"Kafka's writing is a cultic operation that keeps him alive." (Franco Fortini)

MAYBE WE CAN GET IT WEAVED — No. 1

A series of posts paying homage to Jerry Lewis, his world and the world through him.

*

Twelve Memoranda for Jerry Lewising 

by Murray Pomerance

 1  

Don’t try to sound wise or informed about Jerry, don’t try to shed light.  He rejects being understood, quite properly, and his impulses live in darkness.  At any rate, nobody really knows anybody in this life, we’re all surprises—a fact Jerry’s every twitch elucidated.  The countless commentators who worked through the decades to label Jerry, judge him, pass sentence, never sat with him at table, yet eagerly framed him in personal, not professional, terms.  We never met, but I always cherish a tiny moment caught and held by Martin Scorsese in The King of Comedy, where a man I take to be very like Jerry, named, of course, Jerry, pauses in the atrium of his New York apartment to watch Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street on his television: the penetrating regard, the poise, the suspension of breath, the meticulous air of analysis (which I take to have belonged to both the onscreen Jerry I watch there and the real Jerry playing him) give me a thrill, as though in working to scrutinize this TV watcher I am picking up some of the mojo that is already his, in watching the film on his screen.  Perhaps Jerry Langford isn’t Jerry Lewis in any way, and I’m not getting anywhere near Jerry Lewis by observing him, but I really don’t believe that. 

It seems he was always in the glare of one light or another, arc light, klieg light, candle light, sun.  That for him being in the light came naturally (stepping out through the billboard mouth hole in Artists and Models) and therefore couldn’t have been a torture.  Yet can we ever be sure?  Think of Bertolt Brecht’s lines for Kurt Weill:

Some in light and some in darkness
That’s the kind of world we mean.

Those you see are in the daylight.

Those in darkness don’t get seen.

Since, watching Jerry, we sit in the darkness, can we really know what it is to suffer illumination—always unless one retreats, from every side, and with howling voices?  Jerry’s performative antics were hugely visual.

          It is interesting that Jerry, an unwavering source of brilliance, was somehow not a source of illumination.  Illumination was neither his method nor his path, although he was a blinding sun.  The confession speech at the end of The Nutty Professor, where he breaks up during “That Old Black Magic,” then stands on the stage and tells the story of his life:  it is pure sunshine, if also, simultaneously, degradation. 

 2  

I don’t think it could be called a shock, exactly, learning that he was gone.  Since before November 2002, when Enfant Terrible! came out, he had been bloated, incapacitated as a result of the years of pratfalling and the pain drugs, and when those symptoms cleared he fell victim to other harassments of the flesh.  And if now I would have to confess it was categorically impossible to imagine sharing the world with him, that he was out there moving around, in truth I always thought of him as being somewhere else, walking into Sulka on Park Avenue, say, to pick out some shirts, or wandering Pacific Palisades or the yacht basin in San Diego, but never in life–just as in death–present for me as a person who might walk up and say hello.  In the materiality of Jerry (a taller man than one may have supposed) there was something unsettling, especially as one reflected upon it now:  less that in dying he confounded the fact that one had presumed to consider him immortal, in the way that one tends to presume with stars, than that one positively needed him to keep on, to be an ultimate survivor, a defier of time who would never lose his path in the desert of the real (as Zizek had it).  For some time it did become palpably clear, in the photographs glowing with the bright red sweater that screamed out against the forces of gravity, that one way or another he was waning, perhaps terminally ill—we wouldn’t be told.  What afflicted him shared the mortality of his voice, his crossed eyes, his twisted run.  To claim that at the end he was no longer young is, of course, an immaterial lie, because he was, young in a way that hurt us to consider:  embarrassingly young, challengingly young, insouciantly young, proudly young, critically young, a person with young sensitivities, to whom rudeness was an attack.  Jerry was young against the tide.  He had succeeded in retaining what so many of us are pleased to surrender.  And yet, now one had to use the past tense, and with every grammatical transposition away from here and now one felt a strange, metallic pang.

          It was charming and affronting in Visit to a Small Planet that the alien he played was all of, and nothing but Jerry Lewis, and that, coming to earth for a short while (he liked to say, “I will not come this way again”) he did not offer the creepy sagacity of Robert Wise’s Klaatu but gave instead unfamiliarity, wonder, awkwardness. 

          Awkwardness—poise—awkwardness—poise—awkwardness—poise.

“That old black magic has me in its spell.”   

