by ·Comments Off on Onibaba (1964, Kaneto Shindo)

Brilliant movie. It’s a simple, straightforward story with just a few characters, but manages to have some of the most indelible horror scenes, the most erotic moments, best cinematography and craziest music I’ve seen/heard all year. The music has a real sense of humor, with punctuating sound effects, all drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! drum-drumma-drum-drumma slash-YEAAAGH! a hundred times in a row. Later it uses a crackling sound, like someone walking on sticks.

The main characters are credited by their relationship to a missing man – Kichi’s Mother (Nobuko Otowa, also of Shindo’s Naked Island) and Kichi’s Wife (Jitsuko Yoshimura of Pigs and Battleships). Kichi never appears, and we assume he’s dead because his friend and neighbor Hachi (Kei Sato, the warden in Death By Hanging, a reporter in Pitfall) returns from war (escaped, not dismissed) and tells them so. Hachi’s kind of a bastard, so mom is suspicious that he’s lying, but mostly she’s afraid that Kichi’s horny widow will abandon her for Hachi. Before he showed up, the two women had a good racket going, killing unsuspecting escaped warriors who are either hiding or lost in the tall grasses and selling their armor and weapons to local merchant Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama, who possibly got naked in In the Realm of the Senses, was also in Vengeance Is Mine).

The two killers:

Ushi:

The young widow begins waiting for mom to fall asleep then sneaking away, racing through the grasses to Hachi’s hut. When I mentioned erotic scenes above, I meant the running itself, not their embrace after she arrives. The camera flies with her through the grass as she flails ahead at full tilt, mouth open, ecstatic with anticipation.

Hachi:

One night a demon-masked man appears at the hut when mom is alone and orders her to show him the way out of the grasses. He claims the mask protects his extremely handsome face and intimidates the enemy, and refuses to remove it when she asks. She leads him straight into the deep hole where they dispose of the soldiers they kill, then she drops down on a rope the next day and removes his mask, using it at night to scare her daughter-in-law into returning home, after a setup lecture about sin and punishment. But after one rainy night, the mask gets stuck, and after much pulling and prying, finally comes tearing off, disfiguring the mother’s face in the process. Incidentally, Hachi is killed the same night, but neither of the women find this out before the movie ends. The daughter flees, “a real demon!” and the mother follows, falling headlong into the hole shouting “I’m a human being!”

Criterion:

Released in Japan in 1964, the same year as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes (a film to which it bears a number of striking resemblances), Onibaba is based on a Buddhist parable meant to encourage women’s attendance at religious convocations. But in Shindo’s hands the parable is gleefully deformed into a cautionary tale about sexual jealousy and unrequited passion, reaffirming his propensity for superimposing the modern and the ancient, not to mention God and the devil. Not only was Onibaba the director’s first period film, set in the sixteenth century during a time of constant war and ceaseless famine, it was also his first (of several to come) to place an overt focus — in shot after shot of the topless torsos of its central characters — on the ways that sexual desire, while essential to human survival, can also have cataclysmic consequences.

by ·Comments Off on The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman)

On a Bergman kick lately, so I meant to watch this and Hour of the Wolf for SHOCKtober, but only made it to one. The beginning of Bergman’s extensive work with cinematographer Sven Nykist, brilliant looking but with less of the extreme blacks of Smiles of a Summer Night and The Magician. Supposedly this was stylistically influenced by Akira Kurosawa, after which Sven and Ingmar created their own style.

Pure and flowery Karin with dark, suspicious Ingeri:

Karin (Birgitta Pettersson, a housemaid in The Magician) is the beautiful daughter of Tore (Max Von Sydow, The Magician himself) and Mareta (Birgitta Valberg of Port of Call), sent to church to deliver candles one Sunday wearing her nicest dress. Pregnant dark-haired servant girl Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom of Winter Light) comes along. The parents are devout Christians (especially mom, who whips herself in atonement) but the girls aren’t – Ingeri prays to Odin and Karin seems to only care about being spoiled by her parents and looking pretty for boys. Along the way Karin flirts with a boy whom Ingeri knows, and the two flee from an icky bridge keeper.

