Oscar's Cinema Journal 2005

Sat August 20th

James Stewart marathon on Turner Classic Movies. It's just as important to point out that three films below, not including the Capra film, were lensed by one of the greatest of Hollywood cinematographers: William Daniels. Greed was the first of a long list of distinguished films in which he worked.

Thunder Bay (USA, 1953)
Anthony Mann and James Stewart was one of the great partnerships in film history, but Thunder Bay is not great, not at the level of the five Westerns they made. The main reason is the story. Stewart and Dan Duryea play oilmen who manage to get an investor to finance the construction of an oil rig off the coast of a gulf town. The locals make a living fishing shrimp. The film minimizes environmental concerns in risible, dishonest fashion. I expected a happy ending, but this is too much, a joyously ecstatic ending in which every character's dream comes true. It's still Mann-Stewart-Daniels though, and it's fun to watch.

Night Passage (USA, 1957)
This was supposed to be the 6th Mann-Stewart western, after Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie, but Mann bailed out at the last minute reportedly because he didn't like the script. Thankfully, the excellent cast and crew stayed because the script is not bad. It just lacks the moral ambiguities and behavioral ambivalence that characterize those awesome five Mann-Stewart-Daniels westerns. Shot in Colorado in Widescreen Technicolor.

You Can't Take it With You (USA, 1938)
This film resulted in Frank Capra's third Oscar for Best Director. It also won Best Picture. It's another anti-elitist, big business vs. the common man plot that Capra favored. It is also more sentimental and conformist than the source Pulitzer-winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It's funny and entertaining enough to recommend and the cast is uniformly good, but definitely not the best film of 1938.

The Shop Around the Corner (USA, 1940)
Ernst Lubitsch purchased the rights to a Hungarian stage play named Parfumerie about the relationships between the employees of a Budapest store. MGM agreed to finance it if Lubitsch'd agree to direct Ninotchka first, because Cukor had withdrawn from that film just as shooting was scheduled to commence. Lubitsch turned both films into gold. The Shop Around the Corner is a witty and visually splendid ensembler devoid of contrivance and cheap sentimentality. The arc of the relationship between the characters played by Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan is depicted with great attention to detail. The obvious chemistry between them certainly didn't hurt the picture. A Must See. Perhaps a masterpiece among witty, urbane, Hollywood romances.

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The three dvds together sell for $41.99 at deepdiscountdvd. Shipping included

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What a good deal!

Ain't it? Reliable too, but don't expect fast shipping for free. There's a shipping surcharge if you want that.

Sunday August 23rd

The Prefab People (Hungary, 1982) dvd
Unlike the miserable young couples in Tarr's first two films, the couple in his third feature cannot blame the state or society for their misery. The husband has a good job while the wife stays atheir (relatively) nice apartment with their two sons. They have psychological and relationship problems, not unlike couples in capitalist societies.
That's all I feel comfortable saying about The Prefab People. The reason is that the film is 102 minutes long but the dvd version released by Facets Video is advertised at a mere 80 minutes. In actuality, the timer on my dvd player marked 76 minutes and 16 seconds by the film's end. Conclusion: there are 22-26 minutes of the Prefab People missing from the version made available on dvd by Facets.

The Gang of Four (France, 1988) dvd
Perhaps the best, and decidedly the most challenging, of the five Jacques Rivette films I've seen in 2005 (Histoire de Marie et Julien, Va Savoir, Secret Defense, the short Le Coup du Berger).
Cecile, one of the four 20-something women sharing in a suburban home, is moving out, ostensibly to live with her boyfriend. Lucia, a girl from Portugal whose parents think she's studying science, will take Cecile's room. All five are students in Constance's theatre acting class. Rivette sets most of Gang of Four at the suburban home and the theatre, including long takes of the women rehearsing scenes by Marivaux and Euripedes. There's a mystery man who engineers to meet each woman separately using different aliases to extract information regarding Cecile and something she hid in the house. We become increasingly aware of something criminal and sinister involving Cecile's never-seen boyfriend but the details are purposefully obscured to implicate the viewer in the unease-verging-on-paranoia experienced by the gang. The film paints detailed, nuanced pictures of the four women, depicts the process of acquiring acting skills and how reality bleeds into performance, and sketches a vague, creepy mystery with some surprising turns. I'd have to re-watch Gang of Four to draw parallels between the scenes on stage and the rest, assuming they exist. Cast includes Bernadette Giraud, Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bulle Ogier, Ines de Medeiros, and Nathalie Richard. Like most Rivette films, Gang of Four is over 2 1/2 hours long and not meant for cut-to-the-chase types.

