by ·Comments Off on Cuadecuc Vampir (1970, Pere Portabella)

Filmed in super-grainy black and white on set of a lesser Christopher Lee Dracula movie. Mostly it’s not the behind-the-scenes type footage I’d expected, but the actors of that film in character, either rehearsing or performing their scenes shot from a different angle. Scenes are even edited in order corresponding to the Dracula story. We often see the production lighting, and sometimes catch the crew and camera peering from the sidelines, as if haunting the characters from another era.

No sync sound until the end – instead it ranges from symphonic music to low doom-strings to bird sounds and construction noise to ambient loops. In the last few minutes, Christopher Lee explains then reads Dracula’s death scene from the novel.

The synopsis states that this film is “a sly political allegory about generalissimo Francisco Franco” but I’d like to hear some support. IMDB says “Cuadecuc” is Catalan for “worm tail.”

Rosenbaum:

Recalling without imitating such classics as Nosferatu and Vampyr, the film uses high-contrast cinematography to evoke the dissolution and decay that strikes viewers who see those films today in fading prints. It all adds up to a kind of poetic alchemy in which Portabella converts one of the world’s worst horror films into one of the most beautiful movies ever made about anything. (It’s characteristic of his artistic integrity that he refused to allow Cuadecuc-Vampir to be used as an extra on a Count Dracula DVD.)

–
Acció Santos (1973)

It’s odd that the other short on this disc is Play Back, which I’ve watched before, because this one could very easily share the same title. Carles Santos (composer of Cuadecuc Vampir and the composer/star of Play Back) performs a Chopin piece in the first half, then listens to a tape recording of his performance in the second. The part that turns this from a typical conceptual piece into a weirdly frustrating one is when he plugs in headphones, leaving us in silence for the last four minutes of the film.

by ·Comments Off on Mysteries of Paris: Out 1 Revisited (2015)

Watched this right after the Mulholland Dr. extras where Lynch says his film’s title was originally intended for another, cancelled project – and here’s Rivette saying the same. Out as the opposite of In, since in the late 1960’s everything was “in,” and 1 because if it was successful a sequel would be filmed the following year. I also learned that Noli me tangere was a Rivette-approved optional subtitle of the long version, added during the 1990 restoration. “You can make up what you like about the title. There will be 500 interpretations I haven’t even thought of. That’s what titles are for, to give the critics something to play with.”

Interesting that Igor gets a row:

He hadn’t actually read History of the 13 yet when shooting Out 1, nor had any of the actors, and Rivette only read the first of the three stories later while editing the film and the other two years later – hence Rohmer’s appearance as guest expert. Rivette became a huge Balzac appreciator though, and based Don’t Touch the Axe on one of those belatedly-read stories.

Rivette saw an 11-hour private rough cut screening of the otherwise normal-length Jean Rouch movie Petit à petit, loved the experience of watching it, which gave him the initial idea – so the long duration of Out 1 was part of its initial conception.

Rivette never told the cameramen how to shoot the scenes, and never told the actors exactly what to say or do. Cast and crew would have to recap at the end of the day, discuss what had been said and done, so the next day they could cover or explain things the improvising actors had previously put on film

by ·Comments Off on Noroît (1976, Jacques Rivette)

2016/17: Watched the new blu-ray and updated the 2008 writeup below.

The brother of Morag (Geraldine Chaplin, then of Cría cuervos and The Three Musketeers, later of Love on the Ground and Talk To Her) is killed. She seeks revenge on pirate queen Giulia (Bernadette Lafont, Sarah in Out 1, also Genealogies of a Crime), infiltrates the castle with help of traitorous Erika (Kika Markham of Truffaut’s Two English Girls and Dennis Potter’s Blade on the Feather). Gradually all of Giulia’s associates are killed off, then G & M stab each other to death, fall to the ground dying and laughing.

Early ambush attempt:

Feels more mysterious and less straightforward than Duelle even though there’s less talk of magic in this one. Morag is apparently the moon goddess and Giulia the sun goddess, though they don’t reveal their powers until the last half hour. I didn’t do the best job keeping track of the minor characters, but I’m almost positive that some of them – including Morag’s brother – keep dying then reappearing in later scenes. In fact, I guess one of the two male pirates, “Jacob” (Humbert Balsan of Lancelot of the Lake, later an important film producer) is also her brother “Shane,” which complicates the plot in ways I no longer understand.

