or Something Else? Mixed-Race in Science Fiction Movies—Eric Hamako's presentation on mixed-race people in science fiction movies and the media. Popular movies are telling stories about mixed-race, but what are they saying? Will vigorous hybrid messiahs herald racial salvation? Will degenerate hybrid monsters cause a racial apocalypse? Are you prepared to talk about and talk back to the movies that students love? We'll explore white supremacist and Christian supremacist ideas about mixed-race people prevalent in current science fiction movies like Harry Potter, Blade, and Underworld and why people shouldn't believe the hype… or the hate.
This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at [email protected].
Freda Mansfield (an American, age 38) is checking out of a London hotel; she is planning on eloping with her British lover George Frobisher (age 43, who already has a wife, Monica, and kids) and they are going to New York City together.
Roald Dahl - Host Sumner Elliot - Writer Daniel Petrie - Director
Cast - Constance Ford as Freda Mansfield, Neil Fitzgerald as Doctor, Anthony Dawson as George Frobisher, Angela Thornton as Rose Thorn, George Turner as Mr. Burnly, Jean Cameron as Phone Operator
Ah, infidelity! The cinetrix is seizing this tenuous segue to direct your attention to Geoff Dyer's amazing piece "Sleeping Under Four Stars," which appears in his new collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition [via Maudie]:
The luxury hotel is a quintessential example of what the French theorist Marc Augé calls the 'non-place' of super-modernity. In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe pointed out that the defining architectural feature of the motel — namely that you don't "have to go through a public lobby to get to your room" — played a major part in the "rather primly named 'sexual revolution.'" In international hotels, however, the passage through the lobby is also a passage from place to non-place. By checking in and handing over your credit card or passport you effectively surrender your identity. By becoming a temporary resident of this non-place you become a non-person and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity.
You are no longer Mr. or Ms. Whoever, you are simply the occupant of a room. You become morally weightless. You have no history. The act of the porter carrying your stuff up to your room means that you are, as they say, not carrying any baggage. As a result (I am basing this claim on zero medical evidence) men are less liable to be impotent in a hotel than in any other environment. You are free. If a man goes to a motel with his mistress he cheats on his wife. In a luxury hotel, on the other hand, there is no moral liability, only financial.
Friday March 25 at the Plaza Theatre, audiences will be treated to filmmaking as love-making between two intensively creative people with the first two of five installments of YOKO ONO: reality dreams, which Film Love is co-presenting with Emory University and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. John Lennon and Yoko Ono certainly must be one of the most famous couples of the 20th century, but these experimental films are rarely seen and aren’t available on video.
Helping to make little-seen movies available to the public is part of Tsiantis' job at Turner, where he's a corporate legal manager at TBS' Entertainment Division. Though he does not have a legal background, he was hired 13 years because of his vast knowledge of film history to do rights research on the approximately 3,900 RKO, pre-1986 MGM and pre-1950 Warner Bros. features purchased in 1986 by Ted Turner (now owned and administrated by Warner Bros. Entertainment).
Are you reading Clothes on Film? Smart and pretty! Here's a snippet from a post on Desperately Seeking Susan, well-timed given that trove of early Madonna photos that recently made its way online.
But while this was an introduction of New York’s bourgeois style and attitude to the masses, it was also a counterculture to the burgeoning ‘yuppie’ sensibilities that were bubbling on Wall Street, the physical and social opposite of bohemian Bleecker Street. Even Roberta’s husband reacts with dismay and confusion after she purchases the jacket that so reflected the attitude of the time yet seems horribly outdated now, “You bought a used jacket? What are we, poor?”
One of the motivations for putting the book together was in order to join the concerns of academic film studies with the way cinemagoers talk about films. We were struck by how often, when people talk about films they’ve seen they say, ‘There’s this moment…’ Moments are touchstones for everyday conversations about film and they are often testing grounds for scholarly writing on the medium and on individual films as well. Within the academy, analysing moments closely is often characterised as the preserve of particular strands of film scholarship; in fact, a broader concentration on the ‘moment’ can question the territorialism of much contemporary film study while also contributing to long-standing arguments for the value of close ‘textual’ analysis.
Miranda July chats with More Intelligent Life, to which you should subscribe.
I get the feeling your creativity is, for the most part, not inspired by other works of art and comes quite purely from the way you experience life.
