There seems to be a general agreement among cinephiles that Fritz Lang thought that Cinemascope was suitable only for filming snakes and funerals — despite the fact that Lang’s own Moonfleet (1955), shot in the related format of Metroscope, uses that rectangular shape quite effectively, as does the similarly anamorphic While the City Sleeps (1956).
But that wisecrack about snakes and funerals is more or less what Lang delivers while playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), also shot in a ‘Scope format. Yet as Pierre Gabastan points out in the Autumn 2016 issue of the French quarterly journal Trafic (No. 99), this is a remark stolen from Orson Welles — specifically, from a French translation of an article by Welles (reprinted in the same issue of Trafic) that appeared in the weekly magazine Arts (no. 673, 4-10 juin 1958), one of the journalistic mainstays of Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette during this period, which stated that CinemaScope was ideal for funeral processions in long shot and snakes in close-up. As Gabastan plausibly argues, Godard must have remembered this line and asked Lang to deliver it as his own.
If so, there might have been a faint sense of getting even on Lang’s part. Read more
My summer 2020 column for Cinema Scope. — J.R.
Well before the coronavirus pandemic kicked in, I’d already started nurturing a hobby of creating my own viewing packages on my laptop. This mainly consists of finding unsubtitled movies I want to see, on YouTube or elsewhere, downloading them, tracking down English subtitles however and whenever I can find them, placing the films and subtitles into new folders, and then watching the results on my VLC player. The advantages of this process are obvious: not only free viewing, but another way of escaping the limitations of our cultural gatekeepers and commissars— e.g., critics and institutions associated with the New York Film Festival, the New York Times, diverse film magazines (including this one), not to mention the distributors and programmers who pretend to know exactly what we want to see by dictating all our choices in advance. (I hasten to add for the benefit of skeptics that my interest in subtitling unsubtitled movies has nothing to do with liking certain films because they’re neglected: I’ve been employing the same practice lately with some of the films of Carol Reed, largely because I like combining the pleasures of reading with those of film watching.)
Case in point: the great Ukrainian/Romanian/Russian/Soviet writer-director Kira Muratova (1934–2018), whose wild and amazing works have never reached the consciousness of most North Americans, can sometimes be joyfully accessed in this manner. Read more
