Sight and Sound Poll 2022

[ad_1]

My ballot for the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll for the greatest films of all time:

La Jetée (1962, Chris Marker)
Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-98, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912, Ladislaw Starewicz)
Sátántangó (1994, Béla Tarr)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin)
To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch)
The Up! Series (1964-ongoing, Michael Apted, Paul Almond)
The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927, Walther Ruttmann)
Homework (1989, Abbas Kiarostami)

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

“Best Picture” ≠ “Live Action”

[ad_1]

Wreck-It Ralph (2012).

Kristin here:

Way back in 2006, I posted a long piece on the increasing prominence of animated features being released each year. This was in the infancy of the blog, and the entry shows it–few photos, inserted as thumbnails. We only gradually worked up to our format of posting plenty of illustrations. By contrast this current contribution offers plenty of visual pleasure.

Basically I argued three points. First, that by their nature animated films would tend to be among the highest-quality films in any given year, despite their relatively small number in those days.

My argument laid out some reasons for this high quality. First, the fact that animated films were perforce thoroughly planned in pre-production, meaning that every detail was carefully considered. This means that relatively few inadequate scenes are reworked in production. Live-action films these days tend to be heavily dependent on shooting lots of coverage and making many decisions in the editing stage. Not true of animated films. Similarly, the soundtrack is recorded in advance and the images animated to sync with it. Hence the sound is meticulously planned. The voice actors record their voices and leave, usually not hanging around to try and change their scenes during shooting or fluffing lines and thus requiring multiple retakes of scenes.

My second point addressed the opinion, widely circulating in the trade press, that the spread of animation, and particularly digital animation, was a mistake. I quoted a recent Screen International article: “Much has been made this year of the seeming over-saturation of studios’ computer-generated titles, with critics and analysts pointing to growing movie-goer apathy.” I pointed out that such a claim didn’t fit the facts: “As a proportion among the total number of films made, CGI’s box-office successes seem fairly high compared to live-action films.”

My third point was that American distributors did not know how to market films from abroad, so that Ghibli and Aardman titles did not get nearly the audiences they deserved. Since then the distributor GKIDS has shown that it’s possible, at least for a relatively small company, successfully to release such films. They currently offer films with eleven best-animated feature Oscar nominations (with one win, Spirited Away), having gained distribution rights to Ghibli films, previously controlled by Disney.

Since I wrote that entry, the number of animated films, mostly digital, released yearly has sharply increased. And the disproportionate number of those animated films that appear among the top hits of the year continues to demonstrate that people are not apathetic. The spread of streaming services, combined with the decline of theatrical attendance during the pandemic, make it difficult to judge the success of films. Going back to 2019, where it’s a bit easier to judge, the top ten films included two animated successes, Toy Story 4 and Frozen II. An additional two were in the top twenty, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and The Secret Life of Pets 2. Animated films did not make up 20% of all films released, but that’s the portion of the top twenty they occupied.

I followed up that entry with one that found additional evidence that animated features were doing well, including the fact that Ice Age: The Meltdown was, though not the top box-office film of 2006, the most profitable film of that year.

So many developments have occurred in the world of feature animation since that first post that I decided to write an update.

 

The neighborhood is getting crowded

To some extent today’s update was inspired by a recent online post concerning new competition for Disney, which had absorbed Pixar and easily led the box-office race for years, with Dreamworks a second-run. Current developments led Alexandra Canal to point out some interesting figures. In 2022, Disney’s box-office total was $1.93 billion in ticket sales, for 26% of market share. Universal, number two, generated $1.64 million, for 22%, and Sony’s box-office coming in at a mere $834.8 million, or 11%. But things are changing. Other studios’ investments in building animation wings have started to challenge Disney’s dominance of the market for these films.

So far in 2023, as of July 1, Universal has The Super Mario Bros. (released April 5) at number one on the top-grossing list and over $1.3 billion worldwide. Sony has Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June 2) at number four and approaching $620 million worldwide. By contrast, Disney has had two flops in recent memory: Lightyear (which I found mildly entertaining but not what I expect from Pixar) under-performed last summer, and Disney’s own Strange World (November 23) ended up with less than $74 million. Disney’s film in the top ten is the live-action version of The Little Mermaid (May 26), at number five with just over half a billion.

It will probably take several years for the long-term effects of streaming and the theatrical distribution recovery (if any) will have on Disney’s dominance. Still, it seems that the other Hollywood studios’ move toward creating their own animated departments is succeeding to some extent. The trend toward a greater variety of animated films may last.

 

Best Animated Feature or Best Picture? Which will win?

For this entry I have picked a rather arbitrary method of comparing quality animated films with quality live-action ones. I’m going to look at the Best Animated Films Oscar winners and nominees in comparison to the Best Picture ones.

Every now and then someone points out that such excellent animated films are now being turned out regularly that it would be logical to nominate the best of them for Oscars in the Best Picture category. There has never been a rule against such a crossover. So far it has only happened three times: Beauty and the Beast (1991, before the Best Animated Feature category existed), Up (2009), and Toy Story 3 (2010). None won, though they did take home Oscars in their own race. Other categories are technically open to animated films. Seven have been nominated for best screenplay, all Pixar films, with none winning.

A somewhat comparable situation has happened in the Foreign Language category. We tend to forget, but ten foreign-language films have been nominated for Best Picture: Grand Illusion (1938), Z (1969), The Emigrants (1972), Cries and Whispers (1973), Il Postino (1975), Life Is Beautiful (1998), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006), Amour (2012), Roma (2018), Parasite (2019), Minari (2020), Drive My Car (2021), and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Oddly enough (maybe there was some change of rules), starting in 1998 with Life Is Beautiful, six of these also got nominated for Best Foreign Language film: Life Is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Amour, Roma, Parasite, Drive My Car, and All Quiet on the Western Front. All of them won in the Foreign-Language category, but only one, Parasite, won Best Picture as well. Presumably if a film was good enough to be nominated for best picture, it certainly would be good enough to win the Foreign-Language Oscar.

The same was true for animated films. Up and Toy Story 3 were nominated in both categories and won just the animation awards. (The animated feature award was started in 2002 for films released in 2001, so Beauty and the Beast could not do the same.)

Now we turn to another way of looking at the Best Picture and Best Animated Feature categories. If one is on Facebook, as I am, or, presumably, other social-media sites, as I am not, in many years one reads many vociferous complaints about the quality of the Best Picture winners. Since online people love lists, there are plenty of people weighing in on the ten worst films to have won that prize. These ten are usually fairly recent, since these online commentators usually don’t watch older films. Occasionally someone mentions Cavalcade (1933), but those are the real cinephiles.

I’m going to compare the Best Picture and Animated Feature nominees and winners, starting in 2002, when the latter category originated (for films released the previous year). The questions are, are some of the animated nominees and/or winners better than the live-action films that won Best Picture in the same year, and if so, how often does this happen? This is not, of course, to say that the Oscars are a true reflection of the cream of the crop, especially in the live-action Best Picture category. The best animated films (at least, English-language) tend to rise to the surface in terms of nominations because there simply are so few of them in comparison.

Logically, having chosen the Oscars as a means of comparison, I should compare all the excellent nominated animated films with all the excellent nominated live-action films. After all, the film or films deserving to win seldom do so. Maybe some of them are better than the animation winner. I’m not going to include all the nominees, because first, it would make this entry more lengthy and convoluted than it already is. Second, I haven’t seen all the nominees in either category, though I have seen a higher portion of the animated ones. Still, I shall mention in parentheses live-action titles that in my opinion were more deserving of the Best Picture Oscar than the actual winner.

I have seen all the animated winners and all of the live-action ones apart from Crash. Thanks to the reviewers and friends who warned me off the latter. (To be honest, I turned Chicago off about twenty minutes in.)

 

The Face-off

So let’s go year by year and see how the Best Picture fares against the Best Animated Feature–or in some cases multiple nominees in that category.

Going by release years rather than the years when the awards were given, we start with 2001. A Beautiful Mind was the winner. I’ve actually seen it on a list of worst-ever Best Pictures, but I think it’s a fairly good film. Shrek, the animated champ that year, was much admired, but I was disappointed by it. Monsters, Inc., however, was up against Shrek, and in my opinion deserved to win. It’s arguably better than A Beautiful Mind.

There’s no contest for 2002. Even today, awarding a foreign-language film the best-animated prize is nearly impossible–or indeed, a non-Hollywood one. (Non-American winners come from the UK and Australia.) To be sure, many Academy voters probably saw the dubbed version of Spirited Away. Nevertheless, the obvious sheer brilliance of Miyazaki’s film (above) won the day. Indeed, with Godard gone, Miyazaki may be our greatest living filmmaker–though no one can see enough films from around the world to make such a judgment.

2002 was the first year in which there were enough eligible animated features that five rather than three films were nominated, something that wouldn’t happen again until 2009. Nevertheless, the animated competition was pretty lackluster: Ice Age, Lilo and Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet. Spirited Away, arguably one of the greatest films of our current century, is miles beyond Chicago. If there is any evidence that the animated films can top the live-action ones, this year provided it.

Unlike our Supreme Court and other federal judges, I shall recuse myself from judging the 2003 contest. Having written a book on the subject of The Lord of the Rings film franchise and having had extraordinarily generous cooperation from the filmmakers, I can’t really be objective. Quite possibly Finding Nemo is better than The Return of the King,

2004 saw a return to only three animated features–a situation that would last until 2007. Three nominations were enough, however, since The Incredibles was up against Crash, a film high on many lists of the worst-ever winners. I doubt many would dispute my claim that The Incredibles won this face-off by a mile. (Again, I haven’t seen Crash or some of the other nominees, but I very much suspect that Spielberg’s Munich should have won.)

I am less confident in calling the 2005 winner. Million Dollar Baby is a decent film, though I wish Eastwood had not injected the heavy-handed point that Maggie wins Frankie’s heart because she’s a substitute for the daughter who has willfully disappeared from his life. Frankie losing his prejudice against training women boxers would be more powerful if it was simply based on her skill and determination. Still, I hesitate to say that the animation winner, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (above), is better. (One of the English-language imports that have won.) I am a huge Aardman fan, but Wallace and Gromit work better in the shorts (especially the sublime The Wrong Trousers). Of the other two nominees in the category, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride isn’t a contender, but one could make a case for Howl’s Moving Castle (Miyazaki again) as the film of the year.

Scorsese’s The Departed is a more complicated case in the 2006 face-off. Those of us who know the Hong Kong film it’s based on, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Internal Affairs (2002), know how very much Scorsese used from the original. Plus who can forgive that final shot? Being a George Miller fan, I was quite disappointed by Happy Feet (the second English-language import to win). Rather bland, I thought, and certainly no Babe: Pig in the City (1998). I think Cars should have won best animated feature, and it outdoes The Departed as well. For some reason a lot of people don’t like Cars all that much compared to other Pixar films, which I don’t understand. Certainly Cars 2 is awful and Cars 3 pleasant enough. But the original is terrific.

The 2007 contest must be a draw. It’s hard to choose between the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Rataouille, the animated winner. (If Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has won best picture, I would give it the edge over the Pixar film. It’s another of the great films of the current century.)

It’s safer to say that in 2008 WALL-E tops Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire. The first half hour of WALL-E, set on Earth, is perhaps the best thing Pixar has done. It falls apart a bit once the hero and Eve get onto the giant spaceship to which humanity has fled once the Earth became uninhabitable. It turns into a prolonged chase that isn’t nearly as interesting as the incredibly clever exploration of the detritus of civilization that WALL-E diligently searches through in that first half-hour. Still, for that half-hour, I give it the edge against Slumdog Millionaire.

In 2009, there were for the second time five animated nominees. The category would return to three in 2010, but thereafter there have always been five. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was probably one of the stronger films to win best picture in the period I’m covering. Still, can it really be said to be better than both Pixar’s Up (the winner) and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox? And possibly Coraline or The Secret of Kells, Laika’s and Cartoon Saloon’s first entries into the fray respectively. (One benefit of writing this entry is that I watched for the first time all three of Tomm Moore’s lovely nominated Irish films, including The Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers.)

My case is pretty strong in 2010. With only three nominees, the animated winner, Toy Story 3, easily tops Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech. (We should remember we’re in the period when Harvey Weinstein was bludgeoning his company’s films into the winner’s circle.) Some would say How to Train Your Dragon would as well. (Among the live-action nominees, I would vote for Inglourious Basterds, but it would be a miracle if the Academy members chose such a film.)

