MoMA sent over a press release this morning about an event called Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts, which looks very cool. Curator Ron Magliozzi and silent film accompanists Steve Massa and Ben Model have put together a program of silent slapstick comedy shorts that “explore social, cultural, and political subjects”; they’ll be screening these, followed by shorts comissioned from contemporary comedians including Nick Kroll and ThunderAnt, AKA Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.
The press release doesn’t reveal exactly what they’ll be showing in terms of silent films (when I think slapstick silent comedy I think Fatty Arbuckle, but unless the comedy of being fat is a cultural issue, I’m not sure his work qualifies), but I hope the contemporary response pieces fall somewhere along the lines of ThunderAnt’s Boink!, embedded below. It’s a mock, New York Noise-like public access indie rock show, featuring special guest Sadaam Hussein, who strums an acoustic guitar in his “home recording studio in Manhattan” while talking about the life of a dictator in the language of a jaded old punk rocker.
It’s our 100th episode! To celebrate, we look at what’s changed in the movie world since we’ve been watching from the couch. And, we look at how things have changed in that 100 years of movies. Surprisingly, there are a number parallels between 1908 and today, namely innovative artists grappling with new technologies.
Karina checks in with some disappointing movies of ‘08, Heather Locklear cheers up lonely women on cable, and The Reader asks the pressing question, what’s worse, sleeping with a 15 year-old, or sleeping with a Nazi?
Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art’s recent exhibit “Dali: Painting and Film” (through 9/15/08), which features over 130 of the artist’s paintings and drawings, scenes and films brilliantly juxtaposed side by side, I feel I now understand Salvador Dali for the very first time. Though erotic Freudian imagery, sexed up amoebas and disembodied cocks, may be what draws one into the Surrealist’s paintings, it’s his use of lighting and perspective that keeps you coming back for more. For Dali never was a painter at heart, but a man possessed by a cinematographer’s eye. Within the limits of the flattened canvas Dali’s mind was able to create – see into the future – that which modern day CGI allows for the screen. In fact, both showman and visionary, this master of the bizarre does not even make sense outside of filmmaking! A piece of the puzzle is missing when his paintings are seen alone and static, not in conversation with Bunuel or Hitchcock (or even Cocteau). Viewing Dali’s artwork without a cinematic context is like trying to talk about (his friend and sometime collaborator) Warhol without mentioning The Factory.
So with this in mind let’s revisit Dali and Bunuel’s classic study in sexual frustration, the erotically surreal L’Age d’Or (offered in its entirety at the end of this post). …Read more
For weeks I’d been raving to anyone and everyone that the recent re-release of Chaplin’s controversial 1947 Monsieur Verdoux, in which the Tramp sheds moustache and cane to become a gold digging serial killer of wealthy widows, is one of the finest films of the year. So I wasn’t surprised when an actress/comedienne friend of mine on the west coast emailed to say she’d just rented and laugh-out-loud adored it. What did give me pause was her follow-up, “That scene where he woos the rich woman in the parlor at the beginning, and also the one where he’s in the flower shop ordering roses…is it wrong for me to have the hots for a clown? Chaplin is so fuckin’ sexy!”
My answer: not only is it not wrong, but Chaplin wouldn’t have been believable mesmerizing his prey in Monsieur Verdoux if he hadn’t finally allowed his natural sexual charisma to shine through. For his entire career up until then Chaplin had been masking his virility beneath a shabby overcoat like a drag queen packing away her package. Monsieur Verdoux is perhaps the closest character to the real, really-young-women loving, multiple wed Hollywood legend than any other role he ever undertook. Verdoux’s seducing and serial killing of old coots seems like a screen-friendly substitute for Chaplin’s real-life seduction and serial impregnation of teenage girls.
Long-missing footage from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has, apparently, been found. Berlin-based David Hudson at GreenCine breathlessly passes along the online preview to a story that will run in Germany’s ZEITmagazintomorrow. Hudson’s English-language parsing of the preview is a must-read, but the short version is that a copy of “the long version” of the film––which may or may not be Lang’s original cut, but which seems almost certainly close to it––has been discovered at Buenos Aires’ Museo Del Cine.
David says he’ll have more details after buying the magazine tomorrow; in the meantime, there’s a gallery of stills from the new/old footage. I’ve screencapped two of the eight images; the more vivid one is up top, and a scratchy and almost spectral-looking still is below the jump.
