by ·Comments Off on Standard Operating Procedure (2008, Errol Morris)

It’s Political Documentary Month! We will see how long that lasts. Katy asked if all Errol Morris’s films are about death (as far as I know they are) and commented that the square photos within a widescreen strip within our square TV across the room made her feel blind, so I brought up stylistic differences between Morris and Ken Burns, figuring we’re being punished for watching a theatrical feature in the same way we’d watch a television program. Afterwards, I showed her In The Loop, which I thought worked much better than S.O.P. on the TV screen. I was psyched to revisit it but she didn’t like at all, since it doesn’t count as satire on government if it’s exactly the way she imagines government works, and anyway it’s not funny.

S.O.P. was surprisingly tame. As one of the former prison guards points out, it’s not like they were beating prisoners or killing them, although that happens when the CIA bring in their own prisoner, a guy who they’re told “was never here.” Unfortunately for the CIA, photos of that incident leaked along with the rest – the ones with prisoners tied up in “stress positions” with panties on their heads, handcuffed into simulated sex scenarios and stacked in naked pyramids, all with Lynndie England flashing a thumbs-up in front. The prison holds a confusing number of military and government groups and private organizations – it would’ve taken a whole other movie to get it all straight. The guards certainly weren’t clear about it themselves. A side-effect of Morris’s technique here is that he’s made the opposite of The Road to Guantanamo, which was told from the prisoners’ point of view. This movie is an analysis of the photographs, of the circumstances behind them, but only from the guards’ points of view. The nameless prisoners, degraded and objectified in those photographs, remain anonymously dehumanized in the film, enigmatic vessels of suspicion (they are, after all, “enemy combatants”) and sympathy (for the torture/s.o.p. depicted).

by ·Comments Off on The Last Bolshevik (1992, Chris Marker)

Marker’s most traditional, talking-head-style documentary since Le Joli Mai still has its fanciful Marker-moments, such as an intermission called “Cat listening to music,” which I believe is the same as the segment in his Petit Bestiare, and some graphics created in HyperStudio on his Apple IIGS

Guillaume-en-Egypte, dreaming images from Japanese television:

Computer camel:

Even though it’s mostly interviews on the topic of Alexander Medvedkin, and not Marker’s missive narration, the film is still structured with chapter headings “first letter, second letter,” etc. Aelita (the Queen of Mars) is shown watching scenes from Happiness. Marker visits Medvedkin’s grave, notes that he was born in 1900 and so his life can be used as a measuring stick for the century. But the metaphor is underused since his recorded life largely consists of the flurry of activity around the cine-train and Happiness, then a long silence until his rediscovery in France in the 70’s.

A.M.’s daughter:

Marker met Medvedkin while in Russia with Costa-Gavras and Yves Montand for The Confession, then Marker made The Train Rolls On, which he excerpts here. “He wouldn’t give people films; he would give them cinema.” The cine-train was fascinating, even if it didn’t ultimately lead to more efficient production and a communist worker’s utopian cinema of the people.

A camera that is aimed like a rifle – I WANT one:

“When Vertov was using studio lights on the extras he mixed with real mourners at Lenin’s funerals it was said he betrayed kino-pravda, film truth. But once you see the same kind of lights in the courtroom, you realize that life itself has become a fiction film, a film noir, filled with suspense, where some actors applaud their own condemnation in advance.”

Insight on Vertov and Eisenstein, giving context to Medvedkin’s work. He says Battleship Potemkin was not successful in its own country. “While European film buffs reveled in the sight of the Potemkin sailors, Russian audiences were dreaming of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.” An interviewee tells us that Stalin used to watch every movie made in the country – impressive if true. Best of all is when Marker watches long-lost films from the 1920’s cine-train and finds the birth of moments in the 1932 Happiness – images and editing techniques discovered or invented on the train reused in the feature.

I wonder if interviewee Viktor Diomen was coached when he said A.M. is “outside time. On the one hand, his own time has left very distinct marks on him. He’s like a big tree with its growth rings and its bark marked by the carvings of passers-by.” One thinks of the Vertigo reference in La Jetee, the woman pointing off the edge of the tree, “outside time.”

“Only later did I understand his tragedy – the tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists.”

