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May 19, 2017, 1:11 am

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TONIGHT

May 19, 2017, at 8pm

"KINO SLANG"

A new monthly cinema series

programmed by Andy Rector

at the 

Echo Park Film Center

1200 North Alvarado St. 

Los Angeles, CA 90026

The inaugural program, a raucous double bill 

of two comedies about moviemaking, love, and work:

A GIRL'S FOLLY 

(1917, Maurice Tourneur)

with

GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE 

OF A SMALL-TIME FILM COMPANY 

(1986, Jean-Luc Godard)

Program total running time: 3 hours

In lieu of an introduction, a short film or poem will precede the double feature.

Doors open at 8pm. $5 Suggested Donation. Program Notes will be provided at the door.

Special Thanks to Bruce Calvert, Chloe Reyes, Francisco Algarín, and Michael Witt.

"Kino Slang" is a new regular series of cinema screenings at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. This iteration of "Kino Slang" will continue the cinematographic investigations, historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog. 

Notes on the program and series, documents and translations, ephemera and images, will appear on this blog both before (see below) and after this evening's program. 

Future "Kino Slang" programs at E.P.F.C.: Time in the Sun (1940, Marie Seton/Sergei Eisenstein), Mack Sennett and His Disciples, D.W. Griffith shorts, The Final Insult (1997, Charles Burnett), rare Jean Renoir.

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A GIRL'S FOLLY a.k.a. A MOVIE ROMANCE

U.S.A. 1917. 57 minutes. Direction: Maurice Tourneur. 35mm (screened on 16mm print courtesy of Bruce Calvert). Cinematography: John van den Broek. Script: Frances Marion and Maurice Tourneur. Assistant Director: Clarence Brown. Design: Ben Carré. Production: Paragon/World Films. With Doris Kenyon (Mary Baker), Robert Warwick (Kenneth Driscoll), Chester Barnett (Johnny Applebloom), Jane Adair (Mrs. Baker), June Elvidege (Carleton), Johnny Hines (Hank), Leatrice Joy, Emile Chautard, and Maurice Tourneur.

A Story of a Farm and Moving Picture Studio―.......Mary Baker, a pretty country girl, longs to get away from her humdrum existence. A moving picture company takes pictures near her home, and a chance meeting with the leading man gives her the desired opportunity. She goes back to the city with him. Everyone is taken with her beauty, but she fails to register in her trial picture and, rather than return home, consents to let the leading man take care of her...... Did Mary ever regret this decision?  Did she ever go back home? See "A Girl's Folly" at this theater and learn the outcome of Mary's adventure. This plot, which does not reflect any too much credit upon the moving picture actor, is assisted materially by its comedy situations and by the care given the production. The cast is of unusual strength.

―Edward Weitzel, Moving Picture World, 1917

The story is worked out very cleverly, and it is full to overflowing with comedy. The public should be greatly interested in seeing how moving pictures are made― It is all here.

―Variety, 1917

The characters are all pleasingly grey, all possessed of weaknesses as well as likeable qualities, and there's a satisfying humanity to their motivations and actions...... (Tourneur was) the most sophisticated director working in films in this country in 1914 (though D.W. Griffith was certainly the most dynamic), and his films exhibited not only craftsmanship and skill, but a great deal of taste and charm as well...... their pictorial values were often superb...... (Here Tourneur is) still unobtrusively meticulous about all his light sources...... It is a film about filmmaking in New Jersey, and Fort Lee in particular, at a time when it was only just losing out to Hollywood as the American film producing centre. The virtually documentarian coverage of film production―everything from studio and location shooting to lab processing―is both fascinating and valuable historically and it is indeed sad that no Hollywood film performed the same function. Too, it is rather odd to find a film already debunking the "myth" and "magic" of moviemaking even before those traditions had really been built up. 

― William K. Everson, 1975 & 1979

One man who is seen on the screen in "A Girl's Folly" has been working in motion picture studios for the past ten years and yet this is the first time he ever acted in a play before the camera.  He is one of the very efficient carpenters appearing in several of the studio scenes in this production. 
In "A Girl's Folly" Miss Doris Kenyon takes the part of a young girl who runs away to a movie studio.  The girl is given a part in a picture and she expects it to be a wonderful production but......
"I know how it feels to wait for the first showing of the first picture in which you appear" said Miss Kenyon.  "I know with what tremblings I waited for the first showing of my first picture.  It was a thrill that will come only once in a lifetime to me."
The lunch hour scene in "A Girl's Folly" is so very realistic because the scene was taken at the lunch hour when all the actors at the studio were participating in the noon day meal.  No special poses were made for this picture -- outside of the acting done by the stars.  Consequently the lunch room scene is an actual reproduction of the actual happenings every noon in the studio.
"This picture ought to give hundreds of thousands of film fans a perfectly correct idea of what a movie studio looks like and the way that a picture is taken," said Maurice Tourneur, who directed the production of "A Girl's Folly."

―The World Film Herald, 1917

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GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE OF A SMALL-TIME FILM COMPANY a.k.a. RISE AND FALL OF A SMALL FILM COMPANY AS REVEALED BY CASTING ACTORS FOR A PUBLIC TELEVISION FILM BASED ON AN OLD NOVEL BY J.H. CHASE

Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma a.k.a. Chantons en choeur. France. 1986. Direction: Jean-Luc Godard. Video, telefilm, broadcast in the "Série Noire" series on TF1 in May 1986. Script: Jean-Luc Godard, from the novel The Soft Centre by James Hadley Chase. Cinematography: Caroline Chapetier. Sound: François Musy, Pierre-Alain Besse. Editing: Jean-Luc Godard. Producer: Pierre Grimblat. Productoin: Hamster Productions/TF1/Télévision suisse romande/RTL/JLG Films. Music: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Arvo Pärt, Béla Bartók. With Jean-Pierre Léaud (Gaspard Bazin), Marie Valéra (Eurydice), Jean-Pierre Mocky (Jean Almereyda), Caroline Champetier (Herself, as cinematographer), Françoise Desportes, Anne Carrel, and the unemployed of the ANPE (National Agency for Employment).

  

SYNOPSIS

We said of cinema that it was a dream factory...

On the factory side, there is a director: Gaspard BAZIN who is preparing his film and making tests, recruiting for small roles and extras.

On the factory side, there is Jean ALMEREYDA, a producer who's had his moment of glory and now has greater and greater difficulties raising the capital to run his business. 

Between them there is Eurydice, ALMEREYDA's wife, who wants to know if she can become an actress.

While ALMEREYDA searches for the money to complete the financing of his film, and at the the peril of his life--the money promised to him smells fishy--Gaspard tests with Eurydice. 

The cinema is as much the art of looking for a beautiful face to put on film as it is finding the money to buy the celluloid. 

"Grandeur and Decadence" tells a bit of this story. And it's also a painting of the extras, the technicians, and all those who work for the darkened theater, and now for television.

―Jean-Luc Godard

​​

What we have here is one of Godard's most vital films of the 1980s, if not his entire career. For it's the film where Godard stuck closest to his avowed subject: the cinema at work, unemployment, the human face. After seeing a cut of Godard's earlier Every Man for Himself a friend was happy but bemoaned to the director "Jean-Luc, when are you going to make a real movie?" ― this is his real movie. Jean-Pierre Léaud I say without hesitation gives his most intense and precise performance in this practically unseen made-for-TV movie. The extent to which the picture ― shot on broadcast video ― shows its own cinematographer, here the great Caroline Champetier, in the process of working and suddenly as a fictional character, is unprecedented. The centerpiece of the movie and one of its Corinthian achievements comes after Leaud's character, having just endured and condemned the obligatory use of a stale text during screen tests, tells an aspiring actress "I'll give you a test, but first I must test humanity―" There follows a 12-minute sequence of a large group of extras stepping in front of the camera one-by-one, as in a chain, and reciting, each with just a couple words, and completely out of order, one long sentence from William Faulkner. Each utterance and all humanity is "a wave" ― the actress, and we, are asked to "recreate the ocean". The question remains: can we?     (Andy Rector)

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BITTERNESS,
PERSEVERANCE, 

AND YOU

Excerpts from "Meeting the Public Demands" 

by Maurice Tourneur

(...)

Making pictures is a commercial business, the same as making soap and, to be successful, one must make a commodity that will sell. We have the choice between making bad, silly, childish and useless pictures, which make a lot of money, and make everybody rich, or nice stories, which are practically lost. Nobody wants to see them. The State rights buyers wouldn't buy them; if they did, the exhibitors wouldn't show them. 

I remember how delighted I was when I read what the reviewers had to say about my The Blue Bird. Do you know, amongst the hundreds of exhibitors in New York, how many showed it? To my knowledge Mr. Rothapfel and a few fellows uptown.

Those of us who are familiar with the productions of the articulate stage know very well that every time we go to see a show we sit before the curtain in a thrill of anticipation, waiting for the magic moment to come, feeling certain that we shall get an excitement of some sort or other. The orchestra plays, the footlights go on and the curtains part.

But what do we see if it is the screen? A sneering, hip-wriggling, cigaret-smoking vampire. She exercises a wonderful fascination upon every man that is brought anywhere near her, and so far as I have been able to judge, the only reason for this strong fascination is the combination of the three attributes I have already mentioned. They are good enough to apparently kill any man at fifty yards.

If it is not a vampire, it's a cute, curly-headed, sun-bonneted, smiling and pouting ingenue. She also is full of wonderful fascination. She runs thru beautiful gardens, (always with the same nice back-lighting effects), or the poor little thing is working under dreadful factory conditions that have not been known for at least forty years. Torn between the sheer idiocy of the hero and the inexplicable hate of the heavy, is it any wonder that her sole communion is with the dear dumb animals, pigs, cows, ducks, goats--anything so long as it can't talk. 

If it is not either a vampire or an ingenue, it is a band of cowboys, generous-hearted, impulsive souls. They never do a stroke of work; they couldn't--they have not got time. They must be hanging around the saloon, ready to spring into the saddle and rescue the heroine, whether she is a telegraph operator or a lumberman's daughter, or a school-teacher up in the mountains. I saw all that many times, but I have yet to see a cowboy looking after a cow. 

(...)

I would rather starve and make good pictures, if I knew they were going to be shown, but to starve and make pictures which are thrown in the ash-can is above anybody's strength. As long as the public taste will oblige us to make what is very justly called machine-made stories, we can only bow and give them what they want. 

(date unknown)

...and Godard, several years 

before GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE OF A SMALL-TIME FILM COMPANY:

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Danièle Huillet at Work

May 23, 2017, 1:06 am

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Ted Fendt has gifted us the following translation from the German of the only interview, to our knowledge, that Danièle Huillet did without Jean-Marie Straub. It comes from a 1982 issue of Frauen und Film.

Photo courtesy of Cristina Fernandes

The Fire in the Mountain

A conversation with Danièle Huillet by Helge Heberle and Monika Funke Stern

Danièle I was born in May 1936. In 1954, I did one year in a preparatory school for IDHEC. I saw a lot of films – like Buñuel's Los Olvidados– which interested me, and I wanted to try making documentary films. At the end there was even an exam that I took. But after the film that they projected for us, I simply handed in a blank piece of paper and said that it was a shame to project a film like that for an exam.

            I met Jean-Marie in November. I still know this exactly because the Algerian Revolution was beginning. He had his idea for a film about Bach and asked me if I would help him write the thing together. In ‘58 he had to leave France because of the Algerian War. He didn't want to shoot Algerians and at the end of ‘59. I also came to Germany. That's all.

Monika And you’ve done everything together?

Danièle Yes, we've done everything together. Only, that at the time it wasn't fashionable to mention women. No one noticed. Until it came into fashion, then they suddenly noticed that I was always in the credits. That was funny.

Helge Did you develop the conception of your films together? They’re so distinctive and different from the films of the time.

Danièle Yes, but that also came through our lives.

Helge You came to Germany as emigrants. Did you first start learning German here?

DanièleI had learned a little German before, but only with the texts of Bach's cantatas and that was already a strange German. In any case, I didn’t learn German so well because together we speak more in French. There are things that we can only say in German, but otherwise we mainly speak French together.

Helge Having left Germany again, what does your time there mean for you?

Danièle The time in Germany was the discovery of the class struggle and a violence that also exists in Italy and France but does not appear so openly and clearly, probably because the hypocrisy is greater.

Monika The discourse about the class struggle often conceals that men and women are also two different classes. The difference can also be seen in the way your film work has gained recognition. In the back of the book Kluge/Herzog/Straubthere is eventually also something about Huillet with a short biography and Karsten Witte is at least polite enough to talk about “the Straubs” - is your name actually Straub or Huillet?

Danièle Well, we aren't married. I kept my name. But it isn't so easy to pronounce. Straub is much easier. I don't think it’s so important. It's never bothered me. I don't really like talking about things and answering questions. Everyone has his or her own style and what you don’t do well, you shouldn’t do. There are other things that I do better and besides, what we’re interested in are the products and not the names.

Monika The distribution of your films is important to you. You go around with you films and talk about them. I feel that your silence is a form of denying auteur cinema and representation.

Danièle We won't be able to talk about the films anymore when we’re dead. Film material is very sensitive and the negatives won't last forever, but the films will outlive us for a certain amount of time and I hope that they will still speak to people. We talk about the films because in general the distribution system does not work anymore. Straub talks better than I do. I don't know if he enjoys doing it. I think that one destroys a bit of the work that way.

Helge What do you mean by destroys some of it?

Danièle A film is work that you’ve carried through to the end. A discussion is always something where you only say half-truths or force things that you have tried to keep balanced in the film. Also, in a discussion you can never take time to really reflect. Otherwise, you would say: it's going to take eight days before I can give you a proper answer. So, per forza, as the Italians say, sometimes you answer too quickly and sometimes falsely. However, whenever you make a film, you try out every possibility so the film remains open to people who will see and hear it.

Monika What does your role in the work look like?

Danièle With Too Early, Too Late, for example. A certain Straschek – he is a friend of ours – came to visit while we were recording the orchestral part of Moses and Aronin Vienna in 1974. He brought two suitcases full of books – the entire correspondence between Marx and Engels. I thought that I would never read so many books. I don't have enough time. I can only read a little before going to bed. Nevertheless, I read everything and the letter from Engels was in it too. I read it aloud to Straub and he said: Maybe we can make something about France. Then we went to Egypt because of Moses and Aron. We wanted to see how people in Egypt live, what clothing, what gestures, what living conditions, etc., before we looked for costumes. In Egypt, we asked ourselves questions besides ones relating to the film. In Rome, Jean-Marie saw a book called Class Struggles in Egypt with statistics and explanations about what was going on there at the time. We were always nostalgic for Egypt. I think that I said then: We could make a film out of these two things. It was easier with Engels' text, which in some way stood on its own. We had to check the information since Engels had written it to Kautsky from his memories of a Russian historian. There were false quotations in it. We verified everything in the archives in Paris where the parishes had sent the cahiers in 1789 in the great hope that something would change if someone recounted what was wrong. The notebooks are still lying there and are used very infrequently. It’s somehow moving when you get them in your hands. Then we checked the figures and the names, drove to the locations and together we looked for where the camera could be placed, what can be seen, and sometimes we argued very fiercely as well.

            It was easier in France. We always went back to the locations. In Egypt we could only do this once and it was difficult to find the locations. There are no maps aside from the ones made by the colonial administration. The names on these are in Egyptian and underneath in European. We looked for the places using photocopies of them. The people there, five kilometers away from a village, don't know what the next village is called. We scouted locations with a friend from Paris, an Egyptian, in his car. Sometimes, we needed an entire day to find a village. So, about the same work as the people who had drawn the maps. Except that we only had about twenty days in Egypt. The organization came after we returned. What you can do with the money you have. What you have to pay for immediately and what later. These kinds of necessary discussions ­­– I do this more than him. If he says, I'm not doing it this way, then I try it differently. Then comes the shooting. People must be paid, hotels arranged, etc. During production, I'm more involved with the sound and he's more involved with the camera. He frames the shots. During the editing, I operate the editing table. Now and then he does something that an assistant usually does, like rewinding the reels, and so on. We had an editor for the first short film. That lasted a week. As Jean-Marie began to say, here we have to take out five frames and three here, the guy had a nervous fit. Ever since, we've never had a third party. We always watch the rushes silent because I never went to let the sound out of my hands as long as it hasn’t been transferred, because I have good friends who have lost part of the location sound between the shooting location and the transfer. Or where the transfer isn’t right, if they mixed or dubbed. I want to be present for that. Jean-Marie is also present because while listening to the sound you can discover things that you wouldn’t hear otherwise. The hardest comes when we're cutting and begin to make choices: we have three, ten, fifteen takes of the same shot – choosing one is sometimes painful.

Monika If you take the raw material – the documents from the 18^th century, the reports about villages and Engels' text – entirely different images could be imagined for them. For example, the reports say this many families are impoverished, this many can still live, this many are rich – and in the images, we don't see a single family now, not a single person. Today, now, we occasionally see a truck drive by over the asphalt highway, the village sign. How do arrive at this visual conception?

Danièle What we were interested in was clear from the beginning. It was seeing what traces remain there today and what has entirely changed. For example, a city like Rennes, where it's stated that a third of the population was living in constant risk of pauperization, is now much richer. A lot has been built there. But at the beginning, we see villages in Brittany that have perhaps become poorer. We were interested in seeing what traces remain today and what was swept away and left no trace. And in this regard, a topographical film: with camera and Nagra, with picture and location sound as the tools of an investigation.

Helge That reminds me of the talk at the DFFB. You said there that the long drive along the canal goes through as few villages as possible because driving through villages seems intrusive to you. So this investigation has a distanced relationship to the people.

Danièle Yes...

Helge And in a different context during the discussion it was said that humans aren’t center stage in this film. But I perceived this entirely differently because through the panning movements and the intrusion into the space from the sides – whether from birds or butterflies, from bushes – we in fact feel the presence of the filmmakers very clearly. I mean that, on one hand, it is a world that is visibly desolate, but over it stands a human presence that has no face.

Danièle But this research is also applied to the landscape. There are obviously humans there because these landscapes are arranged and altered. The nature there has been completely changed by humans. That's one thing. But we were also interested in understanding a landscape. Why a village was built there, what it is like. Why irrigation in Egypt works with a large canal and smaller ones. It's clear that this is all from people. Us not wanting to drive through a village – that was not the subject because the narration is telling how struggles and revolts happened and when we see, for example, the plains of Luxor: first the camera is still, then it pans left to the mountains where there is a village, then we come back to the right – then how many people were massacred is recounted.

Monika Yes, it is also entirely clear from the text that someone is there, and the landscape is being considered from a particular perspective and intention. That's what I find fascinating in your films, that you consistently renounce any form of staging these landscapes: they are shown here and now, not as a costumes or a re-enactment of past times, but now, they way they are now with all the details and historical forces like wind, water, and rain that move the land. This point of view is charged with histories through these elements and above all through the text that is being read.

