by ·Comments Off on Tales from the Crypt (1972, Freddie Francis)

Anthology horror with a lousy framing story, exactly like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. This is actually based on the comics, didn’t just steal the title. Buncha pricks on a tourist romp in some ancient crypts get lost, run into evil cryptkeeper Ralph Richardson (bad parson of The Holly and the Ivy), leading to series of flashbacks before revealing that they’ve all been dead all along.

First, TV star Joan Collins kills her husband (for the insurance) on Christmas, then she’s stalked by a psycho killer santa.

Next, Ian Hendry (Repulsion) leaves his wife to run off with a girl, but he dies in a car crash then comes back a zombie.

Robin Phillips wants to do some realty scheme, but friendly old Peter Cushing refuses to step aside, so Robin destroys the old man, who comes back a zombie and kills him.

Richard Greene (Hound of the Baskervilles) dies in a car crash after his financial advisor (Roy Dotrice, Mozart’s dad in Amadeus) wishes on the monkey’s paw, then he and Greene’s wife have second thoughts and wish him alive again, but he lives in zombie-agony. Three zombie stories in a row!

Mustache businessman Nigel Patrick (The League of Gentlemen) becomes new head of a home for the blind and slashes budgets for everything to the despair of Patrick Magee (Alex’s tormentee/tormentor in A Clockwork Orange), who plots elaborate revenge.

by ·Comments Off on Three Musketeers (1973, Richard Lester)

I expected to like this a lot more, considering the last 1970’s Richard Lester star-studded period adaptation I watched. Adapted by the guy who wrote Octopussy and a few later Lester films, which starred some of the Musketeers, so I guess there were no hard feelings all around.

Logan’s Run star Michael York is our excitable young D’Artangnan, who teams with musketeers Oliver Reed (between The Devils and Tommy), Frank Finlay (his follow-up to Shaft In Africa) and Richard Chamberlain (Julie Christie’s husband in Petulia). The evil Cardinal Heston plans to undermine the monarchy by exposing Queen Geraldine Chaplin’s affair with Duke Simon Ward. Heston and his partner Faye Dunaway try to preserve evidence of the affair while the Musketeers ride to their presumed deaths trying to hide it. Doesn’t seem like the most noble use of their talents in service of the king, but whatever, it’s pretty fun. Christopher Lee and Spike Milligan were in there somewhere, too.

by ·Comments Off on Mirror (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky)

An unseen narrator is flashing-back to his childhood in 1935. Since Tarkovsky made his first feature in the early sixties and this one is called Mirror, I’m going to assume it’s partly autobiographical. It’s also his Tree of Life – deeply-felt fragments with no easily-readable storyline. I might have missed some and misinterpreted the rest, but here are the episodes as I saw them:

1. A stutterer is cured under hypnosis. Sepia-toned film, shadows of camera crew visible, and neither character appearing in the rest of the story, because this episode is watched by the young protagonist on television.

2. color, a lost doctor talks to a woman at her house while two shaved-headed boys watch drowsily from a hammock. He leaves, turns back as a great gust of wind blows through the grass. I could watch this segment all day.

3. color, the barn burns down. Long takes bring The Sacrifice to mind.

4. b/w, woman wet hair vamping like The Ring monster, the house crumbles around her like a Low video, older woman appears in mirror reflection.

5. color, Alexei talks to his mom over phone, an Andrei Rublev poster on his wall. “Remember the hay-loft that burned down at the farm?”

6. b/w, woman proofreader thinks she’s made an error, runs through a printing press to check and it turns out okay but then everyone insults her. I think she is called Marousia, or Masha.

7. color, unseen man talking to ex-wife who reminds of his mother (same actress). “When I recall my childhood and my mother, somehow she always has your face.” Their son is Ignat. Wife might be Natalya. b/w news footage interlude.

8. color, Ignat has deja vu, then sees people who might not exist when left alone, talks to dad on phone.

9. color, a boy, maybe Ignat or his dad when young, in army training, notices girls, throws a fake grenade. War footage in b/w.

10. color, bird lands on freckly boy’s head

11. color, the mother/wife works in a ruined room.