The men of the castle, Jacob and Ludovico:

There are gas lamps and castles and swordfights and magic, all very period, but then there is lots of cool, modern (clearly 70’s) clothing and guns and motorboats. And nobody is cooler than Bernadette Lafont in her bellbottomed pink leather suit (which creaks loudly when she moves). Watching her and Chaplin’s movements through the scenes, and to a lesser degree the other male pirate Larrio Ekson, are the best part of the movie and sometimes appear to be its entire point.

As beautiful and simple as the sun: Giulia with pink jeans on:

Morag and Erika have meetings in which they sit or walk robotically and recite lines in English from the play The Revenger’s Tragedy, so maybe reading that would help somewhat. Then again, D. Ehrenstein says “Analysis begins to run into a series of dead ends. The texts utilized as central sources of quotation… Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noroît — are merely pre-texts, having nothing to say about the films that enclose them, posed in the narrative as subjects for further research.”

As in Duelle, whenever there’s music in a scene the musicians are part of that scene, even when they realistically would’ve left the room. Maybe right before the shot begins Giulia has threatened their lives and told them to play, no matter what. There are long stretches with no spoken dialogue. Lighting mostly looks natural indoors. This and Duelle were Rivette’s first films shot by William Lubtchansky, who would shoot most of the rest of the films (not Hurlevent). William is husband to Nicole L., who edited everything for forty years from L’Amour Fou to Around a Small Mountain.

Morag killing Regina:

Erika playing Morag in the reenactment of previous scene:

Morag playing Regina getting killed by skullfaced Erika:

I wish I knew how this movie’s title was pronounced, because every time I think of it, Fred Schneider sings “here comes a narwhal!” in my head. It’s gonna be “narr-WHAA” until some Frenchman tells me otherwise. One site translates the word as “Nor’wester.”

Rivette:

When I was filming Noroît, I was persuaded that we were making a huge commercial success, that it was an adventure film that would have great appeal … When the film didn’t come out, when it was considered un-showable … I was surprised. I don’t consider myself … unfortunately, I’m not very lucid when it comes to the potential success of my projects.

J. Reichert:

As with all good revenge dramas (this one inspired by bloody Jacobean plays), the mass of killings begin to far outweigh the initial wrong done and the angel of vengeance experiences moments of doubts and sympathy for her marks—there’s betrayal as well. Rivette shorthands these narratively rich moments, suggesting them in a glance, a line, a change of Chaplin’s face, so that he can maintain focus on the ballet-like movement of his players through space, where stowing recently acquired treasure takes on the aspect of slow-motion acrobatics. The drama climaxes in a clifftop masquerade ball/murder spree/dance performance shot across what looks like infrared, B&W, and color, that combines violence and poetry into a mix that’s literally unlike anything I’ve seen.

Doomed dance party:

Giulia (left) and Morag having stabbed each other to death:

D. Ehrenstein:

The films are devoted to methods that while seeming to reach representational specificity, do so in a manner designed to cancel all possible affectivity. The settings and costumes of Duelle suggest their display in a reserved “theatrical” style, but the camera, while tracking smoothly, does so far too energetically, and when coupled with the film’s nervous angular montage rhythms, disrupts the space it has spent so much time constructing. Likewise each setting (casino, hotel, aquarium, ballet school, race track, park, subway, dance hall, and greenhouse in Duelle, castle by the sea in Noroît) suggests the possibility of an atmosphere the mise en scene never seems directly to create (as in Resnais, Franju, Fellini, etc.).

Similarly acting styles clash with one another. Flip off-hand cool (Bulle Ogier, Bernadette Lafont) wars with highly stylized affectation (Hermine Karaheuz, Geraldine Chaplin) rather than the work holding to the latter mentioned category for an overall tone as would be logically demanded by a project of this sort … The film’s essence is thus not reducible to a specific moment, but must be seen in the working through of its positive/negative gestures — unfixed points neither within nor without the films.

Poster shot: Morag and Shane… or is it Jacob?

Michael Graham:

Like any Rivette film, [Noroît] took shape gradually, drawing on a large number of deliberately chosen ideas and as many fortuitous circumstances. As important as Rivette’s interest in Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (drawn to his attention by Eduardo De Gregorio), and the curious traditions surrounding the period of Carnival, was the availability of Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont together with that of a group of dancers from Carolyn Carlson’s company. It must be kept in mind that Rivette often conceives a film around particular people; Celine et Julie began as ‘a film for Juliet Berto’. Any casting decision is consequently of primary importance. Further, the selection of Brittany as a location arose as much from certain union allowances permitting a six day week outside Paris, as from a vague desire to spend some time in the country. Once the different ideas and practical considerations begin to sort themselves out and interact, the narrative itself starts to acquire definition. Even after shooting has begun, however, Rivette is enormously influenced by what he may discover the actors capable of achieving.

by ·Comments Off on Duelle (1976, Jacques Rivette)

2016/17: Watched the new blu-ray and updated the 2008 writeup below.

Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier are rival goddesses, only on Earth for a short time unless they can possess a magic stone. Juliet hires Hermine Karagheuz (Marie in Out 1) to track some people connected to her brother Pierre (Jean Babilée, a dancer not in a lot of films) – first an acquaintance named Sylvia who dies at the aquarium, then Pierre’s on-again girl Elsa (Nicole Garcia of Mon oncle d’Amérique, now a director). Poor Elsa has a key role in the middle half of the movie, then gets killed trying to defeat Bulle and is barely mentioned again. Pierre himself has been possessed by Bulle and also infected by the stone, which he hands off to Hermine, who figures out how to use it to banish the two goddesses, Hellraiser-style, at dusk.

Juliet Berto in her serious vengeance suit:

So much camera movement, most of it (per Rosenbaum’s set-visit notes) on tracks, which seems too complex to be possible. Music is improv piano and pianist Jean Wiener is on set, in the shot, even in places where he obviously does not belong. Bulle has an accomplice, Elisabeth Wiener (daughter of the pianist) who disappears a few scenes into the movie.

Bulle and Elsa go for a walk:

David Ehrenstein has the inside scoop on literary and filmic references: “Our innocent heroine (Hermine Karaghuez instantly recalling Betty Schneider in Paris nous appartient) recites lines from Cocteau’s play [Knights of the Round Table] as a kind of incantation, much as Geraldine Chaplin reads lines from Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noroît.” Rivette screened The Seventh Victim for the cast, and D.E. also mentions Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne as an influence.

Frederique Fatale: Juliet Berto at the aquarium

Hermine discovers Sylvia dead:

David Cairns puts it best:

Lots of creaking in this film! As the dolly trundles over wooden floors, a cacophony of straining wood announces its presence. Since the film has a very live soundtrack, there was obviously no way to eliminate these extraneous sounds, so they kind of make a mild virtue of them. The camera movements, coupled with the moves of the actors, are extremely elegant and elaborate, and the symphony of sounds that accompany them all can be seen as atmosphere … Jean Babilée is an amazing physical presence, not just when he does his acrobatic feats, but just in his general movements, which are all like dance, even when maybe he’s just moving around so you can’t see how short he is next to the women.

Showdown: Elsa and Juliet…

vs. Bulle and the fabulous Babilée

Rivette discussed how each of the four planned films (this was written as part two) would be set during the same forty days of Carnival, two cycles from new moon to full.

During shooting, each “unit” (each block-sequence) will be subjected to a method designed to break down not only conventional dramatic techniques but also the more recent conventions of improvisation with all the prolixities and cliches it entails (hesitations, provocations, etc.), and to establish an ecriture based on actions, movements, attitudes, the actor’s ‘gestural’, in other words. The ambition of these films is to discover a new approach to acting in the cinema, where speech, reduced to essential phrases, to precise formulas, would playa role of ‘poetic’ punctuation. Not a return to the silent cinema, neither pantomime nor choreography: something else, where the movement of bodies, their counterpoint, their inscription within the screen space, would be the basis of the mise en scene.

In order to enable us to make a definitive crossing of this frontier which separates traditional acting from the kind we are looking for: the constant presence during shooting of musicians (different instruments and styles of music according to each film) who would improvise during the filming of sequences, their improvisation dependent on the actors’ playing, the latter also being modified by the musicians’ own inventions (recorded in direct sound along with the dialogue and the “stage noises” properly speaking).

Showdown: knife-wielding Bulle…

vs. gem-wielding Hermine

G. Adair reporting from the set:

Whatever else it may be, a film is also the record of its own tournage. In Rivette’s case, the film set becomes a theatre of imponderables, which shape the result much as a sleeper’s movements will govern the nature of his dreams; and from the evidence of interviews one realizes that the only guidelines of a Rivette film are those of tournage, the idea of a definitive form, at least until editing begins, being a nonsense. In the past (L’Amour Fou, Out 1) his overriding concern as a director has been to record the work’s gestation, which tempts me to suggest that, though the ‘legendary’ 13-hour version of Out 1 may indeed be extraordinary, it must be less so than the six-week version, i.e. the tournage. From [Duelle], whose camera movements are plotted out in advance but whose dialogue is written the evening before, whose actors have specific things to do but whose music is improvised, one can have no idea what to expect.