            But these are texts that come out of a particular class conflict, the text by Engels as well, just as in History Lessons with the text by Brecht. For them, class conflicts are defined through property and not, for example, through gender relations.

            In my opinion, these images of landscapes, of a city like Rome with its cobblestones, are charged with history, but this history misappropriates the history of women who have participated to a great extent in history and whose sweat, blood, and tears have been drunk by the cobblestones of Rome as much as the blood, sweat, and tears of the men being named and quoted. I don't know how much this interests you and how aware you are about making things from women present in the historical charge of the images.

Danièle I can say three things about this. First – I've already said this – there are rules of the game that we must obey. For example, sticking a woman into Brecht where he did not have one would also be false for the woman. In front of a factory in Egypt, we see one woman who is entirely dressed in black go through the frame. She is carrying something on her head; she's probably bringing her husband or her son something to eat. And we see a second woman who is dressed like a European out of the factory – probably a secretary. And no other women, only men milling about. We see more women on the country roads: at one point, a woman with a child on a donkey. During the long tracking shot we also see a woman riding a donkey and reading a book, probably going to school or coming from school.

            That is one answer. I think a second answer is a film like The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp. That is a film in which the oppression of women is very clear. That's a subject that comes more from us. The construction doesn't come from anyone else.

            There are actually no sentences in it that come from us. There are only texts from other people, but the construction and the story come from us and it began like this: we were in Munich – we lived there at the time – and went to a cinema downtown. We were coming back on foot because it was too late and there were no more buses. It was pretty far and we found this street where women were standing on the sidewalk and only men in trucks or cars were driving by and stopping. The rest of the film was organized around this. We drove down the street twice and we even covered up the license plate on the car because there were also pimps watching this.

            That is a second answer and my third answer is I think it will go much faster and easier – and on this point Marx was right in some sense – that women will become liberated if there is a total revolution. For example, in Vietnam, women gained equality in one burst. That doesn't mean that afterwards the reaction didn't shut this down. As in all other areas, the struggle is just as necessary when the war is over. That's clear. But I mean, something happened there very suddenly because there is an entire movement and not only with women, but the women were part of it.

Monika Hope for the third world, for a total revolution that also solves the side contradictions, things with women, is also very clear in your films.

Danièle But the Egyptian woman at the Q&A at the Arsenal Cinema represented something even more radical. It really upset me because she came with arguments that originate with politicians and that she adopted. Of course, if we hear this from men it is already dumb, but it's even worse from a woman. She is not only colonized as an Egyptian, but also as a woman. She said that no revolution can be expected from workers because they can’t read. There is some truth to this argument, but still, I can't listen to it anymore. What is funny and sad is that not only the first revolts, but also revolutions partly came from workers, for example here in Germany. And they were also unable to read. But they had a culture, just not the clergy’s.

Monika The absence of women from the images is also a historical document. But that’s not what I mean. You two decide on particular texts that interpret history. That's a decision, whether you choose Engels or Brecht, or if you criticize them in your view of history. That is what the new women's movement does, for example. I'm very skeptical that the position of women will change with a revolution. Maybe intermittently in periods when they are needed and they help. That's always been the case, if women are needed for work during and after a war, but their own thing doesn't fundamentally change. I don't know if you were interested in dealing with these subjects with other texts that deal with women's things.

Danièle But this is also an encounter. A love story doesn't only happen when we meet a person, it can also be a text in which something seems right. It is always only partially true. I think we both agree that we can't make films with general ideas, that we must have something concrete and precise, and the text by Engels is concrete and precise for something very, very small and limited. We could make another film that is critical of it but that is not the same film and some kind of an encounter must happen in that regard.

Monika You could find something is missing, for example, and then develop it. Speaking for myself, it is possible for this kind of process of awakening consciousness to happen. After the discussion at the DFFB, you said: after History Lessons something like an absence opens. At the end, there is this fountain statue, a woman – although a very mythologized one who I didn't really recognize as a woman – with water flowing out of her mouth, she's vomiting. She says the final words of the film: vomit over the path of history. In one of your earlier films, the Böll adaptation Not Reconciled, the subtitle is Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules. For me, that is a male saying that also determines politics, armament politics, for example. The ideology that we must make weapons because the enemy is making weapons, so only violence helps against violence...

Danièle I'll interrupt only to say that "violence" is not only violence with weapons. A strike is also a form of violence. Let's take a utopia, the biggest utopia there is: that suddenly every intellectual, women and men, would go on strike and this shit society would collapse. That would also be a form of violence that would essentially be bigger than every possible form of it.

Monika But you have shown the rudiments of alternative figures. The old Fähmel woman...

Danièle Yes, she stands for a kind of counter violence, but it is destroyed. And the pressure is so strong that she is also destroyed. Not only the pressure of the war or of all time, but also the pressure she has to feel and experience as a woman.

Helge I'd like to know which films by women you like. Can you find anything in common with Marguerite Duras, for example?

DanièleI admire her a lot. She has a lot of energy and is really sharp, but I have a lot more admiration for a woman who leads an everyday life, not only as an intellectual, but a woman who does this with a husband and children, who doesn't kill herself, and can live like this. I find that much harder than making films.

Monika But you don't want that?

Danièle I don't have the strength for both together.

Monika You prefer making films?

Danièle That is also a love story. You choose when you're very young and experience comes later. Maybe there are women who can do both. Maybe Caroline [Champetier] will do this, a husband and daughter or several daughters. But with the younger generation... It is very hard, not to oppress others, which would also not be a solution.

Monika What do you think of Chantal Akerman's films, Jeanne Dielman, for example?

Danièle I can say that I couldn't bear some of it. For example, the way the actress Delphine Seyrig peels potatoes and you notice that she never does it in real life. That doesn't work. And what I also don't like in the film are the obstinately systematic shots so that if someone stands up, for example, their head is cut off.

MonikaBut, I mean, you've gone pretty clearly against the film language developed in Hollywood – shot/reverse shot – where what is important at the moment always appears in the image, the head, and somehow this must have come to you – a particular obstinacy in the staging that maybe focuses more on a dress or a random detail...

Danièle But I don't think that you can replace one form of oppression with another and I also don't think that you can combat one system through another because then one thing simply becomes rigid and that's all.

Helge So you feel that the film grammar there is very arbitrary?

Danièle It becomes systematic in a way that doesn't work for me. That's all.

Monika But I find your films very systematic in their resistance, in their reflection on the commercialization of film language.

Danièle But I think, I hope, that it is not so much a system as a method to investigate something; that can also be blown up, a shot for example. I think it is the third village we see in Egypt, where we have the sign at the beginning and then pan left, then come back right again, then we see the village and people walking in the background. And a donkey. In the foreground, on the road, wagons, a truck, a cart and a donkey are coming – that is happening very much in the foreground. That was not planned. It was a surprise for us as well and so we wanted to keep it because we didn't want to clear away reality and only keep the shot as we had planned it. Because otherwise, if we had done a shot with what was happening on the street, we would never have cut it like that...

Monika Don't you also think that to understand your films, you also need a lot of knowledge about film history?

Danièle Well, empirically, people who have seen barely any or very few films are very moved. I think there are two kinds: there are people who have a film culture and have seen many films, who receive the films very well and are therefore interested. But people who are moved the most and, I think, perhaps perceive the films best are the ones with no film culture.

Helge Does that mean they have no film culture? Today there is also TV...

Danièle But people see more news and sports on TV and the people I'm talking about also barely see feature films. They see TV the way we used to read the newspaper. Or – yes, sports. They're right because that is the only thing that is filmed well. It gets hard with people who believe they know what film is and what film should be. They come in and immediately say, like the Egyptian woman: this is not a film; this is not what films are like. That's a barrier. They think film must be like this and that, and don't accept that it can also be different. And was different too.

Helge In the interview you did with Karsten Witte, you say that you want to make films that can't be understood through cinema, through film history, but that can be understood on their own.

Monika But I think there is something like tradition and a tradition of film language that people are trained in. Somewhere ideas like dream factory or "inspiring illusions" become combined with cinema, conventional cinema. And I think this is also something one shouldn't say pejoratively. Because with the possibility of constructing illusions, there also exists the possibility to think of, conceive, and dream utopias – which is also positive...

Danièle ...but I don't think that has a lot to do with utopias. Our dreams come from reality and are only partly different from reality and are an attempt to escape from it. But always from reality and not from nothing...

Monika Yes. Sure. We can also make this very intellectual. But I think your images are somehow renunciations and are therefore barren and rigorous.

Danièle I hope not only. I hope that sensuality and delight can also be felt in them. And the scent of things. Right?

Monika I’m fascinated by your appeal to Cézanne who painted the mountain again and again, always the outside of the mountain, and who knew that the mountain had burned. But he always painted the outside. The fire begins to appear through his energy.

DanièleI can say something else about Cézanne. I saw pictures by Cézanne in a museum for the first time when I was around fourteen. It was the bold thing with the naked women, Les Grandes Baigneuses. At first, I felt that he couldn't paint, that it was poorly painted. And yet, something in it made it so that I engaged with it for a long time and could no longer see the pictures from the other painters that were hanging there because I felt that they painted poorly.

   

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July 9, 2017, 11:52 pm

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"Kino Slang" 
at the 
Echo Park Film Center
continues

MILITANT FILMS BY
HITCHCOCK, BARNET, MONTEIRO


Thursday,
July 27th, 2017
Doors at 7:30pm
$5 Suggested Donation

Echo Park Film Center
1200 North Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

AVENTURE MALGACHE (Madagascar Landing, Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, 32 min)

Deemed ineffective as propaganda and shelved for 50 years by the British government, this wartime short directed by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock reenacts a true story of the French Resistance against fascist collaboration during World War II in the French colony of Madagascar, Africa. The film's m.o. was not suspense but rather an open-book lesson on the ins-and-outs of collaborationism, nationalism, and underground fighting. The film pays tribute to a hero of the Resistance, records how it was done, and reflects on the reflection. Hitchcock stamps every scene with the contradiction that this is a liberation story among colonizers, either by use of colonial symbols or by inserting the colonized themselves. A baroque array of political machinations, choices and attitudes to freedom are compacted into just 32 minutes of pure composition while delving into themes of perception, morality, and disguise. 

A GOOD LAD (Slavnyy Malyy, Boris Barnet, 1943, 65 min) 

Film historian David Bordwell summarizes: "A French pilot's plane is downed in a (Soviet) forest, where a resistance group is hiding out and forming its own little community. Living under the imminent threat of Nazi discovery doesn't forestall songs, romantic affairs, and mistakes born of the language gap: 'I love you.''I don't understand.''I don't understand.'" Boris Barnet, one of the greatest of all Soviet filmmakers, was quite popular in Russia yet his films, full of life, are almost totally forgotten today, or remain unknown in the West. Particularly A Good Lad, which was not released at the time of its production during the Second World War,  but only later screened in the U.S.S.R. in 1959, then was considered lost again until premiering once more in 1999 at the Moscow Film Museum. "Barnet's A Good Lad is (in one hour!) a musical, a comedy, a love story, and a war movie--and everything is perfectly balanced and free" wrote critic/filmmaker Serge Bozon. 

WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD? (Que Farei eu com Esta Espada?, João César Monteiro, 1975, 63 min)

"​We are in Portugal, in 1975, a country boiling in the aftermath of an ongoing, still unresolved revolution. People are out in the streets, crowds shout slogans, tension and indistinctness surround their daily lives. Filmmaker João César Monteiro, himself boiling, goes amidst the crowd. (...) What Shall I Do with This Sword? is a time capsule, from a precise moment in recent Portuguese history, a mirror-image of a fragmented country. There is the threat of external intervention (...), interference with national sovereignty, here embodied by NATO ships moored in the Tagus River, and more specifically an American aircraft carrier, named Saratoga, a sleeping giant. This and other ships, stationed as reserves waiting to invade if deemed necessary, were visible from Lisbon, within reach of the Terreiro do Paço, a symbolic place of power and revolution, and it was necessary to film them. Monteiro takes a boat and surrounds them, filming the aircraft carrier and submarines as if looking for a weak spot, facing these figures with a defiant attitude.This is a film created around symbolism, and the demystification of those same symbols." (João Araújo)

*

Program total running time: 3 hours.
There will be no introduction. 
Program notes provided at the door.

Special Thanks to Chloe Reyes, Bill Krohn, Pierre Leon, Travis Miles, and Bruno Andrade.

"Kino Slang" is a new regular series of cinema screenings,--typically a double-bill and a short on the chosen night--programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. This iteration of Kino Slang will continue the cinematographic and historical excavation, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog. 

Notes on the program and series, documents and translations, ephemera and images related to the films at hand will appear here both before (see below) and after the programs. 

*

On 

AVENTURE MALGACHE

DARK CARNIVAL

 by Bill Krohn

             

What we know about Aventure Malgache(1944), the remarkable short Alfred Hitchcock made to show how the flame of the Resistance had burned brightly in the colonies, we owe to Alain Kerzoncuf, who discovered that Jules Francois Clermont, the actor who plays Clarus, the leader of the Resistance in Malgache (Madagascar), had been a lawyer there before the war and had lived the adventure told in the film – as if Pina, the heroine of Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, had been played, not by Anna Magnani, but by a real heroine of the Resistance.  By 1944 Clermont had joined the Moliere Players, a troupe of exiled French performers assembled in London, because the Allies could no longer employ him in a staff position during the coming invasion of the continent.  Having been on the stage before taking up the law, he now went back to his first profession.

After meeting with Hitchcock, who had travelled in steerage to London to contribute to the war effort, Clermont was commissioned to write a script in tangy colloquial French with Hitchcock’s future collaborator Angus MacPhail, whom the director first met at the Claridge Hotel in London during preproduction for this film and another, Bon Voyage, made to be shown in France when the Allies landed.  (The opening credits address a specific “vous” that never saw the film:  the French people who had been living under Nazi occupation.)  The collaboration with the gifted MacPhail lasted until the writer died of alcoholism after outlining the structure of Vertigo (1957) for Hitchcock.* Aventure Malgache, shelved until 1999 at the request of the French, who didn’t care for its portrayal of the political and economic contradictions at the heart of the French Empire during the Occupation (for example, the black-skinned servants whose wordless presence makes its own comment), didn’t fare much better, but both have now gotten their due.  Ars longa, vita brevis.

The account of Clermont’s war in Aventure Malgachecuts some corners for reasons of budget.  He was being shipped to a penal colony when British warships stopped the convoy and freed him, setting him up as Radio Free Madagascar on a ship in the Indian Ocean.  Hitchcock, who didn’t have the money to film a scene at sea, built a dungeon-like set for Clarus’s maritime prison from which he could see the smoke-stacks of British ships coming to save him.  (His joyous exclamations are greeted by a fellow prisoner’s muttered “’giveafuck”s, which are left un-translated in the BFI’s subtitles.) The British invasion of Madagascar, which is shown in newsreel footage, then leads to the scene where Clarus has the pleasure of broadcasting back to the man who imprisoned him, the gangster and Vichy turncoat Michel (Paul Bonifas), that the British are coming for him.  

The film pays tribute to a hero of the Resistance by having him reenact for Hitchcock’s camera the daring subversion that made him famous.  Clarus introduces the show with a few words in Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, then does the “knock knock” sound effect that introduced all his broadcasts.  Poverty of means spurs a wealth of invention.  It’s hard not to read this as a metaphor for Aventure Malgache, a better film than Spellbound (1945), which Hitchcock put on hold when he came to England, despite MacPhail’s contributions to the latter when he followed the director back to California:  David O. Selznick spent lavishly on Spellbound, then lopped off MacPhail’s opening sequence, set in a mental asylum, and truncated the dream sequence planned by Hitchcock and another gifted collaborator, Salvador Dali.

Selznick’s tinkering paved the way for the psychoanalysis-on-skis sequence that would be Hitchcock’s ludicrous first attempt to portray that impossible-to-portray process until he and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen finally nailed it with the Psychonalysis in the Boudoir sequence that resolves the mystery of the heroine’s frigidity in Marnie (1964).  By way of contrast, despite the gripes about too much dialogue from “users” and professional critics alike preserved on iMdb, Aventure Malgache deftly pulls off a psychoanalysis of the Occupation carried out in France’s colonial unconscious, tucked away out of sight in the Indian Ocean, which anticipates the triumphs wrought by “talky” Hitchcockians ranging from Eric Rohmer to the Straubs long after Aventure Malgache had been consigned to the vaults.

The situation we see in the dressing-room of the Moliere Players (a troupe created to give French actors in exile a way to participate in the fight while hiding their identities to protect their relatives in France) is one that could really have happened:  Clarus advising a colleague on how to play the villain in a play they’re getting made up for by telling him about his personal nemesis in Malgache to enable him to get into the skin of a real-life Nazi.

While Clarus explains the character of Michel to this colleague as they prepare to take the stage – translation: to begin the film we’re watching – the latter gradually dons the make-up that accompanies his inner transformation as he gets into character.  Hitchcock stages the transitions so that, when we cut from the dressing-room to the trial scene in the first flashback, Michel’s back is to us, and we only discover his features gradually.  The figure looming in the foreground of the trial sequence, whose face is also turned away from the camera, is Clarus, the witness -- in reality and within the film -- to everything that happens in this early Hitchcock experiment with single-point-of-view storytelling.**

As the two actors in the dressing-room are getting ready to step on the stage, the one who will play the villain of the piece gradually dons the make-up that accompanies his inner transformation as he gets into the character with Clarus’s help.  It would have taken a while for French spectators – had they been permitted to see the film -- to realize that he’s the same actor who plays Michel in the flashbacks.

Hitchcock has never been subtler, in fact.  Clarus recounts, and the film shows, how the Resistance-friendly governor of Madagascar was forced by Michel to put a spy on Clarus’s tail to uncover his Resistance activities.  Back in the present of the film’s narration the other actors in the dressing-room joke that Clarus must have been killed and ask how he could get away with anything while being tailed. “Nothing simpler,” says Clarus.  Cut to Clarus entering the cellar that is Resistance headquarters to address the troops, arm in arm with his tail.  The ceiling of this odd little set is decorated with symbols from the Zodiac:  Fate, looming like Wagner’s Valkyries over the Resistance, will have to be overcome by guile.

As with the real and reel Michels, the spectator has to use his eyes to understand these gags, and the actor playing the part of the false spy doesn’t make it easy.  His dress and demeanor change considerably between the office of the Governor, where we met him, and the cellar, and no dialogue hints that this is the same man come to the aid of spectators who haven’t been paying attention.  In Bon Voyage, Hitchcock’s other wartime short, the action recounted in flashback happens at night, teaching the spectator a political lesson in how to read images.  Aventure Malgache, which happens in bright light (including an uncanny scene of treachery illuminated through a sheet), is a lesson in how to see. 

