Charlie Chaplin (in Vevey) to Lion Feuchtwanger (in Los Angeles) :
"...glad to hear from you in that distant, remote country of California. It is so wonderful to be away from that creepy cancer of hate where one speaks in whispers, and to abide in a political temperature where everything is normal contrasted to that torrid, dried-up prune-souled desert ofa country you live in. Even at its best, with its vast arid stretches, its bleached sun-kissed hills, its bleak sun-lit Pacific Ocean, its bleak acres of oil derricks and its bleak thriving prosperity, it makes me shudder to think that I spent 40 years of my life in it."

Chaplin (Switzerland) to James Agee (New York) :

"Firstly, I am so glad to be out of that stink-pot of a country of yours. I should have done it in 1930 when I was over here the last time. I never really wanted to come back then, but the fates knew best because I would never have met Oona and our five children! To be over here, away from that torrid atmosphere, is like stepping out of the death house into the free sunlight. occasionally, some sends us a New York Tribune -- its dark news makes me shudder. It's nothing but Dulles'* vomit all over the front page. And the belly-aching about the charity they are giving to the world. Oh, what a stink-pot country! As the negro says about living in Paris: 'Colored folks is quality here,' so I say about Europe: 'Charlie's the tops'."

*John Foster Dulles (February 25, 1888 – May 24, 1959) was an American statesman who served as Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism around the world, particularly in the Middle East. He advocated support of the French in their war against the Viet Minh in Indochina and famously refused to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference in 1954.

good work

Artavazd Peleshian is "working on the final variant of the scenario" for his new film Homo Sapiens which should begin shooting in late 2007, reports Armenian newspaper Noyan Tapan. Peleshian has had a project by this name planned since 1987 ( an overview of his work can be read here , and a better one in French here ). Above, Peleshian at the Yerevan International Film Festival in November 2006, there to accept a Paradjanov Lifetime Achievement Award.

Adrian Martin also informs me that Hermine Karagheuz (see below post) will be doing performance-readings of texts and poems by Paradjanov at the Magic Cinema Paradjanov retrospective in Bobigny, France this month. Four of Peleshian's film will also be part of the retrospective. Anyone wondering what a retrospective of a filmmaker should consist of should take a look at the program here (open the pdf): all of Paradjanov's films, fourteen documentaries, eight films by filmmakers with "elective affinities" (Dovzhenko, Fellini, Pasolini, Tarkovsky), eight "Armenian Friends", five "Russian and Georgian disciples", and four Paradjanov-influenced films from Iran.

Two Notes — Hermine, Nevermore, Lip- and Lap- kina

Wildly different climates when....

....in 1977, Jonathan Rosenbaum is moved to say:

"I can only hazard the personal conviction that, with the passage of time, both films (Duelle and Noroît) will be recognised as significant extensions of (and advances in) Rivette's explorations - even if, from the present standpoint, the former seems to hark back to some of the illusionist premises of Rivette's earliest work..." (Introduction to Rivette: Texts and Interviews, now thankfully available here )

...and in 2003 Jonathan Takagi is moved to report:

"The moods (of Histoire de Marie et Julien) range from troubling and disturbing to lighthearted, especially in Julien’s interaction with his cat, Nevermore. Originally the cat was to have a speaking part. Some have reproached the film for the scenes in which the cat obviously makes some “mistakes” such as watching the boom microphone or scrambling back from the approaching camera." (from Jonathan T.'s wonderfully lively Paris Journal on Film Journey )

The twists and turns of fate in the life of anti-illusionism since Duelle are too much for me, though it does seem right absent in Rivette after the unheralded frame lines of the final showdown/lesson in Le Pont du Nord (1982). One thing is for certain: anti-illusionism in general has been utterly co-opted since the era of Duelle to aggrandize the power of advertising, cynicism, reveling in the "lie" of it all, but telegraphing loud and clear nonetheless (this is probably the relief that's felt in seeing home and cell-phone video on YouTube, they're "saying nothing", seeing/hearing everything).