Commentary says the raven represents Odin

The raven appears right after the old man at the bridge, an Odin supporter:

While Karin is alone she comes across a grotesque gang of acrobat goat-herdsmen brothers, and shares her lunch with them, but the two older ones chase then rape and kill her, while the youngest watches, afraid.

The herdsmen:

Karin, first realizing she’s in danger:

The brothers continue on their travels, ask refuge at Tore and Mareta’s house, and in private offer to sell Mareta a beautiful dress – the one Karin was wearing when she left that morning. So the parents already know Karin is in trouble, possibly dead, when Ingeri comes along and confirms it to Tore. “Kill me first. My guilt is greater than theirs. I willed it to happen. Ever since I became with child I’ve hated her. The very day I prayed for it, he did it. It was him and me, not the herdsmen.”

Sad parents:

Tore puts himself through a purification ritual, wrestles a tree to the ground, then waits for the brothers to awaken and kills them all (knife, fire, and throwing the young boy into the wall). Ingeri walks them to their daughter’s resting place. Mareta: “I loved her too much, Tore, more than God himself. When I saw how she favored you, I began to hate you. It is me God meant to punish by this. I bear the guilt.” When Karin’s head is moved, a spring bubbles up from the ground beneath it. Tore senses God is speaking to him, knows he went too far killing the boy, and swears to devote the rest of his life to building a church on that spot.

Von Sydow, out for blood:

Earlier when Ingeri is preparing sandwiches for Karin’s lunch, she puts a live toad between slices of bread, which falls out just before the murder. The DVD commentary: “in ancient scandinavian folklore, toads were thought to be the devil in disguise.”

The movie won an oscar (against Clouzot’s La Verite), but the American and French critics who’d been Bergman’s biggest champions trashed it. Bergman later said it should be regarded as an aberration in his work, and never made another film in an historical setting.

Tree wrestling:

A decade later Wes Craven took the same story and made reprehensible trash out of it with Last House on the Left.

by ·Comments Off on Spirits of the Dead (1968, Vadim/Malle/Fellini)

Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the title on the print, and IMDB calls it Histoires extraordinaires. An anthology film with three shorts based on Edgar Allen Poe stories, its reputation is of a brilliant Fellini film saddled behind a harmless Malle and terrible Vadim – but I like the Vadim (and I watched it twice, so I’m sure) and found the Malle unpleasant.

–
Metzengerstein (Roger Vadim)

Started watching this on DVD in French with bad dubbing – I noticed Jane Fonda was mouthing the words I saw in the subtitles, though I was hearing French voices. So after this segment, I started over with the British blu-ray, which has a great picture-quality advantage even if some of the voices are still dubbed. IMDB claims Vincent Price is narrating, but it sounds more like Rod Serling.

Jane Fonda, happiest when someone is getting hanged:

Frederique (Jane Fonda a few months before Barbarella) is a countess who wears outrageous clothing and hangs out with her rich friends and exotic pets (a blue/gold macaw, a baby leopard) taunting the peasants, sometimes to death. She meets a distant relative who lives on neighboring land (Fonda’s actual brother Peter, between The Trip and Easy Rider). She’s infatuated with him, but he doesn’t fall for her power trip, so she orders his barn burned down and he dies trying to save his prize horse. Just then a black horse appears at her castle, and she becomes obsessed with riding it, finally riding into some burning fields to be with her deceased cousin. It’s not much of a story, but I liked its mix of gothic brooding and 1960’s decadence. Also I liked Peter’s baby owl.

Francoise Prevost, a conspirator in Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round, plays “friend of countess” – not sure if that’s the friend Jane was fondling naked in a bathtub or not. The Poe story (in which the Jane Fonda character was male) was filmed again in the 1970’s by some French people I’ve never heard of.

–
William Wilson (Louis Malle)

Opens with the jump-cuttiest scene of a man running intercut with a rag doll falling off a church tower. Alain Delon (year after Le Samourai, two before Le Cercle Rouge) barges rudely into a confession booth and subjects a priest to his flippantly-dubbed flashbacks. First, as a psychotic young boy (fun fact: 27 years later, the actor playing young Delon would appear in Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak), Wilson was tormenting his classmates when another boy named William Wilson showed up, frustrating him. “Several years later I entered the school of medicine out of curiosity,” and as a psychotic young man, he rapes and tortures some girl on the autopsy table in front of his colleagues, again is frustrated when another William Wilson (now clearly played by Delon himself) shows up. Finally as a psychotic adult, Wilson is cheating a rich woman (Vadim’s ex-wife Brigitte Bardot, a few years before her retirement) at cards then whipping her (!) when Other Wilson arrives and reveals the fraud.

