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The dog and the rope ********** by Serge Daney

Let us suppose this: the history of cinema is the history of certain states of the human body. Of this filmed body, i.e. unlike any other. The publicity photo – of the type that the big Hollywood majors took the trouble of making as a separate thing – speaks of the genealogy of this body (it is neither a sample nor a duplicate, but like an instant theory of the whole figurative system). In its mode of display, one can best read the way its origin was delirious. For where does this body come from? It gradually freed itself from the bottom of the nitrate image where it was palpitating (the burlesque, popular operation on the left: Harry Langdon) to congeal at the front of the acetate stage (the serious, bourgeois operation on the right: Rope by Alfred Hitchcock), like an answer to the children’s game where one starts by asking: animal or mineral? And between these two reigns, nothing. Or, rather, a genocide. Behind the too neutral, smooth wall of Rope is all that had to be forgotten (left in the background of the image and walled off from our gaze) for the body of the star (here Farley Granger, James Stewart, John Dall) to emerge – indisputably. Yes, but in what a state! Clothed bodies, faces chosen for their capacity as reflectors: every hair, every lash, reflecting light! Whereas in front of Langdon’s wall, it’s something altogether different: something is left of the primitive indistinction between the figure and the background, between the body and its shadow. And what emerges is not the image cleansed of all suspicion, the Hitchcockian image, but a reply which is uncertain, parodic, beside the point, in a word: carnivalesque. Between top and bottom, human beast and domestic animal, shadow and light, fur and frock, Langdon hasn’t chosen yet: he’s gaining time. The time that the protagonists of Rope, the professor and his two students, lose by contemplating the knot in which all of cinema, since the talkies, is going to become entangled (se prendre) and lose itself (se perdre) – and us with it.

Serge Daney
Cahiers du cinéma, hors-série spécial photos de films

1978

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Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar

Thanks to Bill K. and Laurent K.

(click picture to enlarge)

From Gum-Chewing Audience to Snifter Audience, Eisenstein and Mexico Still Hanging Inbetween.

Upton Sinclair's novel OIL! is today pointed at the snifter audience (via Paul Thomas Anderson). The editing of Eisenstein's QUE VIVA MEXICO! is wrested from his hands and pointed at the "gum-chewing" audience by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair makes THUNDER OVER MEXICO out of one section of what Eisenstein had shot. The WORKERS FILM AND PHOTO LEAGUE and ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA respond to Sinclair's version below. Eisenstein, back in the U.S.S.R., is hospitalized.

_________________________

"THUNDER OVER MEXICO"

LIES!

Mexico is NOT a natural paradise where happy people live in peace in plenty!

Mexico is NOT the idyllic picture of "beauty and charm" as it has been described by the sponsors of this film!

Mexico is NOT merely the colorful land of the exotic magueys and majestic Mayan temples. In Mexico the masses are oppressed, exploited and degraded by a military dictatorship whose record of cold-blooded murders and ruthless repression ranks with that of Machado, deposed Cuban tyrant.

The startling beauty of the Mexican land is undeniable, and the Soviet cameraman Edourd Tisse, has succeeded in capturing that beauty in every single and unforgettable foot of this film.

But the Mexican peasants are being driven off this picturesque land by force of arms! Murder bands calling themselves "Liga de Defensa Social," hired by the Wall Street-controlled Calless-Rodriguez government of landowners, plunder and exterminate the peons wherever they offer resistance to forcible eviction from the land.

About these deeds there is nothing either particularly "charming" or "beautiful." No more so than the assassination of labor leaders and suppression of the trade unions. No more so than the wholesale exile of hundreds of intellectuals, workers and peasants to the dreaded "Mexican Devil's Island," Islas Marias.

"THUNDER OVER MEXICO" hails the perpetrators of these deeds and glorifies their existence! HOW? By singing the praises of what it calls "The New Mexico." By showing the peasantry uplifted and "civilized" by the present regime. By asking us to believe that this mythical "New Mexico" is primarily concerned with the welfare of the Mexican people!

That is why we say that "THUNDER OVER MEXICO" lies! That is why we say that to credit this film to Sergei Eisenstein, Soviet director, is adding insult to injury!

No barrage of ballyhoo and publicity can convince us that a director responsible for the greatest films ever made dealing with the struggle of the Soviet masses for emancipation from Czarist oppression and tyranny (POTEMKIN, OCTOBER, STRIKE, OLD AND NEW), could have turned out the monstrous distortion of reality that is the present version of what was once entitled QUE VIVA MEXICO! "THUNDER OVER MEXICO" was not edited by Eisenstein but by Hollywood "montage masters" who completely distorted Eisenstein's original conception of a film that was intended to satirize rather than glorify the present reactionary Mexican regime.

We call upon all movie-goers to demand the withdrawal of this film and the restitution of the original negative to Eisenstein. LET YOUR PROTEST BE HEARD WHEREVER THE FILM IS EXHIBITED. SEND YOUR PROTEST TO STOP THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE FILM!

The releasers of "THUNDER OVER MEXICO" in their advance publicity express the pious hope that their film might be appreciated by they call the "gum-chewing" movie-going audience.

We call upon you, the "gum-chewing" audience to show your appreciation of "THUNDER OF MEXICO" by forcing the film off the screen!

Send protests immediately to SOL LESSER, distributor, Radio City Bldg., NYC
Send protests to ARTHUR MAYER, Mgr., Rialto Theatre, Times Square, NYC

WORKERS FILM AND PHOTO LEAGUE, 220 East 14th Street.
ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 90 East 10th Street.

P. S. We wish to make it clear that we are in no wise connected with groups or individuals who have been campaigning against "THUNDER OVER MEXICO" on the basis of rumors, personalities gossip.

______________________________

1933

This is a reproduction of a Handbill protesting the mutilation of QUE VIVA MEXICO!. The "gum-chewing" reference is in reaction to Upton Sinclair's statement that he wanted to present a film to which the "gum-chewing audience" could respond. 

Today, dias felizes reminds us that JUVENTUDE EM MARCHA (Pedro Costa, 2006), known to us in the States as COLOSSAL YOUTH, will now be known to many more as EN AVANT, JEUNESSE! by its release, at last, in France, February 13th 2008. The delay of the film's release was not willed by the makers of the film. There were problems with the initial distributor.

Kino Slang will soon follow up on this story as reports of the the film's current reception come over the wire.

Let's be optimistic for a moment, and hope indeed that this succession of titles, unintentionally a progression, but beautiful, is taken as a directive: Youth on the march. Colossal youth. Forward, youth!

The film is playing in French theaters, not in the Museum. The cinema is in the cinema. dias felizes has also linked to a terrific text precisely on the question of how and if, from Costa's point of view, it could be anywhere else.

It is a roundtable with writer and Witt de With Centre for Contemporary Art director/curator Catherine David, writer/Museum director/curator Chris Dercon, and Pedro Costa. Now, museums and acadamies often purport to be public, radical places, but no one shifts and leaves works/texts/events behind without a trace as quickly as them, unfortunately. They are untrustworthy in this regard....I recommend saving or printing the text of this roundtable if you are interested in referring to it in the future. Here it is:

From black box to white cube

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.