Duelle itself has aged magnificently (my copy thanks to Travis Miles): a story of sun and moon goddesses, seers, and one girl-detective (only in flashes, like Jerry Lewis in It$ Only Money [Tashlin]) played Hermine Karagheuz, with a face, and some gestures, straight from the silent period. There's second-rate magic/illusion by way of tonic lighting changes, and anti-illusionistic but pro-hypnotic richness in the variations of music and body (musical improvisations blatantly played onscreen by Jean Weiner who is consistently surprising when he appears), radical shifts in acting, posture, and costume (Berto's extremely diverse donning  is such a shock each time, that this alone has the odd effect of strengthening the fiction on the one hand, and blaring it's artificiality on the other). Every move of the body and trembling of the fiction threaten to tear the screen to ribbons (one of Karagheuz's screams out of nowhere nearly does). In any case, Rosenbaum seems excited (at least I was) in his footnote on the film and what came after:

"While Duelle might be described, from a strictly commercial standpoint, as a film 'aimed' at a particular kind of audience which no longer exists, the more ambitious and radical procedures of Noroît suggest both an acceptance of the fact of this 'lost audience' and a subsequent liberation from this frame of reference -- thereby marking a return to the sort of experimentation and 'pure research' largely abandoned by Rivette after Spectre."

Alas, 30 years on, Rivette gets reproached when in Histoire de Marie et Julien (2004) he crystalizes some of his former narrative terror and anti-illusionism into one brief shot of a cat on a man's chest recoiling from the camera and the boom, the whole appartus bearing down on them in a tracking shot. A Bazinian anti-illusionism. Once the camera settles, the cat stares up at the boom mic. Perhaps the man (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is "covering" for the cat when he looks up too and says "nosing around upstairs again? Don't lie, I can see it in your whiskers." This being a film by Rivette the line is sinister (what fiction/terror hovers overhead of our forward stare?), the scene tells a terrible truth on at least two levels, and Rivette once again revives the stakes of the tracking shot to a life or death situation.

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On another note, I was recently struck by Ossos (1997, Pedro Costa), the films ineffable "lead" Mariya Lipkina, and the resemblence of her name to Marfa Lapkina, the "lead" of Eisenstein's The General Line. Mariya Lipkina was not one of the real-life inhabitants of Fountainhas, the district where Costa has been making films for 10 years; she had in fact acted in six Russian films prior to Ossos (quite a few considering her young age). What one wonders is why exactly her filmography stops at Ossos?

Marfa Lapkina, of The General Line, was cast according to the Soviet practice of "typage" (consider the difference in meaning between the word "types" in a capitalist society, and a society attempting communism). In Helen Grace's brilliant article "Hegel's Grave" she describes "typage" as: "a theory which gives a place in the history of the image to figures who are invisible to history."

"If however this face and this body (Marfa's) should disappear from cinema, then it would mean that all human bodies like it are doomed to disappearance not only from the space of representation but from life itself, all these bodies in the name of which an entire moral economy has been formed in the last century and a half. Yes, of course they will die, but I'm speaking more of the prospect of an impression that they never existed at all and that it is only the great men - the Eisensteins, the Hegels - who deserve to be remembered. It is also the concept of a particular ideal cinematic figure - the mass hero - whose future is at stake here."

A similar plea could be made for every face and body in Costa's cinema post-Ossos, namely those that inhabit No quarto da Vanda, Ou git votre sourire enfoui?, and Juventude em marcha. But where has that left Mariya Lipkina? I don't know. Costa obviously stays close those in his films; Thom Andersen reports that Alberto Barros, "Lento", had to explain one of Juventude em marcha's major plot points to Costa after the premiere at Cannes.

Marfa Lapkina did not see Eisenstein's film until fifty years after its making (apparently, in 1978, a film was made of Lapkina's first viewing).

the old and the new (click here for clip)

the Knorr cubes referred to earlier. the ones Carla went to jail for.

"It is unimaginable, at present, for a young person who wants to make a short film to go to a producer and say: 'alright sir, I don't know what to make, I don't know what cinema is but I want to make a film.' Any responsible filmmaker must say that, it is the truth. "

-- Pedro Costa

Zita, Zita...

Geny, Geny...

Nhurro, Pango, Yuran, Chumbito, Nhurro...

Climax, Climax...

Fly, Fly...

Blondie, Blondie...

Vanda, Vanda...

Paulo, Paulo...

da Luz, da Luz...

Nuna, Nuna...

Fatima, Fatima...

Lena, Lena...

Emilia, Emilia...

Lento, Lento...

Ventura, Ventura...

Yuran, Yuran...

Nando, Nando...

Carla, Carla (imprisoned for Knorr cubes!)...

.No quarto da Vanda.

CAREFULLY!

