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Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by

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1701

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:03pm
Subject: Re: Re: Who is King Vidor?

Forgive me for pushing my own work, but the article that Film Comment
rejected can be viewed online as the first part of "American Tryptych:
Vidor, Hawks, Ford") http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html.

To defend the indefensible: Film Comment (was?) (is?) (seemed to be?)
under pressure to concentrate on current cinema; their readership (?)
wasn't interested in "old" movies -- unless linked to some event being
sponsored by Lincoln Center. At least, that's how the situation
appeared to me, as an outsider.

I did, therefore, suggest that they run a photo saying "Happy Birthday,
King," but they didn't want to do this. 1994 was the centenary of Ford,
Renoir, Vidor, von Sternberg. The last two guys got almost no attention
in the US and next to none in Europe (the exception being a Venice retro
of Vidor and some series in Germany -- both promoted by yours truly).

I managed to get my Vidor essay into print in Italian, Spanish (twice),
French and Swedish. But not English. Neither Senses of Cinema nor
Screening the Past had any interest in running (or even in reading) a
piece on Vidor (or the Tryptych). So it took me almost ten years to get
this out in English. All the more reason to celebrate Film
International !! And for me to recommend the essay to you.

Tag Gallagher.

Eric Henderson wrote:

>
> I agree with this. One of the seeming touchtone characteristics of
> cinephiles, I think, is an awareness of just how much one is still
> unfamiliar with, even at the same time as one is aware of how much
> they already know.
>
> --- David Ehrenstein wrote:
> > The linchpin of this culture's
> > ideology is that everyone has sufficient knowledge
> > because they know who and what is being publicized by
> > major coporations. Anything that isn't is ipso facto
> > unworthy of one's time.
>
>
1702

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

Robert Keser wrote:

>
> I'm in the midst of planning
> a course for Facets called "Making Marlene Dietrich" which proposes
> studying the various personae she evolved through half a century, and
> especially how she collaborated with cinematographers, designers,
> musicians, and writers...

Sounds good! I'm sorry I haven't seen the Dietrich expos in Berlin (or
Berlin).

>
> Your piece made me realize that there the flashback does not exist in
> Sternberg, or at least I can't think of any.

Anatahan is narrated in retrospect and there are flashbacks at the end,
when the girl looks at the returning sailors. (I think, offhand, that
Rossellini has only one flashback.)

>
>
> We need only watch
> Song of Songs to see much of the spark missing from her eyes.

In the second half of short thing on Mamoulian, I wrote:
In Song of Songs (1933) Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more
elusive and distant than any of her Sternberg characters (although
Paramount's intent was to find a more commercial director for her), and
the reason is that Mamoulian is literally incapable of looking at
Dietrich for more than a second or two without cutting to a reaction, or
cutting closer, or cutting farther away, before finally running away
entirely, from embarrassment, no doubt, at the perpetration of so many
cheap imitations of Sternberg, at the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of
creating a new Dietrich character (as Sternberg accomplished seven
times), can only record her aping her Sternberg personas. Again, he
fidgets. And, finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
cannot make a movie that is happening before us; instead, he makes a
film that follows a text. His tricks, like his cutting up Dietrich, add
a layer of distraction from whatever emotional reality his characters
might undergo, and worse, convince us that the tricks and special
effects are more interesting than the characters and their stories.

>
> I agree that "Shanghai Express continues for nineteen minutes after it's
> over", but not "solely to ponder faith". The way I see it, the power
> relationship has to be re-established by Lily purchasing the wristwatch,
> a fetish object to test her ex-lover's acceptance of her dominance by
> allowing her to "handcuff" him. In this action, she's like an animal
> marking
> its property. This seems well worth nineteen minutes to me (although
> maybe you are making a different point).

I meant it as a compliment, not a complaint. Your remark about her
dominance is fascinating; I never thought of it that way.

> Roger Ebert is bringing "the world's leading benshi" to
> accompany a showing of I Was Born, But...

There have been a number of benshi performances in Europe at Pordenone
or museums. And there are editions of some Mizomovies that have "music
& benshi" soundtracks. The problem is that they do it in Japanese, and
I can't understand a word, and so it's like an announcer who goes on and
on and never stops. (I hate to admit it, but I wish there were a DVD of
Anatahan where one could turn off von Sternberg's voice, at least for
one screening.) You know, John Ford's brother Francis got his start in
pictures as a benshi; they were common in the nickelodeon period in the
US, albeit not in Japanese.

>
1703

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 5:28pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
instead, he makes a
film that follows a text."

What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
"happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.

--- Tag Gallagher wrote:

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
1704

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 5:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

You're right to object. And I apologize. First, that was the second half
of a one-paragraph entry (so I give you the whole thing now). Second, I
was obliged to write about Mamoulian and yet I feel strongly that
negative criticism is not useful: better someone tell me how to like
what I don't like than how not to like what I do like, and in my
experience the reasons why others dislike something I like are always
irrelevant to why I like it, even when true. So I am simply (ab)using
Mamoulian in order to identify what von Sternberg does.

**

Rouben Mamoulian (Tiflis, Georgia, Russia. 1898-1987) Moscow Art
Theater. England 1920; US in 1923.
Imported from Broadway when sound came, Mamoulian responded as hoped. On
one hand, his films had a manner that privileged text and dialogue and
the careful playing out of a concept. On the other hand, they brimmed
with self-conscious tricks in cutting, camera movement and design. The
combination made Mamoulian.s movies seem refreshing and brash in the
early 30s (like David Lynch.s in the 80s), but already by the 40s they
seemed academic. Applause (1929) used a very mobile camera, in an
intentional reproach to the wooden staticity of most (but not all) early
talkies; Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
Tracy's transformation without a cut; and Love Me Tonight (1932) used
songs as an excuse for montage-of-free-association. But today none of
this bravura equals the simple, direct eroticism of Joan Peers's love
scene and strip-tease. And in contrast to Peers, Helen Morgan, the star
of Applause who was raved over at the time, is a bore, not by her fault,
but thanks to Mamoulia's general tendency to be a bore. His dialogue
could often profit from a seventy-percent cut, but instead his scenes
waddle slowly toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas. Queen
Christina (1934) has one of Garbo's better performances chiefly because
Mamoulian raises her natural ponderousness to Grand Guignol proportions.
Naturally Mamoulian fidgets; who would not? In Song of Songs (1933)
Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more elusive and distant than
any of her Sternberg characters (although Paramount's intent was to find
a more commercial director for her), and the reason is that Mamoulian is
literally incapable of looking at Dietrich for more than a second or two
without cutting to a reaction, or cutting closer, or cutting farther
away, before finally running away entirely, from embarrassment, no
doubt, at the perpetration of so many cheap imitations of Sternberg, at
the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of creating a new Dietrich character
(as Sternberg accomplished seven times), can only record her aping her
Sternberg personas. Again, he fidgets. And, finally, this is why
Mamoulian is boring: because he cannot make a movie that is happening
before us; instead, he makes a film that follows a text. His tricks,
like his cutting up Dietrich, add a layer of distraction from whatever
emotional reality his characters might undergo, and worse, convince us
that the tricks and special effects are more interesting than the
characters and their stories.

David Ehrenstein wrote:

> I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
> terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
> finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
> cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
> instead, he makes a
> film that follows a text."
>
> What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
> "happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
> Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.
>
>
1705

From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:18pm
Subject: Re: Who is King Vidor?

Mike Grost
Tag Gallagher's Triptych article is very interesting!
It is full of ideas that will illuminate future Vidor screenings. Especially interesting: The Vidor Rossellini comparisons; the look at the religious views of American filmmakers; the position of Vidor as an artist in the world of silent film.

Vidor and Visual Style
Vidor is darn hard to write about. Take the matter of his visual style. His films are full of great pictorial beauty. Yet this is achieved by apparently simple compositions. By contrast, a typical image in such great stylists as Sternberg or Welles looks enormously complex. Think of a typical Sternberg image. It might have plants in the foreground, netting, elaborate costumes, murals on the walls, huge props held by the characters. And Welles often positions his people in the most complex architecture: think of Touch of Evil, or the hotel at the end of Journey into Fear. But there does not seem to be anything like this in Vidor. The images look clean, direct, simple, uncluttered, made up of a few geometric objects or regions on screen. Yet the effect is of the richest pictorial beauty. And unlike those in any other director. How does Vidor do this? I have no idea. Yet ...
Recently saw Love Never Dies (Vidor, 1921), in a restored version on TCM. The scenario in this early Vidor is inconsistent and causes characterization problems. Yet Vidor has his great visual style here, right from the start!

Painful Truth
This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when everybody knows these great artists.

On Humilty
Eric Henderson writes:
> I agree with this. One of the seeming touchtone >characteristics of cinephiles, I think, is an awareness of
> just how much one is still unfamiliar with, even at the
> same time as one is aware of how much they already know.
True!
My father always used to say, "the more you learn, the more you discover you do not know". This is profoundly true!
Lloyd Hughes, the leading man in the 1921 Vidor, made 95 movies. I have never seen any of them! Nor had I ever heard of him. Here is a whole movie star, none of whose films is on my radar.
We have so much to learn about the cinema. We need open mindedness, humility, and a love of film art.

Mike Grost

1706

From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:20pm
Subject: Orson Welles

Peter Tonguette’s article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html

Mike Grost

1707

From:
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 6:38pm
Subject: Orson Welles

Peter Tonguette's article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html

Mike Grost
(whose e-mail sometimes has trouble with apostrophes)
1708

From: Fred Camper
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 3:23pm
Subject: From J. Hoberman

Some have expressed concern about the Village Voice's redesign and how
it might limit the length of J. Hoberman's movie reviews, and when I was
in New York recently for two days and picked up a copy I saw evidence of
same. I wrote him, also inviting him to look at our group, which he says
he will check out when he returns from Toronto. Here's his reply on the
question of the Voice's redesign:

"The Voice arts coverage has merged with the arts listings. Previously,
a page (such as mine) could hold some 1550 words. The new word order
allows for 1400. That redesign is complicated by the new mandated
layout. All review pages must be divided into at least three sections.
On my typical page, there is room for a "long" review of no more than
900 words, plus a shorter review of no less than 300 words; there's also
a gray box which is meant to be treated as a graphic element (used for
lists, asides, &tc)"

- Fred
1709

From: Maxime
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 7:46pm
Subject: Re: NYC: Barnet

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:
> 1. BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS
> 2. THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA SQUARE
> 3. THE SCOUT'S EXPLOIT
> 4. WHISTLE STOP (aka THE SMALL RAILWAY STATION)
> 5. BOUNTIFUL SUMMER
> 6. THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN
> 7. MOSCOW IN OCTOBER
> 8. THE OLD JOCKEY
> 9. MISS MEND

I wish I could discover By the Bluest Seas as it was the first time
again... (Does that make any sense?)
I don't think The Scout's Exploit deserves such a high rank in your
wish list. Good professional, impersonal job.
Bountiful Summer has a very high reputation in France since the
article by Rohmer. Imho overrated.
Miss Mend is a cheerful mixture of chaotic rigour.
I agree with you about Ledolom, non-Barnet movie ruined by formalism.
I haven't seen Moscow in October. Is that good, anybody??