The movie gets increasingly interesting and freeform as Marker sets his rifle sights on Russia’s recent past – a very good final chapter, leading to the greatest final paragraph/shot of any Marker film.

by ·Comments Off on Orson Welles: One-Man Band (1995, Vassili Silovic)

A catalog-style entry for…

Initiated by Shadowplay

Not just a late film, but a whole compendium of late films: a catalogue of works by Orson Welles during his last twenty years, assembled with stylish fun by Silovic and Oja Kodar, very entertaining and informative. All these years I’ve read Jonathan Rosenbaum championing the late, unreleased works of Welles, I still haven’t been clamoring to see them – I figured I’ve got enough things to watch. But now that I’ve had a taste, the clamoring begins.

It starts, naturally, with magic and stage shows – this wonderful bit of duck hypnosis which I played again and again.

Then Orson’s 1975 acceptance speech for his AFI lifetime achievement award, at which he presented scenes from The Other Side of the Wind.

P. Bog as actor:

Oja introduces herself, says she wants to combat the public opinion that Orson idly spent his time doing voiceovers and liquor commercials, but she only fuels the opinion that he couldn’t finish projects at the end because he was easily distracted by newer, shinier projects. Sure, some of it was sheer bad luck, mostly finance-related, but also the negatives of Merchant of Venice going missing.

That unlabeled can holds the original cut of Ambersons:

Scenes from Filming The Trial are shown, a good opportunity for Welles to speak for himself out of character (or, more accurately, in character as himself).

Oja discusses the great trailer for F For Fake (his final completed feature) and shows half of the trailer, then rifles through paintings and sketches he made.

Monologue readings from Moby Dick: filmed solo performance of select scenes before water-shadowed backdrops. Supposedly the rushes have been edited together and screened in Germany and New York. Please feel free to send them here next.

Don Quixote, which he spent 30 years trying to complete. I haven’t seen Jesus Franco’s version, but despite all the public whining about it, it’s probably better than nothing. Franco had no access to some of the footage, which has since aired on television (and therefore on youtube).

A Winston Churchill-related comedy sketch piece in silhouette, and an embarrassing bit at a hammy tailor shop – these are possibly part of the compilation piece known as London, also edited in Germany. I wonder if the Germans would care to release a DVD.

With tailors Charles Gray (of Dearden’s Man in the Moon and a couple of Bond movies) and Jonathan Lynn (director of Clue, My Cousin Vinny):

A trailer for The Deep, a thriller set on a couple of boats in the middle of the ocean, featuring Jeanne Moreau.

Footage shot for Merchant of Venice. The film was almost completed when part of it went missing.

A desperately lonely-looking Welles performing the missing monologue outdoors on a windy evening.

“I think acting is like sculpture, in other words it’s what you take away from yourself to reveal the truth of what you’re doing that makes a performance … There is no such thing as becoming another character by putting on a lot of makeup.” – spoken by Welles, but similar to what Renoir says in that short with Gisele Braunberger.

More projects: The Orson Welles Show (featuring The Muppets, and available on video):

The Dreamers, which I know little about:

Overall a very useful little doc, which unsurprisingly got me fired up to watch more Welles movies (and to finally read that recent Welles book by Rosenbaum). Unfortunately my follow-up feature, Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, was much less enlightening.

Afterwards I scouted around online, having a Late-Welles scavenger hunt. I came up with a couple interesting bits. First, a piece of Vienna, as it aired on the Arte channel – a segment of the 1969 One Man Band project. Seems like an unexceptional travelogue, featuring a man who feeds birds, a montage of quick zoom-ins on different cakes (also shown in the Silovic/Kodar doc). A caped and hatted Orson walks through the city scenery, visits a ferris wheel and comments on the Third Man soundtrack, then he and Mickey Rooney perform a magic trick with Senta Berger (of Major Dundee, The Terror of Dr. Mabuse).

Ten minutes of silent screen tests and still photography in preparation for Merchant of Venice, compiled by the Italians – not especially enlightening except to get another look at those long-nosed Eyes Wide Shut masks. I wonder how these tests got out while the film itself remains under wraps:

by ·Comments Off on Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

The Auteur Completion Project rolls on. I never knew how to see Permanent Vacation until Criterion put it out a few years ago, and now that I’ve finally watched it, I might as well also finally see this Neil Young/Crazy Horse doc that I bought a decade ago. I have a weird attraction to buying concert DVDs and a weird aversion to watching them. Anyway, now I’ve seen every Jim Jarmusch film that I know of, and I feel good about that. Now to move to New York and see them all on 35mm instead of DVD.

