“It’s your negative insinuendo!”

Whoops, I accidentally watched two bizarro hyperactive cult movies in a row from the criterion collection (Mr. Freedom and now this). In their words: “Based on Peter Barnes’ irreverent play, this darkly comic indictment of Britain’s class system peers behind the closed doors of English aristocracy. Insanity, sadistic sarcasm, and black comedy—with just a touch of the Hollywood musical—are all featured in this beloved cult classic.”

If there’s one thing you remember about The Ruling Class, it should be to not watch it again. It feels too much like other cult classics: loud, overlong, and funny but in a pained sort of way. O’Toole has a powerful character though and a wildly good performance. He’s Jesus for more than half the movie, then becomes much more dangerous when he starts appearing to be normal.

“How do you know you’re God?”
“It’s simple; when I pray to him I find I’m talking to myself.”

Definitely doesn’t count as a musical, though it has three or four scenes of Dennis Potter-style singalong. Might actually count as a horror. Gets more terrible and less funny as it progresses, closing with a shrill and mighty scream. Kind of good as political satire in that respect… the ol’ Catch-22 approach of drawing ’em in with humor and then unleashing the message, that these are very bad people in important positions of power and they should be stopped.

Lindsay Anderson fave Arthur Lowe is the only actor here who also worked on “Kind Hearts and Coronets”. He’s hilarious as the butler who inherits a fortune from the old Earl, then keeps his job but openly mocks everyone he works for.

I won’t make fun of “Species II” director Medak for this one, since he seems like a good sport, although now I realize he also made that dismal Masters of Horror episode “The Washingtonians”, another way over-the-top, shrill political piece.

Ian Christie:
“In revolting against naturalism, we should not forget that Medak (a refugee from Hungary) and Barnes were in good company. Roeg and Cammel’s Performance (1970) had plunged fearlessly into bravura fantasy… while such otherwise very different filmmakers as Kubrick and Anderson had also forsaken realism in their two great “state of the nation” films of the same period: A Clockwork Orange (1971) and O Lucky Man! (1973). And Medak’s fellow countryman, Peter Sasdy, was leading Britain’s horror specialist Hammer into post-Freudian terrain with Hands of the Ripper (1971), another tribute to the enduring fascination with the Whitechapel murderer.

“There are also some remarkable purely filmic inventions. The image of Dr. Herder embracing the police cut-out silhouette of Lady Claire has an eerie pathos, and the chilling final scream that rings out over the brooding exterior of the Gurney mansion after Jack has stabbed his wife, flushed with his acclaim in the House of Lords, seems to unite the bloody poetry that Hammer aspired to with a real protest against Britain’s decaying aristocratic tradition.

And an interesting connection to “The Trap”, which I’m in the middle of watching, also via Christie:

“R. D. Laing’s account of schizophrenia as essentially family-induced—a logical response to irrational pressures—was proving influential as a counter argument against advocates of ECT and drug treatment; and this is the backdrop to The Ruling Class’ elaborate staging of Jack’s madness and its “cure,” through a surreal confrontation with his opposite, the “electric messiah.”

Resnais films a 1925 libretto by Andr̩ Barde (which was also filmed in 1931, but nobody seems to know much about that version) with much of the same crew and cast as his 1997 Same Old Song. Movie is shot like a straight period piece in hazy color (or was it my DVD which was hazy?), almost like a play, with longish wide shots and not many close-ups. Comedy/musical style, characters look into camera and talk to the audience. Songs are decent, nothing memorable or amazing, with subtitles annoyingly translated to rhyme in English. No big setpiece numbers, in fact it abruptly changes scenes just as one was about to begin. A few interesting cinematic bits Рwhen characters leave the room they are seen fading away accompanied by a sound of fluttering birds.

I like the movie a lot, enough to see it a second time and show it off to Katy (assuming correctly that she’d like it a bit more than Private Fears). But is it simply a cute, charming light-hearted musical? Is Resnais Trying To Say Something Here? Does this fit in with the grand cinematic master’s important themes of life & death, memory & time, his intricate puzzle-box editing schemes? Of course, I’ve watched the 50’s and 60’s movies and then jumped 35 years through time to watch Not On The Lips, so I’m missing a significant amount of development. Before jumping all over the internet for theories on what’s going on with this film, the only clues I have are the fading-out/fluttering-birds bits. The story is set around the time Resnais was born, and all these characters would be long dead… ghosts still inhabiting their stage-play world performing to a nonexistent audience? Is that stretching it? Anyway, most of the other author of online reviews are suffering from the same lapse as I am, comparing this one to Hiroshima and Marienbad instead of, say, Smoking or Stavisky. I’ll get to ’em all soon though. For a start I’m picking up that most of his works since 1980 have been about artifice and theatricality rather than time and memory.