With 2011 we reach another case where the best-picture winner is widely decried as among the worst to pick up the trophy: Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. The line-up of animated entries was pretty weak apart from Rango, directed by, of all people, Gore Verbinski. This brilliant outlier within the animation industry (produced by Nickelodeon), is a sort of cross between Chinatown and Once upon a Time in the West. That’s Rango with the villainous-tortoise mayor, above; the latter is a combination of Noah Cross in Chinatown and Mr. Choo-choo in Once upon a Time in the West.

Rango seems to have largely slipped from people’s memories, perhaps partly because it’s not a Disney or Pixar film that you buy on disc for your kids and have around forever. I don’t know what kids would make of Rango, but it’s definitely more aimed at adults. And hilariously imaginative.

2012 was a banner year for great animated films. The Oscar winner, Pixar’s Brave, was the first of six films in a row from Pixar and Disney, both at that point under the leadership of John Lasseter. I don’t find Brave among the best of these, but it’s OK and it no doubt benefited from all the fuss about it having Pixar’s first female protagonist. For me, there were no fewer than three wonderful nominees that were better: Laika’s Paranorman, Aardman’s The Pirates!: In an Adventure with Scientists! (the British title, changed to the much more boring The Pirates! Band of Misfits for North American release), and Disney’s Wreck-it Ralph. All three offer a flood of clever jokes and original concepts that could only be understood by adults. In Wreck-It-Ralph there’s the AA-style meeting of video-game villains that Ralph attends (top). Or in The Pirates!, the Pirate of the Year awards ceremony that puts the rival contestants in split-screen à la the Oscars show (second from top).

Any of them beats the “best picture,” Ben Affleck’s Argo. Remember that? (I haven’t seen all its live-action rivals, but Lincoln and Amour would have been creditable winners.)

Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave fully deserved to win Best Picture. There’s certainly nothing to rival it in the somewhat set of nominations in the animation category. I did not find the winner, Disney’s Frozen, particularly interesting. It seems to be geared to appeal to small children. Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises was the only plausible nominee to go up against Sir Steve’s film, but I’m not going to make that argument. (It’s a real pity that Gravity was in the competition this year, since it truly is a great film and also deserved to win.)

Moving on to 2014, the live-action winner was Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Innocence). The list of animated nominees was not as strong as some years, but I think Birdman is overrated, and Disney’s Big Hero 6 tops it. (I’ve only seen some of the live-action nominees, but The Grand Budapest Hotel and some of the others were pretty strong contenders.)

In 2015 the winners in the two categories were Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight and Pixar’s Inside Out. I don’t really have a preference. (Here’s another case, similar to Inglourious Basterds, of a marvelous but violent, over-the-top masterpiece deserved Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road. It pretty much swept the technical awards to end up with six, but Spotlight won only two–picture and screenplay. Go figure.)

I remember watching Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight in a theater in 2016. I sat there thinking that this film was made by a talented young man who someday might win an Oscar. To me, his The Underground Railroad was a more impressive achievement and deserved a slew of Emmys. Three excellent animated films were nominated in 2016: Disney’s Zootopia, Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings (bottom), and Disney’s Moana. I was convinced that Kubo would finally win Laika it’s first, well-deserved Oscar. Zootopia won over what I think is a slightly better film, Moana, but one can’t really complain in this case. (My preferences for Best Picture would have been Arrival and La La Land.)

The situation was reversed in 2017. Much though I like many of Guillermo del Tor’s films, I’d have to give Pixar’s Coco the edge over The Shape of Water (talk about a Mexican stand-off!). (The true masterpieces among the nominees that year were Nolan’s Dunkirk and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. At least, as so many of my friends have said, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri didn’t win.)

Now we come to the notorious year of 2018, when Peter Farrelly’s (!) Green Book won best picture against competition that included Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Curaón’s Roma. This incomprehensible choice throws an even greater light on the high quality of the animated race that year. Three masterpieces were among the five nominees: Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which won, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (above), and Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet. Any one of these rolls right over Green Book. Incredibles 2 is pretty good as well. I enoyed the fifth nominee, Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai, but it hadn’t a chance against these three.

2019 is easy. Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite beats everything, even Pixar’s Toy Story 4. Probably a lot of people agreed with my assessment that the franchise was showing a bit of wear and tear, though not nearly as much as last year’s Lightyear. (Again, it’s a pity that two other masterpieces nominated that year couldn’t also win: Little Women and Once upon a Time in Hollywood.)

For 2020, when theater-going was difficult if not impossible, studios delayed many films or sent them straight to streaming. The result was a somewhat uninspired lineup of animated nominees. Soul almost inevitably won. I must admit that I preferred Pixar’s films as they were until recently–adventures of various sorts, whether involving actual superheroes, groups of toys, or an old man flying his house to South America to learn how to be sociable again. These had psychological depth, but they didn’t make it explicit by making emotions into characters or sending them to heaven. So Nomadland comes out ahead this time. (I would have preferred two other nominees, The Father or The Trial of the Chicago 7.)

In 2021 I found Sian Heder’s Coda as heartwarming as anyone, but Oscars are purportedly for picking great films that we assume till be watched in the future as classics. Not that they get it right very often, but, well, Oscar-bait ain’t what it used to be. The Danish animated documentary Flee leaves us with a tear in the eye as well, but the Academy stuck to its long habit of rewarding Pixar and/or Disney films and made Encanto its top animated film. This film had many good moments, but it annoyed me every time it got into a lively scene. Suddenly the characters (and virtual camera) started zipping about through the settings. Those settings were gorgeous, but we didn’t get a chance to look at them. Just compare it with Moana, which also had scenery worth lingering over while still managing to drip with exuberance. (For the live-action champ, I would have gone for Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, or West Side Story. It was a pretty good year.)

There was, however, one animated feature nominated that year: the unmissable The Mitchells vs. the Machines–though many may have missed it when during the pandemic it skipped theatrical and went straight to Netflix. It was produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who also did Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for Sony Pictures Animation, and although a very different film, it has all the energy, imagination, and craziness of that film. It also plays out the potentially apocalyptic rebellion against humans by AI and the robots run by it. The premise is that an angry computing system being replaced by a new generation sends robots to put all humans in plastic cubes and fire them into space–including its own inventor. The dysfunctional Mitchells are humanity’s only hope. The funniest and most telling scene is when they stop at a mall and all the products in the stores, which have chips installed holding a kill order to destroy the family, start attacking them. This culminates in a bunch of Furbies going after them, led by the world’s largest Furby (above).

What happened in the 2022 category is sort of like what happened in 2002, when Spirited Away won. An outlier from outside the traditional Hollywood studio structure (Netflix) was nominated among a somewhat weak group of animated films and won the day. I settled down to watch the broadcast of the ceremony wondering if Academy members would recognize what a remarkable film Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is and not just reflexively vote for the Pixar film. That was Turning Red, which got a lot of attention for daring to show a teenager hitting puberty and experiencing her first period. I didn’t think it was a very good film and confirmed my sense that Pixar has declined in recent years. It’s probably better than The Good Dinosaur and now Lightyear, which is not saying much. (Carolyn Giardina’s recent “Elemental Steps into the Ring in Major Box Office Test for Pixar,” astutely sums up reasons for the aesthetic decline of Pixar–and, one might add Disney Animation.)

I know a lot of people for some reason are enthralled by Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, which won the 2022 Best Picture. I found it mildly entertaining but at least it gave Michelle Yeoh a career win for Best Actress. Pinocchio is miles beyond it. (Everything won against a slew of superior films. In alphabetical order: The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fabelsmans, Tár, and Women Talking.)

 

Totting up the live-action vs. animation winners in this face-off, we find one recusal, one draw, five decisions in favor of the live-action winners and fourteen for the animated winner or one or more of the animated nominees. As I mentioned at the start, the figures would be quite different if I had compared all the Oscar-worthy animation awards with all the Oscar-worthy Best Picture nominees. Still, in general this comparison may suggest that animated films are unfairly treated as one of the minor categories that people don’t pay much attention to.

I’m not suggesting that the Academy change their categories or rules. There’s probably no way to boost the prestige of the Animated Feature nominees.

The point here has simply been to add some evidence to my claim that a higher percentage of animated films tend to be excellent in a way that compares favorably with the live-action films nominated in the more prestigious category. Despite this, animated films are simply not taken seriously by most people, inclined cinephiles. They are still viewed as children’s fare, despite the successful appeal to adults built into many of the titles I’ve singled out here. They are also mostly comic to some extent and often involve fantasy, while Oscar bait leans toward drama and, with rare exceptions, away from fantasy/science fiction.

The conclusion is that if you think, for whatever reason, that live-action Oscar winners and films in general have declined in the past few decades, check out some ‘toons.

 

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016).

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist review – an intimate document of family tragedy | Movies

[ad_1]

With its piles of white sheets and whirring machines, the inside of a hospital room can feel oddly impersonal under the cold fluorescent light. Giving a poignant warmth to this sterile environment, this compelling documentary from Lebanese director Corine Shawi intimately captures how her family comes together during a time of tragedy. Struck by sudden paralysis, her father, Andre, is confined to bed and Shawi’s film grapples with this state of reduced mobility as well as her own emotional stasis, caught between the past, the present and the future.

As it examines Andre’s hospital room, the camera tenderly observes how the space is transformed into a second home. Containers of food lovingly prepared by Shawi’s mother are stacked by the bed, while the radio hums his favourite songs. The film does not shy away from moments of uncomfortable friction, either, as Andre’s frustration and Shawi’s helplessness erupt in arguments and sudden emotional outbursts. However, as Andre braves lengthy sessions of physical therapy with a smiling resilience, it is Shawi, not her father, who needs more courage to deal with this difficult new reality.

This brings us back to the film’s beautifully enigmatic title, which gets at the heart of Shawi’s crisis. During one particularly momentous conversation, Shawi’s sister advises that she should also follow her own dreams, instead of being tethered to the needs of their admirably self-sufficient parents. Like the film’s recurring images of a hand peeling off dried tree-bark to reveal a fresh surface underneath, the film appears to seek the same kind of renewal.

Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist is available from 4 August on True Story.

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

New Film ‘Kokomo City’ Chronicles Black Trans Sex Workers

[ad_1]

D. Smith never set out to be a filmmaker. For years, the Florida native enjoyed major success in the music business as a producer and songwriter, collaborating on projects with Lil’ Wayne, Katy Perry and other artists.

All of that changed, however, when Smith came out as a transgender woman in 2014. Suddenly, she says, her opportunities in the recording studio ground to a halt, and she lost her home and her car as a result.

Amidst that professional upheaval, however, Smith bought a camera and quietly began making plans for her latest project. Her new documentary, “Kokomo City,” offers a thoughtful and startlingly intimate look at the lives of four Black transgender sex workers ― Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver ― in New York and Georgia. The film, shot in stylish black-and-white, opened in theaters Friday after premiering at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival in January.

“I had no intentions on being the director of this film, but it worked out that way,” Smith told HuffPost in an interview. “I asked maybe five or six directors to do it. I’m like: ‘Hey, I got this great idea. You want it? Here you go.’ I saw it as clear as day. Everybody else saying no allowed me to be the director.”

Filmmaker D. Smith (second from left) with "Kokomo City" stars Dominique Silver, Daniella Carter and Koko Da Doll.

Emily Assiran via Getty Images

The music industry’s rejection still weighed heavily on Smith as she began work on “Kokomo City.” That “definitely not entitled” approach, she said, helped her establish a jovial rapport with the sex workers in the film.

“I was in a really low place in my life, so I had this demeanor that they were helping me, and I wanted to help them as well by telling their stories,” she said. “I was very transparent about what the process of making this film was going to look like. It’s not going to be glam. There’s no fancy lighting person, no hair and makeup. It’s just me. And they were drawn to that.”

She went on to note: “They were drawn to the fact that they didn’t have to worry about the politics of being in the LGBTQ community or of being trans. It’s very stressful, very taxing, actually. A lot of the rules and regulations that we have dehumanizes us.”

Still, “Kokomo City” is being released as violence against the transgender community is at an all-time high, and not surprisingly, the film finds its subjects sharing moments of trauma and tragedy. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Mitchell recalls spotting a loaded gun beside the bed of a client just as she’s about to have sex with him.

Liyah Mitchell in "Kokomo City."
Liyah Mitchell in "Kokomo City."

D. Smith, Magnolia Pictures

Sadly, that reality was emphasized when Koko Da Doll ― also known as Rasheeda Williams ― was fatally shot in April, just weeks after appearing at the film’s Sundance premiere.

But Smith was adamant that “Kokomo City” depict Black trans sex workers as more than just victims and is quick to highlight the joy and occasional humor of her subject’s private lives. She also interviews a number of trans-attracted men who have been involved with or, in some cases, had lengthy romantic relationships with the women.