That’s the autopsy girl, not Bardot:

I don’t know what Wilson wanted the priest to do about all this, and I’m not sure if he’s just bringing up a few specific examples of the many times WWII turned up in his life, or if the guy only arrives once a decade. WW goes running outside, fights his doppelganger in a duel, and either stabs himself or leaps off the church tower, it’s hard to tell which. Good. It’s a misogynistic little film with diabolically bad dialogue. The Poe story (which has less nude-woman-torture, and fewer leaps from atop church towers) was filmed before in the silent era with Paul Wegener and again with Conrad Veidt, and I can tell just from its wikipedia entry that the original story is better than Malle’s visualisation.

William the Second:

–
Toby Dammit (Federico Fellini)

A drugged-out British actor arrives in Italy to appear in a film, for which he has been promised a ferrari. After suffering through his flight, cast and crew meetings and a party (haven’t seen it in a while, but looks like they’re partying on the set of Satyricon), he gets his hands on the ferrari and drives through the confounding Italian countryside, finally leaping an out-of-order bridge but failing to notice the steel wire just at neck level.

A decadent little film – every shot is crazy and imaginative and essential. Terence Stamp (year after Poor Cow) was so good in this, that it will now be necessary for me to watch everything he did between it and The Limey. Creepiest is the devil girl with a white ball who alternately torments and provokes the volatile Stamp without any dialogue. The Poe story actually features a character named Toby Dammit’s bridge-jumping beheading – though not in a ferrari, obviously.

–
Bonus image – a Jean Cocteau snowball fight:

by ·Comments Off on Thriller (1960-61)

Watched a few episodes of this Boris Karloff-hosted series.

Well of Doom
It’s the night before the wedding of rich property owner Penrose to his bride Laura. He drives towards the bachelor party with old family friend/employee Teal (Torin Thatcher of Blackbeard the Pirate) when they’re stopped by an evil wizard (Henry Daniell who appeared with Karloff in The Body Snatcher, also in The Great Dictator) and his minion (Richard Kiel in one of his first screen roles). The wizard kills Teal and their chauffeur and locks bride and groom in a dungeon with the titular well, demanding Penrose sign over his estate. Penrose complies, fakes his death (having tied a rope inside the well to escape) and learns that there’s no magic – all trickery perpetrated by the long-suffering Teal who plans to take over the estate, claiming the couple had eloped. A shootout ensues between power-hungry plotters, Kiel stumbles into a fatal fall and love and money are preserved. Pretty decent. John Brahm also directed The Locket and a remake of The Lodger. Written by Donald Sanford (Midway).

Kiel hulking over Henry Daniell:

Trio for Terror
Three shorts from various stories, all adapted by Barré Lyndon (The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse) and directed by Ida Lupino (The Hitch-Hiker).

Simon (cousin Richard Lupino) has thought of the perfect crime (or at least the perfect alibi), murdering his rich uncle by slipping unseen out of his train car while the ticket-taker thinks he’s napping. Unfortunately, his murdered uncle (Terence de Marney, who’d appear with Karloff in Die Monster Die) was into voodoo, appears as a rooster-beast in Simon’s train car for revenge.

Richard Lupino, who should’ve known not to murder anyone who keeps a rooster tied to a circular astrology table:

Terence de Marney, who should’ve been able to see his murderous nephew coming through that glass bulb:

Collins (Robin Hughes, the talking head in The Thing That Couldn’t Die) goes to a gambling hall, breaks the bank winning at roulette, then escapes from a potentially murderous trap-bed. No way to make this one too exciting.

Eyepatch man (didn’t catch his name) with silent-talking eerie conquistador headed Robin Hughes:

Manhunt for a strangler, who escapes into a mannequin museum run by Milo (John Abbott of Slapstick), a serial killer who preys on serial killers, turning them to stone with the head of Medusa.