At the end of the film the nameless actor preparing to play a Nazi, who now sports Michel’s moustache, picks a fight with the indignant Clarus, who realizes when the transformation is complete that his colleague has become Michel and they are talking to each other the way they did back in Malgache.  They have become the characters they’re playing, like Norman Bates in Psycho, still sixteen years in the future.  As they leave the dressing-room to go on stage “Michel” buttons the jacket of his Nazi uniform and Clarus dons the costume of a Resistance fighter.  The flashback is over, but the struggle goes on.

Does the budget alone account for the bare-bones staging of some scenes, like the one with uncanny illumination where a hysterical woman whose motives are never explained in words picks up the phone to denounce Clarus, where the set is a bed and a gauze curtain with a light behind it?***  Perhaps, but the production seems to have had a dolly, a costly piece of equipment for a no-budget short, which the director uses here to pull back until the phone that seems to be controlling her actions, like the stolen money on Marion Crane’s bed in Psycho, is in the frame.  Other scenes where the dolly is being used in offbeat ways include the one with the pooterish Vichy General, during which the camera moves closer to the characters, almost imperceptibly, until Michel is center frame, then pans right each time the general paces nearer to the camera.  There is also a rather modern quick dolly-in on Michel during the trial. For viewers who aren’t hypnotized by the dialogue they hate (cf. those iMdb comments), there’s quite a lot being done with the camera in this little film.

If Lifeboat is a film influenced by Brechtian stagecraft, Aventure Malgacheis a Freudian miniature, with Michel occupying the place of Willie (Walter Slezak), the German submarine captain.  “I see the type you mean,” says Boniface, playing the nameless actor who is having Michel explained to him in preparation for his own performance as a Nazi he considers underwritten and opaque.  “A rat like Laval” [a Vichy official executed after the war]. “No,” says Clarus, “he was a roly-poly man…”  Surfaces are deceptive when the Unconscious is calling the shots.

Aventure Malgache also reproduces the mythical structure of Lifeboat by equating the rise to power of Michel, a gangster, with a period of misrule:  a dark carnival that can only end in when the Lord of Misrule who presides over it is killed.  Although we don’t see Michel go before a firing squad, we’re assured that the British weren’t fooled by him when they arrived in Malgache.  He sticks his framed picture of Petain (shown in the first insert used in this little film) under the fridge, prudently stashes his bottle of Vichy Water -- this is the second insert -- inside the fridge, an expensive but invaluable item in the tropics in 1944, and puts up a picture of Queen Victoria where Petain had been. 

The last dolly (a cut, actually:  Hitchcock’s own pricey equipment had its limitations) isolates the motto at the top of the painting: Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense, Latin for “Shame on anyone who sees evil in it” — an ironic motto that French spectators in 1944, who spoke a language descended from Latin, would have had no trouble parsing:  Michel, who embodies Collaboration, would be quickly spotted and put to death by the Free French accompanying the British invaders, the way the enraged lifeboat passengers execute Willie when they realize he’s steering them to a concentration camp.

Notes

“Hitchcock’s Aventure Malgache (or the True Story of DZ 91),” Alain Kerzoncuf, Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, November 2014.

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut and Helen Scott, Simon & Schuster 1967.

Hitchcock at Work by Bill Krohn, Cahiers-Phaidon 2000.  

*MacPhail had been driven to drink by dialogue writer John Michael Hayes, who should have shared screen credit for the script of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) with him but didn’t because the ambitious Hayes was American and a dues-paying member of the WGA, founded in 1954 to look after the rights of American screenwriters, but not of English writers working on American films – a situation that the Guild had not yet figured out, although Hitchcock imposed his own solution:  he never worked with Hayes again.  When Aventure Malgache was finally released in 1999, MacPhail was properly credited as the co-author of the screenplay with Clermont.  He was subsequently the credited screenwriter on such classics as Dead of Night, Whiskey Galoreand, for Hitchcock, The Wrong Man.  He is cited in books on the Master as the man who invented the concept of the MacGuffin.

**On the psychoanalytic symbolism of characters facing away from the camera, see “Cinema and Psychoanalysis:  Parallel Histories” by Stephen Heath in Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (ed. Janet Bergstrom), University of California Press, 1999, 25-56.  Heath discovers this figuration of the Unconscious in early films about psychoanalysis like G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926)

***The eerie illumination in the scene where Clarus is denounced to the Gestapo recalls the scene with Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in dead Rebecca’s dressing room (Rebecca, 1940).  Hitchcock disliked Rebecca because he didn’t have complete control when he made it (cf.  the ham-fisted scenes with George Sanders), but for that very reason it seems to have haunted him, as we can see in this little scene in Aventure Malagache where the Unconscious is in the driver’s seat.

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July 18, 2017, 9:48 pm

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This text originally appeared in Евгений Марголит, "Живые и мертвое. Заметки к истории советского кино 1920-1960-х годов" — Evgenii Margolit's The Living and the Dead: Notes on the History of Soviet Cinema of the 1920s-1960s (St. Petersburg, Seans, 2012).  

It was recommended and translated from the Russian by Dmitry Martov (great thanks to him) on the occasion of the upcoming July 27th, 2017 screening of Boris Barnet'sНовгородцы (also known as A GOOD LAD) — to be shown alongside Hitchcock's AVENTURE MALGACHE and Monteiro's WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD? — as part of "Kino Slang" at the Echo Park Film Center, in Los Angeles.

"Slavnyy Malyy" 
(A Good Lad, Boris Barnet, 1942)

by Evgenii Margolit

For historians of the Soviet era in general and of Soviet cinema in particular, the present time has one undeniable advantage: we are dealing with a system that has completed its formation, and the entire network of previously latent, secret meanings and connections, of which the creators were unconscious, is now spread before our eyes, where global traditions at their origin could lead to phenomena which were, in the past, partly or completely ignored.

The template for Soviet films about the [Great Patriotic] War which unites THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Kalatozov, 1957) and IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (Tarkovskii, 1962), FATE OF A MAN (Bondarchuk, 1959) and TRIAL ON THE ROAD (A. German, 1971), ONLY OLD MEN ARE GOING TO BATTLE (Bykov, 1973) and TORPEDO BOMBERS (Aranovich, 1983) manifests itself for the first time in a 1942 film by Boris Barnet that is not merely unknown but is, in a manner of speaking, the most unknown of his films, with even its exact title being a mystery until recently: according to the official papers it was NOVGORODTSY (MEN OF NOVGOROD) but during the opening credits the viewers would read with amused disbelief the title SLAVNYY MALYY (A GOOD LAD).

This film was completely forgotten as soon as its fate — or rather lack thereof — had been sealed. No documents have yet been found explaining why it was banned; and the surviving documents testify the following: no global objectives were set before Barnet; everybody clearly understood that no masterpiece could be created in the absence of a more or less proper script (there was a libretto by Petr Pavlenko titled “The Avengers” which, according to some testimonies, war correspondent Aleksei Kapler was trying to turn into a screenplay but he was soon purged); and the film that Barnet was eventually able to produce was met quite charitably.

Indeed, the lack of a script’s strong foundation would never be a fatal hindrance for Barnet, what with his irrepressible imagination as a director. He said on several occasions that to direct a weak script is, in a way, easier: the director’s prowess would be more apparent, and there would be fewer complaints. So A GOOD LAD turned out to be a modest, unpretentious film, sticking to its genre.

However, Barnet turned the subject of the partisan movement into a comedy. Did the ban have anything to do with his choice of the genre? On the one hand, the Russian official criticism certainly did not favor war comedies, but on the other hand, there had been precedents, and in the same year, 1942, Gerbert Rappaport made VOZDUSHNYI IZVOZCHIK (TAXI TO HEAVEN) and Konstantin Yudin directed ANTOSHA RYBKIN. Another thing was probably more important: the author of A GOOD LAD populated his film with characters who were fundamentally no different from the lovable and touching oddballs of [Barnet’s 1940 film] THE OLD JOCKEY. Actually, the plot thickens only when two completely eccentric characters appear in the midst of the squadron: a French aviator and an opera singer. The Frenchman is played by Viktor Dobrovolskiy who here looks somewhat similar to young Jean Marais; he is an actor from Leningrad, later based in Kiev, who became popular after PETER THE FIRST (Petrov, 1937) (where he played the parts of the officer Yaguzhinsky and runaway debtor Fed’ka). The role of the opera singer is performed by Nikolay Bogolyubov, and it is incredibly interesting to observe how Barnet yet again plays in a comical fashion with the monumental typecasting of his Kol’ka Kadkin from OUTSKIRTS (Barnet, 1933), whose trademark roles by this time were “the Great Citizen” and “the First Red Army officer”. This was the triumph of an auteur cinema logic, which was not very typical for Soviet wartime cinema. It is not a coincidence that, for example, SEKRETAR RAYKOMA (WE WILL COME BACK) by Ivan Pyryev, made during the same year and based around the same subject of the partisan movement, had nothing in common with Pyryev’s comedies: this was rather a partisan western, with a completely different cinematic universe, with the actors and archetypes being completely different.

A GOOD LAD, on the contrary, is a very moving and very humane, genuinely auteur gesture: when facing imminent danger, the first thing to be saved should be the spring of one’s loins — one’s world. Barnet searches for a narrative provision whereby this world can survive, and hides it in an almost fairy-tale forest, so remarkably shot by the cinematographer Sergei Ivanov, far from open spaces where the enemy is rampant. Thus emerges another half-ark, half-haunted island, so typical in Barnet’s cinema. A sanctuary of harmony, which from film to film becomes more and more fortuitous and exotic: from the crowded house on Trubnaya Square, through the prewar Russian province, to the island of the eccentrics “by the bluest of the seas”.



In this respect, Barnet is an artist-demiurge to the nearly the same degree as those artists to whom this term is usually applied. His model of the world is just as fortuitous and individual as that of, let’s say, Eisenstein’s. However, the nature of their models is fundamentally different. Montage cinema is imbued with the pathos of life-building: it is a sort of display of creative will, which re-creates reality based on new principles; a sort of campaigning for the advantages of this way of life. If you will, conjuring reality by demonstrating its future. Whereas for Barnet the most important thing is the self-propulsion of life, whose festive spontaneity he is trying to evoke with all available artistic devices. For such a world, any purpose prescribed from the outside is a catastrophe, a restriction to the abundance of life; in other words, a depravity. The director first and foremost strives to uncover in his characters their natural belonging to this spontaneity.

For this reason Barnet’s cinema at its core knows only two genres: idyll and tragedy, since, given such a complete degree of fusion between a character and the world, all other transitional genres drop out as unessential. A conflict in Barnet’s films is either flat-out false, serving as a foil to the sought-after harmony, or total — tragical, because the incongruity between an individual and the world is in itself already catastrophic [1].

This is one of the reasons why the blatantly fortuitous world of Barnet’s guerrilla fighters, led by a young woman (lovely ingenue-comеdienne Ekaterina Sipavina from the Lenfilm acting school), who sing romantic songs by Tchaikovsky and satirical stanzas composed by Nikita Bogoslovsky, nevertheless does not irritate us with its contrivedness. For the record, A GOOD LAD proved itself to be the precursor of the war musical comedy genre. Particularly if one takes into consideration the fact that both Semyon Timoshenko, the creator of HEAVENLY SLUG (1945), and Mikhail Zharov, who directed A NOISY HOUSEHOLD (1946) right after the war, in 1942 were also stationed in Alma-Ata and, therefore, could have witnessed Barnet at work.

However, in their films, made under completely different circumstances, the comic universe engulfs the plot entirely. In A GOOD LAD things are much more complicated. Apart from the idyllic partisan forest, there also exists the tragic universe beyond the forest’s bounds. These two universes, closed on themselves with heightened genre definitiveness and finality, oppose one another and define each other through this opposition. In the forest reigns early autumn, with its sun shining through the luxuriantly yellow foliage. But around the forest is a pre-winter season, with its bare wastelands, where under heavy skies and wind skeletal trees are stripped of their leaves and burned down huts stand still. During some of the shots the viewer is startled: we’re seeing the landscapes from IVAN’S CHILDHOOD.

To be sure, in Soviet wartime cinema this kind of opposition between the tragic and the idyllic is encountered quite frequently. However, as a rule, it is arranged temporally: the tragedy of war descends upon the pre-war idyll. (The most representative example is THEY FOUGHT FOR THEIR COUNTRY, again dedicated to the guerrilla subject. In this film the protagonist literally changes: a peace-loving person is transformed into a forbidding warrior, a soldier).

In Barnet’s wartime filmography, however, the characters remain immutable in their essence: they are profoundly civilian. They are intrinsically unable to live by the wartime laws, which are alien to them. In A GOOD LAD the partisans are not primarily fighting or avenging — they are simply living in the forest. Their primary mission is preservation of life’s vividness. The opposition between the two universes turns out to be the opposition between the element of vivid life and the element of war (which is intent upon conquering, dismembering and destroying life).

But it is exactly on this opposition that the whole paradigm of the Soviet cinema about the Great Patriotic War is built thereafter. One can effortlessly spot it in, for example, the very complex world of Aleksei German’s TRIAL ON THE ROAD that separates with the same precision the universes of war (stone cold snowfield) and life (forest). The same principle takes shape in the war films of Leonid Bykov, in which the protagonist organizes his own “combat unit”, right up to a musical ensemble. And is it a coincidence that the idea of IVAN’S CHILDHOOD came to Tarkovsky only when he envisioned Ivan’s dreams — the blatantly idyllic world?

Obviously, such an artistic template of the cinematic universe fundamentally contradicts the official sovereign template, because for the ideology of the state the immediate goal was “the final and decisive battle”, wherefrom the vision of war-as-a-festival, war-as-a-parade emerged, eventually transforming into the vision of war-as-a-competition between two military state-machines (from the defense films of 1930s through epic docudramas of 1940s to the LIBERATION film series [1970-1971] as well as the endless number of Stierlitziana films [2]).

Therefore, A GOOD LAD turns out to be the earliest exposition of the Soviet war cinema. The starting point of the plot is yet to come: in this film two universes, foreign to each other and at odds with each other, remain as if frozen before the collision. Here is where the lack of screenplay manifests itself: a flimsy storyline, proposed by the author of a libretto, is merely a substitute for the actual plot. For this reason, in A GOOD LAD the convergence of these universes has not yet taken place (although by this time there already existed the cinenovella A PRICELESS HEAD — perhaps the best segment in all of the FIGHTING FILM COLLECTION (BOYEVOY KINOSBORNIK). This collision was to occur eventually in the last of Barnet’s wartime films — in the truly unknown (even today!) masterpiece of war cinema DARK IS THE NIGHT.




1.This concept defining Barnet’s creative work was first proposed by Khrisanf Khersonsky during the post-screening discussion of Barnet’s DARK IS THE NIGHT at Moscow’s Dom Kino in May 1945.

2.Spy films inspired by the very popular TV series "17 Moments of Spring"(1972) about the Soviet spy who was operating in Nazi Germany under the name Max Otto von Stierlitz . (Translator’s Note)

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July 28, 2017, 7:32 pm

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We are very pleased to add another text here expressly written in support of last night's "Kino Slang" program at the Echo Park Film Center, "Several Militant Films: Hitchcock, Barnet, Monteiro". Its author is Bruno Andrade, Brazilian critic and editor of the journal FOCO, 
and long-time friend of this blog (his own blog,o signo do dragão, we dialogued with for many years, roughly 2007-2015). Below, Andrade dives into João César Monteiro’s WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD? (1975) and comes up with a startling fugue of ideas. His text goes alongside the translation by Dmitry Martov of Evgenii Margolit's essay on Boris Barnet's A GOOD LAD (here) and Bill Krohn's essay on Hitchcock's AVENTURE MALGACHE (here) in the endeavor to give non-summary attention to these films.

Along the Great Wall
by Bruno Andrade

It should come as no surprise that João César Monteiro’s What Shall I Do with This Sword? was programmed with a 1942 Boris Barnet musical comedy about a downed French pilot who falls in love with a Russian partisan, and a 1944 Alfred Hitchcock war-effort short that reflects upon the Resistance against the Axis powers during World War II. Product of an extremely volatile creative and social turmoil, Monteiro’s 1975 film works as a kind of great synaptic rift between past and present, document and representation, intervention and reflection. What Hitchcock and Barnet – what Murnau himself – did in the form of spectacle is done here by Monteiro in the form of documental inscription – and is closer in that respect to what filmmakers like Glauber Rocha and Santiago Álvarez were doing in films like Di Cavalcanti (1977) and 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh (1969), but with a meditative quality that appeals to the films of Monteiro’s countrymen Fernando Lopes, Manoel de Oliveira and António Reis.


The film begins its inquiry – about the situation of economic and social distress in Portugal during the aftermath of some maneuvers by NATO ships in the Tagus River from late January to early February 1975 (i.e. less than a year after the Carnation Revolution) – by establishing a fairly blunt intertextual structure: the interference of American imperialism is directly associated with the arrival of Murnau’s Nosferatu, the vampire, in the city of Wisborg (the famous scene where actor Max Schreck is seen carrying a coffin in the emptied entrance of a pier plays as an analogy to the arrival of American sailors on land). Later on we follow a pursuit of American sailors in the red-light district while Billie Holiday’s I Cover The Waterfront plays on the soundtrack (I cover the waterfront / I'm watching the sea / Will the one I love / Be coming back to me?).

To achieve this mixture of debauchery and committed testimony, Monteiro seeks less to merge past and present than to put them on a collision course, and it is by shock, by abbreviation, by montage, in short, that the profound reality of a country manifests itself through the very construction of a film: colonialism, in all its stages, both its face and its shadows, is violently stripped bare on the film surface itself. For what is shown to us is a country that represses its own colonialist past while being exploited by a country with a very active imperialist inclination. Much like the people we see in the film (a verbose prostitute who tells us about her sexual experiences with a priest, some Alentejo peasants, a couple of dockworkers, an old revolutionary who gives a long anti-fascist speech), we are constantly bewildered by the immediate disorder of such a situation. But the film itself lays out this disorder in a way that feels very much like the product of a culture that needs to be shaken up. By questioning each step of his own inquiry – i.e. the scenes where we listen to the life experiences of two black immigrants from former Portuguese colonies –, Monteiro establishes an unsparing invocation of Portugal’s past and present situation.