12. b/w, Ignat’s unseen father wants Ignat to live with him, but ex-wife and Ignat disagree, dad says Ignat is stupid and recommends the army. Flashbacks and dreams: a bird flies through a windowpane.

13. color, mom comes to visit relative of the doctor – same one from first scene? Tells doc’s wife “a ladies little secret” while boy is alone looking in mirror. Red-haired girl might be Alyosha. They both feel sick. A chicken is killed.

14. b/w, a woman levitates

15. color, shaved-head kid talking to mom at farm, but mom is the old woman from reflections in #4.

16. color, doctor looking at sick guy, we see his hand holding a little bird

17. color, young woman lays on some guy in field, while two kids walk with older woman.

RW Knight for Reverse Shot:

Each event-that is, each cut, each encounter, each memory flashed back or forward-in the film’s networked composite is skewed by the film’s narrator. This narrator is the camera, and the film. His face is never seen. We are denied an identifying reverse shot. We are simply presented with his point of view: the identification is our instantaneous assimilation. His disembodied voice, weathered and granular, presides over the whole body of the work. His body is the work: the film and the guiding frame of the film. Occasionally when reading poetry the voice-over registers differently than when heard talking to other characters from outside the frame, but it still sounds like the same man. In fact, there are two voices: the poet-narrator is voiced by Arseni Tarkovsky, the director’s father, while the strictly first-person-narrator/character is voiced by Innokenti Smoktunovsky, the “first international Russian film star” (according to imdb.com), one of many point of view refractions. As identities merge in the film (father becomes son while mother becomes (ex-) wife and the son becomes his father in youth) they overlap in reality as well: the real father becomes the film star, and vice versa, incorporating their identities in the film, and its maker.

TCM summarizes:

The Mirror forgoes a conventional narrative structure, instead weaving together loosely autobiographical reminiscences, dreams and newsreel footage to suggest how the past is reflected in the present, both on a personal and on a larger historical level. … As a further personal touch, his real-life mother Maria appears as the mother in old age, his wife Larissa appears as the doctor’s wife to whom the mother sells an earring, and his stepdaughter appears as the red-headed girl with whom the narrator falls in love as a young boy.

Some good wind, and fire. Slow motion. Objects move by themselves, sometimes mysteriously just before an edit. This is the closest Tarkovsky came to making The Shining.

Begun in 1968 then interrupted to make Solaris. Appears in the Sight & Sound directors poll top-ten (and critics poll top-twenty). Probably not my favorite Tarkovsky movie, but neither would I mind watching it again right this minute.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Left His Will On Film (1970, Nagisa Oshima)

A closed loop of a movie, unusual for Oshima in that you can guess where the story is going and how it will end, but there’s plenty of engaging craziness in between. Opens with a handheld shot of two people fighting over a camera. Someone with a camera suicides off a building, the cops apparently have taken the camera, and Motoki wakes up with his friends (or comrades – they seem to be a political media collective).

Nobody else seems to know anything about anyone jumping off any buildings, just that police attacked while the group was filming a protest in the park and took their camera, and Motoki had bravely tried to reclaim it (though they chide him for having a sense of private property about the group’s camera). Motoki swears to Yasuko that her boyfriend Endo killed himself this morning – though Endo was in the room with them all a few minutes before. Then he rapes Yasuko – why? A “seventh art series” video essay I found says that she was always his girlfriend, but when Motoki doesn’t seem to remember this she plays along, agreeing that she dates Endo.

He and Yasuko start acting like a couple, screen footage of seemingly random locations shot by another group member then set out to find these locations, each starting to “remember” events that may not have happened, and denying events that did. “The stupid asshole who made that movie didn’t exist!” Motoki seems to accidentally find his own parents’ house while reverse-location-scouting. He sets out to shoot the same landscapes in order to become the other cameraman, and Motoki stands in every shot, ending up hurt or raped each time. Finally we see a POV shot of the group confronting him to return their camera, and he runs – but in front of the handheld camera, as if there are two of him. Atop a building, Motoki appears, blocking his way back down, so he jumps – then we see a hand pick up his camera and run with it.