L-R: dummy, strangler, Milo:

Papa Benjamin
Wilson (John Ireland, Monty Clift’s buddy/rival in Red River) comes to the police station, says he just killed a man named Papa Benjamin. It seems Wilson followed his band’s drummer into a private voodoo club looking for “that new sound,” then promptly ripped off that sound with his all-white orchestra. A year later Wilson has been suffering from pain, cursed for betraying the voodoo secrets, so he “kills” the voodoo leader, but when he leads the cops there, no evidence. Dummy goes out with his band and performs the “voodoo rhapsody” once again, is struck dead at the end of it. Directed by Ted Post (Dirty Harry 2, Planet of the Apes 2) based on a story by popular mystery writer Cornell Woolrich.

John Ireland getting forcibly inducted into a voodoo cult:

by ·Comments Off on The Last Ten Minutes vol. 007

Oh look, netflix streaming has a whole bunch of James Bond movies. I never watched them consistently, saw a couple all the way through and a bunch more in fragments on cable. So this is an attempt to figure out which Bond is which, and which movies were halfway decent.

Thunderball (1965)
Sean Connery is not-so-excitingly rescued by a helicopter, yells some exposition that I didn’t quite catch. Underwater harpoon battle! Black team vs. orange team, heavy casualties. Everyone except Bond is wearing pants. The movie harpoons a shark, booo. I hope the movie ate that shark. Bond catches up with grey-haired eyepatched Largo (Adolfo Celi of Diabolik and The Phantom of Liberty) aboard the Disco Volante – aha – slaps him around while the boat accelerates to Benny Hill speed. He escapes with a girl named Domino (Claudine Auger of A Bay of Blood), who also has no pants. They ditch the Peter Lorre-like fellow who helped rescue her, and escape into a bluescreen sky. Director Terence Young’s third Bond movie – he’d later make Wait Until Dark.

You Only Live Twice (1967)
Connery fails to escape Donald “Dr. Evil” Pleasence by shooting a guy with his cigarette. Lots of men (ninjas, according to IMDB) fight in different-colored outfits. Bond knocks an unpunchable tough guy into a pirahna pool and pushes the button that makes a spacecraft on TV blow up. Pleasence blows the whole base, but every single person escapes anyway, and the same planes drop the same lifeboats as in the last movie. Bond ends up in one with a girl named Kissy (Mie Hama of What’s Up Tiger Lily).

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Jill St. John (of Tashlin & Lewis flick Who’s Minding The Store?) is making a mockery of clothing in her purple/red flag swimsuit. Connery does acrobatics in a suit, while helicopters explode into optical stills. Baddy Blofeld (Charles Gray of the Rocky Horror movies) enters a toy submarine held by a Bond-controlled crane. Connery gleefully wrecking-balls the toy into the control tower until the whole derrick explodes. Nice finale featuring one waiter on fire and another exploding mid-air.

Live and Let Die (1973)
Heroin dealer Yaphet Kotto (of Bone, Alien and the show Homicide) has stolen Roger Moore’s inflation gun, shows off all his silly bad-guy toys (a monorail, waterproof heroin canisters) then threatens Bond and Jane “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” Seymour with death by shark. Every movie so far has featured watery deaths. In the most WTF moment of any movie so far, Bond shoves a compressed-air pellet into Yaphet’s head, turning him into a balloon. The last-minute assassination-attempt is back, and Moore tosses a metal-claw-handed Julius Harris (of Black Caesar) out his train window.

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)
The great Christopher Lee (year after The Wicker Man) is TMWTGG, but Moore shoots him dead before he’s got any lines – shame. Nice scene, all rotating mirrors and neon triangles. Criminals used to put such style into their lairs. Britt Ekland (also of Wicker Man) tosses a guy into subzero liquid (another watery death), then triggers self-destruct with her ass, the least competent of any bond girl so far. He and the girl sail away in an ancient Chinese ship, pausing to dispose of an angry Hervé Villechaize (soon after Greaser’s Palace). These last three were directed by Guy Hamilton, who’d go on to make Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
A boat is blowing up – more water, and oh look, more sharks. Moore is aboard the evil aquatic base, shoots boring Curd Jurgens (star of both a Blue Angel remake and a Threepenny Opera remake), sics Jaws on a shark (a funny joke in the mid-1970’s) and escapes with lovely enemy spy Barbara Bach – codename Triple X, another joke. It all seems rather inert, the least-exciting Bond finale I’ve seen despite Jaws and explosions.