"But then, what else happens? 1619, you've got white slaves and you've got black slaves. You have the first representative assembly that takes place as modeled on the corporation, but it is attempt at democratic elections, the first representative assembly. They gathered July 30, 1619. They cancelled August 4, because it got too hot. And thirteen days later, here comes the boat with the first Africans. And at that time, slavery was not racialized.
"You had white slaves and you had black slaves.
But the white slaves, you look on the register, 1621, they had names like James Stewart and Charles McGregor. But you look on the right side and you see negro, negro, negro, negro. So even before slavery became a perpetual and inheritable structure of domination that would exploit the labor of Africans and devalue their sense of who they were and view their bodies as an abomination, you already had the black problematic of namelessness. White supremacy was already setting in as another dominant ideology to ensure that these working people do not come together.
"It's a creation of different worlds, so that the de facto white supremacist segregation that would be part and parcel of the formation of the American Empire would constitute very different worlds and constitute a major challenge to what it means to be a leftist in America from 1776 up until 1963, given the overthrow of American apartheid, which took place in the ’60s"
-Cornel West, 2007


Clarity. Psychology. Logic.

"Now there's one modern day lie that we want to attack and then move on very
quickly and that is the lie that says anything all black is bad. Now, you’re all
a college university crowd. You’ve taken your basic logic course. You know about
a major premise and minor premise. So people have been telling me anything all
black is bad. Let’s make that our major premise. Major premise: Anything all
black is bad. Minor premise or particular premise: I am all black.
Therefore...
I’m never going to be put in that trick bag; I am all black
and I’m all good, dig it. Anything all black is not necessarily bad. Anything
all black is only bad when you use force to keep whites out. Now that’s what
white people have done in this country, and they’re projecting their same fears
and guilt on us, and we won’t have it, we won't have it. Let them handle their
own fears and their own guilt. Let them find their own psychologists. We refuse
to be the therapy for white society any longer. We have gone mad trying to do
it. We have gone stark raving mad trying to do it. "
-Stokely Carmichael,
1966

Different worlds, still, as according to the FBI (Kwame Ture)


Careful! - Wu Tang Clan

Somethin in the slum went rum-pum-pum-pum...
Yo somethin in the street went, BANG BANG
Makin it hard for you to do your THANG THANG
Clarity -- tracking shot. Wu Tang versus "Mr. Spectacle".
"Naggers got guns! Naggers got guns! Naggers got guns!" --Bobby Seale imitating police reaction to one of the first Black Panther community patrols in Oakland, California. (from AK Press released recording of rally in 1968).

Syringes, rubber bands, needles, the 60's...

film: Murder of Fred Hampton: mock trial.
this was the real life trial of Fred Hampton, carried out by Chicago police and FBI:





I put a spell on you, Nina Simone: shot counter shot.



references:
( "What it Means to be Leftist in the 21st Century" -- Cornel West)
( "Black Power" -- Stokely C.)

JULY TRIP

Waël Noureddine:

When the last war began, I was far away, in my house in Paris. I just wanted one thing: to return to Beirut as soon as possible and to start to shoot, they were historical moments. This film had become for me the essential film: to film to prevent the repetition in loop of the story, and create a bank of images for future generations. I never understood why there were so few films directed during the war in Lebanon. Except some rare films, nothing remains of this time. The war however needed more attentions. (September 2006)

[July Trip is a documentary essay shot in Lebanon during the last war in July 2006. Filmed in 16 mm and HDV, this film is more an essay than a documentary. Using connections between video and cinema, Wael Noureddine tells of the repercussions of the last war in Lebanon. The film plunges us in a universe in war: the images shot in 16mm sublimate a tension, frightening because of the lack of sound. An incipit in silence, almost a reference made to all the noises caused by the bombs, by the explosions, which will follow to this unconventional beginning. More than to give us his version of the war in Lebanon, the director suggests to us keys of reading throughout film. What does one have to think about the foreign journalists, who put themselves in scene in front of the camera? They remain bits of humanity behind the cameras which pile up in front of a corpse in rigor mortis?Do we really share this tabloid information and these scoops which relax us so much sitted on our sofas IKEA? Wael Noureddine does not formulate answers to all these questions, but lets the images and sound go on to make us become aware of our manipulation, of "a true" reality which hides behind the television news of the 20:00. We travel through the South of Lebanon, diverted by a torn landscape: a limpid sky, a blue sea, make this contrast even heavier. The Mediterranean sea, heart of civilization, was trapped by a too "human" history, nature seeks to rebel while making us weigh his beauty, the human "work" being, on the other hand, "monstrous". The repercussions of the war are there in front of our eyes, so present that we would like to go up on this boat with Europeans and come back home.](from the Mediterranean Films website)

for Akasaka Diasuke...