Guy Maddin’s version of his hometown of Winnipeg is a dreamland patchwork of half truths and exaggerations, a standard-issue suburban incubator carved into blank screen fields of snow so blinding white they seem almost hot, on which Maddin has projected a secret life. He was commissioned to make My Winnipeg, an ostensible non-fiction portrait of this birthplace, by The Documentary Channel, but the city itself is only of concern to him insofar as it’s an extension of and metaphor for his psyche. He casts the project as his attempt to come to terms once and for all with his fever stream of memories, real and fabricated, inextricably intertwined with the places and spaces where he grew up. The question of “real” doesn’t matter. While Darcy Fehr, the actor hired to be his (younger, improbably attractive) stand-in, nods off next to a bottle on a moving train, the real Maddin, our narrator, informs us of his designs on Winnipeg: “I must leave it! I’ll film my way out!”
YouTube, I love you. Behold, Lulu in Berlin, a 1984 documentary by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, featuring an extensive sit-down interview with the then 78-year old Louise Brooks. Still lucid, witty and enigmatic just a year before her death, Brooks explains how and why she left her studio contract at age 20 to make two films in Germany with G. W. Pabst. The film also includes ample clips from Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.
Interesting side note: the man at the beginning of the above clip, who brands Brooks “the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid…the only unrepentant hedonist I think I’ve ever known,” is Kenneth Tynan, the author of the famous 1979 New Yorker profile of Brooks. After her husband’s death, Kathleen Tynan wrote a screenplay about Kenneth’s obsession with Brooks, which in turn may have had something to do with a certain anecdote about Brooks that Tynan revealed in his diaries, which has the distinction of being the dirtiest thing about an elderly woman that I’ve ever read or heard tell of. If Kathleen Tynan’s IMDb profile is any indication, the screenplay was never produced.
Parts 2-4 of Lulu in Berlin follow after the jump.
Remember when the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle admitted that he hadn’t seen a bunch of movies that most would consider classic, and then he watched them and dismissed many (including Young Frankenstein and 2001) with lazy capsule “reviews” that, if not published in a major newspaper, would have been indistinguishable from IMDb message board missives?
It’s happened again. Apropos of … absolutely nothing, LA Times “Oscar expert” Tom O’Neill has made an announcement: he doesn’t like F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise!!! Yeah, that Sunrise, the 1927 film that’s considered by many to be the pinacle of achievement of pre-sound cinema. Dismissing the film as the sentimental favorite of “hipsters” and “Oscar Nazis,”––and if such a thing exists, isn’t O’Neill, like, Mein Fuhrer?–– O’Neill then lays down his critical law:
Sunrise is paper-thin, hilariously schmaltzy. All three primary characters are cartoonish clichés and their performances 3-inch slices of honeyed ham…What corn pone! Smothered in Cheez Whiz!
Of course, the hipsters and Oscar Nazi’s weren’t going to take this one lying down. Highlights from the eviscerations of O’Neill, and thoughts on What It All Means, after the jump. …Read more
BoingBoing is all excited about this trailer for KINO’s new Houdini: The Movie Star DVD set, because it features “THE FIRST EVER ROBOT IN A MOTION PICTURE.” And the robot is, admittedly, exciting, but I’m pretty much a sucker for silent era special effects of any kind. More on the DVDs here.
Based on Paul’s recommendation, on our last day in Telluride I went to the encore presentation of People on Sunday. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s endorsement of Sunday’s fully-modern depiction of courtship, I was equally taken with its utopian treatment of working class leisure. People on Sunday is as much a love letter to the proletariat as the films of the Bolshevik giants, but politics are ultimately pushed aside for a celebration of a pursuit of happiness that’s in some way about transcending social class. As a snapshot of the last wave of youthful abandonment before the Hitler era, it’s a heartbreaker.
Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent Soviet classic The Man With a Movie Camera has outlived the grand majority of films from its epoch to become a staple of film schools and retrospectives, a landmark of personal/political documentary and even a kind of style guide for avant garde filmmaking and design. Now, British artist Perry Bard is putting together a “global remake” of the film, to screen at the UK Big Screen touring film festival in 2007-2008.
Bard is using his website to solicit collaborations from around the world. He’s posted every scene from the film, as well as thumbnails representing each scene’s beginning, middle and end. The basic idea is to have volunteers pick a scene from the original to re-interpret by creating their own footage. Within those parameters, Bard is encouraging experimentation:
Use what you have at your disposal. If you don\’t have a video camera, a succession of still images will work. Text is also o.k. The database will reflect the shape of the wired world on the 21st century stage…Vertov\’s footage was shot in the industrial landscape of the 20\’s. What images translate the world today? e.g. instead of the mining scene if you\’re living in Silicon Valley you might film inside Apple headquarters, etc.
This approach makes a lot of sense. Not only was the original Movie Camera a love letter of sorts to collaborative labor, but as a one-man movie studio using a prosumer technology to document his vision of the world, Vertov sort of prefigured the YouTube generation by about 85 years.
If you’d like to participate, all the relevant info can be found here. Bard says he’ll start accepting submissions in August, but you’re advised to keep it clean–he reserves the right to “eliminate inappropriate material.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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