What am I missing? “Alex” says “Resnais has often made extensive play between beautiful surface spectacle and underlying reality a central feature of his work.” He points out that rich steelmen Eric and George both have weird sexual hang-ups, and says that George is seen reading a far-right-wing newspaper and sings a racist song (must not have been translated that way on our DVD). Then Alex tries to make a point about how the less-rich Charley and Faradel are more thoughtful but less successful with women, but he’s lost me there.

Alex: “Both Valandray and Thompson are portrayed as quite unattractive figures. Many critics have painted Thompson’s portrayal as anti-American, but Resnais’ Georges Valandray is, if anything, much more darkly presented. Georges sings a strange song (“I was pushed aside”) that is openly racist and anti-immigrant (cutting heavily against the thesis that the movie is purely light-hearted). Georges is specifically shown reading the far-right-wing newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, Action Francaise. In addition, Georges’ eros is shown up as highly flawed – he gives several bizarre speeches comparing love-making to steel-making, speeches which attempt to explain why he values virginity so highly, yet the speeches come off perverse and even disturbing, while the all of Georges’ other speeches are very elegant and pleasing.”

Michael Sicinski on the late films:
“Instead of using complex editing schemes to delve into Proustian time, late Resnais uses distancing techniques to explore both artifice and the false temporality of cinema. Like a more populist Manoel de Oliveira, Resnais has concerned himself with the relationship between theatre and cinema, particularly the theatre’s immediacy and the way his stagy films embalm this immediacy into irrevocable distance. Some, like Smoking / No Smoking, highlight this with theatrical gimmicks (multiple characters played by only two actors) whose awkward transition into cinema turns a light middlebrow entertainment into something eerily impenetrable. Others such as Mélo and Same Old Song, use artifacts from the past to undercut the cinematic present with the past’s obdurate alterity. Not on the Lips is another experiment in this vein, and my befuddled reaction to it has to do with my inability to access it on any level other than the intellectual.”

Greg Muskewitz:
“The operetta is a genuine reflection on the deceptiveness — albeit playful deceptiveness — of the human condition that Resnais has so creatively carved out in his long-spanning oeuvre.”

Rosenbaum:
“The characters’ exits are marked by lap dissolves that make the actors appear to evaporate, accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings — something Resnais says he did for musical and rhythmic reasons.”

“Like Melo, which adapted a serious boulevard play of 1929, Not on the Lips offers a profound history lesson — one that becomes tricky once one realizes that despite the close attention to 1925 details, it has no visible relation to any French film made during that period. It’s like an artifact from a parallel universe where film history took a different turn. In this respect, it’s unlike Resnais’ previous flirtations with musicals: Stavisky (1974), with its lovely Stephen Sondheim score; Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), with its operatic segments; and Same Old Song (1997), which appropriates Dennis Potter’s use of lip-synched pop songs. Despite its playful allusions to theater — shadow-play silhouettes to introduce actors, an unrealistic lighting change in the midst of a monologue, a finale that musically thanks the audience for not leaving early — Not on the Lips is closer to a dream than a pastiche, a fantasy grounded in memory and imagination.”

Story via IMDB:
“Gilberte, in middle-age, flirts with men but loves her husband Georges, wishing he were more demonstrative. He’s negotiating a deal with an American, Eric Thomson, who turns out to be Gilberte’s first husband from an annulled and secret stateside marriage. Along with her sister Arlette, Gilberte begs Eric not to tell Georges about the marriage. Meanwhile, a young artist, Charly, pursues Gilberte while Arlette tries to match him with the young Huguette, who loves him.”

The Eric Thomson sham is carried off, and when their hand is forced, the sisters claim that Arlette is the ex/wife… she kisses Eric, sparks fly. Charly goes to hanger-on Faradel’s bachelor pad to meet Gilberte but finds himself happily with Huguette. Gilberte makes up with husband Georges. Faradel doesn’t necessarily end up with meddling landlady Madame Foin, but wouldn’t that make for a quadruply happy romantic ending?

