by ·Comments Off on I Am Curious (1967-68, Vilgot Sjöman)

Ah, the mid-to-late 1960’s, when sex was freer and racism was lessening and students protested things and art was weird and you could have nudity in movies. Sjoman made a long movie (broken up into yellow and blue halves) combining fiction and documentary elements (including much behind-the-scenes footage of the film’s own making) featuring sex and protest and weirdness and nudity, successfully challenging censorship laws.

Vilgot and Lena:

I think Yellow is considered the classic important film and Blue its less-important little sister, but I enjoyed Blue more, maybe because I was used to the movie’s tricks and could pay more attention to the content. In both movies, Lena Nyman roams Sweden, escaping a cheating boyfriend, visits different national institutions, interviews passers-by about current social issues, hangs with friends and worries about her family but never seems comfortable anywhere, finally returns home and tells her cheating boyfriend that she has scabies.

Yellow has more of Vilgot, who is sleeping with Actor Lena (not Character Lena – though presumably neither is the Real Lena). Actor Lena starts dating the actor playing her boyfriend, which pisses off Vilgot, who latches onto a different young female film student at the end. A highlight is Lena’s imaginary discussions with Martin Luther King Jr.

Vilgot:

I was trying to introduce a Utopian idea about nonviolence: Sweden changing its military defense into one of nonviolence… Then I started to embellish that theme, and suddenly discovered that the girl was surrounded with symbols of aggression. She had knives in her closet, and a rifle. This is really a strange adherent of nonviolence!

Vilgot predicts his own death, quite incorrectly:

Blue opens behind-the-scenes with some public reaction to Yellow in the form of hate-mail to the studio. Lena will escape into the fictional film then Vilgot will break in and discuss character motivation. She hitchhikes to a prison, then stays with (and spies on) lesbian friends Sonja and Elin, and hangs with violent Hans and his apologetic girl Bim.

The crew sings a song about prisons:

G. Giddins:

When the crowds actually saw the picture, however, they felt cheated; pubic hair was in short supply, the sex was unerotic, and the running time mostly given over to a droll, Brechtian-Pirandellian, mock-vérité exploration of the chasm between the political and the personal.
…
Within a year or two, suburban theaters routinely programmed nudity-filled potboilers about nurses and stewardesses, soon to be followed by Deep Throat. Never again would audiences have to put up with socially redeeming values in the pursuit of pornography. Yellow triggered the sea-change that resulted, ironically, in the subsequent indifference towards Blue. It altered the American moviegoing experience, pointing the way to a post-code cinema.

Lena, curious:

by ·Comments Off on Satyricon (1969, Federico Fellini)

On a bit of a Fellini kick. On a recent shopping trip I found two different books about this movie, so I thought I’d do the full research project, (re)watching the DVD then reading the books. But about halfway through the DVD I decided I was ready to be finished with Satyricon, so the books will have to wait. It’s an imaginative adaptation of an ancient novel, Fellini-grotesque-style with a huge cast and massive sets. Seems like it should work, but everyone is a bit too wild and campy and I couldn’t get on the movie’s wavelength.

Our hero (or protagonist, anyway) is blonde Encolpius (Martin Potter of Demy’s Lady Oscar), introduced vehemently seeking his ex-lover Ascyltus (Atlantan Hiram Keller of Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye), who stole away E’s underage boy Giton and sold him to pig-faced actor Vernacchio. E gets the boy, immediately loses him again, then his entire apartment building is destroyed by an earthquake so E goes to a banquet thrown by super rich poet Trimalchio and attended by bitter rival poet Eumolpus (Salvo Randone of Hands Over the City), who nearly gets thrown into the oven.

Poetry party:

Trimalchio and Fortunata:

Eumolpus vs. the oven:

E is captured by a slave ship and “married” to an old man called Lichas (Alain Cuny, mysterious caped dude in The Milky Way), who is soon killed by enemies of Caesar. Little Giton is there too, but captured again, of course.

Baths are taken, and the demigod Hermaphrodite is kidnapped then allowed to die of dehydration. E fights a fake minotaur then loses his mojo and has to visit the fire-crotched witch Oenothea to get it back.

Oh yeah, there are some women in the movie besides the witch – Capucine (Clouseau’s wife in The Pink Panther) and Magali Noel (temptress of Amarcord), mostly playing bitter wives.

The wikipedia claims the dubbing was unusually horrendous by directorial intent, but I’m not buying it.

by ·Comments Off on Love Affair (1967, Dusan Makavejev)

Opens with a sexologist talking to us from his office, then flashes of sex-oriented drawings amidst the credits, finally easing us into the story of the switchboard operator. She’s stalked at work by an annoying messenger, starts dating a sanitation worker. But we know how this will end, because documentary-style scenes keep cutting in, of the police finding her body in a water tower, and her autopsy. She gets pregnant, is unhappy with her situation with the exterminator, he finally kills her, as we know he will.

