Unknown Chaplin

It has been quite some time since I have written. These past few months have been exceedingly busy ones. I have been working full time as well as started a masters program in Library Science at the University of Illinois. I have also been trying, sometimes vainly it would seem, to complete a script. I have been thinking also about what I would really want to say in a forum like this.

I have certainly seen movies that are worth talking about and commenting on (The Fantastic Mr. Fox), but for whatever reason, I have not been compelled to do so.

One thing that I have though is the above series produced by Kevin Brownlow for the BBC because it was particularly revelatory for me.

I have to admit I have always had a bias against Charlie Chaplin. I did what a lot of unenlightened film snobs do and compared him against Buster Keaton and found him lacking. Keaton seemed to be of the the future, of absurdism, of the 20th Century, and Chaplin seemed like a sentimental throwback to where movies had come from (the 19th Century stage) and not to where they were going.

But if you think about the little tramp in terms of what it represented (as the most popular image, persona of all time) and as a underdog, a truly relatable character, it is easier to see where his influence lies as well as where we have strayed from it. Think of the amount of current comedy that is based on hatred of the other and how an audience is meant to identify with that. Chaplin was always the other.

The Last Five Minutes of Summer Hours

This goes to an experience I had awhile back, watching Summer Hours in a packed Highland Park theater. 

Assayas' "return to form" (after Boarding Gate, maybe, but am I the only person who admired Clean?) fits very well into the "cinema of quality" and the audience loved it's Merchant/Ivory sense of a very material old world succumbing to the modern age.

Then there is the last five minutes.

The audience I was with, primarily well off and middle aged reacted to the scene with gasps of horror. 

Actual gasps! 

People where Tsking out loud, and i didn't even know anyone outside of kindergarten teachers actually "tsk'ed"

The scene to them was almost like a rape scene.  And what was this rape?  A bunch of teenagers have a party in an old (I'm sorry "classic") family villa. They smoke some pot, drink some beer and listen to french hip-hop, which by the way comes as a shock on two levels:  1) After a very quiet film, this really disrupts the mood that Assayas has created over the past ninety minutes and 2)  French Hip-hop is not nearly as bad as I thought it was.

The audience treated this as if it was a desecration of old world values and not for what Assayas meant:  This is just a house.  A container of experiences, and this experience is the most vital in the film since the opening scene because it is about living and not commodification.

These kids were not putting graffiti on the wall or wrecking the place.  It reminded me of a very similar scene in Cold Water, or several scenes in Irma Vep (actually, is there anyone who films a party better than Assayas?).  The scene is integral to the film because it shows the concrete value of what is being passed on and not just the monetary one.

What is funny is they reacted the same way when a maid "accidently" is bequeathed a valuable vase.  Is it ironic that she doesn't know the value of the vase or that she will actually use it as a vase, as opposed to an object d'art?

The Highland Park audience preferred to identify with the vase. 

Oh well.  Great Incredible String Band music at the end too.

The party scene from cold water:

Iran

Two interesting posts on Iran. The first is on Hussein Moussavi...architect

and the next Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf, official spokesperson in the Guardian

1 and 1/2 hours with Bela Tarr, courtesy of the Walker Arts Center

Oh Bela.

Phil Solomon.com

One of the pleasures of the web for me is when I am able to see something that has been obscured to me before that point, either by the vagaries of distribution or coverage.  

Phil Solomon has always been a film maker that I had heard more about than seen his work, but when I woke up this morning I was reading a little blurb on his Last Days in a Lonely Place in Film Comment and thought to look him up.

I was led directly to his very nicely conceived and designed website (love the orange on grey color scheme!).  You can watch portions of his films, view his blog, or read his academic writings.  Or at least will be able to soon as the majority of the site is still being put up.

One caveat:  I wish the screen to view his films was larger.