Two sisters: Isabelle Nanty is the girl who gets set up with Dominique Pinon in Amelie… Sabine Azéma is the pious/sexy caretaker in Private Fears and has been in everything else since the early 80’s:
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Jalil Lespert, of Le Petit lieutenant, whom Katy says looks like Crispin Glover:
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Lambert Wilson: dan the barfly in Private Fears, also in The Belly of an Architect, plays evil frenchman parts in recent hollywood movies:
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A hopping party:
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Love behind the hedges – there’s Audrey Tautou at lower-right. Georges, on the left, played Lionel in Private Fears and like Sabine Azema he has been in all of Resnais’ movies since ’80 except for I Want To Go Home.
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L: best supporting actor winner Darry Cowl, R: Daniel Prévost from The Dinner Game
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A happy ending:
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I liked this little trick where Georges and Gilberte are talking in the hall, then they get edited into the kitchen mid-conversation:

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“Something is going to happen.”

I enjoyed the movie a lot, more than the other post-breakdown Rivette films I’ve seen. Along the way, tried to draw connections to his other work and figure out what it all means. Might be difficult since I haven’t watched related works Duelle and Noroit yet, but this was supposed to be part one of the still-unfinished four-part series, so I thought it might work.

We’ve got such Rivette favorite themes as…

Performance and ritual:
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…secrets hidden in an old house:
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…and a sinister photograph:
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We’ve got such late-period trademarks as the fade to black after each scene, the ordinary household details of daily life, and the minimal music score.

So yeah, I followed the story, tried to figure out what was happening and why, and guessed I had an alright grasp of things. Bopped around the web looking for opinions.

DVDverdict didn’t like it much:

Béart and Radzilowicz, improbably matched as lovers but fine as actors, go through their paces with all due seriousness, but in the end there’s little momentum, little of interest, and little reward. At the core of the story is forbidden love, and what we will do in its name, but Rivette’s proficient, clinically precise filmmaking refuses to embrace the one element of his story upon which even Marie and Julien’s personal tragedies hinge.

On a separate review on the same site, DVDverdict rather did like it:

One’s growing realization that the strange emotional affect of the characters, and dialogue that sometimes comes off as artificial and intellectually abstract, are both servants of plot and not merely pretentious art film conceits is a great source of delight.

Then I hit up Senses of Cinema, which proved that neither I nor DVDverdict had any idea what we were watching, and made me feel bad all week for not having thought of any of this stuff by myself.

Before getting into that, despite author Michael J. Anderson’s statement that “a traditional analysis which details the plot and characterisations utilised in the narrative is of little use in talking about Rivette’s film,” I’m gonna lay those out just so I don’t forget ’em later.

Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Walser in Secret Defense) works from home as a clock repairman, alone but for his cat.
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He dreams of a chance encounter with Marie (who he met one time a year earlier) that ends with her trying to stab him. Goes out and has a chance encounter with Marie, who agrees to go out for coffee but never shows up. So he goes back to blackmailing Madame X (Anne Brochet, of Intimate Strangers and a 1992 French Phil K. Dick adaptation), who runs a phony business and may have killed her own sister.

Finally Marie (Emmanuelle Béart, of La Belle noiseuse, Strayed, an Assayas, some Chabrols and Mission: Impossible) mysteriously reappears. They’re both lonely and attracted to each other, and he soon asks her to move in. Cue transition from part 1 (“Julien”) to part 2 (“Julien et Marie”).

Julien et Marie:
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The two have hot role-playing sex together, finishing each other’s erotic stories. Marie moves in but remains mysterious, spends her free time secretly rearranging an upstairs room, and sometimes disappears to a hotel and has to be tracked down. She is let in on the blackmailing plot, but while Julien is meeting with Madame X, Marie appears to be meeting with X’s dead sister (Bettina Kee of Va savoir).

More dead than alive:
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Things get more ghostly when Marie also appears to be dead, having killed herself months earlier after an argument with her then-boyfriend, as we move to parts 3 (“Marie et Julien”) and 4 (“Marie”). Keeping in mind the dream at the beginning and the unreal tone to the meeting pictured above, I start to wonder which parts of the story are actually happening.

Marie acts more strange, starts chanting in a foreign language, and remodels the upstairs room to look exactly like the one in which she hung herself, then is stopped by Julien when she tries to ritualistically repeat that action. The blackmail plot plays out, and the two sisters meet and work things out.