It's a question I always wrestle with because I've observed enough at this point from knowing other artists that I'm not actually inspired by other work in quite the same way. I'd love it if when I watched a movie I actually noticed how it was shot. But I'm watching it like a child and believing it's all really happening [laughs]. And I'm entirely concerned with only what the filmmaker wants me to be concerned with—just the story and the characters.
The good news is that the best of those "lost" movies featuring music from Can Soundtracks is to become available for the first time. This is Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, which the BFI is re-releasing in May. A teen drama set in a swimming baths at the end of Swinging London, it features the most legendary song on Can Soundtracks: Mother Sky, which plays as the hero trawls through sleazy Soho, steals a cardboard cut-out, makes the acquaintance of a prostitute with a broken leg and buys a hotdog from Burt Kwouk. Mother Sky is quintessential Can: a mighty 15-minute psychedelic wig-out with crazy screeching guitar, minimalist bassline, clockwork drumming and indecipherable Damo Suzuki chanting. It's garage punk with a longer attention span, math rock with a human soul, and prog without the self-indulgence. Nobody could get away with that now, not even Radiohead.
Foley fx! [via] Incidentally, I heard an excellent paper at SCMS called "Unpacking Punches: Synchresis and Schizophonia in the Combat Foley of Fight Club."
The cinetrix used to want a aftermarket Sleep Sheep --it'd have to be black, of course* -- that played only dub. [Although, that the actual item plays whale songs is pretty fuckin' great. Talk about yer contrapuntal sound!] Now, however, I want one that tunes into Listening to Montréal. [via Hilobrow] Or, OK, in descending order, its sister cities: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. Mmmm... Chicagoland cop accents! Perhaps Boston will be next?
Let's let Chicks on Speed's radiance illuminate the following lexical l'il links, shall we?
First off, a public service announcement. Former cinetrix prof J. Hoberman and ongoing Pullquote pal A. S. Hamrah read TONIGHT at KGB Bar. You should go!
Please join us next Tuesday, March 22 as we host two film critics who examine films that reflect America's political and cultural moments, both historically and surprisingly--unsettlingly--current. Senior Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman will read from his new book AN ARMY OF PHANTOMS: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, and n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah will read from his recent Baffler piece, "A Cottage for Sale," about a film based on a painting by Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light."
In ARMY OF PHANTOMS, Hoberman sees politics "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, back stories and reception." Hoberman covers witch hunts, House Committee on Un-American Activities tactics, racial dramas such as Pinky, message movies, the blacklist, protests, propaganda, HUAC humiliations, and the "Cold War's key fictional text," Orwell's 1984, all capped by a trenchant analysis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The centerpiece of A. S. Hamrah's "A Cottage for Sale" is the Thomas Kinkade-themed homes outside of Vallejo, which are in various states of foreclosure and squatters' temporariness. Hamrah writes, "Whatever his value as an artist, he has used his own experience to create a business that predicted and in some ways replicates the current mortgage crisis. His paintings of quaint houses with burning interiors substitute nostalgia for values and hope for community.... Kinkade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste."
5) So, The Smurfs looks quite good. Now we come to the part of the trailer where the word "Smurf" reveals some of its many hidden meanings. Here, for example, after witnessing Gutsy Smurf getting his bum out in front of Smurfette, Generic Smurf says: "I think I just smurfed in my mouth." It would appear that, as well as being the name of their own species, "smurf" also means "vomit".
6) And here one of the Smurfs says: "Where the smurf are we?" From this, we can assume that, as well as meaning "vomit", the word "smurf" can also mean either "hell" or "fuck".
7) Here, one of the Smurfs says "Let's smurf this joint". So it turns out that "smurf" might also mean "ditch" or "blow". Admittedly neither of these examples are quite as extreme as some of the other synonyms we've discussed, but they're hardly very pleasant nonetheless.
8) This is the final image of the trailer. While it's being displayed, an off-screen voice shouts: "All right, who smurfed?", which would imply that "smurf" can also be a substitute for "fart". And notice the address of the official Smurf website? It's SmurfHappens.com. So – and this is by no means an exhaustive list – the word "smurf" can mean "vomit" or "hell" or "fuck" or "ditch" or "blow" or "fart" or "shit". This is obviously problematic, not least because it warrants a complete recontextualising of the hit 1996 album The Smurfs Go Pop, in particular the songs Noisy Smurf, Our Smurfing Party and Don't Stop Smurfing. I take it all back. The Smurfs movie is a disgrace.