Moonraker (1979)
Oh god, laser gun battles. Moore ejects Michael Lonsdale (!) into space then watches some Star Wars models out the window. Jaws is in love with a girl with pigtails and it’s sweet. He even gets dialogue, helps Bond and Lois Chiles (of Broadcast News) into a shuttle where they play high-stakes space invaders then celebrate with zero-G sex. These last two and You Only Live Twice were directed by Lewis Gilbert, who helmed some thrillers in the 50’s and more recently an Aidan Quinn ghost story.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Moore is in a decidedly low-tech mountain hideout, with a full team for once. Punch-out in a church, people thrown through stained glass windows, and another one of those tough guys who just smiles when Bond punches him in the gut. It’s all for some Texas Instruments-looking device which Bond hurls off a cliff so the Russians won’t get it. Not nearly as exciting as the others, with an unsexy PG version of the gag ending from the last few, then a dubbed macaw to close it out. John Glen, editor of the last couple Bond films, is promoted to director and takes the series through License to Kill.

Octopussy (1983)
Hooray for gypsies, acrobats, dancers and sad clowns. This makes up for the drab brownness of the last movie. The title character (Maud Adams, returning from Golden Gun) has a gun and Bond is nowhere to be found. Oh here he is, in a hot air balloon of course. Some Goldeneye-(the video game)-style first-person machine-gunning. Bond on horseback chases down the Afghani/Indian villains’ plane and just rides around on top of it. Louis Jordan (star of Letter from an Unknown Woman) flies his plane into a cliff after Bond and the girl jump to safety. They’ve toned down the sexy ending even further – this is getting out of hand.

Never Say Never Again (1983)
Weird, a non-canonical Bond film from a rival studio, a remake of Thunderball from the director of The Empire Strikes Back featuring the return of Sean Connery. Never having cared about the 007 series, this is not something I ever suspected existed. Connery has a jetpack! He and partner Bernie Casey (of Cleopatra Jones and The Man Who Fell To Earth) scuba into a paper-mache fortress where Max von Sydow reigns, a less-iconic Largo. Bond, as in the original, can be easily recognized as the one without pants. An underwater battle ensues, with worse lighting, much less harpooning, and slightly more Kim Basinger than before. In the would-be sexy postscript scene, Bond dumps Rowan Atkinson into a swimming pool – so, less Benny Hill, more Mr. Bean.

A View to a Kill (1985)
Opens with a disclaimer about baddie Chris Walken’s character name “Zorin” – I wonder what prompted that. Anyway, very excited to see Grace Jones with new wave hair helping out Roger Moore. She explodes while a slick blonde Walken watches from above, as does the proper blonde love interest (Tanya Roberts of The Beastmaster and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Bond dangles from a zeppelin line as Walken tries to shake him loose in the city, accompanied by corny dialogue. Punch-out atop the Golden Gate bridge features lots of bluescreen backdrops, Chris Walken with an axe, and an angry old man with a cartoon stick of dynamite. Postscript involves a camera-equipped robot, chuckling Russians and somehow an even less sexy finale than the Rowan Atkinson one. Come on now, 1980’s.

The Living Daylights (1987)
Roger has been retired to a closet at MGM, and was never heard from again. Tim Dalton is flying a plane around with Maryam d’Abo (of Shootfighter), blowing up a bridge while Arabs wage war below. Hmm, they drive out of a crashing plane in a jeep. Warfare afficionado MITCHELL is blasting away at Bond – thought I remembered him as a good guy in the later ones. Mitchell is dead, so never mind. Ash liked all the whistling in this one.

by ·Comments Off on Vivre Sa Vie (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)

Subtitled “a film in twelve tableaux,” it’s broken up by numbered chapter title cards.

Chapter One:

A Warholian credits open, long-held shots of a self-conscious-looking Anna, each take with music at first then dying off. Sets a mournful tone for the movie, which plays like a hard-luck tragedy, even if Anna herself rarely seems disappointed. It also sets up the viewer for the playfully offbeat formal choices that will be made for the next 80 minutes, as if the “film by Godard” credit didn’t already prepare for that. JLG must’ve taken a page from Fellini – just because you’re making a depressing movie about the downward spiral of a prostitute doesn’t mean you can’t have fun along the way.

