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Notes for the End of the World

Dream Junky from Paracelso Zeppelin on Vimeo.

Still marinating weeks after seeing--finally--the five-hour version of Until the End of the World.* I remembered the beginning and the end and not much in between, it turns out, but I have lived inside the soundtrack and it inside me for more than a quarter century. For now, these links and clips will have to act as a placeholder for more choate feelings about how soundtracks tether us to their fleeting films like half-remembered dreams. So beautiful--the cinematic soul singing to itself after the end in the way that Decasia looks like cinema dreaming itself into being before the beginning.

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, this story poised at the brink of a nuclear apocalypse and set at the turn of the millennium wends its way from Venice, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and San Francisco, to the cataclysmic meeting of mystery and dreams in the Australian outback. Claire (Dommartin), a femme fatale for a new age, abandons a doting lover (Sam Neill) to chase an inscrutable man on a mission (Hurt). Haunting echoes of film noir shade a globetrotting sci-fi fantasy for Wenders’s wild poetic vision of escape through technology. In English, French, Italian, Japanese, and German with English subtitles. New 4K DCP digital restoration. There will be a 10-minute intermission.

Note that at the end of the original trailer, it heralds "the music of 1999." 

Wenders gets a good deal right about the technology of the future.
(Sidebar: Only today I learned that a 15-year-old Neneh Cherry toured with the Slits.)

It's strange, though. The Peter Gabriel song (featured in the extended trailer above) was not on the soundtrack CD, and (so) it came across as jarring and lyrically too on the nose to me.

The endless roundelay of the Kinks was just perfect, though. It had me wondering whether Wes Anderson had this film in mind during The Darjeeling Limited.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD - Director's Cut (Wim Wenders, 1991) from wimeo on Vimeo.

I also got distracted wondering where all the cigarettes came from out there in the post-nuclear-blast outback.

And by how much I loved Chico.

And Solveig's clothing.

And

and

*I took a solo road trip for more than 2,000 miles last week, listening to dire news bleating from my satellite radio.

and

Girls of the Golden West

A few Mondays ago, I had occasion to hear a Q&A with Sofia Coppola at the Harvard Film Archive, about which I may write more later. Or not. Most of what was said about her film The Beguiled that evening had been said before elsewhere, as a cursory tour of other Q&As on YouTube dating back to the film's Cannes debut can confirm. You can't expect a director's answers to why she did x or y to change, but fresh questions might lead in fresh directions or at least offer a filmmaker the gift of surprise and more of an opportunity for her sly sense of humor to shine through.

Coppola has long embraced the word "girlie" to describe her aesthetic, but she was also once what I'd term "x-Girlie," as these three episodes of her 1990s Comedy Central show—a riff on which can be seen on the Criterion Beastie Boys disc—with Zoe Cassavetes make clear. Or the wonderful moment where she tries to sell an infant Jon Stewart her trashed GTO in this painfully awkward clip below.

Stewart: "What do you watch?"

Cassavetes: "O.J."

It's all eyeliner and baby tees.

Jon Stewart

Hi Octane 1

Hi Octane 2

Hi Octane 3

The Vicious Circle

An image from the cassette era. I still have the promo postcards some guy I met at the cinema during a trip to London in 1995 later sent me.

Reading this Film Comment interview with Alan Rudolph while listening to cassettes on a wee boombox I dug up in this house. The radio is mono, sports an antenna, does not have autoreverse, and belonged to my late father-in-law. It's making me uncommonly happy.

AR: Music to me is like the hub of the wheel. It’s visible, it works in your senses and emotions, and that seems to be where I reside. To me, music and emotional responses are twins, and if you want to establish emotional tone in a film then music is the number one way to do it.

FC: I read one of your early interviews where you said that you were more influenced by John Coltrane than by John Ford.

AR: Some glib asshole said that, I guess it was me. It’s true. I mean, look, I’m not going to deny John Ford, but for me personally that’s all I’ve ever been able to talk about when it comes to American filmmaking. I taught myself how to write screenplays just because the box I was in was too confining as an assistant director in the old Hollywood system. If you wanted to make a little film then you went to Roger Corman, I guess. I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t care. I just didn’t make those kinds of movies. So I started writing. I’d write a screenplay in three or four days just to learn how to do it. At the time you’d go to the Xerox machine with three dollars and you had a movie. But I always listened to music. This was before mobile technology, so when the first Walkman came out—I think it was the size of a Kleenex box—it changed my life forever. I started to tape pieces of music that I liked and I’d make little cassettes without putting labels on them. I used to prowl record stores after work every Friday night and I’d buy albums to tape them. I must have had a hundred tapes without knowing what was coming up next. It was a primitive version of shuffle. I’d walk around Manhattan and watch a movie unfold on the sidewalks listening to how it was scored in my head. But it’s funny, the number-one album was always Kind of Blue. Without that album, I’m not sure I would have been able to make films. Kind of Blue was my film school.

a kind of moody yearning

Costumes, like mise-en-scene more generally, seem legible only when they're showy. Give the award to the period piece or the genre picture. Yawn.

I mention it for two reasons. One is how distracted I got by the discordant crispness of clothing worn by kids living in perfectly run-down RVs in a film I saw just last week. The second is this great piece on glam capers:

Good movie clothes speak movie language, not brand language. They’re like lines of dialogue written in folds and shadows; the way they move with, or against, an actor becomes part of the performance. A good glam caper needs great clothes, ensembles that inspire not “How much is it and where can I get it?” acquisitiveness but something deeper and less tangible, a kind of moody yearning. That’s a tall order for a bunch of cheetah spots. But it’s never too late to learn how to read their secret language.

If there is an academic writing as fluidly about fashion and fabric as Stephanie Zacharek does here (or Tom & Lorenzo and Abbey Bender do often and elsewhere), please tell me who and where to find them.

via GIPHY

New adventures in WiFi

Why, hello there. It's been a minute. I've seen some movies since we last spoke. I've also heard some directors speak. And I'm at a festival right now. (Well, actually I'm in a brewery that used to be an auto body shop when I lived here, next to a Montessori school I'm fairly certain was a black barber shop. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, nah I mean?)

Walk with me.