KINO SLANG
at the
Echo Park Film Center
SATURDAY
January 11th, 2020
Doors at 7:30pm
$5 Suggested Donation
Echo Park Film Center
1200 North Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA. 90026
presents
A KING IN NEW YORK
preceded by
*
Special Thanks to Chloe Reyes, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dr. Macro, The Chaplin Office and Association Chaplin.
“Kino Slang” is a series of repertory cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center. We project the silent alarms and naked dawns to be found nowhere else but the cinema. Past programs have included the films of Maurice Tourneur, Jean-Luc Godard, Boris Barnet, Jerry Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar G. Ulmer, Pedro Costa, Jacques Tourneur, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, João César Monteiro, Esfir Shub, Carl Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu.
presents
A KING IN NEW YORK
(Charles Chaplin, 1957)
preceded by
THE WALLS OF SANA'A
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974)
and
"The Mississippi" sequence of
SONG OF THE RIVERS
(Joris Ivens, 1954)
*
A KING IN NEW YORK
U.K. 1957. 110 minutes.
Produced, Written, and Directed by Charles Chaplin. Attica Film Company. Distributor: Archway. Music by Charles Chaplin, arranged by Boris Sarbek and conducted by Leighton Lucas. Cinematography: Georges Perinal. Associate Producer: Jerome Epstein. Production Manager: Mickey Delamar. Art Director: Allan Harris. Assistant Director: Rene Dupont. Camera Operator: Jeff Seaholme. Editor: John Seabourne. Sound: John Cox, Bert Ross, Bob Jones. Sound System: Westrex. Make-up: Stuart Freeborn. Hair: Helen Penfold. Continuity: Barbara Cole. With: Charles Chaplin (King Shahdov), Maxine Audley (Queen Irene), Oliver Johnston (Ambassador Jaume), Michael Chaplin (Rupert Macabee), Dawn Addams (Ann Kay), Sidney James (Johnson), Robert Arden (liftboy), John McLaren (Mr. Macabee), Harry Green (Lawyer Green), Jerry Desmonde (Prime Minister Voudel), George Woodbridge (Member of Atomic Commission), Clifford Buckton (Member of Atomic Commission), Vincent Lawson (Member of Atomic Commission), George Turzzi and Laurie Lupino Lane (Nightclub Vaudevillians).
SYNOPSIS
King Shahdov (Charlie Chaplin) of Estrovia has fled his own country to the U.S, after a revolution. In New York his Majesty is in dire need of cash. He quickly finds that in America his royal title is an asset to be exploited. Through a young woman TV producer (Dawn Addams) he is unknowingly filmed and entrapped into a deodorant commercial, which sets off a wave of advertisement offers to the King. On a visit to a progressivist school he meets a 12-year-old Marxist child prodigy (Michael Chaplin). He takes the boy in from the cold when his parents are detained for refusing to name names to the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities. The King is now suspected of Communist subversion, put under surveillance, and finds himself ducking subpoenas to testify before the Committee.
"In A KING IN NEW YORK (1957), Chaplin is working in a more directly autobiographical mode depicting himself literally as a deposed king living in exile, and casting his own son Michael as a 'communist' malcontent youth whom the King takes under his wing. Made in England after Chaplin was forcibly barred from re-entering the United States, the film remains one of his most controversial works.
"Even on a Steenbeck, Chaplin’s penultimate feature and last extended performance has such a naked power of embarrassment and assault that one can see right away why so many have recoiled from it. Chaplin himself avoids any mention of it in the text of his Autobiography; most reports refer to it as a shameful debacle; and even such an indefatigable enthusiast as Bazin virtually threw in the towel. So far as I can gather, only Rossellini — seconded by some of his wilder Cahiers disciples — had the perspicacity in 1957 to call it the film of a free man. Clearly the objections can’t be traced back to any failures of expression: how many films are more expressive than Chaplin’s? No, the discomfort seems to be with the things that are expressed, more autobiographical and candid in their revelations than anything we are ordinarily accustomed to; and without this “personal” reading, the film is almost meaningless.