Makavejev made this a few years before Mysteries of the Organism, and I’m pretty sure I liked this one better, though I’m no huge fan of either.

Criterion:

Despite such genre-flouting contradictions, Makavejev’s mix-and-match aesthetic creates visual and thematic harmony rather than Dadaist discord. In the most memorable sequence, a lovely shot of Izabela’s bare buttocks is graphically matched to eggs and then a mound of flour, into which a yolk is dropped, followed by images of hands mixing and kneading strudel pastry, all set to Verdi.

Film Quarterly:

We soon become aware of his fascination with the mythology of society, a mythology expressed through media and technology. Makavejev uses the images of mass culture as background for a straightforward story about two luckless people. The film illustrates McLuhan’s idea that man becomes the reproductive organ of the technological world.

N. Power:

[Isabella] smilingly telling him to come through to the bedroom because “there’s a good program on television.” It turns out to be Vertov’s 1931 Enthusiasm, specifically the scenes of churches being toppled by the crowds which are themselves taken from Esther Shub’s The Fall of the Romanovs. Thus we have a fictional couple watching a documentary within a documentary as a form of seduction: the cinematically informed viewer is thus seduced three times over. “It’s more intimate” this way, Isabella suggests, resting her head on Ahmed’s shoulder as they watch Vertov.

by ·Comments Off on Daisies (1966, Vera Chytilová)

The kind of filmmaking anarchy that everyone was doing in the 60’s, only here it’s done exceptionally well – as much anarchy as possible without the whole thing devolving into a mess.

Two girls who may or may not be sisters and possibly have the same first name seem to be scamming older men, playing with their food, and destroying everything they see (but artistically).

The filmmaking is as nuts as the girls – color filters, editing tricks, svankmajerian stop-mo fields of springs, a scene where the girls lop each other’s heads off with scissors, all from b/w to color and back again. It’s all very playful and contagiously fun.

After trashing an entire banquet table, the girls atone by trying to reassemble things while spouting propaganda (“If we’re good and hard-working, we’ll be happy”), closing with: “This film is dedicated to all those whole sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle.” Governments have no senses of humor, so the film was banned for wasting food.

The Guardian: Chytilová does not see herself as a feminist filmmaker, but rather believes in individualism, stating that if a person does not believe in a particular set of conventions or rules then it is up to that individual to break them.

M. Koresky for Criterion:

Chytilová ensures that something unexpected occurs in virtually every shot and edit, juxtaposing images with dissonant sounds, abruptly changing color filters within scenes, and fragmenting many sequences through unmotivated montage.
…
Though Daisies remains playful to its climactic orgy (a mega food fight), it is ultimately a dark, subversive work, aggressively critiquing those who might find it offensive before they even have a chance to complain.

Film Quarterly:

Roughly, the film is a series of fluctuations between gorging and de-gorging, a come-and-go between deluxe restaurants and ladies’ rooms. Our entire civilization could not be mocked more brutally. … But the most truly original element of the film is the soundtrack, an incredible blend of canned music from Wagner’s “Gotterdimmerung” to “Plaisir d’Amour,” animation noises, jazz songs and murmurs which … work not against the film but for it. The score bursts forth from the atonality of the images.

by ·Comments Off on Man Without a Map (1968, Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Teshigahara made a fifth film with writer Kobo Abe besides the three features canonized by Criterion and the short Ako, which appears on their Antonio Gaudi collection. I had high hopes for this stray unCriterionized film, but this time Abe and Teshigahara’s identity-crisis protagonist was so lost, I couldn’t even follow him. Also, Teshi seems to have misplaced his brilliant cinematographer, settling instead for a Gamera D.P. who sometimes seems to forget he’s shooting in color.

There’s plenty of visual interest, though – there are some wild geometric patterns and treated images, sudden shocks of yellow and red, and nice cinemascope compositions. The camera sometimes spies on people not in conversation, as if doing its own detective work. Our hero has a dialogue with a man we only see grotesquely reflected in a glass.

From the official blurb: “A salary man named Hiro Nemuro went out to deliver some documents… never to be seen again… Joining a detective who has been hired by the wife of the missing man, the film progresses at first like a hard-boiled detective story as the search leads the investigator further into the seedy Tokyo underworld of unlicensed taxi drivers, blackmail gangs and pornography, but his life becomes bit-by-bit more like the life of the missing man he seeks until he begins to lose his own identity.”

