Brandon's movie memory

“You underprivileged bastard!”

Iconic Hopper, slightly blurry:

A strange movie in many ways. For instance, no opening credits then after 12 minutes it says “a film by Dennis Hopper”… then after 12 more minutes we get the title. Hopper plays a different sort of hippie drifter loner. He’d like to get married and have a steady job, but on his terms. He worked as a stunt man on a film about Billy the Kid (under director Sam Fuller, in a cameo) in Peru, but seems alienated at the wrap party, only comfortable in smaller groups.

When the production leaves, he stays behind with local girl Maria, idyllic until a priest tries to get Hopper’s help when locals pretend to be making their own movie, with real violence, not understanding the Hollywood fakery. Maria also starts getting him down – turns out she’s not satisfied with the natural paradise that Hollywood Dennis had envisioned. She wants all the American conveniences, which an out-of-work stuntman can’t afford. He turns to the elusive fast-buck by helping his shady friend Don Gordon (Bullitt) try to strike gold, but that ends in failure and embarrassment.

Don Gordon and Donna Baccala, whose only other film was Brainscan:

From what I’d heard I was expecting a rambling incoherent mess of a film, a drugged-up slog making no real sense. But it’s a right proper movie, and a good one. There’s much more to it though; more plot and characters than I’ve mentioned, events sliding out of order, flash-backs-and-forwards. Reference to someone who died during the film shoot. At the end there are “scene missing” cards and a slate onscreen, we see a retake of a scene we just watched, and people start breaking character as the movie winds itself down.

Nice garfunkly folk music throughout. Maybe they’re pushing it when they play a Jesus song while Dennis is dazed and wounded. After the gold mine idea goes bad he rampages through the old movie set and is imprisoned by the local “filmmakers” with their wicker camera. “They want me to die in the movie like Dean did” – so he named his dead friend Dean. “That’s what’s wrong is we brought the movies – that’s where we made our mistake.”

The priest: “They didn’t want to come to my church anymore. They got carried away by that game. So I just wanted to show them that the same moralities that exist in the real church can exist here in the movie church. I hope that after this game is over, morality can be born again.”

Priest Tomas Milian of Traffic, also starred in an Antonioni film and a Django movie:

Mubi explains it all:

The success of Hopper’s Easy Rider gave many young filmmakers the opportunity to work in Hollywood under the studio system. In 1970, Universal hired five “young genius” directors to make pictures for them. Hopper was one of these and developed a script with Steward Stern, the writer for Rebel Without a Cause, about the process of moviemaking and its effect on the natives of a remote and primitive village in Peru where it is being shot.

The Last Movie was the result – an amazing milieu of cinema and the decade it was created in. Hopper is a stunt man and wrangler on a big budget western, with which Hopper infused the presence of Sam Fuller, Sylvia Miles, Toni Basil, Henry Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell and the cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs. After the production leaves town, Hopper’s life starts to get a little insane, torn between a new movie producer in town, a buddy (the great Don Gordon) and his quest for gold, and the incredible, ritualistic movie being “shot” by the locals using a wicker camera and boom mike. Under the surface bubbles the genius of the film, dealing with friendship, loyalty, the superstitious nature of filmmaking and the notion of film genre.

Although it received the only award given at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, Universal refused to distribute the film unless Hopper re-edited it. Hopper was intransigent, and Universal gave The Last Movie only token distribution and the picture was shelved.

Sam Fuller:

Only two user reviews on Mubi. One says “it’s wildly textured, emotionally intense, covers a lot of thematic ground, but its all of a piece-it works.” and the other, “a truly loathsome work of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, whose charms include smug, playful racism, and casually brutal misogyny.”

Peruvian “director” frames up a shot:

Wicker-cam:

MZ Seitz on Hopper’s filmmaking:

Although he directed just seven features, his style is quite distinctive. It’s ragged and intuitive, more sensual than logical, intoxicated by drugs, sex and music. And to greater or lesser degrees, all of his films address the individual’s struggle to survive within a machine without becoming a cog — the central narrative of Hopper’s long and strange career, with its youthful promise, adult madness and autumnal wisdom.