Hermine triumphant:

by ·Comments Off on Silence (1971, Masahiro Shinoda)

Set during whatever era of Japan when Christianity was outlawed, the story follows dour missionary Rodrigues and Garrpe, his balding friend who is less good at dialogue acting, as they arrive in a small town to clandestinely spread their religion. This turns out to be harder than they suspected, and they’re eventually captured and brought to their predecessor and teacher Ferreira, who has abandoned Christianity and tries to convince them to do the same.

Rodrigues:

Obviously watched in preparation for Scorsese’s upcoming remake. I didn’t find it all that engaging or convincing, which I suppose means there’s more hope for remake improvement than there was for Infernal Affairs / The Departed. I tend to make a really big deal out of less-than-convincingly delivered dialogue, so I generally favored the Japanese cast in this movie, who I couldn’t understand, over the English speakers, who I’m afraid the director couldn’t understand. And unrelated to the film’s quality, I couldn’t make it play in proper full-screen on my TV, so it’s the last Filmstruck movie I’m watching until they get Roku support.

Iwashita:

Looking around online, I’m not the only viewer who was reminded of Apocalypse Now (which this movie predates by eight years). Played at Cannes with fellow crisis-of-confidence films Solaris and Images. The white guys haven’t been in much else, but Ferreira was the prolific Tetsuro Tanba (grandpa in Happiness of the Katakuris). The supposedly Christian guy who sells out Rodrigues to the cops was Mako, Bob Hope’s companion in The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell. And Shima Iwashita, convinced to apostatize when her husband (Woman of the Dunes star Eiji Okada) is buried to the neck and nearly trampled by a horse, was a regular Shinoda star, also in The Demon and Sword of the Beast.

Tanba:

by ·Comments Off on The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)

Watched this after the great Killing Them Softly. It passed the time – kind of a mismatched buddy cop movie along the lines of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang but with half the chemistry and humor of that one – or else I wasn’t in the most receptive mood. Can still appreciate the effort though, a fun, throwback action comedy with more careful work put into the characters and jokes than the twisty conspiracy plot.

During a 1977 smog epidemic, Russell Crowe is hired to break private eye Ryan Gosling’s arm when Gosling has been snooping around on behalf of a client searching for her dead niece. Gosling’s surprisingly capable teenage daughter (Angourie Rice of the next Sofia Coppola movie) tags along, and I think Matt Bomer (Magic Mike) plays a hit man threatening Crowe’s client Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers) who is hiding out from her mom Kim Basinger, a sold-out politician whose dirty secrets are hidden in a porn film.

My favorite shot: Gosling fighting with a guy on the roof, one falls into the pool, the other just misses

R. Collin in The Telegraph:

Both leads aren’t playing to type, exactly, so much as types gone halfway to seed. Crowe is 52 years old now, and has warmly embraced the dramatic possibilities of middle-aged spread … Gosling, meanwhile, plays the kind of moustachioed bro who — for want of a better way of putting it — thinks he’s Ryan Gosling, giving Holland a loose-swaggering confidence that amusingly exceeds his practical abilities.

by ·Comments Off on High-Rise (2015, Ben Wheatley)

Loki moves into a class-stratified apartment building topped by The Architect Jeremy Irons, and it quickly goes to hell. There’s lots of drinking & smoking & cocaine & sex (with Baroness Sienna Miller) above, while the lower floors lose power and their composure. Belatedly the movie tries to tell us who is whose secret mistress or absentee father, but we’ve lost interest in personal details by that point. Not a dystopian-universe Snowpiercer thing like I expected from reading some Ballard stories – the world outside the apartment seems mostly unaffected.

I liked Pontypoolian Luke “Not Chris” Evans as pregnant Elisabeth Moss’s shithead-turned-documentarian husband. Some okay music choices too, like closing with The Fall’s Industrial Estate, and an upper-class chamber version of Abba’s S.O.S. (later, the sadsack Donnie Darko version doesn’t work as well)

Evans:

Tom Charity in Cinema Scope:

Seizing on the delightfully oxymoronic possibilities of an apocalyptic period film, Wheatley has retained the ’70s period trappings … Yet the movie feels of our time too, immediate, or perhaps imminent, a flash-forward (not backwards) to a present tense we already know in our bones: savage, chaotic, cannibalistic, and doomed. As Ballard puts it, it exists in “a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

by ·Comments Off on Black Christmas (1974, Bob Clark)

On the heels of A Bay of Blood, here’s another godfather of slasher films. I’d heard and heard that this was good but still wasn’t anxious to watch it because sometimes the most highly recommended movies turn out to be losers (ahem, The Changeling), but surprise, it was good. Sorority house is gradually emptying due to holidays and also because the remaining girls are being murdered and stashed in the attic, the bodies never found so the survivors don’t know to be afraid. And unusually, no crazed killer backstory – we never find out who’s murdering people, or why. So, suspense is generally higher than in most of these kinds of things.

