"Kino Slang"
at the
Echo Park Film Center
continues
MILITANT FILMS BY
HITCHCOCK, BARNET, MONTEIRO
Thursday,
July 27th, 2017
Doors at 7:30pm
$5 Suggested Donation
Echo Park Film Center
1200 North Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA 90026
AVENTURE MALGACHE (Madagascar Landing, Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, 32 min)
Deemed ineffective as propaganda and shelved for 50 years by the British government, this wartime short directed by master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock reenacts a true story of the French Resistance against fascist collaboration during World War II in the French colony of Madagascar, Africa. The film's m.o. was not suspense but rather an open-book lesson on the ins-and-outs of collaborationism, nationalism, and underground fighting. The film pays tribute to a hero of the Resistance, records how it was done, and reflects on the reflection. Hitchcock stamps every scene with the contradiction that this is a liberation story among colonizers, either by use of colonial symbols or by inserting the colonized themselves. A baroque array of political machinations, choices and attitudes to freedom are compacted into just 32 minutes of pure composition while delving into themes of perception, morality, and disguise.
A GOOD LAD (Slavnyy Malyy, Boris Barnet, 1943, 65 min)
Film historian David Bordwell summarizes: "A French pilot's plane is downed in a (Soviet) forest, where a resistance group is hiding out and forming its own little community. Living under the imminent threat of Nazi discovery doesn't forestall songs, romantic affairs, and mistakes born of the language gap: 'I love you.' 'I don't understand.' 'I don't understand.'" Boris Barnet, one of the greatest of all Soviet filmmakers, was quite popular in Russia yet his films, full of life, are almost totally forgotten today, or remain unknown in the West. Particularly A Good Lad, which was not released at the time of its production during the Second World War, but only later screened in the U.S.S.R. in 1959, then was considered lost again until premiering once more in 1999 at the Moscow Film Museum. "Barnet's A Good Lad is (in one hour!) a musical, a comedy, a love story, and a war movie--and everything is perfectly balanced and free" wrote critic/filmmaker Serge Bozon.
WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THIS SWORD? (Que Farei eu com Esta Espada?, João César Monteiro, 1975, 63 min)
*
There will be no introduction.
Program notes provided at the door.
Special Thanks to Chloe Reyes, Bill Krohn, Pierre Leon, Travis Miles, and Bruno Andrade.
"Kino Slang" is a new regular series of cinema screenings,--typically a double-bill and a short on the chosen night--programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. This iteration of Kino Slang will continue the cinematographic and historical excavation, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.
Notes on the program and series, documents and translations, ephemera and images related to the films at hand will appear here both before (see below) and after the programs.
Notes on the program and series, documents and translations, ephemera and images related to the films at hand will appear here both before (see below) and after the programs.
*
On
AVENTURE MALGACHE
DARK CARNIVAL
by Bill Krohn
What
we know about Aventure Malgache
(1944), the remarkable short Alfred Hitchcock made to show how the flame of the
Resistance had burned brightly in the colonies, we owe to Alain Kerzoncuf, who
discovered that Jules Francois Clermont, the actor who plays Clarus, the leader
of the Resistance in Malgache (Madagascar), had been a lawyer there before the
war and had lived the adventure told in the film – as if Pina, the heroine of Roberto
Rossellini’s Open City, had been
played, not by Anna Magnani, but by a real heroine of the Resistance. By 1944 Clermont had joined the Moliere
Players, a troupe of exiled French performers assembled in London, because the
Allies could no longer employ him in a staff position during the coming
invasion of the continent. Having been
on the stage before taking up the law, he now went back to his first
profession.
After
meeting with Hitchcock, who had travelled in steerage to London to contribute
to the war effort, Clermont was commissioned to write a script in tangy
colloquial French with Hitchcock’s future collaborator Angus MacPhail, whom the
director first met at the Claridge Hotel in London during preproduction for
this film and another, Bon Voyage,
made to be shown in France when the Allies landed. (The opening credits address a specific “vous”
that never saw the film: the French
people who had been living under Nazi occupation.) The collaboration with the gifted MacPhail lasted
until the writer died of alcoholism after outlining the structure of Vertigo (1957) for Hitchcock.* Aventure Malgache, shelved until 1999 at
the request of the French, who didn’t care for its portrayal of the political
and economic contradictions at the heart of the French Empire during the
Occupation (for example, the black-skinned servants whose wordless presence
makes its own comment), didn’t fare much better, but both have now gotten their
due. Ars
longa, vita brevis.
The
account of Clermont’s war in Aventure Malgache
cuts some corners for reasons of budget.