After its Sundance premiere, “Kokomo City” was warmly embraced by critics, who praised the film’s vérité approach to an often-dehumanized subset of the LGBTQ+ community. The Washington Post called the film a “meditation on masculinity, femininity, what constitutes pleasure, and the bitter price of personal and social denial,” while The Hollywood Reporter praised Smith for “stepping into relatively uncharted territory with grace and courage.”

Smith is, of course, heartened by the success of “Kokomo City” thus far. Ultimately, she’s hopeful the film who help humanize a derided and much-overlooked subset of the LGBTQ+ community, too.

“Even as a trans woman, I was completely unaware of the things that sex workers and their clients go through,” she said. “All of that happens because people are not able to be who they are. That’s what it boils down to at the end of the day. And once you watch this film, you really don’t want anything to happen to the girls.”

Watch the trailer for “Kokomo City” below.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdM2voAE-ok[/embed]



[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Despite Acquittal, Kevin Spacey Faces Uphill Battle for Hollywood Roles

[ad_1]

The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.

“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey told a German magazine, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”

Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan cleared him of battery in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.

But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.

Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”

During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations began to emerge in 2017. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.

Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s character was killed off in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World” were reshot with a different actor, and Netflix scrapped the film “Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.

Beyond two recently filmed parts listed on IMDb, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.

Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.

The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.

Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies: “Control,” a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.

Michael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.

“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”

Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.

Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.

“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor played the country’s first president.

Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”

In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.

There was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.

Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017 the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.

“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”

Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr., the road was long.

“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.”

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Spotlight: Supriya Suri | The Seventh Art

[ad_1]

[Part of Curator’s Corner, a section dedicated to showcasing work of emerging and marginal filmmakers.]

Delhi-based Supriya Suri has made four films, short and long, that could hardly be more unlike each other: an experimental profile of a celebrated filmmaker, a fictional character study of small-time urban criminals, an expositional documentary about a film personality and a diaristic feature about a family pilgrimage. Taken together, they attest to a constantly self-reinventing creativity trying out various subject matters, styles and modes of expression. Professionally trained in film direction, Supriya segued early into film criticism and curation before making works of her own. “I never saw filmmaking as a journey,” she says. “Making one film was the ultimate goal, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it right. For the longest time, I didn’t get into direction.”

Supriya’s two documentary featurettes comprise a study in contrasts. Commissioned by the now-defunct Films Division, her debut Maestro, a Portrait (2013) is an oblique, non-biographical profile of Bengali filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta that synthesizes vastly disparate material—poetry, paintings, classical music, film excerpts and archival footage—in its attempt to arrive at deeper insights into its subject. Eschewing exposition or direct interviews, the film presents a silent Dasgupta striking solemn poses in different environments while a cluster of voices reads out heterogenous texts in English, Bengali and even Portuguese.

In a more radical departure, Maestro refuses to demarcate Dasgupta’s words and images from those by others that are cited; for instance, excerpts from the films of Dadasaheb Phalke, Luis Buñuel and Satyajit Ray are seamlessly woven with ones from the Bengali auteur’s works. What we get in effect is a mosaic of cinematic and literary references in dialogue with Dasgupta’s cinema, arranged into themes of memory, dream and myth—a stream of images and texts that flow into and out of Dasgupta’s films. In its rejection of authorities and hierarchies of information, Maestro registers as an unusual, ambitious study that assumes some degree of familiarity with the subject.

Aruna Vasudev – Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), on the other hand, crafts a relatively more conventional portrait of the eponymous film critic and programmer. Through talking-head interviews, archival material and voiceover, we come to learn about an enterprising individual who significantly contributed to giving Asian cinema an identity as Asian cinema. Quickly covering Vasudev’s years as a student and an apprentice filmmaker abroad, the film devotes more attention to the magazine Cinemaya, the organization NETPAC and the film festival Cinefan, all of which she co-founded with a view to foster and promote Asian cinema.

“I was making a short film in which she played herself,” Supriya recalls. “But I realized that she was old and had started forgetting things.” Supriya, thus, abandoned the short film for the documentary with a view to preserve Vasudev’s stories and experiences. The testimonies in Mother of Asian Cinema capture a sense of Vasudev’s outgoing, friendly personality as well as her astounding capacity to forge lasting links across the globe. At the end, we see Supriya herself in front of the camera, recounting Vasudev’s influence on her own journey and, in some respect, tracing her professional lineage—a theme that finds echo in Supriya’s most recent work, the mid-length feature We Shall Meet Yet Again (2022).

At the centre of the short film Boys from Hinterland (2019) are two men on a bike; poker-faced, clad in black leather and almost comically representative of a strain of brash Haryanvi masculinity. They mug pedestrians and other commuters in a series of orchestrated robberies, only to blow their loot on booze. In lateral tracking shots, we see them cruise the vast, desolate highways around the national capital, high-rise buildings in the background furnishing silent commentary. Yet it is neither sociological portraiture nor genre thrill that Supriya is after. Ostensibly inspired by Robert Bresson, Boys from Hinterland strives to capture the feeling of drifting under the open skies, finding existential freedom if only in criminal behaviour.

Produced by Supriya herself, We Shall Meet Yet Again documents her journey with her mother and grandmother to pilgrimage sites in Northern India. For the most part, the film unfurls like generational road movie around their trip to Haridwar, Hrishikesh and Kashi. The three women revisit the places where they once lived and meet local priests to help them trace their lineage using bahis, pilgrim registers maintained through the centuries and updated whenever a birth or a death occurred in the pilgrim’s family. Between these visits, we witness the women in conversation in guest houses and in trains, speaking reverently of the river Ganga or philosophizing about the ephemerality of life. “I would tell them the beginning, middle and end of a given scene, and they would fill up the rest,” explains the filmmaker. “It was a very improvised process of shooting.”

If We Shall Meet Yet Again presents three generations of women, it doesn’t, however, place emphasis on their differences. There are certainly superficial distinctions: the filmmaker converses in Hindi with her mother, who uses Punjabi with her mother. Serial shots underscore the hair, attire and footwear of the three women. But absent is the kind of friction and clash of worldviews typical of intergenerational narratives. The reticent Supriya hardly speaks in the film, and mother doesn’t seem to have much to disagree with grandmother either. If anything, commonalities—such as a shared interest in spiritual literature and ancestry information—bring out continuities between the three women.

The apparent unity is compounded by the fact that the film offers us no privileged perspective; no voiceovers, texts or instructive moments that tell us how we should interpret the events we see. Even the film’s autobiographical dimension is obscured to the viewer who is unaware that it features the filmmaker and her real family. This absence of a discursive framework keeps us at a distance from the women’s words and experiences, but it also empties the film of an egocentrism that lends it an unassuming, self-effacing quality.

Even so, the film takes matrilineage as its central theme, if only to examine its otherness within Hindu social and religious contexts. Firstly, the notion of women undertaking a pilgrimage by train, all by themselves, runs counter to both road movie conventions and the reality of Indian public transport. But the fact that the ladies successfully trace their lineage or conduct shradh rituals, traditionally male prerogatives, on the ghats of the Ganga attests to changing times and mores.

Times are indeed changing; grandmother’s son (the filmmaker’s uncle), we learn, is planning to emigrate, leaving her alone in the house and under the sole care of her daughter, who lives separately in the same city. Supriya’s film eventually becomes a record of this delicate bond between mother and daughter, who are filmed in two shots side-by-side on the train, often re-enacting fictionalized exchanges. What emerges from this portrait of maternal inheritance isn’t nostalgia or family pride, but a muted sense of patriarchy’s failings. “I’ve always regretted not knowing my paternal grandparents well enough,” Supriya recalls. “So the film was also an excuse to spend more time with my naani.

We Shall Meet Yet Again is currently looking for a distributor.

 

Bio

Supriya studied film direction with Egide Scholarship at Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français in Paris, France. She started her career as the founding member of Cinedarbaar in India in 2009. With her organisation, she has been involved in curatorial practices, film criticism and educational programmes, and has organised several film festivals across India. She co-founded and wrote for a film magazine Indian Auteur and ran a cinema gallery 13BCD in New Delhi. As a film curator, she was nominated by the U.S government for the IVLP to talk about Indian films in the USA. She also runs her production company Maison Su that focuses on international co-production projects. She was a jury member for Cineaste International Film Festival, India, in 2021. She was recently invited by META Cinema Forum, 2022 in Dubai as a speaker on Asian Cinema. She was also on the jury of 28th Kolkata International Film Festival, 2022, for Asian Select category awards.

Contact

info@maisonsuentertainment.com

Filmography

  • Maestro, a Portrait — A Film on Buddhadeb Dasgupta, 2013, 52 min., digital
  • Boys From Hinterland, 2019, 14 min., digital
  • Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema, 2021, 65 min., digital
  • Main Tenu Phir Milangi (We Shall Meet Yet Again), 2022, 65 min., digital

Showcase

Maestro, a Portrait (2013)

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIsDqlTP95k[/embed]

Boys From Hinterland (2019), password: hinterland@watchnow

https://vimeo.com/703848579

Aruna Vasudev — Mother of Asian Cinema (2021), password: vasudev@2021

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Art, entertainment, and the hard-boiled mystique

[ad_1]

The Maltese Falcon (1941).

DB here:

The traditional opposition between Art and Entertainment still holds some sway. Art, some believe, is the realm of higher significance and profound emotion, while entertainment yields mere diversion and superficial engagement. Art embodies wisdom and technical breakthroughs, while at best entertainment is home to talent and cleverness. Art harbors genius, entertainment offers ingenuity. Art expresses the creator’s personal vision, entertainment recycles collective fantasy (or the Zeitgeist). There’s usually an implied hierarchy of quality and of appeal: art is for a sensitive elite, entertainment is popular (read vulgar).

One problem, though, is that for long stretches of history much art has been thoroughly entertaining. Mozart, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hiroshige, Austen, and many other major artists have found wide popularity. They provide pleasure aplenty. But with urbanization and the rise of capitalism, mass production created a huge public, and tastemakers have tended to treat art as a realm apart. For a hundred years or more, entertainment has been equated with mass culture, and art with high culture, most notably with modernism and its successors.

Another problem is cultural endurance. In a recent column, Michael Dirda points out that genre fiction often outlasts prestigious literary fiction of its era.

Take fantasy and science fiction: In 1997, I praised William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and the works of Ursula K. Le Guin — all remain vital to contemporary writers and readers. 

Similarly, classics of mystery fiction by Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Patricia Highsmith still attract readers, while “mainstream” novels of their eras are forgotten. Dirda’s second point is no less valid.

More generally, American novelists have wholly embraced the energy and potential of fantasy in its various forms. We are all fabulists now. This century revels in comics, graphic novels, manga and superhero movies. Authors as varied as Colson Whitehead, Walter Mosley, Kelly Link, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand and Michael Chabon, to name a few prominent figures, all grew up loving fantasy and science fiction.

Genre appeals have infiltrated prestige literature, as in the crime plots of Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, and Richard Price. (I consider Colson Whitehead’s and Richard Wright’s contributions here.) Likewise, we have horror-infused tales like George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home .

Creators of entertainment have felt the distinction keenly. “A wedge has been driven into the industry,” says Christopher MacQuarrie, director of the latest Mission: Impossible installment. “Are you an artist or an entertainer? Tom doesn’t see them as mutually exclusive.” But some creators have seen a forking path. Rex Stout, after several “serious” novels failed, came to two conclusions:

First—that I was a good storyteller, and second—that I would never be a great novelist. I’d never be a Tolstoy, or a Dickens, or a Balzac…. So since that wasn’t going to happen, to hell with sweating out another twenty novels when I’d have a lot of fun telling stories which I could do well and make some money on it.

The Art/ Entertainment distinction runs through my recent book, Perplexing Plots, because many mystery writers have aimed at “elevating” their work to the level of prestige literature. This urge drives them to experiment with the norms of plotting and writing. Even when the genre limits remain in force, there’s a chance that skillful exponents can accept them and still yield “literary” pleasures. A good example is what happened to hard-boiled detective fiction in the hands of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

 

The Op

Hammett launched his fame with a series of crime stories mostly published in the pulp magazine Black Mask from 1923 to 1930. His protagonist is a nameless investigator for the Continental Detective Agency. The Continental Op, as he came to be called, is a pudgy but tough middle-aged detective who values camaraderie, crafty stratagems, and a good cheap steak. Women flirt with him, but he sees through their schemes. The Op’s drabness and humility give him a realism that is amplified by the milieu Hammett depicts. He had been a Pinkerton agent and larded the stories with underworld argot and tips on investigative technique.

Black Mask stories put a premium on action, so the Op was often at the center of violence perpetrated by crooks, sociopaths, and corrupt cops. Unlike other hard-boiled detectives, the Op isn’t a swaggering sadist. Violence is his last resort; he favors obstinate everyday professionalism. Sometimes he’s fooled by the grifters and has to wriggle his way out. At other times, he can set crooks against one another and watch the mutual destruction.

