Friday, December 30, 2011
ENG 282: 1930s
1930
All Quiet on the Western Front (USA: Lewis Milestone, 1930: 136 mins)
Norris, Margaret. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 2000. [Available in BCTC Library: PN56 W3 N67 2000]
The Blood of a Poet (France: Jean Cocteau, 1930: 55 mins)
Cocteau, Jean. "Preface to Blood of a Poet (1946) Current (April 24, 2000)
The Blue Angel (Germany: Josef von Sternberg, 1930: 124 mins)
Brockmann, Stephen. "Der blaue Engel (1930) and Learning to Talk." A Critical History of German Film Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010: 97-111. [Professor has copy of the book]
1931
Little Caesar (USA: Mervyn LeRoy, 1931: 79 mins)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
Tokyo Chorus (Japan: Yasujirô Ozu, 1931: 90 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
Trouble in Paradise (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1932: 83 mins)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
1932
Bird of Paradise (USA: King Vidor, 1932: 80 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice." Acidemic (February 28, 2012)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (France: Jean Renoir, 1932: 85 mins)
Brody, Richard. "DVD of the Week: Boudu Saved From Drowning Current (Decenber 8, 2010)
Faulkner, Christopher. "Boudu Saved from Drowning: Tramping in the City." Current (August 22, 2005)
Broken Lullaby (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1932: 76 mins)
Iannone, Pasquale. "Broken Lullaby." Senses of Cinema #56 (2010)
Freaks (USA: tod Browning, 1932: 64 mins)
Bradley, S.A. and James Hancock. "A Good Cast is Worth Repeating, Part II: Tod Browning." Hellbent for Horror #31 (January 26, 2017)
Dennis, Zach, et al. "Freaks." Cinematary #164 (October 6, 2017)
Grand Hotel (USA: Edmund Goulding, 1932: 112 mins)
Ray, Robert B. "Grand Hotel." The ABCs of Classic Hollywood. NY: Oxford UP, 2008: 3-84.
Island of Lost Souls (USA: Erle C. Kenton, 1932: 70 mins)
Gallagher, Ryan and James McCormick. "Erle Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls." CriterionCast #128 (August 3, 2012) ["A twisted treasure from Hollywood’s pre-Code horror heyday, Island of Lost Souls is a cautionary tale of science run amok, adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. In one of his first major movie roles, Charles Laughton is a mad doctor conducting ghastly genetic experiments on a remote island in the South Seas, much to the fear and disgust of the shipwrecked man (Richard Arlen) who finds himself trapped there. This touchstone of movie terror, directed by Erle C. Kenton, features expressionistic photography by Karl Struss, groundbreaking makeup effects that have inspired generations of monster-movie artists, and the legendary Bela Lugosi in one of his most gruesome roles."]
"Lost Isles." Grand Old Movies (November 2015)
I Was Born, but ... (Japan: Yasujirô Ozu, 1932: 100 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
No Blood Relation (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1932: 94 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
One Hour With You (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1932: 80 mins)
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "One Hour With You." Senses of Cinema #56 (2010)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
1933
42nd Street (USA: Lloyd Bacon, 1933: 89 mins)
LoBrutto, Vincent. "An American Musical: 42nd Street." Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005: 144-150. [BCTC Library: PN1994 L595 2005]
Apart From You (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1933: 61 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
Baby Face (USA: Alfred E. Green, 1933: 71 mins)
Ecstasy (Czechoslovakia/Austria: Gustav Machatý, 1933: 82 mins)
Hudson, David. "Sex in the Movies." Green Cine (2005)
Every-Night Dreams (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1933: 65 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
Passing Fancy (Japan: Yasujirô Ozu, 1933: 101 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
The Private Life of Henry VIII (UK: Alexander Korda, 1933: 97 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Germany: Fritz Lang, 1933: 122 mins)
Rivas, T.J. "Cinematic Responses to Fascism." Film History and Aesthetics Wiki (A Project of Film 110: Introduction to Film History and Aesthetics at Westminster College)
Zero for Conduct (France: Jean Vigo, 1933: 44 mins)
Flores, Steven. "The Auteurs: Jean Vigo." Cinema Axis (July 3, 2014)
1934
The Black Cat (USA: Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934: 65 mins)
Saunders, D.J.M. "Hope and History: Beyond Violence." Bright Lights Film Journal #82 (November 2013)
Imitation of Life (USA: John M. Stahl, 1934: 111 mins)
Courtney, Susan. "Picturizing Race Hollywood's Censorship of Miscegenation and Production of Racial Visibility through Imitation of Life." Genders #27 (1998)
The Private Life of Don Juan (UK: Alexander Korda, 1934: 89 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
The Rise of Catherine the Great (UK: Paul Czinner and Alexander Korda, 1934: 95 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
Street Without End (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1934: 87 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
1935
The 39 Steps (United Kingdom: Alfred Hitchcock, 1935: 89 mins)
Keane, Marian. "The 39 Steps." Current (November 23, 1999)
Wilmington, Michael. "The 39 Steps." Current (December 9, 1985)
Heldt, Guido. Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Intellect, 2013. ["This is the first book-length study of the narratology of film music, and an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology. It surveys the so far piecemeal discussion of narratological concepts in film music studies, and tries to (cautiously) systematize them, and to expand and refine them with reference to ideas from general narratology and film narratology (including contributions from German-language literature less widely known in Anglophone scholarship). The book goes beyond the current focus of film music studies on the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music (music understood to be or not to be part of the storyworld of a film), and takes into account different levels of narration: from the extrafictional to ‘focalizations’ of subjectivity, and music’s many and complex movements between them."]
Triumph of the Will (Germany: Leni Riefenstahl, 1935: 110 mins)
Beloff, Zoe, J. Hoberman and Nicolas Rapold. "Art and Fascism." Film Comment Podcast (February 27, 2019) ["This week, the Film Comment Podcast digs into Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the ways in which the reputation of the notorious film—and that of its maker—have shifted over the years. In a feature article on the legendary Nazi-propaganda project in the latest issue of Film Comment, contributing editor J. Hoberman writes that, “Triumph of the Will is an organic product of cinema history, a synthesis of Metropolis’s monumental mass ornament, Potemkin’s pow, and Hollywood extravagance.” Once denounced as fascist propaganda, the film came to be celebrated as a masterpiece of formal daring in the 1960s and 1970s, a rehabilitation that culminated with Riefenstahl receiving a controversial tribute at the 1974 Telluride Film Festival. Film CommentEditor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Hoberman and filmmaker and professor Zoe Beloff for a discussion of the film’s relevance to the current historical moment (Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes are purportedly big fans) and the larger question of artistry in the service of evil."]
1936
Dracula's Daughter (USA: Lambert Hillyer, 1936: 71 mins)
Deighan, Samm and Kat Ellinger. "Lust for a Female Vampire Lover: The Evolution of Lesbian Vampires in Cinema, Part 1." Daughters of Darkness #1 (March 12, 2016) ["This first episode of three begins by examining the lesbian vampire from her origins in eighteenth century Gothic literature, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Christabel” (1797) and Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” (1871), both of which explore themes of monstrosity, repressed sexuality, and female identity. “Carmilla” — the source material for the majority of lesbian vampire films — follows a lonely young woman named Laura, who makes a strange, seductive new friend, Carmilla, whose designs on Laura are decidedly sanguinary. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s surreal horror film Vampyr (1932) was the first to adapt “Carmilla,” however loosely, but was followed soon after by the more straightforward Universal horror film, Dracula’s Daughter (1936). The latter — with its depiction of an elegant, sympathetic female vampire reluctantly driven to act out her bloodlust out on female as well as male victims — was among the first to portray vampirism as a blend of madness, female hysteria, sexual dysfunction, and addiction. Dracula’s Daughter would influence subsequent adaptations of “Carmilla,” like Roger Vadim’s lush arthouse effort Blood and Roses (1960) and obscure Italian Gothic horror film Crypt of the Vampire (1964). The film co-starred Hammer star Christopher Lee, who spends much of the running time in an outrageous smoking jacket. Speaking of Hammer studios, the episode wraps up with a discussion of their Karnstein trilogy, a watershed moment for lesbian vampire cinema. Films like The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971) — as well as some of the studio’s outlier efforts like The Brides of Dracula (1960) or Countess Dracula (1971) — left a bloody mark on vampire films. With minimal violence and plenty of nudity from buxom starlets like Ingrid Pitt, these films generally depict aristocratic vampires preying on innocent young ladies in pastoral settings. A film like The Vampire Lovers was famous for its use of lesbianism and casual nudity, but is quite restrained compared to the films discussed in episode two by European directors like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin."]
