Sidney Lumet's the Offence

Watching MGM HD, finally had a chance to catch up with Sidney Lumet's The Offence.  I have to admit that I have slept some on Lumet's career, but this movie has made me re-think my laxness.  From the amazing slo-mo opening to the split second flashbacks that litter the film, Lumet makes the material cinematic while getting great performances from Sean Connery and Trevor Howard, the former as a burned out, angry cop and the latter as a suspected child murderer.


Apparently they filmed the movie in a month, and it really seems as if everyone is just burning.


Flick in the links.

The film music of John Carepenter vol.1

MichaelJacket at Blogspot has posted an amazing collection of John Carpenter's self-composed film music at that site (clickable in the title of the post).

What can I say? Not only the perfect Halloween music but if you love minimal synth stuff from the 70's as much as I do- just great music, period.  Also the curatorship is great and includes lesser known music (and hard to find) from the Fog as well as the great Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 stuff.

Highly recommended!

Christmas Holiday

This was a movie that was recommended to me by a friends mother and boy was she right.  Excellent example of early noir with a title that belies its dark heart.  

The copy here is much better than the video above would have you believe.

Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly are both excellent in this 1944 Robert Siodmak film written by Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane). Great Script, beautiful cinematography...

Links in Comments

Sandra (Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa... )

D: Luchino Visconti


I have been on a real Visconti kick lately after re-watching Senso. There are certain films, just like there are certain books, you should not watch early in life and Viscont's work is in that place for me.  I saw Rocco and his Brothers and the Leopard years ago and while I understood them to be "masterpieces," I did not have the life experience to actually deal with what the movies were saying.


Sandra is a later film and completely unavailable on DVD in the United States. It deals with Auschwitz while still working in a framework of forbidden love and class differences.  It is a fascinating film if not on the same level as the ones mentioned above but perhaps people disagree with that assessment? 


Links in the comments and subtitles included.

Claudia Cardinale as Sandra

Treno Popolare (1933)

"One of the beacon films of the European cinema of the Thirties."  Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma, Laffont, Paris, 1992

As always, I was intrigued this week by Dave Kehr's article on the films of Raffaello Matarazzo that are being released this week by Criterion under the banner title Raffaello Matarazzo's Runaway Melodramas.  The set includes four films, “Chains,” “Tormento” (1950), “Nobody’s Children” (1952) and “The White Angel” ( 1955).  


What intrigued me was Kehr mentioning an even more florid melodrama,  Ship of Condemned Women” (1953) Which Kehr says, "stands at the most extreme edge of Matarazzo’s art."  Looking for it online, I was unable to find a direct download, but did instead score Treno Popolare which also happens to have a role in it for the director (he plays the bandleader at Orvieto).


You can also watch the first 15 minutes of the film above.


Link in comments (no subtitles unfortunately)

Little Man, What Now?

In honor of the Northwest Chicago Film Society that will be wrapping up their winter season with the above title tomorrow night, I was able to find a copy of this unknown to me Borzage film.  I will be honest and say that I have not seen this yet as I want to view it in all of its glory on the Portage screen.  Completely unavailable here in the states on DVD, VHS, air mail, whatever, I thought that maybe Borzage would get a boost from the box set of a couple of years ago (A door that shut rather than opened unfortunately).


From the looks of it, this film has a good amount in common with his Man's Castle of a year earlier.  But if you are in the Chicago area find out for yourself tomorrow night!  Support a local film group that has had nothing but excellent programming and also has the good sense to serve drinks in the theater.


The copy of this here is not great, but it is here!  Also has hard French subs.  Links in comments.

Rosebud

There has been a lot more available later period Preminger, mainly due to the VOD services and the small you must support them Olive films (no, really you must support this kind of consumer passion driven archivism- it is needed.  For God's sake, they put out  Skidoo!).  


Look at Dave Kehr's excellent takes on Preminger's much maligned Hurry Sundown and Such Good Friends (again put out by the laudable Olive) in today's NYtimes.  


What is nice is some of these remasters are also making their way to cable, including Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon.  One of his that I have seen on cable turning up sporadically in its original widescreen glory is this film, but no DVD in sight.


Rosebud is a film about exhaustion and it takes up the form well. The problem is that then some see this as an exhausted film, which is not the case.


Links in the comments.

The Divine Woman

There is something about the twilight of the silent era.  The refinement of the visual language of film and the complex narrative framework and character psychology that good movies were able to establish with an economy of motion are still in many ways unsurpassed.  I certainly have a hard time thinking of giving up dialogue when I write, and I always look at these movies with a sense of wonder and constant learning.