 3 

Magic, which is not to imply that he acted without limit or responsibility, that he was always, somewhere underneath, “The Kid” audiences around the world came to know so well.  If you watch King of Comedy or Max Rose, you’ll see a sensitive, touchy, adult human being with dignity, poise, grace, music, brains.  But of course you’ll never deny to yourself that underneath all this is The Kid in full blossom, waiting, breathing, holding his breath.  In King, watch the look of cold appreciation in his eyes while, as Jerry Langford, he stares at the performing Masha (Sandra Bernhard) as she sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” into his face.  A man never not in the business of the show.

 4 

On The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson one of those nights he was filling in, he did “One Hen Two Ducks.”  Why?  To this day I have no clue, hearing it over and over for decades.  One hen.  Two ducks.  Three squawking geese.  Four corpulent porpoises.  Five Limerick oysters. . . .

     But, not trying to sound wise or informed, let me just peek at that once more.  Language in pure form, words with musical enchainment.  The logic of the puzzle a complete hopelessness, which is why some people—the logicians among us—go nuts trying to remember it.  Six pairs of Don Alverzo’s tweezers.  Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array.  Why Macedonians?  Why seven thousand, not seven hundred?  You have to work the phrase “Seven thousand” around your mouth a few times, begin to taste the volume and the chewiness of the thing you produce when you say those words together.  Forget mnemonics, forget sensibility, forget pointing to something.  Just use your mouth, and then recall how Jerry used his mouth, the mouth chewing and tasting language and soundfulness.  But you also have to go on, it’s all about going on.  Eight brass monkeys from the ancient sacred crypts of Egypt.  (Crypts . . . of . . . Egypt.  Of course there are crypts in Egypt but are they more relevant to any theme than crypts somewhere else?  It is only—only!—a semantic link, the “ypt” in crypt and in Egypt, an echo and a matching so that the Egypt becomes a crypt and crypts become Egypt, both of these more deeply something unidentified, something vocal, that is, musical, that is, beyond what we can know.)  Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity toward procrastination and sloth.  (Oh yes.)  Ten lyrical, spherical diabolical denizens of the deep, who hall-stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivy all at the same time.

 5 

It is possible to mean “saying” without meaning “that which one says.”  Children do this all the time.  And so do drunkards.  And people suffering from certain neurological disorders.  And comedians.  There is a revealing piece of footage showing Jerry backstage preparing to go on, at the 1979 Telethon.  His world seems divided, “us” and “them.”  His team includes his backstage crew, his stage manager, his control room gang, his wife, his personal assistant, all of whom take him utterly for granted as both the person that he is, a person they know well, and this for some time, and the public face he is intending shortly to put on.  He can jump, or lapse-jump, into that public persona—the shrill voice, the improper comment—and slip quickly back out of it.  With his team he stands calmly, quietly, looking around, checking time.  How much?  How much?  “Three seconds.”  “Oh—I can do three seconds in an hour!”  It is fascinating to see the concentration, to note him noting the circumstances, who is where, who is doing what, what must he do, what is next, what must he worry about?  A low, calm voice when he speaks directly to someone; then a higher-pitched, louder voice for a crowd, or for a quasi-performative instant.  There is a line of majorettes dancing on camera before he is to come out, and standing backstage he quips to an unseen confederate (in a snarky tone of voice), “None of them will give birth.”  Our instantaneous reaction to this—but not, perhaps, to a great deal else that he says backstage: to his comments or queries, to his listing of what must be said on camera, to his kissing his wife, to his asking a security guard to get his wife to her seat, to his affection for his wardrobe assistant—is to assess it as a clue to the deepest meanings in life, as he entertains them.  And what, indeed, could he mean?  That no human being will couple with any of these girls at any point to produce offspring?. . . That they dance but are barren?. . . that it is genuine creative movement they will not produce ?. . . That misfortune will befall every last one of them . . .?  But he does not react to his own comment as though he means any of these things, or indeed as though he means anything at all.  It is simply that the dancers are not part of his team, and so they are there.  Like the audience in the auditorium and the several hundred million television viewers, they are “them.”  He is distancing himself, identifying his family, his region, by pushing back the alien horde (who live onstage just as well as anywhere else), and then pushing back Ed McMahon, too, by virtue of a comment about the man’s problematic microphone that they should scurry to fix.  The mic can be fixed but we can hear it’s not the mic, it’s Ed McMahon on the mic who is one of them.

