by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Everything Everywhere Again Alive (1975, Keith Lock)

Color fields, electro-tones, patterned text onscreen, with the main camera action being Canadian farmers. A barn raising is interrupted by color fields. A pig is killed, but then, pigs are portrayed as horrible disgusting creatures (I thought the one playing with the dogs was cute). It’s an ambitious title for an experimental re-edit of your home movies from some months at the cabin, but I’m not mad that I spent the time watching this, and at least it will always be filed alphabetically next to an oscar winner.

Joshua Minsoo Kim in Cinema Scope:

At various moments throughout the film we hear minimal, humming synth tones, which were added because Lock felt he heard such sounds coming from the images themselves … It’s an elegant manoeuvre that is matched by another interesting strategy: graphics (shapes, numbers, a circuit diagram) are overlaid atop images. Formally, these feel in line with works by other Canadian filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and R. Bruce Elder, and they call attention to the surface of the film plane, as if inviting us to view everything as a spectacle behind glass.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 15: The Spanish Earth (1937, Joris Ivens)

Unfortunately they still haven’t invented commie propaganda films that aren’t boring, but in the early scenes Joris pulls out some terrific images of the farmland before it goes into newsreel-like war scenes. What does lboxd mean by “The film would have been seen by those making it as a documentary.”

The soldiers and the farmers working for the same cause, driving back and destroying fascism. Nice story – of course this outcome brought decades of prosperity and creativity, which is why Spanish cinema was so dominant in Europe throughout the mid-century. The music is pretty decent, and halfway through I realized there were two narration tracks and switched from Hemingway to Welles.

by ·Comments Off on One, Two, Three (1961, Billy Wilder)

Cagney is a Serious Fast Talking Businessman who yells all his lines in Cold War Germany. He’s a Coca Cola executive (which means a lotta references to Atlanta), pitting pop culture and business against commie mentality. The German language jokes are sharp and funny, from former Berliner Wilder. Oscar nominated b&w cinematography by Daniel Fapp, who shot color oscar winner West Side Story the same year. The jokes and politics are good, as is most of the farce stuff, but Cagney is a disaster.

The daughter is with beau Horst Buchholz, just off The Magnificent Seven:

“You want the papers in triplicate or the blonde in triplicate?”
“See what you can do.”

Sexy secretary Ingeborg was in Rivette’s The Nun, the boss’s Southern party-girl daughter was in the following year’s State Fair, and her dad had been in Shockproof. The boss isn’t doing a Southern accent, exactly, but I like that all you can see out the window of his Atlanta office is parking lots. References to Omaha, La Dolce Vita, and Playboy.

Atlanta:

Commies:

by ·Comments Off on Her Socialist Smile (2020, John Gianvito)

After Profit Motive, Gianvito made a couple of 4+ hour docs about the messes that US military bases leave behind in other countries, but here he’s back in Profit Motive mode with a compact doc full of reading material. The subject is Helen Keller, so he plays with narration and silence, also mixes in period sound recordings and tactile nature photography. A dead bird is photographed for metaphorical reasons, and I’m still recovering from all the avian violence in Bird Island but I’m going to allow it.

Keller was turned onto socialism by an HG Wells book, and after socialist party infighting, she joins the IWW/wobblies and becomes increasingly radical – but remains philosophical and witty in her Q&A responses.

by ·Comments Off on Dope is Death (2020, Mia Donovan)

Portrait of a NYC clinic that sticks pins in your ears to treat stress and addiction. Through interview and archive footage it delves into the history of how Black Panthers and other associated groups studied Chinese acupuncture and brought it back to help their community, then keeps returning from the archives to the present-day clinic and its patients. The founding leader was Mutulu Shakur (below) – I’m behind on the ol’ blog, no surprise, and now we’re watching the new Adam Curtis movie, following the story of Afeni Shakur, so really covering Tupac’s roots this year. The fatal armed car robbery that gets Mutulu imprisoned for life came out of nowhere in this story, and it’s not interested in explaining much about acupuncture itself, more of a history lesson and community portrait.

by ·Comments Off on La Chinoise (1967, Jean-Luc Godard)

Catching up… I watched this three weeks ago, and the only note I took says:

Unfun intellectual/political word games

Obviously it’s a complicated (if unfun) movie, so a one-line review will not do. This is where my lack of biographical knowledge on Godard (and lack of interest in 1960’s politics) holds me back, because this feels like an escalation of ideas about consumerism and radicalism and societal ills from 2 or 3 Things and Weekend… but it also feels like a parody, its characters deluded comic-book Mao radicals. This doesn’t seem right, since the ideals of our main characters seem similar to Godard’s own, in his later, more boring works.

Feels like we spend forever in the primary-color apartment with young commies Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto (her first year in film) and Anne Wiazemsky (star of Au Hasard Balthazar the year before). But there’s also an assassination attempt, a guy exiled from the group, suicide, some fun self-reflexivity, and an endless train conversation with a philosophy professor. Literature references abound, apparently, and name-dropping of Katy’s favorite theorists.