Z. Campbell:

The Last Movie is the only film I’ve seen that makes me think that it well and truly is an ‘anti-Western.’ (Though: this much-maligned genre that I love so much didn’t actually need ‘post’ or ‘neo’ updates–it had a strong critical component to it from the classical era onwards.) The Last Movie is quite possibly the only true and intentional avant-garde feature film I’ve seen from Hollywood. It shatters its own sense of fiction, of narrative illusion, it’s just celluloid material projected, and in so doing foregrounds the personal & cultural situations which constitute these fictions. Apocalypse Now? Child’s play–everything Coppola tried to do in his film on violence and imperialism and cinema, Hopper has already done–better–by 1971.

Maria and the city: Stella Garcia was also in a Clint Eastwood western called Joe Kidd.

Mrs. Anderson: Julie Adams was great in this. Hopper cast her in Catchfire twenty years later, and twenty years earlier she’d starred in Creature from the Black Lagoon.

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The American Dreamer (1971)

“A camera is always a questioning instrument”

Also watched a washed-out old VHS of a truly ridiculous documentary on Hopper made during the editing of The Last Movie. Not about The Last Movie at all, just a portrait of a hippie for people fascinated by the Easy Rider freakshow. It’s everything that Lions Love was accused of being. Hopper gives his views on spirituality but mostly talks incessantly about sex. The movie takes up plenty of time showing him shooting guns and getting naked, and even writes him a theme song.

“There’s no honest men in the movie business except me.”

An hour in, the movie gets more interesting when Hopper starts to question and criticize the filmmakers methods, and to their great credit they left this in there. The doc is made by L.M. Kit Carson – David Holzman himself, who’d later write the terrible Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 starring Hopper – and Larry Schiller, who later made not one but two JonBenet Ramsey movies. I’d heard that The Last Movie was a disaster and that this intrepid documentary shows why, but I found the opposite to be the case.

“I don’t need to have people make movies about me.”

“This movie, it’s a nice idea, whether it’s damaging or whether it isn’t,
it doesn’t really matter to me.”

An early blast against the Vietnam war. Well, not TOO early – made at a time when the war had dragged on and people were already enraged about it, but when the mass media hadn’t yet jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. Uses all the stock footage we’ve been seeing for years – guy shot in the head, napalm-burned children running down the street, aerial footage of beautifully-colored bombs destroying the lives of people below – and adds incriminating interviews with soldiers (inside a brothel!), politicians (a general is quoted as saying that “orientals” value human life less than we do) and disillusioned veterans, many of whom are gradually revealed to be amputees.

My favorite bit is when a government source (I can’t remember who, actually) speaks about the origin of the war. North Vietnam was being occupied by France, and shortly after WWII, Ho Chi Minh wrote letters to the U.S. asking for its support in his fight against the evil colonialist French, little guessing that we’d replace the French as his country’s main oppressor twenty years later. Not that I’m taking his side – he sounds like a really crappy guy. Movie won the oscar for best documentary, but the golden globe went to the far safer choice Animals Are Beautiful People.

RK Brigham:

When the film first appeared in 1974, its sympathetic and complicated treatment of average Vietnamese created a sensation. For years, the news media and policymakers had given Americans their only view into the lives of Vietnamese peasants, and that presentation was crude. … Few stories of the war had included such moral statements about the impact of high altitude bombing on civilians. Fewer still had shown that U.S. aerial assaults targeted both North and South Vietnam, that all Vietnamese citizens lived in fear of attacks.

The energy crisis, inflation, rising unemployment, and Watergate led to an almost narcissistic obsession with what the war had done to us. Hearts and Minds challenged that predilection by forcing viewers to consider what the war had done to the Vietnamese. As uncomfortable as it may have been for many Americans, it now seems clear that Hearts and Minds was the first step in coming to terms with a conflict that threatened to destroy the social fabric of the country.

Buy from Amazon:
Hearts and Minds DVD

Shanks (1974)

“The town drunk with a shrew for a wife and a deaf mute for a brother-in-law”

The movie has silly, cartoonish music by Alex North which belongs in a goofy porno comedy, just a few years before North’s lowest low point in Wise Blood. He was oscar-nominated by the tin-eared academy, but fortunately they awarded the great Nino Rota the honors instead.