Flash Gordon (USA: Frederick Stephani and Ray Taylor, 1936: 245 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "The Primal Father (CinemArchetypes #8)." Acidemic (March 19, 2012)
Fury (USA: Fritz Lang, 1936: 92 mins)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
Modern Times (USA: Charles Chaplin, 1936: 87 mins)
Falzon, Christopher. "Philosophy Through Film." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (August 12, 2013)
Rembrandt (UK: Alexander Korda, 1936: 85 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
Sabotage (UK: Alfred Hitchcock, 1936: 76 mins)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
1937
The Dybbuk (Poland: Michal Waszynski, 1937: 108 mins)
Bird, Daniel, Yossi Chajes and John Walker. "The Dybbuk." The Projection Booth #269 (May 3, 2016) ["Based on Sholom Ansky's 1904 play, Michal Waszynski's 1937 Yiddish-language Polish film, The Dybbuk, tells the story of a broken promise and its consequences."]
Elephant Boy (UK: Robert Flaherty and Zoltan Korda, 1937: 80 mins)
Harvey, Dennis. "Sabu’s Enduring Star Power." Keyframe (January 5, 2014)
Grand Illusion (France: Jean Renoir, 1937: 114 mins)
Cowie, Peter. "Grand Illusion Current (November 22, 1999)
Jennings, Tom, et al. "La Grande Illusion (1937)." The Projection Booth #318 (April 16, 2017)
Make Way for Tomorrow (USA: Leo McCarey, 1937: 91 mins)
Overstreet, Jeffrey. "#6: Make Way For Tomorrow." Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (2011)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (USA: William Cottrell, et al., 1937: 83 mins)
All Quiet on the Western Front (USA: Lewis Milestone, 1930: 136 mins)
Norris, Margaret. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 2000. [Available in BCTC Library: PN56 W3 N67 2000]
The Blood of a Poet (France: Jean Cocteau, 1930: 55 mins)
Cocteau, Jean. "Preface to Blood of a Poet (1946) Current (April 24, 2000)
The Blue Angel (Germany: Josef von Sternberg, 1930: 124 mins)
Brockmann, Stephen. "Der blaue Engel (1930) and Learning to Talk." A Critical History of German Film Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010: 97-111. [Professor has copy of the book]
1931
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
Trouble in Paradise (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1932: 83 mins)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
1932
Bird of Paradise (USA: King Vidor, 1932: 80 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice." Acidemic (February 28, 2012)
Brody, Richard. "DVD of the Week: Boudu Saved From Drowning Current (Decenber 8, 2010)
Faulkner, Christopher. "Boudu Saved from Drowning: Tramping in the City." Current (August 22, 2005)
Broken Lullaby (USA: Ernst Lubitsch, 1932: 76 mins)
Iannone, Pasquale. "Broken Lullaby." Senses of Cinema #56 (2010)
Freaks (USA: tod Browning, 1932: 64 mins)
Bradley, S.A. and James Hancock. "A Good Cast is Worth Repeating, Part II: Tod Browning." Hellbent for Horror #31 (January 26, 2017)
Dennis, Zach, et al. "Freaks." Cinematary #164 (October 6, 2017)
Longworth, Karina. "Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: The Flapper and Douglas Fairbanks Jr." You Must Remember This (August 15, 2016) ["Joan Crawford’s early years in Hollywood were like -- well, like a pre-code Joan Crawford movie: a highly ambitious beauty of low birth does what she has to do (whatever she has to do) to transform herself into a well-respected glamour gal at the top of the food chain. Her romance with Douglas Fairbanks Jr -- the scion of the actor/producer who had been considered the King of Hollywood since the early days of the feature film -- began almost simultaneous to Crawford’s breakout hit, Our Dancing Daughters. But the gum-snapping dame with the bad reputation would soon rise far above her well-born husband, cranking out a string of indelible performances in pre-code talkies before hitting an early career peak in the Best Picture-winning Grand Hotel."]
Island of Lost Souls (USA: Erle C. Kenton, 1932: 70 mins)
Gallagher, Ryan and James McCormick. "Erle Kenton's The Island of Lost Souls." CriterionCast #128 (August 3, 2012) ["A twisted treasure from Hollywood’s pre-Code horror heyday, Island of Lost Souls is a cautionary tale of science run amok, adapted from H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. In one of his first major movie roles, Charles Laughton is a mad doctor conducting ghastly genetic experiments on a remote island in the South Seas, much to the fear and disgust of the shipwrecked man (Richard Arlen) who finds himself trapped there. This touchstone of movie terror, directed by Erle C. Kenton, features expressionistic photography by Karl Struss, groundbreaking makeup effects that have inspired generations of monster-movie artists, and the legendary Bela Lugosi in one of his most gruesome roles."]
"Lost Isles." Grand Old Movies (November 2015)
I Was Born, but ... (Japan: Yasujirô Ozu, 1932: 100 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
No Blood Relation (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1932: 94 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
Dixon, Wheeler Winston. "One Hour With You." Senses of Cinema #56 (2010)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
1933
42nd Street (USA: Lloyd Bacon, 1933: 89 mins)
LoBrutto, Vincent. "An American Musical: 42nd Street." Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005: 144-150. [BCTC Library: PN1994 L595 2005]
Apart From You (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1933: 61 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
Baby Face (USA: Alfred E. Green, 1933: 71 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #3: The Animus." Acidemic (February 1, 2012)
Ecstasy (Czechoslovakia/Austria: Gustav Machatý, 1933: 82 mins)
Hudson, David. "Sex in the Movies." Green Cine (2005)
Every-Night Dreams (Japan: Mikio Naruse, 1933: 65 mins)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura. "Silent Ozu." The Eclipse Viewer #1 (August 7, 2012)
The Private Life of Henry VIII (UK: Alexander Korda, 1933: 97 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
Rivas, T.J. "Cinematic Responses to Fascism." Film History and Aesthetics Wiki (A Project of Film 110: Introduction to Film History and Aesthetics at Westminster College)
Zero for Conduct (France: Jean Vigo, 1933: 44 mins)
Flores, Steven. "The Auteurs: Jean Vigo." Cinema Axis (July 3, 2014)
The Black Cat (USA: Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934: 65 mins)
The first big-screen meeting of two titans of horror, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, The Black Cat was a box office smash for Universal and the film’s newly arrived Austrian émigré director, Edgar G. Ulmer. In Hungary, a storm strands four travellers, including psychiatrist and war vet Dr Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), in the house of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff), an Austrian architect and part-time Satanic cult leader. Highly stylised and wonderfully convoluted, it’s heaped with the sort of over-the-top grotesqueries that were only gotten away with in Hollywood’s pre-Code era. – Anna Bogutskaya
Saunders, D.J.M. "Hope and History: Beyond Violence." Bright Lights Film Journal #82 (November 2013)
Imitation of Life (USA: John M. Stahl, 1934: 111 mins)
Courtney, Susan. "Picturizing Race Hollywood's Censorship of Miscegenation and Production of Racial Visibility through Imitation of Life." Genders #27 (1998)
The Private Life of Don Juan (UK: Alexander Korda, 1934: 89 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
The Rise of Catherine the Great (UK: Paul Czinner and Alexander Korda, 1934: 95 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
Blakeslee, David and Robert Nishimura."Silent Naruse." The Eclipse Viewer #2 (September 3, 2012)
1935
The 39 Steps (United Kingdom: Alfred Hitchcock, 1935: 89 mins)
Keane, Marian. "The 39 Steps." Current (November 23, 1999)
Wilmington, Michael. "The 39 Steps." Current (December 9, 1985)
Mad Love (USA: Karl Freund, 1935: 68 mins)
Deighan, Sam, et al. "Mad Love (1935)." The Projection Booth #343 (October 3, 2017) ["Karl Freund's final film as a director and Peter Lorre's first film in America, Mad Love (1935). Based upon Maurice Renard 's The Hands of Orlac, the film shifts focus from the titular Orlac to Dr. Gogol, a cunning physician who specializes in some questionable procedures. He’s fascinated by the actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) and, rebuffed in his advances, manages to enter her life after he backhandedly helps her husband, concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), by giving him a new pair of hands after his have been crushed in an accident. But what kind of gift are the hands of a murderer on a master musician?"]
Top Hat (USA: Mark Sandrich, 1935: 101 mins)Deighan, Sam, et al. "Mad Love (1935)." The Projection Booth #343 (October 3, 2017) ["Karl Freund's final film as a director and Peter Lorre's first film in America, Mad Love (1935). Based upon Maurice Renard 's The Hands of Orlac, the film shifts focus from the titular Orlac to Dr. Gogol, a cunning physician who specializes in some questionable procedures. He’s fascinated by the actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) and, rebuffed in his advances, manages to enter her life after he backhandedly helps her husband, concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), by giving him a new pair of hands after his have been crushed in an accident. But what kind of gift are the hands of a murderer on a master musician?"]
Heldt, Guido. Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Intellect, 2013. ["This is the first book-length study of the narratology of film music, and an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology. It surveys the so far piecemeal discussion of narratological concepts in film music studies, and tries to (cautiously) systematize them, and to expand and refine them with reference to ideas from general narratology and film narratology (including contributions from German-language literature less widely known in Anglophone scholarship). The book goes beyond the current focus of film music studies on the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music (music understood to be or not to be part of the storyworld of a film), and takes into account different levels of narration: from the extrafictional to ‘focalizations’ of subjectivity, and music’s many and complex movements between them."]
