Pre-Modern Times ironic drama equating schools and assembly-line workplaces with prisons. Henri Marchand gets out of prison and looks up his cellmate-escapee Raymond Cordy (Wooden Crosses) who now runs a phonograph factory.
Now being chased by both criminals and cops, the two guys weigh their options: friendship, money, status, escape – and come to the correct conclusion.
Fred (of early Bunuels – also good roles in major Renoir movies, but I suppose I’ll always think of him as the enraged looney from L’Age d’Or) is would-be rapist who steals pretty Pola’s key to surprise her at home – a foolish plan, since without the key she spends the night with Al instead. He’s Albert Prejean of The Crazy Ray, the French version of Threepenny Opera, S.S. Tenacity and something called The Buttock. Also in the mix: pickpocket Emile and criminal Louis (Edmond Greville, who’d later helm a Hands of Orlac remake).
Will the pretty girl with the cheek curls choose the thief, the lout, the rapist or the cheater? She is Pola Illery, who’d appear in an unknown 1930’s version of The Indian Tomb / The Tiger of Eschnapur as well as a poetic realist Pierre Chenal film from the same year as L’Atalante. Anyway, she ends up with Louis but only because Albert is arrested for a crime Emile committed. We would’ve preferred she end up with nobody, or at least leave town and find some better guys. Anyway it’s quite a pretty movie and more importantly for 1930, uses the title song expressively.
Luc Sante for Criterion:
In that era, the start of the worldwide financial crash, important movies tended to be set in fantasy realms of impossible wealth. Clair’s Paris was, in a way, no less fantastic—every street and square, every tenement, garret, dancehall, and café was designed by the great Lazare Meerson and built in the studio. But its characters, who live on the border between ill-paid labor and petty crime, were both instantly recognizable the world around and imbued with romance by the magic of Paris. In the decade that followed, that setting and those kinds of characters were to constitute the fundament of the French cinematic style called “poetic realism,” a principal architect of which was Marcel Carné, an assistant director on Under the Roofs of Paris.
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His Royal Slyness (1920, Hal Roach)
Katy went flipping through the endless scroll of Criterion movies on Hulu, settling on this. Of course we didn’t know it was a short, so 20 minutes later we started Under the Roofs of Paris. This one’s a Harold Lloyd short, where Lloyd and the King of Whatever trade places then he ends up joining the revolution against the monarchy. There’s a princess, and I dunno it was lightly amusing and now I don’t remember it all that well.
Fun movie, but I made the mistake of reading the Guy Maddin article before watching. The movie itself could never live up to that article! French expatriate Clair directs Veronica Lake (the year after Sullivan’s Travels but looking five years sexier, err, older) as a witch who spends centuries imprisoned in a tree with warlock Daniel (Cecil Kellaway, entertainingly overdoing it), overseeing their curse upon the family line of mayoral candidate Fredric March (PTSD’d husband of Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives). Lightning strikes the tree, the tricksters escape, and she falls for March, deciding to ditch the warlock and break up his engagement to cold Susan Hayward, daughter of the newspaperman (Robert Warwick, studio boss in Sullivan’s Travels and a big star back in 1915) helping March get elected. Comedian Robert Benchley plays March’s buddy and professional auntie/grandma Elizabeth Patterson his housekeeper. Kind of a naughty movie. Not surprising that Preston Sturges was involved with this – he quit and had his credit removed.
The House Is Black (1963, Forugh Farrokhzad)
I’ve seen this a couple times before, and there’s really nothing to be said. Farrokhzad brings poetry to a leper colony, with thrilling results. It sits alongside Sans Soleil and Resnais’s 1950’s shorts as a supreme example of the possibilities of the personal documentary form. Katy was happy to watch it, and cringed from the images less than I thought she would.
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Pumzi (2009, Wanuri Kahiu)
Usually a young aspiring filmmaker will make a short to prove her abilities before moving on to more expensive feature-length films, but Kahiu’s feature drama From a Whisper predated this slick, expensive-looking 20-minute sci-fi film.
Between watching this and Hello Dolly, we are having an unintended WALL-E tribute week. Story goes that Asha lives in a tightly-regulated base in a post-WWIII wasteland. No plant life grows outside, all water is obsessively recycled and rationed, and each resident has to generate their own daily portion of electricity via exercise machines. An outsider sends Asha a soil sample that seems able to sustain life, and when the authorities try to suppress her discovery, she sneaks outside, treks through the desert to the origin point of the soil sample, plants a tree and shelters it with her body. But then we’re confused by the final shot, aerial pull-out beneath the PUMZI title, which appears to show her lonely tree off to the east and a vast forest to the west.