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“Now I am yours. You are mine. Where I must go you will accompany me. For what I must do you will help me. Don’t fail me, or you will lose the very memory of me.”

Julien rebels and it happens. Marie disappears to him, though we still see her. This is where an ordinary ghost story would end… he broke the rules and the prophecy came true… but Marie becomes real again, her blood is restored and they get their happy ending.

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Oh, and I’d read an article on Kino Slang a while back about this movie but had forgotten and thought it was referring to Duelle. Fun to watch the documentary moments in the film as Julien’s cat responds to the camera crew and boom mic offscreen.

Alas, 30 years on, Rivette gets reproached when in Histoire de Marie et Julien he crystalizes some of his former narrative terror and anti-illusionism into one brief shot of a cat on a man’s chest recoiling from the camera and the boom, the whole appartus bearing down on them in a tracking shot. A Bazinian anti-illusionism. Once the camera settles, the cat stares up at the boom mic. Perhaps the man is “covering” for the cat when he looks up too and says “nosing around upstairs again?

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On to the great analysis from Senses of Cinema:

Rivette structures his film not as a dream or a series of dreams, but instead eviscerates any distinction between dream and reality, establishing a logic present only in fiction – there is no distinction between consciousness and subconsciousness, dream and reality, life and death, but rather, all is fiction.

With the opening “Julien” intertitle, Rivette suggests that this character may be constructing the narrative: for instance, there is simultaneous depiction of desire (that Marie needs him, that she is free, that they meet on the street; and more directly later in the film, a cut from Marie stroking Julien’s arm to the pair making love) and anxiety (the knife, the fact that she stands him up) woven throughout the opening section of the film. Yet, this evident focalisation – the narrative being told through Julien – does not last, as Marie quickly becomes a co-creator of the pursuant narrative. In a more directly self-aware moment of creation, for instance, Marie speculates about two sisters in a photo that she and Julien are examining: “one is dead, the other alive.” Likewise, Marie asks Julien to tell her about the “forest”, which leads into an erotic fantasy narrated first by Julien, and then by Marie herself. (At this point they are co-creators of the narrative, taking turns constructing the incident.) Moreover, there are also scenes in which Julien plays no part at all, such as a mysterious nocturnal meeting – that once again Rivette suggests may be a dream – between Marie and the dead woman from the photo, who imparts a fragment of information and gives her a secret hand signal. And then there are also the subsequent intertitles: “Julien and Marie”, “Marie and Julien” and “Marie”, which similarly denote shifting narrative perspectives.

Indeed, if anything, Marie seems to occupy a special place in the narrative, as it is she and not Julien who seems aware of the fact that they are in a narrative.

And there’s more about the theatricality of the film… stuff that I should’ve been able to catch. Ugh… next time I need to either try harder, or find articles to read BEFORE watching the movie. Maybe I’ll try that with Duelle then see if I can fend for myself with Don’t Touch The Axe.

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Congoma-player Marigo hasn’t paid the rent in a few months, so his landlady (the griot from Touki Bouki) has confiscated his instrument until he pays up.
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With no way to earn a living, Marigo buys a lotto ticket from an optimistic dwarf acquaintance.
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Marigo has got the winning number… but he pasted the ticket to his front door behind a poster of Yadikoon (“an African robin hood”), so he has to take the whole door to the lottery office.
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…along the way, dreaming of the rich life…
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…only to be told that the ticket needs to be detached from the door to be authorized.
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So Marigo makes a run for the beach and uses the pounding surf to remove the ticket, dancing and dreaming on the rocks, losing his poster but getting the ticket off successfully, screaming ecstatic laughter.
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I pretty much loved it.

Culturebase.net:
“We have sold our souls cheaply!“, Mambety concludes, though he never described himself as a political director. Yet his films always refer to the economic reality of his country, which is entirely dependent on the World Bank, monetary funds and French economic policy. This is true for his last two films. They were part of a trilogy on “The story of small people.” “Le Franc” and “La petite vendeuse de soleil” are from parables on the lives of people who must ask themselves the same question every morning, namely how to gather the most fundamentally necessary means to survive. The small people in this trilogy are the counterparts to the greed of the hyenas in his longer feature films.”