Triumph of the Will (Germany: Leni Riefenstahl, 1935: 110 mins)
Beloff, Zoe, J. Hoberman and Nicolas Rapold. "Art and Fascism." Film Comment Podcast (February 27, 2019) ["This week, the Film Comment Podcast digs into Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the ways in which the reputation of the notorious film—and that of its maker—have shifted over the years. In a feature article on the legendary Nazi-propaganda project in the latest issue of Film Comment, contributing editor J. Hoberman writes that, “Triumph of the Will is an organic product of cinema history, a synthesis of Metropolis’s monumental mass ornament, Potemkin’s pow, and Hollywood extravagance.” Once denounced as fascist propaganda, the film came to be celebrated as a masterpiece of formal daring in the 1960s and 1970s, a rehabilitation that culminated with Riefenstahl receiving a controversial tribute at the 1974 Telluride Film Festival. Film CommentEditor in Chief Nicolas Rapold is joined by Hoberman and filmmaker and professor Zoe Beloff for a discussion of the film’s relevance to the current historical moment (Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes are purportedly big fans) and the larger question of artistry in the service of evil."]
Dracula's Daughter (USA: Lambert Hillyer, 1936: 71 mins)
Deighan, Samm and Kat Ellinger. "Lust for a Female Vampire Lover: The Evolution of Lesbian Vampires in Cinema, Part 1." Daughters of Darkness #1 (March 12, 2016) ["This first episode of three begins by examining the lesbian vampire from her origins in eighteenth century Gothic literature, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Christabel” (1797) and Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu’s story “Carmilla” (1871), both of which explore themes of monstrosity, repressed sexuality, and female identity. “Carmilla” — the source material for the majority of lesbian vampire films — follows a lonely young woman named Laura, who makes a strange, seductive new friend, Carmilla, whose designs on Laura are decidedly sanguinary. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s surreal horror film Vampyr (1932) was the first to adapt “Carmilla,” however loosely, but was followed soon after by the more straightforward Universal horror film, Dracula’s Daughter (1936). The latter — with its depiction of an elegant, sympathetic female vampire reluctantly driven to act out her bloodlust out on female as well as male victims — was among the first to portray vampirism as a blend of madness, female hysteria, sexual dysfunction, and addiction. Dracula’s Daughter would influence subsequent adaptations of “Carmilla,” like Roger Vadim’s lush arthouse effort Blood and Roses (1960) and obscure Italian Gothic horror film Crypt of the Vampire (1964). The film co-starred Hammer star Christopher Lee, who spends much of the running time in an outrageous smoking jacket. Speaking of Hammer studios, the episode wraps up with a discussion of their Karnstein trilogy, a watershed moment for lesbian vampire cinema. Films like The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971) — as well as some of the studio’s outlier efforts like The Brides of Dracula (1960) or Countess Dracula (1971) — left a bloody mark on vampire films. With minimal violence and plenty of nudity from buxom starlets like Ingrid Pitt, these films generally depict aristocratic vampires preying on innocent young ladies in pastoral settings. A film like The Vampire Lovers was famous for its use of lesbianism and casual nudity, but is quite restrained compared to the films discussed in episode two by European directors like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin."]
Kuersten, Erich. "The Primal Father (CinemArchetypes #8)." Acidemic (March 19, 2012)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
Modern Times (USA: Charles Chaplin, 1936: 87 mins)
Falzon, Christopher. "Philosophy Through Film." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (August 12, 2013)
Rembrandt (UK: Alexander Korda, 1936: 85 mins)
Berrett, Trevor and David Blakeslee. "Alexander Korda's Private Lives." The Eclipse Viewer #43 (June 5, 2016)
Sabotage (UK: Alfred Hitchcock, 1936: 76 mins)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
1937
The Dybbuk (Poland: Michal Waszynski, 1937: 108 mins)
Bird, Daniel, Yossi Chajes and John Walker. "The Dybbuk." The Projection Booth #269 (May 3, 2016) ["Based on Sholom Ansky's 1904 play, Michal Waszynski's 1937 Yiddish-language Polish film, The Dybbuk, tells the story of a broken promise and its consequences."]
Elephant Boy (UK: Robert Flaherty and Zoltan Korda, 1937: 80 mins)
Harvey, Dennis. "Sabu’s Enduring Star Power." Keyframe (January 5, 2014)
Grand Illusion (France: Jean Renoir, 1937: 114 mins)
Cowie, Peter. "Grand Illusion Current (November 22, 1999)
Jennings, Tom, et al. "La Grande Illusion (1937)." The Projection Booth #318 (April 16, 2017)
Make Way for Tomorrow (USA: Leo McCarey, 1937: 91 mins)
Overstreet, Jeffrey. "#6: Make Way For Tomorrow." Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (2011)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (USA: William Cottrell, et al., 1937: 83 mins)
Disney’s first animated feature preserves some of the most grotesque aspects of the Grimm tale, making them all the more macabre by depicting them visually. Scariest of all is the queen-turned-witch, with a lair that is part laboratory and part torture chamber, littered with victims’ bones, and featuring an underground river that she rows across in a chilling scene reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera. Walt Disney drew inspiration for the film from German expressionism, encouraging his animation crew to screen films like Nosferatu for ideas. In turn, Dario Argento has said that he tried to recreate the look of Snow White in Suspiria (1977). – Kelly Robinson
Rapold, Nicholas. "Short and Sweet: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Reverse Shot #29 (2011)
The Spanish Earth (USA: Joris Ivens, 1937: 52 mins)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
1938
The Adventures of Robin Hood (USA: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938: 102 mins)
Heldt, Guido. Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Intellect, 2013. ["This is the first book-length study of the narratology of film music, and an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology. It surveys the so far piecemeal discussion of narratological concepts in film music studies, and tries to (cautiously) systematize them, and to expand and refine them with reference to ideas from general narratology and film narratology (including contributions from German-language literature less widely known in Anglophone scholarship). The book goes beyond the current focus of film music studies on the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music (music understood to be or not to be part of the storyworld of a film), and takes into account different levels of narration: from the extrafictional to ‘focalizations’ of subjectivity, and music’s many and complex movements between them."]
Alexander Nevsky (Soviet Union: Sergei M. Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev, 1938: 112 mins)
Hoberman, J. "Alexander Nevsky Current (April 23, 2001)
Bringing Up Baby (USA: Howard Hawks, 1938: 102 mins)
Klevan, Andrew. "Expressing the In-Between." LOLA #1 (2011)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #2: The Anima." Acidemic (January 29, 2012)
Holiday (USA: George Cukor, 1938: 95 mins)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
La Bête Humaine (France: Jean Renoir, 1938: 100 mins)
O'Brien, Geoffrey. "La bête humaine: Renoir On and Off the Rails." Current (February 13, 2006)
Too Much Johnson (USA: Orson Welles, 1938: 67 mins)
McBride, Joseph. "Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema." Bright Lights Film Journal (April 24, 2014)
1939
Destry Rides Again (USA: George Marshall, 1939: 94 mins)
McGee, Patrick. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.[Professor has copy]
Hurne, Mark and Aaron West. "Only Angels Have Wings (1939)." Criterion Close-Up (May 15, 2016) ["Mark and Aaron fly back to 1939 to discuss Howard Hawks’ classic Only Angels Have Wings. We evaluate the special effects, how the film built suspense, the context of aviation in the late 1930s, and later films that embody a similar masculinity. "]
Stagecoach (USA: John Ford, 1939: 96 mins)
McGee, Patrick. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. [Professor has copy]
The Wizard of Oz (USA: Victor Fleming, et al, 1939: 102 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #3: The Animus." Acidemic (February 1, 2012)
The Spanish Earth (USA: Joris Ivens, 1937: 52 mins)
Barker, Jennifer Lynne. The Aesthetics of Antifascist Film: Radical Projection. Routledge, 2013. [Get through interlibrary loan]
1938
The Adventures of Robin Hood (USA: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, 1938: 102 mins)
Heldt, Guido. Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Intellect, 2013. ["This is the first book-length study of the narratology of film music, and an indispensable resource for anyone researching or studying film music or film narratology. It surveys the so far piecemeal discussion of narratological concepts in film music studies, and tries to (cautiously) systematize them, and to expand and refine them with reference to ideas from general narratology and film narratology (including contributions from German-language literature less widely known in Anglophone scholarship). The book goes beyond the current focus of film music studies on the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music (music understood to be or not to be part of the storyworld of a film), and takes into account different levels of narration: from the extrafictional to ‘focalizations’ of subjectivity, and music’s many and complex movements between them."]