Victor Sjöström is someone I wish I have seen more of.  While I have seen The Wind, the rest of his available films are on my long list of "To Be Seen," the problem being my TBS keeps getting longer, not shorter.

Well, this is an easy one.  Only 10 minutes or so of The Divine Woman survive and it was used as an extra on the Garbo box set that came out a bit ago.  Maybe the rest will be discovered someday in an old box in a hospital or someone's garage.  Who knows?

Is there something extraordinary about this clip?  Sure there is the "multiple clock dissolve to suggest lovemaking" motif around minute eight but instead look at the shots after.  There is the casual lyricism of Garbo and Hanson by the moonlight lit win and then the dissolve into medium shot, where we realize the emotions and psychology of the first half of the scene have been reversed.  Their love has calmed Garbo but stricken Hanson, who now realizes what he is giving up  It is a simple dissolve and it tells us everything we need to know.

Scattered Clouds (1967) Mikio Naruse

“From the youngest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”


I became enamored of the particular life view of Mikio Naruse before I could see any of his movies.  I had picked up Philip Lopate's Totally, Tenderly, Tragically and was engulfed not by Naruse's movies, but Lopate's prose of them.  At that time the only movie of his available was  A Woman Ascends the Stairs which at that time was on a cruddy VHS tape.  I did not take the opportunity to see it, scared away by the muddy image on the tape box that  promised a lot of squinting and bad subtitles ahead.  


Now of course things are a little different.  


Streaming sites and a multi-region DVD player have brought a good number, if not alas, the majority of Naruse's films to us.  This has helped go to Lopate's point that one Naruse film will not do, that the style is so invisible in one that it appears to be no style at all. It is only after watching several and letting the themes and images wash over you that a viewer gets the idea of who this man was and why he was such a singular artist.


Dave Kehr in his invaluable NYTimes DVD column talked about the Eclipse release of early Naruse films that is coming out today and I thought it would be a nice correlative to talk about and post his last film Scattered Clouds from 1967.  

Auteurist alert!  It does share a trait with no less than three of the films in the Eclipse set (Street without End, Apart From You and Every-Night Dreams), in that it revolves around a car accident.  


The pregnant Yoko Tsukasa's husband is runover by Yuzo Kayama and after he is found innocent he tries to make amends to her.


This sounds like a case of Sirkian melodrama, and what fascinates about this film is the way the outside world starts pushing in and compressing their relationship.  And as with most Naruse, what he offers her before love is money.  The idea that everything in the world ha s price, whether it be emotions or death, haunt Naruse's cinema, which is nothing if not truly materialistic.  


And look at those colors!

Links in comments

Ball of Fire and Gene Krupa's Drum Boogie

Watching this movie early n the A.M. and thinking about the seemingly off handed mastery of Howard Hawks.

The first time that I saw Ball of Fire I was around ten years old.  No VCRs at that point (or at least not widespread).  Our neighbors, the Knupfers, were friends with a guy who worked at a place in Wilmette called Films Incorporated, which would rent out 16mm prints.  He was able to get a copy of this and bring it over, where one summer we waited for nightfall and watched the movie in their backyard.  I have to say I don't remember the movie from that evening so much as the experience.  The specialness of watching something with friends and family in such a setting.

Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the movie, I did and I do!  Anyone who loves language has to (add in Howard Hawks directing, Billy Wilder & Charles Brackett writing, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Oskar Holmoka acting (among a treasure trove of character actors)).

One point I remember from that screening was how Barbara Stanwyck called the phone the "Ameche" because Don Ameche had just finished playing Alexander Graham Bell.  I fell in love with the idea that language was not set in stone but transmutable and elastic; stretching like a cultural taffy to change with whoever decided to change it.

Needles to say it led to a continued fascination with slang, dialects, and any sort of hip patois I can come across.

Watching it this morning though what struck me was the above scene.  Look at how Hawks films it- almost all in medium shots except for the cutaways to Stanwyck, and even there she is always presented as part of the larger band.  Look at the way the musicians sway to the music and look at each other in appreciation and smiles as they play.  This is such a contrast with some other big band shorts of the era where when they are not playing or soloing, the musicians look ahead stone faced and immutable- seemingly scared of the camera and each other.

This is a case of Hawks doing what he does best:  Showing the easy camaraderie of professionals who enjoy being able to work and play around each other.  It is infectious to watch.