Argento covets this shot:

Kidder ain’t kiddin’:

I was surprised when Margot Kidder was killed, but I guess Sisters wasn’t a mainstream hit and the Superman movies wouldn’t start for a few years. Instead, Olivia Hussey (of 1968 Romeo & Juliet) makes the last stand with her semi-crazed boyfriend Keir Dullea. Victims Ms. Mack (Marian Waldman of Phobia) and Phyl (Andrea Martin, who’d play Ms. Mack in the remake) and Claire (Lynne Griffin of Dream House) are dead in the attic while Detective John Saxon (between appearing in Enter The Dragon and Mitchell – the man had a strange career), his moron assistant Doug McGrath (Ghosts of Mars) and Claire’s guy Art Hindle (his third 1970’s horror I’ve watched in two months, after Body Snatchers and The Brood) uselessly look around campus not realizing the calls are coming from inside the house.

Saxon spends most of his time on the phone:

Those calls feature some of the dirtiest dialogue I’ve heard in a non-porno 1970’s movie. Also surprised by the abortion debates between Olivia and Keir, and the amount of comedy in the movie. Director Bob Clark is better known for his other holiday movie A Christmas Story but he did a couple other 1970’s horrors I might check out.

by ·Comments Off on A Bay of Blood (1971, Mario Bava)

There are some things you’ve gotta do in SHOCKtober, and one thing is you’ve gotta watch something Italian. As the saying goes, if you haven’t got Argento, a Fulci will do. If you haven’t got a Fulci, woe unto you.

This is one of those giallo things where everyone is knifed to death by unknown black-gloved assailant(s). In this case, I think it’s not a single crazed killer, but everyone killing everyone else in order to gain ownership of the bay that all their houses border. At least it seems that way, but it was really hard to care about any of these generic characters – I barely had their names and/or relationships sorted out when they’d be hastily murdered. Dialogue was in English on my copy, and reasonably well-synced, a nice surprise (though the words themselves, and the actors speaking them, remain quite poor). And of course Bava’s got enough style – lighting and zooms and focus tricks – to keep things watchable.

Laura Betti transcends this stupid movie:

Frank and sexy secretary:

Bug Man:

Let’s see if we can piece together what happened. The movie’s only good story idea is staging the death of an elderly landowner (Isa Miranda of The Late Mathias Pascal and La Ronde) by using her own diary entry reading “I am tired. My life no longer has meaning” as a suicide note. I guess this is done by her husband Filippo, who is immediately killed by squid fisherman Simon (Claudio Camaso of John the Bastard), illegitimate son of the hanged countess. Squid Simon has a rivaly with insect hunter Paolo (Leopoldo Trieste, young husband in The White Sheik), who’s scheming with fortune teller Anna (Laura Betti, the miraculous servant in Teorema). Realty Dude Frank (Chris Avram of Voodoo Sexy) and his girlfriend/secretary are also scheming with various participants somehow. Renata (Claudine Auger of Yoyo and Thunderball) is daughter of the count and countess, I think, arriving late with her husband Albert (Luigi Pistilli of Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key) to claim the bay. I think these two succeed, then are shot to death by their own young kids in an epilogue, the movie’s final “fuck you” to its characters and/or viewers.

Our ignoble heroes, Renata and Albert:

Filippo beneath the Squid Thief’s slimy cargo:

Also, with no apparent connection to anything else, four young partying sex-crazed kids (including a skinny-dipping Brigitte Skay, title star of Isabella, Duchess of the Devils) break into a house on the bay and get quickly murdered.

Duchess of the Devils:

The Duchess’s boyfriend catches a machete to the face:

This movie, sometimes known as Twitch of the Death Nerve, was a relatively late film from Bava, arriving some years after his early-to-mid-60’s horror heyday. I guess the others didn’t catch on like this one, since it’s credited as one of the most influential slasher/giallo films (though I’m not sure that’s anything to brag about), with some if its deaths directly ripped off by Friday the 13th sequels.