Chapter Two:

Karina, in her second film with husband Godard (not counting the silent short in Cleo from 5 to 7), is our star. Hardly anyone else appears in the movie for more than a few minutes, but she’s stylish and vivacious enough to carry the picture. Her co-star would be the camera, always doing something interesting, but in a showy, look-at-me way, Godard in the phase when he was pointedly giving the finger to convention while still trying to make a viable movie with a story and character.

Chapter Three:

This cop is questioning Anna about a minor crime, if picking up money that someone else dropped is a crime at all. Highlights include this reaction shot of the cop, and Anna’s concluding line, “I… is someone else.”

Chapter Four:

Film references: in an early scene she repeats a line a few times, saying “I just wanted to deliver that line a specific way.” She watches The Passion of Joan of Arc, her reactions shot in Dreyerian close-ups, then goes to a diner that has posters for Un Femme est un femme and L’Amérique insolite (and something in Japanese). A prostitute (below) stands under a giant torn poster for Spartacus, and later Anna stands before The Hustler (ha) and Danny Kaye in On The Double. More than once, Anna tells people she was in a movie with Eddie Constantine some months ago (technically true – Eddie appeared in the silent Varda short). And on the final car ride, they pass a nice big poster for Jules and Jim.

Chapter Five:

The fourth feature Godard made, the third to be released to theaters, the eleventh that I’ve watched. The fifth Godard feature that I’ve written about here, and probably my favorite of these five. Scored an 8/10 from IMDB user ratings, which is good – like Avatar good.

Chapter Six:

M. Atkinson:

You can’t miss his self-awareness here—the movie’s signature move is a “close-up” of the back of Karina’s head as she chats with offscreen men … Godard’s shots were always about how he felt about what he saw, and this composition is the equivalent of looking but not seeing, of turning your star’s expressive power into offscreen space, of admitting to the world that, though you love this woman, you do not know her.

Chapter Seven:

One episode is like a educational film on prostitutes. I don’t remember which one. Maybe this one.

Chapter Eight:

Nice music by Michel Legrand, a short theme repeated endlessly, but not to annoyance, and of course the sharp cinematography by Raoul Coutard.

Chapter Nine:

Won a couple prizes in Venice, nominated alongside Lolita and Knife in the Water and Mamma Roma and Therese, while Tarkovsky and Zurlini shared the top prize.

Chapter Ten:

In the second-to-last chapter she sits down for a chat, “a philosophical café discussion about the difficulty of truth telling with Brice Parain, a famous French philosopher who paved the way for the poststructuralists by maintaining that language begat humanity, not the other way around.” I’ll bet Parain would get a kick out of Pontypool.

Chapter Eleven:

Of course she dies suddenly at the end. This was before screenwriters had figured out how to end a movie without killing a main character. I can’t figure exactly who was responsible for her death, or what went on in the final scene. It’s not important.

Chapter Twelve:

by ·Comments Off on Black Test Car (1962, Yasuzo Masumura)

60’s-style cool in a cinemascope stripe, more Seijun Suzuki than Red Angel. The upstart Tiger motor company tries to release a new sports car but the larger Yamoto company is trying to steal their ideas and sabotage their success. Asahina is a young Tiger engineer expected to become department head after the new car’s launch, but after going along with his bosses in the spy game – including selling out his girl to get trade secrets – he walks out at the end, saying Tiger has become as dirty as their competitors.

A test car crashes dramatically. Asahina’s girl Masako works at a bar, tries to get the competitors to talk. Tiger employees attempt to sell fake designs to Yamoto, but Yamoto has already stolen the real plans. A designer is kidnapped. A triple-crossing reporter gets payment from all sides. A board meeting is filmed through the window and a lip-reader employed to translate. A collector buys the first car off the line, rigs its destruction on train tracks and says the car was a lemon, drawing big publicity. The Tiger employee responsible for the leaks is discovered and kills himself. It’s all pretty action-packed for a movie populated by motor engineers.