Hoberman, J. "Alexander Nevsky Current (April 23, 2001)
Bringing Up Baby (USA: Howard Hawks, 1938: 102 mins)
Klevan, Andrew. "Expressing the In-Between." LOLA #1 (2011)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #2: The Anima." Acidemic (January 29, 2012)
Holiday (USA: George Cukor, 1938: 95 mins)
Naremore, James. "Film Acting and the Arts of Imitation." Cyncos 27.2 (2011) ["Louise Brooks once said that in order to become a star, an actor needs to combine a natural-looking behavior with personal “eccentricity.” My presentation will explore some of the analytical problems raised by this phenomenon: What constitutes eccentricity and how is it balanced by naturalness in specific cases? What happens when a movie star acts in a film in which he or she impersonates the eccentricities of another star (Larry Parks as Al Jolson, Clint Eastwood as John Huston, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, Meryl Streep as Julia Child, etc.)? How can we distinguish between impersonation as caricature and impersonation as dramatic illusion? What is the difference, if any, between impersonation and stylistic influence?"]
O'Brien, Geoffrey. "La bête humaine: Renoir On and Off the Rails." Current (February 13, 2006)
McBride, Joseph. "Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema." Bright Lights Film Journal (April 24, 2014)
1939
Destry Rides Again (USA: George Marshall, 1939: 94 mins)
McGee, Patrick. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.[Professor has copy]
Hurne, Mark and Aaron West. "Only Angels Have Wings (1939)." Criterion Close-Up (May 15, 2016) ["Mark and Aaron fly back to 1939 to discuss Howard Hawks’ classic Only Angels Have Wings. We evaluate the special effects, how the film built suspense, the context of aviation in the late 1930s, and later films that embody a similar masculinity. "]
Stagecoach (USA: John Ford, 1939: 96 mins)
McGee, Patrick. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. [Professor has copy]
The Wizard of Oz (USA: Victor Fleming, et al, 1939: 102 mins)
Kuersten, Erich. "CinemArchetype #3: The Animus." Acidemic (February 1, 2012)
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Ohayo/Good Morning (1975 Review)
OHAYO/GOOD MORNING (1975 review)
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Devoted to both the profound necessity and the sublime silliness of gratuitous social interchange, OHAYO is a rather subtler and grander work than might appear at first. Commonly referred to as a remake of Ozu’s silent masterpiece I WAS BORN, BUT . . . , it is as interesting for its differences as for its similarities. The focus of the earlier film is a family adapting to a new neighborhood by undergoing brutal social initiations: the father humiliates himself before his boss to get ahead while the sons are accepted by their peers only after humiliating a local bully. Shocked by the behavior of their father, who says that he has to demean himself in order to feed them, the sons retaliate by going on a hunger strike. In the lighter climate of OHAYO, twenty-seven years later, the setting is again middle-class Tokyo suburbia, but the central family is firmly settled, and serious problems — whether old age, unemployment, or ostracism — are principally reserved for their neighbors and friends. The sons’ complaint this time is that their parents won’t purchase a television set and that grown-ups talk too much; the form of their rebellion is refusing to speak. Significantly, it is the humiliations in the first film which provide much of the comedy, a subject assuming gravity only when it causes a rift between father and sons. But the more pervasive humor of OHAYO extends to the rebellion itself and all it engenders, as well as the various local intrigues surrounding it. Clearly one of Ozu’s most commercially minded movies — with its stately, innocuous muzak of xylophone and strings recalling Tati backgrounds, a similar tendency to keep repeating gags with only slight variations, and a performance of pure ham (quite rare in an Ozu film) by the delightful Masahiko Shimazu as the younger brother — its intricacy becomes apparent only when one realizes that each detail intimately links up with every other. Rhythmically, this is expressed by the alternation of simply stated (if interlocking) miniplots with complex camera setups, less bound by narrative advancement, depicting the physical layout of the neighborhood itself: the perpendicular passageways between houses and the overhead road on the embankment behind brilliantly suggesting certain structures as well as strictures in a society of interdependent yet insulated busybodies.
To Read the Rest of the Review
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Devoted to both the profound necessity and the sublime silliness of gratuitous social interchange, OHAYO is a rather subtler and grander work than might appear at first. Commonly referred to as a remake of Ozu’s silent masterpiece I WAS BORN, BUT . . . , it is as interesting for its differences as for its similarities. The focus of the earlier film is a family adapting to a new neighborhood by undergoing brutal social initiations: the father humiliates himself before his boss to get ahead while the sons are accepted by their peers only after humiliating a local bully. Shocked by the behavior of their father, who says that he has to demean himself in order to feed them, the sons retaliate by going on a hunger strike. In the lighter climate of OHAYO, twenty-seven years later, the setting is again middle-class Tokyo suburbia, but the central family is firmly settled, and serious problems — whether old age, unemployment, or ostracism — are principally reserved for their neighbors and friends. The sons’ complaint this time is that their parents won’t purchase a television set and that grown-ups talk too much; the form of their rebellion is refusing to speak. Significantly, it is the humiliations in the first film which provide much of the comedy, a subject assuming gravity only when it causes a rift between father and sons. But the more pervasive humor of OHAYO extends to the rebellion itself and all it engenders, as well as the various local intrigues surrounding it. Clearly one of Ozu’s most commercially minded movies — with its stately, innocuous muzak of xylophone and strings recalling Tati backgrounds, a similar tendency to keep repeating gags with only slight variations, and a performance of pure ham (quite rare in an Ozu film) by the delightful Masahiko Shimazu as the younger brother — its intricacy becomes apparent only when one realizes that each detail intimately links up with every other. Rhythmically, this is expressed by the alternation of simply stated (if interlocking) miniplots with complex camera setups, less bound by narrative advancement, depicting the physical layout of the neighborhood itself: the perpendicular passageways between houses and the overhead road on the embankment behind brilliantly suggesting certain structures as well as strictures in a society of interdependent yet insulated busybodies.
To Read the Rest of the Review
Monday, December 26, 2011
Megan Ratner: David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method
David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”
by Megan Ratner
Film Quarterly
At the center of the emotional and intellectual geometry of A Dangerous Method are Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a woman so afflicted when she first consults Jung that she can only speak with effort. But she responds to Jung’s prototype of psychoanalysis, and, emboldened by his success, Jung contacts Freud (Viggo Mortensen), his mentor and (as the younger man sometimes puts it) father figure. Meanwhile Spielrein graduates from Jung’s patient to his assistant, and they embark on an affair that threatens both to cause a scandal and to discredit the psychoanalytic movement.
The actors bring an understated subtlety to the material: Mortensen is surprisingly laconic and light in the role of Freud, a far cry from the aggressive protagonists he played in previous outings with Cronenberg, A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). Unhurried and assured, his portrayal of Freud reveals a man convinced of his own greatness but fretfully protective of the future of his intellectual creation. This undercurrent serves him particularly well in his single scene with Spielrein, in which their shared devotion to the movement eclipses even their shared affection for Jung.
In the role of Spielrein, Knightley is initially startling. Though her writhing and grimaces are credible, it’s her consistently spooked expression, electrified and unpredictable, that makes her performance more than bravado. Even sitting relatively still during her initial session with Jung, Spielrein seems just this side of chaos. Cronenberg explained to me that Christopher Hampton studied Jung’s own notes about Spielrein during a research trip to Geneva. Additionally, Cronenberg viewed early actuality films of women with similar symptoms. “They’re very difficult to watch,” he said, “because it’s sort of a willed deforming.” He worked with the actress to go as far as possible toward depicting such self-disfigurements without getting to the point that it would become too uncomfortable for the audience. By channeling Spielrein’s mania into keen focus, as in the scene where she and Jung measure word-association reaction times (on his wife), Knightley effects a delicate transformation from madwoman to rising analyst. From the outset, she looks for no sympathy, playing Spielrein as an experimenter, unafraid of risk to her body or mind.
To Read the Rest of the Review
by Megan Ratner
Film Quarterly
At the center of the emotional and intellectual geometry of A Dangerous Method are Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a woman so afflicted when she first consults Jung that she can only speak with effort. But she responds to Jung’s prototype of psychoanalysis, and, emboldened by his success, Jung contacts Freud (Viggo Mortensen), his mentor and (as the younger man sometimes puts it) father figure. Meanwhile Spielrein graduates from Jung’s patient to his assistant, and they embark on an affair that threatens both to cause a scandal and to discredit the psychoanalytic movement.
The actors bring an understated subtlety to the material: Mortensen is surprisingly laconic and light in the role of Freud, a far cry from the aggressive protagonists he played in previous outings with Cronenberg, A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). Unhurried and assured, his portrayal of Freud reveals a man convinced of his own greatness but fretfully protective of the future of his intellectual creation. This undercurrent serves him particularly well in his single scene with Spielrein, in which their shared devotion to the movement eclipses even their shared affection for Jung.