Filmref.com:
“Mambéty introduces the trenchant idea that the power of the imagination to raise post-colonial African consciousness does not exist in fanciful, but ultimately empty, idle dreams or wistfully dwelling over a lost – and stolen – noble past (a theme that is also articulated in Jean-Marie Téno’s films, as well as Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret), but in a certain wide-eyed innocence and naïve determination that recovery and advancement are still possible with dedicated effort.”

California Newsreel:
“In both films there are conspicuous references to Yadikoon, a semi-legendary figure who in popular memory became a kind of Senegalese Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. In Le Franc, the main character, Marigo has a poster of Yadikoon in his room. Mambety himself named a foundation he established for Dakar’s street children after Yadikoon.”

The only hits I get from “Yadikoon” on google are from articles on these films, so either he’s a Mambety-created character or we are all spelling his name wrong.

Also watched “Echek” again, fun little flick by Adan Jodorowsky:
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A suicidal man haunted by memory is picked by a massive computer system as the ideal candidate to send to the past in a time-travel experiment. But enough about La Jetee, here’s a full-length full-motion movie from six years later.

I don’t know if the computer was aware that the man had killed his woman on vacation in Glasgow by turning up the gas while she slept, or if the scientists were aware that the man would be able to re-experience his past having no free will to change it. The results are, of course, a fragmented Resnais film jumping back and forth willy-nilly through the last 2-5 years of this guy’s life.

Star Claude Rich, who looks somewhat like Michael Showalter from The State, was in Jean Renoir’s final film The Elusive Corporal and would later play the offscreen cranky father in Coeurs.

Rich is with this girl Wiana (Anouk Ferjac from The War Is Over) sometimes, but mostly he’s with young Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot, who wasn’t in many memorable films before she killed herself in ’97). He is occasionally happy with Catrine, but he cheats on her and she knows it. They’re both depressive, and she has no life outside of their relationship, doesn’t enjoy vacation, is becoming more of a burden.

Now I’m told that some of the “past events” that Claude experiences are actually dreams he had. Wonder if the hot girl in the mirrored bathroom asking him to wash her back was one of those.

Just a dream? Carla Marlier (Zazie‘s aunt):
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After being trapped for who knows how long bouncing through time and memory (90 minutes as the movie’s running time, or infinitely longer?), Claude finds himself reliving his attempted suicide by gun. Does he manage to affect his past this time by succeeding where before he had failed? His body appears on the hospital grounds, and the technicians run out to collect him, with a final shot of Claude’s mouse companion still caught inside his glass dome in the machine.

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The mouse appears earlier, running across the beach right around the moment that Claude was supposed to be sent back (it was to be one year ago, for a duration of one minute).

The time machine:
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This idea of time travel doesn’t seem like it’d be very useful to the scientists, rather more like traveling through your own memory than actually moving in time… though it does show that Claude’s body disappears when he travels. And the scientists, besides having invented/created the thing, don’t seem very capable of handling the machine or Claude.

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Holm says “it was a weird film that was openly laughed at in the States.”

Andy says “If we become stuck in our own time loop of visiting the past the memories can become too overwhelming. Suicide in context of the movie becomes a means to end or break the flow of time and memory.”

The time machine premise seems like a useful tool for Resnais to explore the obsessive cross-cutting of memory that he’d already played with in Muriel and Marienbad.

Resnais: “There are absolutely no flashbacks or anything of the sort.”

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Watched again June 2008 with a group. Very plain look to the sets, clothes… not a visually stylish movie except in the editing. I like it more the second time around. Would like to watch a higher quality copy next time.

September 2014: wish come true, a restored 35mm print at Filmstreams.

IMDB says it’s “believed to be Africa’s first avant-garde film”. Think it’s the earliest African film I’ve seen period other than the not-so-avant-garde Black Girl & Borom Sarret.

It’s a semi-comic story of horned-motorcycle-drivin’ Mory and his college student girlfriend Anta riding around Dakar, Senegal looking to steal enough money to get them to the paradise that is Paris. After successfully robbing a gay rich dude and unsuccessfully robbing a wrestling match, she boards the boat but he is overcome by nationalistic cow-related panic and runs back into town. There’s a woman “Aunt Oumy”, local griot, yells at them, they imagine returning to town rich and famous, Oumy singing for them. I did kinda like it even though I don’t have much to say about it.

Rosenbaum says “one of the greatest of all African films and almost certainly the most experimental … The title translates as Hyena’s Voyage, and among the things that make this film so interesting stylistically are the fantasy sequences involving the couple’s projected images of themselves in Paris and elsewhere.”

