Delighted to report that my piece about The Loving Story, which I was fortunate to catch at Full Frame -- the festival founded by its director, Nancy Buirski -- is currently running at The Awl.
A trove of previously unseen photographs (many of them taken by Life's Grey Villet) and 16mm film (the latter shot by Hope Ryden in 1965 while the publicity-adverse defendants were living secretly in Virginia) turns the abstract but aptly named “Loving” of Loving v. Virginia back into a family fighting a terrible injustice. The film’s most powerful moments come from two marriages, actually: the Lovings’ and the marriage—a film term never more appropriate—of audio recordings of the Supreme Court testimonies with these photographs and silent footage of Mildred, Richard and their three children doing homely, ordinary things.
Still pulling together my notes from the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, dealing with end-of-semester student freakouts, and prepping for the Independent Film Festival of Boston (which starts tomorrow, although I won't get there until Friday this year). Here are some recent pieces, film related and not, that I enjoyed reading when I should have been grading.
Molly Young strikes again! "His shoulders are broad and his smile dazzling. Yet there is also something of the psychopath about him. Rob Delaney, comedian, recently tweeted: "I bet Bradley Cooper & Jared Leto text photos of women they've murdered to each other & have a good laugh". Over 100 people retweeted Delaney's speculation. Never mind Jared Leto for now. Whence Mr Cooper's creepiness?"
Bordwell on Benning: "Twenty Cigarettes yields something different from the Screen Tests I’ve seen. Using the cigarette as a constant feature, pulling smoking out of its usual place in our habits and social exchange, denying the tradition that shows smoking as connoting attitudes and emotions in people onscreen, Benning enables us to watch, across some ninety minutes, faces that aren’t dramatizing themselves or sending signals. No stars, these folks, let alone superstars. No narcissism either." Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Mitt Romney, Men in Black fan. "When asked if he had a sense of timing for an announcement, he said, 'I have a sense, and I'd tell you. But I don't have one of those magic pens like they had on "Men in Black," where I could wipe out your memory.'"
Via nymag.com, a clip from the documentary about Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, The Swell Season, which "follows the duo and their bandmates on the road as they meet their public. The film begins to show the slow tears in the fabric of Hansard and Irglová’s relationship — both with each other and with their newfound public identities.
It's a petit planète after all. "In PASSENGERS, Marker has once again tracked his fellow human beings at their most unguarded and banal—nodding off after a hard day’s work, gazing blankly out the window and listening to an iPod, reading a book or a text message—and captured almost iconic images that linger in memory long after you have left the gallery. Anyone who has lived in a major city and taken the subway has seen these images before—but perhaps has never seen them before as images. The girl languidly resting her head against the window does not only exist in the Paris Métro—I have seen her in the subway in New York, I have seen her in a film that Marker made almost thirty years ago in Japan."
What a life. Most folks would be content with starting "the Cinematheque on the Charles." Or launching groundbreaking world cinema distribution company Janus Films. Or helping the New York Film Festival get off the ground. Or, you know, starting Crabtree & Evelyn. Cyrus Harvey, who died earlier this month at 85, did all these things and more.
The cinetrix was at a film festival when she learned the news, from the Criterion site, no less. I'd kinda of known that Harvey, if still alive, couldn't possibly be for much longer. But I chose to ignore that when, last month, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies about a lawsuit Harvey and his Brattle business partner Bryant Haliday won wayyyy back in 1955. It was more appealing to think that someday I might be able to sit down and chat with him.
In a way, I guess that every time we see a film that opens with that distinctive two-faced Janus coin (which Harvey's wife explained referred to her husband and his partner: "Bryant was gay and Catholic. Cy was straight and Jewish. They really liked that."), we all become part of an ongoing conversation. Thanks, Cy.
'Diary' is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It's a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.
And then, as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane. But Citizen Kaneis immortal, and I am screening it, yet again, this afternoon.
In an attempt to limber up for the twice annual event, this weekend I watched F for Fake, which I distinctly remember renting on VHS but had no recollection of while watching, and Richard Linklater's slight but impressively well-researched when it comes to teensy details [plus, SPUTTERIN' EDDIE MARSAN as John Houseman!] Me & Orson Welles. [Both streamed via Netflix.]