Hammett wrote the stories in the first person, giving the Op a telegraphic, visceral style laced with sour humor. A 1923 story shows his American vernacular already in place.

Just at the wrong minute Henderson decided to look over his shoulder at us–an unevenness in the road twisted his wheels–his machine swayed–skidded–went over on its side. Almost immediately, from the heart of the tangle, came a flash and a bullet moaned past my ear. Another. And then, while I was still hunting for something to shoot at in the pile of junk we were drawing down upon, McClump’s ancient and battered revolver roared in my other ear.
Henderson was dead when we got to him–McClump’s bullet had taken him over one eye.
McClump spoke to me over the body.
“I ain’t an inquisitive sort of fellow, but I hope you don’t mind telling me why I shot this lad.” (“Arson Plus”)

In 1929, the publisher Knopf issued two Hammett novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, based on Black Mask serials. The Op had not lost his wit or his gift for staccato narration. Here are three excerpts.

I didn’t think he was funny, though he may have been.

He stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me with solemn eyes. I sat on the bed and looked at him with whatever kind of eyes I had at the time. We did this for nearly three minutes.

The latch clicked. I plunged in with the door.
Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and windows tinkled around us.
Somebody tripped me. Fear gave me three brains and half a dozen eyes. I was in a tough spot. Noonan had slipped me a pretty dose. These birds couldn’t help thinking I was playing his game.
I tumbled down, twisting around to face the door. My gun was in my hand by the time I hit the floor.
Across the street, burly Nick had stepped out of a doorway to pump slugs at us with both hands. I steadied my gun-arm on the floor. Nick’s body showed over the front sight. I squeezed the gun. Nick stopped shooting. He crossed his guns on his chest and went down in a pile on the sidewalk.
Hands on my ankles dragged me back. The floor scraped pieces off my chin. The door slammed shut. Some comedian said:
“Uh-huh, people don’t like you.”

As he was finishing The Dain Curse, Hammett wrote to Blanche Knopf confessing that in future work he wanted to go beyond Entertainment to Art.

I’m one of the few—if there are any more—people moderately literate who take the detective story seriously. I don’t mean that I necessarily take my own or anybody else’s seriously—but the detective story as a form. Some day somebody’s going to make “literature” of it (Ford’s Good Soldier wouldn’t have needed much altering to have been a detective story), and I’m selfish enough to have my hopes, however slight the evident justification may be. 

The question is: How to do this?

 

Inside and outside

Hammett proposed an answer in his letter to Blanche Knopf. He wanted to try that he wanted to try out modernist technique in a third novel.

I want to try adapting the stream-of-consciousness method, conveniently modified, to the detective story, carrying the reader along with the detective, showing him everything as it is found, giving him the detective’s conclusions as they are reached, letting the solution break on both of them together. I don’t know whether I’ve made that very clear, but it’s something altogether different from the method employed in “Poisonville [Red Harvest],” for instance, where, though the reader goes along with the detective, he seldom sees deeper into the detective’s mind than dialogue and action let him. 

His mention of stream of consciousness may mislead us about his intentions. In that technique the verbal narration seeks to mimic the flow of the mind as it flits across sensory impressions, memories, and fantasies. The process is often rendered as sentence fragments, often introduced by a sentence indicating the behavior of the character.

Here’s an example from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the most famous showcase of stream of consciousness. Mr. Bloom is in a Catholic church.

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Sometimes the images and phrases are separated by commas and periods, but sometimes they simply pile up. In the book’s last chapter, Molly Bloom’s drowsy imaginings are given in an unpunctuated, sparsely paragraphed flow.

It’s likely that Hammett didn’t want his usage to be as fragmentary as what we encounter in Joyce and others. His invocation of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) suggests something closer to what many now call inner monologue. (Ford called it “impressionism.”) Here the flow of thought is given as a sort of soliloquy, a flow of more or less cogent and coherent ideas and impressions. What makes it a modernist technique is that inner monologue may not respect story chronology and it’s likely to be biased, uncertain, equivocal, and subject to revision. Ford’s narrator, John Dowell, tells a rambling, out-of-order tale of marital infidelity and suicide, in which flashbacks are analyzed and re-analyzed.

Looking over what I have written, I see that I have unintentionally misled you when I said that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that was the impression that I really had until just now. When I come to think of it she was out of my sight most of the time.

At the climax, Dowell makes a provisional sense of what the characters knew and why they acted as they did.

The problem in importing this to the detective story is evident. How can the detective’s ongoing reasoning, bristling with mistaken inferences and reconstructed impressions, be passed along to the reader without causing confusion? For this reason, detective story narration, whether first-person or third-person, suppresses most of the protagonist’s reasoning. The Watson figure and the dumb authorities exist to be baffled and play with misleading possibilities while the detective holds back even a partial solution.

By convention, the climax of the tale is the revelation of the truth–not when the detective discerns it, but at the moment when it can be announced with decisive impact (often in a gathering of suspects with the police present). Raymond Chandler noted that the delayed revelation was a serious constraint of the genre, even when the detective, like the Op, is telling the story. “The first person story is assumed to tell all but it doesn’t. There is always a point at which the hero stops taking the reader into his confidence.”  The detective “stops thinking out loud and ever so gently closes the door of his mind in the reader’s face.” This prevents the public announcement of the solution from being anticlimactic.

Worse, Ford’s protagonist Dowell is an unreliable narrator, as the above passage suggests. To make the detective’s first-person account unreliable would be more than a “convenient modification” of the standard plot schema. It would push toward the experiments seen in Cameron McCabe’s The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937) and later “anti-mysteries.”

Hammett admitted in a later letter that he would put the “stream-of-consciousness” experiment on hold while he wrote material for Hollywood in “more objective and filmable forms.” (That would include his script for City Streets of 1931, which does include a subjective auditory flashback rare in films of the time.) But in his next novels Hammett turned sharply away from the interiority he had considered. Instead, he went toward extreme objectivity, almost completely shutting us out from his protagonists’ inner lives.

The action of The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Glass Key (1930) attach us closely to his protagonist, scene by scene. We’re confined to his activity and his range of knowledge. But this doesn’t get us into his mind. For these books Hammett switched to third-person narration and made it radically objective, sticking almost completely to reporting dialogue and character interaction.

In Perplexing Plots, I explore how this strategy works, but here’s an example from The Glass Key.

At Madison Avenue a green taxicab, turning against the light, ran full tilt into Ned Beaumont’s maroon one, driving it over against a car that was parked by the curb, hurling him into a corner in a shower of broken glass.
He pulled himself upright and climbed out into the gathering crowd. He was not hurt, he said. He answered a policeman’s question. He found the hat that did not quite fit him and put it on his head. He had his bags transferred to another taxicab, gave the hotel’s name to the second driver, and huddled back in a corner, white-faced and shivering, while the ride lasted.

The narration presents what a third-person observer would have seen and heard, and it won’t venture into Beaumont’s thinking. The cues are behavioral: he seems cool enough in slipping out of the crash, but his true reaction is given through his nervous reaction while riding back to the hotel.

As Hammett’s second letter to Blanche Knopf suggests, this flat objectivity would seem an ideal novelistic basis for a “filmable” treatment. John Huston’s screen adaptation of The Maltese Falcon confines us almost completely to Spade’s range of knowledge. (The big exception is that we see his partner Miles Archer shot by an unknown killer.) The film’s visual narration mostly follows Hammett’s impassive neutrality. But when Casper Gutman drugs Spade, we get Spade’s clouded optical viewpoint.

In the novel the narration reports that Spade’s eyes seemed to muddy over. When he says, “And the maximum?” we’re told that “An unmistakable sh followed the x in maximum as he said it.” This isn’t Spade’s experience but rather what an observer would register, an “unmistakable” impression confirmed when we’re told that “a sharp frightened gleam awoke in his eyes.” As Spade tries to walk, he’s tripped by Wilmer. He falls and Wilmer kicks him. “Once more he tried to get up, could not, and went to sleep.” The whole scene is rendered externally.

So instead of giving the detective story a modernist subjectivity, Hammett went to the other extreme. Did he intuitively recognize the problem of revealing the detective’s inferences too soon? Maybe, although his increasing involvement with Hollywood may have kept him on the objective, “filmable” path. The Thin Man (1934), his last novel, is a fascinating effort to return to first-person narration while incorporating the dry objectivity of the two previous books.

Perhaps inadvertently, Hammett’s radicalization of the objective method yielded what he had hoped for. The Maltese Falcon was greeted as a serious work of literature and was soon incorporated into the prestigious Modern Library series. His works have become part of the canon of American letters enshrined in the Library of America collection. The convention of delaying the detective’s solution didn’t prevent the genre from becoming accepted as a legitimate literary form–at least as practiced by Hammett, and his most prominent successor.

 

Overtones, echoes, images

That successor was, of course, Raymond Chandler. Ten years after Hammett wrote to Blanche Knopf with his hopes of elevating the whodunit, Chandler wrote to Alfred Knopf about his plans for The Big Sleep (1939) and the novels that followed. It has an echo of Hammett: “I was more intrigued by a situation where the mystery is solved by the exposition and understanding of a single character, always well in evidence, rather than by the slow and sometimes long-winded concatenation of circumstances.”

But what Chandler means by “understanding” doesn’t include full-blown reasoning. First-person narration, he explains in a 1949 note, must “suppress the detective’s ratiocination while giving a clear account of his words and acts and many of his emotional reactions.” This seems a response to the detached reportage of late Hammett prose. Chandler also rejects the Op’s streetwise patter by explaining to Knopf that his method will use  “a very vivid and pungent style, but not slangy or overtly vernacular.” He wants “to acquire delicacy without losing power.”

Hammett, while a voracious reader, learned a good deal of his craft from actually investigating crimes. Chandler, who began writing mysteries as Hammett’s productivity tailed off, owed his knowledge of the mystery genre to reading. He studied crime fiction of all sorts with almost academic passion and became one of the most nuanced commentators on the tradition. He claimed to have learned plotting from outlining pulp stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. His literary tastes didn’t run to modernism. He admired the Greek and Roman classics, Flaubert, James, and Conrad and thought highly of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hammett imagined elevating the genre by “conveniently modifying” modernist technique, but Chandler sought to make the hard-boiled detective story more like the ambitious mainstream novel.

He believed he could do that through style. In his crucial essay, “The Simple Art of Murder (1944/1946),” he praises Hammett’s prose but objects that “it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill.” Chandler sought to give style a greater novelistic richness not only through probing his protagonist’s mind but also through fairly dense descriptions colored by the protagonist’s emotions and judgments.

Hammett sketches characters in quick strokes and he merely indicates settings. But Chandler dwells on his characters and their surroundings. The opening of The Big Sleep devotes a page and a half to Philip Marlowe’s impressions of the Sternwood mansion (stained-glass  window of a knight rescuing a lady, plush  chairs, a mysterious portrait) and another page and a half to his meeting with the coy Carmen. These are filtered through Marlowe’s running commentary. The knight doesn’t really seem to be trying. The chairs appear to never have been sat in. The portrait looks threatening. Carmen’s infantile flirtation reveals that “thinking was always going to be a bother to her.” Here are the overtones and echoes that Chandler finds lacking in Hammett. This is an ominous household–as Marlowe will later say, this will be “no game for knights.”

Chandler would pursue this method in the following novels. Yet at times the narration plunged deeper into subjectivity. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940) Marlowe is repeatedly knocked out in tussles, and in the second passage Chandler writes:

The man in the back seat made a sudden flashing movement that I sensed rather than saw. A pool of darkness opened at my feet and was far, far deeper than the blackest night.
I dived into it. It had no bottom.

The film adaptation, titled Murder, My Sweet (1944), uses this subjective device in every knockdown. Marlowe’s voice-over narration runs through the film, and after the first assault we hear:

I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.

Onscreen we see Marlowe’s crumpled body blotted out by a miasma that leads to a black frame.

In a later sequence, a knockout of Marlowe is rendered as wild optical exaggerations before following the novel’s report of Marlowe seeing a room full of smoke. That’s translated as wispy superimpositions over the shots, with explanatory voice-over.

The film tries a bit too hard, but its use of voice-over and delirious visual subjectivity would become common in film noirs of the period.

In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe’s recovery from his first knockout is rendered with vigorous subjectivity across two pages, as Marlowe realizes that the voice he hears reviewing what happened is his own. “I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I was trying to figure the thing out subconsciously.”

Marlowe is able to reconstruct bits of the crime through this process, but it’s a provisional solution, not the decisive one. That one he keeps from the reader until the climax. By then, as per convention, the door to his mind has shut in the reader’s face.