Shanks (Marcel Marceau) is a ridiculed mute puppeteer hired by rich Mr. Walker (also Marceau!) to control dead people using a three-button remote? I don’t remember why. Honestly, it was late at night and it was a very silly movie and I watched it while assembling Ikea furniture. But here are some notes I took:

The miracle of bringing dead animals to life is achieved cinematically by using live animals
Suddenly an underage love interest named Celia.
The drunk gets killed by a reanimated chicken in slow motion
Flowery intertitles

Wife is hit by a car – I’m not giving murderous Marceau credit for that one
TV laugh track during sinister scenes
He makes them do an awful lot with just three buttons

Mr & Mrs Barton is the couple, mute is Malcolm
Perverse to star a celebrated mime but have all the other actors play fun reanimated dead people [this was before I realized Marceau also played Mr. Walker, the first to be hilaiously reanimated]

Silly-ass music

“The outside world of evil,” says a title card which burns away revealing… youth on motorcycles. Still the greatest threat to society in 1972: mustache dudes on motorcycles.

Mata Hari is the bad girl
Good girl is killed and, let’s face it, probably raped. Typical 70′s.

Closing title card unsubtly tells us “Good versus Evil,” but I wouldn’t exactly call Marceau “good,” just maybe in comparison with the others in this movie. He’s also shown to be a better fighter than the leader of the bike gang. Needless to say, he reanimates the dead girl at the end and makes her dance with him, because he is a dangerous creep. Mata Hari never wakes up and calls the cops, like she should.
First rom-zom-com? Look out, Shaun of the Dead.

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Mr. Sardonicus (1961)

“London, 1880″
Castle doesn’t really look like John Goodman, but he is just as cheesy.

What was this about? Robert goes to Sardonicus’ castle to surgically fix his death-grimace face, supernaturally obtained when Dr. S tried to rob a winning lotto ticket from his own father’s grave, but Robert’s science is unsuccessful. There is intrigue involving Dr. S’s wife, I believe. I’m pretty sure I liked it better than Shanks, or maybe I’d just been drinking more.

Sir Robert is a handsome physical therapist with right-hand man Wainwright
Much is made of the invention of the hypodermic needle
He has a photo-locket that speaks to him in flashback-voiceover
One-eyed hunchy Krull [Oskar Homolka of Ball of Fire and Sabotage]

A scene ripped off from Dracula when he arrives in eastern europe
Also no mirrors in the castle
Ana has leeches on her!

Nice to see a castle servant who’s intelligent and well-spoken
Maybe Sardonicus is meant to sound like sarcophagus, but it looks more like sardonic
Toulon! [Sardonicus is played by Guy Rolfe, Andre Toulon in Puppet Masters 3-7]

Henryk [Vladimir Sokoloff of Baron of Arizona] was his dad. I actually thought it was Oskar playing a different character. Elenka is his first wife
Comically over-explainy, like in MANT

Buy Sardonicus from Amazon:
The William Castle Film Collection

Scenes with kids in town and school, episodic with a couple more-central characters (I’m thinking of the poor boy with abusive parents who gets rescued by social services at the end). Katy’s favorite part was the girl whose parents went out for dinner without her so she yelled “I’m hungry, I’m hungry” through a bullhorn out her window until the neighbors sent a picnic basket to her window using ropes and pulleys. I liked the double date at the movies, where the meek boy loses out and his friend takes both girls. Also wonderful, an Antichrist-recalling scene with a toddler chasing a cat slooowly out a tenth-floor window, finally falling and bouncing harmlessly upon the ground. It’s frightening at first until I realized (and assured Katy) that Truffaut doesn’t kill children, especially not in a comedy. Ebert liked “the painful earnestness that goes into the recitation of a dirty joke that neither the teller nor the listeners quite understand.”

Ebert again: “He correctly remembers that childhood itself is episodic: Each day seems separate from any other, each new experience is sharply etched, and important discoveries and revelations become great events surrounded by a void. It’s the accumulation of all those separate moments that create, at last, a person.”

Of all the kids, how many went on to further acting careers? Only Eva Truffaut, unsurprisingly. More unexpected is that only a few of the adult actors have any other acting credits. Hairdresser Mrs. Riffle (Tania Torrens) was in The Lover, Lydie Richet (Virginie Thevenet) was in Chabrol’s Cry of the Owl, and new father Mr. Richet the schoolteacher (Jean-Francois Stevenin) played Marlon in Out 1 and more recently appeared in The Limits of Control. Same cowriter (Suzanne Schiffman) and cinematographer as Out 1, too.