C. Fujiwara, in an excellent article on Moving Image Source:

The sense that The Man Who Left His Will on Film has come after something else, in a “post” period, is explicit in the Japanese title, Tokyo senso sengo hiwa, which means “Secret Story of the Period after the Tokyo War.” “Tokyo War” refers to the mass protests in November 1969 against Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato’s visit to the United States. This war is assuredly and emphatically not “the War” that serves as the main historical landmark for characters in other Oshima films, providing a (false) explanation and excuse for their actions (as with the officials in Death by Hanging and the father in Boy [1969]). The Man Who Left His Will on Film places itself within a later history, one perhaps not yet readable at the time it was made.

by ·Comments Off on Screening Room: Hollis Frampton (1977)

Much more breathing room in the interview than in the Hubley episode, and Frampton, as always, is great fun to listen to. He discusses getting to know Ezra Pound and experiencing his Cantos (a difficult, book-length piece of modernist poetry full of obscure references), which sound like they could easily have influenced HF’s work, but sadly his story gets cut off to show Maxwell’s Demon, then Surface Tension (minus the first part, the man with a clock), accompanied by good descriptions. Frampton tries to explain exactly what kind of filmmaker he is, and they struggle into a very good HF intro to Lemon (excerpted on the Criterion disc), then they do an honest-to-god audio commentary over the silent film. Some talk of Frampton’s work as a professor then an excerpt from Critical Mass.

Pas de Trois (1975)

Oooh, haven’t seen this one appear anywhere else. Footage from the New York State Fair, the “stripper” tent lit by strobes, then a little girl dancing in a different area. HF shoots the dancers, but also the strobes, a crack in the tent where someone peers through, and a fishtank, all accompanied by another HF/RG commentary.

Description found online: “An analysis of film’s persistent relationship to sexuality, mediated by allusions to early cinema’s flicker, and other aggressive qualities of the cinematic apparatus.”

“This is probably something that will never transpire,” HF says about the final form of Magellan – sadly, he was right. He discusses his plan for Magellan, thoughts on sound vs. silent film, and shows a collection of “Lumiere Bits,” what Criterion calls the Pans, short for the Panopticons. Somewhere there’s a program called Straights of Magellan: Drafts and Fragments collecting 49 of these. Of the kid with the frog, “this is my one-minute horror movie.” There’s also a cat toying with captured bird, 3D pattern on a sidewalk, saw cutting wood, a few more.

HF, interviewed elsewhere about these: “A catalogue or compilation of films which were limited to exactly one minute – 1440 frames. They were to be an homage not so much to the early cinema of the Lumieres as to an aspect of film that I feel has been lost.”

At a certain point, what has tended to happen previously happened again: I set out to make a simple inventory or catalogue of the appearances of the world, which I imagined might run to a few hundred short films, but as I actually began to gather these film segments they began to organise themselves – to my discomfiture – in a manner that I suppose is determined by my own immersion in montage: one thing suggests another, and if you have five things there seems to be some best order in which they should be seen. The bits of film, which were as opaque as an isolated word, seemed somehow to be demanding a more intricate organisation than I had originally planned. At first I thought that simply meant sorting them into more intricate categories; I had originally imagined that there would be four categories – ‘ordinary, extraordinary, exotic, and erotic views’ – which were the categories used by the Lumieres. So I attempted a more complex sorting, which led to the question of an equilibrium among the categories … What basically evolved from that proposed inventory – or catalogue, or storehouse – is a work whose working title is currently Magellan. This is composed of parts, not all of which consist of one-minute segments, not by any means. It’s not a work that can be diagrammed in linear fashion, since it uses the grid – among many others – of the cycle of the solar year. In other words, it’s a calendar. That is to say, it rotates like a wheel, or rather like a series of wheels that rotate within one another. I now expect, when and if the whole thing is completed, that it will be, very roughly, thirty-six hours long. Within those thirty-six hours there are a series of rough categories – well, the categories are actually quite exact, but they name parts that overlap each other on a kind of twodimensional map of the work. Those categories are ‘Straits’ and ‘Clouds’ [of Magellan], and there’s a section which corresponds to a ‘Birth of Magellan’ (itself comprised of subsections), and there’s another which relates to adolescence. Then there’s a ‘Death’ and even, heaven help us, a ‘Resurrection’.