Tom Sutpen is the cinetrix's hero for this post, which I quote in its entirety:
Hence Nina’s madness. All the doubling swirls miasmatically around her: Odette/Odile, her and her mother, her and Beth, her and Lily. Both those latter pairs are distorted versions of what should properly be named the “All About Eve doubling,” wherein a younger, more vital female performer threatens to take over the role and the life of the older and more fragile one. As an aside, the revelation of this device is the retroactive recognition not that Aronofsky’s film is actually a melodrama along the lines of All About Eve (or Stella Dallas or Sunset Blvd.), but rather that those were body-horror movies like Black Swan. The real of body horror is aging itself, decay, redundancy, replacement. That women, within the diegesis of each of these films, are not just the victims but the agents of this terror, is an exact measure of Hollywood’s gender trouble.
One would suspect that Country Strong, a gently appealing genre flick, is distant from the Grand Guignol of Black Swan. But it has its own doubling urge, albeit more schematic. It offers four main characters, representing the four quadrants of Hollywood’s stunted demographic model: older female, younger female, younger male, older male. The first three are country singers; the only character who isn’t is played by an actual country singer, just to keep the doubling channels open. That’s Tim McGraw, in the role of James, husband–manager to a country superstar, Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow, an older woman at thirty-eight). McGraw is doubled by Beau (Garrett Hedlund), a true soul who is nonetheless (unlike James, which is to say, in his place) sleeping with Kelly. But Beau is doubled as well by the young female siren Chiles Stanton, also a rising talent: they both open for Kelly. Chiles is ascending swiftly on beauty-pageant looks and doey naiveté—thus she is in turn also the older star’s All About Eve double, and begins to receive the acclaim and hit songs once due Kelly. She is played by Leighton Meester, shortly appearing in The Roommate, a dorm-room remake of doubling’n’dementia classic, Single White Female. It’s enough to make your head spin.
But it doesn’t, which is a token of the film’s surefootedness, its easygoing locomotion—formally cognate to the Grand Ol’ Opry pop it proffers, and affectively distant from Black Swan’s propulsive panic. And yet, finally, they are the same movie, and not just because they are backstage dramas: Kelly, coming away from a mental breakdown and in danger of relapse, pushed by a younger and sexier replacement, cripplingly unable to confront the stage performance that every-body desperately needs from her (most of all herself), is nonetheless compelled to give it a go. She botches a couple of preparatory attempts, acts self-destructively, gets high, fools around, misses a rehearsal gig, visits a hospital, freaks out about her competition. All of which happens in Black Swan, as does the remainder: she eventually takes the stage on the big night, gives a bravura, transformative show including magical costume changes, the crowd goes wild, she kills herself, exeunt omnes. Along the way, as if for emphasis, there are doubled sequences of Kelly breaking down: her country-strong mascara so smeared around her eyes it can’t help but resemble the already iconic black-swanface of Nina’s maquillage. It’s the Grand Guignol Opry, and Kelly is Country Swan.
A traveling preacher's nefarious motives for marrying a fragile widow are uncovered by her terrified young children.
"Laughton's delirious compositions evoke a Grimm landscape where love is constantly and erratically at war with the forces of hate. Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, TheNight of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance." —Slant Magazine
As an addenda to the previous post, for ages I've been trying, to no avail, to adopt the Movies in Frames [One movie - four frames. That's it.] approach in the classroom, too. Ideas?
This column is an experiment in writing about film: what if, instead of freely choosing which parts of the film to address, I select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case and for future columns, the 10-minute, 40-minute, and 70-minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as a guide to writing about the film, keeping the commentary as close to possible to the frames themselves? No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. Constraint as a form of freedom.
Now, since time immemorial, I've had film students do shot descriptions and analyses as their first writing assignment. Ordinarily, I select a two- to three-minute section of Casablanca and ask them to account for individual shots' lengths, cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène [mit out sound]. Then I ask them to write a few paragraphs about one of those aspects, how it works in the sequence, why the filmmakers might have chosen to do whatever they did, and its relationship to the film as a whole.
I usually change up the sequence each semester so as to thwart Greek organizations' banked papers/my own short attention span. This time I showed them instead [essentially] minutes 10, 40, 70. It made for much more cogent analyses. So, yay.
1955, USA, Charles Laughton, 93 min.