Oddly, the U.S. poster I found online says “Roger Corman presents…”

Should’ve been called Pocket Money (French is L’argent de poche) but the name was taken by a Lee Marvin/Paul Newman flick a couple years before. The Truffaut movie plus the Tom Waits “Small Change” album released the same year (the two are unrelated; nobody in the film gets rained on with his own thirty-eight) effectively wiped the Lee Marvin film’s title from the English language… now we wouldn’t dream of naming a movie Pocket Money.

Nominated for a Golden Globe (remember those?) but beaten by Bergman. It’s nice to see shouts-out to Bergman and Truffaut in a year when every actress in Freaky Friday was nominated.

I’ve started an Amazon account to see if I can get any kickback money out of my sucker readers’ online spending. I hate to commercialize, but could use a few bucks, so please click and buy to support cinephilia on the internet.

Actually, the Truffaut DVD is out of print (let’s hope for a cleaner image on the next release), but here’s the just-as-good Tom Waits album: Small Change

Watched for Shadowplay’s Film Club, where you can find an excellent summary and valuable comments by regular readers, plus less-valuable comments by myself.

A step down from Disney’s recent Robin Hood in Roger Miller music contributions and in novelty voice characterizations, but two steps up in every other respect. I think David didn’t want to set expectations too high for this one, so I was prepared for a middling semi-romance with clunky action bits, but the action was clunky on purpose (Robin’s not a young lad anymore), the romance is fully there, and I felt the whole thing came together beautifully.

Sets its tone in the first scene: aging, disillusionment, violence (King Richard has turned murderous tyrant), with a hint of the supernatural (a blind man throws an arrow from far too great a distance straight into Richard’s neck). Prince John (now King, and played by Ian Holm in his only scene) and the Sheriff (played by Robert Shaw and his scary eyes, one of his last films) are still in charge. Marian (Audrey Hepburn’s return from retirement) has become a nun. Friar Tuck (TV star Ronnie Barker), Will Scarlett (Denholm Elliott of Brimstone and Treacle) and Little John (Nicol Williamson, later Merlin in Excalibur) happily follow Robin’s renewed, somewhat obligatory-seeming, fight against the sheriff and eager new deputy Ranulf (Kenneth Haigh in cool leafy armor).

Sean Connery (right between James Bond and Time Bandits) and Richard “Dumbledore” Harris as King Richard are both excellent in scary, unpredictable ways. Whenever I thought the movie might drag, whether the final battle-of-champions evoked The Postman/Gladiator-type cheesefests or the plot seemed headed towards a Prince of Thieves action spectacle, it’d either take a left turn or just cruise through on charm, throwing out hints of humor when necessary. Whole movie is a treat, really, with one of the most moving endings I’ve seen in a while.

I like how the end credits disclaimed that “some of the characters and incidents portrayed and some of the names used herein are fictitious”… not really any kind of disclaimer at all.

Refreshing to see a period (early 70′s) flick that relies only on props, fashion and speech with no TV news montages, shouts-out to topical issues or drenching the soundtrack in pop hits of the time. Unfortunately that’s the only thing refreshing about this movie, in which Peter Jackson seems to be Taking Himself Seriously and not having any fun anymore. He’s got himself a serious, dark dramatic novel and damned if he’s going to do anything to dilute it with his own manic energy and kooky camera angles. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be pleasing anyone, not the reviewers, not the fans of the book sitting near me who complained that the film turns the rapist/murderer into just a murderer (though Stanley Tucci gets a rapist-mustache so I thought it was implied) and not me, who wished I was tired enough to fall asleep through the interminable digital “heaven” scenes in which Saoirse Ronan from Atonement pulls faces (surprise! sadness! delight! ennui!) while the sky turns colors, tree leaves turn into a flock of birds, mountains part, gazebos crumble, fields turn into swamp and other murdered girls throw a picnic. Sometimes she tells us “it’s so beautiful,” which failed to convince me that it actually was. I dug the Super Mario Galaxy-looking planet effects, but Jackson’s swirly heavenly skies seemed significantly less beautiful than every single shot in the A Single Man trailer, which I’m gonna punch myself if I end up missing. The real sadness, sadder than the death scenes and the grieving parent scenes (The Sweet Hereafter or In The Bedroom this ain’t), was that nothing happened in the heaven scenes. They weren’t beautiful or terrible. Saoirse didn’t do anything, the eskimo girl she befriends didn’t do anything, nothing happened at all. Okay, so she touched the hand of creepy loner girl Amanda Michalka causing Ronan’s almost-boyfriend Reece Ritchie to kiss her, and she made dad Marky Mark (not half as convincing on his obsessed search for the truth as Jake G. in Zodiac) see flickering candle reflections and dead roses bloom.