States (1967)

White-on-black streaks of falling water and/or sparks, and rising smoke, alternating. Lovely, put me right to sleep.

Heterodyne (1967)

A large amount of black, with quick single-frame bursts of a color wash, a shape, or a colored shape. Gets boring pretty quickly. I played Mogwai’s You’re Lionel Richie which didn’t work at all. Frampton says “it was made in abject (if blissful) ignorance of Paul Sharits’ early work.”

Watched again with William Tyler’s Terrace of the Leper King after fixing an interlacing issue. Much better! The film still lasts twice as long as it is interesting, but I enjoy the anticipation/response of each burst of colors and shapes.

Snowblind (1968)

Watched with Yo La Tengo’s Ashes on the Ground, very enjoyable. A study of shifting lighting, motion and focus effects on layered fence patterns, pretty simple as far as HF films go. Internet doesn’t mention the identity of the patient man behind the fences, but I don’t think it’s Michael Snow.

Artificial Light (1969)

A minute-long scene of some artist-types chatting around a table, with cuts and dissolves, ending with a zoom into a photo of the moon. But this is repeated twenty times, each with a different variation. Once their faces are whited-out, once the picture flickers on and off, sometimes they’re colored or processed in different ways, flipped upside down and run in reverse. Quite an amusing movie. Apparently it was Frampton’s entry point from typical 1960’s avant-garde into structural films – and only a year later he’d put out Zorns Lemma.

Music played: Ennio Morricone – Music For Cinema: The Complete Edition, disc 4, though only track 6 really worked with the movie.

Noctiluca (1974)

Colored circles, reminding me of searchlights across a chain link fence, and sometimes of the MasterCard logo. Music played: “Stalker Dub” from John Zorn’s Nosferatu, which worked nicely. Intended for day two of Magellan.

Autumnal Equinox (1974)

Watched on Frampton’s 77th birthday. Shot in a slaughterhouse, but not terribly comparable to Blood of the Beast, since HF shoots everything too close with his trademark jittery camera movements. I wish there’d been fewer tongues and eyeballs, but it was mostly bearable, more textural than representational. Still, a motherfucker of a film, very red and gloopy and horrible. Music played: Autechre’s Exai tracks 10-13, which worked well, so I’m glad I resisted the urge to play Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse.

by ·Comments Off on Screening Room: John & Faith Hubley (1973)

I got a collection of the Screening Room series, in which Robert Gardner (a great filmmaker himself) interviews creators of avant-garde, animated and short films and shows their work. The plan is to watch some of these and supplement them with other shorts by the filmmakers. In the Hubleys’ case I’ve got plenty, since I bought all their DVDs when they were in print – probably watched most of the films a decade ago but now I can’t remember one from the other, so need to see again. Since I already had all these movies (except possibly Children of the Sun) I would’ve appreciated more time spent in conversation with Gardner, but when this aired I’m sure it was more important to show the work itself.

Eggs (1970)

Birth and Death share a car, drive through civilization debating (over)population. Then Quetzalcoatl shows up and sends them both to a new planet, announcing that the old one is on its own. The dialogue recording is a little too beatnik, but it’s a nice film, good one to start the program. John mentions to Garner that an advantage of animation is being able to tackle huge social issues in the abstract.

The Hat (1964)

One of my favorites, with Dizzy Gillespie and Dudley Moore as two border guards riffing on the idea of war and artificial boundaries after one drops his hat onto the wrong side of the line.

I also flipped through their book adaptation of The Hat, an attempt to turn the rambling dialogue into written form (with illustrations)… doesn’t seem to have worked as well.

Children of the Sun (1960)

Child play and fantasies (accurate to a fault), ending with a weird string-music motion child collage.

Zuckerkandl (1968)

Opening narrator sounds like WC Fields. An illustrated speech given by Robert Maynard Hutchins about Freud student Dr. Zuckerkandl, who is animated as a tiny man with an amusing accent. Mostly I distracted myself watching him and thinking about animation and missed the part where he’s supposed to be the father of modern times. Oh nevermind, internet says it’s a fiction/parody of psychology, which I suppose accounts for all the laughter during Hutchins’ speech. Regardless, another weird choice for an animated film.

