by ·Comments Off on Level Five & Immemory (Chris Marker)

Level Five (1997)

La Jetee is often called Chris Marker’s only fictional film, but others have fictional frameworks or false narrators. This one is the prime example, casting actress Catherine Belkhodja (weirdly – thanks, IMDB – her daughter played the Diva in Fifth Element this same year) to play a fictional narrator before the cameras, not just in voiceover. She writes a book on a computer which is shared with her man, who is writing a video game based on the battle of Okinawa. They both research on an internet-like computer system called (what else?) OWL. Sometimes Chris speaks in his own voice, which seems unusual – is he supposed to be the never-seen game programmer?

Some philosophy about the nature of communication and computers – she feeds her antique Mac nouns as commands to see its response (“I don’t know how to sardine”) – and about the permanence of the past. No matter what variables you change in the Okinawa simulator, the results are the same. She says computers have become her memory, which obviously strikes a chord with me, sitting here typing about movies I’ve seen so I don’t forget them. Besides Catherine and her OWL, most of the movie is devoted to exploring the story of Okinawa, a Japanese island where a large portion of the rural locals committed suicide for fear they’d fall into the hands of barbarian Americans during a brutal WWII battle.

Okinawa memorial footage shot by Nagisa Oshima:

My favorite bit, about a man filmed falling to the ground engulfed in flames:

I know where Gustave is from. You told me his name was Gustave. I’d seen him a hundred times. Nobody had ever filmed a man burning alive so close, a lulu for war documentaries. The unknown soldier, in full kit, holding his own flame. He was carted around battlefields, like a war-artist on tour with a unique act. Gustave in the Philippines, Gustave in Okinawa. I even saw him in a Vietnam movie, still burning 20 years later. I viewed so much newsreel I knew Gustave at birth. Filmed in Borneo, by Australians. The interesting thing is that, at the end of the original shot, you can tell he doesn’t die. He gets up again. You feel he’ll get over it like the napalm girl in Saigon. That ending has always been cut in all documentaries. A born symbol doesn’t get out of it so easily! He testifies against war, you cannot weaken his testimony for the sake of a few frames. Truth? What is truth? The truth is, most didn’t get up.

Catherine dancing with an emu:

–
Immemory (1998)

I watched a nice transfer of Level Five on my laptop, and there are few movies that would seem more appropriate to view as a computer file rather than in cinemas or on television. But Immemory isn’t a movie at all – a CD-Rom with photos and collages, writings, articles and film clips, meant to be navigated instinctually, like a memory. There’s an index in case you want to cheat and view it exhaustively. I tried to read it like a book, going to each section in turn and reading forward through them all, taking side trips when I felt like it, but then returning where I left off. Really wonderful and fun, with more straight autobiography than you usually get from a Marker film – I enjoyed it more than Level Five.

Some choice pages:

by ·Comments Off on Adventure in Sahara (1938, D. Ross Lederman)

Having completed my quest to watch all movies Sam Fuller directed, I took a victory lap with this action revenge flick based on a story he wrote.

Pilot Wilson (Paul Kelly of Side Street, Crossfire) hears his brother has died in Niger, immediately enlists in the French Foreign Legion, asks to serve under Captain Savatt (villain specialist C. Henry Gordon) but doesn’t tell anyone why. Among the men: Poule (Marc Lawrence, whose final film was Looney Tunes: Back in Action), a bunch of guys who want the sadistic Savatt dead, a fellow who’s always pining after his girl, and the decent second-in-command Lt. Dumond (small-mustachioed Robert Fiske, mostly from westerns). The men make a big deal over Wilson being American, but despite their French names they all sound quite American. Wilson takes the Cool Hand Luke martyr role and plots to overthrow the wicked Savatt.

Paul Kelly is quite possibly the guy on the left:

Lorna Gray (of those awful late-30’s Buster Keaton shorts) was Wilson’s girl back home, a fellow pilot, and since she hasn’t heard from him in a long while she flies to Africa, crashes her plane into the sand and wanders into the base only to find a mutiny in progress.

Most of the men successfully take over the base and send the mad captain on a death march through the desert, but incredibly he survives and returns with troops to take back his fort. The mutineers hold off the reinforcements until desert hostiles attack, forcing the two sides to work together. In the ensuing court martial, Lt. Dumond breaks his silence and tells his superiors that the men had extenuating circumstances to revolt since Savatt had been a demon – so Wilson waits a few token months in jail then gets to rejoin his hot pilot girl. I guess nobody thought to blame the mutineers for the lives they cost among men sent out with Savatt who didn’t make it out of the desert, or casualties in the fight before they opened their gates to the reinforcements. Not a very well thought-out revenge plot, overall.

Savatt is not amused:

Lederman had been a director since the 20’s, and his final film was 1951’s The Tanks Are Coming, also with story by Sam Fuller. I thought this was not bad for a standard 30’s action movie until the end, when due to crappy use of stock footage I saw the same man fall off his horse three times. I liked the music (mostly stock), some of which sounded suspiciously like that of Star Wars. Screenwriter Maxwell Shane later directed a few pictures, including Nightmare with Edward G. Robinson. Some fine work by cinematographer Franz Planer, who had worked on Murnau’s Finances of the Grand Duke and movies by Max Ophüls, before shooting King of Kings for Nick Ray.

Charles Moore played the boot polisher, would soon move on to better things, working with Capra and Hawks before becoming Preston Sturges’s favorite black actor to humiliate.