For all its dragged-out length, certain parts seem too skimpy, like mom Rachel Weisz skipping town to pick fruit in California while working through her grief. Susan Sarandon has fun as hard-drinkin’ gramma in the movie’s only comic relief. It’s little sister Rose McIver who gets the best scene, pure tension as she breaks into the killer’s house searching for (and finding) evidence before making her narrow escape. Second-best would be Tucci’s random demise, year(s)? later trying to pick up a girl in a parking lot he’s hit by a supernatural icicle and tumbles horribly down a cliff, Jackson’s cartoonish gruesomeness making a late appearance in the PG-13 movie. PG-13 is how it felt overall, not through lack of swearing or smoking (Sarandon does) or blood or sex but lack of anything challenging. I got the early speech about obsession and hobbies, the parallels between Marky/Saoirse and Marky/Tucci, the snow-globe penguin in his perfect isolated world, and the goofy director cameo in a camera shop but didn’t get any sense of wonder or sadness from what’s supposed to be a splendorous film about mourning, just some pretty pictures.

Reverse Shot calls the movie “profoundly disingenuous,” accusing Jackson of being primarily interested in Tucci’s killer, not the victim and her family. Also: “Even Jackson’s celebrated CGI wizardry feels off; his color-saturated vision of the afterlife has all the visual dexterity and emotional weight of an iTunes screensaver.”

A tumbling act vaults in different styles according to their costumes (hockey players, military parade). Magicians one-up each other. The audience participates. We go backstage and into the lobby. Tati mimes at different sports (badminton, soccer, fishing)…

Not a documentary of a circus performance but a film (make that a video, one of the first video-shot features, after 200 Motels) with a circus performance in it. Doesn’t look like an existing, functioning circus but a soundstage with paid extras for audience members, complete with choreographed “backstage” scenes. Amused me as well as any real circus (and more than Fellini’s The Clowns). Video quality on my copy was below average, but the editing (and lack of talking heads/announcers/titles) differentiates it from, say, a period PBS special on a circus, and the pacing would confirm Tati as director, rather than simply performer, even if his name wasn’t there in the credits. Whole thing has an attractive draw to it… I liked it better than I thought I should, can’t say just why.

Rosenbaum has a good theory: “[a] gag is more likely to make us smile than laugh; but the cumulative effect of dozens of such underplayed gags is to make reality itself seem both slightly off-kilter and alive with comic possibilities––every moment brims with potential gags that often require an audience’s alert participation in order to be noticed at all.” He has written a long, perceptive article which makes me want to watch this again immediately.

Surogat (1961, Dusan Vukotic)
Slightly naughty beach picture about a fat guy who brings inflatable ball, boat, car, food and girl. Real great anything-goes animation. Disney, Friz Freling and Chuck Jones must’ve cancelled each other out, giving the award to the underdog foreigner.

The Crunch Bird (1971, Ted Petok)
“Crunch bird, my ass!” Ugh, punchline shorts. Was there no competition this year? I would’ve awarded Thank You Mask Man over this. From a co-writer of What’s Up Tiger Lily, this beat a comic Canadian short about evolution and an adaptation of an Oscar Wilde fairy tale (OW wrote fairy tales?).

The Sand Castle (1977, Co Hoedeman)
A desert man with arms and legs but no body creates clay creatures to help him build a giant sand castle. All stop-motion, the short that (probably deservedly) beat Doonesbury at the oscars.

Every Child (1979, Eugene Fedorenko)
More of a foley demonstration than a proper cartoon. The animation is there I guess, though slightly Squiggle-visioney. Wow, someone sings the Umbrellas of Cherbourg theme. So the foley guys are telling the story of an unwanted baby… to a baby. One foley guy went on to voice the French version of Chief Quimby on Inspector Gadget. This beat a short called Dream Doll which I’d like to see, apparently an X-rated spoof of The Red Balloon.