Moonbird (1959)

The cutest of their children-voices movies that I’ve seen – Mark and Hampy dig a hole, lay bait (candy) and set a trap to catch the elusive moonbird. Won the oscar over a Speedy Gonzalez, a biblical Disney and an Ernest Pintoff musical short.

The Adventures of * (1957)

Fun, visually exciting short about how aging crushes your imagination and sense of fun – but with a happy ending.

Urbanissimo (1967)

Another favorite. A farmer is startled by a giant, resource-scarfing mobile city that steals his fruits and spits out canned fruit. Entranced by the music of the city (a nice jazz score by Benny Carter) he drops everything and runs after it. Presented by the National Housing Agency of Canada.

Dig (1972)

Educational short about geology. Adam is going to the store for milk when he falls deep into the earth’s crust. Guided by a talking rock (Jack Warden, the president in Being There) he learns about quakes, salt, stalactites, different kinds of rock, fossils, volcanoes. Songs ensue, including “So Sedimentary,” which Dump has covered. Blacklisted actor Morris Carnovsky protects “the tomb of the earth,” through which they go back through prehistoric eras. Finally Jack returns to his mom (Maureen Stapleton, Emma Goldman in Reds) with his new pet rock (and no milk).

by ·Comments Off on Eduardo de Gregorio double-feature

Eduardo de Gregorio, cowriter of the great Celine and Julie Go Boating, died last month. I don’t know any of his non-Rivette works, so I watched one he wrote/directed and one he adapted from a Borges story directed by Bertolucci, both very good.

Surreal Estate (1976, Eduardo de Gregorio)

A novelist (Corin Redgrave, Vanessa and Lynn’s brother) seeks a country house in France as an investment – can’t find gate so he climbs the wall. A sexy, ghostly Bulle Ogier shows him around then abruptly disappears when he attempts to enter a forbidden room. Already he’s referring to his situation as novelistic: “Her act was pointless. The mixture of old clothes, erotic come-on and overacted hysteria was in the most hackneyed gothic tradition, a tradition I had done my own small part to debase.”

Next time he meets a different girl (Marie-France Pisier, Bulle’s fiction-house coinhabitant in Celine & Julie) and an older servant (Gigi star Leslie Caron). He rightly comes to think that the vanishing girls are part of an imaginative scam to get him to buy the house, and decides that he must meet Bulle again to write a book about her – but eventually he buys with the understanding that the two beautiful girls will stay there with him – which they do not.

Leslie Caron:

Marie-France:

I lost track at the end of who really was working for whom, and who knew what about which scam, instead paying attention to the mobile camera creeping around corners, the great crazed piano music, and the self-conscious gothic atmosphere the film is creating. Shot by Ricardo Aronovich (Ruiz’s Time Regained and Klimt) with assistant director Claire Denis!

But maybe losing track of the plot threads and simply reveling in the atmosphere of mystery was the film’s intent. It seems to purposely confound expectations in order to mess with Redgrave, beyond simply the goal of selling the house, and the girls end up competing for him (and against him), while Caron takes a larger role than first expected, and even takes over narration for a while.

D. Cairns in The Forgotten:

Secret passages and two-way mirrors are hinted at. What emerges is a much stranger yarn, one which never fully coalesces into an “explanation.” Depending on one’s inclinations, this is either less or much more satisfying than the initial Scooby Doo plot. What seems to be the case is that the younger women are actresses playing parts for the dubious benefit of Redgrave, whose mind starts to unravel when faced with such duplicity. … The idea of actors performing a semi-improvised “play” in a real location with an unwitting stooge as co-star is a beautifully Rivettian one.

Of course, Marie-France Pisier (Agathe) had problems with flowers in Celine & Julie as well.

–
The Spider’s Stratagem (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)

Bertolucci made this the same year as The Conformist. I think I’ve underestimated him because the only movie I’ve watched in the last decade was his underwhelming The Dreamers. Similarities to Surreal Estate: it’s about an outsider entering an enclosed world full of unknown intrigues. Also, both movies have overt Macbeth references. Very elegant camerawork, outdoing the other feature.