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It’s Auteur Completism Month! I try to watch all the movies by my longtime favorite filmmakers – Fuller, Lang, Jarmusch, Cocteau, Maddin and so on – but sometimes a couple titles fall through the cracks. Either I can’t find them or they’re just not a priority. Auteur Completism Month is meant to take care of that.

Sam Fuller is the one whose movies I’ve tried the hardest to see, buying a bunch from bootleg tape traders in the dark days before they all came out on DVD. This was the last lingering title on my original list, and it snuck out on disc a few months ago. IMDB has since added a bunch more titles Sam supposedly directed – six episodes of The Iron Horse and something called The Dick Powell Theatre – but I’d rather check out the movies he wrote, like The Klansman, The Deadly Trackers, The Command, The Tanks Are Coming and Confirm or Deny.

A hammy Tony Perkins introduces the series, an inadequate replacement for his onetime director Hitchcock. As far as I’m concerned Patricia Highsmith, on whose stories this series are based, is inadequate as well, but I shouldn’t judge based on a single short story. In fact, Hitch himself adapted her story for Strangers on a Train.

This story is ridiculous, but the actors are game and Fuller is freaking out in full, free Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street mode. He must figure they wouldn’t have called him if they’d wanted a cheap but professional straightforward television production – in this post Shock Corridor (in fact, post White Dog) era, they wanted Rebel Fuller. So he threw all he had at this story of a doomed modern chicken farm, including an awesomely-edited black and white musical dream sequence, nutty angles, nuttier acting, zooms and camera shots from a chicken’s point of view – literally inside a chicken eyeball.

Gross drifter-looking John (Cris Campion of Altman’s Aria episode and Polanski’s Pirates) shows up at his aunt and uncle’s farm, discovers they’re into automated chicken farming these days. Caught him sharing inappropriately suggestive looks with aunt Helene (spanish Assumpta Serna of Wild Orchid, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) when not being ranted at about the wonders of chicken farming by crazed, desperate, possibly loaded uncle Philippe Léotard (older brother to France’s former minister of defense, had recently been in an Agnes Varda movie, less recently in Truffaut’s Two English Girls).

Aunt Helene looks crazed:

Uncle Ernie demonstrates his enthusiasm for chicken farming:

The couple’s daughter Samantha Fuller’s little cat dies as soon as John arrives – a bad sign. There’s some time-killing business. Neighbors Manuel Pereiro (Pod People) and Christa Lang come to visit. Then Samantha herself dies by suffocating in the grain (possible references: A Corner in Wheat, Vampyr) and her parents lose it. Helene frees the chickens who kill uncle Ernie then gather outside under the watchful eye of the single rooster. And Helene starts making out with her nephew (who often looks like a scarecrow). Shot by Alain Levent (Cleo from 5 to 7, The Nun). Some corny dialogue and ominous keyboard music and abuse of the song “Old Macdonald,” but a cute movie. Anyway, a good November 1 transition movie from SHOCKtober to Auteur month.

Christa Lang:

Some chickens were almost definitely harmed in the making of this picture.

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Films de France says:
“Fantômas (1964) is certainly a very different film to Fantômas (1913), although both were targeted at mass cinema audiences. Whereas Feuillade’s film is a chilling and atmospheric work which succeeds in conveying the menace of Fantômas, André Hunebelle’s version is little more than a conventional action comedy which is far more concerned with trivial comic stunts than characterisation. Because their approaches are so different, it is difficult, and perhaps unfair, to make comparisons between the two films.”

The French dutifully line up for the latest Fantomas movie:

I disagree, and shall proceed to make comparisons between the two films. The original was wonderful, groundbreaking, while this one is a bit of fluff that would seem demeaning to the great Jean Marais – except that I somehow had him confused with Jean Gabin. Marais… let’s see, he was in those Cocteau movies and Donkey Skin, and before this he made The Iron Mask, Captain Blood and The Hunchback of Paris, so on second thought, this seems right up his alley. Marais plays Fandor the journalist, a sidekick to chief inspector Juve in the Feuillade, but here his rival. With Fandor’s type of sensationalist journalism, Fuller would’ve made him a villain, but Hunebelle makes him our hero. I think we’re supposed to like him, but it’s hard to tell, because I think by the end we’re also supposed to like Juve, a nasty, hateful little man.

A rare smile from Juve after a prolonged earplug gag:

First half of the movie is barely a movie at all, people standing still and talking. Sometimes there’s a joke, usually one that tries too hard. Sometimes cute comic sound effects play on the soundtrack. Ineffectual Juve is Louis de Funes, supposedly a big enough star to make Marais jealous, but with my fancypants Criterion-groomed New Wave bias, I haven’t heard of his other movies. Fandor’s got a fiancee (Mylene Demongeot of Bonjour Tristesse and Tashlin’s Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell) and Fantomas, who wears a blue robot mask when he’s not being played by Marais, has a girl (Lady Beltham – remember her?) played by some magazine model. It heats up in the second half with some fun vehicle chases, almost becoming a worthwhile action-comedy were it not for the comedy. I was glad that Mylene takes an active role by the end, taking helicopters to rescue people, and that it’s always the men who are in distress.

Jean and Mylene:

Ah, so Fandor ticks off the great criminal Fantomas by faking an interview, so Fantomas kidnaps him and commits some robberies wearing a Fandor mask. He also wears a Juve mask, getting the chief in trouble with his own subordinates. The two victims grudgingly team up and fail to catch him, because there are sequels. Hunebelle made two more in the Fantomas series with the same stars, and also a few OSS 117 movies. People in the 60’s liked this sort of stuff.

Jean Marais will return… on television!