My first to be seen list would be the following:
BY THE BLUEST OF SEAS
OKRAINA
THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN
THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA SQUARE
WHISTLE STOP
ALIENKA
MISS MEND
THE OLD JOCKEY
ONCE AT NIGHT
MEN OF NOVGOROD
1710

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 7:56pm
Subject: Re: Re: NYC: Barnet

> My first to be seen list would be the following:

Thanks very much! I hope the series is as comprehensive as BAMcinematek
hinted it would be. - Dan
1711

From: David Westling
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 8:46pm
Subject: My favorite year: 1932

> Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
> Tracy's transformation without a cut;

Just a technical point, but Mamoulian's version of the film starred Frederic
March. Tracy is in the 1941 Victor Fleming rendition.

An aside--since no one has mentioned it, I I thought I'd throw in 1932's
_The Phantom of Crestwood_. No more or less than a good mystery story, that
had its beginnings on the radio (the film being the resolution of a
long-running serial), it also stars the inimitable Karen Morley as the
almost heartless vamp who aims to destroy the lives of those who have
incurred her displeasure.

David Westling
1712

From: Ruy Gardnier
Date: Wed Sep 3, 2003 11:53pm
Subject: Re: Digest Number 105

This e-mail is just tio thank you and to remind the list that your article
on media coverage of Schmidlin's GREED and WELLES published on french
magazine TRAFIC is superb and more than proves your point.
I haven't read Film Comment in ages. The last articles I really liked were
two pieces by Kent Jones: the first on John carpenter, the second on Wes
Anderson. Oh, and there was that splendid article against "easy riders,
raging bulls", also by KJ.
ruy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Rosenbaum"
To:
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 12:52 PM
Subject: Re: [a_film_by] Digest Number 105

> The refusal of Film Comment to "recognize" Vidor was matched by its total
lack of interest in a piece on any of the recent Munich "restorations" of
shorter and unfinished Welles works--or the fascinating episodes done for
AROUND THE WORLD WITH ORSON WELLES, including the unfinished DOMINICI AFFAIR
(available on DVD in the U.S. for at least a year and never before seen in
the U.S., but ignored by everyone) at the same time that it was
commissioning reviews on such junk as RKO 281 (if I remember the title
correctly). This is not unusual but standard in mainstream American
journalism: assign coverege of the remake of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS or
the Hickenlooper decimation of THE BIG BRASS RING or anything else that has
the name Welles attached to it and that might conceivably line the pockets
of suits, but stay away from anything that Welles made himself and that
remains unseen or unchronicled. In other words, despite its many claims to
the contrary, the magazine is generally about the
> film business first of all, and everything else secondarily.
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
1713

From: planet_jake
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 1:58am
Subject: Hello, I'm new.

Hello, my name is Jake (Jacob, whatever) And I am a new face around
here. I am pretty much like everyone else here. Except I am just
beginning to discover the world of film, I am 18 years old, and have
been obsessed with film and its possibilities since I was 9. I can't
really say much, I'm not an expert yet, but I hope to be someday, My
DVD collection and favorite film list can be located in my profile
(links) if you would care to look, if not thats cool too.

Lets see, I was taken out of school when I was 14, and have been
teaching myself since then, and I am just now getting through the
final HSED tests, My hobby is of course, film, its also my life, I
may not contribute much on thses posts, but thats because I do most
of my thinking to myself, so don't mind me, I'm not rude, I'm just
quiet.

Oh and also until I get my hands of some equipment I am an avid
photographer, I'll see if I cant get some of my photos on a yahoo
page soon.

Thats about it, Thank you for your time, and that you for inviting,
and accepting me into this wonderful group :)
1714

From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:12am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea

Tag Gallagher wrote:

>
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
>
> > Roger Ebert is bringing "the world's leading benshi" to
> > accompany a showing of I Was Born, But...
>
> There have been a number of benshi performances in Europe at Pordenone
>
> or museums. And there are editions of some Mizomovies that have
> "music
> & benshi" soundtracks. The problem is that they do it in Japanese,
> and
> I can't understand a word, and so it's like an announcer who goes on
> and
> on and never stops. (I hate to admit it, but I wish there were a DVD
> of
> Anatahan where one could turn off von Sternberg's voice, at least for
> one screening.) You know, John Ford's brother Francis got his start
> in
> pictures as a benshi; they were common in the nickelodeon period in
> the
> US, albeit not in Japanese.

That could make a great story: American Benshi!

It's not quite the same thing, but I'm up for any live music with films
ever since last year when I saw Storm Over Asia with
accompaniment by Tuvan throat singers (they also came equipped
with electric guitars and keyboard). By the film's end, between
Pudovkin's sensational montage climaxes and the exciting music,
the audience was ready to rip out the seats and march on the
winter palace!

Also not directly related to benshi, Im Kwon Taek's excellent film
Chunhyang imaginatively interweaves the very prettily illustrated
narrative scenes with a stage performance of a "pansori" singer
who narrates (solving the problem of exposition), comments and
generally whips up the intensity of the proceedings. Well into the
story, though, the director throws in an intriguing third level
by staying on the reactions of the pansori singer's audience, so
that we are watching performance, reception, and dramatization
all dynamically rippling together.

This film also kept making me think of Sternberg in that the
director is always honest with the audience: he shows that the
young lovers are frisky and appealing and colorful, but he also
refuses to lie about the ways of the world or the cruel turns that
fate might hold. Like Sternberg and Mizoguchi, he's not so much
unsentimental as somehow a-sentimental: he wouldn't even know
how to exploit our emotions because this doesn't concern him--
which is a great relief.

His breakthrough film Mandala is even better, quite striking
visually with really memorable landscapes that are framed with
a kind of rough poetry, uniquely masculine to my mind. (It's very
hard to see a good print of this, but the drama is moving and
quite worth the effort). Has anyone seen these movies?

--Bob Keser

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1715

From: Tristan
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:31am
Subject: Re: Hello, I'm new.

Hi, welcome to a_film_by. It's good to see another teenager
interested in film. Have fun posting!
1716

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:31am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea

> His breakthrough film Mandala is even better, quite striking
> visually with really memorable landscapes that are framed with
> a kind of rough poetry, uniquely masculine to my mind. (It's very
> hard to see a good print of this, but the drama is moving and
> quite worth the effort). Has anyone seen these movies?

I've seen CHUNHYANG, but I'm afraid I didn't enjoy it as much as you.
Can't remember why - I think I found the emotions of the story more
conventional than you did. Dave Kehr was a big fan of the film, I
think. - Dan
1717

From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:04am
Subject: Re: Teaching Who King Vidor Is

MG4273@a... wrote:

> Painful Truth
> This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most
> modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or
> Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on
> a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when
> everybody knows these great artists.

Very movingly put, Mike. Of course, this is a lamentable situation.
But I believe there's hope. Myself, I deal mostly with urban commuter
college students, most of whom have to work, the kind of everyday
people who don't stand out especially, a bit older than dorm-dwelling
students.

When I get them in my Art of the Film course, it's amazing how
thirsty most are to learn new ways of looking. They know that better
things are out there, but they're not sure how to get at them (which
is the shame of our public education!) It's really moving to me to see
ordinary folks, who've never seen a silent movie, get all excited
debating about Man With a Movie Camera. The edgiest selection
I show is Sokurov's Mother and Son, and I hesitated about it
because I feared it might be too slow and need a level of
concentration that you don't learn from watching TV. However,
most of the students really respond to it, and one mother of two
thanked me because she had been literally afraid to go to a foreign
film before, but now she saw that she could understand them. A
number of other students ask me where they can buy the DVDs
of Black Narcissus, the silent Ben-Hur, and Red Beard (one
woman went out and bought The Third Man DVD the very night
we watched and discussed it because "I want my husband to
see it".)

I work in a college situation, but the same thing could be done at
the high school level, heck, in grade school! There are teachers,
I'm sure, who are making stabs at this, but there's no vision in
America to posit a plan that schools could follow: that's really
where the problem is. In the meantime, there's hope that cinephile
parents (and uncles and grandmothers) are exposing kids to their
own enthusiasms (and discussing the best ways to do this, on some
of the bigger netgroups), while Turner Classic Movies helps a lot.
Whatever the downside of converting movies to digital images
(which Fred Camper has rightly criticized), from the standpoint of
trying to build a film culture that honors its own history, the DVD
is our best hope, short of a massive national program of visual
education. But how did we reach a point where Film Comment,
rather than a part of the solution, is actually part of the problem?

--Bob Keser

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1718

From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:05am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Robert Keser wrote:
> Like Sternberg and Mizoguchi, he's not so much
> unsentimental as somehow a-sentimental: he wouldn't even know
> how to exploit our emotions because this doesn't concern him--
> which is a great relief.

Im's SOPYONJE, which I liked much more than CHUNHYANG, is all about pansori singers; I wouldn't call it sentimental, but it is very emotional. Perhaps coincidentally, his two other, impressive films I've seen (out of hundreds) both seemed to have actual Mizoguchi antecedents: GILSODOM, about reuniting Korean families, suggested a modern version of SANSHO DAYU, and TICKET, set in a brothel, seemed to recall STREET OF SHAME.
1719

From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:35am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

How do you solve a problem like Mamoulian? (Okay, not as good
a pun as The People Against Oharu!)

The factor that turns me against Mamoulian is his arbitrary camera
movement. In Blood and Sand, there's a moonlight seduction
scene in a (blindingly overlit) garden with a fountain spraying
amiably. While Rita Hayworth works her wiles on Tyrone Power,
the camera moves around them, then tracks into the fountain to
block our view for a while, then decides to move to the side (this
description probably isn't exact, but it's close enough). But there's
no reason for the camera to be moving at all, and certainly
not meandering around the set and obstructing our view with an
entirely non-symbolic fountain. The effect to me is like being a
passenger in a car driven by a child.

Applause is practically nothing BUT shaky-cam tracking shots
that we try to justify by rationalizing in our brains that this one is
setting the scene and that one is moving us from the dressing room
to the stairs, or some such reasoning. When you examine the text,
though, there's not much evidence that the camera needs to be
wheeling around to increase the expressivity of a scene or to
embody some directorial worldview. Now and then the movement
does match or express some dramatic value (like a broken clock
is right twice a day), but the tracking shots seem like such a stunt,
all the more so when everything stops for some static dialogue
exchanges. In the burlesque numbers, the movie does capture a
kind of fleshy physicality, of big bodies lumbering back and forth,
but to my mind, not much of the kind of direct, unmediated emotion
we were admiring in Sternberg. That's what I see.

Before I'm awarded the scarlet letter 'N' for negativity, for falling
into the trap of wagging my finger at people for liking Mamoulian,
I'll confess to very much enjoying the imaginative visuals and artful
performances in City Streets, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, We Live
Again, Becky Sharp, and--quick, make the sign of the cross!--
Silk Stockings. And, of course, I'm the one who brought up the
delightful Love Me Tonight.

However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter if
we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
Holiday, then why not say so?

What would Mamoulian's Cleopatra have been like, I wonder,
if he had not been fired from the already begun production with
Elizabeth Taylor and a different cast (Peter Finch and Stephen
Boyd), cinematographer, and sets, not to mention script?
Probably not a loss on the magnitude of I, Claudius...