From the time we see, in the film’s first post-credits shot, a perfectly symmetrical and balanced composition of an old cannon atop Castelo de São Jorge targeting a NATO ship right down to the last shot of the film, where we face a shot of a peeling wall brutally ravaged by the passage of time, What Shall I Do with This Sword? avoids the guileful device of coercion through an opinionated testimony of its author. It does so by working less as an interventionist or a confrontational document than as an accurate testimony of some facts from a convulsive present. Monteiro contemplates, in such a situation, the possibility of exposing dialectically the conventions and the contradictions, the order and the despair of a whole society, projecting all of its memory into a kind of chaotic mythology (Nosferatu on one hand, Siegfried on the other; Billie Holliday’s music and Richard Wagner’s Siegfried's Funeral March on the soundtrack). The chaos, the contingent disorder of the present ends up unsteadily outlined by this richly textured assortment of icons, but such a resort has an inevitable consequence: it destabilizes all previous order. The disjunctive procedures of such an editing ploy, which scrutinizes directly and indirectly all that is narrated to us by speech, all that is articulated by language and cultural reflexes, cannot but lead us, spectators, to the scaffold: it is us, in our conditions as spectators, who are being summoned in the end. One cannot walk away from a film like What Shall I Do with This Sword?, or a film like Branca de Neve, unscathed: we leave them no longer as spectators, but as witnesses.


It is said that a book that demolishes everything but does not destroy itself has exasperated us in vain. The work of João César Monteiro, here and elsewhere (the last shot of Come and Go, the whole of Branca de Neve), has not been disappointing in that respect. From the moment, near the end, when Margarida Gil asks the film title’s question to its last moments, What Shall I Do with This Sword? seems to take an almost epic ascent, with the winds of Dovzhenko’s cinema blowing into Portugal’s seas, the peasants demonstrating through their marches the fearsome action of gravity upon earth. The image of a freighter cutting the ocean, seen under the effect of a diaphanous sea air that looms until it completely obliterates the image, could inspire in us the most romanticized feelings of a once lost grandeur now recovered by the magnitude of a new order, that of the immutable and eternal values of sacrosanct Western civilization. Monteiro would already be a great filmmaker for evoking such greatness in a film that until then not only seemed unable to accommodate it but also seemed to insidiously and deliberately reject it; he would be an even greater filmmaker by doing so with such an extreme scarcity of material means. But the truth is that Monteiro is more than a great filmmaker. As a man, as a witness – in other words, as a citizen with responsibilities –, Monteiro is capable of evoking this glorious past, haughtily and ironically at the same time, and then of discarding it, making this the main political point of his film. 

At the very end the camera zooms in on a depleted wall where the Marx and Engels phrase “Proletarians of all countries, unite” can be read. There’s a cut that brings us closer to that last word; a camera movement follows, which takes us off of it and leaves us only with the stripped wall, empty, not carrying any inscription. But that is not true: we’ve seen this wall before, at the beginning of the film. It carried the name of the film’s crew, the laboratory where film was processed and the film’s production office. These people that got together and worked together in the film we just saw were already occupying a place on this wall. This wall, the empty spot on it, points to the necessity of a new space, a space at no time previously explored. This space could only arise at the moment when everything is already said and done, the moment past the point of no return, past the risk of any retreat. This space is a void, the “after” that comes at the end of all stories, of all the possible tensions between history and civilization, a wall where nothing has yet been written, where it is still possible to inscribe something. Let us not be surprised, therefore, that Monteiro made a film from this “next instant”, from this wall still without inscriptions.

It’s title is What Shall I Do with This Sword?

Films that weren't, Buñuel / Renoir: Los Angeles

October 6, 2017, 9:10 pm

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"...I spent two years in Hollywood from 1944 to 1946."— Luis Buñuel *

"Buñuel and Man Ray planned a scenario, THE SEWER OF LOS ANGELES, whose action took place on a mountain of excrement close to a highway and a dust desert. The scheme was abortive; but later Man Ray managed to collaborate on a Surrealist film DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY." (Francisco Aranda)





"Dudley Nichols and (Jean Renoir) were considering a new version of LES BAS FONDS (THE LOWER DEPTHS). It was to be set in Los Angeles, based on the contrast between the modern buildings and the crumbling houses of the Victorian era. This, too, never saw the light of day. Dudley did not understand why."  — Jean Renoir, Ma vie et mes films

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* 1940: "Every last person believes that America will enter the war next year and I hope to be at a distance from it. I can see myself defending the American flag in Hong Kong or resting for a few years in a concentration camp, and of course I'm getting out of here." L.B.

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October 10, 2017, 2:25 am

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KINO SLANG

at the 

Echo Park Film Center
presents

THE SOUTHERNER (1945, Jean Renoir)

THE YOUNG ONE (1960, Luis Buñuel) 

Saturday,

October 28th, 2017
Doors at 7:30pm
$5 Suggested Donation

Echo Park Film Center
1200 North Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA. 90026








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THE SOUTHERNER (a.k.a. Hold Autumn in Your Hands)

U.S.A. 1945.16mm print. 92 minutes. Direction: Jean Renoir. Script: Jean Renoir, William Faulkner (uncredited), from the novel Hold Autumn in Your Hands. Adaptation: Hugo Butler. Production: Producing Artists, Inc. Producer: Daivd, Loew, Robert Hakim. Cinematography: Lucien Androit. Sets: Eugene Lourie. Editor: Gregg Tallas. Music: Werner Janssen. Cast: Zachary Scott, Betty Field, J. Carroll Naish, Beulah Bondi, Jay Gilpin, Jean Vanderwilt, Paul Burns, Chalres Kemper, Norman Lloyd, Percy Kilbride, Rex. Premiered April 30, 1945.

"We are in the middle of a vast, sun-beaten cotton field somewhere in Texas. Cotton pickers under straw hats bend in long rows. Black hands and black faces, white hands and white faces fill huge bags and carry them to the tally-man. Poor blacks and poor whites share their common economic hardship as indentured labor to a large grower. In one row Uncle Pete Tucker feels faint and succumbs to a weak heart, but not before urging his nephew Sam to work the land for himself. The film's story, to which William Faulkner contributed without credit, becomes the uphill battle of Sam, his wife Nona, Grandma Tucker, and kids Daisy and Jotty to raise their own subsistence crop as tenant farmers." ― Christopher Faulkner

THE YOUNG ONE (La Joven)

Mexico/U.S.A.1960. 95 minutes. Direction: Luis Buñuel. Script and Dialogue: Luis Buñuel, H.B. Addis (Hugo Butler), based on the short story "Travelling Man" by Peter Mathiesen. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Music: "Sinner Man" written and sung by Leon Bibb. Editing: Luis Buñuel and Carlos Savage. Sets: Jesus Bracho. Cast: Bernie Hamilton, Zachary Scott, Key Meersman, Graham Denton, Claudio Brook. 

One of the two American films directed by the great Buñuel (and one of his favorites), this seething tale of racism, flesh, and survival amid the wilds of an untamed South Carolina island was hailed as an "unsung masterpiece, one of the most authentic and pungent of all the films set in the American South” (Jonathan Rosenbaum). Tensions simmer between a black jazz musician on the run from a lynch mob and a white supremacist game warden who lusts after the island’s only other inhabitant: a 14-year-old girl. 

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Further notes and articles on these films and this screening will soon be posted.

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Program total running time: 3 hours
There will be no introductions.
Doors open at 7:30pm, film at 8pm.
$5 Suggested Donation.
Program Notes will be provided at the door.

Special Thanks to Dino Everett, Chloe Reyes, and Jean Rouverol-Butler.

"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. It continues the cinematographic investigations, historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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October 27, 2017, 1:09 pm

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Jacques Rivette on THE SOUTHERNER (Jean Renoir, 1945)

What follows is an English translation (not in the least meant to be definitive) of the second half of an article on Jean Renoir's THE SOUTHERNER (1945) written by a 22-year-old Jacques Rivette at La Gazette du Cinéma in 1950.  In the years 1945-1950, Parisians were seeing one, sometimes two new American Renoir films a year, catching up on what was missed during the Nazi Occupation, and re-seeing the pre-war French films in a changed landscape. Renoir's work was being reassessed at-large, with his American films often superficially dismissed as concessions to Hollywood mores (or as "dilutions of his French films"). The first half of Rivette's article is thus a bold defense of the American Renoirs, noting certain continuities with Renoir's past ("his silent contempt for all rules"), but more importantly elucidating the total evolution and worldly change evident in the new work (when this article was written Renoir was in India researching for THE RIVER and, not incidentally, gone from Hollywood in these years of the blacklist's wake). Rivette makes both sage practical points ("One forgets that if Renoir had remained in France, the failure of THE RULES OF THE GAME would have forced him to accept lesser scripts than those he shot on the other side of the Atlantic") and massive, cosmic statements... Then come the excerpted paragraphs below, and with their vertiginous use of the semi-colon, these were some of the first where, of a small American Renoir film made independently in the dust, the entire universe would be evoked...

(...)

Renoir's American films mark a definite victory for innocence; it is no longer a question of voluptuously submitting to the world of appearances, and of abandoning oneself to the object and all concreteness, to an almost animist intoxication, into a world before sin, where things are, without the intervention of a value judgment; a simpler, more clairvoyant look now judges the universe, reflects it, and gives each thing its true value, rather than the pantheistic metamorphosis of the past. Renoir has left the realm of pure existence; things are now something; love is hence lucid; the mind, free and clear.

...Renoir acquired (this restraint and modesty) through maturity—and perhaps through contact with these calm, direct men, and marked equally by the Protestantism that he encountered through Swamp Water and The Southerner. In such an existence, a few gestures embody all the passions, the pains, the hopes, the simplicity, the rigor of attitudes and the words, all constituting a sober ceremonial. Direct and frank, these men hide nothing and each express their feelings, their calm, and sometimes even their coldness, granting their gestures a great sobriety, that which often comes with the repose of heart and spirit, to the point of complete immobility; whether it's the episode of the grandmother swaying obstinately in her rocking chair on the platform of the caravan, or the young fallen woman, lying on the ground, grabbing the soil in her nervous hands, or even this splendid fight, refined, rigorous and yet beautifully alive—this valorization of the gesture and attitudes, by their sobriety, therefore their intensity, and the often precise planting of the characters in the frame of the screen, impose the impression of a certain "theatricalization" (and the very existence of these men is "theatrical", these men constantly engaged in a struggle with nature, who define themselves and find meaning and value only in their conflict with the external world: man exists only through action, the act, he is an actor); an impression heightened by the nakedness, the rigor of the natural settings, and the leitmotif of the porch, these few wooden steps, the peristyle of the domestic temple, where one comes to sit side by side; at the intersection of the house and the fields, they are the knot of the decor. Here man is at the center of his universe, he comes to rest there, to confide in it and, like Antaeus, regains strength in the most intimate contact with all that justifies his life.

To speak of a banal and flatly edifying "script", to regret "the absence of dramatic progression", all that is flatly absurd. Man in the midst of the world, of his seasons and his whims, is the subject of The Southerner. It proves once again that the word "script" has no meaning, that there is no "script" and never will be; a film is people walking, embracing, drinking, bumping into each other; men who act before our eyes, and oblige us to accompany them in their actions, to share their lives, to participate in the thousand little incidents that make up an existence, and which interest us henceforth equally; here Renoir joins Flaherty; their purpose is the same even if by opposite paths; one puts the actors in touch with the concrete realities of their "role", forcing them to live this feigned existence for its capture by the camera; the other considers men—his occasional performers—as actors, and has them play their lives, instead of simply living it in front of the lens, reconstructing each of their customary gestures with a view precisely to its inscription on the film; —both realize this subtle mixture of artifice and reality is necessary for an expressive transcription of the world; otherwise we obtain only an impersonal, bloodless copy, from which all the weight of the concrete, which was the living justification, has escaped—without being replaced by structures which will justify it in this other universe, of which they are the foundations, and where nothing is of existence except through them, and will give by artifice the same total, the same weight of the concrete and undeniable evidence, as the basic reality.

To return to The Southerner: —what is good is that all these beautiful thoughts come to you afterwards; one does not think at the moment that one sees, one marches on; it is only through a twitch of the eye, an eye long distorted by this ugly game, that we notice shot changes and camera movements without actually being able to give them more importance than these things deserve. This total, immediate adhesion, this innocence of the spectator finally found, along with the impossibility of speaking of this film directly, and the obligation that it places on us to discourse only about him—such are still the most immediate proofs of the total success of Jean Renoir.

Jacques Rivette, La Gazette du Cinéma, nº 2, juin 1950
Translation: Andy Rector 
Many thanks to Miguel Armas

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THE SOUTHERNER will screen on 16mm this Saturday October 28th, 8pm, at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles on a double feature with Luis Buñuel's THE YOUNG ONE (1960), as part of the series "Kino Slang presents".

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November 21, 2017, 8:04 pm

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KINO SLANG​
at the
Echo Park Film Center

Friday 
December 1, 2017

Doors at 7:30pm

$5 Suggested Donation

Echo Park Film Center 

1200 North Alvarado St. 

Los Angeles, CA. 90026 

*

CINEMA THE INCESSANT

"‎Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, 

 Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn." 

Walt Whitman

THE SINGING STREET  (​T​he Teachers of Norton Park School, Edinburgh, 195​1,​ 17 min​​​) 
A collection of children's street games filmed in the streets of Edinburgh accompanied by traditional children's songs. Said its makers: "Not meant for education or entertainment but belonging to the art of play. Shot in six Easter days of boisterous weather, the cast, mostly girls, numbering sixty." 

IL VIANDANTE ​-​THE WAYFARER​  (Jean-Marie Straub,​ ​Danièle Huillet,​ ​2001, ​5 min​​)​ 
A woman in Sicily tells her grown son the story of a past roll in the hay with a striker disappeared. 

A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU - THE RABBIT HUNTERS  (Pedro Costa, 2007​, 23 min​) 
In the housing projects of Lisbon all are in mourning. What has happened? Old Alfredo, a Cape Verdean immigrant and laborer, follows Ventura, the same, through the staircases, hallways, rec​​ rooms, and soup kitchens of the Casal da Boba tenements​,​ remembering their lives and the lives of others, their misfortunes, and anger. One of them confesses to have already been beaten to death​ in a field​. They cross paths with a young man about to be deported from the country he was born in. Who escapes? 

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN  (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960​, 58 min) 
Crime, nuclear science, and the State profitably conspire against humanity in a top-secret experiment to render human life invisible. A world-historical cheapie by Edgar G. Ulmer where the diabolical plot exposes a hustle like any other: run on blackmail, theft, and forced labor. Safe-cracker Joey Faust is broken out of prison by former military man Major Paul Krenner only to be used in a scheme to create an invisible army. The Major's experiments are​ ​unwillingly carried out by Dr. Peter Ulof, for his "soul", which is to say his daughter, is being held captive by the Major. The result of this ​slavery: nuclear catastrophe. If this film were an essay on humanity—and it is if you ignore the richness of its characters and sparse sets used to portray a naked and desperate world—it may have been called "On Annihilation." 


Program Total Running Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes 
Doors: 7:30pm 
$5 suggested donation. 

Special Thanks to Charlotte Garson, Chloe Reyes, and Pedro Costa.

"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. It continues the cinematographic and historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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December 1, 2017, 5:23 pm

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Tonight's Kino Slang screenings (here) are dedicated to an ineradicable man, Alfredo Mendes, the protagonist of A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU (THE RABBIT HUNTERS, 2007, Pedro Costa), who died last month in Lisbon. We don't know much about him, save for what is told and how it's told in the two movies TARRAFAL and A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU—momentous sounds and images of Alfredo, filled with his intensity and bitterness, the irony of a knockabout and agitation of a man on the lam, making each shot testy, a live wire—and that "He drove a pickup truck delivering papos-secos."



Below is a "testimony" to the films TARRAFAL and THE RABBIT HUNTERS that I wrote in 2011, initiated by Craig Keller for the Colossal Youth dvd booklet as released by Masters of Cinema/Eureka. 

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Limbo Film(s) 

We cannot accept cinema's death. Not so long as Ventura lives and breathes—and looks off like all those who sing to themselves, yet to the entire world (...Bach, ...Oharu, all the nameless exiles). Not so long as Alberto Ze plays with his knife innocently, then suddenly stakes his expulsion letter against a wood post for all to see. Not so long as fathers die, rabbits escape death, and Alfredo wakes at daybreak to tell about it. Not so long as mothers laugh while telling stories of back home, and suddenly become grave about an evil which passes if one is too accepting. Yes, so long as a few trees remain, there's a soup kitchen to skim, several cats, and the people are willing, a film can be made, and the cinema is not dead. Its lines are catastrophic.

"You narrate in order not to die or because you're dead already," (Serge Daney). Thus we have Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, which respectively strike out, each with its own slash—one supernatural, one social—the "or" of that aphorism. That is their militancy. These short films, made with the inhabitants of a housing project—two former masons, a parolee, a mother, a cafeteria cook—narrate. That is their power. Taking advantage of the fluency he gained with the people of the neighborhood, and the fluency the neighborhood people gained with the cinema during the two year shoot of Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa makes these films, or as Bernard Eisenschitz distinguished, "this film(s)", in a mere two weeks, for two separate omnibus films.

30 years after Jacques Tati, in his César award acceptance speech, urged distributors and film people to support short films, the short film still basically remains in limbo, still disrespected and unaccepted as cinema's life-blood. The proof: the egregious non-reception of these Costa and company films, the richest short film(s) in a half-century.

It's as if Costa wanted to test the limits of the short films' trenchancy, as if he wanted to sharpen one short with another perpetually through a total, vigorous, concentrated combination of the supernatural, the militant, the local, and the poetic, with oral history and field recording (the song at the end of The Rabbit Hunters), true reverse-shots (across both films), narration, and montage. Even the title, like a scar, Tarrafal—a reference to the Portuguese-established "Camp of Slow Death" in Cape Verde, a prison camp for political prisoners opposing Salazar from 1936-54—is montaged over this contemporary story in Lisbon of a young man's expulsion from Portugal and deportation to an island he never knew, the beating to death of Alfredo by racists, and Ventura’s "lot of departed spirits that walk with me..."

 As if this concentration weren't enough, Costa plays a cat's game (concretely: compare the cats in each film) with the very idea of an international omnibus film contribution (often products of a vague and alienated cultural initiative) for which this film(s) were made. Not in the negative, but in the positive. He has found another vein to tap for cinematic resonance: by separating and multiplying the film(s) into two different omnibuses, the film(s) repeat, differ, multiply and regard each other for all time...

This enormous and brief film(s) have an inexhaustible amount to teach us about the editor's stiletto; as Colossal Youth does about the overall epic, as Ne change rien does about the microphone.

Someday Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters may emerge as the greatest film(s) ever made on the reverse-shot, formally and thematically. Again, it took two films, crossing each other, with we the public hovering between them, to achieve this.