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Conclusion: there are 22-26 minutes of the Prefab People missing from the version made available on dvd by Facets.

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Why do you think that would be?

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including long takes of the women rehearsing scenes by Marivaux and Euripedes.

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Sounds reminiscent of Va Savoir in varous ways.

*My guess is that the folks at Facets didn't realize that the source print of The Prefab People they transferred to dvd was "mutilated". It's also possible they made some type of a technical mistake. I know from three different sources that the original film length is 102 minutes.

*Although Va Savoir is significantly less daring and challenging than Gang of Four, there are strong similarities. Notice how both focus on a character obsessively searching for a lost object. In Va Savoir, it's spelled out from the beginning that the object is a lost text by 18th century playwright Goldini. It takes much longer for the viewer of Gang of Four to realize Thomas is looking for a key to a safe.
Va Savoir is also reminiscent of Gang of Four because of scenes in which characters are rehearsing or performing theatrical scenes. Often we learn something about the film's character from his/her performing a scene from a play. Moreover, it appears that the content of the play or the specific scene being rehearsed has a relation to the plot of the film itself. (How exactly the play-within-the-film and the film itself are related is never obvious or explicit).
Like I wrote, the "gang" is rehearsing Marivaux and Euripedes and Va Savoir's Camille and Ugo are rehearsing Pirandello's "As You Desire Me" . This is a trademark of Jacques Rivette that harks back to his first feature, Paris nous appartient, in which a lit student joins a troupe rehearsing Shakespeare's "Pericles" to investigate a mysterious death. In Spectre, there are two different groups performing plays by Aeschylus: "Prometheus Bound" and "Seven Against Thebes". In Celine and Julie Go Boating, there's a Victorian melodrama being performed inside the haunted house the titular characters visit separately. This inter-textuality, typical of Rivette and not limited to theatrical references, would be an interesting thesis subject.

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This inter-textuality, typical of Rivette and not limited to theatrical references, would be an interesting thesis subject.

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Almost too obvious, perhaps, but certainly something we as Rivette-watchers need to be aware of. As unfortunately happens quite often, my knowledge of this director doesn't include his entire œuvre or I'd probably have considered this point too obvious to note. The first paragraph of www.frenchculture.org's page on Rivette is as follows:

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Jacques Rivette is the first of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics to direct a feature, and at age 73 he is still making films that challenge our perception of cinema and life, and the intersection of the two. Rivette frequently uses a work of theatre at the heart of his films (from Shakespeare's Pericles in Paris Belongs to Us to Pirandello's As You Desire Me in Va Savoir, and a continuing theme in his work is the conflict between "fictional" theatre and "real" life. The subject matter is often the process of creation itself-often rehearsal or artmaking (as in La Belle noiseuse). Rivette's style is marked by his willingness to make use of improvisation and to experiment with structure. The result is films that are intelligent, unpredictable, and, as Dave Kehr wrote, "animated by a sense of play---of fantasy, freedom, and wonder." .

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The French Culture.com page on Rivette is here .

Good summary of Rivette's career and major themes.
What I had in mind was a detailed attempt to answer the question of the rationale behind the selection of the plays (and the specific scenes from those plays) in relation to the films' plots and characters. This would require a great deal of thought and analysis of both films and plays.
My study of Rivette continues with his version of Wuthering Heigths, probably Saturday or Sunday, along with more Chahine.

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What I had in mind was a detailed attempt to answer the question of the rationale behind the selection of the plays (and the specific scenes from those plays) in relation to the films' plots and characters. This would require a great deal of thought and analysis of both films and plays.

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It would, and that would be an obvious academic approach. That was all I meant, not that it was to be avoided -- though in general I'm not too fond of academic writing -- but that it was inevitable that this should be done and I'd be surprised if it hasn't begun already.

I'd rather hear you talk about it in your film class than read about it in some dry thesis.

