What Was Done Once Away from the Trusts in New York by Allan Dwan, For Example.

"In his elegy for Allan Dwan, Jean-Claude Biette (CDC 332) called him "a great narrator" and "a great poet of space." An anecdote Dwan told Peter Bogdanovich about his early days shows how these compliments are linked: Scouting for ideas with his cast and crew near Lakeside, California, the young director saw a cliff and filmed a fight that ended with the hero throwing the villain over it. Still in search of a story, he then saw a flume "like a great bridge" which carried water from one ranch to another. Result: a two-reel melodrama in which the villain poisons the flume to kill his neighbor's cattle and is punished by being thrown off the cliff at the end of the film. 

"The story has an archetypal quality. On the one hand, the setting (the cliff) inspires the action that takes place in it (without determining it: other actions could easily have been envisioned); on the other hand, a division of space (the two ranches) and the passageway which links them (the flume) generate a story to justify the action (THE POISONED FLUME, 1911)."

-- Bill Krohn, "The Cliff and the Flume."

Why Get Away from the Trusts in New York?

"They began to hire hoodlums to put us out of business -- either by destroying the camera or by burning down our studios, if we happened to have one. That's one of the reasons most of us went to California, and to distant places, to get away from the packed areas where hoodlums could hide, appear with a gun suddenly and take away the camera. They found that by shooting holes through the camera, they could stop their use and that became their favorite method."

-- Allan Dwan

LISTEN!

the WORD

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for Pedro Costa and Jeanne Balibar
(to be played simultaneously at equal volumes)

FEROCIOUS by Jean-Marie Straub

What I particularly admire in the Dreyer films that I've been able to see or see again over the past few years is their ferocity in respect to the bourgeois world: its notion of justice (THE PRESIDENT, which is one of the most astonishing narrative constructions I've known, and one of the most Griffith-like of films, hence one of the most beautiful), its vanity (the feelings and decors of MICHAEL), its intolerance (DAY OF WRATH, stupefying through its violence, and through its dialectic), its angelic hypocrisy ("She's dead....she's no longer here...she's in heaven," says the father in ORDET, and the son replies: "Yes, but I loved her body, too..."), and its puritanism (GERTRUD, so well-received for that by the Parisians on the Champs-Elysees).

In other respects, VAMPYR ("There are no children here and no dogs") remains, ever since the day I saw it thirteen years ago on rue d'Ulm, for me the most resonant of all films. And in 1933, Dreyer was sending out that call that, apart from Amico and Bertolucci, the present-day Italian filmmakers would do well to finally understand:

"If one is striving to create a realistic space, the same thing must be done with sound. While I am writing these lines, I can hear church bells ring in the distance; now I perceive the buzzing of the elevator; the distant, very-far away clang of a streetcar, the clock of city hall, a door slamming. All these sounds would exist, too, if the walls of my room, instead of seeing a man working, were witnessing a moving, dramatic scene as background to which these sounds might even take on symbolic value -- is it right then to leave them out? ... In the real sound film, the real diction, corresponding to the unpainted face in an actually lived-in room, means common everyday speech as it is spoken by ordinary people."

And at present, when so many young authors dream only of imposing their ideas and their petty reflections in their films, seducing or raping (patronizing Brechtianism, or the utilization of advertising techniques and the propaganda of capitalist society) or even disappearing (collages, etc.), let us listen to Dreyer:

"The Danish author, Johannes V. Jensen, describes 'art' as 'soulfully composed form.' That is a definition which is simple and very much to the point. The same goes for the definition the English philosopher Chesterfield gives to the concept of 'style.' He says 'Style is the dress of thoughts.' That is right, provided that 'the dress' is not too conspicuous, for a characteristic of good style must be that it enters into such an intimate bond with matter that it is absorbed into a higher unity with it. If it imposes and strikes the eye, it is no longer 'style' but 'mannerism.'

"Style in an artistic film is the product of many different components, such as the play of rhythm and composition, the mutual tension of color surfaces, the interaction of light and shadow, the measured gliding of the camera. All these things, in association with the conception that a director has of his material, determines his style...

"I don't underestimate the teamwork performed by cinematographers, color technicians, set decorators, etc., but within the collectivity, the director must remain the driving force, the man behind the work who makes the writer's words resound and the feelings and passions spring forth, so that we are moved and touched... So this is my understanding of a director's importance -- and his responsibility....

"To show that there is a world outside the dullness and boredom of naturalism, the world of the imagination. Of course, this conversion must take place without the director and his collaborators losing their grasp of the world of reality. His remodeled reality must always remain something that the public can recognize and believe in. It is important that the first steps towards abstraction be taken with tact and discretion. One should not shock people, but guide them gently onto new paths.

"Each subject implies a certain voice (route).* And that must be heeded. It is necessary to find the possibility for expressing as many voices (routes) as one can, It is very dangerous to limit oneself to a certain form, a certain style.... That is something I really tried to do: to find a style that has value for only a single film, for this milieu, this action, this character, this subject.