Costa and the inhabitants have not placed pennies on the eyes of the dead, they've place a film(s). Our theoretical limbo as viewers between this film(s), the very real stateless limbo of the young Alberto Ze, the made-real limbo of a dead man in the film: wheels within wheels within wheels… To take another Walshian idea: a discreet REGENERATION of deposed mass heroes. 

 Andy Rector 

July 13, 2011 

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Thieves Highway

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January 19, 2018, 5:17 pm

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Saturday 
February 3rd, 2018 
8pm

KINO SLANG​

at the

Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St. 
Los Angeles, CA. 90026

presents

THE BOSS DIDN'T SAY GOOD MORNING 

(1937, Jacques Tourneur)

&

THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN 

(1957, Boris Barnet & Konstantin Yudin)

Program total running time: 1 hour 47 minutes

There will be no introduction

Doors open at 7:30pm, Film starts at 8pm

Program Notes will be provided at the door 

"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector continuing the cinematographic and historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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THE BOSS DIDN'T SAY GOOD MORNING 
1937. Direction: Jacques Tourneur. 11 minutes. An MGM "Miniature". Script: Douglas Foster. Narrator: Carey Wilson. 

When ordinary office worker John Jones's boss doesn't return his routine "good morning", Jones and his family live in anguish over the implications. Exhorting the boss, the narrator of the film (Carey Wilson) insists one must know "whether John Jones is happy, and what relation to life John Jones has that gives him inspiration and the ability and willingness to live."



THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN (Борец и клоун)
1957. Direction: Boris Barnet & Konstantin Yudin. 95 minutes. Mosfilm. Script: N. Pogodine. Cinematograpy: S. Polouianov. Sets: V. Chtcherbak, B. Erdman. Music: Iou. Birioukov. Sound: V. Zorine. Costumes: M. Joukova. Cast: S. Tchekan, A. Mikahilov, A. Soloviov, B. Petker, I. Arepina. In Sovcolor. 

In Tsarist Russia, circa 1900-1910, Ivan, a wrestler, arrives at the port of Odessa in search of a job with the local circus. There he makes fast friends with Durov, a clown, similarly destitute and ambitious. After successfully being hired, they face difficult working conditions, being subordinated like animals and sabotaged like men, struggling for life and the exercise of their respective arts. Ivan falls in love with Mimi, a trapeze artist, Durov wins international acclaim and travels the world. Director Boris Barnet--one of the greatest, most casual poets the cinema has ever known--exuberantly transcribes the atmosphere of the old circus with his Sovcolor camera. Bursting with human and historical detail, aesthetically a bulwark for the young Jean-Luc Godard and a regular feature at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN has been admired for its tenderness, its tall and vital rendering of popular real-life people in turn-of-the-century Russia, and its bittersweet dynamic of fragility, spectacle, and sport. Never before screened in Los Angeles.

MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 1

January 31, 2018, 4:30 am

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A series of posts paying homage to Jerry Lewis, his world and the world through him.

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Twelve Memoranda for Jerry Lewising 

by Murray Pomerance

 1  

Don’t try to sound wise or informed about Jerry, don’t try to shed light.  He rejects being understood, quite properly, and his impulses live in darkness.  At any rate, nobody really knows anybody in this life, we’re all surprises—a fact Jerry’s every twitch elucidated.  The countless commentators who worked through the decades to label Jerry, judge him, pass sentence, never sat with him at table, yet eagerly framed him in personal, not professional, terms.  We never met, but I always cherish a tiny moment caught and held by Martin Scorsese in The King of Comedy, where a man I take to be very like Jerry, named, of course, Jerry, pauses in the atrium of his New York apartment to watch Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street on his television: the penetrating regard, the poise, the suspension of breath, the meticulous air of analysis (which I take to have belonged to both the onscreen Jerry I watch there and the real Jerry playing him) give me a thrill, as though in working to scrutinize this TV watcher I am picking up some of the mojo that is already his, in watching the film on his screen.  Perhaps Jerry Langford isn’t Jerry Lewis in any way, and I’m not getting anywhere near Jerry Lewis by observing him, but I really don’t believe that. 

It seems he was always in the glare of one light or another, arc light, klieg light, candle light, sun.  That for him being in the light came naturally (stepping out through the billboard mouth hole in Artists and Models) and therefore couldn’t have been a torture.  Yet can we ever be sure?  Think of Bertolt Brecht’s lines for Kurt Weill:

Some in light and some in darkness
That’s the kind of world we mean.

Those you see are in the daylight.

Those in darkness don’t get seen.

Since, watching Jerry, we sit in the darkness, can we really know what it is to suffer illumination—always unless one retreats, from every side, and with howling voices?  Jerry’s performative antics were hugely visual.

          It is interesting that Jerry, an unwavering source of brilliance, was somehow not a source of illumination.  Illumination was neither his method nor his path, although he was a blinding sun.  The confession speech at the end of The Nutty Professor, where he breaks up during “That Old Black Magic,” then stands on the stage and tells the story of his life:  it is pure sunshine, if also, simultaneously, degradation. 

 2  

I don’t think it could be called a shock, exactly, learning that he was gone.  Since before November 2002, when Enfant Terrible! came out, he had been bloated, incapacitated as a result of the years of pratfalling and the pain drugs, and when those symptoms cleared he fell victim to other harassments of the flesh.  And if now I would have to confess it was categorically impossible to imagine sharing the world with him, that he was out there moving around, in truth I always thought of him as being somewhere else, walking into Sulka on Park Avenue, say, to pick out some shirts, or wandering Pacific Palisades or the yacht basin in San Diego, but never in life–just as in death–present for me as a person who might walk up and say hello.  In the materiality of Jerry (a taller man than one may have supposed) there was something unsettling, especially as one reflected upon it now:  less that in dying he confounded the fact that one had presumed to consider him immortal, in the way that one tends to presume with stars, than that one positively needed him to keep on, to be an ultimate survivor, a defier of time who would never lose his path in the desert of the real (as Zizek had it).  For some time it did become palpably clear, in the photographs glowing with the bright red sweater that screamed out against the forces of gravity, that one way or another he was waning, perhaps terminally ill—we wouldn’t be told.  What afflicted him shared the mortality of his voice, his crossed eyes, his twisted run.  To claim that at the end he was no longer young is, of course, an immaterial lie, because he was, young in a way that hurt us to consider:  embarrassingly young, challengingly young, insouciantly young, proudly young, critically young, a person with young sensitivities, to whom rudeness was an attack.  Jerry was young against the tide.  He had succeeded in retaining what so many of us are pleased to surrender.  And yet, now one had to use the past tense, and with every grammatical transposition away from here and now one felt a strange, metallic pang.

          It was charming and affronting in Visit to a Small Planet that the alien he played was all of, and nothing but Jerry Lewis, and that, coming to earth for a short while (he liked to say, “I will not come this way again”) he did not offer the creepy sagacity of Robert Wise’s Klaatu but gave instead unfamiliarity, wonder, awkwardness. 

          Awkwardness—poise—awkwardness—poise—awkwardness—poise.

“That old black magic has me in its spell.”   

 3 

Magic, which is not to imply that he acted without limit or responsibility, that he was always, somewhere underneath, “The Kid” audiences around the world came to know so well.  If you watch King of Comedy or Max Rose, you’ll see a sensitive, touchy, adult human being with dignity, poise, grace, music, brains.  But of course you’ll never deny to yourself that underneath all this is The Kid in full blossom, waiting, breathing, holding his breath.  In King, watch the look of cold appreciation in his eyes while, as Jerry Langford, he stares at the performing Masha (Sandra Bernhard) as she sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” into his face.  A man never not in the business of the show.

 4 

On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson one of those nights he was filling in, he did “One Hen Two Ducks.”  Why?  To this day I have no clue, hearing it over and over for decades.  One hen.  Two ducks.  Three squawking geese.  Four corpulent porpoises.  Five Limerick oysters. . . .

     But, not trying to sound wise or informed, let me just peek at that once more.  Language in pure form, words with musical enchainment.  The logic of the puzzle a complete hopelessness, which is why some people—the logicians among us—go nuts trying to remember it.  Six pairs of Don Alverzo’s tweezers.  Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array.  Why Macedonians?  Why seven thousand, not seven hundred?  You have to work the phrase “Seven thousand” around your mouth a few times, begin to taste the volume and the chewiness of the thing you produce when you say those words together.  Forget mnemonics, forget sensibility, forget pointing to something.  Just use your mouth, and then recall how Jerry used his mouth, the mouth chewing and tasting language and soundfulness.  But you also have to go on, it’s all about going on.  Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt.  (Crypts . . . of . . . Egypt.  Of course there are crypts in Egypt but are they more relevant to any theme than crypts somewhere else?  It is only—only!—a semantic link, the “ypt” in crypt and in Egypt, an echo and a matching so that the Egypt becomes a crypt and crypts become Egypt, both of these more deeply something unidentified, something vocal, that is, musical, that is, beyond what we can know.)  Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity toward procrastination and sloth.  (Oh yes.)  Ten lyrical, spherical diabolical denizens of the deep, who hall-stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivy all at the same time.

 5 

It is possible to mean “saying” without meaning “that which one says.”  Children do this all the time.  And so do drunkards.  And people suffering from certain neurological disorders.  And comedians.  There is a revealing piece of footage showing Jerry backstage preparing to go on, at the 1979 Telethon.  His world seems divided, “us” and “them.”  His team includes his backstage crew, his stage manager, his control room gang, his wife, his personal assistant, all of whom take him utterly for granted as both the person that he is, a person they know well, and this for some time, and the public face he is intending shortly to put on.  He can jump, or lapse-jump, into that public persona—the shrill voice, the improper comment—and slip quickly back out of it.  With his team he stands calmly, quietly, looking around, checking time.  How much?  How much?  “Three seconds.”  “Oh—I can do three seconds in an hour!”  It is fascinating to see the concentration, to note him noting the circumstances, who is where, who is doing what, what must he do, what is next, what must he worry about?  A low, calm voice when he speaks directly to someone; then a higher-pitched, louder voice for a crowd, or for a quasi-performative instant.  There is a line of majorettes dancing on camera before he is to come out, and standing backstage he quips to an unseen confederate (in a snarky tone of voice), “None of them will give birth.”  Our instantaneous reaction to this—but not, perhaps, to a great deal else that he says backstage: to his comments or queries, to his listing of what must be said on camera, to his kissing his wife, to his asking a security guard to get his wife to her seat, to his affection for his wardrobe assistant—is to assess it as a clue to the deepest meanings in life, as he entertains them.  And what, indeed, could he mean?  That no human being will couple with any of these girls at any point to produce offspring?. . . That they dance but are barren?. . . that it is genuine creative movement they will not produce ?. . . That misfortune will befall every last one of them . . .?  But he does not react to his own comment as though he means any of these things, or indeed as though he means anything at all.  It is simply that the dancers are not part of his team, and so they are there.  Like the audience in the auditorium and the several hundred million television viewers, they are “them.”  He is distancing himself, identifying his family, his region, by pushing back the alien horde (who live onstage just as well as anywhere else), and then pushing back Ed McMahon, too, by virtue of a comment about the man’s problematic microphone that they should scurry to fix.  The mic can be fixed but we can hear it’s not the mic, it’s Ed McMahon on the mic who is one of them.

     The moment—and Jerry’s presence in it—is utterly indicative without troubling to “say something”: “we” are here together, making this show, about to have me go on, and this complex happening—the number of people involved and the details multiplying are reminiscent of a launch from Cape Canaveral. This event we are working with enormous care to stage, and to stage successfully (so that over the 24 hours of the telecast over twenty-four million dollars can be raised), is something “we” are all in, each of us on the team equally, and I, Jerry, am merely the face, the face you are checking and fixing, the face in the tuxedo that is being politely brushed from behind, I am merely getting ready, ready to follow these interminably dancing girls, who are “other,” part of the hired warm-up.  The crazy Jerry is not the Jerry behind the crazy Jerry, who works the wings like a flier.  The crazy Jerry is just a puppet that Jerry and his team are working.

 6 

This alchemical transformation, when one moves out of the wings onto the stage:

One does not think, as one waits there, of the atmosphere into which one is about to fall.  Indeed, the senses are very acute, there is a tendency to notice small, idiosyncratic things, like a small vertical tear in a near-hanging curtain, or a piece of spinach caught in the teeth of one’s hairdresser as she leans over your head, or to think, quite suddenly, of some fragment from an old story, as when one’s grandmother touches one’s face again, earliest childhood returned, and asks if one would like a boulichka and some warm milk.  The sweetest politesse in all directions.  The genuine smile, only that one, which is distinct from the stage smile, and only when it is justified, but broadly.  I had the fortune one night to stand in the wings next to Leonard Bernstein as he prepared to make his way onstage to conduct the New York Philharmonic.  He wore, over his tails, a long black cloak, and an assistant made a move—a tiny move that I can recall to this day, fifty-three years later—upward with the hands, in preparation for removing this cloak.  And the maestro said aloud, in poetic reverie, “Ashrei yoshvei veytecha!,” which is the beginning of a Hebrew prayer, “Blessed are those who sit in audience to You,” and there was a distant—a very distinctly distant—gleam in his eye, because he was thinking about and looking toward some place else.  Some place:  the orchestra onstage in the bright light?  His past?  His blind future dream?  Once, stepping onstage myself, I found my director by my elbow, unanticipated, shoving a lit cigar between my teeth so that as I entered I was coughing up smoke (“Perfect!” he said).  And Jerry paced and stood, and turned and grinned, kissed, made comment, was concerned, was relaxed by his assistant, asked how long.  “How long?”  —“Three.”  —“I can do an hour in three minutes.”  He turned to face away, in the direction of the long dark gap.  He took a second to lift up his head.  He strode forward with that buoyant, athletic, Buddy Love stride.  Where did the spirit enter? 

 7 

And who was it died, when Jerry Lewis died?  Consider that the Jerry so many fans adulate today, and adulated earlier, the Jerry of Living It Up, or of Artists and Models or Hollywood or Bust; or the Jerry of The Bellboy or The Nutty Professor; or even the later Jerry of The King of Comedy, is a Jerry of memory, a Jerry of the past, which is to say, a living ghost, borne away and forward again in time (and preserved in time) from the Jerry whose life ended at the age of ninety-one.  Memories change in the winds, but their status as memories does not.  They persist as iconic images.  And they are reproduced as such in the countless items of memorabilia, signed by him or not signed, that people collected (and collect) in order to feel attached (and show off, in order to make claim to the attachment).  Iconic Jerry neither died nor was mortal, since media images are not mortal things.  Jerry Lewis inhabited a colossal array of media imagery, such that seeing him in multiple contexts is inevitable, and the insurmountable imagery has permanence.  When fans openly grieve for their lost “Jerry” they are forgetting that he was already lost, lost even when his images first showed.  When The Nutty Professor opened in New York, July 17, 1963, the Jerry beneath both Julius Kelp and Buddy Love was long gone.  We know there is no film of which this cannot be said.  Yet with Jerry, perhaps more than with other performers, it is a fact audiences today find hard to grasp, sentimental as they are about the characterizations offered onscreen.  But those characters and those sentiments are generated out of material, but immortal stuff.  As to the future, we will not see him again.  He would not give birth.

 8 

Are you there?  I’m making sound and watching your face, are you there?  You smile, you nod, you talk back, you whisper in my ear.  I need you to be there, are you still there?  I need to touch you, I need always to be in touch with you (or to know that I can be in touch with you).  I’m not talking because there’s something I want you to know, I’m talking because I want to touch.  Talk as touch.  So, where does the talk come from, the brain or the heart?  Because only fools believe there is no difference.

          If there is only the stage and the audience, the stage in light, the audience in darkness (at this point in history, the point Jerry inhabited with us), touch is the problem.  Are you there, can I touch you?  Are you out there touching me?  Can you go beyond appreciation and reach forward, so that onstage here, in this blinding light, I am not alone?  If I invoke you, if I call out in some very close language, a language that hits the spine, can you feel me? 

It is a marvel to see and hear Jerry bellow and belt incoherently, the sound welling up from some hidden dark cave and taking shape through the curvature of the face.  We get this in The Disorderly Orderly when he listens to patients’ symptoms and instantly suffers from whatever horrendous condition they are describing.  Or when, pushing the brake pedal of an ambulance too desperately his foot goes through the floor and starts smoking as it skitters along the road:  “Pain!  Pain!”  Or when he is in a fast flow of traffic, standing alone among the cars, and something ominous is speeding into his face.  Vowels and consonants put together as comic-bubble squeal.  Words that are no longer words, words carried back to their origins in the feelingful (the sentimental) body subjected to conditions. 

 9 

Or the helpless, profitless attempts at well-behaved articulation, the wholly civil Jerry, as when Julius Kelp needs to explain something to his Dean (Del Moore):  “Wel-elllllll . . . ahem,” with the tongue emerging from the teeth.  Meaning only goodness, trying very hard.  We cannot ask for more.  But unable to meet the (vicious) demands of modernity, the compelling militaristic, heartless, incompassionate orders from above, and because of a nature over which he has no authority.  “Use your authority./ If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long.”  Unable, not unwilling.  Unprepared—that is, unindoctrinated.  Jerome K. Jerome being welcomed at breakfast in the girls’ boarding house in The Ladies Man (by the Brünnhilde, Helen Traubel):  speechless, flailing, turning and turning to find the answer in the air, who-what-when?

        We have all been there, initiates to a much cultivated ceremony that we do not grasp, whose features are all mysteries, and surrounded by a coterie of uninterested insiders who have forgotten their own initiations and treat us like dirt.  We have all been there, and have forgotten.  When he invokes the memory, we resist.  We say, with our lips turned down, “Such a clutz!”  Indeed, clutzes we are all, but have forgotten, thinking now, in our elegance, that because we are socialized, because we survived the torture that Jerry never escapes, we were always naturally this way, always cool, and it is only with him that there is something very wrong.

 10 

I love the delicate way he sings Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s “By Myself” in The Delicate Delinquent, because, as need hardly be said, in the late 1950s so many people took delinquency as a serious problem they were incapable of conceiving how a delinquent could be delicate; and here, with this rendition, he is everything of delicate and at the same time, because such a bad fit, everything of a delinquent.  In The Band Wagon Fred Astaire had come close to making an anthem of this song, as he walked the platform at Grand Central in the shadow of his former glory.  But Jerry’s version is simpler, cleaner, less orchestrated for the voice, the simple, unadorned Sidney Pythias voice:  “I’ll go my way by myself, this is the end of romance . . . I’ll face the unknown, I’ll build a world of my own.”  This wasn’t long after his breakup with Dean, this Pythias’s Damon and his daemon, too. 