He was being shipped to a penal colony when British warships stopped the
convoy and freed him, setting him up as Radio Free Madagascar on a ship in the
Indian Ocean. Hitchcock, who didn’t have
the money to film a scene at sea, built a dungeon-like set for Clarus’s maritime
prison from which he could see the smoke-stacks of British ships coming to save
him. (His joyous exclamations are
greeted by a fellow prisoner’s muttered “’giveafuck”s, which are left un-translated
in the BFI’s subtitles.) The British invasion of Madagascar, which is shown in
newsreel footage, then leads to the scene where Clarus has the pleasure of
broadcasting back to the man who imprisoned him, the gangster and Vichy
turncoat Michel (Paul Bonifas), that the British are coming for him.
The
film pays tribute to a hero of the Resistance by having him reenact for
Hitchcock’s camera the daring subversion that made him famous. Clarus introduces the show with a few words in
Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, then does the “knock knock” sound effect
that introduced all his broadcasts. Poverty
of means spurs a wealth of invention.
It’s hard not to read this as a metaphor for Aventure Malgache, a better film than Spellbound (1945), which Hitchcock put on hold when he came to
England, despite MacPhail’s contributions to the latter when he followed the
director back to California: David O.
Selznick spent lavishly on Spellbound,
then lopped off MacPhail’s opening sequence, set in a mental asylum, and
truncated the dream sequence planned by Hitchcock and another gifted
collaborator, Salvador Dali.
Selznick’s
tinkering paved the way for the psychoanalysis-on-skis sequence that would be
Hitchcock’s ludicrous first attempt to portray that impossible-to-portray
process until he and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen finally nailed it with the
Psychonalysis in the Boudoir sequence that resolves the mystery of the heroine’s
frigidity in Marnie (1964). By way of contrast, despite the gripes about
too much dialogue from “users” and professional critics alike preserved on
iMdb, Aventure Malgache deftly pulls
off a psychoanalysis of the Occupation carried out in France’s colonial
unconscious, tucked away out of sight in the Indian Ocean, which anticipates the
triumphs wrought by “talky” Hitchcockians ranging from Eric Rohmer to the
Straubs long after Aventure Malgache had
been consigned to the vaults.
The
situation we see in the dressing-room of the Moliere Players (a troupe created
to give French actors in exile a way to participate in the fight while hiding
their identities to protect their relatives in France) is one that could really
have happened: Clarus advising a
colleague on how to play the villain in a play they’re getting made up for by
telling him about his personal nemesis in Malgache to enable him to get into
the skin of a real-life Nazi.
While
Clarus explains the character of Michel to this colleague as they prepare to
take the stage – translation: to begin the film we’re watching – the latter
gradually dons the make-up that accompanies his inner transformation as he gets
into character. Hitchcock stages the
transitions so that, when we cut from the dressing-room to the trial scene in
the first flashback, Michel’s back is to us, and we only discover his features
gradually. The figure looming in the
foreground of the trial sequence, whose face is also turned away from the
camera, is Clarus, the witness -- in reality and within the film -- to
everything that happens in this early Hitchcock experiment with
single-point-of-view storytelling.**
As
the two actors in the dressing-room are getting ready to step on the stage, the
one who will play the villain of the piece gradually dons the make-up that
accompanies his inner transformation as he gets into the character with
Clarus’s help. It would have taken a
while for French spectators – had they been permitted to see the film -- to realize
that he’s the same actor who plays Michel in the flashbacks.
Hitchcock
has never been subtler, in fact. Clarus
recounts, and the film shows, how the Resistance-friendly governor of
Madagascar was forced by Michel to put a spy on Clarus’s tail to uncover his
Resistance activities. Back in the present
of the film’s narration the other actors in the dressing-room joke that Clarus
must have been killed and ask how he could get away with anything while being
tailed. “Nothing simpler,” says Clarus. Cut
to Clarus entering the cellar that is Resistance headquarters to address the
troops, arm in arm with his tail. The
ceiling of this odd little set is decorated with symbols from the Zodiac: Fate, looming like Wagner’s Valkyries over
the Resistance, will have to be overcome by guile.
As
with the real and reel Michels, the spectator has to use his eyes to understand
these gags, and the actor playing the part of the false spy doesn’t make it
easy. His dress and demeanor change
considerably between the office of the Governor, where we met him, and the
cellar, and no dialogue hints that this is the same man come to the aid of spectators
who haven’t been paying attention. In Bon Voyage, Hitchcock’s other wartime
short, the action recounted in flashback happens at night, teaching the spectator
a political lesson in how to read images. Aventure
Malgache, which happens in bright light (including an uncanny scene of
treachery illuminated through a sheet), is a lesson in how to see.