"In other words, Chaplin’s letter of spite and sorrow to America asserts personal indignation — perhaps the least palatable form to an audience, because it is the most honest, consequently the most apt. In place of generalized invective, we largely get Chaplin’s own experience, which includes his complex and ambivalent implication in the American dream: the King’s own silliness in the presence of Dawn Addams. But the horrible taste of the plastic surgery episodes, which immediately derive from this, is not only Chaplin’s transgression, but America’s too; and the charge that most of the film isn’t very funny should be met with the reply that, as at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR and throughout much of MONSIEUR VERDOUX, there are times when laughter is beside the point. The implication of Chaplin being hounded out of America was that he didn’t deserve to stay; the implication of a KING IN NEW YORK (made four years later) is that America didn’t deserve Chaplin. And maybe it didn’t. How could McCarthy-crazed America have possibly appreciated the lucidity that the film has to offer, which, going beyond Tashlin, reveals the true moral and aesthetic tackiness of the U.S. in the mid-Fifties, without any digestible sweetening? That America in the mid-Fifties had more than this is obvious, and one can look elsewhere to find it. But one can’t go anywhere else to find the devastating accuracy or justice of his last testament."
Jonathan Rosenbaum,
March 25, 1976. Film Comment July-August 1976
"(In addition to explosive laughs) A KING NEW YORK is also a point of view as general as possible on the condition of man in modern civilization. Chaplin expects the worst of this civilization, because it destroys man. It is the carrier of germs that doom man to inevitable destruction. (...)
"Some will say that this idea is not new, that Chaplin does not have a monopoly on pessimism, that Fritz Lang, for example, professes a similar point of view. No doubt, but A KING IN NEW YORK's demonstration of it is very original and you'd have to search far and wide to find a film as tonic, full of vitality, and devoid of illusions. Chaplin indeed describes a process of gangrene. He shows how a civilization, after having contaminated the body, destroys the soul, eats away at its individuality, leaving behind only an anonymous man dominated by fear."
Jean Domarchi, "L'Emigrant"
Cahiers du cinéma no. 77, Dec. 1957
*
THE WALLS OF SANA'A
LE MURA DI SANA. Italy, Yemen. 1974. 13 minutes.
Written and Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Produced by Franco Rossellini. Commentary by P.P.P. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Editor: Tatiana Casini. Sound Recording: Cinefonico-Palatino. Shot in 1970. Dedicated to this Yemenite scarecrow.
While making THE DECAMERON Pasolini fell in love with the city of Sana'a, the capital of North Yemen, and decided to shoot a short documentary plea for its protection. He shot the film quickly, in one Sunday, in 1970.
He described Sana'a as being akin to the "once beautiful city of Venice, perched not on the sea, but on the dirty dust of the desert between gardens of palm and grain." Pasolini saw before him a force of the past, an ancient testimony against the degradation caused by modernization and the rapid and senseless construction of new buildings. He saw forms representing a country whose history seemed to have been suspended for centuries, if not millennia: the city of Sana'a alone is 2,500 years old.
Sana'a, opening itself to the ways of consumerism, adopted a chaotic and miserable path towards industrial development, a process already nearly complete in Europe. A sign of the disaster: around the central part of the city--with its incomparable design of rammed earth structures of burnt brick decorated with geometric accents in white gypsum-- the encircling wall of the city "which gave it that beautiful form of so many ancient cities" (P.P.P.) has been razed to give way to the construction of tiny tenements and a number of very ambitious cement monstrosities.
Describing the beauty of Sana'a, its unity ripped apart by the now deeply entrenched ideology of 'progress', Pasolini wishes to convey a particular message: the risk that such ideology will attack and destroy more countries, particularly those that still maintain their links with history. In the film, for the sake of comparison, Pasolini includes a brief profile of a small Italian town shot in 1974, the town of Orte, framed "to show only the perfection of its style, it's absolute form," with intellectuals and townspeople gazing up at it. The town is well-preserved within its walls, but nevertheless disfigured by the presence of a massive skyscraper.
The people discuss implications of this.
As an understanding of one of the oldest cities on Earth, THE WALLS OF SANA'A is impressionistic. It is a militant film, as stated at the outset, a plea to UNESCO to admit Sana'a as a World Heritage Site, to protect it from the speculation that had already ruined many European cities.