--Bob Keser

Tag Gallagher wrote:

> I feel strongly that
> negative criticism is not useful: better someone tell me how to like
> what I don't like than how not to like what I do like, and in my
> experience the reasons why others dislike something I like are always
> irrelevant to why I like it, even when true. So I am simply (ab)using
> Mamoulian in order to identify what von Sternberg does.
>
> **
>
> Rouben Mamoulian (Tiflis, Georgia, Russia. 1898-1987) Moscow Art
> Theater. England 1920; US in 1923.
> Imported from Broadway when sound came, Mamoulian responded as hoped. On
> one hand, his films had a manner that privileged text and dialogue and
> the careful playing out of a concept. On the other hand, they brimmed
> with self-conscious tricks in cutting, camera movement and design. The
> combination made Mamoulian.s movies seem refreshing and brash in the
> early 30s (like David Lynch.s in the 80s), but already by the 40s they
> seemed academic. Applause (1929) used a very mobile camera, in an
> intentional reproach to the wooden staticity of most (but not all) early
> talkies; Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch > March's> transformation without a cut; and Love Me Tonight (1932) used
> songs as an excuse for montage-of-free-association. But today none of
> this bravura equals the simple, direct eroticism of Joan Peers's love
> scene and strip-tease. And in contrast to Peers, Helen Morgan, the star
> of Applause who was raved over at the time, is a bore, not by her fault,
> but thanks to Mamoulia's general tendency to be a bore. His dialogue
> could often profit from a seventy-percent cut, but instead his scenes
> waddle slowly toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas. Queen
> Christina (1934) has one of Garbo's better performances chiefly because
> Mamoulian raises her natural ponderousness to Grand Guignol proportions.
> Naturally Mamoulian fidgets; who would not? In Song of Songs (1933)
> Marlene Dietrich's character is many times more elusive and distant than
> any of her Sternberg characters (although Paramount's intent was to find
> a more commercial director for her), and the reason is that Mamoulian is
> literally incapable of looking at Dietrich for more than a second or two
> without cutting to a reaction, or cutting closer, or cutting farther
> away, before finally running away entirely, from embarrassment, no
> doubt, at the perpetration of so many cheap imitations of Sternberg, at
> the fact that Mamoulian, incapable of creating a new Dietrich character
> (as Sternberg accomplished seven times), can only record her aping her
> Sternberg personas. Again, he fidgets. And, finally, this is why
> Mamoulian is boring: because he cannot make a movie that is happening
> before us; instead, he makes a film that follows a text. His tricks,
> like his cutting up Dietrich, add a layer of distraction from whatever
> emotional reality his characters might undergo, and worse, convince us
> that the tricks and special effects are more interesting than the
> characters and their stories.
>
> David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> > I am in complete agreement that "Song of Songs" is
> > terrible, but it's quiteunjust IMO to then say "And,
> > finally, this is why Mamoulian is boring: because he
> > cannot make a movie that is happening before us;
> > instead, he makes a
> > film that follows a text."
> >
> > What do you mean by that? Does "Love Me Tonight" not
> > "happen before us"? What about "Applause" and "City
> > Streets"? Are they phoned-in? I think not.
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1720

From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 6:34am
Subject: Re: Narration and Korea

> > Robert Keser wrote:
>
> Also not directly related to benshi, Im Kwon Taek's excellent film
> Chunhyang imaginatively interweaves the very prettily illustrated
> narrative scenes with a stage performance of a "pansori" singer
> who narrates (solving the problem of exposition), comments and
> generally whips up the intensity of the proceedings. Well into the
> story, though, the director throws in an intriguing third level
> by staying on the reactions of the pansori singer's audience, so
> that we are watching performance, reception, and dramatization
> all dynamically rippling together.
>

I was knocked out by Chunhyang. It's a really lovely movie, and
Im's highly stylized is extremely impressive. I had previously had
no awareness of the pansori tradition, but I found the music in the
movie fascinating. The use of a pansori "narrating" the story -- a
folk fable -- to a contemporary audience is a very effective
distancing device, as are the shots of the audience which Bob
mentions. Im is empahasiazing objective and intellectual elements at
the expense of the visceral, which was a fascinating and daring
choice on his part. Im further holds the audience at bay through a
mise-en-scene that at times calls to mind Sirk - a somewhat removed
camera placement and objects that obscure or draw our attention away
from the actors. (There are a few love scenes which are, conversely,
very direct and, although the action is relatively subdued, they are
quite erotic.) Because one is kept a bit disengaged from the
proceedings for much of the running time, when the the emotional pay-
offs do come, they are particularly effective. The film works
simultaneously on a narrative, a structural and a polemical level.
And Imk uses color wonderfully well.
1721

From: Damien Bona
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 6:48am
Subject: Re: Hello, I'm new.

Hi Jake

Welcome to the board.

Although you say you're not a film expert yet, I'm sure you certainly
are in comparison to your contemporaries.

The thing is that through such resources as this board, one quickly
becomes more and more of an expert. At the same time, all of us are
constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas about films and
filmmakers and re-evaluating our opinions, and it's very exciting and
invigorating. For instance, I never gave Roy Mack a second thought
until Mike Grost make an intriguing case for him the other day.

SO keep reading, keep seeing movies and keep on contributing here to
the extent you feel comfortable (and hopefully Magnolia will be
knocked off your Favorite Movie list before long ;o) )

- Damien
1722

From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:56am
Subject: Gesture

All -

I took a grad seminar on feminist film theory a few years back and one of the
films we watched was The Wild Party (Dorothy Arzner, 1929). I didn't much
like The Wild Party at the time. Basically, it felt like a filmed play,
stylistically bland. But that seemed too banal a reason to dislike it so I kept my
mouth shut for the most part during the class discussion. When the prof asked what
we thought of it, however, someone (a man - perhaps significant, perhaps not)
piped up and said "I didn't like it - it was just a filmed play." I verbally
seconded and then the prof asked "Well, can you think of any reason why Arzner
would film like that?" No one had a response but I was breathless in
anticipation of how the prof would answer it. She finally offered: "A static,
tableau-like frame can highlight things like gesture."

This blew my mind since another work screened for this course was Dry Kisses
Only, the 1990 video where Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke freeze and move
back and forth on a shot from Arzner's Christopher Strong of Katharine Hepburn
and I forget who (Helen Chandler?) embracing - not so much (if at all) to bring
forth a lesbian subtext but rather to make material lesbian spectatorial
pleasure/desire. Suddenly, there seemed to be a use for a static,
just-filming-a-play style, something that had always seemed to betray film as an art.
Christopher Strong, for instance, seemed ideally suited to just this kind of play of
lesbian desire.

So then I went back to The Wild Party and another film I'd always had a
problem with, Laughter (Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast, 1930) and they both hit a bit
deeper this time, Laughter especially. I noticed a carefree skip in Fredric
March's stride; the dance sequence seemed more precious; etc. And then I started to
read some theorists on melodrama - Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Doane, Christine
Gledhill, etc. - who have all written quite brilliantly on gesture (among other
things) and I now have an entirely different way of looking at some
films/styles I'd previously dismissed.

I won't get into the theoretical stuff and I know that there are lots of
different ways to show gesture. Certainly, the cubistically cut plate smashing
scene in Battleship Potemkin shows a gesture. Basically, I was excited to have my
conceptions of film style flip-flopped.

This leads me to my purpose for writing which amounts to a question for Fred
Camper. Fred, a while back on the list, you mentioned "the poetry of tiny
gestures" while discussing Hawks as a great formalist and that it's "hard to see
this or explain it because it's so subtle." Also, allow me to quote from your
Red River capsule review: "Hawks's elusive style grows from a kind of
antiformalism that builds imagery around characters' tiny movements and gestures, so
that each shot seems organized around personality traits--it's almost as if each
composition grows organically from a single glance." Much as I love Red River
, I'm afraid that poetry of tiny gestures is too subtle for me, his style (at
least in relation to gestures, glances, movements, etc.) too elusive. Can you
attempt to explain this? Is there a specific scene that particularly bears
this out?

For the record, I'm not asking so I can elevate Arzner or D'Arrast into some
(the?) Pantheon. I'm not sure I'm interested in rescuing Arzner or D'Arrast as
formalists. For all I know, someone's already attempted that anyway. But
there is a way one can describe the films of Arzner or D'Arrast as antiformalist.
Not in the same way as Hawks, of course. I just want to better understand the
antiformalist qualities of a great formalist like Hawks so I can better
understand antiformalism in film overall. Make sense?

And now that I've written all this down, I guess it stems in part from an
annoyance with commonly held notions of film art. Too often, people think film
art inheres in overly formalist gestures (that word again) like a canted angle
or a swooping camera movement or cubist editing, some device that calls
attention to itself or the materiality of the medium and thus theoretically alerts
the spectator of the presence of the director or somebody behind it. In the case
of Hawks, I'm simply interested to learn how he can be "there" in the absence
of such overly formalist gestures.

And of course if anyone besides Fred has something to offer, please do so.

Kevin John
Montr�al

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1723

From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:59am
Subject: Rouben Mamoulian

Mamoulian is a director whose personality is hard to nail down.
For the record, I enjoyed:
Love Me Tonight
We Live Again
Golden Boy
The Mark of Zorro
Summer Holiday
Silk Stockings
Did not like:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Queen Christina
Becky Sharp
High, Wide and Handsome
Blood and Sand
and have not had a chance to see other Mamoulian films.
Both The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand are remakes of fine silent movies
directed by the underrated Fred Niblo (Ben-Hur). Neither is especially close to
the original, however. We are a long way from Gus Van Sant's shot for shot
remake of Psycho (1998).
Mamoulian likes characters with double identities, such as the tailor in Love
Me Tonight, Zorro, and Jekyll/Hyde. And people caught between two worlds,
such as the hero of Golden Boy, and Silk Stockings. These people have two
personalities, and shuffle back and forth between them. The two personalities are as
different as possible. There is often a change of costume: William Holden in
Golden Boy looks completely different as the violinist with long hair, than he
does as the boxer with short hair and a sharp suit.
Jonathan Demme is a contemporary director with a fascination with people with
multiple identities. See "Who Am I This Time?", "Citizen's Band", "Something
Wild" or the FBI agent in "Married to the Mob".
Secret Identities began with charming rogues with multiple identities in such
1890's British authors as Israel Zangwill and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of
Being Earnest). The hero with a secret identity started with Baroness Orczy's
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" (1905), found a vigorous home in American pulp fiction
of the 1910's such as Frank L. Packard's "The Adventures of Jimmy Dale" and
Johnston McCulley's Zorro books, and has had a huge history in comic books
since the 1930's.
Fred Camper's description of Mamoulian as a dialogue and text oriented
director is insightful. (See, you sometimes CAN learn from a negative review!) The
up-side of this is that Mamoulian brings good craftsmanship to such stage
adaptations as Golden Boy and Summer Holiday. Both are a lot better done than one
might expect, with lively performances that are sensitive to the meanings and
feelings of the plays. Neither shows the inspired artistry of King Vidor's
version of Street Scene (1931), however.
I have never seen a film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remotely as good at
Stevenson's novella. Stevenson's original is structured as a mystery story,
and one doesn't learn the truth until the tale's finale. The 1920 silent
version with John Barrymore seems awful, too.
Mike Grost
1724

From: Dan Sallitt
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 0:32pm
Subject: TIFF

I'm off to Toronto for the film festival - back on the 14th. Take care,
all. - Dan
1725

From: planet_jake
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 0:33pm
Subject:

Well I'll tell you something about my peers damienbona, they are the
worst kind of hypocrites, they rebel against one kind of conformity,
and embrace another. My identity is primarily that of a film geek, so
the first question I usually hear is have you seen American Pie 3
(For Example) They assume I run out every weekend to eat up whatever
hollywood regurgitates into the mass media trough, but thats not what
I do, and I dont think thats what any of us do. I generally seek
films tht I think would be psychologically rewarding, intellectually
stimulating, or emotionally satisfying, and I cant do that by
watching teenagers have sex with pies.