...reverse shot ... ?

"Normal conversation! Family atmosphere!"

With a floppy hat on but with no one around (my writing desk) I say the same thing as Peter Falk...normal conversation, family atmosphere!

If cinephilia is a history of stubborn orphans and elected families (Daney) I've been blessed with good aunts, uncles and cousins. Past contributions to Kino Slang have made the thing worthwhile to me; now and in the future I'd like to intensify this in the interest of polemics, contrapuntuality; if not that, then at least sprightliness (you bastard! such words about a blog! it's only words and images put together!). John Gianvito's film image and the below series on Cassavetes by my compatriot Charles Leary are steps in this direction. Charles has done incredible work for the William K. Everson website and he continues to write on Cassavetes, among others.

-andy r.

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“It’s a tradition. Actresses get slapped. It’s a tradition.”
– Manny (Ben Gazzara), Opening Night

John Cassavetes runs through scene in Ben Carruthers’ place, with Jacqueline Walcott. Shadows (1959)


Bobby Darin and Marilyn Chambers. Too Late Blues (1961)

Slap to bring her back from the dead; Seymour Cassell and Lynn Carlin, Faces (1968)

"You're not the first guy to ever punch his wife out." Ben Gazzara, Meta Shaw, Lorraine MacMartin John Cassavetes, Peter Falk in Husbands (1970)

Cassavetes engages the whole body in motion for the force of a slap of Rowlands. Rowlands: “The secret is that the person who’s doing the hitting is in the foreground and he pulls his hand back to the camera. It’s not the forward motion of the slap you see. His hand doesn’t touch you but, as it looks like he’s hitting you, you have to snap your head back. At the same time, what I did was an old stage trick of clapping my hands loudly. You don’t need that on film because you can always put the sound in…the crew threw down the lights and anything else they were holding and rushed and grabbed John by both arms.” (from Judith Christ, ed., Take 22; also recounted on DVD commentary). Minnie and Moskowitz (1971).

In the 1983 draft of the screenplay for Love Streams, upon the arrival of Sarah (Rowlands) at Robert’s (Cassavetes) home, the following takes place:

ROBERT: I hate the word love. When someone says I love you, that means they want to kill you.

SARAH: If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead, because I still have my magical powers. And I never do it with a knife or a gun.

The boy has been watching, taking it all seriously.

Robert lunges at Sarah, and she throws him down to the ground in a shot. Robert springs to his feet.

ALBIE (screams) Dad!

Robert moves to her and slaps her across the face. It's a fake slap; something they have done a thousand times before. Sarah gets up.

SARAH: I need a drink. Just one. I'm trying to stay balanced.

“See what you made me do!” Peter Falk rehearses the scene with Cassavetes, taking Rowlands’ in A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Another rehearsal, Cassavetes slapping Falk as Mario Gallo discretely looks on.

Cassavetes demonstrates (for Falk) the slapping of Rowlands atop the couch, as Cassavetes’s parents, Fred Draper, and Eddie Shaw look on.

Before we know what is happening, Rachel (Azizi Johari) slaps an auditioning dancer. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

While Manny asks Myrtle on the phone, “What’s wrong with being slapped?” he is also annoyed by his wife Dorothy’s pantomime and asks her to stop. She (Zohra Lampert) mimics a punch (slap) to her face, making a noise of contact with her mouth, and falls limp to the bed. Opening Night (1977) .

“I’m gonna bury that bastard.”

First, Gloria (Rowlands) slaps “the sissy” (Gaetano Lisi) then braces herself for his counter. Gloria (1980)

The tradition runs its course, and this is the last slap in a Cassavetes film.

This piece is by Charles Leary.

Profit motive and the whispering wind

Communiqué from John Gianvito! this image from his latest film...

Luc Moullet part one...

In preparation for an upcoming, yet-to-be solidified, roundtable discussion on Luc Moullet, here are two of his early critical pieces for Cahiers du cinéma. I have not found any further information on La Punition, the first film under consideration, but no matter, Moullet's article still has many interesting ideas, and also serves to remind that, at it's inception Cahiers was officially called: Cahiers du cinéma, Revue mensuelle du cinéma et du télécinéma.