The IMDB only feels like listing a few of the actors. Our moral hero was Jiro Tamiya, who costarred in a popular series of films known as Bad Reputation or Tough Guy. His girl was Junko Kano – didn’t act for long, not in anything else I’ve heard of. Bald Tiger unit boss Onada was Hideo Takamatsu of A Wife Confesses. Hiraki, fresh-faced son-in-law of the hospitalized company head, was Eiji Funakoshi, star of Fires on the Plain and Blind Beast.

AV Club:

Throughout his career, Masumura displayed a flair for the ludicrous, and frequently skewered his countrymen’s Westernizing pretensions by mocking the ways in which the new religion of business was costing them their souls. Black Test Car is largely effective because Masumura plays the story relatively straight. Shooting in stark black and white, in crowded rooms framed at cramped angles, Masumura keeps the mood tense and coaxes performances that are earnest without becoming campy. The boardroom chatter—along the lines of, “People want speed and luxury!”—coupled with the fast-paced editing make Black Test Car play like a darkly sophisticated live-action episode of Speed Racer.

by ·Comments Off on Canyon Shorts

As I said, reading the Canyon Cinema book just made me want to see more of their films, and so I held a solo screening of some video reproductions of films from their archives.

Notes on the Circus (1966, Jonas Mekas)

Doc footage from his seat at the Ringling Bros. circus, edited to a pulp after the fact, divided into four sections.

1. nervous, jittery views of circus acts: trapeze, clowns, animal acts.
2. more of the same, but towards the end of this section the editing goes hyper and adds superimpositions.
3. picks up where the end of 2 left off. This is likely more fun than an actual circus.
4. all energy, focus be damned.

The guitar/harmonica folk music worked pretty well alongside the images. Mekas repeats songs just as he repeats shots (the same woman doffs her white coat and ascends the trapeze at least three times).
Canyon claims “no post-editing of opticals,” so was he rewinding and re-exposing the film while sitting at the circus?

Here I Am (1962, Bruce Baillie)

A pre-Wiseman verite doc on a local school for mentally disturbed children. Why is the caretaker giving the kids cigarettes?!? Non-sync sound (no narration) with added cello. Nicely paced, and very well preserved. Canyon called it “never before released,” but before when? The DVD notes say it was part of a homegrown newsreel program. “Like the school itself, the camera gives the kids center stage and moves at their pace.”

Fake Fruit Factory (1986, Chick Strand)

Shaky, handheld doc of women who work at the titular factory, talking about sex and food and work, interrupted in the middle by their annual picnic. Non-sync sound, I think – hard to tell since close-ups of hands and bodies and fake fruit are favored over faces. Canyon gets the title wrong on their website and botches the description. Wasn’t Strand one of their founders?

SSS (1988, Henry Hills)

Oh wonderful, a dance film. Many dancers in many locations, all wearing hilarious clothes, rapidly edited in a pleasing way, punctuated by a few seconds of black every once in a while. Best part is the music, orchestral then cartoonish, sounds like a DJ with some electronics, all by Tom Cora, Christian Marclay and Zeena Parkins (and recorded by Kramer). Canyon says “filmed on the streets of the East Village and edited over three years.”

Money (1985, Henry Hills)

No music this time, but lots of musicians and some dancers. Seems like a hundred people on the street were interviewed about money (some were given scripts to read) then their every word was chopped out of context and edited against everyone else, sometimes forming new sentences or patterns from different sources, sometimes just spazzing out all over, interspersed with the musician and dancer clips. Somewhere in there were John Zorn, Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Eugene Chadbourne, Ikue Mori, Bill Laswell, Christian Marclay and Derek Bailey. I’ll bet they play this at every Tzadik party. Hills would seem to have a love for music, a sense of humor and tons of patience. Canyon: “thematically centered around a discussion of economic problems facing avant-garde artists in the Reagan era. Discussion, however, is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition.” Good poster quote by J. Hoberman: “If time is money, this 15-minute film is a bargain.”