     The moment—and Jerry’s presence in it—is utterly indicative without troubling to “say something”: “we” are here together, making this show, about to have me go on, and this complex happening—the number of people involved and the details multiplying are reminiscent of a launch from Cape Canaveral. This event we are working with enormous care to stage, and to stage successfully (so that over the 24 hours of the telecast over twenty-four million dollars can be raised), is something “we” are all in, each of us on the team equally, and I, Jerry, am merely the face, the face you are checking and fixing, the face in the tuxedo that is being politely brushed from behind, I am merely getting ready, ready to follow these interminably dancing girls, who are “other,” part of the hired warm-up.  The crazy Jerry is not the Jerry behind the crazy Jerry, who works the wings like a flier.  The crazy Jerry is just a puppet that Jerry and his team are working.

 6 

This alchemical transformation, when one moves out of the wings onto the stage:

One does not think, as one waits there, of the atmosphere into which one is about to fall.  Indeed, the senses are very acute, there is a tendency to notice small, idiosyncratic things, like a small vertical tear in a near-hanging curtain, or a piece of spinach caught in the teeth of one’s hairdresser as she leans over your head, or to think, quite suddenly, of some fragment from an old story, as when one’s grandmother touches one’s face again, earliest childhood returned, and asks if one would like a boulichka and some warm milk.  The sweetest politesse in all directions.  The genuine smile, only that one, which is distinct from the stage smile, and only when it is justified, but broadly.  I had the fortune one night to stand in the wings next to Leonard Bernstein as he prepared to make his way onstage to conduct the New York Philharmonic.  He wore, over his tails, a long black cloak, and an assistant made a move—a tiny move that I can recall to this day, fifty-three years later—upward with the hands, in preparation for removing this cloak.  And the maestro said aloud, in poetic reverie, “Ashrei yoshvei veytecha!,” which is the beginning of a Hebrew prayer, “Blessed are those who sit in audience to You,” and there was a distant—a very distinctly distant—gleam in his eye, because he was thinking about and looking toward some place else.  Some place:  the orchestra onstage in the bright light?  His past?  His blind future dream?  Once, stepping onstage myself, I found my director by my elbow, unanticipated, shoving a lit cigar between my teeth so that as I entered I was coughing up smoke (“Perfect!” he said).  And Jerry paced and stood, and turned and grinned, kissed, made comment, was concerned, was relaxed by his assistant, asked how long.  “How long?”  —“Three.”  —“I can do an hour in three minutes.”  He turned to face away, in the direction of the long dark gap.  He took a second to lift up his head.  He strode forward with that buoyant, athletic, Buddy Love stride.  Where did the spirit enter? 

 7 

And who was it died, when Jerry Lewis died?  Consider that the Jerry so many fans adulate today, and adulated earlier, the Jerry of Living It Up, or of Artists and Models or Hollywood or Bust; or the Jerry of The Bellboy or The Nutty Professor; or even the later Jerry of The King of Comedy, is a Jerry of memory, a Jerry of the past, which is to say, a living ghost, borne away and forward again in time (and preserved in time) from the Jerry whose life ended at the age of ninety-one.  Memories change in the winds, but their status as memories does not.  They persist as iconic images.  And they are reproduced as such in the countless items of memorabilia, signed by him or not signed, that people collected (and collect) in order to feel attached (and show off, in order to make claim to the attachment).  Iconic Jerry neither died nor was mortal, since media images are not mortal things.  Jerry Lewis inhabited a colossal array of media imagery, such that seeing him in multiple contexts is inevitable, and the insurmountable imagery has permanence.  When fans openly grieve for their lost “Jerry” they are forgetting that he was already lost, lost even when his images first showed.  When The Nutty Professor opened in New York, July 17, 1963, the Jerry beneath both Julius Kelp and Buddy Love was long gone.  We know there is no film of which this cannot be said.  Yet with Jerry, perhaps more than with other performers, it is a fact audiences today find hard to grasp, sentimental as they are about the characterizations offered onscreen.  But those characters and those sentiments are generated out of material, but immortal stuff.  As to the future, we will not see him again.  He would not give birth.

 8 

Are you there?  I’m making sound and watching your face, are you there?  You smile, you nod, you talk back, you whisper in my ear.  I need you to be there, are you still there?  I need to touch you, I need always to be in touch with you (or to know that I can be in touch with you).  I’m not talking because there’s something I want you to know, I’m talking because I want to touch.  Talk as touch.  So, where does the talk come from, the brain or the heart?  Because only fools believe there is no difference.