From wikipedia, Mambety “sought to expose the diversity of real life”, and his “editing and narrative style are a confluence of the ancient griotic tradition of tribal storytelling and modern avant-garde techniques. Mambéty was interested in transforming conflicting, mixed elements into a usable African culture, and in his words, reinvent[ing] cinema.”

Shortly before he died, Mambety was asked what he would do next. “I will finish the third part of the trilogy about ordinary people. After that, I will make Malaika, the third part of the trilogy about the power of craziness. The first two were Touki Bouki and Hyènes. Then I will consult God about the state of the world.”

Sex on the beach:
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Wild child in a tree:
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Griot in a riot:
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Fantasy riches:
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Also watched Episodes from the Life of Jekyll and Hyde by Paul Bush, a few-minute piece using the soundtrack to one (or a few) Jekyll & Hyde movie and ultra-fast-cutting two actors together into some kind of stop-motion nightmare… where the Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb meets Alone, Life Wastes Andy Hardy. Cool.

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Two or three years ago I completed a holy quest to track down and watch every movie by the extremely great Samuel Fuller. This directly led to the creation of this journal, because it turns out that I don’t remember movies very well when I just watch them one after another and never think about them again or discuss them with anybody so now it’s as if I’ve seen no (or just a few) movies by Samuel Fuller instead of all. Fortunately they’re all worth revisiting (except maybe for Underworld USA or Shark! or Madonna And The Dragon) so they’ll all show up here eventually, and maybe I’ll remember them better this time.

So here’s Park Row… selected by John Sayles, aired by Turner Classic, and digitally botched by Comcast (god, they’re worse than ever). Such a sappy and idealistic little flick for the first 30 or 40 minutes, about a fiery newspaper man (Gene Evans) who dreams of starting his own paper and whose dreams come true when a booze-buddy (vet actor Herbert Heyes) turns out to be a rich investor. His little-paper-that-could is run on honest journalism, ingenuity, and dedicated employees including Italian typesetter Mr. Angelo, linotype inventor Mergenthaler (sculptor Bela Kovacs), reckless bridge-jumping reporter Steve Brodie (George O’Hanlon, voice of George Jetson) and young type-sorter and paper-hawker Rusty.

The movie doesn’t show or narrate the events… it reports them. Sam was a newspaper man, a writer, photographer, and a war vet… and all of those come out in this movie, as the second half turns into a war between Evans and his rival paper’s editor Charity Hackett, and not just of wits… wagons run off the road, news stands destroyed, fist fights, even bombs thrown through windows, highlit by an awesome tracking shot that Sam reportedly created by strapping the camera to a man’s back and having him run after Evans, weaving through the movie’s single street set. The movie’s still corny, and at the end Charity admits defeat and offers to fold her paper, in love with the uncompromising Evans. But the grittiness and the sentimentality ramp up simultaneously and complement each other in a way Sam wouldn’t manage again until “The Naked Kiss”.

Excellent movie. It sneaks up on you.

Thirty.

Silent World by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle beat it for the golden palm at cannes, but it took the “human document” award. The film print said “grand prix” but it doesn’t even look like that award was handed out in ’56. The print also calls Ray “Roy”, but those two seem interchangeable by the IMDB. Supposed to be India’s Rashomon, the one that brought Indian film to the world’s attention.

Daunting to watch a movie known for 50 years as a masterpiece… well-illustrated when I walked into the room early and saw a bunch of freshman watching the end of Citizen Kane.

Oooh, my fourth 50’s film in a week. This came out less than a decade after Bicycle Thief, its inspiration, and the year after Senso, La Strada, Seven Samurai and Saga of Anatahan.

Ray’s first film, with great music by then-unknown Ravi Shankar. Rich drama, very moving and awesomely shot. I kind of expected to be underwhelmed, but I loved it (probably more than the film students around me who sighed a lot and started fidgeting and text-messaging towards the end) and maybe even cried a little. Some of the students did too, so there’s hope for them.

Little Apu is born to overburdened mom, underemployed dad, always-in-trouble sister and elderly aunt. Sis’s friend is getting married. Apu goes to school. Dad gets work with the landlord but isn’t paid for months. Sis steals a necklace. Mom fights with aunt while trying to make sure kids are fed and staying out of trouble. One horribly powerful fight scene when, after the necklace dispute, mom drags sis out of the yard by her hair, collapses against the inside of the door while through the wall we can see Sis crying on the other side.