Anyways thats my rant.
1726

From: Zach Campbell
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:03pm
Subject: Ozu, Late Spring

I'm taking a course on Ozu this fall, and had my first class last
night. I may be disappointed with the course itself, for reasons I
don't need to go into deeply now. (For one thing, would anyone agree
with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
apart? Let there be someone of greater repute than me who believes
this, or I'm doomed.) The course is set up in conjunction with the
NYFF Ozu retrospective, and NYU will use its print budget for the
class to buy discount tickets for the students to attend screenings.
We watch five or six of Ozu's best known films on video in the
opening weeks, but we are required to revisit at least three of these
in the retrospective, as the course syllabus makes clear, "You
haven't really seen them yet!"

In short, the course is a bit more old-fashioned in the department
and puts a premium on authorship, formal analysis "for its own sake,"
and research. I feel as though the class discussions might often
stagnate into banal acknowledgments of Ozu's "transcendent" camera
and how good it is that we can recognize his deep humanism ... but
that seems like a small price to pay considering the treasures on the
screen.

Last night I saw LATE SPRING for the second time, and this time
(unlike my politely admiring first encounter), I was astonished.
This film is practically *perfect*.

I was overwhelmingly struck by how alike this film seems next to a
Ford film. The music is practically straight out of Ford, bouncing
along and flowing along. I felt a similar sense of pacing, of coming
and going in and out of homes, bars, communities ... Ozu places the
narrative a series of social ceremonies and private moments, whereas
Ford (whose films don't strike people as "slow") is a bit more
bustling, filling his own narrative with work, travel, broad comedy.
But in each case the directors are biding time and letting their
characters live in a world that moves on whether they like it or not,
and after a while emotions bubble to the surface in a string of
ascending climaxes. It's as if Ford and Ozu both make films about
the devastating impact of time and change sweeping along characters
who slowly come to realize their place. What a beautiful shot when
Chishu Ryu is walking in the park, the aunt scurrying along through
pigeons toward the staircase, and Ryu turns around for a moment to
look back toward the camera.

The powerful sense of character psychology struck me too: this film
is considerably sharper (if also subtler) on its characters than I
remembered. Setsuko Hara's constant laughing is a genius bit of
acting, a defense mechanism that she pulls over herself like a
security blanket when the issue of marriage comes up (her own
marraige, but also with her friends and acquaintances). And Ryu's
final words of advice to Hara are heartbreaking ... this is part of
why Ozu's film is supremely intelligent, because it recognizes that
traditions, institutions, and cultures are (for better or for worse)
larger than individuals, and we are made to see this fatherly
prodding as an act of utmost love, even as we're taking in the
inevitable sadness of the breakup of father and daughter, and we want
to imagine them staying together. Anyone less than a master couldn't
handle the demanding tonal balancing act necessary to pull of this
message in the way Ozu does ... this is a masterpiece.

--Zach
1727

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 2:59pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

I agree with everything Robert Keser writes about Mamoulian. I think
we're saying much the same thing. I also like CITY STREETS. Thanks for
the correction Spencer Tracy/Frederic March.

But I don't understand the paragraph below. You wish me to demonstrate
a waddle?

Robert Keser wrote:

> However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
> toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter if
> we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
> Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
> and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
> Holiday, then why not say so?
>
>
1728

From: Rick Curnutte
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:01pm
Subject: Re: Orson Welles

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Peter Tonguette’s article on hidden Welles films is outstanding:
>
> http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html
>
>
> Mike Grost

Yes, perhaps I'm biased because I know Peter so well, but this is
just about my favorite bit of film writing this year.

Rick
1729

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:05pm
Subject: Re: Teaching Who King Vidor Is

A ray of reality:
While it is lamentable that King Vidor et al. aren't household names on
one hand, and aren't even recognized by our film
museums/universities/film profs/periodicals on the other hand --- in
otherwords: while it is true that we do not have a "museum culture" in
the US in cinema, it is also true that in any given week there are five
or six John Ford movies on cable tv, playing to a potential audience of
40 or 50 million. If even 10,000 people watch one such movie, that's
more than attend a good European cinematheque in a year. Maybe only a
few dozen of these 10,000 people note the name "John Ford" or pay any
attention to any of that. But these films are still alive, still part
of living culture. There's something murderous about hanging a painting
in a museum, or putting a movie there.

Robert Keser wrote:

> MG4273@a... wrote:
>
> > Painful Truth
> > This is not a defense of what happened in 1994. But is true that most
> > modern day Americans have not heard of King Vidor. Or of Sternberg or
> > Ford or Fritz Lang. This distresses me no end. Most people on
> > a_film_by are working hard to change this. I long for a day when
> > everybody knows these great artists.
>
> Very movingly put, Mike. Of course, this is a lamentable situation.
> But I believe there's hope.
1730

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:12pm
Subject: Re: Gesture

I'm not Fred, but:

1) Consider Chaplin. Static frame. Gesture. Is it cinema?

2) Hawks's style is probably impossible to convey with just words. I've
been doing criticism of late using Final Cut Pro and using clips and
various analytic methods, and it's possible that way to take a scene
(say, when Bogart meets Bacall in The Big Sleep) and show how the
cutting and framing and shot construction, which first look utterly
banal or just functional, are actually reinforcements of the gestural
play -- the exchanges of glances and looks. It's difficult to talk
about this because, as you say, almost all of our official teaching is
constructed to STOP and PREVENT you from relating to movies as movies.
My suggestion would be to put all of these formulae (damned theory!)
out of your heart and just watch a scene like this over and over, trying
as much as possible to get into empathy and sympathy with the characters
and their feelings. Eventually all will come clear like a sunrise.

LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:

> She finally offered: "A static,
> tableau-like frame can highlight things like gesture."
>

> Fred, a while back on the list, you mentioned "the poetry of tiny
> gestures" while discussing Hawks as a great formalist and that it's
> "hard to see
> this or explain it because it's so subtle." Also, allow me to quote
> from your
> Red River capsule review: "Hawks's elusive style grows from a kind of
> antiformalism that builds imagery around characters' tiny movements
> and gestures, so
> that each shot seems organized around personality traits--it's almost
> as if each
> composition grows organically from a single glance." Much as I love
> Red River
> , I'm afraid that poetry of tiny gestures is too subtle for me,
1731

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:17pm
Subject: Re: Ozu, Late Spring

Zach Campbell wrote:

> would anyone agree
> with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
> apart?

Many miles.

Great post, Zach!
1732

From:
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 3:21pm
Subject: Rouben Mamoulian

CORRECTION: My last post quoted (admiringly) from a post by Tag Gallagher, which I managed to attribute to Fred Camper! My apologies to both men.

Mamoulian's slow pace and lengthy dialogue scenes perhaps reflect stage norms. Such long dialogue scenes were standard in much American theater of the 20th Century. Mamoulian has many credits as a stage director, and perhaps this just seemed "normal" to him. I found the dialogue interesting amd worthwhile in Golden Boy and Summer Holiday, and hard to take in Dr Jekyll and Becky Sharp...
When playwright Elmer Rice and director King Vidor adapted Rice's play Street Scene for the movies, they cut it drastically. Maybe as much as half of the original dialogue is gone. One can argue that this is largely an artistic improvement. While a few ideas are inevitably lost, the screen version is far more compelling.
Everyone's comments on Applause and City Streets make me long to see these movies!
Mike Grost
1733

From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:16pm
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

By all means, feel free to waddle (!) However, my comment
was intended to correct your self-criticism that you were
"simply (ab)using Mamoulian in order to identify what von
Sternberg does". My point, ill-expressed as it was, tried
to argue that it's perfectly okay to use Mamoulian in order
to identify the style of anyone else, from Sternberg to
Doris Wishman, as long as one can articulate one's
objections to his style. Hmmm. I'm not sure that's any
clearer...

Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)

--Bob Keser

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> I agree with everything Robert Keser writes about Mamoulian. I
think
> we're saying much the same thing. I also like CITY STREETS.
Thanks for
> the correction Spencer Tracy/Frederic March.
>
> But I don't understand the paragraph below. You wish me to
demonstrate
> a waddle?
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
>
> > However, when Tag notes that Mamoulian's "scenes waddle slowly
> > toward full belaborment of self-evident ideas", it doesn't matter
if
> > we're starting from a comparison with Sternberg or Feyder or
> > Christy Cabanne: if this is demonstrable in, say, Queen Christina
> > and Song of Songs and Blood and Sand and Summer
> > Holiday, then why not say so?
> >
> >
1734

From: Robert Keser
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 4:29pm
Subject: Re: Ozu, Late Spring

I agree that Bresson and Ozu seem to be polar opposites in terms of
acting. Bresson tries to actually bypass acting by waiting for the
(often non-professional) player to reveal a "natural", unmediated
reaction in a scene, whereas Ozu's players are professional actors
who are plying their art.

--Bob Keser

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Zach Campbell"
wrote:
...would anyone agree
> with me that the acting in an Ozu film and a Bresson film are miles
> apart?
1735

From: Joseph Kaufman
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:46pm
Subject: Re: Rouben Mamoulian

>I have never seen a film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remotely as good at
>Stevenson's novella. Stevenson's original is structured as a mystery story,
>and one doesn't learn the truth until the tale's finale. The 1920 silent
>version with John Barrymore seems awful, too.
>Mike Grost

My opinion, Mamoulian's is the best among the many film versions of the story.

BTW, LOVE ME TONIGHT will finally get its first video release (from
Kino) in the near future.
--

- Joe Kaufman

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1736

From: planet_jake
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 1:09am
Subject: Ingmar Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" **SPOILERS***

For the first time tonight I viewed Ingmar Bergman's "Through a glass
darkly", and something isn't quite clear to me, perhaps I wasn't
paying close attention, but I am known to miss the more subtle things
in films like this. Did Minus and Karin have an incestual
relationship? It seems to me they did, when she runs away from him to
the half-sunken ship and they embrace, she seems to be fighting the
urge, and later she almost seems to confess as much to her father,
now another question arises, Did Ingmar Bergman use this incestual
(?) relationship to illustrate the extreme sexual frustrations of
Minus? Or did he use it to illustate the extreme depths of of Karins
illness?
1737

From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 3:32am
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

And, of course, I'm the one who brought up the
> delightful Love Me Tonight.

One reason LOVE ME TONIGHT works so well is that the various
stylistic tricks (with sound, camera movement, editing, etc) are
openly put forward as 'stunts' to be enjoyed for their own sake. It's
not about personal emotion expressed through artifice, more like a
wonderfully ingenious puppet show. The characters barely seem to
exist in their own right -- maybe this is why they can transform
themselves so easily and completely?

Re Jekyll and Hyde adaptations, Renoir's TESTAMENT DU DOCTEUR
CORDELIER is very interesting, and maintains the mystery-story
structure.

JTW
1738

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 3:47am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

So you agree with my analysis of Mamoulian, but you like what I dislike
-- that the tricks overpower the characters...?

Tag.

jaketwilson wrote:

>
> One reason LOVE ME TONIGHT works so well is that the various
> stylistic tricks (with sound, camera movement, editing, etc) are
> openly put forward as 'stunts' to be enjoyed for their own sake. It's
> not about personal emotion expressed through artifice, more like a
> wonderfully ingenious puppet show. The characters barely seem to
> exist in their own right -- maybe this is why they can transform
> themselves so easily and completely?
>
>
1739

From: jaketwilson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 5:36am
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
> So you agree with my analysis of Mamoulian, but you like what I
dislike
> -- that the tricks overpower the characters...?