Detective Shintaro Katsu (Zatoichi himself, also Hanzo the Razor) is hired by missing man’s wife Etsuko Ichihara (Samurai Rebellion, Black Rain), then follows her shady brother into some sort of struggle in which the brother is killed – and I’m already lost. Then he follows a suicidal man who claims to have information but is really just lonely and is glad for the attention. The detective ends up with the missing man’s wife – then he escapes her, going missing himself. Something like that. I shouldn’t have watched while sleepy. Or maybe that’s exactly what I should have done, since it made images like these more mysterious.

by ·1 Comment

Lang’s final film finds him back in Germany, making a cheap-looking b-movie callback to one of his largest silent features and his pioneering second sound film. Immediately following his Indian Epic, another serials-inspired adventure flick, it seems that either Lang’s artistically triumphant two decades in Hollywood have earned him no respect and he’s been kicked down to making silly action flicks – or maybe these are the kinds of movies he’d been wanting to make again. Seems like the former, a bland assignment for a tired old man, since the plotting is snappy but this lacks the atmosphere and interest of Franju’s Judex a few years later.

Wolfgang Preiss, who would continue playing Mabuse throughout the 60’s and appear in Chabrol’s Dr. M:

Roger Corman-looking billionaire Peter van Eyck of Wages of Fear and Mr. Arkadin:

Movie starts with a flutter of things happening. Inspector Kras speaks with a blind psychic named Cornelius, snipers are ordered by a clubfooted kingpin to kill a reporter in rush hour traffic, and the cops declare that Dr. Mabuse’s crime legacy was forgotten in the wake of the whole nazi thing. Then billionaire Travers talks a suicidal woman named Menil down from a ledge while an insurance salesman called Mistelzweig bothers everyone down at the bar.

Mistelzweig: Werner Peters, a Mabuse film regular

fake-suicidal Dawn Addams, who followed-up by playing Jekyll/Hyde’s wife in a Hammer film:

The billionaire falls for the pretty suicidal girl (and is shown a secret one-way mirror where he can watch her) while the inspector fends off assassination attempts while investigating the crime-ridden fancy hotel where those two are staying. Anyway, the psychic is the girl’s psychiatrist is Mabuse, Mistelzweig is an undercover cop, the girl is a Mabuse plant who gets the billionaire to fake-kill her fake-husband, and all this leads where it must: to a confession of evil plans in an underground lair and a car chase/shootout.

Inspector Gert Frobe, who would run into another master criminal years later in Nuits Rouges:

Henchman Howard Vernon, a Jean-Pierre Melville regular and title star of The Awful Dr. Orlof:

According to Wikipedia, based on a novel written in Esperanto. I’d like to hear the Masters of Cinema commentary with David Kalat, but I’ve already bought the other two Lang-Mabuse movies domestically, so it seems nuts to buy the UK box set for $60.

by ·Comments Off on If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966, Chris Marker)

Part 1: The Castle

“The photo is the hunt. It’s the instinct of hunting without the desire to kill. It’s the hunt of angels… you track, you aim, you fire and–clic! Instead of a dead man, you make him eternal.”

A slideshow of photographs with a voiceover discussion about the nature of photographs, flipping rapidly all over the globe. Familiar sights: streets of Cuba, “commuter trains full of sleeping Japanese,” an owl in a flight museum, that shot I love of the Russian woman holding a turtle. Many references to things I don’t follow, but because of the great photos and the 50-minute length, this would make a great Intro to Marker – especially if there was better-quality video available.

They fawn over Russia for a while, moving to to lonely monasteries in Greece, then the first day of Algerian independence (below).

“One instant of happiness paid for with seven years of war and one million deaths. And the following day, the Castle was still there. And the poor are still there, day after day. And day after day, we continue to betray them.”

Part 2: The Garden

A montage of animal shots, then a tour of a Korea, and on to Scandinavia.

Different kinds of music, including bits of the electronic effects and percussion that would become more prominent in his later films.

“One needs to look closely at this Scandinavian man. He has everything, truly everything that nine tenths of humanity doesn’t dare to imagine in their wildest dreams. It’s for his standard of living that the Black, the Arab, the Greek, the Siberian and even the Cuban militiamen are striving. He has everything the revolutions promised. And when one shows him some Brecht – free moreover – in the Stockholm gardens, he doesn’t really get the message.”

How do you say elephant in Russian? Slon.

Then a tour of tombs and discussion of death. “I met a man who lived his own death” sounds like an alternate intro to La Jetee.

A yugoslavian hog considers the day to come:

After a wordless musical section, all fades out, but returns for a strange coda, a montage of torn posters with the sound of a screaming monkey, then final voiceover, which seems lovely when it accompanies the images, but didn’t make sense when I tried to transcribe here.

by ·Comments Off on 2000 Maniacs (1964, Herschell Gordon Lewis)

It is my dad’s fault that I’ve wanted to see this for so long, since he mentioned it years ago. I figured it’d be pretty bad, but I didn’t count on it being a self-conscious bit of low-budget camp horror-comedy. So it’s a stupid, terrible movie but still impossible to hate (I have more of a savage dislike for it).