I also read this article in Tablet, "Citizen Bernstein," which I commend to you, on the subject of Bernstein's Jewishness. I remember being sort of appalled by the character when I first saw Kane in college, and the piece engages with a lot of my questions. An excerpt:
While investigating the evolution of the character of Bernstein in Citizen Kane, I reached out to the legendary film director Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend and confidant of Welles’ whose conversations with the director were recorded and published in 1992 as This Is Orson Welles. Bogdanovich is not surprised that Welles was moved to include a sympathetic Jewish character in his first film: “Orson was very fascinated and crazy about all things Jewish,” he said. “He was a big fan of the Yiddish art theater.” When asked where Welles’ empathy for Jewish culture originated, he talked about Maurice Bernstein, a doctor who was a close friend of the Welles family: “Bernstein, who was [Orson’s] legal guardian after his father died, was a very, very important figure in his life. He named Bernstein in the movie as a gesture toward his guardian … because he loved him dearly. Don’t forget, he lost his mother when he was 8 and his father when he was 15, so Dr. Bernstein was a huge influence in his life.” Asked if he thought Welles was moved to create a sympathetic Jewish character in Citizen Kane because Europe’s Jews were under fire, Bogdanovich said, “it was very much on his mind.”
Welles described the evolution of Mr. Bernstein to Bogdanovich in 1969, noting that he “sketched out the character in preliminary sessions,” but that Welles’ co-writer, Herman Mankiewicz “did all the best writing for Bernstein.” Mankiewicz was a frequent guest at the parties of William Randolph Hearst, the media giant on whom Charles Foster Kane was modeled.
Despite the collaborative writing of Citizen Kane, there’s evidence that Mankiewicz was considerably less comfortable than Welles in having a major Jewish character in the film. Bogdanovich has unearthed an August 1940 memo written by Mankiewicz after he’d seen Bernstein’s first major scene in the film: “In Bernstein’s office with Bill Alland [the actor who played the reporter Thompson]: Everett Sloane is an unsympathetic looking man, and anyways you shouldn’t have two Jews in one scene.” Mankiewicz was clearly uneasy about transgressing unspoken Hollywood rules concerning Jews on screen (whether as characters or actors), and Welles would have been well aware of this resistance. Asked if Welles, a Hollywood neophyte at the time, may have been unaware of such rules when he developed the Bernstein character, Bogdanovich replied that Welles “knew what he was doing there.”
Everett Sloane's own sad history is also covered. Do read the whole thing, won't you?
A bonus Kane allusion, of the sort that makes me proud of my part in inducting college kids into our shared pop-cultural inheritance, from the Awl:
David Raposa: I shouldn't talk, since my bandwagon of choice (Boston) did some slo-mo, black-and-white, Citizen Kane bullshit to herald the arrival of Carl Crawford.
David Roth: He gave a speech in front of a giant banner of his own face?
For the afternoon commute/trip to the gym/what have you, allow me to recommend the recent and wide-ranging Mubi chat between Dave Kehr and Mubi's Danny Kasman and David Phelps. NYU cinema studies grads are especially encouraged to give a listen, as [my sources tell me] Kehr will be teaching a course in the program this coming fall. No foolin'. [And, somehow, the University of Chicago will claim credit for the whole thing.]
Makes perfect sense to me. And an excerpt from the incredibly dense treatise referred to above:
The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards. The human mind may find ways of playing it backwards subconsciously. Tricks are used to play with your memory.
There are several reasons why backwards is viable as a viewing order. 'End credits' begin the film, blue-turquoise filled helveticas rise as if the film is coming to an end (and Kubrick does not utilize rising end credits, ever). It also recalls how paper is scrolled in a typewriter, upwards. Like many other subtle combinations of camera movement and storytelling/activities, seen backwards, the first shot of the film can become the end of the film: the final image the horizontal/horizon, mountain and reflection, a state of hybrid native American perfection: eye-bliss. Another example: Wendy reads Jack’s typed book ‘backwards’ in the film’s forward, ie: she reads the page in the typewriter then the top page and continues down. The film itself is a series of reflections, each scene possesses a mirror scene of the other (ie: Danny and Wendy’s campfire/roadrunner meal is doubled beginning and end.) Kubrick stages certain interactions with characters that walk confrontationally, ie backing up. Seen reversed, a baseball bat wielding Wendy appears to be coaxing Jack ‘back’ into himself, similarly Danny backs up to fool his father in the snowy maze. Shock cuts: the film is actually scarier backwards since Kubrick has reversed the order of conventional horror-film storytelling. Viewers have always commented on the film’s inability to shock, with the scariest imagery appearing at the tail of each ‘scary’ scene, diffusing any effect. Backwards these effects increase their shock value. Most importantly, the film is a series of zooms, tracking movements some to and from awakenings. Many of these tracking sequences exhibit characters from far away, enough so that movement is primary to the scenery rather than plot. And the end is set in the past, not the present or the future, in the flash of a photographic bulb. Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.