"In the cinema, you cannot play the roll of a Jew, you have to be one."

The fact that Dreyer was never able to produce a film in color (he had thought about it for more than twenty years) nor his film on Christ (a profound revolt against the state and the origins of anti-Semitism) reminds us that we live in a society that is not worth a frog's fart.

Jean-Marie Straub

*Straub's quotations from Dreyer are drawn from four sources: "The Real Talking Film" 1933, "Imagination and Color" (1955) a 1965 interview with Michel Delahaye and an unknown text, respectively. The versions of the first two here are adapted from Donald Skoller's Dreyer in Double Reflection (New York, Dutton, 1973); the third is adapted from the English translation fo the Delahay interview in Andrew Sarris's Interviews with Film Directors (New York, Avon, 1967). In the original French version (in Cahiers du cinema No. 170, Septembre 1965), it isn't clear whether Dreyer is saying "voix" (voice), or "voie" (route). (trans).

-from the FILM AT THE PUBLIC program, "The Cinema of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet", November 2-14 1982. Translation by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

FOR ZACH CAMPBELL

STRAITS OF LOVE AND HATE

~the first three shots of Aien Kyo (Mizoguchi, 1937) without sound~

FOR RICK THOMPSON.

YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED

More mammoth and dutiful work on Straub and Huillet (!): the above is from the Vienna and Munich Filmmuseum's DVD Edition of Klassenverhältnisse (Straub/Huillet, 1984). The details of this edition are astonishing: full production documents, a transcription of the press conference, three documentaries on the film and Straub/Huillet, 44 production stills, an entire book by Wolfram Schuette
 -- read all the details here .

-- See many of the production documents here .

-- Read the press conference in German here .

A true labor of love and, by all indications, the finest edition of a Straub/Huillet film possible on video -- and suddenly existing. More about the disc once I have it in my hand...

The good acquaintances at Terminal Beach also heralded it and included a link to an amazing piece of writing on Huillet/Straub by Giulio Bursi (in Italian), who has worked with the them for years and made a film of the shooting of QUEI LORO INCONTRI called J'ECOUTE!. You should also see what else Terminal Beach is heralding lately...

Thank you Klaus Volkmer!

Tag Gallagher has re-written his monumental book JOHN FORD: THE MAN AND HIS MOVIES (dialectical cinema)

As if this wasn't massive enough, he has made the entire book available for download in pdf form, here: http://rapidshare.com/files/61830908/ford_tag3.pdf.zip .

Tag estimates it is roughly 40% new material, large and small changes, and all the frame enlargements are new. The latter detail is saying quite a lot considering Gallagher is an artist with still frames and their placement.

I was going to write a little something about how much Tag's book has taught me over the past 7 years but this is such a process in motion (as you see!) that it would just be flowery and ill-judged at that.

Grazie Tag

DARK PAGE

"I'm not a man...I'm fifty-five years old, have four human children, six human grandchildren, weigh about one hundred and forty pounds; I eat, sleep, scratch myself and hate lice; but I am not a man.

"...I'm the black sheep of Gotham's flock, the whiskey breath of Stephen Foster, the oldest street in the United States, the tea-water pump. I am the Henry Astor of the Fly Market, Priest of the Parish, Murderer's Alley, the Dead Rabbits. I am exaggerated humor, intense filth. I am an accomplished linguist, can hold my tongue in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Yiddish. I am the rise of the gangs. I am also a mystery. I am Bowery."...

"You're full of hop," said Lance.

--Sam Fuller 1944

(thanks to Bill!)

LIAISONS

by Tag Gallagher



The filmmakers I admire most today are the Straubs, Abel Ferrara and Eric Rohmer.

Rohmer I met once nineteen years ago. I was in Paris researching Rossellini. I called him from a pay phone and then ran halfway across Paris when he said, "Can you be here in twenty minutes?" I found him sitting in a bare empty office writing dialogue in a student bluebook, without pause or hesitation. He was kind and solicitous and "gave" me Jean Gruault. This incident epitomizes Paris for me.

Rohmer's Spartan simplicity seems somehow connected to an Athenian richness in the human and the cinema, as does the simplicity of the Straubs in even barer quarters. And if Rohmer is Paris, where time is measured, the Straubs are Alsace-in-Rome -- the Rome of thirty years ago, not of today -- where the light is more intense, and makes infinity more attractive than time, in order to get inside the awe of things in Frankish fashion.

This was evident even in New York, when Jean-Marie and Daniele came in 1974 to show MOSES UND ARON and afterwards sat on the floor of our apartment watching 16mm prints of DONOVAN'S REEF and PILGRIMAGE. A good quarter century passed before I saw more of them, and not just them but their films too, which are impossible to see in America, even on video. But in 2001 in Turnin where their work was reprised at the Festival, we resumed the same debates as years before without any sense of interval between sentences.