Young Athos comes to the town where his militant anti-fascist father (also Athos, and they look identical) lived and was murdered. He meets his father’s mistress Draifa (Alida Valli of The Third Man, schoolmistress of Suspiria), who sets Athos to investigating the murder. The town is hostile to his queries, and Athos feels endangered from all fronts except by creepy Draifa who wants to hook him up with a young niece so he’ll stay. Then when he tries to flee in frustration, the secretive parties suddenly open up.

The main suspect was fascist Beccaccia, who finally tells Athos “unfortunately, it wasn’t us who killed your father.” Elder Athos’s three friends, who seem alternately welcoming and sinister, finally give up the plot – that Athos had ratted on his own group when they’d planned to bomb a visiting Mussolini, then had allowed them to shoot him instead, martyring him for the cause.

Ebert:

He’s on a strange sort of quest. He doesn’t seem to really care much who killed his father (if you’ll forgive me for not taking the plot at quite face value). In a way, he is his own father, or his father’s alter-ego. Magnani was the only vital life force in the district, and the district defined itself by his energy. Even the fascist brownshirts gained stature and dignity because Magnani opposed them, and Bertolucci demonstrates this with a great scene at an outdoor dance. The brownshirts order the band leader to play the fascist anthem. All dancing stops, and everyone looks at Magnani to see what he’ll do. Coolly, elegantly, he selects the most beautiful girl and begins to dance with her.

by ·Comments Off on A Hollis Frampton Odyssey disc 2 (1971-1980)

Frampton explains his Hapax Legomena cycle:

Hapax Legomena means things said one time. The phrase is a piece of scholarly jargon that refers to words that occur only once in an entire literature or in the entire corpus of a writer’s work in the antique languages. The problem typically with a hapax legomenum is that because it occurs once, it occurs only in one context, and the context does not always reveal the meaning… There is always an element of uncertainty.

Poetic Justice (1972)

Frampton: “a film script in the act of becoming a film”

HF shoots 240 pages of a script upon a table, one at a time, describing a film in four scenes (tableaus). The first describes a couple of rooms in which “you” (I didn’t expect to be the star of the film) attempt to film a blue jay out the window until “your lover” comes home. The second scene alternates between shots of empty rooms, and shots of “my hand holding a photograph of the same scene” but populated. Next, the two of you make love while different impossible visions appear out the window. Back to photographs in the fourth scene, as your lover rifles through a stack of photographs, alternately showing the two of you in similar scenarios. The filmmaker returns: “Your lover’s hand is holding a still photograph of myself, filming these pages.”

Critical Mass (1971)

Slowly step through the audio of a two-character improvised drama, looping two steps forward, one step back, like a less intense but no less methodical version of a Martin Arnold film. Audio plays over black for a couple minutes, then picture, then picture disappears halfway through, and comes back (but out-of-sync) after an interval. Near the end, the editing stops interrupting every word of the dialogue, lets them run on for 20 or 30 seconds at a time, repeating sections we’ve heard before.

Briefly annoying, then thoroughly mesmerizing for the first half, then back to annoying.

I’ve watched (Nostalgia) before. The other four in the series are Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Remote Control and Special Effects.

–
Criterion summarizes Magellan: “His intention was for the cycle to include thirty-six hours of film, to be shown over the course of 371 days, which Frampton dubbed the Magellan Calendar.” This never made sense to me until I heard HF’s comments on the disc:

First of all, it’s a kind of encyclopedia or inventory of sites (sights?) which proposes to have so many different images that it will function as a kind of voyage through the world… If one were to undertake to see the final film in a certain form there would be really a little bit to see every day… One of the aspects that I think is important is that I feel that the spectator of film who has been invited or asked to experience film… might also enjoy having another kind of experience of film that filmmakers have. For a filmmaker, film is not an exotic thing that you go out to, it is a thing pretty much that you do every day. For a filmmaker, whatever you’re doing, even if you’re making Cleopatra or something like that, still you live with it, it becomes an extremely intimate part of your life, which is vivid on the one hand, and on the other hand it’s very ordinary. Film is not an exotic thing to be doing for a filmmaker, it’s daily.