Jim and Neil on the bus:

As far as behind-the-scenes musician docs go, this one is top-notch, not for any particular visual superiority (in fact, it was purposely shot on cheap film and video cameras) but because it lets the songs play out in full – even the long jammy ones – without impatiently cutting to some famous person telling us how great Crazy Horse is. If there’s anyone who can be counted on for patience, it’s Jarmusch.

by ·Comments Off on Babies (2010, Thomas Balmès)

It’s like Sweetgrass, only instead of sheep there are babies. And there aren’t so many of them. And the camerawork is better. That was surprising, that a doc about babies (from just-been-born to just-learning-to-stand) looked better than the Cinema Scope-acclaimed doc about sheep herding. But neither movie transcended expectations. If you are into sheep (or, in this case, babies), we’ve got your movie here. Bonus feature of the movie: pretty vistas of Mongolia.

Baby in his Searchers pose:

by ·Comments Off on Jean Painleve Through His Films (1989, Denis Derrien)

Interesting guy – besides the shorts I’ve seen, he made so many scientific research films, capturing and studying animals and behavior previously unknown. This was probably the best way to see those, in short excerpts with explanations of their significance, instead of trying to watch them through (not that they’re available to do so). This was a TV series, going chronologically through Painleve’s career, stopping at each film to discuss its creation and reception.

by ·Comments Off on The Last Movie (1971, Dennis Hopper)

“You underprivileged bastard!”

Iconic Hopper, slightly blurry:

A strange movie in many ways. For instance, no opening credits then after 12 minutes it says “a film by Dennis Hopper”… then after 12 more minutes we get the title. Hopper plays a different sort of hippie drifter loner. He’d like to get married and have a steady job, but on his terms. He worked as a stunt man on a film about Billy the Kid (under director Sam Fuller, in a cameo) in Peru, but seems alienated at the wrap party, only comfortable in smaller groups.

When the production leaves, he stays behind with local girl Maria, idyllic until a priest tries to get Hopper’s help when locals pretend to be making their own movie, with real violence, not understanding the Hollywood fakery. Maria also starts getting him down – turns out she’s not satisfied with the natural paradise that Hollywood Dennis had envisioned. She wants all the American conveniences, which an out-of-work stuntman can’t afford. He turns to the elusive fast-buck by helping his shady friend Don Gordon (Bullitt) try to strike gold, but that ends in failure and embarrassment.

Don Gordon and Donna Baccala, whose only other film was Brainscan:

From what I’d heard I was expecting a rambling incoherent mess of a film, a drugged-up slog making no real sense. But it’s a right proper movie, and a good one. There’s much more to it though; more plot and characters than I’ve mentioned, events sliding out of order, flash-backs-and-forwards. Reference to someone who died during the film shoot. At the end there are “scene missing” cards and a slate onscreen, we see a retake of a scene we just watched, and people start breaking character as the movie winds itself down.

Nice garfunkly folk music throughout. Maybe they’re pushing it when they play a Jesus song while Dennis is dazed and wounded. After the gold mine idea goes bad he rampages through the old movie set and is imprisoned by the local “filmmakers” with their wicker camera. “They want me to die in the movie like Dean did” – so he named his dead friend Dean. “That’s what’s wrong is we brought the movies – that’s where we made our mistake.”

The priest: “They didn’t want to come to my church anymore. They got carried away by that game. So I just wanted to show them that the same moralities that exist in the real church can exist here in the movie church. I hope that after this game is over, morality can be born again.”

Priest Tomas Milian of Traffic, also starred in an Antonioni film and a Django movie:

Mubi explains it all:

The success of Hopper’s Easy Rider gave many young filmmakers the opportunity to work in Hollywood under the studio system. In 1970, Universal hired five “young genius” directors to make pictures for them. Hopper was one of these and developed a script with Steward Stern, the writer for Rebel Without a Cause, about the process of moviemaking and its effect on the natives of a remote and primitive village in Peru where it is being shot.

The Last Movie was the result – an amazing milieu of cinema and the decade it was created in. Hopper is a stunt man and wrangler on a big budget western, with which Hopper infused the presence of Sam Fuller, Sylvia Miles, Toni Basil, Henry Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell and the cinematography of Laszlo Kovacs. After the production leaves town, Hopper’s life starts to get a little insane, torn between a new movie producer in town, a buddy (the great Don Gordon) and his quest for gold, and the incredible, ritualistic movie being “shot” by the locals using a wicker camera and boom mike. Under the surface bubbles the genius of the film, dealing with friendship, loyalty, the superstitious nature of filmmaking and the notion of film genre.