Well, I think his approach works in that particular case. The point
isn't the technical tricks themselves so much as the way they make
the story & characters seem provisional, lighter than air -- a bit
like in some Disney cartoons. E.g. in the sequence where 'Isn't It
Romantic' is passed from one setting to another, the sense is that
the song is controlling the characters, rather than the characters
expressing themselves through the song.

JTW
1740

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:07am
Subject: Through a Glass Darkly

Planet Jake,

I believe they do commit incest, and it's probably a good thing: the
brother is the only male character in the film who shows any signs of
life, leaving us with some reason to hope when Karin is hauled off to
the asylum. I agree with Robin Wood that Bergman hurt his own film by
making Karin insane, because her vision of the Spider God is the
vision of all his subsequent work, beginning with Winter Light, the
next film, which is my favorite. According to Wood, Bergman's real
self finally burst from its shell after decades of imposed religious
belief when he dreamed up the character of Karin, but he still had to
deny her in that film.

Two unorthodox observations:

I greatly prefer now to see Bergman dubbed. Partly that's my
prejudice - the sound of Swedish grates on my ear - but with all the
dialogue in Winter Light, I'd feel I was missing the film if I spent
all the time reading subtitles when I should be looking at the
images.

If calling the sister and brother in Glass Darkly representatives of
the life force seems odd, given their incest, apparently for some
people incest is not that big a deal. (When I met Marcia Gay Harden
while she was making Miller's Crossing, she indicated that as far as
she was concerned the brother and sister she and John Turturro play
in that film are an incestuous couple, adding that she had taught all
her brothers how to kiss when they were growing up in Texas.) I'm
reading John Boorman's autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy,
where he recalls that he and his free-spirited sister Wendy fell in
love when she dumped her Canadian husband and moved back in with the
family, and that they came very close to acting on their feelings.
Boorman notes drily: "That incest was a taboo would have recommended
it to her."

A good book, by the way. Boorman's films are as loony as they come,
but he is lucid and often eloquent about the experiences that
inspired them.
1741

From: Robert Keser
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:30am
Subject: Re: Ingmar Bergman's "Through A Glass Darkly" **SPOILERS***

planet_jake wrote:

> "Through a glass
> darkly"... Did Minus and Karin have an incestual
> relationship? It seems to me they did, when she runs away from him to
> the half-sunken ship and they embrace, she seems to be fighting the
> urge, and later she almost seems to confess as much to her father,
> now another question arises, Did Ingmar Bergman use this incestual
> (?) relationship to illustrate the extreme sexual frustrations of
> Minus? Or did he use it to illustate the extreme depths of of Karins
> illness?

It's a while since I've seen this one, but my feeling is that Bergman
purposely leaves the specifics of their relationship shadowy, knowing
that nailing down literally what happened would remove some of the
attractive ambiguity that gives audiences (and critics) something to
chew over. There are other examples in Persona and (as I remember)
The Magician, where Bergman drops suggestions of relationships
without clarifying them.

Incidentally, writing from Stockholm, the critic Vernon Young pointed
out that Through a Glass Darkly and L'Avventura opened in the same
week [in Sweden?] and he makes "a serious distinction between
Bergman's lifeless treatment and the compassionate culture of
Antonioni". Both filmmakers enjoyed a lot of attention in their
heyday, the 1960s and 70s, and as their output has now slowed
to a trickle for various reasons, both have somewhat fallen out
of favor lately, or at least out of the spotlight.

--Bob Keser

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1742

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Thu Sep 4, 2003 5:34pm
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

Robert Keser wrote:

> My point ... was ... that it's perfectly okay... as long as one can
> articulate one's objections to his style.

I hope I succeeded...
(It's easy to say why one doesn't like something. Damn difficult to say
why one does.)

>
>
> Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
> 'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
> refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
> I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
> Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)

Me too. It was his wife and son who said the name begins with V and
that we should say "von Sternberg" rather than "Sternberg." (I asked;
they didn't volunteer this!) I pointed out that usage is different in
Germany, and they replied that this is America and we can call ourselves
anything we want. (There's no doubt the "von" was an add-on. Some
people, like Clive Brooks, used to call him "Von" but I don't if this
was without humour.) Note that David Shepard puts him in the V's.
1743

From: Robert Keser
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 6:44pm
Subject: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher wrote:
>
>
> Robert Keser wrote:
> >
> > Incidentally, no one has responded to the name controversy:
> > 'von' or not-'von'? Doesn't it seem accepted practice to
> > refer to Stroheim, not von Stroheim? As a slave to consistency,
> > I prefer Sternberg to von Sternberg (but I'll call him Foghorn
> > Leghorn if someone pays me enough!)
>
>
> Me too. It was his wife and son who said the name begins with V
and
> that we should say "von Sternberg" rather than "Sternberg." (I
asked;
> they didn't volunteer this!)

That proves it: never ask!! (Did you interview them in
person, or was it an exchange of letters?)

I pointed out that usage is different in
> Germany, and they replied that this is America and we can call
ourselves
> anything we want.

Yes, they can. And we can call them whatever WE want. Ain't
democracy grand, at least compared to the Austro-Hungarian
empire?

(There's no doubt the "von" was an add-on. Some
> people, like Clive Brooks, used to call him "Von" but I don't if
this
> was without humour.)

Arthur Jacobsen, who was an assistant director at Paramount
in the 20s and 30s, said that Sternberg was so irksome and
hard to get along with that even someone as phlegmatic as
Clive Brooks would start dissing him as "von"! (That's in
one of the Director's Guild Oral History books).

>Note that David Shepard puts him in the V's.

That's more surprising, but he may believe in following
the exact usage in the onscreen credits.

--Bob Keser
1744

From: George Robinson
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 7:49pm
Subject: Israeli film

Brothers and sisters --

I had wanted to reply to Dan's e-mail on Israeli film last week but had ISP
problems (of my own making, to be absolutely fair) and only got back on-line
today. That said, here's what I had written:

I'm glad that the subject of Amos Gitai and Israeli film came up
last week or so. This is exactly the sort of highly intelligent, serious
film group on which I've long wanted to try out some thoughts on why Israeli
film developed so slowly.

And make no mistake about it, until the past decade or so,
Israeli film was pretty dire with the notable exceptions of Gitai and some
very fine documentarians. There were individual films that were creditable,
and Eli Cohen (best known here for "The Quarrel" and "Under the Domim Tree")
showed some promise, but the rest of it was Golan/Globus rubbish and the
like, designed for the very small domestic market.

I once asked a prominent curator of Jewish film if it was just
me, if I was missing something or if there were good films that didn't get
shown here or what. This is someone who goes to the Jerusalem Film Festival
every year, so it's a well-informed opinion. The reply I got was, "No, they'
re pretty lousy films."

Well, as I said in a previous posting, that has been changing
for about a decade.

I think that even for Orthodox auteurists, there is something to
be learned here. Why was Israeli film so bad for so long? I have a few
theories and have heard a few others.

The one that even Israelis I know favor is that the language
market is extremely small; there are, after all, only about 4 million Hebrew
speakers in the world. So a film has to do stupendous business at home in
order to recoup its costs. Hence, filmmakers must appeal to the lowest
common denominator to reach the largest audience.

Maybe. Of course, there aren't a lot of Danish speakers in the
world either (5.3 million in Denmark) but in recent years the Danes have
given us von Trier and the Dogme 95 gang. (Let's put aside how we may feel
about them; clearly they are making serious films with some aesthetic
aspirations, which is not what you'd say about Menachem Golan or Ephraim
Kishon). One big difference, though, is that there is a history of narrative
filmmaking in Denmark that goes back to the very beginnings of the silent
era and includes such world-class talents as Dreyer and Christensen. (It's
telling, on the other hand, that both of them had to work outside the
country more often than at home.)

Still, there may be some merit to the linguistic/economic
argument. Certainly it is getting harder to find English-language
distribution for foreign films. But that's another story for another time.

There are, I think, two interrelated historical factors that
militated against the emergence of an Israeli cinema of real quality in the
first 50 years of the nation's existence (besides the obvious fact that when
you are in a nearly perpetual state of war there are more important things
to spend money on than movie-making). Modern Hebrew, let us recall, is a
unique proposition, the first example in history of a "dead" language being
revived for modern use. So the problem isn't just that the market was/is
small; it's a relatively new market altogether. (Seen any good movies in
Esperanto lately?) Allied to that fact is that Israel was slow to develop an
indigenous Hebrew theater tradition, with Israeli playwrights still thin on
the ground into the 1960s. I haven't done any hard research on this but I
suspect that you won't find a vibrant national cinema in any nation that
didn't already have some kind of fairly developed theatrical tradition
beforehand, at least not before the 1980s and '90s when film and television
became such pervasive and dominant industries/arts that they could generate
a momentum of their own in developing countries. (This is purely speculation
on my part and even as I'm typing this, I can think of notable exceptions
all over sub-Saharan Africa, although at least one of the best of them -
Ousmane Sembene - came out of a Francophone literary tradition of long
standing.)

The other problem is quite simply that the Israeli industry and
film/TV academies essentially date from the 1960s and after, with the result
that their engines are driven more by TV than by theatrical film. And it
shows in the visual style (such as it is) of many Israeli filmmakers of the
'60s-'80s. You only need compare Gitai, who was trained outside of Israel
(and who hangs out with Bertolucci and people like that) with Eli Cohen, who
has worked as much for Israeli TV as on theatrical features. Cohen is not
untalented (he is a particularly good director of actors in fact) but
visually his films are constructed around the same
master-shot-into-duelling-closeups as your average TV drama. I doubt if he
would ever play with long takes like Gitai's or take his oblique approach to
narrative structure. (And I seriously doubt if he would ever have a film end
on as inconclusive a note as "Kedma.")

I see that changing with, among other things, the big influx of
Soviet �migr�s in the '90s. Dover Kosashvili, director of "Late Marriage,"
which is surely the best first feature from an Israeli filmmaker in a
decade -- I highly recommend "Blind Man's Buff" by Aner Preminger, which is
a first feature from about ten years ago and the last debut of such promise
that I've seen - comes out of the former Soviet Union; I don't know where he
went to film school, if he went to film school at all, but his film owes a
lot more to Jarmusch and Sirk than it does to previous Israeli models (other
than Gitai). "A Trumpet in the Wadi," a nice debut by Lina and Slava
Chaplin, is also the product of �migr�s from Russia, likewise "Yana's
Friends," a comedy that I rather like. Both the filmmakers and the subject
matter in these films are redolent of the former Soviet Union. But Avi
Mograbi, a video artist who makes absolutely hilarious and mordant
satirical movies/videos, is a native Israeli and his stuff looks more like a
cross between Ross McElwee and the Marx Brothers.

Go figure.

I don't know where this will end up. Box office receipts in
Israel have plummeted since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa intifada, and last
year's Israel Film Festival was mostly pretty disappointing. (Except for the
new Menachem Golan, which was every bit as awful as I expected; it's an
adaptation of one of A.B. Yehoshua's less successful novels that makes you
yearn for Merchant-Ivory.) The real question is, what happens when
Kosashvili and the other young filmmakers get to make their second features.
Or, more to the point, will they?

George Robinson

Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.