          If there is only the stage and the audience, the stage in light, the audience in darkness (at this point in history, the point Jerry inhabited with us), touch is the problem.  Are you there, can I touch you?  Are you out there touching me?  Can you go beyond appreciation and reach forward, so that onstage here, in this blinding light, I am not alone?  If I invoke you, if I call out in some very close language, a language that hits the spine, can you feel me? 

It is a marvel to see and hear Jerry bellow and belt incoherently, the sound welling up from some hidden dark cave and taking shape through the curvature of the face.  We get this in The Disorderly Orderly when he listens to patients’ symptoms and instantly suffers from whatever horrendous condition they are describing.  Or when, pushing the brake pedal of an ambulance too desperately his foot goes through the floor and starts smoking as it skitters along the road:  “Pain!  Pain!”  Or when he is in a fast flow of traffic, standing alone among the cars, and something ominous is speeding into his face.  Vowels and consonants put together as comic-bubble squeal.  Words that are no longer words, words carried back to their origins in the feelingful (the sentimental) body subjected to conditions. 

 9 

Or the helpless, profitless attempts at well-behaved articulation, the wholly civil Jerry, as when Julius Kelp needs to explain something to his Dean (Del Moore):  “Wel-elllllll . . . ahem,” with the tongue emerging from the teeth.  Meaning only goodness, trying very hard.  We cannot ask for more.  But unable to meet the (vicious) demands of modernity, the compelling militaristic, heartless, incompassionate orders from above, and because of a nature over which he has no authority.  “Use your authority./ If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long.”  Unable, not unwilling.  Unprepared—that is, unindoctrinated.  Jerome K. Jerome being welcomed at breakfast in the girls’ boarding house in The Ladies Man (by the Brünnhilde, Helen Traubel):  speechless, flailing, turning and turning to find the answer in the air, who-what-when?

        We have all been there, initiates to a much cultivated ceremony that we do not grasp, whose features are all mysteries, and surrounded by a coterie of uninterested insiders who have forgotten their own initiations and treat us like dirt.  We have all been there, and have forgotten.  When he invokes the memory, we resist.  We say, with our lips turned down, “Such a clutz!”  Indeed, clutzes we are all, but have forgotten, thinking now, in our elegance, that because we are socialized, because we survived the torture that Jerry never escapes, we were always naturally this way, always cool, and it is only with him that there is something very wrong.

 10 

I love the delicate way he sings Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s “By Myself” in The Delicate Delinquent, because, as need hardly be said, in the late 1950s so many people took delinquency as a serious problem they were incapable of conceiving how a delinquent could be delicate; and here, with this rendition, he is everything of delicate and at the same time, because such a bad fit, everything of a delinquent.  In The Band Wagon Fred Astaire had come close to making an anthem of this song, as he walked the platform at Grand Central in the shadow of his former glory.  But Jerry’s version is simpler, cleaner, less orchestrated for the voice, the simple, unadorned Sidney Pythias voice:  “I’ll go my way by myself, this is the end of romance . . . I’ll face the unknown, I’ll build a world of my own.”  This wasn’t long after his breakup with Dean, this Pythias’s Damon and his daemon, too. 

Hollywood or Bust, his previous film, had been their final collaboration.  The romance that was ending was Jerry’s and ours, but only those old enough to remember watching Dean and Jerry together will fully feel nostalgia for that loss.  “Two Men Singing,” the act might have been called, and one has to stretch the eardrums to conceive the force of that comedy as a duet:  Dean was a crooner, like Mel Torme, like Sinatra, like Tony Bennett.  Jerry used a harshly tuned whine, like a human version of Jack Benny’s violin at its most romantic and like an animal in pain at other moments.  Jerry was always in sympathy with the “animal” in pain.  The question with Dean and Jerry was never who could sing better but which voice we preferred to hear.  (I was supposed to prefer Dean, but I preferred Jerry.)  Dean’s was the voice of custom, the one we had been trained to hear.  Jerry’s was the voice of the new.  The tacit—the hidden—public presumption behind the split-up of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis was that Jerry had clung to Dean; that Dean had been the totem pole and Jerry had been tormented slave.  Thus, “I’ll go my way by myself” was a pathetic promise.  But we have learned better.  Jerry made a deal with Barney Balaban at Paramount (a handshake deal, nothing on paper) and then let the technicians teach him cinema.  The rest is history.