Hammett’s novels were published when most crime fiction consisted of genteel whodunits and gangster sagas, so he had the advantage of novelty. By the time Chandler published The Big Sleep, he was competing with many book-length stories of hard-boiled investigators. Aware of the need to establish a distinctive presence, he presented work that stood apart by its social criticism and the romanticized realism of a righteous avenger alone on the mean streets of a corrupt city–sure-fire attractions to intellectuals then and since. Just as important was his self-consciously literary style. “In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

Through concern with language’s echoes and overtones, he established himself as Hammett’s successor. The literati followed his lead and declared him a significant novelist. His books, along with “The Simple Art of Murder,” provided an enduring rationale for the tough detective story. While adhering to the conventions of the classic puzzle (clues, faked deaths, false identities, least-likely culprit), he acquired lasting prominence. Like Hammett he has found a home in the Library of America.

Arguably Hammett and Chandler also elevated their genre. Their achievements encouraged other ambitious writers and stimulated critics and readers to look more closely at the possibilities of the murder novel. No wonder that prestigious writers have turned to mystery plots. Fans still labor to make a case for Golden Age puzzles as art rather than entertainment, but most critics and readers assume the hard-boiled mystery to be at least potentially serious literature–especially when it goes under the alias “noir.”

 

Nowadays the Art/ Entertainment duality has weakened its hold. If, as Dirda suggests, we are all fabulists now, we’re also probably mystery fans to some degree. It’s likely that film played a role here, in showing intellectuals that films by Hitchcock, Ozu, and other popular directors were of high quality. More and more, I think, people aren’t as eager to see the split as absolute. Instead of a hierarchy, we have more of a spectrum.

In harmony with this, Perplexing Plots argues that culture offers us a plenitude of individual works with varied appeals, all of which can be realized with, to use Chandler’s terms, delicacy and power. Some works rely on subtlety, others on immediate impact. We have the refinements of Baroque music and the direct force of The Rite of Spring. If Treasure Island is a masterpiece a well as a rousing yarn, so is Die Hard.  There is heavy art and light art, brooding art and and diverting art, intellectual density and emotional charm. None of these qualities is simple or easy to achieve; all can repay analysis. The slogan might be: “There’s valuable work at all levels. And there are no levels.”

One source of value, not always acknowledged, is the role of entertainment in revealing fresh expressive possibilities in the medium. For example, the martial arts cinemas of Japan and Hong Kong opened up new vistas of cinema. And yes, as Hammett and Chandler indicated, a lot of the freshness lies in style. This is why Perplexing Plots spends time looking closely at how mystery fiction and film work, word by word or shot by shot. Even Agatha Christie’s supposedly bland verbal texture points up ways in which language can mislead us.

So Hammett and Chandler didn’t “elevate” the hard-boiled story so much as blur the line between genre fiction and the “legitimate” novel. Ambler and Le Carré did the same for the spy story, as did Highsmith for the psychological thriller. For such reasons, Perplexing Plots discusses hard-boiled detection extensively. I explore the Art/ Entertainment distinction because it has obsessed critics and creators. But I try not to buy into the split, opting instead for the looser idea of “crossover.” It’s a swap meet, with storytellers ransacking works “high” and “low” for subjects, forms, techniques, whatever.

I wanted to put up this entry on 23 July, Raymond Chandler’s birthday. It happens to be mine too. No cheerleading here, though. I prefer Hammett, as maybe you can tell.


My quotations from Hammett’s letters come from Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960, ed. Richard Layman and Julie Rivett (2002). I take Chandler’s remarks on mystery fiction from Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, ed. Frank MacShane (1981) and Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker (1962).

Michael Dirda, as my mentions of him should lead you to expect, has written an admirable example of taking popular storytelling seriously but not solemnly: On Conan Doyle, or the Whole Art of Storytelling (2014). Kristin does something similar in her Wooster Proposes, Jeeves Disposes, or Le Mot Juste (1992), available here and here. Her immensely popular subject, P. G. Wodehouse, was regarded as a master of English prose by Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and many other literary celebrities.

What about the third celebrated hard-boiled pioneer, Ross Macdonald? Read Perplexing Plots to find out!

Murder My Sweet (1944).

This entry was posted

on Sunday | July 23, 2023 at 9:07 am and is filed under 1940s Hollywood, Film and other media, Narrative strategies, PERPLEXING PLOTS (the book).

Both comments and pings are currently closed.




[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

‘It just feels warm and fuzzy’: how Hallmark built an empire of unashamedly schmaltzy rom-coms | Movies

[ad_1]

Avon, Connecticut, lies toward the north of the US state, a small town of perfect contour and construction, where even on a bare-branched midwinter afternoon, the light falls pleasingly across East Main Street. The population is largely white and affluent, and alongside the Walmart and the Whole Foods, there is a congregational church and a country store that, in the autumn months, offers hayrides to a nearby pumpkin patch.

When Julie Sherman Wolfe moved to Avon from Los Angeles five years ago, it was a relocation she came to regard as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sherman Wolfe is the screenwriter behind 22 Hallmark movies, from The Convenient Groom, via Right in Front of Me and Always Amore – films that were often set in precisely the kind of quaint New England town to which she and her family had moved. The draw for Sherman Wolfe echoed the on-screen appeal for viewers. “I think the more unsafe the world seems, the safer a small town seems,” she says. “It’s the idea that less bad stuff is going to happen to you in Avon than it is in Brooklyn. It’s a nostalgia thing, where it just feels warm and fuzzy.”

For the uninitiated, the Hallmark movie is a genre of made-for-TV romantic comedy now so ubiquitous that the term “Hallmark movie” has extended to encompass any TV movie of a similar tone and aesthetic, regardless of whether it has been made by the Hallmark Channel. There are variations on the basic theme – different locations, the possible involvement of royalty, perhaps an element of the supernatural – but the plot invariably runs along the lines of: high-flying career woman returns from the big city to the small town where she was raised in order to sell the family pecan farm. She insists upon wearing inappropriate footwear and brims with disdain for small-town life. But a series of unexpected events leads her to appreciate the charms of a simpler existence, and to rekindle her love for her high school sweetheart, who is now the town baker.

Jesse Metcalfe and Autumn Reeser in A Country Wedding
Stable relationship … Jesse Metcalfe and Autumn Reeser in A Country Wedding (2015). Photograph: Cinematic Collection/Alamy

Thanks to the predictability of the Hallmark movie framework, over the past few years the films have become rich meme-fodder. There was even an AI experiment in which a bot was fed 1,000 hours of Hallmark movies then asked to write its own screenplay (the result was a heartwarming tale of a widowed single mother working for a small-town snow globe company).

So unchallenging and untextured is the Hallmark world that it is easy to regard these movies as harmless entertainment. But as their reach has spread they have also diffused an idea of home and life and relationships that has been traditional and conservative, and perhaps even retrograde. “In this particular kind of romance, there’s always an affirmation of some really conventional standard,” says Billy Mernit, author of the bestselling textbook Writing the Romantic Comedy, and a story analyst for Universal Pictures. “It’s straight up middle-American heartland values.”

The Hallmark Channel can trace its lineage back to the early 1990s, when two religious cable TV channels, the American Christian Television System and Vision Interfaith Satellite Network, began companionably sharing time on a satellite service. Over the years that followed, the combined network moved through several incarnations and investment structures, until in August 2001, now owned by Crown Media Holdings, itself owned by the Hallmark Cards Inc, it was rebranded as the Hallmark Channel.

While the network introduced secular shows alongside its faith-based output, its programming remained resolutely wholesome (aside, perhaps, for the vague lustfulness of repeats of the Golden Girls). When it began creating original movies, the romances they portrayed were remarkably chaste. To this day, there is no sex, drugs or swearing in a Hallmark film, no politics or violence or drunkenness. “In standard theatrical romcoms it all busted open in the 60s,” notes Mernit. “But Hallmark movies kind of act as if that never happened.”

For Sherman Wolfe, these parameters make for something distinct. “The thing that makes these movies special is they’re a safe thing for everyone to watch,” she argues. “Your little kid and Grandma can watch it together.”

While other production companies have attempted to imitate the genre, she argues that they often fall flat precisely because they don’t work within the same family-oriented restrictions. “They have more freedom, they can have sex and swearing and murder, but it dilutes the beauty of what it’s supposed to be,” she says.

Compared to your average cinematic release, Hallmark movies are cheap to produce, rumoured to be a little over $2m per film. Accordingly, there is something gently low-budget to the productions: the sets, the wardrobe, the effects feel more homely than Hollywood. Although the likes of Danny Glover and Megan Markle have starred in Hallmark fllms, the actors are usually familiar but not famous. You are most likely to recognise them from other Hallmark movies (Candace Cameron Bure, for instance, has 30 Hallmark credits to her name).

Elizabeth Henstridge and Rebecca Street in Christmas at the Plaza
I wish it could be Christmas every day … Elizabeth Henstridge and Rebecca Street in Christmas at the Plaza (2019). In 2021, the network made 41 Christmas movies. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

There are, after all, a lot of movies to make. The Hallmark scheduling year has nine distinct seasons: films devoted to New Year, to spring, and to Valentine’s Day; then comes the countdown to summer, followed by actual summer, June weddings, Christmas in July, and autumn. Then, in October, the channel begins its much-vaunted countdown to Christmas. The season is big business for Hallmark. In 2021, the channel made 41 Christmas movies – an increase from just 11 in 2010, and more than 35 million people tuned in to watch them – the majority female, aged 25 to 54. With the holiday market secured, it makes sense for the channel to also try to corner other seasons.

The weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day have been branded as Loveuary by Hallmark, and this year offerings number six new films, including Sweeter Than Chocolate, A Paris Proposal and Welcome to Valentine, which stars Kathryn Davis as Olivia, a career-driven New Yorker who loses both her boyfriend and her job in quick succession and must return home to her home town of Valentine, Nebraska. Along the way she hitches a ride with her roommate’s friend George (Markian Tarasiuk) and as their roadtrip unfolds, she begins to re-evaluate her ideas of love.

This is Davis’s second Hallmark film, and her first as a lead (she made her debut in a supporting role in 2020’s A Christmas Carousel). As with most Hallmark movies, the turnaround was fast. “I got the offer on the Thursday, I took the offer on the Friday, and then I was flown out to Ottawa on the Wednesday,” Davis says, speaking from her home in Toronto. “Then we started rolling the Monday after.”

Welcome to Valentine’s premise seemed to Davis both hopeful and accessible. And there is a place, she believes, for this kind of story in among rolling news cycles and the disconnection of social media. “It’s just optimism,” she says. “Good stories kind of get buried in the turmoil of everyday life. So I think it is that opportunity to just remember that just beyond your door, there’s the opportunity to fall in love, to meet someone, to make a connection.”

Sherman Wolfe is the first to admit that there is a formula to Hallmark movies. There are nine acts (as opposed to a conventional movie structure of three) to accommodate eight advertising breaks. “Act one and act two, is setting everybody up, a little conflict,” she says. “Act three, they’re put together and maybe there’s a couple of little moments where they think: ‘Oh, I really think I really like this person, despite my misgivings.’ And then acts four, five, six, they start actually falling in love. But that conflict is still there. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we know something’s going to go wrong. And in act seven something goes wrong. In act eight, it’s over. And then the last act they make up happily ever after.”

Traditionally, she says, the Hallmark formula did not allow the actors to kiss before the final scene. In more recent times, they might be permitted an earlier kiss, somewhere around the midway point, to shore up their burgeoning affections.

skip past newsletter promotion

Meghan Markle and Christopher Jacot in When Sparks Fly
Queen of hearts … Meghan Markle stars alongside Christopher Jacot in When Sparks Fly (2014). Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Alongside this structural pattern runs a distinct moral path for the films’ protagonists. “One of the most important things that we try to do is make sure that where we have a relationship, each one of them helps each other in some way to grow,” Sherman Wolfe says. “So a lot of times if people are just starting out writing for Hallmark, you’ll see a story where the man will change the woman, or the woman will change the man. But we like to have both of them help each other get on the right path.”

You could trace Hallmark’s familiar narrative all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, the founding father who did most to imbue the US with this notion of rural superiority and the pleasures of the simple life. “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,” he said, “we shall become as corrupt as in Europe.” Rural America, he argued, was the real America.

Ever since, this trope has played a recognisable role in American cultural and political rhetoric. When Pete Buttigieg embarked on the presidential primaries in 2020, he drew on his midwestern upbringing to bolster his campaign: “We need Washington to look more like our small towns, not the other way around,” he declared. Bill Clinton’s political narrative has long rested not on his time spent at Oxford or Yale, but on his childhood in Hope, Arkansas – a town that all but sounds like a Hallmark movie setting.