--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
1745

From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:15pm
Subject: Re: Auteur Theory, Charlie's Angels

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Dan Sallitt wrote:

> I was thinking about this a lot when MTV came along. Most of us
were
> accustomed to a cinema where the shot was a unit of meaning, so to
> speak: in other words, where a shot change meant a shift in our way
of
> looking, and where the contrast between two shots yielded
information.
> And then along came MTV, where shot changes no longer signified
like
> that, and where you'd go crazy in short order if you tried to make
them
> signify like that. Clearly the frequent, random shot changes were
doing
> something other than what I was used to - and whatever they were
doing
> quickly became codified for the audience, so it was pointless to
call
> these practices an aberration.

I'm not sure... Are music videos unique in this strategy, or is this
just rhythmic montage with a faster rhythm? (For example, is there
much difference between Dudow's setting of Brecht's
song, "Vorwaerts," in "Kuhle Wampe," and a music video?)

Also, is editing in which, as you write, "the contrast between two
shots yields information," really the norm? My preconception is that
this -- intellectual montage -- is rare. Of course it partly depends
on whether you mean diegetic or non-diegetic information. But my
impression is that in most films, meaning comes from within the shot;
editing just helps the narrative along, it's for continuity and
sometimes for emotive or rhythmic effect. (And sometimes it's just
pointless: for example, much as I like Fellini, I often get the
feeling that the only rationale for the editing is that one shot
ended and another is about to begin; there's no narrative, rhythmic,
or formal relationship between many shots.)

But I certainly could be very wrong about all this and wonder what
others think.

Paul
1746

From: Paul Gallagher
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:42pm
Subject: Re: Joseph Pevney (and James Goldstone)

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Enjoyed the posts on "what makes an auteur".
> Some directors were mentioned in passing, among them Joseph Pevney.
He
> directed some outstanding works for episodic television.
> Pevney made a whole series of Star Trek episodes. One can argue
that his
> episodes are the core of the series, and most of its best works.

I was very much a fan of the show in reruns when I was a child. I
recall reading David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek," where he
praises Star Trek's directors for their unobtrusive, self-effacing
style. I think this was the first time I encountered discussion of or
praise for a director. Pevney directed Gerrold's script of "The
Trouble with Tribbles." Gerrold might well have been thinking of
Pevney.

I vaguely recall what the Dec. 1963 Cahiers review of the American
cinema had to say about Pevney: something like, he has no trace of
style, but somehow we like him. I think Tavernier and Coursodon wrote
something similar, but more harsh: Pevney's incapable of adding "the
least trace of his taste" or "the least semblance of technical brio,"
but on his best days they're impressed by his gentleness, naivite,
and good will.

There was a brief discussion of Pevney on the Usenet newsgroup,
rec.arts.movies.past-films. I mentioned Tavernier's and Coursodon's
remark that Pevney's friendliness and charm in interviews might be
the reason for his brief moment in the spotlight of French criticism.
One poster responded: "They're so star-struck about directors over
there, they'll belly up for any hack ... that'll sit there
and play the 'auteur' game with them" -- which perhaps indicates the
status of Pevney (and French critics) with many film fans.

I saw some Star Trek episodes recently, and it was interesting
looking at them with new eyes, even as I recalled their narratives
vividly. Two episodes that impressed me dramatically and visually
were "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "What Are Little Girls Made
Of?", both directed by James Goldstone. They struck me as more
stylish than the norm for the series. So I'm curious about him. I saw
that IMDb indicates he was a visiting professor in film at Columbia
University.

Paul
1747

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 9:10pm
Subject: Re: Re: Auteur Theory, Charlie's Angels

>"(And sometimes it's just
pointless: for example, much as I like Fellini, I
often get the
feeling that the only rationale for the editing is
that one shot
ended and another is about to begin; there's no
narrative, rhythmic,
or formal relationship between many shots.)

But I certainly could be very wrong about all this and
wonder what
others think."

You're very wrong about this. Consider the opening
sequences of "8 1/2," and the climactic car ride of
"Toby Dammit." The whole of "La Dolce Vita" is a
master class in sequence-montage. There is nothing
arbitrary about the order of what we're seeing. And
scenes begin and end in excruciatingly delibrate ways.

Fellini is the greatest auteur of them all.

And that's undoubtedly why most proponents of the
auteur theory reject him so reflextively.

--- Paul Gallagher wrote:

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1748

From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 9:25pm
Subject: Pevney

In Back to God's Country and Yankee Pasha Pevney degrades
the lead (Rock Hudson, Jeff Chandler) - not a habit in Hollywood.
Tic? Obsession? Homophobia (Could anyone but Esther
Williams have known that Chandler was a transvestite?)?

Until such mysteries are solved, the work of the auteur theory is
not done.
1749

From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:08pm
Subject: Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) managed to watch Spencer
Tracy's transformation without a cut;

The following is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with Harold Kress, the film editor on the film:

"The shooting hadn't started yet. I went to see Spencer Tracy and asked him if he knew how they were going to do the tranistions from Jekyll to Hyde and Hyde to Jekyll. He said a still cameraman had taken several head shots of him. They hired 65 animators and were going to do it in the way they did the old film cards. They put this animation stuff on his face and told me to take it over to Walt Disney to see if they had any ideas. Disney said, 'This is terrible, it's a bunch of crap, you've got to find a better way.' I ran the two other Jekyll and Hyde pictures. Every time they showed Jekyll and Hyde, Frederic March dropped his hands down, they cut to the hand, hair started growing, cutaway, cutaway, all cutaways. I said to Specer, 'I've got an idea. The motion picture camera will be locked off, steel riveted to the stage floor so nobody can move it. Next to you we'll have one of those old-fashioned cameras with the big plate behind it and an artist who will sketch you. I'm only
going to shot your face, it will be so effective if we can see your face changing. There will be a long make-up table, all the pieces for your changes will be laid out and you'll be in a barber chair with wheels.' Spencer was getting so excited. We went to see the director, Victor Fleming, and he said, "Harold, Spencer and I have faith in you, go ahead and do it. You'll have to go up and see Victor Saville, he's the producer.' Saville said, "Young man you're just the film editor on this picture, this is none of your goddamn business and i"m going to have you fired." So I left the lot and went home. My wife Zelda said, "What are you doing home?" I said "I've been fired." Now the phone rings and it's the assistant director and he says. "We hear you're not on the lot, stick by the phone" Fleming canceled the day's shooting, he had Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, and Spencer Tracy on the set- that's an expensive day. He and Spencer went up to see Louis B. Mayer and they said, "We want
Harold to do it, it's the only way, or else we have to do it the old way with the cutaways." Louis B. Mayer picked up the phone, called Ben Goetz at the London Studios and said, "Call Victor Saville and tell him you have a picture that's in bad trouble over there and that he's got to go to London tommorrow morning."
Tracy was a dream to work with. There were over 40 make-up changes. To keep the registration perfect we had to put him back and realign him. An artist sketched him and we lined up his nostrils. You couldn't touch the camera. I was ten feet away with a remote control switch. The camera was never changed and overnight a guard was on the stage. I would say, "Okay SPence, get ready, we're rolling, now just a little grimace, a little more, you fight it, fight it, cut." That went on for 46 changes of make-up. There were just a few times when the eyes blurred, but I couldn't help it, I had to make a continuous series of dissolves. The result was that you would stay on his face. For the scene when he was dying, SPencer wanted to say something. I said, "We'll do it just like a music number with playback. We'll make the sound track first." I had a disk cut. When we shot it to playback he mouthed the words. I got a nomination just because of my work. The picture didn't get a nomination. The
editors all knew that I had directed Tracy. If the movie is not good, it's not going to be good for the stars or for the studio. It's not going to be good for your reputation, so what the hell, you do the best you can to come up with ideas."

Vinny

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1750

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 11:32pm
Subject: Re: Pevney

Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
Do you want a list? It goes on forever.
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> In Back to God's Country and Yankee Pasha Pevney
> degrades
> the lead (Rock Hudson, Jeff Chandler) - not a habit
> in Hollywood.
> Tic? Obsession? Homophobia (Could anyone but Esther
> Williams have known that Chandler was a
> transvestite?)?
>
> Until such mysteries are solved, the work of the
> auteur theory is
> not done.
>
>

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1751

From:
Date: Fri Sep 5, 2003 8:02pm
Subject: tutti-frutti

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Fascinating Posts! The Kress interview is really absorbing.
Have never seen Renoir's version (Dr. Cordelier). Would greatly like to.
The River (Renoir) will be on TCM tonight in the middle of the night. Very
interesting, and great use of color. This film really seems ancestral to
Satyajit Ray, who was Renoir's assistant on the film. ( I love Ray.)

James Goldstone and Star Trek
I liked "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" too. It has a script by the talented
Robert Bloch. It has been a long time since I've seen any Star Treks.

Joseph Pevney
Have never seen most of Pevney's theatrical work. "Man of a Thousand Faces"
is sympathetic, but a bit flat and dull in spots. It is thematically
interesting. The hero comes from a family of deaf people, and his talent is associated
with his origins in the deaf subculture. This culture is portrayed a gentler
and more loving than mainstream culture. And the hero has trouble adjusting to
mainstream culture outside of the deaf community.
This very much anticipates Mr. Spock on Star Trek. His Vulcan society is more
civilized and kinder than the rest of the universe. Like the earlier hero, he
is a talented representative of a subculture, now participating in the world
at large.
"Amok Time" takes us to the planet Vulcan. Celia Lovsky is good as a Vulcan
elder. The idea that a society could have a major female leader seemed
revolutionary in 1967. Lovsky might be best known to auteurists for her roles in Fritz
Lang pictures. She was the blind flower seller in "The Blue Gardenia" (a
favorite film) and the nurse at the start of "While the City Sleeps".
"Wolf in the Fold" deals with a whole planet of gentle people who only live
for pleasure. This is Hedonism raised to saintliness. Onnce again, the talented
Robert Bloch scripted. This is an interesting political idea.

Fellini
This auteurist regards Fellini as a major auteur. Favorite film: The Clowns.
Love many others, from Variety Lights to Intervista.
The car scene at the end of "Two Weeks in Another Town" (Vincente Minnelli,
1962) probably influenced the car scene in "Toby Dammitt".

Editing
Confession time: When watching films, I've been highly conscious for years of
composition, camera movement and color. But rarely notice the editing at all,
unless watching an official "montage classic" like The Man With a Movie
Camera. The attention paid to editing by members of a_film_by is a real eye opener!
Clearly, I'm missing something. (Please don't firebomb me over this - I
promise to be more observant in the future!)

Gesture
"The Man of a Thousand Faces" (Pevney, 1957) is a biopic about silent screen
star Lon Chaney. His parents were both deaf. My sister suggests that Chaney's
astonishing gift of gesture in his films is a result of Chaney's being raised
inside the deaf culture, where hand language is used for communication.
Jeanine Basinger's book on silent screen stars suggests that silent actors
used sweeping gestures involving their whole arms, in a way that is taboo among
modern actors, who are obsessed with underplaying, etc. The hero of Metropolis
(Fritz Lang, 1926) uses his whole arms in magnificent gestures, probably
directly coached by Lang. The finale has him and the other actors reaching out to
each other. It is very moving.

Mike Grost
1752

From: Tag Gallagher
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 1:22am
Subject: Re: Re: My Favorite Year: 1932

Robert Keser wrote:

> (Did you interview them in
> person, or was it an exchange of letters?)

Phone. Separately. Several times.

> Sternberg was so irksome and
> hard to get along with that even someone as phlegmatic as
> Clive Brooks would start dissing him as "von"! (That's in
> one of the Director's Guild Oral History books).