Dusty and Sweets McGhee

Dusty and Sweets McGee

D. Floyd Mutrux

Finally had a chance to catch up with this after Thom Anderson's write-up in Film Comment.  Here he is talking about the film (cutoff at the end):




It has finally come out as part of the Warner Archive collection here as both a DVD and download.  It is also available in the Comments section below.

Beautifully shot by WIlliam Fraker with a sense of place in early 70's Los Angeles that s palpable.  There is also a great soundtrack with Van Morrison, Harry Nilsson, and a selection of older rock and doo-wop.  Anderson points out the similarities between the movie and Pedro Costa's recent work and it is an apt comparison.  Though I find Mutrux's work to be looser and not nearly as aesthetically stringent. Both though share a sense of empathy with their subjects that reviewers have taken as morally dubious, though I don't think this is the case.

What is interesting to me is how films like this or Barbara Loden's Wanda are essentially about drift and how those films did not speak to an audience in 1970 but, for whatever reasons that modern life has, speak to us (or at least a select few of us) now.

When I took this out of Odd Obsession, the gentleman behind the counter recommended Cisco Pike to me as another early 70's LA movie in a similar vein.  That will be one that I rent today.

Jacques Tourneur's The Fearmakers and J Hoberman's Cold War

There are a few critics these days that when they put out books, I must buy them immediately:  Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chris Fujiwara, and J. Hoberman.  


The latter has a new book just out, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War which is coming out on March 15th.  Hoberman seems to be doing a reverse history if we start with his The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties


In anticipation, I have been reading about the book online and the series of films that Hoberman programmed at BAM to celebrate the books publication.  


One of my own favorites from this period that is not included in the Hoberman show is Jacques Tourneur's the Fearmakers.


Coming at the tail end of the "commie scare films" (Woman on Pier 13, My Son John) Tourneur did this as a favor to star Dana Andrews, who refused to star unless Tourneur directed.


There are films where we as an audience have to do more work to find the frequency that the film is emitting its particular waves of radiation.  Films where perhaps the acting is a bit more stiff, the sets a little cheaper, the production a little rushed.   We have to look past the plot to see what the film is actually about. 

What makes this film fascinating to me is how little it has to do about communism.  Tourneur actually directed a proto pro-socialist movie during WWII, Days of Glory,  as well as one of the last Hollywood films with a communist hero in Berlin Express and his politics hd always been left leaning.  Here the communism takes a backseat to a pretty scathing indictment of post war consumerism and late period capitalism.

It is cheap and quick with a mis en scene that is scattered.  Andrews was perhaps at the apex of his alcholism and his performance is sweaty, nervous and expressive.  There are a couple of "Tournean" moments under the title credits and during a nightmare sequence.  

In the Facets class discussion linked below, we go into the particular reasons this might be the case and how it leads to an alternate reading of the film.  And it is still a fascinating film that tells us quite a bit, if sometimes inadvertently, about America in 1958.

Let me share a good quote.  French critic Jacques Lourcelles, who praises the movie, writes: "the true subject of the movie is fatigue, the wear of the main character, and, through it, the wear of democracy itself"

Here is a link to our Facets class discussion about the film:


And here is an excellent interview with Hoberman at indiewire.

The Salvation Hunters (1925)

I have been watching the Criterion Von Sternberg box for quite sometime now and really have to hand it to them for doing such an excellent job presenting these films (I am salivating for their Eclipse lines' Silent Naruse set).  One of the joys in sets like this is not only with the films you get, but how they make you want more.  Thunderbolt?  A Woman of the Sea?

Watching the excellent Tag Gallagher essay on his films that comes as an extra, a good amount of time is spent on Sternberg's first film which I had no idea of and then wanted to see now, The Salvation Hunters.

Completely unavailable on either VHS or DVD at least to my knowledge, I found the links below (found in the Comments section) so now you too can enjoy this odd little movie.  UCLA did restore the film, but this is not that restoration, just an fyi.

As the forward puts it:

There are important fragments of life that have been avoided by the motion picture because Thought is concerned and not the Body. A thought can create and destroy nations—and it is all the more powerful because it is born of suffering, lives in silence, and dies when it has done its work. Our aim has been to photograph a thought—A thought that guides humans who crawl close to the earth—whose lives are simple—who begin nowhere and end nowhere.