 11 

Martin Scorsese eulogized that watching Jerry was like watching a virtuoso pianist in performance.  As a former pianist, I find this comment intriguingly apt, because in pianistic virtuosity a great deal that a performer might cause audiences to think supremely difficult is in fact not difficult at all; whereas a great deal of what is supremely difficult might be invisible, or seem merely casual to those not in the know.  Scorsese’s comment reveals something very true about Jerry, who knew in his flesh, from decades upon decades of practice, how far to go:  when it was necessary to strain the muscles, when not; when it was necessary to hold back from strain (because a stressful moment was about to come on), when not.  He knew how to play his instrument.  We may nod with dismay about the damage to his skeleton the constant pratfalls produced, and his medical therapies, but really, honestly, go into the kitchen with any hard worker who knows his stuff:  damage happens.  Life happens.  Erosion happens.  Jerry lived his life in his art, he gave his life in his art.    

 12 

Perhaps every Jerry fan has his own Jerry but I have surely never met a Jerry fan—and I have met many zealous Jerry fans, Jerry mockingbirds—whose own Jerry was a Jerry I recognize.  To put this a little differently:  the sounds Jerry made (his animal sounds, that is, his sounds of recognition that we live an animal life), that are crucial to me, are not the ones I hear people quote.  I learned to love the Jerry who was in love with Anna Maria Alberghetti in Rockabye Baby.  The Jerry running up and down the stairs to carry a telephone message to Dean in Artists and Models.  The Jerry sternly lecturing Robert De Niro in King of Comedy, “You’ve got it.  You’ve . . . got  . . . it.”  The Tonight Show Jerry very much, walking up with a hungry “Gnunnnng” and opening his maw to eat the camera.  The Telethon Jerry, nervous, calculating, desperate for time, perspiring openly.  Jerry with his mouth open in distress, but untold distress, pure distress.  Jerry with Kathleen Freeman (a brilliant and frequent collaborator) or Del Moore (a brilliant and frequent collaborator).  Improbable Jerry in a palpably masking clown-face in The Jazz Singer (yet how improbable, since he was a clown?).

My own Jerry—not any of the many I treasure and laugh with, but the single Jerry I find both impossible and wondrous, both instructive and mystifying—is the Morty Tashman who conducts an invisible jazz band in the “board room” sequence of The Errand Boy—a film, I must confess, the disregard of which, in public statements, by Mr. Jerry Lewis, astounds and befuddles me.  Here he is, at any rate, letting the band articulate the “voice” coming out of his mouth.  It is mime, it is conducting, it is (almost impossibly) cigar-lighting and puffing to the beat, it is irony, it is sarcasm, it is desperation, it is supreme confidence, it is music.  Oh, but Jerry was music.  Jerry is music.  The Jerry who was music has gone, but the music remains.      

Saturday 
February 3rd, 2018 
8pm

KINO SLANG​

at the

Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado St. 
Los Angeles, CA. 90026

presents

THE BOSS DIDN'T SAY GOOD MORNING 

(1937, Jacques Tourneur)

&

THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN 

(1957, Boris Barnet & Konstantin Yudin)

Program total running time: 1 hour 47 minutes

There will be no introduction

Doors open at 7:30pm, Film starts at 8pm

Program Notes will be provided at the door 

"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector continuing the cinematographic and historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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THE BOSS DIDN'T SAY GOOD MORNING 
1937. Direction: Jacques Tourneur. 11 minutes. An MGM "Miniature". Script: Douglas Foster. Narrator: Carey Wilson. 

When ordinary office worker John Jones's boss doesn't return his routine "good morning", Jones and his family live in anguish over the implications. Exhorting the boss, the narrator of the film (Carey Wilson) insists one must know "whether John Jones is happy, and what relation to life John Jones has that gives him inspiration and the ability and willingness to live."



THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN (Борец и клоун)
1957. Direction: Boris Barnet & Konstantin Yudin. 95 minutes. Mosfilm. Script: N. Pogodine. Cinematograpy: S. Polouianov. Sets: V. Chtcherbak, B. Erdman. Music: Iou. Birioukov. Sound: V. Zorine. Costumes: M. Joukova. Cast: S. Tchekan, A. Mikahilov, A. Soloviov, B. Petker, I. Arepina. In Sovcolor. 