( ) (2003, Morgan Fisher)

Composed entirely of insert shots from other films. Could be the most intricate murder/conspiracy film of all time, what with all the plots and notes and watches and gambling and guns and knives and secret goings-on. I wish it’d had music. Didn’t recognize a single film, and I couldn’t even find any of the sources by searching character names spotted on notes and letters with IMDB. Shadowplay would be ashamed of my b-movie image-recognition prowess. I really want to do a remake, but the logistics and time involved would be hefty. Fisher is only glancingly mentioned in the Canyon book, but I had this and wanted to watch it.

Thom Andersen:

Fisher appreciates inserts because they perform the “self-effacing… drudge-work” of narrative cinema, showing “significant details that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling a story,” and he made ( ) to liberate them… to raise them from the realm of Necessity to the realm of Freedom,” to reveal their hidden beauty.

Oh Dem Watermelons (1965, Robert Nelson)

Much talk about this one in the book. A silent, still shot of a watermelon lasts an age, then a singalong with an old racist song – or is it an ironically racist new song? – then some melon smashing with pioneering use of the shaky-cam. The song starts repeating and becomes irritating, as must all avant-garde film soundtracks. This time, Steve Reich is to blame. There’s stop-motion and Gilliam-style cut-out animation. My favorite bits are the dog that appears to poop out a watermelon, and the melon slowly crushed by construction equipment. Made as an intermission film for a theatrical racial satire, Nelson claims to have been inspired by Louis Feuillade.

Samadhi (1967, Jordan Belson)

Eclipses and auroras, perhaps the eyeball of a wizard, five spherical minutes with a blowing, groaning soundtrack.


Samadhi (c) Jordan Belson

The Way To Shadow Garden (1954, Stan Brakhage)

The camera stalks creepily around an empty room. A clean-cut young man comes home, struggles with a glass of water and the bed, dances, reads a book. The camera continues its subtly creepy assault, lingering on light bulbs, but otherwise I’m thinking this is Brakhage’s most performance-based film that I’ve seen, a wordless narrative episode. But then the man claws his eyes out, the film stock reverses, and he seems to find the shadow garden, all blind light and shubberies. The first half makes me think Brakhage could’ve made some killer Sirkian dramas if he’d had the urge.

The Potted Psalm (1947, Sidney Peterson & James Broughton)

Shots of people and things. A graveyard. A snail. An accordion. A funhouse mirror. Dolls suicide. A woman eats a leaf. The cameraman has a beer and a cigarette.

Not the first Sidney Peterson movie I’ve watched, and I still don’t get what he is on about. Kino made an interlaced transfer, hired a woman whose Casio can make neat sounds to record a horrible score.

I had a bunch more in mind to watch, but I suppose I’ll get to them another day.

by ·Comments Off on The League of Gentlemen (1960, Basil Dearden)

“Everything’s prepared. We’ve left nothing to chance.”

A tight, charismatic perfect-crime heist movie. Guys with gambling problems, mean wives, fake personas (one pretends to be a priest) and mounting debts join forces under the instruction of a cranky ex-soldier. Turns out they’re all ex-soldiers, specially selected (aren’t they always) for their former military skills. Two heists ensue – first to get military weapons from a training complex (arguably the more exciting of the two), then a gas-mask assault on the bank (definitely the more photogenic). They’re sold out by an eight-year-old witness, going straight from the celebration party (where nobody tries to scam anyone’s share – gentlemen indeed) to the paddy wagon.

The gang’s (mostly) all here:

The film’s writer (Bryan Forbes) is one of the criminal soldiers, as are the great Roger Livesey (years after his Powell/Pressburger films), Lord Richard Attenborough (Flight of the Phoenix), Nigel Patrick (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman) and Jack Hawkins (The Small Back Room, Zulu, Land of the Pharaohs).

Highly enjoyable little movie by Basil Dearden, about whom I still know nothing because I rented this and didn’t get the liner notes. Here we go: “elegantly crafted… noir-tinged dramas that burrowed into corners of London rarely seen on-screen.” Looks like the other three in the box set were more explicitly about British social problems.

M. Koresky:

A lively crime escapade with melancholy undertones, this examination of the instability of a generation of British men may have appealed to Dearden and Relph’s social sensibility: the film takes place more than ten years after the end of World War II, but its main characters are veterans who have not been able to fully reintegrate into civilian life. They find the normal patterns of postwar behavior alienating—going to work, living with wives and children—and are haunted by nostalgia for the masculine community of wartime.