Seen today one realizes something very painful: a certain failure of Pasolini (his haste, his addressing of UNESCO rather than the Yemenis, to impart the warning to them as someone who had suffered modernization, identified its deprivations, came to conclusions) and a much greater historical failure, still unaddressed:
Sana'a was indeed admitted as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986, independently of the efforts of this film. In 2015, after being relatively protected by various rulers (the Ottoman Empire, etc.) pre-dating even the birth of Christ, the old city of Sana'a, still inhabited by ordinary people, was almost completely destroyed by American bombs dropped by Saudi Arabian-led forces in its war of aggression on Yemen. The destruction is ongoing, the human toll in numbers beyond those of the Final Solution.
(Adapted by A.R.
from the synopsis by Fondo Pasolini.
A Future Life, ed. Laura Betti,1988.)
*
SONG OF THE RIVERS
DAS LIED DER STRÖME
East Germany-G.D.R. 1954.
**11 minute excerpt, Sequence: "The Mississippi".**
Directed by Joris Ivens. DEFA Studios for Newsreel and Documentary Films, Berlin, and the World International Trade Union. Written by Vladimir Pozner, Joris Ivens. Camera: Erich Nitzschmann, Ruy Santos, Anatoli Koloschin, Sascha Vierny, Maximilian Scheer, and many others. Montage: Ella Ensink, Traute Vishnevsky. Commentary: Vladimir Pozner, Maximilian Scheer. Music: Dmitri Shostakovich. Lyrics: Bertolt Brecht, Semion Kirsanov. Singers: Paul Robeson, Ernst Busch. Dedicated to the people who work on and around the world's six great rivers.
Shot in many countries by different film crews and later edited by Dutch filmmaker Ivens with a commentary by Vladimir Pozner, this sprawling film celebrates the international workers movement along six major rivers: the Volga, Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, Amazon, and Yangtze. It was produced by East Germany's Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) for the World Federation of Trade Unions, and includes a stirring score by Dmitri Shostakovich with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, sung by Ernst Busch and Paul Robeson.
We will be screening only an 11-minute excerpt from this extraordinary film: the sequence on oppression and the Cold War, "The Mississippi". But it is with full pleasure that we reintroduce SONG OF THE RIVERS to the U.S. after its distribution was outright prohibited here during the Cold War years.
The sequence we've chosen is a critique on the difficulty of happiness under the many contradictions, injustices, and deprivations of capitalism. Unlike the bulk of the film, which glorifies workers solidarity, this sequence condemns: poverty, slavery, and its masters. Through the strength of Pozner's engraving-like commentary, which makes strange these images of exploitation and hunger, and through a montage particularly alive to the desperate matter on the screen as it clashes ironically and tragically with the proclamations and questions of the voice-over, the sequence has a power of revelation and provocation not typically found in the cinema, but elsewhere, in Brecht's epigram-photobook The War Primer (1955) or Goya's The Disasters of War. Indeed SONG OF THE RIVERS was turned into a photobook, with a cover painting offered in solidarity by Picasso.
In France this particular sequence of SONG OF THE RIVERS was censored at the time of its release. Over the censored passages the filmmakers cunningly "let black film roll in the space where scenes had been cut. At the Paris premiere of the film, DEFA producer Hans Wegner recounts, there was a 'whole stretch of black film after the panning shot to the Statue of Liberty in New York. This way, the spectators knew very clearly that certain things were being said about America that the censors did not like'" (Comrades of Color, Quinn Siobodian). The sympathetic crowd filled in the blanks.
SONG OF THE RIVERS is practically unknown today, even among lovers and scholars of Ivens, yet it is said to have been seen by 250 million people in the Communist countries.
...
 |
Shostakovich and Brecht at work on the SONGS
|
*
Program total running time: 2 hours and 15 minutes.
There will be no introductions.
Program Notes provided at the door.
Doors at 7:30pm, film at 8pm.
Program Notes provided at the door.
Doors at 7:30pm, film at 8pm.
$5 Suggested Donation.
Special Thanks to Chloe Reyes, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dr. Macro, The Chaplin Office and Association Chaplin.
“Kino Slang” is a series of repertory cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center. We project the silent alarms and naked dawns to be found nowhere else but the cinema. Past programs have included the films of Maurice Tourneur, Jean-Luc Godard, Boris Barnet, Jerry Lewis, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar G. Ulmer, Pedro Costa, Jacques Tourneur, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Charlie Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, João César Monteiro, Esfir Shub, Carl Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu.
*
Chaplin at work on A KING IN NEW YORK  |
*
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