What you get is an amalgamation of realism and allegory all made independently by  Sternberg.  It has been described as the first independent film (which is a bit disingenuous), Von Sternberg did make it privately for around $6, 000 (later spruced up with 14k more form Chaplin and United Artist after he saw and loved the film.  So much so that he cast actress Georgia Hale, in The Gold Rush).  

Psychological and expressionistic, the film is a nascent one:  slow moving and symbolic it does not completely work, but points to the director Sternberg would become while also becoming an excellent record of parts of California in the early part of the last century that you would not see otherwise.  Well worth checking out.

Public Housing

One of the best films of the 1990s and available for 29.95 through Wiseman's own Zipporah films reachable through the title.

People always talk about Wiseman's ability to capture reality and the time he puts into filming, and I do not want to take away from any of that , but what really catches me when I watch his films is his formalism.  The editing that shapes the reality he captures not making a raw slice of life, but molded into powerful essays about how institutions shape our lives.

Look at the way Wiseman opens with the ice cream truck and allows him to pan to the store and then cut to the interactions outside the store and then takes us inside to show us the scene from the cashier's pov, then topping it with how the store operates from both sides of the partition.

Also, I am not sure if this is a purely Chicago thing- the shopping at a convenience store through a bullet proof partition and turnstile that makes buying a box of donuts a parody of high end shopping, like Tiffanys,  where the customer asks to see what is on display.  When I had my daycare there was a food and liquor store like this at the end of the block and it made buying a soda into a surreally degrading experience.

My Life as Liz

Channel surfing yesterday I came upon the MTV show My Life as Liz, now in its second season. The show presents life and times of ”Liz” (the quotes are appropriate here as you will see) a small town Texas native who is now in her first year of art school in New York.

The story:  She is in a long distance relationship with a boyfriend who is going to school in Austin and otherwise stays in touch with her other high school friends and though it looks like she has been in NY for quite sometime (the weather looks “spring-ish and she talks about going back to Texas for the summer, so I assume we are to think it is Spring but really I am not sure) she apparently has not made any friends or visited any place outside of going to school (the show has a subplot of her Austin boyfriend surprising her in NY and her not knowing anywhere t take him).

The show is, in almost every conceivable way, horrible. But it is expressively horrible.

Though it is in the same genre as a reality show (and even here you have to break it down further: it is not part of the game show reality (Survivor) but more a part of scripted reality (The Hills, The Real Housewives of….) it wears the genre superficially because the plot construction is so naked and the acting is bad (and not just a little bad, really bad)- but this is where it becomes so expressive.

Sidebar: Is there a more expressive term to describe the last decade that we have been living in than scripted reality?

What happens when you present something as reality but then overlay fictional constructs on top of it, just not so well? On shows where they do this seamlessly, the audience does not think about it because it fulfills an audience desire to live in that type of fiction themselves.

Most of these shows do this by presenting not just conspicuous, but almost orgiastic indulgence (I am looking at you Real Housewives). But here there is no such wish fulfillment. Instead the audience desire is not aspiration but identification: The show wants us to identify with the main character and see the world through her eyes. This brings on the double entendre of the title- the show does want to show “my” life as Liz.

But that doesn’t work out so well. The fiction is not seamless.

We want to identify but are continually pulled out of it by being able to see the wiring and stage lights break though the curtain. The camera is always in places it would never be if it was a documentary and the acting is so wooden it does not remind a viewer so much of people but watching pre-schoolers play act as people. It is a new genre: “accidental Brecht.”

And it makes you wonder, “what are they really like?” and “why are they doing this?”

The answer is, I am assuming, wanting to be on TV and that they are being controlled by “Liz.” Does she write these scenarios for them all to play act? The reason I think so brings up the second meaning of the title: It is Liz playing at being “Liz.” In this respect, what the show resembles most is pornography: This bizarro version of the real world where there is only one motivation but “Liz” replaces “sex”.
Everyone, even people thousands of miles away (though apparently not her parents, who are not alluded to) are obsessed with Liz and think about her constantly even though she presents herself as a type of socially awkward art school naïf.

It really does show the world through the distorted lens of a relatively entitled 19-20 year old who can only think about the world narcissistically.

And this is why the show is so expressive: It wants us to identify but really shows someone aspiring: The wish fulfillment is being able to control everyone around you, which is happening because we know it is her show, her fiction, even though the narrative of the show doesn’t present this- only the art school naïf part.

But the manipulation is so mechanical and naked (in the same way that it is with a 19-20 year old) that it becomes sort of endearing because it is s honest about not realizing it is lying to you.

