Filmmakers and spectators both suffer substantially from the sort of critical typecasting fostered by the marketplace and its reliance on advertising shorthand. I once heard Terry Gilliam complain that he was surrounded by people trying to come up with “typical Gilliam touches” when those were just the sort of things he wanted to avoid. And even when I was in grammar school, Cecil B. De Mille, another large-scale director, was one of the few movie auteurs along with Disney, Ford, and Hitchcock whose artistic identity I could readily recognize, even though, as Luc Moullet points out in his 2012 book about DeMille, L’Empereur du mauve (literally, “The Emperor of Purple”), the overblown contrivances and vulgarities of DeMille’s pictures, combined with their popularity, virtually excluded him from art and serious criticism as far as the U.S. was concerned. The DeMille profile that I recognized in the Eisenhower era was basically that of a Republican patriarch who delivered epic adventures and Biblical spectaculars, an impression broadened only slightly by his 1952 circus blockbuster The Greatest Show on Earth. Read more
On October 23, 2021 Tenement Press will release The Liberated Film Club, a collection of transcripts, texts, etc., related to a screening series of the same name that took place at London’s Close-Up Film Centre 2016–2020.
Screen Slate invited critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to review the book.
I’m a sucker for genre-defying “What is it?” books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged “inside” might consist of. Read more
I was too late in catching up with La La Land to have included it in my best-of-the-year lists for Sight and Sound and Film Comment, where it likely would have figured in both cases. But one telling aspect of the movie that I find missing from the reviews that I’ve read is just how desperate its euphoria turns out to be — which is not an argument against this euphoria but a statement of what gives rise to it and what makes it so poignant. Of course this is a fact about many of the greatest musicals (and greatest post-musicals, such as those of Jacques Demy that Damien Chazelle is so obviously emulating) that characteristically gets overlooked, which is how much the elation of song and dance is only half of a dialectic that also highlights failure, hopelessness, and defeat. The most salient thing about the musical numbers here is how they figure as interruptions to misery and diverse irritations and frustrations — interruptions that are typically interrupted in turn by the hell of a freeway traffic jam or the anguish of a failed audition.
This is what makes the singing and dancing seem absolutely necessary, not merely a simple flight from unpleasantness. Read more
Conceivably the most neglected of James Whale’s better works, this hilarious period farce (1937, 91 min.) imagines a hoax perpetrated by the Comedie Francaise in order to teach the famous and conceited English actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne) “a lesson in acting.” The only problem is, Garrick is in on the gag from the beginning, leading to a variety of comic complications at a country inn. Boisterous and high-spirited, this sport of a movie helps to justify critic Tom Milne’s claims that Whale was a kind of premodernist Jean-Luc Godard; rarely have the art and pleasure of acting, demonstrated here in countless varieties of ham, been demonstrated with as much self-reflexive energy (with the possible exception of Sylvia Scarlett), and Whale’s enjoyable cast (including Olivia de Havilland, Edward Everett Horton, Melville Cooper, Lionel Atwill, Lana Turner, Marie Wilson, Albert Dekker, Fritz Leiber, and the wonderfully manic Luis Alberni) takes full advantage of the opportunity. Ernest Haller’s cinematography creates an intriguing period film noir atmosphere, and Ernest Vajda’s script gives the players all the chances to cut up that they need. On the same program, Bob Clampett’s Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Cookin’, Doc?Read more
1. Written in 2007 for Sight and Sound’s annual “five best” poll: “The beautiful and exciting fifth feature of Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella — the onetime coproducer of Viridiana who forged a memorable kind of clandestine experimental cinema under Franco with Vampir Cuadecuc (1970) and Umbracle (1972) — was made in 1989. But thanks to the overall scarcity of his work, I only caught up with it this year, at the first North American Portabella retrospective, held in Chicago in November. His work as a whole has been preoccupied with issues of continuity in almost every sense of that term — historical, political, thematic, narrative, poetic, musical, pictorial, sonic, stylistic, formal. And now that mainstream cinema has replaced Franco as the power to be subverted, continuities of narrative and those between sound and image are the principal orthodoxies to be played with.“
2. In between its opening shot (rain falling on pavement) and its final shot (a plane spraying artificial rain –- actually a torrential downpour—on what remains of a burnt forest), Warsaw Bridge is concerned with both flow and contact, movement and collision, agitation and stasis. What might be said to flow and move, apart from water, is different kinds of narrative and different forms of information. Read more