Hollywood or Bust, his previous film, had been their final collaboration.  The romance that was ending was Jerry’s and ours, but only those old enough to remember watching Dean and Jerry together will fully feel nostalgia for that loss.  “Two Men Singing,” the act might have been called, and one has to stretch the eardrums to conceive the force of that comedy as a duet:  Dean was a crooner, like Mel Torme, like Sinatra, like Tony Bennett.  Jerry used a harshly tuned whine, like a human version of Jack Benny’s violin at its most romantic and like an animal in pain at other moments.  Jerry was always in sympathy with the “animal” in pain.  The question with Dean and Jerry was never who could sing better but which voice we preferred to hear.  (I was supposed to prefer Dean, but I preferred Jerry.)  Dean’s was the voice of custom, the one we had been trained to hear.  Jerry’s was the voice of the new.  The tacit—the hidden—public presumption behind the split-up of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis was that Jerry had clung to Dean; that Dean had been the totem pole and Jerry had been tormented slave.  Thus, “I’ll go my way by myself” was a pathetic promise.  But we have learned better.  Jerry made a deal with Barney Balaban at Paramount (a handshake deal, nothing on paper) and then let the technicians teach him cinema.  The rest is history.

 11 

Martin Scorsese eulogized that watching Jerry was like watching a virtuoso pianist in performance.  As a former pianist, I find this comment intriguingly apt, because in pianistic virtuosity a great deal that a performer might cause audiences to think supremely difficult is in fact not difficult at all; whereas a great deal of what is supremely difficult might be invisible, or seem merely casual to those not in the know.  Scorsese’s comment reveals something very true about Jerry, who knew in his flesh, from decades upon decades of practice, how far to go:  when it was necessary to strain the muscles, when not; when it was necessary to hold back from strain (because a stressful moment was about to come on), when not.  He knew how to play his instrument.  We may nod with dismay about the damage to his skeleton the constant pratfalls produced, and his medical therapies, but really, honestly, go into the kitchen with any hard worker who knows his stuff:  damage happens.  Life happens.  Erosion happens.  Jerry lived his life in his art, he gave his life in his art.    

 12 

Perhaps every Jerry fan has his own Jerry but I have surely never met a Jerry fan—and I have met many zealous Jerry fans, Jerry mockingbirds—whose own Jerry was a Jerry I recognize.  To put this a little differently:  the sounds Jerry made (his animal sounds, that is, his sounds of recognition that we live an animal life), that are crucial to me, are not the ones I hear people quote.  I learned to love the Jerry who was in love with Anna Maria Alberghetti in Rockabye Baby.  The Jerry running up and down the stairs to carry a telephone message to Dean in Artists and Models.  The Jerry sternly lecturing Robert De Niro in King of Comedy, “You’ve got it.  You’ve . . . got  . . . it.”  The Tonight Show Jerry very much, walking up with a hungry “Gnunnnng” and opening his maw to eat the camera.  The Telethon Jerry, nervous, calculating, desperate for time, perspiring openly.  Jerry with his mouth open in distress, but untold distress, pure distress.  Jerry with Kathleen Freeman (a brilliant and frequent collaborator) or Del Moore (a brilliant and frequent collaborator).  Improbable Jerry in a palpably masking clown-face in The Jazz Singer (yet how improbable, since he was a clown?).

My own Jerry—not any of the many I treasure and laugh with, but the single Jerry I find both impossible and wondrous, both instructive and mystifying—is the Morty Tashman who conducts an invisible jazz band in the “board room” sequence of The Errand Boy—a film, I must confess, the disregard of which, in public statements, by Mr. Jerry Lewis, astounds and befuddles me.  Here he is, at any rate, letting the band articulate the “voice” coming out of his mouth.  It is mime, it is conducting, it is (almost impossibly) cigar-lighting and puffing to the beat, it is irony, it is sarcasm, it is desperation, it is supreme confidence, it is music.  Oh, but Jerry was music.  Jerry is music.  The Jerry who was music has gone, but the music remains.      

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The August Clown

Interview with Jerry Lewis

by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana 
(1980)

To meet Jerry Lewis—even sick, even bitter, even in the gilt of the hotel Interconti-Mental—is a very moving thing. The Jekyll side and the Hyde side camp together on his barely aged face. Here is a clown "who makes funny faces" (as if to reassure us he's actually Jerry Lewis) and a man who, at the age of 54, doesn't yet know if he'll follow the usual path of the great comedians, the path to the tragic.

CAHIERS: We haven't seen you on French screens for six or seven years. And in France there are many Jerry Lewis fans, even among film critics, us for example. I just read that you once told Benayoun that comedy is always about a man in trouble. The question is: have you had trouble?


JERRY LEWIS: Yes? Me? No. It's comedy that's a man in trouble. Are you sitting in front of the idiot you've seen on the screen now? O.K. Don't confuse the two characters. (Pause) I didn't want to make movies anymore. I'd hoped that would change. I didn't want my work in the same theaters as DEEP THROAT. And this has changed. We are in the process of putting porno films back where they should be.


CAHIERS: But your audience wasn't the same as the porno film audience...


JERRY LEWIS: My audience would've been forced to go see them. Not necessarily forced, but that's what ended up happening. I was very happy to pull back and wait. I didn't stay at home doing nothing.


CAHIERS: What makes you think it's changing now?


JERRY LEWIS: There is no reason for the trend not to reverse and stay there. In the current state of things, there's a lot of housekeeping to do. And everyone is responsible, even those who have nothing to do with it. Cinema is one of the greatest cultures that man has ever had.





CAHIERS: But when you work in television, are you unhappy? Even when you do your show?


JERRY LEWIS: I don't like television.


CAHIERS: Because one can't work properly?


JERRY LEWIS: They don't believe in perfection. Is it good? No, but it's ready now. That's how they work. I cannot work like that.


CAHIERS: But by making movies can you achieve perfection?


JERRY LEWIS: Yes. Of course, we never reach perfection. But the cinema gives you a better chance of approaching it. You make a film, it's forever. Now on television everything is on tape and we erase it. Cinema is a universal means of communication. I communicate better with people in foreign countries than with other people.


CAHIERS: We've wondered here if a clown character would work on television?


JERRY LEWIS: I don't believe so. Television... the simple view of television... Look at this box (he points out a sumptuous tv set in the room and opens it). To communicate, you need concentration. Listen, Absorb. Maintain a thought. Look at this set. It's off. Yet I see a table, a couch, a statue with bare breasts. My training was a darkened theater where there's concentration, larger than life. That (vengeful gesture towards tv), is smaller than life. Just this information, unconsciously and psychologically, makes you look at tiny characters, dwarves. Remember when you were a child and you tried to measure with your fingers the distance between two stars? It's la meme chose. For me. If I go to the cinema... WAW!, it takes me, and there is a place for me, for you and you and you. We can all communicate between each other; that's why when we're in a cinema and the movie is bad, it's really bad. For me it's, (hateful gesture), it's about news and sports. Because in sports there is nothing to communicate but who wins and who loses. If you watch a football match and a player scores a goal... (he applauds) The image of a little man is fine, it doesn't have to be larger than life. But if you want to touch people, their hearts and minds, you can't be distracted. You've all seen that in Hollywood (he holds his hand out while looking the other way): "Hello! Nice to see you..." Bullshit. Distraction. And I say let's take these people and put them in a dark empty room with just a little light on them and they will shake hands and yes, they will meet!





CAHIERS: Do you believe that producers, the people who have the money, believe as much in comedy as they did before?


JERRY LEWIS: To do a good job? No. This is the system: Is it good? No, but it's ready now. THE GIRL THAT ATE DENVER makes money! She is twenty-five feet tall and she can eat three planes at a time. Rrrrah! If it makes money, they will make the film: there should be more people like Sam Goldwyn who did THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES without knowing in advance if it was going to make money, and that's a film rich in meaning, in communication. There are some, there's George Roy Hill who wanted to do and did THE STING. What a film!


CAHIERS: We know very little about your other film THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED and we'd like you to tell us a bit more about it. What's the relation between the theme of the clown in a comic film and a serious film, or is there, I believe, a reflection on the social meaning of the clown...?


JERRY LEWIS: I don't know if there's a social meaning to the clown... It's easier for me to communicate that way, that's all. I am a clown. Even if I don't wear clown makeup all the time. We can be sure it's always the comic, the clown, the one who makes us laugh, who is the first to communicate, without even the people realizing the communication, sometimes without the clown knowing it himself. In France, I'm told that I do things that I did not know. Yet I'm the author, I know what I wrote. I remember a French journalist who wrote that since I was showing a big woman in one of my films, I had a hairy fat woman in my childhood. Baloney! Unless you want to take me by the hand and bring me to doctor Freud... The meaning of the clown in the world today? It's that the clown doesn't take himself seriously and that the world does. Much too seriously, but not enough. People don't know what matters most. They agree, too much importance. The world is vast. We don't stay on it for very long and we must stop making a garbage heap of it. One of the great recipes for that is to make people laugh. If we'd made Idi Amin laugh more, he would have had less time to hate.


CAHIERS: In the movie made about him, he laughs a lot... but like an ogre.


JERRY LEWIS: Yes. Good film. Good director. A propaganda film of course... Same thing with Hitler. Hitler walked very straight when there were cameras around; when there were no cameras, he walked like a cripple*.


CAHIERS: Is THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED a funny film?


JERRY LEWIS: It's a serious film. Completely.


CAHIERS: So this time you didn't want to make the people laugh but to make them think or to move them...


JERRY LEWIS: ...to remember. They must remember. If they do not remember, they will be condemned to repeat it. One of my sons asked me about HOLOCAUST, if it really existed. Every five years we must say to our children: yes, it existed. Many people don't want to remember, because it's painful. But they do not see the danger of it happening again.


CAHIERS: What do you think of HOLOCAUST (1978, Marvin J. Chomsky)?


JERRY LEWIS: I think they made a huge effort. But I had the feeling they were scared. Of what? I don't know. At first they had great courage and then halfway, they made a compromise. It's a very difficult story to tell. And then they gave too much importance to dialogue, to words. There is much more to show. The audience does not want to hear things, it wants to see. I don't remember what I saw more than what I heard. Did they show HOLOCAUST here? Has it been successful? At least we're sure that it will be shown on television, that people will see it. But for different reasons. They will show it to make money, to make profits. There is a whole neo-nazi movement in the United States. Maybe if they see HOLOCAUST two or three times, we'll get rid of them. What scares me is not that, it's how stupid people are.







CAHIERS: Can you tell us the theme of THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED?


JERRY LEWIS: The theme is simple. There were clowns who accompanied the children into the gas chambers. I researched it for three and a half years. Everywhere, from Dachau to Auschwitz. I lived with a family in Heidelberg for a week. The man had been a researcher for Hitler. Hitler wanted to know everything about everything. His biggest fear was the children. He was terrorized by the children. He could not lie to them and the children, it was them he remembered. He believed that the minds of adults could be shaped, but not those of the children. He was afraid they would grow up, that they would remember and escape him. Of the twenty million people who were killed (I never speak about six million Jews, even if, as a Jew, I am more sensitive to the fact that six million of my people were killed -- because there were many more victims, the Poles, etc.) three quarters were children, from six to eighteen years old. The story is, fundamentally, this fear of children. The children cry, make noise, something the adults don't do. So they go find this clown in a circus, an old German clown, Helmut, and they promise to save his life if he keeps the children quiet. And at the end, he goes with them into the gas chamber. It's not a funny movie. It was very difficult. It took two or three years of my life. But when I finish it, I think I can be proud of it. That said, I'll be happy to return to my idiot role, after that. You know, I play the role of a man of seventy-five; I lost forty-four pounds, I looked like that (makes his hand straight, like a stick). I asked the tailor to make my prison clothes two-times too big for me. Pouah!


CAHIERS: What happened to the film?


JERRY LEWIS: It's still in Sweden. Now all the legal problems are in order, we got rid of the gangster, a French producer who lives here; I was told he had a heart attack, not fatal unfortunately. As soon as I finish this tour and I'm back--I have to play again in Las Vegas and prepare my new film--I'll go to Stockholm and spend three months to finish it. I hope to have it finished for Cannes next year.


CAHIERS: On French television not long ago we saw A KING IN NEW YORK by Chaplin. It was surprising to see how, as he aged, Chaplin became bitter. Most comedians judge others and society more and more as they age, and are morally more and more demanding. Their films become tougher. Do you think this could apply to you?


JERRY LEWIS: If they do to me what they did to Chaplin, yes. I don't think it's as inevitable as all that. There is nothing that I should be bitter about. Chaplin had many reasons to be bitter. Sometimes this hardness is just the expression of a job less well done. The artist realizes it and tries to force things. But Chaplin, they broke his heart. They were unfair to him. Today, can anyone tell me if Chaplin was a communist? And if he had been, what does that have to do with his work? As long as his work makes people happy... There are certainly people doing good work today who may be communists, but I don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone . The last time I was in Paris, I did a series of interviews and I didn't know that one of the journalists I was speaking to was a communist. So what? I was initially worried and then I wondered why: they were good people, they printed what I said, which is not always the case... Nobody comes and explains to me what a communist is. My children asked me this question, I answered: I'll tell you, I'm going to Europe to find out. But I agree with you about A KING IN NEW YORK. What a film!


CAHIERS: And the relations between the king and the child are very strange, not at all sentimental.


JERRY LEWIS: Yes, but if it had been sentimental, it would've still been reproached. I find that soft and sentimental people do not realize when they are sentimental, and that people who are sentimental want you to be, they get angry because you remind them that they are sentimental themselves. How dare you be sentimental when it is so easy for you and so difficult for me to admit! But in the time I spent with Chaplin, he never mentioned A KING IN NEW YORK. He talked about everything except this movie. Interesting... I myself have never spoken to him about it. We have rather talked about the MODERN TIMES and THE GREAT DICTATOR, MONSIEUR VERDOUX, LIMELIGHT... It wouldn't immediately come to mind if you asked me what films he made. It's thanks to Chaplin that we have the cinema. He made it walk. It was nice of the Academy Awards to wait until he was almost dead to award him. Another ten minutes and they would've missed him! Like with Stan Laurel. I think I'm going to write them a letter: don't do this to me**, give me now what you'll give to me when I'm eighty-four, give it to me immediately, while I'm still young enough to dance up that scene without shame.


CAHIERS: In this regard, is having been recognized by French critics a good or bad thing in the United States?


JERRY LEWIS: Wonderful. The best thing that's happened to me in my life. It gives me the opportunity to tell American critics what I think of them. The American critics think that the French are stupid because they like what I do. That's why when I want to feel better, I leave America and come here. It's not the American public; they have always been wonderful to me. But in France, I have both, the critics and the public. I have been fighting with American critics all my life, because they are liars, they do not watch films. There is a critic who wrote about a piece of film that I'd eliminated from the final cut... But he had read the pressbook (we didn't have time to correct it) and he criticized what he read inside it. And besides, he liked this scene whereas if I'd removed it, it's precisely because it was bad! The bastard. All critics are not like that, almost all of them... Without the French critics, the French public, my French friends, I might've dropped everything a long time ago. Because they end up taking from you, driving you crazy. I go to Paris as often as I can. I walk down the street and it stimulates me, it's good for my creativity. I want to come to France and work here, make a film. I think it would be good for me.


CAHIERS: One last question: what do you think of the new generation of American filmmakers?


JERRY LEWIS: I like them. But you have to watch them. Spielberg is a good filmmaker. But we should've never let him make 1941 (1979). He's not a comic filmmaker. When you have success in a field, you mustn't change. The man who's very good at repairing the phone, should he also be a brain surgeon? No. If you don't watch the young filmmakers, they'll be eaten alive by the money-men. Spielberg, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Randy Kleiser, they were all my students. They risk disappearing either because they cannot master their success, or because the money-men will steal their talent, turn it on their heads, and not know what to do with it. It's like wine, if you open it too early, it's vinegar. We can't speed up the creative process. We don't do in a year what takes twenty-five years to grow. Hemingway did not begin by writing THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. We learn from what we've done, not from what others tell us. And we are our best judges. Because we know what we did. When we're young we get our heads together, we figure out that what we do is good. But great works come from big mistakes, not great successes. I don't like it, but that's how it is. And the young American filmmakers you're talking about, they've learned their craft but haven't learned patience. We are all impatient in a way, but if you are too impatient, you won't last long. Then there are those who make mistakes, can't stand it and slink away.

Cahiers du Cinéma

May 1980, No. 311

(Translation: Andy Rector)

*This is a long and strongly held conviction of Lewis's, thoroughly demonstrated in his film ten years prior, WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? (1970), where his character, the billionaire Brendan Byers, must masquerade as the Nazi General Erich Kesselring (a brother and lover to Hitler) and perfect the General's spastic limp via rehearsals before an an act of historical sabotage is set in motion (cf. the pealing off and on of roles inside fascism and resistance to it in TO BE OR NOT TO BE [Lubitsch, 1942]). It is worth remembering the categorization of Hitler as "a failed thespian" by both Hanns Eisler (in his conversations with Hans Bunge, 1958-1962) and by Charlie Chaplin (through his famously reported laughter during a screening of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL). -A.R.

**Jerry Lewis was given an honorary Oscar at the exact same age as Chaplin, age 83, beating his prediction by one year. -A.R.

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MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 1 — "Twelve Memoranda for Jerry Lewising" by Murray Pomerance — is here.  

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Friday
March 16th, 2018 
8pm

KINO SLANG​
CINE-CLUB

at

THE BIJOU THEATER
California Institute of the Arts
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA.
91355


presents


THE BOND
(Charlie Chaplin, 1918)


an excerpt of
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-98)


WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?
(Jerry Lewis, 1970)




 

Program total running time: 2 hours 

There will be no introductions 

Doors open at 7:30pm, Film starts at 8pm
Free parking on the Calarts Campus 

Note: the change of venue to CalArts is only temporary. Kino Slang will return to its regular programming at the Echo Park Film Center in April. 

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THE BOND (Charlie Chaplin, 1918. 11 minutes)

The tramp wanders onto a blackboard where the bonds of life—friendship, love, marriage, liberty—are treated, ending in war bonds.

HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998. 20-minute excerpt of chapter 1A, "Toutes les histoires" ["All the Stories"]). 

This 20-minute excerpt of Godard's (Hi)stories of Cinema (more "a history through cinema" wrote Serge Daney) begins with the intonation "...WHILE THE GERMANS WERE TAKING THE FRENCH FROM BEHIND..." (referring to the Nazi invasion of France in May, 1940) and what follows like a deluge is Godard's reflection and projection of World War II and its creation and destruction by cinema ("the only history that projects"), using shards of films, popular songs, paintings, newsreels, graphics, etc.. There are hundreds of relationships per minute here of the simple, brutal sort—real black-and-white SS soldiers consuming a turquoise glade by Monet—as well as macroscopic ideas fleshed out in microscopic montage, for example: that montage was murdered by the talking picture, and that this victory served "the two industrial brothers, America and Germany, RCA and Tobis", particularly Hitler, imperialism, and the soft fascism of the dominance of "commentary".

WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? (Jerry Lewis, 1970. 96 minutes) 

"Which Way to the Front? with fully anachronistic sets and clothing occurs during the time of World War II. Its hero is the wealthiest man in the world, an American business tycoon. When he receives his draft notice we expect him to evade it, as he so easily can. But Jerry Lewis’ satire has the biting truth of logic: he is proud to serve, henceforth the film has the wonder of logic unfolding happily along its own course, totally uninhibited by considerations of historical fact or normal criteria of sense." (Tag Gallagher)

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The Kino Slang Cine-Club is a regular series of cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector continuing the cinematographic and historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 3

March 14, 2018, 2:00 am

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A series of posts paying homage to Jerry Lewis, his world and the world through him.

Jerry Lewis, Which Way to the Front? (1970)

By Serge Daney

1. There's something in Which Way to the Front? that was already at work in Lewis’s previous films and that finally realizes itself here, hence this particularly strident and not very enjoyable movie where none of the previous tenderness remains. Clearly, Joseph Levitch is turning a corner, and today he's closer than ever to the impossible dream (to be one, to gather oneself up and/or to choose oneself, never to split again). He hasn’t chosen once and for all to be the definite all too human victim, which films like The Nutty Professor or The Ladies' Man ultimately valorized, instead he prefers—and this choice should surprise no one—to be the strong man, the self-made man, Jerry Lewis the producer. The era of this splitting, the mechanisms of which were so easy and exhilarating to play with and to dismantle, is definitely fading away. The desert is growing. And while it’s true that Lewis still treats us (and himself) to a few funny faces , it’s not so much to reassure his audience since—and this has not been noticed enough—these cries, faces, and gurglings (borborygmes) occur only twice in the film: at the beginning, and as a response to the word Rejected.

2. Rejected by what? By a system (the army) which has no need for prestigious  names, but for bodies, cannon fodder (chair à pâté) to make war. This is the decisive novelty of Which Way to the Front? in the lewisian problem; the Lewis of this latest movie is reduced to a word, a brand , a Name. As if ‘to accept oneself’, a known lewisian theme, meant: to renounce one’s body and be only one’s name, what one’s name promises, if it promises anything. And ‘Byers’ stands for ’Buyers’ (a plural which indicates that the splitting, although no longer visible, still survives somewhere; the waxen and tragic mask of Lewis in the first shots are there to prove it). Besides, Byers is a third of the Name and—insignificant himself as a body—he merely inherits from this Name a fortune so colossal that he cannot manage it (and squanders it). In his previous films, Lewis in the end has us (women, powerful people, the public) see him as a Body, a subject, an interiority, an intimacy, etc.. Here, there’s nothing like that: he only learns to behave according to the rules of a game which are no longer his. Since, strictly speaking, he no longer has a body (this body being ‘played’ by the trio Byers III = the three ‘Byers’ = Hackle, Bland, Love), he isn’t going to repeat his mistake (of reporting to the army medical examination, to offer his body and thus lose all possibility of language), and since he is only his Name, he is going to act out the meaning of that Name: a buyer, he is going to buy.

3. From then on, the fiction progresses through a rather strong logic. (Let’s mention, without spending too much time on it, that the analogy Lewis/film-making and Byers/war-making functions throughout the movie. The only elements of war selected and shown are the ones that evoke the making of a film: making garments, choice and purchase of props, learning one’s role, rehearsals, etc., without even mentioning Byers’s use of documentary films which he projects on board his yacht.) A fiction rather unbelievable, implausible, but an incredibility which is a new style for Lewis: no longer the meticulous and ‘realist’ arrangement of a situation which slowly turns to madness with the irruption of Lewis-the actor, but rather an implausibility (or discontinuity, we should say) equally distributed among all the elements of the fiction (for example, the very presence of a Black man in a German uniform is not an issue). Not only does Lewis seem unconcerned with the articulations of his story (no longer prevented, but bypassed, avoided, ignored), but it’s the very principle of diegesis that he seems to leave to chance, the question: how (and by what right) does one move from one thing to another? He asked himself this question with force in all his previous films because the question was then but a particular case of another passage, the passage from one instance to an other within a split personality (hence the bravura moments like the seen transformation of Love back to Kelp at the end of The Nutty Professor). But this splitting is no longer the explicit subject of Which Way to the Front?, nor the motor of its fiction.

4. Why such an apparent loosening? Because Lewis-Byers has taken his role seriously. What is wanted of him? Only what he can give: his Name, and/thus the Money that his Name promises, the possibility to exchange, infinite for him (hence shots of foreign currencies and women loaded aboard his yacht). The story no longer progresses linearly in a homogeneous space, but only through one of these generic equivalents: language, money.  No Lewis film has played so much with language, words and word play; no Lewis film has so openly talked about money and the power it confers (we should spend more time looking at all the dimensions of ‘Jewishness’ at last affirmed in the movie in two opposite senses: Byers’s physical appearance/Name of the decorated German solider: Levitch). No film has gone to such lengths to point out their complicity: Speech is gold.

5. It is thus thanks to the transformative power of words that Lewis-Byers clears himself a path to and through the Front. It is (as a master of language, archives at hand) by bothnaming and paying that he can secure collaborators (the Japanese who also appeared in Blue Gardenia, then Love, Hackle and Bland to whom he gives a check after calling their name). It is indeed by speaking the same language that General Buck (his sentences are merely repeated back to him) is duped (Buck = Dollar). In the kingdom of words, no resistance is possible or even thinkable, no instruction or password will hold up. But get the Name wrong and the crude reality of war irrupts (Anzio rather than Naples). And there’s no escaping this reality, that of the Body, this body that Lewis seems to have definitely lost and against which the film is targeted (and to which it is dedicated). Kesserling is defeated precisely because he’s only a body (hence the difficulty for Byers-Kesserling to face his role: whisky and beer before the military council, the blitz of a woman in heat). Hitler is defeated, at the end of a magnificent scene, because again he’s only a mere Body, hence the dance, the reference to Eva, to cooking, the conspicuous masochism, etc.. If  Byers–Kesserling–Lewis–Levitch can mime these mad bodies (in an unbearably bleak manner), it is so as to destroy them (but for how long?). Now he has won, which is to say what he has lost is unspeakable [1]: hisWord is gold: (Deutsch) Mark My Words.

_______________________________________________

[1] The drama of the subject in the Verb is that it faces the proof of its lack of being.

Cahiers du cinéma

March-April 1971, no. 228.

Reprinted in
La maison cinéma et le monde:
1. Le temps des Cahiers 1962-1981,
pp. 118-120, POL, Paris, 2001.

Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar, Andy Rector, Sonja Bertucci.

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Which Way to the Front? (1970) will screen this Friday, March 16th, 2018 at 8pm at The Bijou Theater (California Institute of the Arts) preceded by Charlie Chaplin's short The Bond (1918) and an excerpt of Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98, Jean-Luc Godard), as part of the Kino Slang Cine-Club. For more information, see here.


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MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 2

"The August Clown" Interview with Jerry Lewis (1980) by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana

MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 1

"Twelve Memoranda for Jerry Lewising" by Murray Pomerance

Jean Narboni on THE NAKED KISS

March 23, 2018, 12:13 pm

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The Naked Kiss is, I believe, my favorite Samuel Fuller film because it was very high risk, beyond the conventional limits of vulnerability. Bresson used to say "entre la croûte et le chef-d'oeuvre il n'y a qu'un pas". ("Between a daub and a masterpiece, there's just one step") This would be a good description how one feels watching this film. Fuller made it at the end of his most productive period (1964). It really is sublime, but it could very easily be perceived as ridiculous. The sensational first sequence, which is famous and quite striking, is very different from the rest of the film. It leaves room for another tempo -- Fuller was a very musical director and built the rhythm of his films using a highly musical instinct --where the tone is more downbeat. So you really have two different atmospheres. This first moment, a moment of trauma, and the rest of the movie. When you think of it, this story is very much like a fairy tale. But one that turns into a nightmare, a negative fairy tale. The young woman lives in misery, meets a delightful man who will save her... but it takes a horrifying turn. And like in all fairy tales, it has a point of enigma: the naked kiss. This moment is frightening and very troubling. It enunciates a catastrophe. The sublime then spills over into the grotesque.

And in the middle of the film there is a very special moment, a very vulnerable central sequence showing the handicapped children singing. Here too, it's so dramatic it could almost be ridiculous. But it shows a world that is out of tune, discordant. We're between utopia and nightmare. What's really special about this film is that Fuller shows the former prostitute's point of view within this particular story, and on this small town, and he takes her side. The way I see it, this film could be well summed up by Rossellini's phrase about Chaplin's A King in New York: "It is the film of a free man."

From Jean Narboni's presentation of THE NAKED KISS
January 13th, 2018 at the Cinémathèque française. 
Transcription and translation by Ariane Gaudeaux. 

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March 25, 2018, 1:05 pm

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Saturday
April 7th, 2018
8pm

KINO SLANG

at the 

Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA. 90026


presents 



LOVE'S BERRY
(Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1926)


TIME IN THE SUN
(Marie Seton, Sergei Eisenstein, 1940)
16mm print


CERRO PELADO
(Santiago Álvarez, 1966)




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LOVE'S BERRY a.k.a. FRUITS OF LOVE (Ягодка любви. U.S.S.R. 1926. Dir. & Script Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Photography: Daniil Demutsky, I. Rona. With N. Krushelnitsky, M. Chardynina-Barskaya, Dmitry Kapka. 26 minutes)

The comedy misadventures of a dandified barber trying to dispose of his illegitimate child who is always returned to him. 

TIME IN THE SUN (Mexico / U.S.S.R. / U.S.A. 1940. Dir. Marie Seton, Sergei Eisenstein, Grigory Aleksandrov. 55 min. 16MM PRINT!) 

Eisenstein’s unfinished Que Viva Mexico!, one of cinema’s most celebrated lost masterpieces, exists in several unofficial abridgments and reconstructions. This 1940 version was assembled by Eisenstein biographer Mary Seton, who said it was based on a rough outline provided by Eisenstein himself. The director had come to America in 1930 hoping to make a film in Hollywood. When those plans were dashed, he undertook, with financing from novelist Upton Sinclair, a mammoth cinematic portrait of Mexico’s rich history, peoples, and traditions. Based on the eternal cycles of birth and death, and inspired by the epic murals of Diego Riviera and other Mexican artists, Que Viva Mexico! was to be structured in six parts, moving in history from pre-Columbian times to contemporary Day of the Dead celebrations. Eisenstein reportedly shot some 50 hours of footage; with expenses and misunderstandings mounting, Sinclair shut down the production. Eisenstein returned to the USSR and never again had access to the footage; Sinclair, the legal owner, parceled it out to various film projects, including Seton’s, over the years. Many believe Que Viva Mexico! might have been Eisenstein’s surpassing achievement, if only it had been finished. (Pacific Cinémathèque Pacifique) 16mm print courtesy of MoMA.

CERRO PELADO (Cuba. 1966. Dir. Santiago Álvarez. Photography: ICAIC. Music: Juan Blano. Sound: Raúl Préz Ureta, Idalberto Galvez. Editing: Norma Torrado. 36 min.) 

"Cerro Pelado" is the name of the ship we see carrying a Cuban sports delegation to the Tenth Central American and Caribbean Games in 1966. They are on their way to San Juan, Puerto Rico—a "'freely associated' Yanqui Colony" as a title card says—when U.S. interventionism attempts to prevent the Cubans' entry and participation. The ship becomes a real symbol of Revolutionary Cuban resistance, tenacity, life, and liberty. Their eventual landing at the games is generally triumphant. While Alvarez's camera and editing register shock and sympathy at the poverty, illiteracy and signs of colonialism the Cubans see in Puerto Rico, the film explodes with Revolutionary pride in having overcome such conditions. With commentary almost nil, the film speaks entirely through montage and music. "My style is the style of hatred for imperialism," director Santiago Álvarez has said.  

Program total running time: 2 hours

Doors: 7:30pm, Film starts at 8pm 

$5 suggested donation. 

 

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"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings begun last May programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. It continues the silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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Young stills

April 9, 2018, 2:53 am

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Godard is afoot: Six days ago this page was published for Godard's new picture LE LIVRE D'IMAGE ("Sortie 2018") on the Casa Azul Films website. Of interest, besides the two stills presumably from Godard's latest (already unlike anything you see in a movie these days...), is that the film is listed as a co-production of "Ecran Noir / Mitra Farahani, Paris". Farahani is the director of the very fine documentary FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS (2013) , about Iranian painter Bahman Mohassess (a unique film in the history of cinema for the fact that its subject dies just off camera during the filming). Other Godard-related films listed on the Casa Azul website as in production: LE LAC, directed by Godard's cinematographer and technical man Fabrice Aragno, and À VENDREDI ROBINSON directed by Farahani herself. The latter I know nothing about about save for observing that the still published on the website shows what appears to be Godard standing on the stairs of his Rolle home from a Martin Balsam angle, the same stairs where several pivotal moments of ADIEU AU LANGAGE take place....

  

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May 1, 2018, 5:04 am

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Straub / Huillet
talking


JMS / Jean-Marie Straub
DH / Danièle Huillet
MW / Martin Walsh
PG / Peter Gidal
SH / Stephen Heath
RC / Regina Cornwell
JF / Jonathan Rosenbaum

MW  A general question: all your work has been quite unique in cinema in the sense that all of your films deal with a pre-existing text or texts of some kind; that is to say, you always work through other artists in some form. Roland Barthes speaks of the contemporary convergence of the acts of reading on the one hand and writing on the other as being a characteristic of much modern art. Perhaps this is one direction that we should be aiming for, if you like, a convergence of criticism and creativity in the older jargon. I was wondering whether from a general perspective like that we might move to your approach more specifically to HISTORY LESSONS and MOSES AND AARON?

JMS   . . .We tried to find a subject that resists us because we have to live with the subject for many years, because to find money needs many years. And the secondary reason is that we tried to find subjects that are interesting enough for the audience, for people, and a subject more intelligent than we are, to give the audience a gift that is worthwhile. Do you want to take it further?

MW  Well, it seems to me that the subjects Bach, Schoenberg, Brecht, are all artists that. . .

JMS  It is clear that the reading of MOSES AND AARON is a critical one.

MW  Would you elaborate then on your interest in Schoenberg specifically? Why Schoenberg?

JMS  I don't know. No, it has to be said first that MOSES AND AARON is an old project--a project from '59. It's a thing that I don't think I would make now. It would have been the second film we would have made. The first project was CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH and the second MOSES AND AARON. But why Schoenberg, I do not know. . .

DH   Anyway, it's not Schoenberg, it's Moses and Aaron.

MW   But your handling of both Bach and Schoenberg has in a sense been markedly different from, one might say, conventionally bourgeois approaches to performances of the works of these people.

JMS   I don't know, because I am a bourgeois. . .

MW   But you are a bourgeois who is attempting to escape that or so it would seem. . . you said at the time that THE CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH was your contribution to the fight in Vietnam, for instance.

PG   Do you regret having said that?

JMS  Having said it? No. The approach is trying to. . . if you like, it is anti-bourgeois. I don't like this, but it is anti-bourgeois in what belongs to the mise en scène, to the theatrical, but not necessarily to the approach to the music. The treatment of the mise en scène is a reaction to the whole tradition of bourgeois opera, that has to be said. But at the same time, what interested us was the making of a film which would allow a public which doesn't ever go to an opera, to see an opera. This is what infuriated the music critics in the German papers--DIE WELT, SUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, DIE ZEIT. They didn't talk about the music but, with the idea of the cinema they have, they thought you could make the film more pornographic than bourgeois opera. By pornographic I don't mean showing the people naked, I mean the art of mise en scène in bourgeois opera, if you can talk about art in relation to something like that. They thought, with their idea of the cinema, that you could go further than Cecil B. DeMille, that one could see better things on the screen than what was actually done on the operatic stage. Ours was a reaction, a systematic subversion, destruction and reduction. In that sense all the--very precise--directions given by Schoenberg in the score regarding the staging (mise en scène), we reduced to spectacular points, a succession of spectacular points. We did this where he, Schoenberg, dreaming and working for the stage, established a simultaneity.



Schoenberg, it is true, like all of us, had a very limited ideology. He repressed politics systematically and determinedly. As Danièle said, he had an idea. . . well, that was his personal ideology and, as we see in the Kandinsky letters, he had fantastic intuitions which are even Marxist sometimes. But there is also the other aspect as related by Brecht in his ARBEITSJOURNAL (Work Journal) which has just been published. Brecht's last meeting with him was in front of a drugstore in Los Angeles, or at least in California, and he relates. . . (to SH) will you tell it?

SH  Brecht had been to courses by Schoenberg under the patronage of Eisler who had encouraged Brecht to go to these courses and had, in fact, inspired in Brecht the idea that Schoenberg was to be treated with kid gloves and definitely not to be gotten on the wrong side of or rubbed the wrong way. At their last meeting, I'll be corrected if I'm wrong in saying that Schoenberg said, "look at the way the world is going now."

JMS  What he said was "the proof that your democracy is useless is that it doesn't last long. That's why I am a royalist." And a few months before, Eisler had told Brecht "I am going to introduce you to my teacher, above all don't provoke him, even if he says terrible petit-bourgeois things, don't say a thing." And Brecht kept quiet when he saw him the first time. After that he went to one of his classes and had an impression of great clarity. Brecht said, "unfortunately, with the education we've had, we have no understanding of music, but listening to one of Schoenberg's lessons you feel that with only the slightest grounding in music, everything would be very clear, you would understand everything." And to get back to that last meeting in front of the drugstore, Brecht said nothing. He says himself in his ARBEITSJOURNAL, "I contented myself with shaking the old man's hand" . . .Seeing METROPOLIS again we saw that there are an enormous amount of Schoenbergian elements there. Perhaps Schoenberg had never seen it, nor did Lang know Schoenberg, but it's the atmosphere of the time. . .

. . .In fact we saw--and this is what the project came from--the first stage performance in Germany, Berlin in 1959, of MOSES AND AARON. It was totally a kind of stylization and theatrical abstraction. I detest stylization, all this talk of stylization but, I ask myself, what is it? What style? Not really abstraction obviously, but the costumes aimed at being abstract and stylized, and everything, even the scenes which Schoenberg did not envisage as being danced were danced in the form of a stylized ballet, not even bourgeois ballet but something even more academic. It was a reaction against this that gave me the wish to make a film in 1959, and the idea which immediately raised itself was--it should be in the open air. That was clear.