The Sun Shines Bright, the director's cut

The above is 1st the opening from the film itself and the second is a video essay that Jonathan Rosenbaum did with this and Dreyer's Gertrud.

"Maybe there’s one that I love to look at again and again. That’s The Sun Shines Bright. That’s really my favorite. At Republic, old man [studio head Herbert] Yates didn’t know what to do with it. The picture had comedy, drama, pathos, but he didn’t understand it. His kind of picture had to have plenty of sex or violence. This one had neither, it was just a good picture. But Yates fooled around with it after I left the studio and almost ruined it."
— John Ford

How right he is! There are a few different versions of this wonderful film and this is the 101 minute director's cut. There is also a 92 minute theatrical version that Ford was forced to cut. When the movie failed, the studio made him take a couple of more minutes out of it. For a movie that has so much charm tied in with it's pacing this was regrettable.  I hate to have to pick, but especially when it comes to underrated Ford, this and his episode of How the West was Won (The Civil War segment) are favorites.

Ford had made Judge Priest with Will Rogers in 1934 and he revisits the character here, weaving three Priest tales together.. There is such a lovely sense of humanity and tact here that is both tied into the characters and the mis en scene that Ford places them in.  You get a sense of a world lost and recreated before your eyes.

Two caveats: These are not my links (I have coded them below, replace "hxxp" with "http") and there are two audio tracks included and the default one is in Spanish. Just switch over to the second audio track and enjoy.

hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=V2CWZ835
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=NWP28RP8
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=X1QKWHR7
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=RTUYKSDX
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=DVO9STPG
hxxp://www.megaupload.com/?d=RM1J36X0

Trailers for lost silent films

The above is a wonderful collection of trailers for silent films that just no longer exist. Uploaded to Youtube by "MrDavidcairns." It is well worth watching in full, One caveat: I am so sick of "silent film" music- the vaguely ragtime piano. TCM a couple of months ago showed a wonderful King Vidor silent Wild Oranges from 1924 with terrific new music by one of their silent score winners, who's name, unfortunately I cannot remember.

Never a Lovely So Real

I have started a specific blog for the Data that I have done below on children murdered in Chicago at a new blog linked in the title and here.  In addition to posting interactive google maps of each year I will also be breaking it down by month as well as trying to tell some of the stories behind that data.

Children murdered in Chicago in 2008 and an explication

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

In 2008, 103 children were murdered in Chicago. At the time there was a sense of weary sadness at that number and it has not a feeling that has gone away. The problem for me was at the end of the CPS school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found myself surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.

Children murdered in Chicago in 2009

I have collated the same information as for my 2010 map for 2009. 76 children (meaning to me under the age of 18) were murdered in Chicago last year. The above is an attempt to collate and present that data, information, and those lives.

I will repeat the information below that I have put in each of the other posts:

I started putting these databases together out a sense of frustration and helplessness over what is happening to youth in Chicago over the past few years.

While I work in education and have also done some work in regards to educational reform and protest, I still felt relatively stifled in my role and what I felt were my responsibilities. Each one of these charts is an attempt to address the frustration I felt in a language I felt I could express myself in.

When I started to get my Masters in Library Science last year I had a very limited idea of the role of a librarian that was based on old stereotypes of a type of professional that probably never existed outside of pop culture. It is in my role as a budding "informational professional" ( a somewhat funny sounding term to me to be honest). The work done in compiling these maps and graphs is fully within how I now see the role of a "librarian": Someone who checks out books to be sure but is also involved in the archiving of the community that they live in. In this case that being Chicago.

In 2009, 76 children were murdered in Chicago. At that time as in 2008, there was a sense of weary sadness at that number and it has not a feeling that has gone away. The problem for me was at the end of the CPS school year in June I wanted to find the numbers for how many children had been killed over the course of the school year that passed. I found my self surprised that this information was not particularly easy to come by.

After looking through various resources and finally finding the "Data" section of the Chicago Tribune's Redeye site I was able to uild these maps off of the data provided by their fine site. Tracy Swartz and Drew Sottardi do an excellent job on that site compiling and presenting a host of information that more Chicagoans should know about.

I also suggest looking at the excellent Crime Lab site of the University of Chicago for another source of data driven reports and possible solutions to the 3rd world level of violence that is currently afflicting Chicago's streets.

The title is linked to the raw data that I have compiled in spreadsheet form. If anyone wishes to use this raw data please feel free to. I have created it to be shared, amended, corrected, and built on.