The fateful barrel:

“The South’s gonna rise again,” says the corny-ass song over the introduction, and that’s just what the movie’s about. Some lost travelers on their way to Atlanta get redirected to a rural town and crowned the guests of honor in a Civil War revenge ceremony, killed in various inventive ways, usually in broad daylight before a crowd of cheering townies. One is crushed by a giant rock in a carnival game, another is ripped apart by horses, and in the most famous scene (to my dad, anyway) a guy is put inside a barrel full of nails and rolled down a hill. Twist ending: the couple who escapes returns with law enforcement, but the town has vanished, leaving only a plaque saying that the whole place was leveled by the Union army during the war (apparently inspired by Brigadoon, if “inspired” is the word).

Oh and one girl’s arm is just chopped off:

Lots of banjo music, obviously. The cameraman is zoom-happy and everything looks cheap, but at least it was shot with direct sound, which you can tell since the background hum changes dramatically with every edit. This likely puts it technologically above such contemporaries as Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned and Antonioni’s Red Desert. I distracted myself with the horrible accents (shot in Florida but somehow devoid of authentic Southerners) and character names (Terry Adams! David Wells!).

One detail about the South the filmmakers got right:

An advertising man, Lewis also made The Wizard of Gore and Blood Feast, and producer David Friedman oversaw two Maniacs sequels in the 2000’s.

by ·Comments Off on The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)

Polite, ornate historical movie, shot 4:3 for television in grand color. I had to look this up: XIV was two Louises before the Louis who married Marie Antoinette then got killed in 1793 by the French Revolution. All these Louises had long reigns, so the movie takes place a good century before the Revolution.

This Louis seems a pudgy weakling, more interested in partying and women than in ruling the country, until his main advisor Cardinal Mazarin dies. From then on, the king decides to take charge, proclaims that all policy must be personally approved by him, and arrests the advisor who had schemed to take control after the cardinal’s death.

At the end, the King moves the palace to Versailles, and gets all the nobles to follow him there, consolidating all power around himself.

dying cardinal mazarin:

I wonder if there were commercial breaks when this first aired – it has the abrupt fade-outs at the end of scenes that usually signal that an ad is coming. J. Hoberman says Rossellini’s late TV works “have an intimacy well-suited to the small screen,” but I watched this movie and all his others on my laptop screen, so I’ve long ago lost the difference between theatrical and television. It didn’t seem any more intimate than the Ingrid Bergman films.

Some truth from Tag: “‘You always have to try to emphasize the emotion,’ said Rossellini. Despite the strange rumor in film textbooks that Rossellini siezes reality in the raw, in fact, he carefully crafts his display.”

Louis in his fancypants:

It has a theatrical quality, with people standing and stuffily proclaiming things to others who ought to know already. You’ve gotta mix exposition with your realism if you want audiences to understand your history-lesson TV-movie. The king seems a stiff actor at first, but I started to like him. He never smiles, and the closest he ever gets to a look of glorious kingly determination is a sort of sad droop with shades of anger. It’s quite a good movie but I guess I don’t understand what makes this different from other historical fiction, how Rossellini thought of his TV work as an educational revolution, or how this became an Anthology Film Archives staple.

Louis’s mom is kind of mean to him:

Renzo: “He had a utopian vision: to save the world through television. His utopian vision was that television could free mankind from ignorance, and that freeing mankind from ignorance would also eliminate hunger and unemployment and all other evils. He considered ignorance the source of all the world’s ills. He thought that his function as a mature director was to achieve this. Hence the idea of making films based on history as the font of knowledge, and the idea of describing the world through television.” Tag says R.R. announced in 1962 that cinema is dead and made a doc on the history of iron, which flopped, causing him to be quite depressed. A couple years later, Louis XIV was chosen to close the Venice Film Festival, and a third of the French population watched it on TV. Tag says you can learn more about the life of Rossellini’s historical subjects from a desk encyclopedia than from watching the films, so the films are more for conveying the emotions of the events. “Rossellini’s heroes are the loonies who turn the most damn-fool ideas into reality. … heroes whose inner fire takes us with them into our new reality. … but in Louis’s case, as often in history, the big effort is to subjugate people rather than illuminate them, to create slaves who think they’re free.”

scheming Fouquet:

The guy playing Louis was an office clerk and amateur play director, nervous on camera, reading most of his lines off a blackboard. Colbert, mustachioed advisor to the king, is Raymond Jourdan of Renoir’s The Elusive Corporal. But mostly they’re first-time or small-time actors. Script adapted by Jean Gruault, who worked with Rivette, Truffaut and Resnais.

Tag calls it “the story of a man who was afraid and so creates a new reality where he’ll control everyone … it’s a horror film.”