Finding the archetypal small town often falls to Andrew Gernhard, locations specialist and founder of Connecticut-based Synthetic Cinema International. When we speak, Gernhard is in North Carolina, shooting a film called A Biltmore Christmas, which stars Hallmark favourite Bethany Joy Lenz. Gernhard came to Hallmark movies via horror films (a curiously common route), and is now adept at finding the kind of warm and intimate setting appropriate for a TV romcom, sometimes shooting in Canada or even Iceland, but most often in Connecticut. “Connecticut is perfect because it’s this old New England style,” he says. “There’s something about the Victorian houses and the history that’s there. It just feels like Christmas.”

Mernit likens the sets of Hallmark movies to model train layouts, “where you could assemble your little town and the people in it. They are trying to reconstruct a quasi-imaginary America of some 40 or 50 years ago.” It is a strange depiction of America, Mernit says, suggesting that a more accurate portrayal might be 2020’s Nomadland, in which Frances McDormand leaves her fading industrial town to find seasonal work, living out of a mobile home, her life becoming increasingly itinerant.

But the more unrooted our lives and communities feel, the more we might cling to the idea of a world that seemed simpler, safer, sweeter. “You have this determined attempt to turn the clock back, says Mernit. “Where else are you going to find the apple pie you baked for dinner, with the family in that imaginary cookie-cutter home? It’s alive and well on the Hallmark screen.”

Those who work for Hallmark are keen to note how the channel is evolving. Davis says that as a mixed-race actor she has noted an increasing diversity in casting. Sherman Wolfe, who is Jewish, talks of writing the Hallmark film Hanukkah on Rye, and of a broadening, more inclusive notion of what “the holiday season” might mean. Last year also brought the network’s first gay romcom. “The core of it is still where it was, which is about love and family and friendship and all those things,” says Sherman Wolfe. “It just expands the world that we can see them in.”

Still, the Hallmark world is so distinct for Sherman Wolfe that she carries the thought of it – accessible, joyful, comforting – into her office each morning. There she lowers the window blinds, turns on the Christmas lights and sits down at her desk, in her white colonial house, with its red front door and its black shutters, in her small Connecticut town, where the light falls pleasingly across East Main Street.

In the UK you can watch Hallmark via Amazon Prime.

[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

[ad_1]

When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.

But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.

While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.

Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.

1961

After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”

Variety refused to run it (The Hollywood Reporter did), and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad in Variety rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company was in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.

1974

The nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)

1975

The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.

Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)

After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)

1988

Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”

1991

After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”

2011

Unlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.

2013

Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”)



[ad_2]

Source link

Read More

Favorite Films Of 2015

2015 was a fine period for me. I went to the Mumbai Film Festival, something that I’d been meaning to do for some time now. I could also go to Experimenta to meet and interact with several interesting artists and curators. I wrote a little more at this blog than I had last year and I also started a blog in French that I hope to write more for in the coming months. I watched fewer films and read fewer books than any of the preceding few years. (I had read more books and seen more movies in the first 6 months of 2014 than I did in the whole of 2015.) Yet, I had a much more wholesome experience these past 12 months. For one, abstinence made movies better, providing me the necessary mental space to deal with them more meaningfully. But more importantly, my rejection of the voracious cinephilia that I was practicing helped me better integrate the films I watched with real world experience and further disabuse myself of the notion that cinephilia is a worthy activity in itself. As a result, I could give films their proper place in my life – an act of relegation that ironically made them more valuable. I think I harmonize myself better with the world around now, which I am convinced is what any ‘-philia’ worth its salt should ultimately be about. I look forward to further cutting down on films and books the coming year.

The year was full of surprisingly good films. Besides the following list (strictly consisting of works that world-premiered in 2015), I was really, really impressed by the masterfully-directed Carol (Todd Haynes), the nervous energy-dynamics of Standing Tall (Emmanuelle Bercot), the perspective-bending Scrapbook (Michael Hoolboom), the structural intelligence of Interrogation (Vetrimaran) and the fascinating image-making and commentary of The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos). Other films I liked very much are The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg), Digging for Fire (Joe Swanberg), Masaan (Neeraj Ghaywan), My Golden Days (Arnaud Desplechin), My Mother (Nanni Moretti), Night Without Distance (Lois Patiño), Results (Andrew Bujalski), Sleeping Giant (Andrew Cividino) and the three cine-essays by Mark Rappaport.

1. Francofonia (Aleksandr Sokurov, France)

FrancofoniaAt a time when Daesh funds itself by trafficking cultural artifacts and Europe announces asylum for threatened art works, Sokurov’s marvelous, piercing film offers nothing less than a revisionist historiography of art itself. For Francofonia, History is not the content of art but its very skin. Museums flatten time, and justifiably present their contents as the highest achievements of a culture, obfuscating, in effect, their history as objects involved in power brokerage, class conflict and market manipulation. Sokurov’s film flips this perspective inside out, identifying art as being frequently the currency of diplomatic power possessing the capacity to purchase peace and as being instruments in service of totalitarian collaboration. Napoleon, who made art the object of his wars, perambulates in the Louvre alongside Lady Liberty Marianne, personifying the antipodal instincts of not only this emblematic institution, but also of European civilization itself. Sokurov’s complex film, likewise, holds together with great equanimity and curiosity antithetical views of museums, acknowledging simultaneously their timelessness and particular historical meaning(s). Francofonia poses questions about nationality, ownership and, really,  the value of art and leaves your head whirling with its far-reaching implications, making sure that you will not approach art the same way again.

2. No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, Belgium)

No Home MovieThe jeu de mots in the title says it all. Not only is this deeply death-marked, Ozuvian film an unordinary home movie, but it is also a film about not having a home. Composed of footage shot in the filmmaker’s mother’s Brussels apartment and recorded video-conference sessions between the two, No Home Movie contrasts Akerman’s professional nomadism with the perennial confinedness of her mother Natalia. Between Chantal’s constant off-screen presence and Natalia’s self-imposed captivity (within the apartment as well as the computer screen), between Here and Elsewhere, lies the film’s true space – a part-real, part-virtual space of filial anxiety and affection. Akerman’s matrilineal counterpart to Porumboiu’s The Second Game (2014) investigates heritage and origin as the director meditates on what she has inherited from her mother – a reflection that continuously brings Akerman back to an examination of her own Jewishness. A document of physical decline and decline of the physical (“Je t’embrasse” over Skype), the film crystallizes a collective Jewish narrative of eternal exile through the personal history of the director’s mother, while vehemently refusing to reduce the unique being of Natalia Akerman the individual. Akerman’s harrowing swansong is cinema’s own Camera Lucida.

3. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, Iran)

TaxiTaxi opens with a shot of downtown Tehran photographed from the dashboard of a car. Announcing Panahi’s first cinematic outdoor excursion since his house arrest in 2011, this shot sets up the dialectics that would define the film: home/world, individual/social and freedom/captivity. Through the course of Taxi, the spied-upon filmmaker drives around the city in the guise of a cabbie, chauffeuring clients-actors from various strata of the society, and realizing a pre-scripted scenario with them whose urgent, didactic purpose can’t be more obvious. The Iranian state has forged a private prison for Panahi from the public spaces of Tehran, allowing him a mobility and false freedom that’s regulated by its watchful eyes. Panahi turns this power dynamic upside down, transforming the private space of the vehicle into a public space for debate, discussion, instruction and critique. Watching the film, I was constantly reminded of that saying beloved of Wittgenstein: “It takes all kinds to make a world”. Panahi’s very presence in the film – his image, his voice – becomes an audacious act of political defiance, a gesture of tremendous existential courage that stares at the possibility of death floating in the air. Taxi makes cinema still matter.

4. The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzmán, Chile)

The Pearl ButtonA beautiful marine cousin to Guzman’s previous film, Nostalgia for the Light (2010), The Pearl Button turns its attention from the arid stretches of the Atacama to the waterfront and ice field of Southern Patagonia. Threading metaphor over metaphor, the director fashions a typically associative, richly suggestive essay film that turns the nature documentary form on its head. Guzman’s film plumbs the depths of the ocean, trying to uncover traces of suppressed, unseen history embodied by countless “missing people” – a project that derives its impetus from the filmmaker’s bittersweet childhood experience of the sea. Despite Chile’s economic indifference to its 4000-kilometer-long coastline, he notes, the sea has been indispensable those in power, serving first as the entry point of the European invaders, who wiped out the Patagonian natives, and then as the dumping ground of political prisoners during the Pinochet regime. Guzman teases out the different values that the sea holds for him, the autochthons and the Chilean state, in effect politicizing and historicizing that which conventional wisdom takes to be apolitical and ahistorical: geography and the perception of it. The result is a film of immense poetry and horror – a horror that only poetry can convey.

5. Shift (Alexandra Gerbaulet, Germany)

ShiftThe most impressive debut film of the year, Alexandra Gerbaulet’s ambitious, intoxicating Shift excavates the evolution of her hometown, Salzgitter, along with that of her family with archaeological care and scientific detachment. In Gerbaulet’s heady narration, anchored by a powerful, quasi-declamatory, rhythmic voiceover, Salzgitter’s transformation from a Nazi mining stronghold and concentration camp, through a waning industrial hub and to a nuclear waste dump parallels the gradual disintegration of the Gerbaulet family under the weight of unemployment, sickness and sexual repression. The filmmaker closely intercuts photographs and diary entries of her mother with impersonal material from popular and scientific culture, weaving in and out of both registers with ease. Gerbaulet’s film is literally an unearthing project, as the director scoops out the various historical, political and geographical layers of this war-weathered city whose tranquil current-day model housing sits atop a makeshift Jewish graveyard consisting of camp workers buried using industrial debris. “Man gets used to everything, even the scar”, declares the narrator bluntly. Shift unscrambles such a habituated view of things, observing the tragicomic tautologies in which history revisits the city. The more you dig, it would seem, the more of the same you get.

6. A Century Of Energy (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)

A Century Of EnergyOne of my favorite films of the year is a commercial for a major power corporation made by a 106-year-old artist. Manoel de Oliveira’s last work of his 84-year long career revisits his second film White Coal (1932), a documentary about power generation at the Central Hydroelectric Plant at Ermal, Rio Ave, founded by the filmmaker’s father. The silent film is projected indoors as a string quartet and a trio of ballerinas interpret the film in the space before the screen. Oliveira moves beyond the primary purpose of chronicling the evolution of renewable energy in the past century, charting the evolution of cinema itself during this period. Splicing together shots from the older films with images of the same locations today, he synthesizes a densely dialectical film that brings into dialogue silent movies and talkies, film and digital cinema, youth and old age and power and grace.  Part tribute to the legacy of his father, part meditation on his own long life and transformed perspectives, Oliveira’s film is celebration of the beauty of forms, natural and man made, whose final shot – ballerinas moving like little windmills at the crack of dawn – captures something like pure energy – a supremely befitting parting shot.

7. Spotlight (Thomas McCarthy, USA)

SpotlightThomas McCarthy’s dramatization of Boston Globe’s exposé of child abuse in the Church is a robust, smart procedural that is less about picking apart the Catholic establishment than about elucidating the epistemological processes of the Information Age. Set at the transitional period between print and online news media, the film underscores the soon-to-be-outmoded physical nature of journalistic investigation. There are no antagonists of the traditional kind in Spotlight. The only obstacles to the knowledge required to carry out the exposé are the numerous procedures, and institutional protocols that have for objective the protection or publication of information. It is telling that the entire film is about a pack of newswriters seeking information that’s already out in the open. What’s more, the film recognizes that the Spotlight team’s attempts to mount an institutional critique is itself inscribed within kindred ideological biases, operational strategies and structural iniquities of Boston Globe as an institution and that the metaphysical crisis that their story can potentially wreak amidst readers is but similar to the disillusionment the newsmen experience vis-à-vis their Protestant weltanschauung. With relatively uncommon formal and ethical restraint, McCarthy crafts an arresting film about how a society’s narratives are made, predicated they are as much on the dissemination of information as on their marginalization.

8. The Event (Sergei Loznitsa, Russia)

SThe Eventergei Loznitsa’s formidable follow-up to Maidan (2014) furthers the earlier film’s exploration of the aesthetics and mechanics of revolution, capturing a people coming together to make sense of a political limbo. Without context or a framing perspective, the film drops us straight into the streets of St. Petersburg just after the attempted reactionary coup d’état in Moscow in 1991. Confusion and mundanity – not heroics and determination – reign as we observe the formative process of a people’s movement and the imagined/imaginary social glue that causes individuals to cohere into a group. State apparatuses compete with each other for imposing a narrative onto the events, while the very toponymy of the city becomes an ideological battleground. Working off priceless archival footage, much of which is incredibly reminiscent of the filmmaker’s own cinematographic style, Loznitsa provides an invaluable glimpse into the unfurling of history, chronicling how numerous banal, unsure gestures and actions snowball into Historical Events. If Eisenstein’s better-than-the-original recreation of the October Revolution was the abstraction of materialist history into ideas, Loznitsa’s film, taking place at the same Palace Square 63 years later, rescues history from the reductions of ideology and brings it right back into the realm of the material.