Tango (1981, Zbigniew Rybczynski)
An empty room, simple tango music. A kid (looks like stop-motion cut-out photographs) throws a ball into the room, comes in, throws the ball outside, leaves, repeat. Then another person is added, then another and another, none of them interacting with each other until the very end. How’d they do it? Beat out some stop-motion from the great Will Vinton and a half-hour piece about a snowman.

The Man Who Planted Trees (1987, Frédéric Back)
Just about the happiest thing ever, so lovely it made my head hurt. Story of a lonely shepherd who singlehandedly reforests an entire region of France. I looked it up, hoping that it’s a true story, and unbelievably it is. Narrated by the familiar voice of Christopher Plummer and animated with lush, colorful sketches. The romantic short from the creators of Bob & Margaret and a big of head-morphing Bill Plympton hilarity never stood a chance against this beauty.

A Greek Tragedy (1985, Nicole Van Goethem)
The characters are man/pillars holding up a stone wall that has fallen into ruins. When it finally collapses, the pillars are free to frolic. The kind of simple cuteness you’d see at a festival with three of four similar pieces, not the kind I’d think would win a major award. Hard times in 1986. Actually this beat Luxo Jr. somehow. I guess computer animation wasn’t in style until ’88. At the same time, it’s nice

Tin Toy (1988, John Lasseter)
A one-man-band toy escapes the wrath of a slimy toddler, then grudgingly returns to cheer it up when it’s crying only to be ignored in favor of an empty box and a paper bag. Clear precedent to Toy Story. 1988 computer technology was not up to the task of accurate baby rendering, but it’s still pretty cool looking. It beat a Tex Avery-style short from the future director of FernGully and Cordell Baker’s great The Cat Came Back.

Manipulation (1991, Daniel Greaves)
A good ol’ artist’s-hands-interacting-with-drawing-table short, somewhere between Duck Amuck and Rejected. Funny how one of the most recent shorts is the one available in the lowest quality. The line-drawing guy turns 3D at the end, which I think was done in claymation. Very inventive and fun. Apparently Greaves’ Flatworld is also a must-see. No U.S. shorts in this year’s competition – this UK film beat out two Canadian pieces (including long-time fave Blackfly).

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (1992, Joan C. Gratz)
Really wonderful little animated film which would probably be the greatest thing ever if I was an art history major. Since I only knew about five of the paintings which were mighty-morphing into each other, I probably attribute more of the film’s beauty to its director than I probably should. Oh wait, it won the oscar so I guess I’m not the only one who was impressed.

Then again, some of it is just silliness.

Quest (1996, Tyron Montgomery)
A man made of sand navigates increasingly more difficult and dangerous worlds of paper, rock, metal and water. The end is the beginning – would work as a looping DVD or art installation. Nice stop-motion, like The Sand Castle but I liked this one better, Thought it was anti-technology for a while, but now I think its just trying to say the world is a dangerous place. Competition included an Aardman, a Canadian piece I’ve seen but don’t remember, and a stop-motion short from a future Pixar animator.

Precautions Against Fanatics (1969, Werner Herzog)
“Have you ever seen a dishonest man with a chest like this?”
Said to Werner’s cameraman by a one-armed man in a suit: “What are you doing here? Go away!” It’s not clear who is supposed to be here where they’re filming, in the training area of a horse racetrack. Some guy is repeating himself and karate-chopping flat stones. This cannot actually be happening! It is all pretty wonderful, a parody of a behind-the-scenes documentary. Made in between Signs of Life and Even Dwarfs Started Small, both of which I need to catch some day.

Organism (1975, Hilary Harris)
Time-lapse footage and readings from biological textbooks portray a large city (New York, of course) as a living organism. The dated 70′s sound design is unfortunate but otherwise it’s completely wonderful. Makes me wish I had a classroom of kids to show it to. He worked on this for years, inventing a time-lapse camera in the 60′s for the purpose. Bits from Scott MacDonald “As late as 1975, Harris apparently felt that time-lapsing imagery was unusual and high-tech enough to justify his frequent use of science-fictionish electronic sounds as an accompaniment. … Hilary Harris shot some of the New York City traffic shots used in Koyaanisqatsi, though apparently Reggio didn’t see Organism until after his film was well under way.”