YOU COULD SEE LA PUNITION THREE OR FOUR TIMES

La Punition (Jean Rouch, 1962)

From French television viewers to specialists in cinema verite, nearly everyone has condemned La Punition as a kind of cinema lie. Their attitude is unjustified because it confuses three very different elements: film, truth, and cinema verite. For example, we have no right to say that La Punition is bad because it's untrue (Rossif's documentaries are true, but look at the result), or because it's not real cinema verite (neither is The Rules of the Game), or because its director or, more precisely, its producer (and who should we believe if they disagree?) might incorrectly claim it is. In such a case it would have been enough if they had said nothing, or were from a place (Afghanistan) or time (1909-1914) forgotten by interviewers, for the film to be considered good. The truth of La Punition isn't apparent without the active participation of the television viewer, who in talking or doing the dishes while trying to watch the film, fails to comply, fails to participate. This is not the kind of passivity that a nerve-wraking dramatic intrigue forces you into. The audience has to actively interpret the film to understand at which level of truth the film situates itself. If we relax our attention, we lose the sense of the film. It's possible to watch La Punition three or four times without it ever being the same film. Even if it were eight hours long, it would be equally compelling. In this light, it seems rather unnecessary to cut six or eight minutes out of La Punition, simply to broadcast the full version of Cuba Si! afterwards. Here we have an exciting film devoid of eroticism and accessible to everyone, which would shatter box office records if the French didn't prefer, in place of simple, direct cinema (La Punition, Adieu Philippine, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc), the preciocity of indirect cinema(Melodie en sous-sol, La Grande Evasion, La Guerre des boutons), whose useless digressions, dullness, and repetitiveness in the end reflect purely commercial values. Such values enable viewers to turn their attention from films in which a handful of powerful scenes leave lasting impressions on minds no longer required to confront the disturbing reality of unadorned facts.

Luc Moullet, Cahiers du cinema, May 1964

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A WESTERN WITHOUT INDIANS

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
Luc Moullet

I hate westerns. That's why I adore Rio Bravo. The genre annoys me because, although the sentiments it portrays are admirable, they are almost always based on principle rather than fact. What little directing exists is concerned with something other than itself --personal problems, politics, technique. It denies the spirit of the true western and presents its opposite: emphasis, decorum, lyricism.Yet, Rio Bravo is pretty much the opposite of Johnny Guitar. There's nothing intrinsically poetic about the film although the end result is a kind of poetry. As always with Hawks the rules of the game are respected, at least until that moment when the director has hadenough. Rio Bravo is an extremely original film in that it's a western about confinement in which there are no Indians, landscapes, or chase scenes. It does something rare in rediscovering the essence of the genre, but it does so in this rather remarkable way (whereas Red River and Big Sky arrive at the same result without breaking with tradition). Rio Bravo brings to mind a thriller like To Have and Have Not or a meldrama, like Barbary Coast. So why did Hawks make this western? Because it enabled him to present actions that are not ordinarily seen in our everyday world, by beings outside of nature. I'm not a sheriff, or Angie Dickinson, or a pharaoh; neither are you.Yet Hawks shows us that the appeal of such individuals is unrelated to what we might expect ( the world of adventure, the extraordinary).Hawks the classicist has always rejected these values, satirized them, ridiculed them, even ignored them in The Thing. Yet he also accepts the everyday: a man is a sheriff the same way he's a laborer or a subway conductor. There are plenty of gunshots in Rio Bravo, but none of them real, none of them have any true dramatic value. The incessant gunfights end up only becoming monotonous, and they eliminate all suspense. Each repeated gesture cancels its predecessor. And Wayne's blase intelligence, far from contemplating the act, somehow immediately grasps the range of possible consequences. How Wayne does this is a question of telepathy, similar to the way Hawks' previous heroes had eyes in the back of their head.

Luc Moullet, Cahiers du cinema, July 1959

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Two very good short articles on Moullet, on occasion of the recent travelling Moullet retrospective, one by Chris Fujiwara, "Mineral Cinema", and one by Sam Adams, "Funny Strange-Ha: The Not-Quite-Right Comedy of Luc Moullet".

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If anyone has information about La Punition, please do tell. And if anyone is interested in the Moullet roundtable, please don't hesitate to email me.

This is the 100th post at Kino Slang. Russian proverb: "It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats." Thank you friends, for everything.

yours,

andy