9. In Transit (Albert Maysles & Co., USA)

In TransitA remarkable American counterpart to J. P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), In Transit unfolds predominantly as a series of interviews with a mixed bag of travellers on board The Empire Builder, a long-distance passenger train running over 3500 kilometers and spanning almost the entire width of the United States. The accounts of passengers seeking out professional and financial breakthroughs evoke the pioneer myth hinged on a “Go West” imperative while the stories of those aboard in search of their ‘calling’ demonstrate the essentially spiritual, even religious nature of their pilgrimage-like journey. The diversity and range of the interviewees and their interactions help the film depict the train as a miniature America, à la Stagecoach, and carve out a quasi-utopian space in which members across class, race and gender divides get an opportunity to converse with each other without personal baggage. Nonetheless, In Transit is less a cultural vision of a possible America than an existential meditation on what makes people embark on these journeys. One elderly war veteran remarks that he’ll never be able to see these plains again. To cite John Berger, “the desire to have seen has a deep ontological basis.

10. Wake (Subic) (John Gianvito, The Philippines)

Wake (Subic)One of a piece with Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010), Wake continues its precedent’s important investigation into the ecological consequences of the presence of America’s largest military bases in the Philippines during most of the 20th century. Like Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), Wake is guided by the spirit of Howard Zinn’s approach to history and sketches an economically-founded account of US-Philippines political and cultural relations – a history that seems to be have been lamentably wiped off from the Filipino national consciousness. Gianvito juxtaposes images from the Philippine-American war with current day images from the contaminated Subic naval base area, suggesting, in effect, the poisonous persistence of an agonizing, unacknowledged history. Wake is imperfect cinema – unwieldy and resourceful – and employs fly-on-the-wall records, talking heads, on-screen text, photographs and news clips to mount a potent critique of a historiography defined political amnesia and economic opportunism. More importantly, it is a necessary reminder that imperialism is not always about presence, action and exercise of power but sometimes also about the refusal of these very elements, that history is not only a matter of events but also processes and phenomena and that geography is always political.

Special Mention: Chi-raq (Spike Lee, USA)


SOURCE: The Seventh Art - Read entire story here.

Read More

The ten best films of … 1925

Big Parade barrel scene

The Big Parade (1925).

Kristin here:

As all about us in the blogosphere are listing their top ten films for 2015, we do the same for ninety years ago. Our eighth edition of this surprisingly popular series reaches 1925, when some of the major classics of world cinema appeared. Soviet Montage cinema got its real start with not one but two releases by one of the greatest of all directors, Sergei Eisenstein. Ernst Lubitsch made what is arguably his finest silent film. Charles Chaplin created his most beloved feature. Scandinavian cinema was in decline, having lost its most important directors to Hollywood, but Carl Dreyer made one of his most powerful silents.

For previous entries, see here: 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924.

The lingering traces of Expressionism vs the New Objectivity

Joyless Street mirror

The Joyless Street (1925).

Last year I suggested that German Expressionism was winding down in 1924. It continued to do so in 1925. Indeed, no Expressionist films as such came out that year. What I would consider to be the last films in the movement, Murnau’s Faust and Lang’s Metropolis, both went over budget and over schedule, with Faust appearing in 1926 and Metropolis at the beginning of 1927.

Murnau made a more modest film that premiered in Vienna in late 1925, Tartuffe, a loose adaptation of the Molière play. The script adds a frame story in which an old man’s housekeeper plots to swindle and murder him. The man’s grandson disguises himself as a traveling film exhibitor and shows the pair a simplified version of the play, emphasizing the parallels between the hypocritical Tartuffe and the scheming housekeeper.

The film has some touches of Expressionism but cannot really be considered a full-fledged member of that movement. The lingering Expressionism is not surprising, considering that some of the talent involved had worked on Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr.Caligari: screenwriter Carl Mayer, designers Walter Röhrig and Robert Herlth, and actors Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover.

The visuals include characteristically Expressionist moments when the actors and settings are juxtaposed to create strongly pictorial compositions.  These might be comic, as when the pompous Tartuffe strides past a squat lamp that seems to mock him, or beautifully abstract, as when Orgon is seen in a high angle against a stairway that swirls around him:

Tartuffe candlestick small     Tartuffe staircase small

A restored version is available in the USA from Kino and in the UK in Eureka!‘s Masters of Cinema series. (DVD Beaver compares the two versions.) The restoration was prepared from the only surviving print, the American release version; it runs about one hour.

The other German film on this year’s list, G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street, contrasts considerably with Tartuffe.  It was arguably the first major film of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity trends in German cinema. I have already dealt with it in a DVD review entry shortly after its 2012 release. The restoration incorporated a good deal more footage than had been seen in previous modern prints, but it remains incomplete.

Once more the comic greats

Gold Rush roll dance 3 contrast boosted

The Gold Rush (1925).

For several years now these year-end lists have mentioned Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, in various combinations. Early on it would was Chaplin alone (Easy Street and The Immigrant for 1917) or Lloyd and Keaton alone (High and Dizzy and Neighbors for 1920). In a way most of these films were placeholders, signalling that these three were working up to the silent features that were among the most glorious products of the Hollywood studios in the 1920s. In our 1923 list, each found a place with a masterpiece: Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, Keaton’s Our Hospitality, and Lloyd’s Safety Last.

This year we may surprise some by giving Lloyd a miss. For years The Freshman was thought of as his main claim to fame, perhaps alongside Safety Last. I think this was largely because The Freshman was the one of the few Lloyd films that was relatively easy to see. (Perhaps also because Preston Sturges dubbed it an official classic by making a sequel to it (The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, aka Mad Wednesday, 1947.) Now that we have the full set of Lloyd’s silent features available, it emerges as a rather tame entry compared to Safety Last, Girl Shy, or our already-determined entries for 1926, For Heaven’s Sake, and 1927, The Kid Brother. Let’s just call The Freshman a runner up.

Keaton’s Seven Chances takes one of the most familiar of melodramatic premises and literally runs with it. James Shannon discovers from his lawyer than he stands to inherit a great deal of money if he is married by 7 pm on his 27th birthday–which happens to be the day when he receives this news. A misunderstanding with the woman he loves leads to a split, and in order to save himself and his partner from bankruptcy, Shannon determines to marry any woman who will volunteer in time. Hundreds turn up.

The result is another of the extended, intricate chase sequences that tend to grace Lloyd’s and Keaton’s features, and to a lesser extent Chaplin’s. In fact Seven Chances has a double chase. The first and longer part involves a huge crowd of women gradually assembling behind Shannon as he unwittingly walks along the street. This accelerates and keeps building, exploiting various situations and locales, as when the chase passes through a rail yard and Shannon escapes by dangling from a rolling crane above the women’s heads. Eventually the action moves into the countryside, where the brides temporarily disappear, taking a short cut to cut Shannon off, and he ends up in the middle of a gradually growing avalanche.

Seven Chances crane     Seven Chances avalanche

Seven Chances is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino.

Of all the films on this year’s list, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush is probably the most widely familiar. The Little Tramp character, here known only as a “Lone Prospector,” blends hilarity with pathos in a fashion that is actually typical of relatively few of the director/performer’s films overall. It is, however, how many people think of him.

The Gold Rush looks rather old-fashioned compared with Seven Chances. Although the opening extreme long shots of an endless line of prospectors struggling up over a mountain pass are impressive, much of the action takes place in studio sets, sometimes standing in for alpine locations. Both the cabins, Black Larsen’s and Hank Curtis’, are like little proscenium stages, with the action captured from the front. Yet the film depends on its brilliant succession of gags and on the Prospector’s status as the underdog who is also the resilient and eternal optimist.

The best bits of humor arise from Chaplin’s ability to create funny but lyrical moments by transforming objects metaphorically. Given the plot, some of the best-known gags arise from meals. One is the dance of the rolls, part of a fantasy sequence in which the Prospector dreams of entertaining a group of beautiful women at dinner (above), when in fact the women stand him up. Trapped by a storm in a remote cabin, the Prospector and his partner cook one of his shoes. He serves it on a platter and carefully “carves it, with the leather becoming the meat, the nails bones, and the laces spaghetti.

Gold Rush carving the shoe     Gold Rush shoelace spaghetti

Many home-video versions of The Gold Rush have been released, but the definitive restoration of the 1925 version is available from the Criterion Collection.

The Golden Age in full swing

Lazy Bones Ruth on sluice

Lazybones (1925).

When people speak of the “Golden Age” of the Hollywood studio system, they usually seem to mean the 1930s and 1940s (and the lingering effects of the system in the 1950s). A look at Hollywood films of the 1920s shows that it was already functioning at full steam. Three features of 1925 display the utter mastery of continuity storytelling and style and a sophistication that matches films of subsequent decades.

Lady Windermere’s Fan may be the best silent made by Ernst Lubitsch, who has appeared on these lists before. It arguably ranks alongside Trouble in Paradise and The Shop around the Corner as one of the best films of his entire career. It’s a loose adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play, but it’s pure Lubitsch throughout.

Anyone who thinks that the classical Hollywood system was merely a set of conventions that allowed films to be cranked out with minimal originality could learn a lot from Lady Windermere’s Fan. Its completely correct in its use of continuity editing, three-point lighting, and the like does not preclude imaginative touches and methods of handling whole scenes. There’s the sequence when Lord Windermere visits the mysteriously shady lady Mrs. Erlynne in her drawing-room. The camera is planted in the center of the action, with frequents cuts as the two characters move in and out of the frame and even cross behind the camera. There’s not a hint of a mismatched glance or entrance across this complex and unusual series of shots. There’s the racetrack scene, as everyone present watches and gossips about Mrs Erlynne in a virtuoso string of point-of-view shots.

The racetrack scene ends with a wealthy bachelor following Mrs Erlynne out of the track. The camera moves left to follow her, keeping her in the same spot in the frame. As the man gradually catches up, Lubitsch uses a moving matte to hint at their meeting without showing it or cutting in toward the action.

Lady Windermere's Fan 1     Lady Windermere's Fan 2

A good-quality transfer of Lady Windermere’s Fan is only available on DVD as part of the More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931. (Beware the copy offered by Synergy, which according to comments on Amazon.com is from a poor-quality, incomplete print.)

The one title on this list whose inclusion might surprise readers is Frank Borzage’s Lazybones. I remember being bowled over by this film during the 1992 Le Gionate del Cinema Muto festival in Pordenone, which included a Borzage retrospective. I found the more famous Humoresque (1920) a disappointment, but Lazybones was a revelation. This is another case of a film that was simply unknown when film historians started writing about the Hollywood studio era. It was not discovered until 1970, when it was found in the 20th Century-Fox archives. As a result, Lazybones was, as Swiss film historian Hervé Dumont put it in his magisterial book on the director, “revealed as the most poignant–and the most accomplished–of Borzage’s works before Seventh Heaven.”

Year by year since we started this annual list, I looked forward to recommending Lazybones, and now we arrive there. I rewatched it for the first time to see if it really deserved to make one of the top ten. The answer is yes. For me, this is as good as 7th Heaven, or as near as makes no difference.

It’s difficult to describe the plot of Lazybones, since it doesn’t have much of one. Steve (played by the amiable Buck Jones) is a very lazy young man living in a rural village. He has a girlfriend, Agnes, whose mother scorns him. The girlfriend has a sister, Ruth, who returns home with a baby in tow. In despair, Ruth leaves the baby on a riverbank and tries to drown herself (image at top of section). Steve rescues her, and she explains that unknown to her family, while she was away she married a sailor who subsequently went down with his ship. She has no proof of this and knows her tyrannical mother will assume that the baby is illegitimate. Steve decides to keep her secret and adopt the apparent foundling himself.

All this happens during the initial setup. Then the little girl, Kit, grows up into a young lady. Along the way, not all that much happens. Steve, lacking any goals, stays lazy, which sets him apart from the energetic, ambitious protagonists of most Hollywood films. Kit is shunned by her classmates and the townspeople, and Steve tries to shelter her from all this. He loves Agnes but quickly loses her to a richer, more respectable man. He goes off to fight in World War I, becomes an accidental hero, and returns home after perhaps the shortest battlefront scene in any feature of the period. Kit finds a boyfriend.