The Birth of Magellan: Cadenza I (1980)

Green flickers on black as an orchestra tunes up. A thunderstorm. Then alternating shots of a wedding preparation (applause) and a silent film (a low buzzing sound), with a white/red circular wipe separating the two. Bizarre.

Pans 0-4, 697-700

I thought from the title that HF would be panning the camera for a minute, each in a different location, but these are simply minute-long idea-films using any sort of motion or effect.
0: two cloud patterns strobed together
1: hippie bead thing penduluming left and right
2: thin white stips falling downward
3: manic time-lapse run through cornfield
4: sheets of paper on wall blowing in breeze, overlaid with the same shot at a different time, so each page looks like two sheets, moving through each other
697: argh, machete man removing dead cow’s head
698: whipping back and forth in a flower field
699: boy taunts camera with a still-living frog on a fishhook
700: ghostly translucent road traffic

Selected Pans:

Ingenivm Nobis Ipsa Pvella Fecit, Part I (1975)

Nude woman walks, turns, skips rope, plays ball on a black field in stuttering stop-motion. To HF, this represents springtime.

Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I (1976)

Skulls and mummified things. Red and green overlaid patterns that would probably make your eyes fall out if you watched with 3D glasses on. A hexagonal pattern rushes past as a palate cleanser between the other sections. I liked this one a lot.

Winter Solstice (1974)

Opens with what looks like the bonfire shot from Zorns Lemma. Jittery handheld shots of fire – dark, all yellows and red, with single frames of light blue at the cuts. A shower of sparks which might have been Pan 2. It’s all repetitive, hypnotic and silent – an excellent film to doze off to.

Also on the disc is Gloria!, which I watched once before.

by ·Comments Off on Lisztomania (1975, Ken Russell)

I’d heard that Criterion will be releasing this, hopefully as a precursor to the uncut The Devils, and since I so enjoyed Tommy, I thought I’d check it out. But I got my wires crossed – Criterion is putting out Quadrophenia, the other post-Tommy, Who-related feature, not Lisztomania. Their loss! My loss too, I guess, since I probably would’ve rented this again just to hear what the commentary track would say about things like this:

Oh but wait, my DVD does have a commentary track by a sleepy Ken Russell, who rouses himself to tell us spectacularly obvious things about once per minute – I didn’t play through very much of it.

Train vs. Piano:

Roger Daltrey brings his boyish energy from Tommy straight into this, as enthusiastic womanizer and rock-star pianist Franz Liszt. He throws parties, hold concerts, flees from sword-wielding husbands, and generally ignores his own wife (Fiona Lewis of The Fury and Innerspace) and children. When his daughter Cosima marries his rival Richard Wagner (I already know how Russell feels about Wagner), Liszt must travel to Wagner’s castle (in a loopy Dracula parody scene) and prevent them from creating a nazi superman.

Vampiric Wagner:

Bored Liszt at home with wife:

In the middle of the film, Liszt goes to Russia and stays with Princess Carolyn (Sara Kestelman of Zardoz) in her penis-decorated palace, leading to a fantastic, cock-filled chorus-girl number. I don’t know why exactly, but Liszt joins the church (under Pope Ringo Starr) sometime later. This is what leads him to fight Wagner (Paul Nicholas, Tommy‘s sadistic cousin Kevin), who is defeated but resurrected as a Frankenstein Siegfried Hitler, who guns down Jews while Liszt’s daughter kills her dad with voodoo. But murdered Liszt returns to Earth from heaven in an angel-winged rocketship, gunning down FrankenWagner, achieving peace at last. All of this really happens. This movie is amazing.

Hitler/Wagner with electric-guitar machine-gun alongside Cosima and Superman-caped children brigade wearing Weezer/Wagner t-shirts:

Liszt with Piano Flamethrower:

Russell: “My film isn’t biography. It comes from things I feel when I listen to the music of Wagner and Liszt, and when I think about their lives.”

The Princess:

Senses of Cinema: “By Russell’s account, producer David Puttnam interfered with the project, insisting on more pop art and less context, and also adding the painfully stupid hoedown music to the opening scene.” They also point out visual references to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in the Russian scenes.