In Tsarist Russia, circa 1900-1910, Ivan, a wrestler, arrives at the port of Odessa in search of a job with the local circus. There he makes fast friends with Durov, a clown, similarly destitute and ambitious. After successfully being hired, they face difficult working conditions, being subordinated like animals and sabotaged like men, struggling for life and the exercise of their respective arts. Ivan falls in love with Mimi, a trapeze artist, Durov wins international acclaim and travels the world. Director Boris Barnet--one of the greatest, most casual poets the cinema has ever known--exuberantly transcribes the atmosphere of the old circus with his Sovcolor camera. Bursting with human and historical detail, aesthetically a bulwark for the young Jean-Luc Godard and a regular feature at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, THE WRESTLER AND THE CLOWN has been admired for its tenderness, its tall and vital rendering of popular real-life people in turn-of-the-century Russia, and its bittersweet dynamic of fragility, spectacle, and sport. Never before screened in Los Angeles.

Tonight's Kino Slang screenings (here) are dedicated to an ineradicable man, Alfredo Mendes, the protagonist of A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU (THE RABBIT HUNTERS, 2007, Pedro Costa), who died last month in Lisbon. We don't know much about the man, save for what's told and how it's told in the two short movies TARRAFAL and A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU—momentous sounds and images of Alfredo, all intensity and bitterness, reflecting on life; with the irony of a knockabout and the determination of a man on the lam, he is testy and makes each shot a live wire—all that, and that "He drove a pickup truck delivering papos-secos."

Below is a testimony to the films TARRAFAL and THE RABBIT HUNTERS that I wrote in 2011, initiated by Craig Keller for the COLOSSAL YOUTH dvd booklet as released by Eureka. 

***

Limbo Film(s) 

We cannot accept cinema's death. Not so long as Ventura lives and breathes—and looks off like all those who sing to themselves, yet to the entire world (...Bach, ...Oharu, The Chronicle of..., The Life of... all the nameless exiles). Not so long as Alberto Ze innocently plays with his knife, then suddenly stakes his expulsion letter against a wood post for all to see. Not so long as fathers die, rabbits escape death, and Alfredo wakes at daybreak to tell about it. Not so long as mothers laugh while telling stories of back home, and suddenly become grave about an evil which passes if one is not careful. Yes, so long as a few trees remain, there's a soup kitchen to skim, several cats, and the people are willing, a film can be made, and the cinema is not dead. Its lines are catastrophic.

"You narrate in order not to die or because you're dead already," (Serge Daney). Thus we have Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters, which respectively strike out, each with its own slash—one supernatural, one social—the "or" of that aphorism. That is their militancy. These short films, made with the inhabitants of a housing project—two former masons, a parolee, a mother, a cafeteria cook—narrate. That is their power. Taking advantage of the fluency he gained with the people of the neighborhood, and the fluency the neighborhood people gained with the cinema during the two year shoot of Colossal Youth, Pedro Costa makes these films, or as Bernard Eisenschitz distinguished, "this film(s)", in a mere two weeks, for two separate omnibus films.

30 years after Jacques Tati, in his César award acceptance speech, urged distributors and film people to support short films, the short film still remains elementally in limbo, still disrespected and unaccepted as cinema's life-blood. The proof: the egregious non-reception of these Costa and company films, the richest short film(s) in a half-century.

It's as if Costa wanted to test the limits of the short films' trenchancy, as if he wanted to sharpen one short with the other perpetually through a total, vigorous, concentrated combination of the supernatural, the militant, the local, and the poetic, with oral history and field recording (the song at the end of The Rabbit Hunters), true reverse-shots (across both films), narration, and montage. Even the title, like a scar, Tarrafal—a reference to the Portuguese-established "Camp of Slow Death" in Cape Verde, a prison camp for political prisoners opposing Salazar from 1936-54—is montaged over this contemporary story in Lisbon of a young man's expulsion from Portugal and deportation to an island he never knew, the beating to death of Alfredo by racists, and Ventura’s "lot of departed spirits that walk with me..."

 As if this concentration weren't enough, Costa plays a cat's game (concretely: compare the cats in each film) with the very idea of an international omnibus film contribution (often products of a vague and alienated cultural initiative) for which this film(s) were made. Not in the negative, but in the positive. He has found another vein to tap for cinematic resonance: by separating and multiplying the film(s) into two different omnibuses, the film(s) repeat, differ, multiply and regard each other for all time...