Before I begin, let James Mason make a toast to your health [courtesy of my friend Ted].
The cinetrix loves the Internets in part because she's not much for crowds. Perhaps that's one reason why I admire but could never replicate the lively commenter culture that virtual salonistes the Self-Styled Siren and Girish cultivate at their respective spots.
The Siren certainly touched a nerve with her recent revelation of Ten Movies the Siren Should Love... But Does Not. Of the ten, I've seen more than I usually can claim in posts on her site. I'll admit to an adolescent fondness for the original Where the Boys Are. Even though I agree that Yvette Mimieux's character is ill-used, Jim Hutton is so cute!
Then there's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart "just basically hate one another," says the Siren. Eh, they are going through a rough patch in their marriage, and that, not the mystery, is what makes it superior to the Brits-abroad sportiness of the 1930s version. Day's character gave up a career as a singer, and Stewart is intent on limiting her voice's circulation to the domestic sphere, full stop. Which is what makes her Albert Hall scream and "over-the-top" singing of "Que Sera, Sera" in the embassy where Hank's being held so thrilling. That voice has so much power and agency we "see" it in the series of shots outside the salon, ascending the stairs, and finding her son.
I encourage you to read the whole list and the oodles of comments, but I need to ride to the defense of Welles' The Trial (1962) first. It's by no means loveable. It's prickly, but also gorgeous and a weirdly cabalistic approach to both story and mise-en-scene, rearranging the original elements again and again to come up with a midrashic interpretation of Kafka, Tony Perkins' post-Psycho star persona, the sick soul of Cold War Europe.... that's forever paired in my mind in a grim double feature with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965).
Both films were ones I've still only seen on shitty VHS, which brings me to Girish's recent post on Netflix's streaming service. I find it a godsend, living in the sticks as I do, and one that better replicates the odd sense of discovery and taking a chance one experienced by lingering in the well-curated video stores of yore. My queues for DVDs and Roku-enabled streaming are both nearly maxed out, externalized manifestations of my movie memory and ambitions. But you shouldn't listen to me -- I still have two fully functioning [to the Fesser's abiding chagrin] CRTs, so I mightn't be the best judge of quality. But, again, pristine quality is a relatively recent innovation, and I came of age during the UHF, VHS, pan-and-scanned, beat-to-hell Swank rental 16s era.
Although, our projector just arrived, so I may change my tune.
Which currently is one of lamentation, complete with gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, owing to this tidbit gleaned from Karina Longworth's Twitter: "The "James Franco options Zeroville" story was the first Variety Breaking News alert that I actually clicked and read in maybe a year." I don't begrudge Steve Erickson the ducats, but noooooo, not Zeroville!
While we're on the lamenting tip, there are so many reasons to love Looker's Lawrence Levi, but his recent post "Sob Story" may trump 'em all:
I had also recently learned that there was something called the Academy Awards, and that you could see them on TV. March 30, 1981, was a Monday, the last day of my fifth-grade spring break. That night I was going to watch the Oscars for the first time. I was ecstatic. That afternoon I was home with my friend Kingman, and we were watching my parents’ black-and-white TV when the news of the assassination attempt came on. The slo-mo images of Reagan waving, grimacing, and being pushed into his limo have stayed with me, but Kingman and I were unfazed. (Maybe that had something to do with the horror movies we had begun seeing, like The Fog. I remember staying up late around this time to watch Psycho on TV. Alone.)
There was a rule about TV in my house. My parents allowed me and my brother to watch TV only on weekends and during school breaks. That evening, when we tuned in to watch the Oscars, an announcer said that the ceremony would be postponed for one day out of respect for our hospitalized president.
I was devastated.
Read it and weep.
Another destination on the Internets that may bring on the waterworks is this man's Quixotic quest "for the most '90s movie of all time." One category in each candidate's write-up deals explicitly with "technology/cultural relics" -- a.k.a. "Could the plot reasonably occur with current technology?" StarTAC-tastic! [via the Awl]