Played Venice the year Belle de Jour won, tying China is Near for a jury prize.

by ·Comments Off on L’An 01 (1973, Jacques Doillon)

“Let’s quit everything”

Made around the time of Tout va Bien and We Maintain It Is Possible, a few years after La Chinoise, which also takes anti-capitalism to bizarre, somewhat comic extremes. This imagines the “Year 01” in which everyone decides to quit their corporate jobs and disband capitalist society and live as people did before machines, growing crops with their bare hands, which doesn’t sound like fun to me, but I’ve been corrupted by capitalist propaganda I suppose.

“Now I take care of the cows. Milking isn’t much nicer than typing, but it’s direct work … if I want to eat, I have to do it.”

“98% vote to abolish property” – it’s convenient for the plot that everyone living in France is a good-natured, 28-year-old communist. They rebuild society in a pointedly uneducated way, going on instict and vague desire, which sounds like how the U.S. government is operating today. Neighbors and strangers open up to each other, jewel thievery becomes a respectable hobby, and everyone acts like they’re going on a huge vacation.

Mouseover to see this hippie get an idea:
image

Another great idea:

Watched this as part of my quest to see everything Alain Resnais made – he did a few-minute episode set in New York, where bankers leap from Wall Street buildings en masse as the people on the streets excitedly read the Euro news in the papers. The dialogue acting here isn’t great, but it opens with a cool series of quick zoom-outs on imposing buildings. Jean Rouch also contributes a Niger scene, which was short and forgettable but featured a reference to “Petit à petit, Inc.”

New York:

Closes with the title “Fin du premier film de reportage sur L’AN 01,” but after 85 long minutes, there was no more to say. I don’t know much about Doillon, but this came near the start of a long, still-ongoing career. Writer Gébé was editing a satirical magazine at the time, which would later transform into Charlie Hebdo.

by ·Comments Off on Hail, Caesar! (2016, Coen Bros.)

Slower and weirder than it seemed from the trailer, which sets up a madcap comedy.
Katy was disappointed.

Mid-1950’s Hollywood: Josh Brolin is a hard-working studio employee who keeps the stars in line and keeps the press (Tilda Swinton) away from the more damaging stories. Period epic star George Clooney is kidnapped by commies, is curious and agreeable, doesn’t seem to realize he’s being held hostage until rescued by cowboy actor Alden Ehrenreich. Those two and Brolin are great, but they’ve got nothing on Channing Tatum as a dancing sailor who’s secretly the commie group’s leader. Ralph Fiennes plays a frustrated director, and we get quite small roles for McDormand, Johansson and Jonah Hill, and reeeeally small roles for Alex Karpovsky and Dolph Lundgren.

Slant:

On the flipside is a cell of communist screenwriters who abduct mega star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) to bleed the studios, only to let slip that their ideals of upending the means of production stem from bitterness over not getting the back-end points they think they deserve. In perhaps the only subtle joke in the entire film, the warped prosperity politics that Hollywood communists bring to the cause is tacitly positioned as a precursor to Scientology, another faddish, extreme cause that the Hollywood faithful would frame in terms of making more bank.

G. Kenny:

The movie makes light of the dialectic as explained to Baird by Marcuse, but it also, in its tricky way, continually invites/compels the viewer to use it. Eddie Mannix is a good man who is very good at his job — but his job seems to be manufacturing schlock. People enjoy schlock, but schlock is arguably an agent of The People’s oppression, so… anyway, one needn’t go on. Suffice it to say that in the cosmology of the delightful Hail Caesar!, regardless of the conclusions to which dialectical thinking may lead, acceptance is the key, and Hollywood, while “problematic,” is more a force for good than the military-industrial complex can ever hope to be. And, finally, doing the right thing is an instinct shared by both company men and singing cowboys, for whatever that’s worth.

F. Cardamenis says the movie “reveals a striking ambivalence about [Hollywood], finding magic in its products but malice in its motives.”

D. Ehrlich’s article in Slate was my favorite, even if I did a sorry job condensing its points below:

[Hail Caesar and The Grand Budapest Hotel] shift through several different aspect ratios and feature Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, and — wait for it! — Fisher Stevens. Both films bake their darker underpinnings beneath a frivolous screwball glaze. More crucially, both films probe the ultimate value of storytelling, and leverage their findings into lucid summations of their creators’ entire career and creative worldview. Hail, Caesar! takes one of the diverse back catalogs in American cinema and forces its various components into a reluctant conversation that changes them all, like strangers who are forced into small talk at a cocktail party only to realize that they have the whole world in common.
…
[the sailor musical sequence] convincingly argues the value of filmmaking to a universe of indelible characters who are struggling to understand it for themselves. It’s a truth they could see if only they had faith. And that, ultimately, is what Hail, Caesar! argues with greater clarity — if not always greater force — than any of the Coens’ previous films. There is no meaning but that which we convince ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you adhere to communism, religion, or movies: The only way you can believe in yourself is if you believe in something bigger. Who wouldn’t want to be a lobby boy at the Grand Budapest hotel, sir? It’s an institution.