Lots of people dissed JVS. Lots of people didn't. I have a copy of an
unpublished int with Brooks (part of which I published in Cahiers); he
appears to have liked and admired JVS, which doesn't mean that he didn't
find things to diss about him.

I know two big books about John Ford where the authors went around and
collected every dissing story they could find and strung them together.
Funny thing, they didn't bother going around and collecting every
complimentary story, leaving the impression that there weren't any such
things to be found -- whereas the truth is closer to one diss-able
event for every 99 laudible events.

No one has bothered with JVS in a million years, except in Dietrich's
shadow, and in some wonderful passages in Maria Riva's book, in which a
very different man emerges than the one created by the cess pools of
journalism and rumor.
1753

From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 3:34am
Subject: Pevney

Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
Do you want a list? It goes on forever.

I'm a-callin' yuh, Ehrenstein. Let's see that list, or a finite
subsection thereof. Ya varmint!
1754

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:02am
Subject: Re: Pevney

Charlton Heston in "The Ten Commandments"
Charlton Heston in "The Naked Jungle"
Charlton Heston in "Touch of Evil"
Charlton Heston in "Soylent Green"
Charlton Heston in "Bowling For Columbine"
Paul Newman in "Sweet Bird of Youth"
Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"
Paul Newman in "Harper"
William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard"
William Holden in "Picnic"
William Holden in "Sabrina"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Stand-In"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Casablanca"
Humphrey Bogart in "Beat the Devil"
Humprey Bogart in "We're No Angels"
Cary Grant in "Sylvia Scarlett"
Cary Grant in "My Favoirte Wife"
Cary Grant in "Monkey Business"
Cary Grant in "Walk Don't Run"
James Cagney in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties"
James Cagney in "White Heat"
James Cagney in "Love Me or Leave Me"

This is just off the top of my head.

--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Leading men are ALWAYS degraded in Hollywood.
> Do you want a list? It goes on forever.
>
> I'm a-callin' yuh, Ehrenstein. Let's see that list,
> or a finite
> subsection thereof. Ya varmint!
>
>

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1755

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:06am
Subject: Re: tutti-frutti

>The car scene at the end of "Two Weeks in Another
Town" (Vincente Minnelli,
1962) probably influenced the car scene in "Toby
Dammitt".

Ah but "Two Weeks" was a reworking of the car scene
from "The Bad and the Beautiful."

"Toby Dammit" was inspired by actual incidents in the
life of Peter O'Toole -- who was originally set to
play the role until he read the script, realized he'd
be playing himself and chickened-out.

Why do you like "The Clowns" so much? It's a nice
little movie but scrcely in the same league with the
Magnum Opi di Fellini

--- MG4273@a... wrote:

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1756

From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:50pm
Subject: New member intro

Hello all. I've been lurking in the cybershadows reading the discussions
and after finding myself occasionally prompted to talk back to my monitor, I
thought I'd get involved. I don't know anyone in the group personally and
there's no reason anyone would know anything about me, so here's a little
intro.

Some bio: Born in 1974 in Bayside, Queens, NYC, moving across the city
border to Great Neck for my teen years. Studied business in college
(Bucknell Univ.) and came to Chicago for law school (Northwestern Univ.).
Having reconsidered and rejected the idea of a business law career these
last few years -- contemporaneous though probably not coincidental to my
burgeoning interest in art -- I'm currently considering a future in art
history and/or human rights work. My first, and still deepest, interest in
art was in post-war 20th century music (e.g., John Coltrane, John Cage,
James Brown). My exploration of film and visual art came more recently,
instigated by my first viewing of "Vertigo" on DVD about five years ago.
Incurable cinephilia took hold as I began watching and reading about film as
much as possible; e.g., see monthly logs:
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u (under "Doings")
A sense of my current tastes can be found in my "Best of 2002":
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u/doings/2002/jcg_2002roundup.htm

Over the last few years I've developed a great interest in avant-garde film,
though as a non-privileged filmgoer (i.e., neither academic nor critic) my
exposure to such work has been relatively limited; a posting follows on this
issue. A couple of years ago I started compiling a calendar of film & video
screenings in the Chicago area. It started as a way of recommending certain
films to my non-cinephile friends & acquaintances, and to encourage them to
see them on film rather than on video, but it grew into something a bit more
ambitious and earlier this year I made the calendar publicly accessible:
http://www.restructures.net/chicago/film.htm

In general, what I value in film and in all art is its capacity to challenge
and alter our individual/collective conceptual/perceptual faculties, while
providing moments of beauty/ecstasy, broadening and deepening our
understanding and appreciation of ourselves and the world around us. At
times I tend towards the dogmatic in insisting on the modernist notion of
expression-is-form, since the works I find most powerful are those which
explore the particular qualities of their medium in doing the magical work
of making the impossible possible. I find it difficult to verbalize about a
lot of this stuff, especially when it comes to describing and analyzing how
this functions in particular viewing experiences, but I'm hopeful that this
capacity will improve as I learn from the many eloquent voices in this
discussion group (many of whose published work I've already gained a lot
from).

Jason
-----------------------------------------
Jason Guthartz
jguthartz@a...
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u
-----------------------------------------
The major reason for art is to enable us to share -- and sensitize ourselves
to -- both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on
temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It's what you're
slowest to approve of that teaches you the most.
-- Raymond Durgnat

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1757

From: Jason Guthartz
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 4:50pm
Subject: Accessing the avant-garde

Tag wrote in the "Teaching Who King Vidor Is" thread:
> There's something murderous about hanging a painting in a museum, or
putting a movie there.

While recognizing and agreeing with the problems Tag alludes to regarding
"museum culture" I'd make these points:

1. There is a difference between watching a film and watching a video
transfer (broadcast via cable), and between watching a film in a theater and
a broadcast at home. Some works lose more than others in this change of
medium/context; no need to elaborate on this here.

2. Beyond the difference in image quality, the cable-TV context tends to
reinforce a certain mode of viewing centered on the
populist/entertainment/business/marketing end of visual culture, i.e., forms
of communication emphasizing narrative-with-a-message, just as museums (for
better and worse) induce an "art aura," asking for attention to form and for
contemplation/introspection. This is not to say one context is inextricably
linked to a particular mode of viewing, but that one context does in fact
have significant advantages over the other, whether due to their inherent
qualities or to how they are defined & deployed within society, or some
combination of the two. Resulting in...

3. Avant-garde film in particular suffers from the lack of regular
theatrical screenings. Because such works typically lose the most in the
film-to-video process, in terms of both appreciation and availability, the
only way those of us who have a serious interest in film-as-art have the
opportunity to experience even the smallest sampling of this vast amount of
work is via museums or similar institutions which have an existing
infrastructure that can provide public access to them on something like a
regular basis.

Of the cinephiles that make up this group, how many of us who do not have
privileged access (i.e., neither academic nor critic) have seen, or have had
the opportunity to see, anything close to a representational sampling of the
work of Anger, Breer, Deren, Frampton, Gehr, Jacobs, Kubelka, Lye,
Markopoulos, Menken, Rainer, Richter, Snow, Warhol, et al. As the best
known a-g filmmaker, Brakhage seems to have had a little better exposure
(especially after his death), though still nowhere near the amount worthy of
an artist of his significance. I know that in the last five years that I've
been seriously interested in film and living in a major center of
art/culture (Chicago), the opportunities have been severely restricted to
the occasional screening here and there by some of the filmmakers in the a-g
canon.

ASIDE: Even among those in this discussion group who have privileged
access, there doesn't seem to be broad interest in (discussing) a-g work.
I've found this disappointing and ironic, considering that these works are
least likely to be contested in terms of the "find-the-auteur" game.

I'm convinced that the main reason avant-garde film is considered
inaccessible (= unappreciable) is because it is inaccessible (=
unavailable). I don't expect a-g film to have the same level of
accessibility (in both senses) as films more closely connected to the
tradition of mainstream feature-length cinema, but I do hope/expect that
those with the means and who take art seriously (in our current state of the
world = museums) would treat film as equal among the visual arts. The two
major art museums here in Chicago, the Art Institute (AIC) and the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MCA), fail miserably in this regard, especially when
compared to their NYC counterparts. I can count on one hand the number of
classic a-g films screened by the AIC's Film Center per year**, while the
MCA even more shamefully doesn't have any regular film programming
whatsoever. The smaller, specialized venues do what they can, but it's
nowhere near enough. So if you have other plans for 8pm on that particular
Friday night, you're out of luck for the next decade or two (if you're
lucky).
** NOTE: The School of the AIC used to have public (& free!) screenings of
classic a-g work, but security measures implemented post-Sep-11 barred
non-students/staff from entering the building.

The problem is compounded further by the fact that much a-g work, to a
greater degree than non-a-g work, requires repeated screenings to appreciate
in any meaningful way (or so I'm told), yet such opportunities simply do not
exist. Many issues regarding programming practices can be cited, especially
those related to the length factor: while I'd gladly pay $10 just to see a
great 5-minute Brakhage film, those who program a-g work seem to feel
obligated to fill out a longer (frequently incoherent) program. The short
duration of a-g work may require a different approach to programming,
perhaps charging $2-3 for a 15-minute program, repeating the program
multiple times each day/week/month, as part of a venue's regular schedule
(e.g., "Hand-Painted Film Fridays"). I'm probably not the first to have
this idea, and it may not be financially feasible, but has anything close to
this ever been tried anywhere (outside of Anthology Film Archives)?

I don't wish to open a whole discussion about the validity of "canons" and
the insititutions that perpetrate/perpetuate them, but just want to make the
point that a whole world of great film exists that is currently unavailable
in any form, and as the existing infrastructure for access to art, museums
must take on this task. Unfortunately, outside of NYC, they only seem
willing and able to accomodate still photos and not moving ones, beyond
films/videos by artists who work in other media (e.g., Nauman, Serra).

Jason

P.S.: The release of works by Conner, Deren & Brakhage (and forthcoming by
Anger) on DVD points to this medium as an alternative means of accessing a-g
work. Given the aforementioned institutional neglect it may be our only
hope of seeing the stuff, and when large high-definition monitors become
affordable, seeing it properly.

-----------------------------------------
Jason Guthartz
jguthartz@a...
http://www.restructures.net/jcg2u
-----------------------------------------
The major reason for art is to enable us to share -- and sensitize ourselves
to -- both the surfaces and the structures of experiences existing on
temperamental and moral coordinates different from our own. It's what you're
slowest to approve of that teaches you the most.
-- Raymond Durgnat

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1758

From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 5:55pm
Subject: Re: Welcome Jason! /avant-garde cinema

Welcome Jason,

Great to have you aboard. I was impressed with your impassioned post concerning avant-garde cinema. Some thoughts:

There is not enough exposure to this world of film culture - I agree about the accessiblity situation.

Unfortunately there is a deeper problem. Even within the film community of filmmakers, cineastes, film critics, theorists etc there is a lack of education and even a hostility towards non-narrative cinema. As a film instructor I am amazed at the unwillingness of many to explore the roads traveled by the great filmmakers you have mentioned. For me this is the biggest problem. For many, avant-garde film is considered a ghetto.

Some quick snapshots:

In 1970 I was honored to have Jack Smith as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts. Unfortunately after one class he was fired because the students were outraged that he played, the Beach Boys, Christmas music etc. to a silent film by von Sternberg. The closed minded attitude quickly turned to anger as the masses stormed to the chairman's office to demand his removal. Instead I walked up to him, (I was 20 at the time) and asked him why he was playing these pieces of music. "I like conflict" was his response - that lesson has stayed with me to this day.