Crucified Lovers Class Discussion

One of my favorite Mizoguchi's and perhaps the one that is considered in Japanese film culture to be his supreme work, The Crucified Lovers is fascinating on several levels. He is adapting the work of Chikamatsu, one o f the most well regarded authors in Japanese Literary history and the story itself takes on the potency of myth.

On a technical level, the work that Mizoguchi does with sound design and spatial orientation in the mis-en scene is masterful, always highlighting the emotional potency of his story.

The class had a lot to say and really picked up on the filmic qualities of Mizoguchi's pessimistic vision.

Clickable through the title above and here.

The Grin Without a Cat, more

Finally had a chance to digest the whole of this film over the weekend and this certainly lived up to the high expectations I had put on the film in my head.

What really struck me about the movie was the way that Marker took history and made it a representation of history (see my Awkward Family Photos post below). In the first few minutes we see a century and global scale of social demonstrations and see that footage contrasted with Battleship Potemkin. What is that movie? Art? Propaganda? A view of the revolution idealized and left unfulfilled As we watch history collide with an idealized socialist version of the same we do not see a contradiction- we see Potemkin project itself on the twentieth century.

Later we see an Army camp selling war to Latin America and journalists and, what look to be, tourists. They play war for them and then the visitors have a go of it, interrogating a prisoner as the camera interrogates them.

What is a grin without a cat truly but a fantasy of what could be?

Awkward Family Photos, brilliant

I am more than certain there are quite a few sites like this scattered about. I have even seen more than one. But there is something about this that I love (and I was just alerted to it today). To whit:



One of the beauties to me of family photos is the difference between the reality that people think they are presenting and the reality that other people see. The representation and the reality. And how that representation, that photo, really becomes more real.

Lady of Musashino class discussion

After the harsh beauty of Women of the Night I decided to step back and show a film that is deceptively more civilized.  Not considered one of Mizoguchi's stronger efforts, The Lady of Musashino takes on a strong willed heroine and the change in middle class japan over the post war period in one suburb of Tokyo.

What at first might seem like Merchant/Ivory territory becomes a ruthlessly compassionate study of changing times and those left behind.  A fascinating film.

Again, link in the title.

Women of the Night class discussion

Finally having a chance to edit and upload the class discussions of Mizoguchi. Here we look at his atypical Women of the Night. A very angry film that verges on the type of hardwired B film that Fuller could pump out, Mizoguchi later renounced the film after his Buddhist conversion. This is not to say it is bad. Oh no, it is bad and completely unbelievably powerful.

Link of the discussion in title.

Donald Richie on Japanese Film Over an hour of bliss

It is over an hour long and well worth watching. Richie in discussion with Tom Luddy about life in Japan and Japanese film for University of Berkeley. If the embedded screen below is slow in loading, link is in the title.

Finally some free time and...Brandon Linden, Librarian

Eight weeks ago I started back at Riverside Publishing while also working weekends doing pre-literacy for the Department of Education (through the University of Penn, through a ready to Learn grant, for PBS, for their website-phew!). I was also finishing up my class for Facets on Mizoguchi and doing the occasional recital taping at Northwestern.

Basically I have only had a couple of days off in the past two months. But now that Facets is over with, and the recital tapings have slowed down and tomorrow the Educational Research project is ending this phase, I can actually look forward to having some time off.

The one thing about being laid off (and laid off as a contractor, especially) is the feeling that the floor can drop out at anytime, it is hard to get over that feeling. So I am quite grateful for the amount of work that I have had over the past couple of months. And I am equally grateful for some time off.

One bit of good news too: Found out that I have been accepted into the Masters program at the U of I Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences starting this summer! The majority of course work is online and their reputation as an online school and a Library Science school is quite good. I am excited!

La Jetee

I think it is pretty apparent that I am a Chris Marker fan and as a fan I urge others to go and buy the Criterion La Jetee/Sans Soliel collection. But, if you are more interested in a quick fix, the entirety of La Jetee is now on YouTube in one file. Give it a second to warm up and then watch the beauty.

a short update

I have been pretty crazy busy with the start of the new job, plus doing the research work for the University of Penn. on the weekends, plus the film class and filming the occasional recital. Gotta make the money!