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Entr’acte (1924, René Clair)
Twenty-minute film shown during intermission at a play with music by Erik Satie. Clair pulled out all the cinematic tricks he could think of – flashy editing, speed changes, superimposition, stop-motion. He brings the camera on a rollercoaster and positions it under a glass table on which a dancer is leaping.
There is kind of a story – a man with a bird on his hat gets shot, falls off a building. After his funeral procession goes wrong, he pops out of the coffin then makes the pallbearers disappear. Also: Marcel Duchamp plays chess with Man Ray. Ah, early surrealism, how I love it.
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Nothing But Time (1926, Alberto Cavalcanti)
“This is not a depiction of the fashionable and elegant life…”
“…but of the everyday life of the humble, the downtrodden.”
A city-symphony short, portraying the work day, after hours, early morning, leisure, crime, etc. – a visual, non-narrative social issues movie with mournful music. It’s nice to watch, but the message seems to come down to “gee, it sucks to be poor.” I dig the montage of vegetables becoming garbage the next day
Crazy split screen – all these puzzle pieces are in motion:
Best shot: inside a man’s steak dinner you can watch the cow being slaughtered:
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Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960, Ken Russell)
A slightly strange blending of the omniscient documentary and an artist-interview film – an invisible narrator talks about Delaney in the third person then she responds. It’s shot like an interview, but more like a drama in parts, the camera already in her house when she opens the door and comes in like an actress ignoring it. The opposite effect when the crew follows her into town to the market, where every single person stares at the camera.
It’s exciting to explore Ken Russell’s early work, but the heart of the movie is Delaney and her words. Unfortunately she speaks mainly in cliches about the life and heart of the city, which doesn’t make me anxious to see her plays. Delaney wrote Lindsay Anderson’s The White Bus and was a huge influence on The Smiths.
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From Spain to Streatham (1959, Ken Russell)
A boy plays along with Elvis Presley’s record of “Hound Dog,” thus ensuring that this little film will never see a DVD release. I wonder where that boy is now, and if he’s pleased with himself.
A ten-minute survey of the national craze over guitars, an appropriate short subject for Russell, who loved classical music and was bemused by rock. It moves from kids destroying an old piano in a courtyard to an older kid jamming on his guitar to a professional music school to a teacher in prisons, religious singers on a street corner, and so on.
“Where are the tambourines of yesteryear?”
Second half of shorts listing from Cannes 60th anniv. celebration (first half is here):
It’s A Dream by Tsai Ming-liang
Occupations by a hatchet-wielding Lars Von Trier
The Gift, more weirdness by Raoul Ruiz
The Cinema Around The Corner, happy reminiscing by Claude Lelouch
First Kiss, pretty but obvious, by Gus Van Sant.
Cinema Erotique, a funny gag by Roman Polanksi with one of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s large-faced actors.
No Translation Needed, almost too bizarre to be considered self-indulgent, first Michael Cimino movie since 1996.
At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World by and starring David Cronenberg, one of his funniest and most disturbing movies.
I Travelled 9,000 km To Give It To You by Wong Kar-Wai.
Where Is My Romeo? – Abbas Kiarostami films women crying at a movie.
The Last Dating Show, funny joke on dating and racial tension by Bille August.
Awkward featuring Elia Suleiman as himself.
Sole Meeting, another gag, by Manoel de Oliveira and starring Michel Piccoli (left) and MdO fave Duarte de Almeida (right).
8,944 km From Cannes, a very pleasurable musical gag by Walter Salles.
War In Peace, either perverse or tragic, I don’t know which, by Wim Wenders.
Zhanxiou Village, supreme childhood pleasure by Chen Kaige.
Happy Ending, ironically funny ending by Ken Loach.
Epilogue is an excerpt from a Rene Clair film.
Not included in the DVD version was World Cinema by Joel & Ethan Coen and reportedly a second Walter Salles segment.
Not included in the program at all was Absurda by David Lynch (reportedly he submitted too late, so his short was shown separately). I saw a download copy… some digital business with crazed sound effects and giant scissors.