This enormous and brief film(s) have an inexhaustible amount to teach us about the editor's stiletto; as Colossal Youth does about the overall epic, as Ne change rien does about the microphone.

Someday Tarrafal and The Rabbit Hunters may emerge as the greatest film(s) ever made on the reverse-shot, formally and thematically, and its relation to death and disappearance. Again, it took two films, crossing each other, with we the public hovering between them, to achieve this.

Costa and the inhabitants have not placed pennies on the eyes of the dead, they've place a film(s). Our theoretical limbo as viewers between this film(s), the very real stateless limbo of the young Alberto Ze, the made-real limbo of a dead man in the film: wheels within wheels within wheels… To take another Walshian idea: a discreet REGENERATION of deposed mass heroes. 

 Andy Rector 

July 13, 2011 

************



Thieves' Highway

KINO SLANG​
at the
Echo Park Film Center

Friday 
December 1, 2017

Doors at 7:30pm

$5 Suggested Donation

Echo Park Film Center 

1200 North Alvarado St. 

Los Angeles, CA. 90026 

*

CINEMA THE INCESSANT

"‎Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, 

 Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn." 

Walt Whitman

THE SINGING STREET  (​T​he Teachers of Norton Park School, Edinburgh, 195​1,​ 17 min​​​) 
A collection of children's street games filmed in the streets of Edinburgh accompanied by traditional children's songs. Said its makers: "Not meant for education or entertainment but belonging to the art of play. Shot in six Easter days of boisterous weather, the cast, mostly girls, numbering sixty." 

IL VIANDANTE ​- ​THE WAYFARER​  (Jean-Marie Straub,​ ​Danièle Huillet,​ ​2001, ​5 min​​)​ 
A woman in Sicily tells her grown son the story of a past roll in the hay with a striker disappeared. 

A CAÇA AO COELHO COM PAU - THE RABBIT HUNTERS  (Pedro Costa, 2007​, 23 min​) 
In the housing projects of Lisbon all are in mourning. What has happened? Old Alfredo, a Cape Verdean immigrant and laborer, follows Ventura, the same, through the staircases, hallways, rec​​ rooms, and soup kitchens of the Casal da Boba tenements​,​ remembering their lives and the lives of others, their misfortunes, and anger. One of them confesses to having already been beaten to death​ in a field​. They cross paths with a young man about to be deported from the country he was born in. Who escapes? 

THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN  (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960​, 58 min) 
Crime, nuclear science, and the State profitably conspire against humanity in a top-secret experiment to render human life invisible. A world-historical cheapie by Edgar G. Ulmer where the diabolical plot exposes a hustle like any other: run on blackmail, theft, and forced labor. Safe-cracker Joey Faust is broken out of prison by former military man Major Paul Krenner only to be used in a scheme to create an invisible army. The Major's experiments are​ ​unwillingly carried out by Dr. Peter Ulof, for his "soul", which is to say his daughter, is being held captive by the Major. The result of this ​slavery: nuclear catastrophe. If this film were an essay on humanity—and it is if you ignore the richness of its characters and sparse sets used to portray a naked and desperate world—it may have been called "On Annihilation." 


Program Total Running Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes 
Doors: 7:30pm 
$5 suggested donation. 

Special Thanks to Charlotte Garson, Chloe Reyes, and Pedro Costa.

"Kino Slang" is a regular series of cinema screenings programmed by Andy Rector at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. It continues the cinematographic and historical excavations, proceedings by montage and association, silent alarms and naked dawns of this eleven-year-old blog.

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Jacques Rivette on THE SOUTHERNER (Jean Renoir, 1945)

What follows is an English translation (not in the least meant to be definitive) of the second half of an article on Jean Renoir's THE SOUTHERNER (1945) written by a 22-year-old Jacques Rivette at La Gazette du Cinéma in 1950.  In the years 1945-1950, Parisians were seeing one, sometimes two new American Renoir films a year, catching up on what was missed during the Nazi Occupation, and re-seeing the pre-war French films in a changed landscape. Renoir's work was being reassessed at-large, with his American films often superficially dismissed as concessions to Hollywood mores (or as "dilutions of his French films"). The first half of Rivette's article is thus a bold defense of the American Renoirs, noting certain continuities with Renoir's past ("his silent contempt for all rules"), but more importantly elucidating the total evolution and worldly change evident in the new work (when this article was written Renoir was in India researching for THE RIVER and, not incidentally, gone from Hollywood in these years of the blacklist's wake). Rivette makes both sage practical points ("One forgets that if Renoir had remained in France, the failure of THE RULES OF THE GAME would have forced him to accept lesser scripts than those he shot on the other side of the Atlantic") and massive, cosmic statements... Then come the excerpted paragraphs below, and with their vertiginous use of the semi-colon, these were some of the first sentences where, from a small American Renoir film made independently in the dust, the entire universe would be deduced...