Haven't really had the chance to do much else but I am taking more pictures and have recently become enamored with graffiti in its various forms.

The Grin Without a Cat on DVD soon!

‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’
- Alice in Wonderland

You can imagine how excited I am! This is one of those movies that even as a Marker enthusiast I have had a hard time finding (I will not mention the poor quality and disposable torrent I was able to see).

May 5th.  Marker your calendar

The Wire and Psychogeography

Going through the vast collections of tubes known as the internets this morning, came across this wonderful and thoughtful article on The Wire, Urbanism, Psychogeography and other assorted connections by Jeff Kinkle and Alberto Toscano.  Clickable above.

If you are not a fan of the Wire, perhaps this will start your addiction. If you are already, this will make you rethink the series as a representation of refracted reality even more so.

Red Light District

Openings and closings.

There are very few moments in art where all fuse together into a complete whole. The emotional, the intellectual,the formal.

Such is the case with Mizoguchi's Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai, literally, Red Light District) and more especially, indeed more special, the last sequence and shot.

The look as the young prostitute invites us in, meets our gaze directly, and then withdraws, closing the door behind her.



Read Pedro Costa's lecture about all of this so eloquently in Rouge

I will be editing down the class discussions and posting them quite soon.

Warner Archives

This has possibilities.

The idea behind this is that you can order from Warner Brothers a custom made DVD of one of the over 3800 films in their library not presently available on a mass produced DVD for around 20 bucks.  Of that 3800, about 150 are presently available. 

For someone like myself this is a mouth watering possibility, especially when you take into account the availability of films like Tourneur's Witchita which I have only been able to watch in the most dire dvd that was transferred from a 16mm print that apparently was kept at the bottom of a well.

The idea here is that really anything would be better than the print that I saw but the question remains at how good will these prints be? I did notice that they will be in the original aspect ratio, always a good sign, but will they be remastered?

The info is probably on the website but as of this morning they were still working some kinks out of it and I couldn't find it.

Of course what this augers is a more "on demand" future where entire libraries will be on central servers and we will just pick and chose what we want. I am more than certain eventually we will be able to download Joel McCrea himself to give us a nice massage.

But, hey, this is a start.

Gion Festival Music

Last night we watched Gion Festival Music in class.

Completely unavailable on DVD here in America (though Masters of Cinema put out a nice edition, packaged with Sansho the Baliff in the UK), I have to say that the movie was startling as I rewatched it.

Mizoguchi films split quite easily into his period dramas and his films with a contemporaneous setting. Especially after Kurosawa's success internationally with Rashomon, Mizoguchi started also to submit to international festivals. For the most part it was his period films that were noted in the West, his contemporary films seemed to play more to a Japanese audience. Such is the case here.

The Gion festival occurs every June in Kyoto and has since 896. A friend pointed out that making a movie called Gion festival Music and then not showing the festival would be akin to me making a film called "4th of July Fireworks" and not showing that either.  The only invocation we get is a brief shot the traditional lanterns used, toward the end of the film.

One of the fascinating things about the film is that if it is indeed aimed at a japanese audience, it does much to confound the expectations and wants of that audience.  Stylistically this is much more westernized than what we traditionally think of when we think of Mizoguchi and his "one take/one scene" style (which, granted, is already a pretty reductive way to think about it).  

Instead this film is filled with close-ups and if his other films force and audience to consider a situation, here the emphasis is much more on empathizing with one.  If anything there is a transference between the audiences empathy and the feelings that the older geisha has toward the younger at the end of the film, it is as if the empathy we are extending is taken up.

Corroded Art

Decided to put up a bunch of my photos in blog form here.

This has been a way for me to spend my time over the past few months without going completely nutso.