In the role of Spielrein, Knightley is initially startling. Though her writhing and grimaces are credible, it’s her consistently spooked expression, electrified and unpredictable, that makes her performance more than bravado. Even sitting relatively still during her initial session with Jung, Spielrein seems just this side of chaos. Cronenberg explained to me that Christopher Hampton studied Jung’s own notes about Spielrein during a research trip to Geneva. Additionally, Cronenberg viewed early actuality films of women with similar symptoms. “They’re very difficult to watch,” he said, “because it’s sort of a willed deforming.” He worked with the actress to go as far as possible toward depicting such self-disfigurements without getting to the point that it would become too uncomfortable for the audience. By channeling Spielrein’s mania into keen focus, as in the scene where she and Jung measure word-association reaction times (on his wife), Knightley effects a delicate transformation from madwoman to rising analyst. From the outset, she looks for no sympathy, playing Spielrein as an experimenter, unafraid of risk to her body or mind.
To Read the Rest of the Review
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Films We Want to See: Sound of Noise (Sweden: Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2010)
Sound of Noise. This imaginative comedy follows a band of outlaw musicians who wreak havoc on an unsuspecting city. The sonic outlaws devise a plan to take their percussion-based, avant-garde music to the streets. The group’s opus is titled “Music for One City and Six Drummers.” The outlaws consist of the band’s leader—a spunky heroine named Sanna Persson—and five percussionists who invade four of the city’s civic or corporate institutions to make music with whatever tools, machines, or equipment they find.[link]
An example of their musical activism is the first movement of their opus titled “Doctor, Doctor Gimme Gas (In My Ass).” They invade a hospital, kidnap a flabby patient with gastric issues, and then lock themselves in an operating room. There they proceed to play music using scalpels, the heart machine, ventilators, and other operating equipment as their instruments. They even “play” the patient, a well-known television personality whose problems with gas make him a good percussive instrument with just the right resonance as one of the drummers pounds on his rotund belly. There are four musical movements all together, each of them funny, awe-inspiring, and politically provocative. The group’s assaults on a hospital, bank, symphony hall, and power station amount to acts of anarchy against civic and corporate institutions that play a role in lulling the masses into lives filled with the unimaginative routines of the status quo.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Proshot Kalami: No One Knows About Persian Cinema -- Bahman Ghobadi’s Songscape of Revolt
No One Knows About Persian Cinema: B. Ghobadi’s Songscape of Revolt
by Proshot Kalami
Cinemascope (Italy)
In recent times, Iranian films have been at the centre of attention in world cinema. Since the fraudulent Election in June 2009, Iranian cinema has had to follow a different path of destiny. The poetic allegorical camera and narrative can no longer satisfy the filmmaker who now must work within the politically-charged and troubled narrative of nationhood, human rights violations and questions of artistic integrity. The unjust prison sentences passed on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof made this road more challenging. In this essay, I examine the notion of “revolt” by means of creative process in Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009). This is an underground film—made without any permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance or state support—on the underground music of Iran within an underground culture that survives against the severest odds. This is the last breath at a crossroad that leads to dead-ends in all directions.
The politics of fear is the mobilising force exercised by the Islamic state to keep the nation from potential “Westernization” and anti-Islamic behaviour, through harassment, imprisonment and other nefarious measures. No One Knows About Persian Cats addresses this issue by following a group of Indie-Rock, Jazz, New-metal and Rap bands, and the challenges they face in arranging rehearsals, underground concerts or escaping the hunting guards of the Islamic authorities. Meandering through the streets of Tehran, Ghobadi’s camera travels with them into another Tehran, a liminal space between crime and freedom, where these young artists create their music. Their act of creation is their soundless revolt. And Ghobadi, I argue, has tried to give the sound back to the otherwise muted underground music of Iran in this film.
I Don’t Wanna’ Go to Jail, Why are You pushing Me? [1]
The narrative of the film is locked between two reverse top shots indicating two blinks of the eyes of an injured young man from whose perspective the camera shows the running lights of a hospital corridor’s ceiling in a Kafkaesque manner. The person on the emergency bed-on-wheels, we find out later, is called Ashkan, who remembers in between those blinks all that he has gone through within a few weeks in Tehran. Although the narrative of the film is fictional, the people/actors of the film, barring the professional actor Hamed Behdad who plays the role of Nader, are real and use their own names in the film. Most of the events that are depicted in the film have actually taken place, one way or the other, but not necessarily in that sequence and not exactly to the same people/characters[[2]]. Knowing these factors is important in order to understand, therefore investigate, the connection between the viewer and the material of the film. This becomes more important in regard to Ghobadi’s style that constantly moves between the self-reflexive documentary and the fictional narrative film. This notion in the film is apparent in the way in which he has used the camera, the various rhythms in editing, the selection of locations and with his deliberate casting of largely non-actor real-life musicians.
In the very first frame of the film we see the ceiling with the sharp white fluorescent lamps moving across the frame that look like white markings on a road at first, until you realise that the camera is actually facing upwards. The sound that we hear is more like the muted and unclear breathing sound that one can hear from under the water or over a sealed barrier, a breath at the dead-end[3]. The next shot is the reverse angle, this time an out of focus top shot, showing a young man’s bloody face, covered with an oxygen masque on an emergency bed-on-wheels moving through what seems like a hospital corridor, while another hand with a large piece of gauze is holding one side of his head. We shall meet him again. But Ghobadi leaves his viewer with this bleak image along with that eerie sound of breathing to make a jump cut to another location. The second sequence is located in a dimly lit sound studio. We see the sound editor/engineer managing the recording that is apparently in session along with a few female musicians with their instruments in the background, waiting for their recording session to come. The point of view is of the recording room. The sound is a mixture of a few people talking in the background and a number that none other than Bahman Ghobadi himself is singing in Kurdish. The narrative starts from this moment, not directly though, but through a side conversation that the engineer has with one of the female musicians, who does not seem to recognise the singer in the recording room as the famous film director! The sound engineer says, and we hear, that Ghobadi could not make his films, he did not receive permission to shoot and was stopped by the authorities, as a result he was forced to give up making films. All these made him so depressed that he tried to sing, a hobby that he always kept on the side, to feel slightly better and positive. Babak, the sound engineer also tells us, through their conversation that now Bahman Ghobadi is busy making a film about the underground music scene of Iran. Ghobadi, we hear that, was intrigued by the news of Islamic Guards ambushing an underground rock concert and arresting hundreds of people. There are no professional actors, Babak says, in the film. This, apparently, is the true occasion for making No One Knows About Persian Cats. Ghobadi himself re-asserted this, not only in the “Special Feature” section of the DVD, but also in the 2009 London International Film Festival, during a number of post and pre-screening “Question and Answer” sessions. Why is this information so important that he has to open his film with it and why is it that he repeatedly emphasises this fact at every opportunity he gets? The role the music plays, the importance of creating music and the importance of breath in the creation of voice in songs—all within the oppressive atmosphere of Tehran— and the difference between reality and the truth, I argue, are some of the reasons that this film gives us as way of understanding the importance of this occasion for the filmmaker. In this regard, music is both the apparent subject as well as the political and philosophic metaphor or allegory that the film has to offer.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Proshot Kalami
Cinemascope (Italy)
In recent times, Iranian films have been at the centre of attention in world cinema. Since the fraudulent Election in June 2009, Iranian cinema has had to follow a different path of destiny. The poetic allegorical camera and narrative can no longer satisfy the filmmaker who now must work within the politically-charged and troubled narrative of nationhood, human rights violations and questions of artistic integrity. The unjust prison sentences passed on Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof made this road more challenging. In this essay, I examine the notion of “revolt” by means of creative process in Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009). This is an underground film—made without any permission from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance or state support—on the underground music of Iran within an underground culture that survives against the severest odds. This is the last breath at a crossroad that leads to dead-ends in all directions.
The politics of fear is the mobilising force exercised by the Islamic state to keep the nation from potential “Westernization” and anti-Islamic behaviour, through harassment, imprisonment and other nefarious measures. No One Knows About Persian Cats addresses this issue by following a group of Indie-Rock, Jazz, New-metal and Rap bands, and the challenges they face in arranging rehearsals, underground concerts or escaping the hunting guards of the Islamic authorities. Meandering through the streets of Tehran, Ghobadi’s camera travels with them into another Tehran, a liminal space between crime and freedom, where these young artists create their music. Their act of creation is their soundless revolt. And Ghobadi, I argue, has tried to give the sound back to the otherwise muted underground music of Iran in this film.
I Don’t Wanna’ Go to Jail, Why are You pushing Me? [1]
The narrative of the film is locked between two reverse top shots indicating two blinks of the eyes of an injured young man from whose perspective the camera shows the running lights of a hospital corridor’s ceiling in a Kafkaesque manner. The person on the emergency bed-on-wheels, we find out later, is called Ashkan, who remembers in between those blinks all that he has gone through within a few weeks in Tehran. Although the narrative of the film is fictional, the people/actors of the film, barring the professional actor Hamed Behdad who plays the role of Nader, are real and use their own names in the film. Most of the events that are depicted in the film have actually taken place, one way or the other, but not necessarily in that sequence and not exactly to the same people/characters[[2]]. Knowing these factors is important in order to understand, therefore investigate, the connection between the viewer and the material of the film. This becomes more important in regard to Ghobadi’s style that constantly moves between the self-reflexive documentary and the fictional narrative film. This notion in the film is apparent in the way in which he has used the camera, the various rhythms in editing, the selection of locations and with his deliberate casting of largely non-actor real-life musicians.