What makes all this riveting viewing is its mixture of quiet comedy and poignancy. Steve is so amiably and unrepentantly loath to work that he is scorned by nearly everyone, and yet he commits an act of great kindness for which he gets no credit at all, except from his devoted mother. It is clear that these snobbish townspeople would scorn him even if they knew how he has kept Kit out of the orphanage and made a happy life for her.

The film is beautifully shot, and Borzage displays such an easy mastery of constructing a scene, particularly in depth, that it is easy to miss the underlying sophistication. Early on, Agnes and her mother arrive at Steve’s house. As Agnes waits outside the fence in the foreground, Steve tips his hat to her, in the foreground with his back to the camera. The mother passes by him toward the house, her mouth fixed in a sneer. We may think that Steve is oblivious to this, but once she passes out of the frame in the foreground, he puts his hat back on and slips it down over his face rather cheekily as he glances at her, his gesture suggesting his indifference to her opinion of him. (Note also the subtle touch of his lazily fastened suspenders.)

Lazy Bones mother sneers     Lazy Bones hero looks at mother after sneer

Borzage has mastered the use of motifs that are so characteristic of Hollywood cinema. There’s a running gag about the state of disrepair into which the gate of the picket fence around Steve’s and his mother’s house, with each person remarking “Darn that gate!” as they struggle through it. The repetition becomes cumulatively funnier because about two decades pass in the course of the film without the thing being fixed. The acting, particularly of Buck Jones and Zasu Pitts (as Ruth), is affecting.

It’s difficult to convey the charms of such an unconventional film, but give it a try and you may be bowled over, too.

A superb DVD transfer of Lazybones was included in the lavish Murnau, Borzage and Fox box (2008). The 20th Century-Fox Cinema Archives series offers it separately as a print-on-demand DVD-R. I’ve not seen it but suspect that there would be some loss of quality in this format. Besides, every serious lover of cinema should have that big black box sitting on their shelves next to the Ford at Fox one.

Returning to the more familiar classics, my final Hollywood film of the year is King Vidor’s The Big Parade.

Apart from its success and influence, however, The Big Parade remains an entertaining, funny, and moving film. Vidor’s scenes often run a remarkably long time, suggesting the rhythms of everyday life. One such action  involves James fetching a barrel back to where he and his mates are staying so that he can turn it into an outdoor shower. When nearly back, he encounters Melisande, whom he initially can’t see. His stumbling about and her increasing laughter at his antics are played out at length (see top), as is a supposedly improvised scene shortly thereafter where James tries to teach Melisande how to chew gum.

A very different sort of prolonged scene is the long march of James and his comrades through a forest full of German snipers in trees and machine-gunners in nests. They begin by walking through an idyllic-looking forest, then increasingly encounter fallen comrades, and finally reach the Germans.

Big Parade forest advance begins     Big Parade forest advance 2     Big Parade forest advance 3

For years the prints of The Big Parade available were less than optimum, with some based on the 1931 re-release version, where the left side of the image had to be cropped to make room for the soundtrack. A 35mm negative was discovered relatively recently, however, and is the basis for the superb DVD and Blu-ray versions released in 2013.

Finally, I turn you over to David for some comments on films that fall within his specialties.

Eisenstein, action director

Watch this. Maybe a few times.


These two seconds, violent in both what they show and the way they show it, seem to me a turning point in film history. Here extreme action meets extreme technique. The spasms of the woman’s head, given in brief jump cuts (7 frames/5/8/10), create a sort of pictorial fusillade before we get the real thing: a line of riflemen robotically advancing into a crowd.

It’s not usually recognized how often changes in film art are driven by showing violence. Griffith’s last-minute rescues usually take place in scenes of massive bloodshed; not only The Birth of a Nation but the equally inventive Battle at Elderbush Gulch use rapid crosscutting to treat a boiling burst of action. The Friendless One’s pistol attack in Intolerance is rendered in flash frames that Sam Fuller might approve of. Later, the Hollywood Western, the Japanese swordplay film, the 1940s crime melodrama, the Hong Kong action picture, and many other genres pushed the stylistic envelope in scenes of violence. Hitchcock’s vaunted technical polish often depended on shock and bloodletting, from a bullet to the face (Foreign Correspondent) to stabbing in the shower (Psycho). The free-fire zone of Bonnie and Clyde and Peckinpah’s Westerns took up the slow-motion choreography of death pioneered by Kurosawa. Extreme action seems to call for aggressive technique, and intense action scenes can become clipbait and film-school models.

Sergei Eisenstein is celebrated as the theorist and practitioner of montage, whatever that is; but he insisted that what he called expressive movement was no less important. Just as montage for him came to mean the forceful juxtaposition of virtually any two stimuli (frames, shots, elements inside shots, musical motifs), so he thought that expressive movement ranged from a haughty tsar stretching his stork neck (Ivan the Terrible) to peons buried up to their shoulders, squirming to avoid horses’ hooves (Que viva Mexico!). In Eisenstein, psychology is always externalized, crowds move as gigantic organisms, and any action can turn brutal. (I fight the temptation to call him S & M Eisenstein.) We can trace influences—Constructivist theatre, the chase comedies coming from America, his interest in kabuki performance—but when he moved into cinema from the stage, Eisenstein became an action director, in a wholly modern sense.

Eisenstein’s first two features bracket the year 1925. Strike was premiered in January, The Battleship Potemkin in December. The first was apparently not widely seen outside Russia until the 1970s, but the second quickly won praise around the world. Potemkin’s centerpiece, the Odessa Steps sequence, became an instant critical chestnut, proof that cinema had achieved maturity as an art. Owing nothing to theatre, this massive spectacle was as pure a piece of filmmaking as a Fairbanks stunt or a Hart shootout. But of course Eisenstein went farther.

The Steps sequence was probably the most violent thing that anybody had ever seen in a movie. A line of soldiers stalks down the crowded staircase. A little boy is shot; after he falls, skull bloodied, his body is trampled by people fleeing the troops. Another man falls, caught in a handheld shot. A mother is blasted in the gut, and her baby carriage, jouncing down the steps, falls under a cossack’s sword. A schoolmistress who has been watching in horror gets a bullet in the eye–or is it a saber slash? The sequence ends as abstractly as it began, if “abstractly” can sum up the horrific punch of these images.

Cossack 350     Schoolteacher 350

The film is much more than this sequence, of course, but every one of its five sections arcs toward violence, and each payoff is shot and cut with punitive force. The mutiny itself is a pulsating rush of stunts, unexpected angles, and cuts that are at once harsh and smooth. The whole thing starts with a rebellious sailor smashing a plate (in inconsistently matched shots) and ends with the ship confronting the fleet, a challenge rendered by percussive treatment of the men and their machines.

In Strike, Eisenstein rehearsed his poetry of massacre, along with a lot of other things. Instead of rendering an actual incident, as in Potemkin, here he portrays the typical phases any strike can go through. The plot starts with injustices on the shop floor, escalates to a walkout, and then—of course—turns violent, as provocateurs make a peaceful demonstration into a pretext for harsh reprisals. Throughout, Eisenstein experiments with grotesque satire and caricature. The workers are down-to-earth heroic; the capitalists are straight out of propaganda cartoons; the spies are beastly, the provocateurs are clowns. Every sequence tries something new and bold, and weird.

The most famous passage, well-known from his writings if not from actual viewing, is the climax. Here a raid upon workers in their tenements is intercut with the slaughter of a bull. Montage again, of course, but what isn’t usually noticed is the remarkable staging of that police riot, with horsemen riding along catwalks and fastidiously dropping children over the railings. For my money, more impressive than this finale is the earlier episode in which firemen turn their hoses on the workers’ demonstration. The workers scatter, pursued by the blasts of water, until they are scrambling over one another and pounded against alley walls. This is Strike’s Odessa Steps sequence, and for throbbing dynamism and pictorial expressiveness–you can feel the soaking thrust of the water–it has few equals in silent film.

Hoses 1 350     Hoses 1a     Hoses 2 350     Hoses 5     Hoses 3     Hoses 4

For Eisenstein, the bobbing, screaming head in my clip was the “blasting cap” that launched the Odessa massacre. Is the woman the first victim of the troops, or is her rag-doll convulsion a kind of abstract prophecy of the brutality to come? Yanked out of the actual space of the action, it hits us with a perceptual force that goes beyond straightforward storytelling. Kinetic aggression, making you feel the blow, is one legitimate function of cinema. Eisenstein is our first master of in-your-face filmmaking.

After many tries, archives have given us superb video editions of Potemkin and Strike, both available from Kino Lorber. Potemkin’s original score captures the film’s combustible restlessness. Strike seems to have been shot at so many different frame rates that it’s hard to smooth out, but the new disc makes a very good try, and it’s far superior to the draggy Soviet step-printed version that plagued us for decades.

Chamber cinema

Master high angle 400

Every so often a filmmaker decides to accept severe spatial constraints, creating what David Koepp calls “bottle” plots.  Make a movie in a lifeboat (Lifeboat) or around a phone booth (Phone Booth) or in a motel room (Tape) or in a Manhattan house (Panic Room) or in a remote cabin plagued by horrors (name your favorite). In the 1940s several filmmakers were trying out a “theatrical” approach that welcomed confinement like this; Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles, H. C. Potter’s The Time of Your Life, and of course Rope are examples. Today’s filmmakers are still exploring “chamber cinema.” The Hateful Eight is the most recent instance, with most of its chapters set in Minnie’s Haberdashery.

Typically, the chamber films in any period aren’t “canned theatre” like the PBS or English National Theatre broadcasts. Chamber films push the camera into the space, often showing all four walls and letting us get familiar with the rooms the characters inhabit. But this requires not only a carefully planned setting but also a good deal of cinematic skill in smoothly taking us to the primary zones of action.

Carl Dreyer was one of the earliest exponents of chamber cinema. He had seen initial examples in German Kammerspiel (chamber-play) films like Sylvester (1924) and had made a mild version himself in Michael (1924). Dreyer took the aesthetic to new heights in The Master of the House (1925).

Long before Akerman’s Jeanne Dielmann, Dreyer gave us a film about housework. Ida’s husband Victor is unemployed, so while he loafs and drifts around town, she struggles to keep things going. He pays her back with scorn and abuse. The plot is structured around two days, which yield a before-and-after pattern. At the end of the first, Ida leaves Victor, and a month later, his realization of his mistakes is revealed by his behavior in the household. The drama comes not only from the characters’ conflicts but from the way they handle everyday things like butter knives and laundry lines.

Rendering the household in all its specificity obliges Dreyer to rethink continuity filmmaking. He lays out the geography of the home by shooting “in the round” and cutting on the basis of eyelines and frame entrances. (He displays the same confidence in the “immersive camera” that Lubitsch displays in Lady Windermere’s Fan.) He trains us to notice landmarks, to associate bits of action with particular areas of the apartment, and to sense the characters’ changing emotions in relation to small adjustments in composition. The film is an exceptionally fluid, assured one, and it prepares for  more daring Dreyer experiments to come: the fragmented interior spaces of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, the creeping camera of Vampyr, and the intensely theatricalized late films Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud. Little-known at the time, The Master of the House has come to be regarded as one of the most quietly perfect of silent films.

The most lustrous edition of The Master of the House is the Criterion release. It contains an in-depth interview with Danish film historian Casper Tybjerg and a visual essay that Abbey Lustgarten and I prepared. Criterion has posted an extract from the essay. More about this release is here.


In connection with the eleventh edition of Film Art: An Introduction, to be published in mid-January, we have added ten new online Connect video examples. These include one based on clips from the Blu-ray of The Gold Rush, which the Criterion Collection has kindly allowed us to use. We discuss two contrasting styles of staging used for comedy effects in the isolated cabin set.

The Dumont quotation is from his Frank Borzage: Sarastro à Hollywood (Cinémathèque française, 1993), p. 108.

Lea Jacobs and Andrea Comiskey have examined the complicated early distribution of The Big Parade in their “Hollywood’s Conception of Its Audience in the 1920s,” The Classical Hollywood Reader, Steve Neale, ed. (Routledge, 2012), p. 97.

Eisenstein’s aesthetic of expressive movement, and its relation to montage, is discussed in David’s The Cinema of Eisenstein. On Dreyer’s “theatricalized” cinema see his The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, and this essay on its sources in 1910s tableau filmmaking. Eisenstein’s exactitude in matching gesture to sound and cutting is demonstrated in Lea Jacobs’ Film Rhythm after Sound, reviewed here.

Lev Kuleshov’s second feature, The Death Ray, doesn’t make our top-ten list for 1925, but as a bonus we include its poster (by Anton Lavinsky), which must rank among the most beautiful of that year.

Death Ray poster

SOURCE: Observations on film art - Read entire story here.

Read More
TOP