Although it received the only award given at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, Universal refused to distribute the film unless Hopper re-edited it. Hopper was intransigent, and Universal gave The Last Movie only token distribution and the picture was shelved.

Sam Fuller:

Only two user reviews on Mubi. One says “it’s wildly textured, emotionally intense, covers a lot of thematic ground, but its all of a piece-it works.” and the other, “a truly loathsome work of self-pity and self-aggrandizement, whose charms include smug, playful racism, and casually brutal misogyny.”

Peruvian “director” frames up a shot:

Wicker-cam:

MZ Seitz on Hopper’s filmmaking:

Although he directed just seven features, his style is quite distinctive. It’s ragged and intuitive, more sensual than logical, intoxicated by drugs, sex and music. And to greater or lesser degrees, all of his films address the individual’s struggle to survive within a machine without becoming a cog — the central narrative of Hopper’s long and strange career, with its youthful promise, adult madness and autumnal wisdom.

Z. Campbell:

The Last Movie is the only film I’ve seen that makes me think that it well and truly is an ‘anti-Western.’ (Though: this much-maligned genre that I love so much didn’t actually need ‘post’ or ‘neo’ updates–it had a strong critical component to it from the classical era onwards.) The Last Movie is quite possibly the only true and intentional avant-garde feature film I’ve seen from Hollywood. It shatters its own sense of fiction, of narrative illusion, it’s just celluloid material projected, and in so doing foregrounds the personal & cultural situations which constitute these fictions. Apocalypse Now? Child’s play–everything Coppola tried to do in his film on violence and imperialism and cinema, Hopper has already done–better–by 1971.

Maria and the city: Stella Garcia was also in a Clint Eastwood western called Joe Kidd.

Mrs. Anderson: Julie Adams was great in this. Hopper cast her in Catchfire twenty years later, and twenty years earlier she’d starred in Creature from the Black Lagoon.

–
The American Dreamer (1971)

“A camera is always a questioning instrument”

Also watched a washed-out old VHS of a truly ridiculous documentary on Hopper made during the editing of The Last Movie. Not about The Last Movie at all, just a portrait of a hippie for people fascinated by the Easy Rider freakshow. It’s everything that Lions Love was accused of being. Hopper gives his views on spirituality but mostly talks incessantly about sex. The movie takes up plenty of time showing him shooting guns and getting naked, and even writes him a theme song.

“There’s no honest men in the movie business except me.”

An hour in, the movie gets more interesting when Hopper starts to question and criticize the filmmakers methods, and to their great credit they left this in there. The doc is made by L.M. Kit Carson – David Holzman himself, who’d later write the terrible Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 starring Hopper – and Larry Schiller, who later made not one but two JonBenet Ramsey movies. I’d heard that The Last Movie was a disaster and that this intrepid documentary shows why, but I found the opposite to be the case.

“I don’t need to have people make movies about me.”

“This movie, it’s a nice idea, whether it’s damaging or whether it isn’t,
it doesn’t really matter to me.”

by ·Comments Off on Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, Michael Moore)

Finally caught up with this. Katy and I both liked. Moore has returned to the concerns of Roger & Me, watches the problems of Flint spread to the entire country, but as usual with him (and unusual for political documentaries in general), does it in a way that makes me interested and excited, not depressed. A couple token scenes of Moore trying to talk his way into corporate offices and an ending where he wraps Wall Street in crime scene tape aside, he seems to have listened to criticism and kept himself mostly off-camera. We noticed he was awfully polite and attentive to religion, trying to expand his support base out of the godless-liberal camp. Winning coverage of a factory sit-in and an evicted family that refused to leave balance out the bummers of underpaid airline pilots, life insurance policies on corporate employees and bullying bank bailouts… well, not really, but he makes it feel that way.

Predictably, critical response was off the charts… some raves, many attacks, and still more highly-qualified minor praises – mostly accusing him of simplifying the issues. But they’re issues that needed simplifying, and the accusation is an easy way for a film reviewer to imply their superior knowledge and understanding to Moore without having to defend themselves with examples. Anyway, Cine File put my thoughts succinctly: “Basically the achievement of Capitalism is to spell out the facts in such a way that they’re impossible to ignore. Nobody does it better than Moore.”

Best of all, I found out that in my lifetime, U.S. Presidents used to say things like this:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

– Jimmy Carter, 1979-07-15