Eventually I asked, "Have you seen any Abel Ferrara?" They had not. But they knew who he was, even knew that in Paris there are people who say there are only the Straubs and Ferrara. "Well, he says he likes your films," I said, hoping to inspire noblesse oblige. Immediately I was challenged: "Prove it? What did he say?" I panicked.

In fact I had met Ferrara a few days before. I had thought I would have to take a weary bus from the Milano airport to Turin, but had checked yet again with the Festival office on the morning of my flight. Came the reply: "Yes, you can ride with Ferrara whose plane arrives ten minutes after yours."

He lay stretched out in the back of the van for two hours. Another sort of simplicity, equally intense but low key and indirect. Here was New York, or more precisely, Union Square. And, thank goodness, I suddenly remembered that he had actually said some thing about the Straubs. I'd asked him what he liked about them and he'd said --
"What's there not to like?!"


Around us, everyone translated. "Write it down", said Jean-Marie, well satisfied. I wrote it down, feeling like a character in MOSES UND ARON. "Now sign it. And date it." I did. He took the page, folded it into his wallet. That was in November 2001.



Last week I got an e-mail from WinterKlaus in Munchen. He wrote:

"I have just his evening returned from Paris. Monday was the avant-premiere of UMILIATI at the Cinematheque...Jean-Marie announced before the screening, that he wouldn't like to talk about the film afterwards -- only one thing before -- 'You know Abel Ferrara?' Common agreement in the public... 'Well, a mutual friend, Tag Gallagher, once told me that he had talked to him about our films, and Ferrara had said to him' -- then he took the piece of paper out of his pocket that you gave to him during that dinner in Turin -- 'What's there not to like' Then he translated this AF quote, admitted never to have seen an AF film and left. Then he came back and added -- 'At this momnet, as this tartuffe, ce tartuffe de Chirac, allows the American bombers to fly over France for Iraq, I prefer to keep silent. I'm in mourning. Iraq is the cradle of our culture, and this is being destroyed now.'"

-2003

WORK, DOUGH, DYNAMITE!

"Work was one of several Chaplin comedies scheduled to be shown at the New-York Historical Society in September of 2001. In the wake of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, however, this film and one other, Dough and Dynamite, were pulled from the program, because each one ends with Charlie emerging from the rubble of a destroyed building."

No he did not emerge from the rubble of a destroyed building and then walk into a Burger King or retailer of jeans. Chaplin fades out.

None of the films were pulled for showing what is still with us even on September mornings: poverty, squalor, exploitation, the barbarous relations between people it brings, unemployment, a face on a barroom floor...

Last image of A KING IN NEW YORK (1957). Chaplin fades out.

After the Chaplin films were pulled in September 2001, an exhibition on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the Cold War began in October at the same New-York Historical Society. There, again, A KING IN NEW YORK could have been shown, or censored. Neither was done.

Careful!

"But you had music playing during the hippopotamus hunt!" 

I said "Yes." 

I felt a bit guilty.

Just like in a good old western I'd wanted to shore up the dramatic moments with music.

But at least I'd used traditional hunting music.

They said, "That's true but a hippo has very good ears. Music would scare it off."

(Jean Rouch on the reactions of the people of Ayoru to Bataille sur le grand fleuve [Hippopotamus Hunt], his film of 1951.)

Digital Video:

"Green is almost uniformly spread over the plants, the wind follows the birds, no one risks seeing the stones die."

("The result is not a broken-in animal but an animal trainer.")

-Eluard/Breton Force of Habit

FOR MUBARAK.......

"We were there in '68 (they were?), and we can tell you it was stupid; there's no point doing it again." This is all they have to sell: the bitterness of '68. In this sense, then, they are a perfect fit for the current electoral grid, whatever their political orientations. Everything is filtered through this grid: Marxism, Maoism, Socialism, etc., and not because actual struggles have revealed new enemies, new problems, or new solutions. It is simply because THE revolution must be declared impossible - everywhere, and for all time. This explains why those concepts which were beginning to function in a very differentiated way (powers, resistances, desires, even 'the plebe') are once again globalised, amassed in the insipid unity of Power, THE Law, the State, etc.. This also explains why the thinking subject has made a comeback: the only possibility for revolution, as far as the New Philosophers are concerned, is the pure act of the thinker who thinks revolution is impossible.

"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function, which perfectly compliments the author -and thinker-function....But there never would have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity. Resistance fighters are usually in love with life. No one was ever put in prison for powerlessness and pessimism - on the contrary! From the perspective of the New Philosophers, the victims were dupes, because they didn't grasp what the New Philosophers have grasped. If I belonged to an association, I would bring a complaint against the New Philosophers: they show just a little too much contempt for the inmates of the Gulag."

(Deleuze)