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The scene is edited and scored with such force, seems like it couldn’t be the work of a first-time film director working before his country even had a proper film industry. Anyway, Sis gets sick and dies right before father comes home from the big city (he’s barely in the film) bearing money and gifts. Death scene (during a horrid rain storm) is at least double what the hair-pull fight scene was, with the music peaking into the scream that we never hear from the mother. In the finale, the family is moving to a new town to start again, Apu finds the necklace and throws it in a lake.

Movie feels like a masterpiece despite my pedestrian plot description.

When looking for screenshots I found this scene that wasn’t in the print we watched. The parents have a rare conversation about their lives and bring up moving out of town for the first time.
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Ray: “The cinematic material dictated a style to me, a very slow rhythm determined by nature, the landscape, the country. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.”

Ray in ’82: “All artists owe a debt to innovators and profit by such innovation. Godard gave me the courage to dispense largely with fades and dissolves, Truffaut to use the freeze.”

Truffaut walking out in ’56: “I don’t want to see a film about Indian peasants.”

Apu:
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His sister in the rain, celebrating a short-lived freedom:
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Outcast auntie:
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Sad parents:
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Update, Jan 2010: Katy liked it, but says she saw the sister’s death coming.

“I’m very happy to announce that we’ve destroyed at least half of the country. I hope now they’ll understand that aggression does not pay.”

That sums up the whole movie. It’s so obvious and loud and obnoxious and garish and that’s probably just what it intends to be. But it makes for an unpleasant viewing experience. I can’t imagine this movie screening in theaters without walkouts by exasperated viewers saying “I GET it already” (but probably saying that in french).

All-American titular superhero is introduced blithely massacring a black family in the middle of their dinner. Then Dr. Freedom (Donald Pleasence) calls to tell him that his French equivalent Captain Formidable has been killed and commies are invading France from neutral Switzerland. It’s up to Mr. Freedom to save the ungrateful French, not for any love of the country but to stop the dreaded domino effect and protect the world from communism.

Doesn’t play like a proper movie at all. Sometimes it feels like an advertisement (America’s priorities are more Capitalist than Democratic), and sometimes like a bunch of people goofing around and pretending to make a movie. The dubbing ain’t great, either.

Some funny touches: the american embassy in France is a wal-mart full of dancing girls. And sometimes the cheapness of the project turns into a lo-fi charm. Superfrenchman is played by a balloon with easily confused henchmen, and the also-inflatable Red China Man breathes frozen fog that settles on the ground.

Freedom of course ends up destroying most of France, his french guide Marie-Madeleine turns out to be a commie traitor, Russian Moujik Man is somewhat of an ally but can’t really be trusted. Freedom, not too fazed by the death of all his compatriots and followers, prevails through violence. Sadly it’s not a dated period piece and what Klein’s saying about American foreign policy applies perfectly well today.

Criterion: “Delightfully crass, Mr. Freedom is a trenchant, rib-tickling takedown of gaudy modern Americana.” It’s funny to think how many Criterion completists will soon own this movie.

Movie plays better in stills. When considering the screen shots I took, it seems almost like a good movie, clever and funny and ramshackle without the loud, boisterous, stagey dialogue to distract. In other words, it’s a much better movie when you’re not actually watching it. And since Klein was renowned in the 50’s as a still photographer and appears in Marker’s still-composed La Jetee, I’ve kept more screenshots than the film might deserve.

The introduction of Marienbad star Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine, yowza.
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Dr. Freedom:
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Captain Formidable is played by classy French icon Yves Montand:
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“Anti-freedomism is at a new high.” Can’t get enough of that dress. Note Marie-Madeleine’s placement in front of the red portion of the map, foreshadowing the revelation that she is a communist spy. Just kidding.
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Over a temporarily fallen Freedom, L-R: Moujik Man, Red China Man, Jesus & Mary
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Freedom celebrates the defeat of Superfrenchman… I don’t remember exactly what went on here:
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Forcing the maid to taste the poisoned food she brought. Nice shot setup:
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I love this shot so much. The matching hair, the goofy look on Freedom’s face, the unexplained picture of Hitler hanging on Marie-Madeleine’s wall:
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Serge Gainsbourg very nearly survives to the end:
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Freedom! Now available in a convenient spray!
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