In the very first frame of the film we see the ceiling with the sharp white fluorescent lamps moving across the frame that look like white markings on a road at first, until you realise that the camera is actually facing upwards. The sound that we hear is more like the muted and unclear breathing sound that one can hear from under the water or over a sealed barrier, a breath at the dead-end[3]. The next shot is the reverse angle, this time an out of focus top shot, showing a young man’s bloody face, covered with an oxygen masque on an emergency bed-on-wheels moving through what seems like a hospital corridor, while another hand with a large piece of gauze is holding one side of his head. We shall meet him again. But Ghobadi leaves his viewer with this bleak image along with that eerie sound of breathing to make a jump cut to another location. The second sequence is located in a dimly lit sound studio. We see the sound editor/engineer managing the recording that is apparently in session along with a few female musicians with their instruments in the background, waiting for their recording session to come. The point of view is of the recording room. The sound is a mixture of a few people talking in the background and a number that none other than Bahman Ghobadi himself is singing in Kurdish. The narrative starts from this moment, not directly though, but through a side conversation that the engineer has with one of the female musicians, who does not seem to recognise the singer in the recording room as the famous film director! The sound engineer says, and we hear, that Ghobadi could not make his films, he did not receive permission to shoot and was stopped by the authorities, as a result he was forced to give up making films. All these made him so depressed that he tried to sing, a hobby that he always kept on the side, to feel slightly better and positive. Babak, the sound engineer also tells us, through their conversation that now Bahman Ghobadi is busy making a film about the underground music scene of Iran. Ghobadi, we hear that, was intrigued by the news of Islamic Guards ambushing an underground rock concert and arresting hundreds of people. There are no professional actors, Babak says, in the film. This, apparently, is the true occasion for making No One Knows About Persian Cats. Ghobadi himself re-asserted this, not only in the “Special Feature” section of the DVD, but also in the 2009 London International Film Festival, during a number of post and pre-screening “Question and Answer” sessions. Why is this information so important that he has to open his film with it and why is it that he repeatedly emphasises this fact at every opportunity he gets? The role the music plays, the importance of creating music and the importance of breath in the creation of voice in songs—all within the oppressive atmosphere of Tehran— and the difference between reality and the truth, I argue, are some of the reasons that this film gives us as way of understanding the importance of this occasion for the filmmaker. In this regard, music is both the apparent subject as well as the political and philosophic metaphor or allegory that the film has to offer.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Tim Hjersted: The Top 10 Films that Explain Why Occupy Wall St. Exists
The Top 10 Films that Explain Why Occupy Wall St. Exists
by Tim Hjersted
Films for Action
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why are tens of thousands of people risking arrest all over the world, setting up encampments and protesting the status quo?
For everyone who has been following independent, alternative media, the answer is obvious. People who have been clued in to what's been going on in this country for the last decade are responding: Finally! A movement to match the scale of the problem is taking root here in America!
A new cultural zeitgeist is growing increasingly more visible in the shadow of the old - one that is steadily zeroing in on the root problems that are paralyzing the prosperity of our future: corporate personhood, an undemocratic system of government, a centralized fractional-reserve banking system, neoclassical economics and capitalism itself.
Seen in this light, it's understandable that the press would feign confusion. Unlike the now co-opted Tea Party movement, which has sadly only served to bolster the corporate welfare state and the interests of the 1%, the problems OWS are exposing are too threatening to the established powers to critically examine. Our demands are too big to be mentioned. And so from the media: We have no demands. We do not know what the problem is. We want handouts from government and simply want a free ride. However, as more people get tuned into alternative media and see the disparity between the reality and what the pundits have to say, the comical theater of the mass media only ingrains its own irrelevance.
Of course, for all the people who still get informed by the mass media, there is much work to do. To combat the misinformation, we need to become the media ourselves, and we have ample tools at our disposal. The biggest memes behind OWS - the ideas and analysis of the problem that gives the movement its inspiration - have been amply documented in several amazing documentaries that are freely available online.
So, following, are the top 10 films that capture the spirit and motivation of the movement. They are the heavy-weight truth bombs which provide the intellectual backing and substance to the slogans and chants. Watch these films. Share them with friends. By breaking the bottleneck the mass media holds on the flow of information and turning people on to alternative channels, we'll be able to build the collective understanding necessary to realize the ambitious goals of OWS.
To Read About the Films
by Tim Hjersted
Films for Action
One of the most entertaining yet unsurprising aspects of Occupy Wall St has been the response from traditional media. Whether intentionally playing dumb or genuinely clueless, the mainstream media has failed to inform the public and substantially address the key issues. But why are tens of thousands of people risking arrest all over the world, setting up encampments and protesting the status quo?
For everyone who has been following independent, alternative media, the answer is obvious. People who have been clued in to what's been going on in this country for the last decade are responding: Finally! A movement to match the scale of the problem is taking root here in America!
A new cultural zeitgeist is growing increasingly more visible in the shadow of the old - one that is steadily zeroing in on the root problems that are paralyzing the prosperity of our future: corporate personhood, an undemocratic system of government, a centralized fractional-reserve banking system, neoclassical economics and capitalism itself.
Seen in this light, it's understandable that the press would feign confusion. Unlike the now co-opted Tea Party movement, which has sadly only served to bolster the corporate welfare state and the interests of the 1%, the problems OWS are exposing are too threatening to the established powers to critically examine. Our demands are too big to be mentioned. And so from the media: We have no demands. We do not know what the problem is. We want handouts from government and simply want a free ride. However, as more people get tuned into alternative media and see the disparity between the reality and what the pundits have to say, the comical theater of the mass media only ingrains its own irrelevance.
Of course, for all the people who still get informed by the mass media, there is much work to do. To combat the misinformation, we need to become the media ourselves, and we have ample tools at our disposal. The biggest memes behind OWS - the ideas and analysis of the problem that gives the movement its inspiration - have been amply documented in several amazing documentaries that are freely available online.
So, following, are the top 10 films that capture the spirit and motivation of the movement. They are the heavy-weight truth bombs which provide the intellectual backing and substance to the slogans and chants. Watch these films. Share them with friends. By breaking the bottleneck the mass media holds on the flow of information and turning people on to alternative channels, we'll be able to build the collective understanding necessary to realize the ambitious goals of OWS.
To Read About the Films
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Greg Tate: Fight for rights, will to power -- The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
Fight for rights, will to power: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
by Greg Tate
Sight and Sound (British Film Institute)
...
The Black Power Mixtape Remixed 1967-1975 is an exotic document of this turbulent, extremely violent transitional moment in American race history. Exotic because it’s the culmination of the near-decade an intrepid Swedish TV news team spent interviewing prominent Black American radicals of the day – Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown and Angela Davis. All were dramatic, eloquent, charismatic figures of their time who, except for the still-active Davis, are today hardly household names to the average black American under 40.
Like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, they all seem incredibly well-prepared in their mid 20s to set the world aflame intellectually and dominate the media – but far less prepared than the Viet Cong or Fidel Castro to withstand the withering, brute and constitutionally illegal attacks directed at them and theirs by the US government, especially the FBI’s fascistic overlord J Edgar Hoover.
Time has not diminished their critiques of American power or racism, nor their undeniable star power – any of them and their radical histories could easily sustain a documentary or narrative feature film of its own. Mixtape captures most of them in the short period before they would be tried, convicted or exiled by Hoover’s stated and manically implemented obsession with preventing the “rise of another black prophet” after King.
The footage of Carmichael and Davis is the most poignant and illuminating. Though the film doesn’t say so, it was Carmichael who brought the phrase ‘Black Power’ into vogue, famously goading King to give it airtime near the end of the two-week-long march to Selma, Alabama. The film demands that those who don’t know these figures investigate them afterwards for more background and context. On film the jocular Carmichael proves so at ease in his own skin that he could have given Sidney Poitier competition as a leading man, and challenged Bob Marley as a lyrical protest balladeer.
Carmichael invites himself to take over an interview the news crew had wrangled with his mother in the Chicago-projects apartment in which he was raised. He then patiently extracts from her the pained admission that his Trinidadian immigrant father, a skilled carpenter, was a lifelong victim of employment discrimination.
As noted by progressive hip-hop MC Talib Kweli in his voiceover, Carmichael emerges here as a “regular guy” who also happened to be a incendiary and mesmerising speaker – one still so provocative that Kweli recalls being accosted by FBI and TSA agents at an airport after 9/11 for merely listening to a 40-year-old Carmichael speech. Some may take Kweli’s intimation of wiretaps as conspiratorial and apocryphal, but no-one familiar with Hoover’s paranoia and surveillance of black progressives will be among them. (The biggest laugh in the film comes from Hoover’s claim that the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the United States was the Black Panther party’s free breakfast program. But Hoover was not joking.)