At a MOMA screening of Michael Snows Back and Forth a "suit" was so outraged over the film he would not stop stomping his feet in protest (the rest of the audience had already walked out) I turned and told him if he really didn't like the film he should leave.

Over the years people I very much respect have made stupid, vulgar and ignorant jokes about Brakhage Kubelka and others.

So I do feel that exposure, more venues and DVDs will help.

Most important are the voices that continue to educate us about these marvelous works of art - Our own Fred Camper is one of those courageous enlightened souls.

Spread the word - Keep the faith,

Vinny

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
1759

From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:17pm
Subject: Pevney

Charlton Heston in "The Naked Jungle"
Charlton Heston in "Touch of Evil"
Charlton Heston in "Soylent Green"
Charlton Heston in "Bowling For Columbine"
Paul Newman in "Sweet Bird of Youth"
Paul Newman in "Cool Hand Luke"
Paul Newman in "Harper"
William Holden in "Sunset Boulevard"
William Holden in "Picnic"
William Holden in "Sabrina"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Stand-In"
Humphrey Boagrt in "Casablanca"
Humphrey Bogart in "Beat the Devil"
Humprey Bogart in "We're No Angels"
Cary Grant in "Sylvia Scarlett"
Cary Grant in "My Favorite Wife"
Cary Grant in "Monkey Business"
Cary Grant in "Walk Don't Run"
James Cagney in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
James Cagney in "The Roaring Twenties"
James Cagney in "White Heat"
James Cagney in "Love Me or Leave Me"

This is just off the top of my head.>

David,

Quite a mixed bag. Let me ask you something more useful, along the
same lines - something I was thinking about a few years back based on
seeing an indie film called Cleopatra's Second Husband, and which I
brought up in my last conversation with Jean-Claude Biette: We've
seen forests felled to print theories about the way The Director's
relationship to The Actress gets written into the film (castrated
metteur-en-scene plots, the woman as passive object of the male gaze,
the fetish-woman, etc.). What about The Actor?

Cleopatra's Second Husband is a very interesting - and rather
ghastly - film about a couple who take in a guy who eventually ends
up shtupping them both - he also has a gf who comes and goes, Losey-
like, along with the wife, who was having trouble getting pregnant at
the start of the film anyway and departs in the third act. At the end
the husband traps the guy - who is played by a typical present-day
young actor type, so one really thinks of him as an actor - in a
coffin-like box where he watches him die of starvation through a
video camera. After that, the couple is reestablished, and the wife
gets pregnant. It's by the director of Better Living with Circuitry.
I don't know if it ever got a release.

My question to Biette and his friend Benjamin Esdraffo over egg
creams in the restaurant of the Paris Holiday Inn in 1999 was the
same I have posed above, referring back to a written observation of
JCB's that great directors film both sexes the same - I'm remembering
badly, and I'd have to go back to the issue of Trafic where he said
that to get it right, so don't everyone jump on it.

The question led to an interesting discussion between JCB and BE
about the fact that French directors, unlike Americans, didn't
eroticize actors until Alain Delon, who had previously worked with
Visconti, came along and changed everything. I brought up Geradrd
Phuilippe as a counter-example and they both laughed. (Biette
observed that in Hawks it's a treatment usually reserved for the
second banana - Dewey Martin in Land of the Pharohs - whereas in De
Mille everyone and everything, even a scarab ornament, is eroticized.)

I recounted the strange plot of Cleopatra's Second Husband and asked
if it was in any way revelatory of directors' relationships to actors
in general, and Benjamin said that he thought actors were asked to
sacrifice themselves for films - again, probably not his word: it may
have been something like "abimer" - in a way that actresses weren't.
Not all, but some of your examples, might speak to that. Certainly
what I saw Pevney doing to Hudson in Back to God's Country did.

David? Anyone?
1760

From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:18pm
Subject: Re: Accessing the avant-garde

Great post -- it's a big problem all right. I've seen some work by
most of the names you mention, but nowhere near as much as I'd like
to; certainly in my part of the world public screenings are few and
far between, though prints can often be sought out and viewed by the
sufficiently determined individual. One of my great regrets is that
back in 1995 when a Michael Snow retrospective came to Melbourne, I
wasn't smart enough to forget about my exams and attend -- like the
opportunity's ever going to come again in my lifetime!

It's doubly annoying that, apparently because it's easier
logistically, most galleries seem infinitely more willing to screen
visually dreary "video art", nor are they particularly cognisant of
the value of film as such. Some time ago I attended a touring
exhibition of Len Lye's artworks, including a number of his films
projected on a video loop -- roughly equivalent to exhibiting framed
reproductions of oil paintings in place of the real thing. When I've
seen Lye's early films in decent 16mm prints, the colours just pop
off the screen; on video, most of that life disappears.

I think TV and museums run about even in transmitting a potentially
obstructive set of messages about how a particular film "ought" to be
experienced. I'm not sure that TV necessarily privileges narrative
(again, what about music video?) but then I don't see "narrative-with-
a-message" as a negative, or necessarily "populist", category. Maybe
for related reasons, I have problems with "avant-garde"
and "experimental" as blanket terms to describe the kind of films
you're talking about, and "non-narrative" even more so. There is
certainly "narrative" in Deren, Anger, Markopoulos and others, even
if not of a conventional kind. One alternative might be to
distinguish between "lyric" and "dramatic" forms of cinema -- but
maybe we need to retain "lyric" as a more specific label?

JTW
1761

From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:20pm
Subject: Tutti Fruti

I Clowns is my favorite Fellini, too. It's the ars poetica of the
oeuvre - it gives me enormous pleasure. Fellini Satyricon is second.
1762

From: jaketwilson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:36pm
Subject: Re: Pevney

This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.

Two words: Jack Lemmon.

JTW
1763

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney

Quite True.

And that's why he's the quintessential fin-de-siecle
actor.
--- jaketwilson wrote:
> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like
> male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e.
> stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early
> '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> JTW
>
>

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1764

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 7:55pm
Subject: Re: Tutti Fruti

What is it then about "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2" that
marks them as lesser works for you?

--- hotlove666 wrote:
> I Clowns is my favorite Fellini, too. It's the ars
> poetica of the
> oeuvre - it gives me enormous pleasure. Fellini
> Satyricon is second.
>
>

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1765

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:03pm
Subject: Re: Pevney

"The question led to an interesting discussion between
JCB and BE
about the fact that French directors, unlike
Americans, didn't
eroticize actors until Alain Delon, who had previously
worked with
Visconti, came along and changed everything."

Ce n'est pas vrai! Pas de tout!

Has everyone forgotten Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais ?

And Jean Cocteau and Edouard Dermithe?

Marcel Carne's work is also worth reviewing in this
regard.

Though I'd be the last one to deny the seismic shoft
Delon created.

--- hotlove666 wrote:

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1766

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: Welcome Jason! /avant-garde cinema

Tell us more about Jack Smith, vinny!

--- vincent lobrutto
wrote:

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1767

From: George Robinson
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:10pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney

Or Jerry Lewis.
g

Cry later, but for now let's enjoy the laughter.

--Tupac Shakur, "God Bless the Dead"
----- Original Message -----
From: "jaketwilson"
To:
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 3:36 PM
Subject: [a_film_by] Re: Pevney

> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> JTW
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>
>
>
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>
>
>
>
1768

From: vincent lobrutto
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:41pm
Subject: Re: More about Jack Smith

Hey David,

Thanks for asking.

I was an art student at the time at SVA, I graduated high school in January and needed to be in school in order not to be drafted while I waited to begin film school which began that fall. So this was an elective. The name of the course was either film history or looking at film - it was not catalogued as a experimental film course. In Jack Smith's mind it was a history course. He, I learned later was a great admirer of von Sternberg. The film was The Last Command (1928) which really blew me away!. I was this 20 year old kid from Queens, New York who had been making his own 8mm movies and was soaking up everything I could about the cinema. So the students in the class were not film students but mainly art students. Jack Smith was this tall, skinny very, very intense guy wearing a skull cap. He introduced the film in a scholarly manner. No one in the room knew who he was. Later during that summer I read the Film Culture reader and realized who had taught my class! It was fucking Jack
Smith! Without explanation he worked the turntable (a pre-history of DJing) an played this eclectic mix, classical, show tunes, latin music, Xmas tunes. I really think it was the Beach Boys that took it over the edge for this un-enlightened group (present company excluded). During the break I went over to speak to him. I was really curious about his concept. Later I would learn this is the way he scored his films! That's all he said to me, "I like conflict." I said, "Thank you" and tried not to get stomped by the charge of the rest of the class to complain. As the second half of the class and the film proceeded I really understood what he was doing. By altering the context of the music and the film narrative two things became clear, the visual storytelling was constant but the changing music supported and contrasted the story in ways I could never have experienced in any other way. Their were a lot of unhappy campers at the end of the first class. He actually returned the next week.
This time he was with a huge entourage that lined the walls of the class. I wish I knew who was there that day, it had to be a who's who of experimental film and the NYC art scene. From there it is a bit of a blur, I don't remember what he showed, the animosity in the air caused such bad vibes it was impossible to concentrate but he plunged on with his game plan. The art Nazi's won that day but not without a fight. Jack did not give up - he was yanked. The experimental filmmaker Jud Yalkut taught an experimental film class in the film school. He was an amazing teacher and a great guy. He showed many of his film collaborations with Nam June Paik, Snow, Brakhage, had Carolee Schneemann in class who showed us Fuses - Man!, was that intense, the film alone, and with her sitting there... Amy Taubin is on our faculty now, she teaches classes in avant-garde film and the role of women in cinema so the tradition carries on...

I have a lot to thank Jack Smith for, god rest his soul. He taught me valuable film lessons and to always be curious. No one in that class asked him why he was doing what he was doing - they just got mad - as a teacher every time a student expresses curiousity I know they are on the path - ask a lot of questions - you never know the answers unless you do or who is giving them.

Vinny

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1769

From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 8:51pm
Subject: Re: Pevney

--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson" wrote:
> This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like male leads in
> Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e. stripped of both
> authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and early '60s.
>
> Two words: Jack Lemmon.

Arthur Lake was embodying this degradation to perfection in the
Blondie movies, beginning 15 years before Jack Lemmon made his film
debut.

Laurel & Hardy were emascualted by "the wives" -- and only a chubby
chaser good find any eroticism present in Oliver Hardy.

-- Damien
1770

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 9:06pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pevney

Ah yes.

And as I'm sure we all remmeber, Arthur Lake married
Marion Davies' daughter by WRH, passed off for years
as her "niece."

--- Damien Bona wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jaketwilson"
> wrote:
> > This is just a theory, but somehow it feels like
> male leads in
> > Hollywood became more easily "degraded", i.e.
> stripped of both
> > authority and eroticism, in the late '50s and
> early '60s.
> >
> > Two words: Jack Lemmon.
>
> Arthur Lake was embodying this degradation to
> perfection in the
> Blondie movies, beginning 15 years before Jack
> Lemmon made his film
> debut.
>
> Laurel & Hardy were emascualted by "the wives" --
> and only a chubby
> chaser good find any eroticism present in Oliver
> Hardy.
>
> -- Damien
>
>

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1771

From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Sep 6, 2003 9:08pm
Subject: Re: Re: More about Jack Smith

Wow that's great to read about, Vincent.

My "Film: The Front Line -- 1984"(Arden Press) has a
chapter entirely devoted to Smith.

--- vincent lobrutto