From the Fall 2021 Cinema Scope. — J.R.

The way the Internet Movie Database tells it, two pairs of writerly brothers worked with Josef von Sternberg on his first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), recently released on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray (with a knowledgeable audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton that I’ve so far only sampled). Charles and Jules Furthman are both credited for “story,” though Jules, the younger of the two, gets a screen credit for the actual script; Herman J. Mankiewicz is credited for “dialogue,” while his younger brother, Joseph L., is credited for “titles.”

The question is: What titles? The Thunderbolt that I’ve seen and heard many times has none and needs none. Yet according to the American Film Institute’s online catalogue, there was also a silent version of the film—clearly one more missing Sternberg silent, along with The Exquisite Sinner (1926), the Chaplin-produced A Woman of the Sea(1926), The Dragnet (1928), and The Case of Lena Smith (1929), albeit one I’ve never heard mentioned before now. 

John Grierson, one of the few people who saw A Woman of the Sea, concluded that “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer”—a verdict that I doubt Stanley Kubrick would have agreed with, although I’m sure that treating Sternberg strictly as a photographer and visual artist has led to the unwarranted critical downgrading of both Thunderbolt, his first sound film, and Anatahan (1955), his last (and a far greater achievement). Read more

What I find most disconcerting about Wes Anderson’s new formalist feature is its attitude towards France, which somehow manages to come across as derisive yet disinterested at the same time: not angry or witty enough to be effective as satire yet not observant enough to seem accurate, at least to a onetime resident of that country such as myself. According to all the American reviews I’ve read, it’s not really about France at all but about the American journalists and critics who report from France about France and the French. But because the movie is basically about them and not about the French, it strikes me as being only half-witted much of the time. The material for a knowing send-up of French culture is present yet unexplored and underdeveloped because the movie doesn’t really seem to care much about French people — only about French movies, French food, and other exports.

I never bothered to read Mavis Gallant in The New Yorker about May 1968 because I was living in Paris that year from June through August, before moving to that city in the fall of 1969 for five more years. So maybe I and the people of France are the last people on earth this movie was designed for. Read more

Commissioned by the French quarterly Trafic for their spring 2020 issue. — J.R.

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these
walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-
on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show!
The screen is a dim page spread before us,
white and silent. The film has broken, or a
projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult
even for us, old fans who’ve always been at
the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before
the darkness swept in.
— from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors — two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein) — but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (October 18, 2002). — J.R.

In Praise of Love

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard

With Bruno Putzulu, Cecile Camp, Claude Baignieres, Remo Forlani, Audrey Klebaner, Mark Hunter, and Jeremy Lippmann.

Berthe: “When did the gaze collapse?”

Edgar: “Before TV took precedence.”

Berthe: “Took precedence over what? Current events?”

Edgar: “Over life.”

Berthe: “Yes. I feel our gaze has become a program under control. Subsidized….The image, monsieur, the only thing capable of denying nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us.”

— In Praise of Love

Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary. — Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, quoted in In Praise of Love

Six years ago, when Jean-Luc Godard was presenting his feature For Ever Mozart in Toronto, he described Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love) as his next project — a play he would stage in Switzerland. So it seems appropriate that his film with the same title opens with a young man, Edgar, planning a project called Eloge de l’amour that might be a film, a play, a novel, or an opera. (During the first hour of the film only two intertitles are used: “something” and “about love.”) Read more

From the August 11, 1988 Chicago Reader.  — J.R.

CANDY MOUNTAIN

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer

Written by Wurlitzer

With Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Roberts Blossom, Leon Redbone, and Dr. John.

Is it my imagination, or has “60s” become less of a dirty word lately? Appearances can be deceptive, but in recent movies as diverse in quality (as well as in subject matter) as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Young Guns, and Tucker, we seem finally to be acknowledging that certain 60s values persist in our minds and habits as something more positive than war wounds. The recognition comes slowly and begrudgingly, though — almost as if the Reagan era has kept it under lock and key, and plastered it over with warnings about freak-outs, burnouts, and death. So when something that might be called 60s wisdom makes an appearance in our midst, it deserves to be treasured and savored rather than hastily filed away. At some time in the future we may find uses for it.

Although it’s pointedly set in the present, Candy Mountain has so many links to the 60s in terms of its ambience and attitudes that it seems to exist in a slightly blissed-out time warp — a charmed and charming “other place” that perceives the harshness of the present through a warm and misty (though not necessarily self-deceiving) haze. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (August 1, 1998). — J.R.

Pascal Aubier directed this sweet and winsome 1995 French comedy. A 20-year-old tour guide (Gregoire Colin) in charge of Georgian singers giving a Paris concert pretends to be the son of a famous (but fictional) French New Wave director named Gascogne alleged to have left behind an unseen masterpiece when he died in the mid-70s. This impersonation momentarily gains him admission to the French film world, an identity, and even the love of a young Georgian woman, who accompanies him around Paris in a giddy sequence in which they reenact famous scenes from French New Wave classics. Part of what makes Aubier, a middle-aged filmmaker, tolerant about this deception is his hero?s tender years; charmed and intimidated by the mythology of the New Wave, the boy finds that the only way he can become heroic, to himself and to others, is to become part of something that ended around the time he was born. This reveals a telling postmodernist dilemma for cinema as a whole, not just the French cinema: directors like Quentin Tarantino require allusion and imitation for their very existence, not simply as a means of getting ahead or being fashionable, and this romantic and alluring story dives gracefully yet forcefully into the heart of this dilemma. Read more

Herman Mankiewicz is undoubtedly the victim of a credit thief, but the thief in question isn’t Orson Welles but director David Fincher, brandishing and “delivering” the screenplay of his late father Jack. All the best lines in this script come from Herman, but Fincher Sr. is allotted the only writing credit because that’s the way money (not writing) is supposed to work in Lotusland. Yet we’re supposed to credit Mank for telling us how Old Hollywood thought about itself (and incidentally about us too–assuming that we must be idiots for buying into all their lies, Louis B. Mayer’s as well as Fincher’s). I got tired very quickly of all the witty lines, by Herman and Jack alike, thinking, “Can’t somebody, just once, speak half-normally? Is cynicism the only spice we’re allowed to taste, Hecht and Company by the bucketful?” Yes, I know (spoiler alert), the white wine came up with the fish, and all I could think about, almost to Mank‘s bitter end, was when Jack would finally work in that climactic line. Finally, climactically, at the bitter end, natch. Give that dead man an Oscar. Read more

From the October 5, 2007 Chicago Reader. I was pleased to find this review quoted in the expanded second edition of Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination (2020) — J.R.

In this 50-minute political documentary (1974) by Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella — made the year before Franco’s death, on the same night that the militant anarchist Salvador Puig Antich was executed — five former political prisoners, four men and a woman, whose combined prison terms lasted over 50 years, are seen meeting over a meal in a Catalonian farmhouse (the title means The Supper in Catalan) to discuss political strategies and the effects their prison terms have had on their political commitments. This is mainly a political and historical document, but just as Portabella’s more experimental films (Cuadecuc-Vampir, Umbracle, Warsaw Bridge) are never entirely divorced from politics, this political film has its own formal concerns, most of them related to camera movements and sound recording, as well as the pregnant silences that eventually overtake the conversation. In Catalan and Spanish with subtitles. (JR)

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