Recommended: LE SPECTATEUR QUI EN SAVAIT TROP by Mark Rappaport, translated [from English to French] by Jean-Luc Mengus, Paris: P.O.L, 2008, 240 pp.
There are 16 pieces here -– including a Preface, a concluding essay entitled “Confessions of a Latent Heterosexual (Complete with Illustrations),” and four sections in between consisting of a Hitchcock Cycle (three stories) and an Eisenstein Cycle (three stories, with Marlene Dietrich playing a significant role in one), interspersed with two sections of four stories each. Some of the topics: The son of Madame de…, Jean Seberg, “The Tourist Who Knew Too Much,” “My Life with Catherine Deneuve,” Gilda’s gloves, Silvano Mangano and Capucine, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Marcel Proust in Marienbad. Whether these are autobiographical fictions, fictional essays, and/or stories about other stories is a matter directly addressed in the Preface. (Don’t expect any conclusive answers.)
I can’t wait for this to come out somewhere in English [2021: you can ccess it now online in English here, and both parts of Rappapot’s The Secret Life of Moving Shadows are also available on Amazon]–even though P.O.L, publisher of the quarterly film magazine TRAFIC (as well as the French translation of my own first book, MOVING PLACES, also done by Jean-Luc Mengus), has done a very handsome job with it. Read more
A column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted in May 2021. — J.R
One of my major recent activities, probably shared by most of my readers during the pandemic, is finding “new” (that is to say, unfamiliar) films to watch online. So, after reading a 1970 interview with the usually publicity-shy Elaine May in the New York Times, where she cited “Holiday for Henrietta” (La fête à Henriette, 1952), a film I’d never heard of, and Anchors Aweigh(1945), an MGM musical I only dimly recalled fromchildhood, as particular favorites, along with The Wizard of Oz (1939), I treated the first two of these idle references as recommendations, meanwhile wondering if they might also provide certain clues to or predictions of May’s own filmmaking practices in A New Leaf(1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1985), and/or Ishtar (1987).
Well, Anchors Awayat least offers some predictions. It costars Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors on leave in San Diego and Hollywood—Kelly a brash extrovert and womanizer, Sinatra a shy introvert, anticipating the respective male duos of Nicky (John Cassavetes) and Mikey (Peter Falk) in May’s third feature, and even the blatant casting-against-type of Chuck (Dustin Hoffman) and Lyle (Warren Beatty) in her fourth. Read more
The following letter was published in the May 2021 issue of Harper’s magazine. Violet Lucca, the Letters editor, invited me to respond to the March issue’s cover story, by Martin Scorsese, “on Fellini and the lost magic of movies”. — J.R.
The moment cinephilia links up with personal nostalgia, as it does in Martin Scorsese’s “Il Maestro,” intellectual distinctions become tenuous. He laments the devaluing of art as “content” by his dumb employers and people accessing cinema in their homes, yet he has no trouble admitting that he first saw La strada on TV with his parents. Moreover, he grew up with movies as an art form before having to wrestle with it as a business, whereas I grew up in a family of Alabama exhibitors and eventually underwent the reverse trajectory, discovering film art in New York around the same time he did.
Scorsese’s clearly a cinephile who has done extraordinary and generous work in making world cinema more widely available, but you’d never guess this from reading him on the subjects of Fellini and contemporary film culture. Here he seems to confuse personal choices and predilections with history, but my choices as a consumer aren’t his.
For me film culture remains as vital in some ways as it was in the 60s when Jonas Mekas could put out a magazine plausibly pretending to celebrate all of it. Read more