Fair enough :)
Monday Aug. 24th

Mysterious Skin (USA, 2004)

I saw that, but have not thought of anything to say.

Tuesday August 25th

Intolerance (USA, 1916) dvd
It has been called "greatest of all time" and "still ahead of its time today" decades after it flopped at the box office. Intolerance, at 2 million 1916 dollars, it would be considered the most expensive film ever made, with its thousands of extras and its mamoth sets. No doubt, it's quite spectacular. Yet, what makes Intolerance one of the most ambitious movies ever made is D.W. Griffith daring to tell four thematically linked stories simultaneously, in parallel action: 1) the enmity between Belshazzar of Babylon and Cyrus the Persian with culminates with the fall of Babylon (the most awesome set ever built for a motion picture bar none), 2) A biblical story of the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, 3) a story of the massacre of Protestants engineered by Catherine de Medici in 16th century France, and 4) a contemporary story based on the Ludlow Massacre of striking workers at a factory owned by John D. Rockefeller and the hanging of an innocent man.The film's subtitle is "Love's Struggle Through the Ages" and is linked by shots of a woman (Lillian Gish) rocking the cradle of civilization. As Intolerance progresses, Griffith cut more rapidly from story to story to emphasize the common elements between the stories. The final scenes evidence extremely fluid editing_from Cyrus' chariots racing to destroy Babylon to Catherine's troops about to massacre the Huguenots, to the condemned man walking to the gallows, long shot to long shot, closeup to closeup in a pounding rhythm. One of the most thrilling and devastating endings in the history of cinema.

But what does it all mean?

*Back after three days without electricity due to Katrina. Three most uncomfortable days, especially at night. Despite 9 deaths in South Florida, we were lucky she was a category 1-2 Hurricane when she passed by my neighborhood. My thoughts are with folks from the city of New Orleans. Good Luck.

*Back to cinema. The answer to Chris' question is the simple, obvious one. All Intolerance means is that human being lack of tolerance for others (their views, their rights, etc.) has been a constant cause of pain and suffering throughout history. No matter how much knowledge we gather, no matter how advanced our technology, we can't seem to learn how to reduce the pain and suffering we inflict on ourselves because of intolerance and greed. It's a simple idea but it's spectacularly and elaborately dramatized.

*I 'd like to highlight two wonderful performances by female actors I didn't mention: Mae Marsh, as a young woman whose husband is framed, jailed, and sentenced to death while her baby son is removed from her custody. An amazingly varied effective performance from an actress I had failed to recognize before. A totally different type of performance was delivered by Constance Talmadge in the Babylon episode as "The Mountain Girl", a buoyant, physical performance that would please fans of Errol Flynn. Talmadge was still in her teens when she appeared in Intolerance and had a prolific career until the end of the silent era.

Wed. August 26th

Leaves from Satan's Book (Denmark, 1921) dvd
Carl Theodor Dreyer was inspired to create this anthology film after watching Intolerance. He obviously didn't have a $2 million budget to build huge, monumentals sets. Dreyer opted not to attempt to revolutionize narrative structure so, unlike Griffith's film, each of his four stories comes to a conclusion before the start of the next one. As the title implies, what binds them is the fallen angel himself, as a doomed character that takes many guises in order to influence human behavior at four different historical stages. Satan adopts the guise of a pharisee who tempts Judas to betray Jesus in the first story. Then he is the Great Inquisitor in 16th century Seville pressuring a monk to oversee the horrific fate of the woman he secretly loves and her virtuous father. The third story takes us to 1793 Paris and revolves around a servant who is inducted into the Jacobins and breaks a promise he made to Marie Antoinette. The final story takes place during the Russo-Finnish war of 1918 and concerns the machinations of a Russian monk to condemn a rural family to death because of alleged collaboration with the White counter-revolutionaries. The film anticipates both the thematic concerns and stylistic idiosyncracies of Carl Theodor Dreyer (Ordet, Vampyr, Gertrude). The centrality of female victims within the narrative and the power of religious hypocrites to do evil in the name of God are highlighted. Dreyer's masterful use of closeups and impressionistic lighting were already quite evident in this picture.

Thanks for the further detail about how the theme plays out in Griffith's Intolerance.