The progress of the film is also a tacit record of the Panther’s off-screen dismantling by Nixon and Hoover’s COINTELPRO conspiracy against black leadership. The Panther’s demise by exile, imprisonment and judicial malfeasance is presented at a glance, but the Panthers expended all their political capital on the campaigns to Free Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis.
Davis’s prison interview here offers the most astute and moving rationale for extreme black retaliation to American racial extremists. When asked to justify the advocacy of black violence, Davis recalls her childhood experience of her Birmingham, Alabama community being routinely bombed by Klansmen at the behest of notorious county sheriff Bull Connor. Davis recalls this motherfucker using local radio to promote and direct such violence on a weekly basis. The extreme close-up of her angry, watering eyes when she speaks of the discovery of four classmates’ body parts after the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing provides all the justification for retribution any rational person should need.
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
by Greg Tate
Sight and Sound (British Film Institute)
...
The Black Power Mixtape Remixed 1967-1975 is an exotic document of this turbulent, extremely violent transitional moment in American race history. Exotic because it’s the culmination of the near-decade an intrepid Swedish TV news team spent interviewing prominent Black American radicals of the day – Stokley Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Elaine Brown and Angela Davis. All were dramatic, eloquent, charismatic figures of their time who, except for the still-active Davis, are today hardly household names to the average black American under 40.
Like Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, they all seem incredibly well-prepared in their mid 20s to set the world aflame intellectually and dominate the media – but far less prepared than the Viet Cong or Fidel Castro to withstand the withering, brute and constitutionally illegal attacks directed at them and theirs by the US government, especially the FBI’s fascistic overlord J Edgar Hoover.
Time has not diminished their critiques of American power or racism, nor their undeniable star power – any of them and their radical histories could easily sustain a documentary or narrative feature film of its own. Mixtape captures most of them in the short period before they would be tried, convicted or exiled by Hoover’s stated and manically implemented obsession with preventing the “rise of another black prophet” after King.
The footage of Carmichael and Davis is the most poignant and illuminating. Though the film doesn’t say so, it was Carmichael who brought the phrase ‘Black Power’ into vogue, famously goading King to give it airtime near the end of the two-week-long march to Selma, Alabama. The film demands that those who don’t know these figures investigate them afterwards for more background and context. On film the jocular Carmichael proves so at ease in his own skin that he could have given Sidney Poitier competition as a leading man, and challenged Bob Marley as a lyrical protest balladeer.
Carmichael invites himself to take over an interview the news crew had wrangled with his mother in the Chicago-projects apartment in which he was raised. He then patiently extracts from her the pained admission that his Trinidadian immigrant father, a skilled carpenter, was a lifelong victim of employment discrimination.
As noted by progressive hip-hop MC Talib Kweli in his voiceover, Carmichael emerges here as a “regular guy” who also happened to be a incendiary and mesmerising speaker – one still so provocative that Kweli recalls being accosted by FBI and TSA agents at an airport after 9/11 for merely listening to a 40-year-old Carmichael speech. Some may take Kweli’s intimation of wiretaps as conspiratorial and apocryphal, but no-one familiar with Hoover’s paranoia and surveillance of black progressives will be among them. (The biggest laugh in the film comes from Hoover’s claim that the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the United States was the Black Panther party’s free breakfast program. But Hoover was not joking.)
The progress of the film is also a tacit record of the Panther’s off-screen dismantling by Nixon and Hoover’s COINTELPRO conspiracy against black leadership. The Panther’s demise by exile, imprisonment and judicial malfeasance is presented at a glance, but the Panthers expended all their political capital on the campaigns to Free Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis.
Davis’s prison interview here offers the most astute and moving rationale for extreme black retaliation to American racial extremists. When asked to justify the advocacy of black violence, Davis recalls her childhood experience of her Birmingham, Alabama community being routinely bombed by Klansmen at the behest of notorious county sheriff Bull Connor. Davis recalls this motherfucker using local radio to promote and direct such violence on a weekly basis. The extreme close-up of her angry, watering eyes when she speaks of the discovery of four classmates’ body parts after the infamous 1963 Birmingham church bombing provides all the justification for retribution any rational person should need.
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
Mhairi Guild: The Skin We Live In -- The Mad, Bad World of Pedro Almodóvar
The skin we live in: the mad, bad world of Pedro Almodóvar
Remaining spooked and preoccupied, Mhairi Guild still appreciates density and creativity of Almodovar's latest grotesque fairytale of not-only-gender identity, desire and power
by Mhairi Guild
The F Word
We staggered out of Pedro Almodóvar's latest offering somewhat shell-shocked. There is a huge amount to get out of The Skin I Live In but goodness, is it profoundly dark. Generally well received, the film has nonetheless split critics, some seeing it as a fetishistic mess or empty stylistic exercise, others as a stunning horror of the mind. I think that your reception of the film is likely to depend on your prior relationship with Almodóvar and on how willing you are to go on this particular journey with him.
A dark alpha male Antonio Banderas plays the brooding, obsessive surgeon Robert Ledgard, bunkered in a grand Toledo mansion which offers a lush set for his initially unexplained experimentation on the beautiful captive Vera, played by the porcelain doll-like Elena Anaya. The perfection of Vera's flawless, synthetic skin and the charged secret of her relationship with Ledgard is the central riddle of a plot that weaves back and forth between earlier stages of the narrative and gradually takes us down to depths scarcely imaginable at the outset.
Despite not being familiar with Almodóvar's whole canon, his 2002 Talk To Her has long been one of my favourite films. I have also enjoyed - in different ways - All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) and some earlier works like 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (his last project with Banderas before the latter's defection to Hollywood).
One of the most striking things about The skin I live in is how it pulls together tropes and preoccupations from a number of the director's past films - being a sort of culmination of Almodóvar's body of work. A few of these themes were particularly resonant as the story developed.
Firstly, in Almodóvar's world there is normally an inherent brutality to the male sexual impulse, and it is present to such an extent that I was already squirming uncomfortably within the first half an hour of the film (little was I to know what Almodóvar had in store for me yet). The representation and frequent victory of this type of male sexuality, which is oft accompanied by casual violence, suggests that it is somehow a 'true' manifestation of male sexuality. Together with a forceful masculine possession of the female body, his male characters often exhibit an unreflective ignorance of the coercion present in their seductions. In the three central male figures in the film we get the full bleak spectrum: the boy (Vicente), the man (Ledgard) and the animal (Veco - the 'Tiger'). In this film Almodóvar more than insinuates the notion that heterosexual sex veers precipitously close to rape -, a particularly pessimistic and troubling theme.
More fundamentally, though, Almodóvar's work seems to suggest an impossibility of meaningful communication between the sexes within a certain society. This chasm between man and woman that can never be truly bridged lies at the centre of Talk To Her, where the one-sided relationship between the young coma patient Alicia and her besotted, delusional nurse Benigno is mirrored by the real relationship between Marco and injured bull-fighter Lydia. Almodóvar's men can only ever desire, fetishise and project onto their relations with women; women, in turn, in the male gaze are literally living dolls whose internal lives may be as real as theirs, but can never be truly apprehended. Women remain, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, men's eternal 'others': an inherent mystery, in sharp distinction to the knowable Self of the male individual. This communication gap between the sexes - which after all has some undeniable, socialised roots - speaks in Almodóvar's work in dark and sometimes terrifying tones. It presents one of the most compelling and intriguing challenges posed by his films, seemingly portraying a gender dystopia we are prompted to remain ever-vigilant against.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Remaining spooked and preoccupied, Mhairi Guild still appreciates density and creativity of Almodovar's latest grotesque fairytale of not-only-gender identity, desire and power
by Mhairi Guild
The F Word
We staggered out of Pedro Almodóvar's latest offering somewhat shell-shocked. There is a huge amount to get out of The Skin I Live In but goodness, is it profoundly dark. Generally well received, the film has nonetheless split critics, some seeing it as a fetishistic mess or empty stylistic exercise, others as a stunning horror of the mind. I think that your reception of the film is likely to depend on your prior relationship with Almodóvar and on how willing you are to go on this particular journey with him.
A dark alpha male Antonio Banderas plays the brooding, obsessive surgeon Robert Ledgard, bunkered in a grand Toledo mansion which offers a lush set for his initially unexplained experimentation on the beautiful captive Vera, played by the porcelain doll-like Elena Anaya. The perfection of Vera's flawless, synthetic skin and the charged secret of her relationship with Ledgard is the central riddle of a plot that weaves back and forth between earlier stages of the narrative and gradually takes us down to depths scarcely imaginable at the outset.
Despite not being familiar with Almodóvar's whole canon, his 2002 Talk To Her has long been one of my favourite films. I have also enjoyed - in different ways - All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006) and some earlier works like 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (his last project with Banderas before the latter's defection to Hollywood).
