Daily Archives: December 28, 2023

A Few Notes on My Holiday Home Viewing

Ever since the Gene Siskel Film Center decided to revoke the press pass it had assigned me for 37 years, apparently on the assumption that my money had become more important to them than any of my past or present critical support, I’ve been attending far fewer of their programs, and am currently still debating with myself whether I want to spend $13 plus travel expenses to see a new restoration of Edward Yang’s Taipei Story on New Year’s Day, especially if that entails rewarding their selfishness. But fortunately, I don’t have to contend with such mercenary/capitalist greed, at least on the same level, when I’m at home. The following cost me far less, financially and emotionally:

We Were Strangers (1949) is a film maudit in more ways than one. Look up its title in the index of the Library of America’s Agee on Film volume and you won’t find any trace. But look up Strangers — an imaginary title that must have emerged from a faulty Life edit cutting the full title from Agee’s essay about Huston and then failing to correct the abbreviated version meant to follow the full one. And then a lazy LOA editor and/or indexer perpetuated this error by pretending that Huston made a movie entitled Strangers—a Borgesian stunt that adds a new title to Huston’s filmography. Read more

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN on DVD and the Irretrievable Past

It’s delightful to have Kino’s new “deluxe” edition of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, one of my all-time favorite examples of Hollywood romanticism, glamor, and lushness (as well as Technicolor), based on the film’s 2009 restoration, which I saw and Bologna and wrote about a little over a year ago. But while watching this edition’s extended comparison of the original with the restored version, I’m somewhat taken aback by the fact that the film I remember seeing in 1951, when I was still in grammar school, is closer to the unrestored version:

It’s obvious that the restored version is superior in terms of definition, lighting, and color. But rightly or wrongly, I remember the film in 1951 as being darker, at least in my mind’s eye — a film bathed in black more than auburn hues.

Could this be a matter of Proustian self-deception? Or could it point to a significant change in the film that I originally saw? I wish I knew. [7/8/10]

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