L’Opéra-mouffe (1958, Agnes Varda)
Somehow I missed this during Varda Month – one of her earliest shorts hidden amongst the copious features on a Criterion DVD. Varda films either herself or another pregnant nude women, then goes on a rampage through the marketplace, mostly capturing the faces of people shopping there, with interludes featuring actors (incl. Varda regular Dorothée Blank, as nude here as she is in Cleo) clowning around. Sections highlight public drunkenness, anxiety and affection. I want to say this is my favorite of her shorts so far, but then I remember they’re all so good. Delightfully scored by a not-yet-famous Georges Delerue.

“I was pregnant. I felt the contradiction of expecting a child, being full of hope, and circulating in this world of poor, drunken people without hope, who seemed so unhappy. I felt tenderness toward them, especially the elderly. I imagined them as babies, when their mothers kissed their tummies.”

Silent Snow, Secret Snow (1966, Gene Kearney)
A boy named Paul starts to obsess over snow, allowing the snow in his mind to filter him from reality. Creepy and well shot. Later remade as a Night Gallery episode with Orson Welles narrating. Makes me think of the Handsome Family song “Don’t Be Scared,” with its line “when Paul thinks of snow, soft winds blow ’round his head,” except it’s one of their very few comforting, happy songs and the movie is anything but.

Une histoire d’eau (1961, Truffaut & Godard)
A girl wakes up and the whole town is flooded from melting snow. She meets a guy (a young Jean-Claude Brialy) who offers to drive her to Paris before nightfall. Music is weird – gentle flute or horns punctuated with bursts of percussion. Ooh, a Duchess of Langeais reference… in fact there are a ton of references in her quick monologue narration, which ends with spoken credits.

The Forgotten Faces (1960, Peter Watkins)
Revolution in Budapest. Nice reconstruction, convincingly documentary-like – where’d Watkins get all those guns? No sync sound, a TV-sounding narrator. One part, the reading of a communist speech turns briefly into a dramatic propaganda montage – don’t see that happen much in Watkins’ films.

The Perfect Human (1967, Jorgen Leth)
“Today I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days.”

I like the British narrator. “What does he want? Why does he move like that? How does he move like that? Look at him. Look at him now. And now. Look at him all the time.” There’s no diegetic sound, but if this was dubbed in a studio, why does there have to be so much tape hiss? A fake documentary and a stark white delight, with slow zooms in and out, gentle string music, and a general sense of serious absurdity. Only saw, what, a third of this in The Five Obstructions.

Les Maître fous (1955, Jean Rouch)
Document of a group in Ghana called the Hauka doing something involving wooden toy guns, red ribbons, chicken sacrifice, dog-blood-drinkin’ and having lurchy foaming-at-the-mouth fits. I’m not ever quite sure, because the French narration has been auto-subtitled by google – whatever they’re doing, the subs call it “having.” After they’ve had, the film crew catches up with them at their day jobs, not freaked-out cultists anymore, just working hard, smiling at the camera. This is one African film that Katy didn’t want to watch, because Rouch is an exoticizing anthropologist. So what’s going on that this film makes the best-ever lists? A Rouch tribute page says he popularized direct cinema/cinema verite, that he was known for rethinking ethnography, and a documentary surrealism (sounds like Jean Painleve). Ian Mundell says the film “drew plaudits from the Nouvelle Vague, in particular from Jean-Luc Godard. They liked the fact that Rouch’s fiction emerged from an encounter between the actor (professional or non-professional) and the camera, and his willingness to break the rules of cinema.” Paul Stoller says Rouch crisscrossed “the boundaries between documentary and fiction, observer and participant,” but I take it that’s more about his later films, which I’m thinking I would like better. So it’s seeming like this film gets awarded because it’s one of the most-seen of his films and because of its influence, not because it’s Rouch’s best work.

Nicky’s Film (1971, Abel Ferrara)
A mysteriously silent possibly gangster-related 6-minute film. I can’t imagine even a Ferrara scholar gets much out of this.

The Hold Up (1972, Abel Ferrara)
Super-8 production made when Abel was 21, seven years before Driller Killer. A few minutes in, I realized it’d be much better with the director commentary turned on. “And away we go. Wait, it’s the other way. Which way is she looking?” Um, some guys get fired from factory jobs, hold up a gas station, get caught. The song “Working on a Building” is heard.