At
the end of the film the nameless actor preparing to play a Nazi, who now sports
Michel’s moustache, picks a fight with the indignant Clarus, who realizes when
the transformation is complete that his colleague has become Michel and they
are talking to each other the way they did back in Malgache. They have become the characters they’re
playing, like Norman Bates in Psycho,
still sixteen years in the future. As
they leave the dressing-room to go on stage “Michel” buttons the jacket of his
Nazi uniform and Clarus dons the costume of a Resistance fighter. The flashback is over, but the struggle goes
on.
Does
the budget alone account for the bare-bones staging of some scenes, like the one
with uncanny illumination where a hysterical woman whose motives are never
explained in words picks up the phone to denounce Clarus, where the set is a
bed and a gauze curtain with a light behind it?*** Perhaps, but the production seems to have had
a dolly, a costly piece of equipment for a no-budget short, which the director
uses here to pull back until the phone that seems to be controlling her
actions, like the stolen money on Marion Crane’s bed in Psycho, is in the frame. Other
scenes where the dolly is being used in offbeat ways include the one with the pooterish
Vichy General, during which the camera moves closer to the characters, almost
imperceptibly, until Michel is center frame, then pans right each time the
general paces nearer to the camera. There
is also a rather modern quick dolly-in on Michel during the trial. For viewers
who aren’t hypnotized by the dialogue they hate (cf. those iMdb comments),
there’s quite a lot being done with the camera in this little film.
If Lifeboat is a film influenced by
Brechtian stagecraft, Aventure Malgache
is a Freudian miniature, with Michel occupying the place of Willie (Walter
Slezak), the German submarine captain. “I
see the type you mean,” says Boniface, playing the nameless actor who is having
Michel explained to him in preparation for his own performance as a Nazi he
considers underwritten and opaque. “A
rat like Laval” [a Vichy official executed after the war]. “No,” says Clarus,
“he was a roly-poly man…” Surfaces are
deceptive when the Unconscious is calling the shots.
Aventure Malgache also reproduces the
mythical structure of Lifeboat by
equating the rise to power of Michel, a gangster, with a period of misrule: a dark carnival that can only end in when the
Lord of Misrule who presides over it is killed. Although we don’t see Michel go before a
firing squad, we’re assured that the British weren’t fooled by him when they
arrived in Malgache. He sticks his
framed picture of Petain (shown in the first insert used in this little film) under
the fridge, prudently stashes his bottle of Vichy Water -- this is the second
insert -- inside the fridge, an expensive but invaluable item in the tropics in
1944, and puts up a picture of Queen Victoria where Petain had been.
The
last dolly (a cut, actually: Hitchcock’s
own pricey equipment had its limitations) isolates the motto at the top of the
painting: Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense,
Latin for “Shame on anyone who sees evil in it” — an ironic motto that French
spectators in 1944, who spoke a language descended from Latin, would have had
no trouble parsing: Michel, who embodies
Collaboration, would be quickly spotted and put to death by the Free French
accompanying the British invaders, the way the enraged lifeboat passengers execute
Willie when they realize he’s steering them to a concentration camp.
Notes
“Hitchcock’s Aventure Malgache (or the True Story of DZ 91),”
Alain Kerzoncuf, Senses
of Cinema,
Issue 41, November 2014.
Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut
and Helen Scott, Simon & Schuster 1967.
Hitchcock
at Work by
Bill Krohn, Cahiers-Phaidon 2000.
*MacPhail
had been driven to drink by dialogue writer John Michael Hayes, who should have
shared screen credit for the script of The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) with him but didn’t because the ambitious
Hayes was American and a dues-paying member of the WGA, founded in 1954 to look
after the rights of American screenwriters, but not of English writers working
on American films – a situation that the Guild had not yet figured out,
although Hitchcock imposed his own solution:
he never worked with Hayes again.
When Aventure Malgache was
finally released in 1999, MacPhail was properly credited as the co-author of
the screenplay with Clermont. He was
subsequently the credited screenwriter on such classics as Dead of Night, Whiskey Galore
and, for Hitchcock, The Wrong Man. He is cited in books on the Master as the man
who invented the concept of the MacGuffin.
**On
the psychoanalytic symbolism of characters facing away from the camera, see “Cinema
and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories”
by Stephen Heath in Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel
Histories (ed. Janet Bergstrom), University of California Press, 1999,
25-56. Heath discovers this figuration
of the Unconscious in early films about psychoanalysis like G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926)
***The
eerie illumination in the scene where Clarus is denounced to the Gestapo recalls
the scene with Judith Anderson and Joan Fontaine in dead Rebecca’s dressing
room (Rebecca, 1940). Hitchcock disliked Rebecca because he didn’t have complete control when he made it
(cf. the ham-fisted scenes with George
Sanders), but for that very reason it seems to have haunted him, as we can see
in this little scene in Aventure
Malagache where the Unconscious is in the driver’s seat.
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