One of the most striking things about The skin I live in is how it pulls together tropes and preoccupations from a number of the director's past films - being a sort of culmination of Almodóvar's body of work. A few of these themes were particularly resonant as the story developed.
Firstly, in Almodóvar's world there is normally an inherent brutality to the male sexual impulse, and it is present to such an extent that I was already squirming uncomfortably within the first half an hour of the film (little was I to know what Almodóvar had in store for me yet). The representation and frequent victory of this type of male sexuality, which is oft accompanied by casual violence, suggests that it is somehow a 'true' manifestation of male sexuality. Together with a forceful masculine possession of the female body, his male characters often exhibit an unreflective ignorance of the coercion present in their seductions. In the three central male figures in the film we get the full bleak spectrum: the boy (Vicente), the man (Ledgard) and the animal (Veco - the 'Tiger'). In this film Almodóvar more than insinuates the notion that heterosexual sex veers precipitously close to rape -, a particularly pessimistic and troubling theme.
More fundamentally, though, Almodóvar's work seems to suggest an impossibility of meaningful communication between the sexes within a certain society. This chasm between man and woman that can never be truly bridged lies at the centre of Talk To Her, where the one-sided relationship between the young coma patient Alicia and her besotted, delusional nurse Benigno is mirrored by the real relationship between Marco and injured bull-fighter Lydia. Almodóvar's men can only ever desire, fetishise and project onto their relations with women; women, in turn, in the male gaze are literally living dolls whose internal lives may be as real as theirs, but can never be truly apprehended. Women remain, as Simone de Beauvoir suggests, men's eternal 'others': an inherent mystery, in sharp distinction to the knowable Self of the male individual. This communication gap between the sexes - which after all has some undeniable, socialised roots - speaks in Almodóvar's work in dark and sometimes terrifying tones. It presents one of the most compelling and intriguing challenges posed by his films, seemingly portraying a gender dystopia we are prompted to remain ever-vigilant against.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Spring 2012 Bluegrass Film Society Schedule
(in development) Screenings are at 7:30pm unless otherwise noted
1/18: Trollhunter (Norway: André Øvredal, 2010: 103 mins)
1/25: The Black Power Mixtapes 1967 – 1975 (Sweden: Göran Olsson, 2011: 100 mins)
2/1: M (Germany: Fritz Lang, 1931: 117 mins) [Requested by Cara Durham]
2/8 at 6PM: Something the Lord Made (USA: Joseph Sargent, 2004: 110 mins) [Special event for African American month celebration]
2/15: Dersu Uzala (Japan/Russia: Akira Kurosawa, 1975: 144 mins) [Requested by Martin Mudd]
2/22: Land and Freedom (United Kingdom/Spain/Germany/Italy: Ken Loach, 1995: 109 mins)
2/29: The Shop On Main Street (Czechoslovakia: Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965: 18 mins) [Recommended by Tori Egherman]
3/21: The Conformist (Italy/France/West Germany: Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970: 107 mins)
4/11: The Silence (Germany: Baran bo Odar, 2010: 120 mins) [Requested by Cara Dunham]
4/18: Rango (USA: Gore Verbinski, 2011: 107 mins) [Family film selection chosen by Meagan Brock]
4/25: A Clockwork Orange (UK/USA: Stanley Kubrick, 1971: 136 mins)
1/18: Trollhunter (Norway: André Øvredal, 2010: 103 mins)
1/25: The Black Power Mixtapes 1967 – 1975 (Sweden: Göran Olsson, 2011: 100 mins)
2/1: M (Germany: Fritz Lang, 1931: 117 mins) [Requested by Cara Durham]
2/8 at 6PM: Something the Lord Made (USA: Joseph Sargent, 2004: 110 mins) [Special event for African American month celebration]
2/15: Dersu Uzala (Japan/Russia: Akira Kurosawa, 1975: 144 mins) [Requested by Martin Mudd]
2/22: Land and Freedom (United Kingdom/Spain/Germany/Italy: Ken Loach, 1995: 109 mins)
2/29: The Shop On Main Street (Czechoslovakia: Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965: 18 mins) [Recommended by Tori Egherman]
3/21: The Conformist (Italy/France/West Germany: Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970: 107 mins)
4/11: The Silence (Germany: Baran bo Odar, 2010: 120 mins) [Requested by Cara Dunham]
4/18: Rango (USA: Gore Verbinski, 2011: 107 mins) [Family film selection chosen by Meagan Brock]
4/25: A Clockwork Orange (UK/USA: Stanley Kubrick, 1971: 136 mins)
Leanne Bibbey: Perfume: the Story of a Murderer -- The film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume is a stunning indictment of society's attitude towards women
Perfume: the Story of a Murderer: The film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume is a stunning indictment of society's attitude towards women.
by Leanne Bibby
The F Word (United Kingdom)
A film about a killer on a mission to murder women and harvest their scents might seem like a rather obvious choice of subject for a feminist review. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why I decided to write this and why I'd like to encourage you to see Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume: the Story of a Murderer. First of all, it's one of the most unusual and inventive films to appear in some time, in cinemas and DVD retailers currently glutted with sequels, prequels, remakes and other somewhat unimaginative fare.
The second reason I think it deserves our attention is its graphic and unflinching yet sophisticated representation of violence towards women. This struck me as having appeared at an ideal time, as debates on this and related issues rage on. Having not read Süskind's original novel, I'm in no position to comment on it and so this review is concerned exclusively with the film.
Ben Whishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in 18th century Paris and possessed of a supernatural sense of smell. The film's early scenes, as sensuously fantastical as they are grim, follow him from a childhood of unimaginable poverty and social isolation up to the day his unique talent leads him to become apprentice to struggling perfumer Giuseppe Baldini, played to the hilt by a bewigged Dustin Hoffman. Having already suffocated to death a young woman with whose scent he'd become intoxicated, Grenouille embarks on a quest to create the ultimate perfume by infusing the essences of beautiful women - that is, their scents. To everyone outside his reclusive, amoral world, of course, this is a killing spree and nothing more.
Oblivious to this, Grenouille single-mindedly preys upon women for the "sublime beauty" of their scents. Their lives, personalities and, interestingly, their sexual attractions are inconsequential to him. By way of an omniscient narration, we are made privy to his thoughts and fixations as he commits his shocking acts, but I was intrigued to find that this is only one feature of a multi-layered film experience. The restrained and largely off-camera violence is at the tale's core, but ultimately secondary to our view of the women themselves.
Tykwer's dreamlike storytelling emphasises Grenouille's reveries of smell in the presence of doll-like women with uniformly porcelain skins and shining hair. In doing this, it also shows us a culture that holds women to be just that: dolls. Lovely, guileless and almost voiceless, they appear doomed to slip into the death-destiny planned for them and remain largely unchanged afterwards: their physical appeal - the only valued part of them - captured in scent.
To Read the Rest of the Review
by Leanne Bibby
The F Word (United Kingdom)
A film about a killer on a mission to murder women and harvest their scents might seem like a rather obvious choice of subject for a feminist review. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why I decided to write this and why I'd like to encourage you to see Tom Tykwer's 2006 adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume: the Story of a Murderer. First of all, it's one of the most unusual and inventive films to appear in some time, in cinemas and DVD retailers currently glutted with sequels, prequels, remakes and other somewhat unimaginative fare.
The second reason I think it deserves our attention is its graphic and unflinching yet sophisticated representation of violence towards women. This struck me as having appeared at an ideal time, as debates on this and related issues rage on. Having not read Süskind's original novel, I'm in no position to comment on it and so this review is concerned exclusively with the film.
Ben Whishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an orphan born in 18th century Paris and possessed of a supernatural sense of smell. The film's early scenes, as sensuously fantastical as they are grim, follow him from a childhood of unimaginable poverty and social isolation up to the day his unique talent leads him to become apprentice to struggling perfumer Giuseppe Baldini, played to the hilt by a bewigged Dustin Hoffman. Having already suffocated to death a young woman with whose scent he'd become intoxicated, Grenouille embarks on a quest to create the ultimate perfume by infusing the essences of beautiful women - that is, their scents. To everyone outside his reclusive, amoral world, of course, this is a killing spree and nothing more.
Oblivious to this, Grenouille single-mindedly preys upon women for the "sublime beauty" of their scents. Their lives, personalities and, interestingly, their sexual attractions are inconsequential to him. By way of an omniscient narration, we are made privy to his thoughts and fixations as he commits his shocking acts, but I was intrigued to find that this is only one feature of a multi-layered film experience. The restrained and largely off-camera violence is at the tale's core, but ultimately secondary to our view of the women themselves.
Tykwer's dreamlike storytelling emphasises Grenouille's reveries of smell in the presence of doll-like women with uniformly porcelain skins and shining hair. In doing this, it also shows us a culture that holds women to be just that: dolls. Lovely, guileless and almost voiceless, they appear doomed to slip into the death-destiny planned for them and remain largely unchanged afterwards: their physical appeal - the only valued part of them - captured in scent.
To Read the Rest of the Review
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