—A.R. 

(...)

Renoir's American films mark a definite victory for innocence; it is no longer a question of voluptuously submitting to the world of appearances, and of abandoning oneself to the object and all concreteness, to an almost animist intoxication, into a world before sin, where things are, without the intervention of a value judgment; a simpler, more clairvoyant look now judges the universe, reflects it, and gives each thing its true value, rather than the pantheistic metamorphosis of the past. Renoir has left the realm of pure existence; things are now something; love is hence lucid; the mind, free and clear.

...Renoir acquired (this restraint and modesty) through maturity—and perhaps through contact with these calm, direct men, and marked equally by the Protestantism that he encountered through Swamp Water and The Southerner. In such an existence, a few gestures embody all the passions, the pains, the hopes, the simplicity, the rigor of attitudes and the words, all constituting a sober ceremonial. Direct and frank, these men hide nothing and each express their feelings, their calm, and sometimes even their coldness, granting their gestures a great sobriety, that which often comes with the repose of heart and spirit, to the point of complete immobility; whether it's the episode of the grandmother swaying obstinately in her rocking chair on the platform of the caravan, or the young fallen woman, lying on the ground, grabbing the soil in her nervous hands, or even this splendid fight, refined, rigorous and yet beautifully alive—this valorization of the gesture and attitudes, by their sobriety, therefore their intensity, and the often precise planting of the characters in the frame of the screen, impose the impression of a certain "theatricalization" (and the very existence of these men is "theatrical", these men constantly engaged in a struggle with nature, who define themselves and find meaning and value only in their conflict with the external world: man exists only through action, the act, he is an actor); an impression heightened by the nakedness, the rigor of the natural settings, and the leitmotif of the porch, these few wooden steps, the peristyle of the domestic temple, where one comes to sit side by side; at the intersection of the house and the fields, they are the knot of the decor. Here man is at the center of his universe, he comes to rest there, to confide in it and, like Antaeus, regains strength in the most intimate contact with all that justifies his life.

To speak of a banal and flatly edifying "script", to regret "the absence of dramatic progression", all that is flatly absurd. Man in the midst of the world, of his seasons and his whims, is the subject of The Southerner. It proves once again that the word "script" has no meaning, that there is no "script" and never will be; a film is people walking, embracing, drinking, bumping into each other; men who act before our eyes, and oblige us to accompany them in their actions, to share their lives, to participate in the thousand little incidents that make up an existence, and which interest us henceforth equally; here Renoir joins Flaherty; their purpose is the same even if by opposite paths; one puts the actors in touch with the concrete realities of their "role", forcing them to live this feigned existence for its capture by the camera; the other considers men—his occasional performers—as actors, and has them play their lives, instead of simply living it in front of the lens, reconstructing each of their customary gestures with a view precisely to its inscription on the film; —both realize this subtle mixture of artifice and reality is necessary for an expressive transcription of the world; otherwise we obtain only an impersonal, bloodless copy, from which all the weight of the concrete, which was the living justification, has escaped—without being replaced by structures which will justify it in this other universe, of which they are the foundations, and where nothing is of existence except through them, and will give by artifice the same total, the same weight of the concrete and undeniable evidence, as the basic reality.

To return to The Southerner: —what is good is that all these beautiful thoughts come to you afterwards; one does not think at the moment that one sees, one marches on; it is only through a twitch of the eye, an eye long distorted by this ugly game, that we notice shot changes and camera movements without actually being able to give them more importance than these things deserve. This total, immediate adhesion, this innocence of the spectator finally found, along with the impossibility of speaking of this film directly, and the obligation that it places on us to discourse only about him—such are still the most immediate proofs of the total success of Jean Renoir.

Jacques Rivette

La Gazette du Cinéma, nº 2, juin 1950
Translation: Andy Rector 
Many thanks to Miguel Armas

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THE SOUTHERNER will screen on 16mm this Saturday October 28th, 8pm, at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles on a double feature with Luis Buñuel's THE YOUNG ONE (1960), as part of the series "Kino Slang presents".