So to the question "Why Schoenberg?"--it was always a reaction to theatrical mise en scène etc. Now, as to why music?--where music is concerned there are no restrictions, still less because I am not a musician. Eisler didn't have any restrictions in the face of Schoenberg's music, the dialectical musical tissue of his work.

I believe it's possible to do one work, not ten. That's why you cannot make films and engage in political action. You can't have a political action and make films. That's why Lenin said he couldn't listen to music because he was engaged in political action and it was too absorbing. . . And I think a man like Schoenberg has pushed his musical work so far precisely because he repressed everything else and not just politics. For example, he also painted but he himself said that in painting he was an amateur. He did not take the work far in the area of painting.

Well, that's about music, now to return to Eisler who said that what we have is an unbelievable, impossible, very bad text set to irreproachable music. I don't agree with him. For the benefit of those who don't know, it must be said that Schoenberg wrote the text, since most people who write opera compose them around texts by others, and secondly he says in the letter to Webern or the one to Alban Berg. . .

DH  . . .that he transformed his text as the composition of the music progressed. On the other hand there is the third act where for whatever reasons, either he didn't have the time or I don't know what, he didn't write the music. And the text here, in relation to the texts which were set to music, is in some sense a draft. What's interesting for us in the film is to have both a text which has been re-written, tightened up and reduced, re-worked as the music was composed, and another stage in the work of Schoenberg, which is the first stage of work on the text.

What also interests us is the films we make is to leave the various layers, not eliminating anything. This is contrary to a whole Western artistic tradition, bourgeois of course, which consists of destroying, in effacing the traces and destroying these layers. There are other traditions. Western civilization is only a little drop in the bucket. For example the Bible, of which Brecht said when asked what had marked him most: "Don't laugh it was the Bible" and he of course meant the Lutheran tradition. It's a question of epochs--instead of taking away one adds, the things written five hundred years earlier are not removed, they're left. In a film what interests us is the stratification, like in geology.

PG  To what degree was the text changed?

DH  By us? Not at all.

MW  The last line of the libretto though says "Aaron, free, stands up and then falls down dead."

JMS  That's not the last line.

DH  That's the last indication (stage direction).

JMS  Yes, certainly in the film you don't see Aaron fall because we have left Aaron in order to pan round to Moses. He is off and therefore can't fall. I've been told by someone who knows Hegel well (I don't know the text myself), that this is a very precise reference to Hegel. Aaron falls because he no longer has substance.

But the text was not changed by us, the indications (stage directions), yes.

DH  Another change (in stage directions) is at the beginning, the burning bush. In our work there is no burning bush.

JMS  It is something which is changed so that the voice of the burning bush is no more the voice of the burning bush but already the voice of the people later. And he (Moses) already had mountains behind his head, which Schoenberg did not have. Other things changed, but not the text. But to finish with these questions of the text, and with reference to Eisler, we know the text by virtue of having reheard it, retyped it, translated it into English, French, Italian, we read it over a hundred times and each time we see it stronger. . . therefore I believe Eisler was mistaken on this. From the point of view of the textual tissue, these texts are not far from the work of Brecht. Ideologically, it's another thing of course, but. . . one could even speak of a dialectical texture. . . It is not just the music which pushes things very far in this kind of dialectical tissue, it is also the text.

PG  I didn't understand how you recorded the sound--I must have just not understood what was written in the notes. . .

DH  Every singer has it coming through one ear.

PG  That's what I couldn't figure out, where they got their timing.

DH  And they could hear naturally what was recorded in Vienna.

PG  It was all wired up right?

JMS  But the timing came from the musical director.

DH  And we had the music director Guillaume, as we shot the film because he had to direct them; and the problem for us was to find not only where the camera should stand but also where he had to stay, because when they look at each other or when the chorus looks at them (Moses and Aaron) it's always the right direction but a bit off.

JMS  We anticipated the constraint, each time, of having to find the position. . . this is very, very theatrical, really a work which goes in the direction of what interested Brecht in the sense that the singer sings in two directions. He sings for the person standing in front of him; that is, when it is the chorus, for Aaron or Moses; when it's Moses, for the chorus; or when it is Aaron, for the chorus or Moses. In other words, in each case, he sings for the interlocutor (the person he is singing towards in the action), but also for a slightly displaced pole--we're concerned here with displacements (a staggering)--which is the musical director. And often the real pole for which the singer was singing, was not there: the chorus was effaced, or Moses, when Aaron was responding to them, was not there--often, not always. Most of the time Moses and Aaron are together. So there is a displacement which really creates something more than distanciation.

PG  Do you think that comes out in the text of the final film?

JMS  Well, if I were to see the film as a film not made by me, I would sense that there were such displacements. You feel that these are groups which are opposed to each other but at the same time that those who decided the framing and placing of the groups have decided to de-psychologize the relations between them and to establish relations of power between singer and the group to which it is opposed, and between the group and the singer. These relations of power at the same time concern--in the moral rather than in the physical sense although in the first instance it is physical--the spectator. In other words we have relations of power which are addressed to the spectator, after having addressed themselves to the group to which the singer directs himself. . . they are no longer psychological relations (between singer and group and vice versa), they are relations of force.

DH  . . .which are addressed not only one to the other, or to the group, but also to the audience, because of the slight shift.

JMS  Perhaps one might ask if people have felt something of that kind without having a clear idea what. We will put the question when Danièle has finished outlining the way the recording was done. I have only a thing to add: not only did they sing in the direction of the musical director which was of concern for them and the director and consequently for the spectator who is behind the director because he is behind the camera, but the director had both ears plugged--he heard absolutely nothing of what the singers sang, he only heard the orchestra.

RC  I wondered about the relations and tensions producing this case, i.e. the theological conditioning... (inaudible) how this fits into the political considerations. . .

JMS  Theology is very important because it still guides the world. . . very important. . . It will still take centuries for mankind to be able to do without God, to learn to do without God. Moreover, you don't have to be called Engels--who did an analysis of the question--to know that monotheism within a civilization of flourishing polytheism which in the last stages consisted in, to an ever increasing extent, representing the gods in pharoahs and became more and more oppressive, the idea of a single, unrepresentable god who was nowhere and unimaginable is an enormous and revolutionary idea and a break. The fact that afterwards the idea of monotheism again becomes an oppresive idea is another question. That's what it turned into, but at the outset it was an enormous break.

PG  But the film isn't in at the start. Schoenberg's attitude towards monotheism is presumably not the same as the two of yours. . .

JMS  But the film is a historical reflection, nothing more. It's no different to. . . I don't wish to set myself on the same level, I'm only a little man, but if you read the letters between Karl Marx and Engels which run into seventeen volumes, you become increasingly aware of the interest these two had in plunging ever deeper into history to try to see what happened and to study the relations they were interested in and analyze these relations further and further in the past. I don't see this as a problem. Or perhaps you could clarify your question?

PG  You mentioned that it would take a long time to get rid of ideological power of God, of the belief God and I just wondered whether or your position and Schoenberg's--which in the film seemed to be such--whether your position and Schonberg's to some degree coincided and not questioning, but rather reproducing.

JMS   . . .The film. . . I hope, it's for you judge, but I hope the film is in relation to the work of Schoenberg. I hope the work of mise en scène-- I don't like the word very much--the mise en images, the mise en objet audio visuel is displaced in relation to the attitude of Schoenberg. I hope that at the en of the film not only has Moses destroyed Aaron, Aaron has also destroyed Moses. Aaron, even if he doesn't fall dead, disappears absolutely; Moses, even if his strong idea, the idea of the desert, lives on--has destroyed himself. One destroys the other and simply two aspects of the same thing. I hope that what is left is only the people and that the idea of the film is precisely, not just displaced in relation to Schoenberg, but even opposed to him; the idea that you have to invent a politics which starts from below and that it is not up to the leader to invent it but it's up to the people themselves. And while these two have destroyed each other and disappeared, you have to start from scratch. At this point I hope the idea that asserts is precisely that from the moment you have blown up the leaders who have blown themselves up, you have to. . . well, I don't need to indulge in rhetoric. . . In any case I hope when you see the pan, at least the second pan onto the Nile taken from the mountian, there I hope the audience feels through Schoenberg's music a call to violence which does not concern the Hebrew people alone. Schoenberg moreover stresses this in his text. He says "Vor allem Volke", he doesn't say, "Von allem Volke": not "From" but "Before" all people. This is a stage (etage), a people who were to be a stage. And the pan onto the Nile valley below shows the fields of peasants who are no longer Hebrew, but Egyptian. And at this point I hope the audience senses that this concerns not just a tiny people who no longer exist as a nation and who founded a State. . . well, enough said. . . Because you see in the background the cultivated fields of the Egyptians and in the foreground you see something which though not easy to distinguish, you sense to be the ruins of Egyptian temples. After that it ends on the mountain because you return to Moses' obsession which is the desert. But there is also the word Frei, Frei, Frei, which is a call to freedom. Has that cleared it up or are there still questions? I would like to clarify what I said at the beginning. This is no longer a project I would have done today. That ought to be clear; in that there is a kind of negative answer to your question, or positive, it depends. I have changed, and if I came across MOSES AND AARON  now, I would be just as interested but I would no longer wish to make a film of it. It is an old project, a fulfilled project.

JR  One last question of a different sort involving your short on Schoenberg, This may sound like a frivolous question but it's meant seriously. In all your films but particularly in this short I feel that each detail, each element carries a great deal of weight, both dramatically and in terms of the meaning of the images. And I was wondering if you could comment on two specific things in the film: one is your lighting of a cigarette, and there other is the cat.

JMS  I can tell you about the screen in INTRODUCTION TO ARNOLD SCHOENBERG'S "ACCOMPANIMENT TO A CINEMATOGRAPHIC SCENE" which is behind me when I'm reading Schoenberg's letters. I wanted to have the screen because I wanted the audience to have the impression that on the screen newsreels would be projected. But the cigarette was because the film had been envisaged without the stone figure of the fountain. It was to begin with me. But as the film was commissioned by the third channel of German TV. . . The Germans had two films, one made by Jan Mortensen, a Swedish musician, another by a young French musician called Luc Ferrari, two very different films (to ours), absolutely a-political.

DH  On the same piece of music.

JMS  We had an agreement, our film would be shown last, if it was put out at all, because there was a risk that it would not be. But if it hadn't been, well we had the negative, we'd made the film and we could have shown it somewhere else. The beginning had to be a rest for the audience and since I couldn't just stay like that, I lit up a cigarette. But after the fountain shot was added we left it like that because to go straight into the reading would have mean't there would have been no breathing space. The cat, that's a bit more complicated. It's a cat we had at home. We found it three years before, starving in the street. The vet said it had to be put down at once. It had no hair left, it had rabies and every other disease imaginable, it was undernourished, it walked like this. . . Now it's beautiful. The cat is part of Danièle because without her it would have died, since it was isolated from other cats because its illness was contagious and people didn't bother with it, precisely because it was sick. Apart from that, I was beginning to have an immense problem almost of the class struggle. I think there is a reflection to be made from this standpoint, and it's been going on for centuries, like the other. Obviously it will need centuries to solve it. . . and I believe it is important, really important. But what did you feel about this cat, to ask another frivolous question?

JR  It was a chance element, whereas everything else was in a sense pre-set, it's that you couldn't completely control what the cat was doing.

DH  It was very afraid, not of the camera, but of the microphone. . .

JR  It's sounds like a contradiction, but I like it. . .

JMS  Besides it's an elementary device when you have one who is not an actor, to have something which distracts him. Renoir does it better than anyone, and Brecht too for that matter. . . Moreover I think it was very important since it was a very terrorist text, to have an alien element. . . There is the terrorist direction vis a vis the audience, but at the same time there is an element of tenderness. There is a third pole, not just one, two, but one, two, three, because of the cat.

For the first time. . . For ten years I have been trying to film someone facing the camera and I've never succeeded. It always angers me in Godard's films to see people photographed facing the camera. I told myself, I'll do it one day and I'll do it differently. And they don't look as if the're photographed facing the camera. I wanted to do it and at the same time I didn't agree with it. And I found a way there, precisely thanks to the cat which is a third element. Because from the framing you don't know if the camera's looking at the cat or the person.

And now the final frivolous answer. The cat was a bit Chinese, the black and white pattern is a bit Chinese and this brings us back to Brecht who was interested in Chinese painting. It also had a relationship to the dress Danièle was wearing, one she'd had about ten years but we chose it deliberately from three others.

To take up just one last thing. I think that CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH is a film which should have been shown in the villages of Bavaria. If this wasn't possible it's because we live in the kind of society we do and that's that. I don't mean that I agree with taking a 16mm projector and showing films outside factories or in villages which people see badly because they are uncomfortable, tired, acoustics are bad, the equipment doesn't work, the prints are bad, etc. I'm talking about cinemas where people normally go.

(Vladimir) Posner tells a story in a thing he wrote on great men he had known. There are three or four and among them Brecht--the book came out a year ago. Brecht arrived one day with a text for one shot, which would have lasted for two minutes of speech. Potsner and Cavalcanti had to explain to him that really, that wasn't done and you couldn't devote two minutes just to one shot. What interested me in this text was that one could make things longer than with a theatrical text. And our film is, in a way, as a revenge on Potsner and Cavalcanti for Brecht, to prove, even if he can't see the result, that you can go as far as four minutes, because there are four shots which last four minutes. . .

PG  Are either Danièle or you familiar with Warhol?

JMS  Warhol'? I don't know Warhol. I have seen some of his films once.

DH  We didn't see the last. . .

PG  Which ones did you see?

JMS  CHELSEA GIRLS, another I don't remember. . . I don't hate Warhol, I don't know what he is doing now. . . But what interested me in Warhol is no that he takes 10-minute shots, that's not what is important.

PG  I just wondered what you thought about Warhol.

JMS  What I think about him is more complicated.

PG  That's what I meant.

JMS  To a slightly lesser degree what I felt watching the Michael Snow film the other evening (RAMEAU'S NEPHEW), that is, that it's very interesting for the use demanded of the spectator of his eyes and ears. Obviously seeing and hearing is a question of brainwork, but he isn't asked to use his brain elsewhere. I mean, there is a determination, but there too there is a repression, and not just the political. . .

PG  But Warhol. . .

JMS  They are different, but similar in one direction. Instead of aiding people to think, or to discover dialectical materialism, these films are a bit like a drug. But I must say, in spite of that, that I saw three hours of Snow's film, the first and the second reel, not the third.

DH  We saw WAVELENGTH years ago.

JMS  But I must say that afterwards I had gone to CITIZEN KANE. After seeing three hours, two reels of Snow, I saw about 10 or 20 minutes of CITIZEN KANE and it was CITIZEN KANE which became unbearable, it no longer existed, it was like glycerin. That speaks in favor of Snow in spite of what I have said.

DH  And I mean we should have seen the full four and half hours. If we did not it was not because we did not want to, but because it was really too warm, and we were tired and without air.

JMS  Above all without air.

JR  I just want to ask you some general questions which come out of the discussion of Warhol. Just which contemporary filmmakers do you admire?

JMS  I don't know, Mizoguchi. No, I mean it, but he's dead.

PG  Does that answer for both of you?

DH  Yes.

JMS  Then at the other end of the ideological scale, it would be John Ford. Of course there is Renoir and lots of people, Fritz Lang.

JR  I was thinking more about filmmakers now.

DH  He means the living. Lang is still living, Renoir too.

JMS  Well the one I respect most and will continue to respect is Godard, although I got to know his films very late because I didn't want to see them in dubbed versions in Germany. There first film I saw by Godard was VIVRE SA VIE. At the other end of the ideological scale, if one can say that, I don't know. And then there are others. You can't just draw up a catalog like that. I've seen Oshima, for example, and I'm not interested. I say simply because you know, Oshima's there, and he may well be more important than I think. But I don't think so because perhaps he has too much talent, I don't know. Talent isn't enough. The first film of Oshima's I saw was THE CEREMONY. That made a big impression, boom! Then we saw others and we saw THE CEREMONY again and it didn't work anymore. I find him too rhetorical. He tries to deal with everything. I'm not in agreement with Martin Walsh about Dusan Makavejev. I don't much like MAN IS NOT BIRD, but the second and third are interesting. Then the film about the fascist sportsmen, what's it called? That's interesting in its material forms. . .

Then there is a filmmaker I admire very much. I am willing to defend him until next year--things can change--even against all those who accuse him of being a fascist which he is not. He's the most important filmmaker of the French post-Godard generation--Luc Moullet. Especially for LES CONTREBANDIERS more than for the other two.

JR  I wanted to ask you particularly how you felt about, because of their use of sound, Bresson and Tati.

JMS  I like very much the last Tati.* Rivette was right when he said that Tati has become a political filmmaker. What he does with the blown up video material, what he gets from it is extraordinary. And it's outside that political group, those people who come out of the cinema in the evenings and experience reality entirely differently. What is exciting in PARADE it that is a film about all the degrees of nervous flux, beginning with the child which cannot yet make a gesture, which can't coordinate its hand and its brain and it goes up to the most accomplished acrobats. You know when you ask a question like that I'm sure I've forgotten ten filmmakers at least as important as us. I mean among contemporary filmmakers, young filmmakers, who are perhaps more interesting, I don't know. And among the old, living and dead, there are others. For exapmle, seeing LIMELIGHT again, you are struck by something you've never seen before in the cinema and which has a relation to the class struggle. Knowing how far this is conscious, etc., is not of much importance.



There is a filmmaker who has just been discovered and whose THE NEW ICE AGE you will be able to see on Monday, who has made films with all the means that I am against, which I even thought ought to be condemned. He is called Johan van de Keuken who makes films on which he sometimes works for more than a year. You'll see this one. I think this too has a relation to the works of Brecht. It is a film which seems at moments almost to use the means and methods of capitalist oppression and television but seems to invert them into something which is a critique. Brecht said, Lenin not only said different things from Bismark, he also said them differently. Yet this is against the idea of using those methods. Johan van de Keuken has precisely proved to me that you can't be dogmatic. When you work responsibly, you can go very far with opposing methods.


The above is approximately half of the tape; the other half deals with HISTORY LESSONS, Schoenberg, Baader-Meinhof, etc.

Interview conducted at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Wednesday 27 August 1975

Originally published in the Journal of the Royal College of Art, January 1976

Translated from the French by Diana Matiaf.

*The last Tati film is PARADE, a film of a circus performance in Sweden, which is in videotape blown up to 35mm. (JR)

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Past commemorations of Danièle Huillet on this day—

2006 - Danièle Huillet, in memory of...

2007 - Examine Caesars 

2008 - Song of Two Humans, But...!

2009 - This Land is Mine

2010 - Men Without Women

2011 - Freedom

2012 - Small Grasses

2013 - That's Just What We Intend

2014 - The Lizards

2015 - (no post - misery)

2016 - Free Horse

2017 - M'aider

2017 - Huillet at work

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