Wednesday 27 January 2010
It's Not Dark Yet, But It's Getting There
Monday 25 January 2010
Girls in the Night (1953)
Girls in the Night
Universal, 88 mins, Black & White
Director: Jack Arnold
Screenplay: Ray Buffum
Cinematography: Carl E. Guthrie
Editing: Paul Weatherwax
Art Direction: Robert F. Boyle and Alexander Golitzen
Cast: Joyce Holden, Glenda Farrell, Harvey Lembeck, Patricia Hardy.
It's a story of a few young boys and girls who live on New York's East Side and who hope to escape from that miserable neighborhood. Through the author's tenderness for his youngsters (and without sentimentality), through the incredible violence of the fight scenes, through the dynamism of the whole, the beauty of the relationships among the characters, the tone of this film swings between Becker's Rendez-vous de Juillet (1949) and Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door (1949). Each scene, whether it is the first (the very lively election of Miss 43rd Avenue in a neighborhood movie theater), the last (a very carefully controlled chase), or yet a prodigious dance scene in a sleazy club, makes us think that it was the one that the author treated the most lovingly; the directing of the actors (all newcomers) is perfect. Jaclynne Greene and Don Gordon make such a convincing pair of rascals that when, after the word END that follows closely after their death, they get up to greet us with a smile, we don't fail to feel that a great weight has been lifted from our shoulders.
Sunday 24 January 2010
Homage: Julien Duvivier
"His mood is violent, and belongs to the underside of the stone" -- Graham Greene
"His cutting was extraordinary. Everything was planned out. He was an incomparable technician." -- Max Douy
Saturday 23 January 2010
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
پینك فلوید در پمپی
كارگردان: آدریان مابن.
1972/رنگی/90 دقیقه.
***
آدریان مابن كه مستندهایی باارزش درباره نقاشان سوررئالیست ساخته (مثلاً مستندی درباره رنه مگریت با موسیقی راجر واترز که یک شرکت فرانسوی روی VHS منتشر کرده بود)، در یك فیلمــكنسرت غیرمنتظره به ثبت بهترینهای آلبوم Meddle پینك فلوید دست زده است.
فیلم تلفیقی است از كنسرتی در پُمپِی، بدون تماشاگر و در میانه ویرانهای باستانی برای اساطیر و صحبتهای رو به دوربین اعضا هنگام غذاخوردن یا تمرینهای مقدماتی برای آلبوم «نیمه تاریك ماه» در استودیوهای "ابی رود" لندن و استودیویی در پاریس. فیلم با زومی بسیار طولانی و پابهپای بخش آغازین Echoes، گشوده میشود و سپس با حركتهای عالی دوربینهای متعدد (سه یا چهار دوربین) بهدور نوازنده طبل (نیك میسن) یا در امتداد بلندگوهای بیشمار گروه پیش میرود.
استفاده عالی از قاب ایستا یا نماهای چندتصویری مالیخولیای این پروژه غریب را كامل میكند. یكی از نكاتی كه مابن بهدقت آن را از نظر گذرانده، توجه به نقش هر عضو گروه در قطعات است؛ جایی كه او درك میكند ستاره حقیقی «یكی از این روزها» نیك میسن است و با نمایی از بالای سر، گویی او را در حین انجام عملی آیینی نشان میدهد. این توجه در قطعههای گوناگون بین اعضاء تقسیم میشود و ارزش هر نوازنده در یك كوارتت آشكار میشود.
واقعیت این است که فقط سه آهنگ فیلم واقعاً در پمپی فیلمبرداری شده اند و بقیه با تکنینک "پرده آبی" در پاریس و آنهم در استودیو ساخته شدهاند. DVD های تازه فیلم انیمیشنهای سه بعدی بسیار آماتوری و آزار دهندهای از پمپی به فیلم قدیمی اضافه کرده است که خوشبختانه میشود کاری کرد که دیده نشوند.
Thursday 21 January 2010
The Doors on Film
Tuesday 19 January 2010
Monday 18 January 2010
Truffaut and the Criterion of Gloria Grahame
"Sometimes they make films in the streets of Paris. A few extras are there, more gapers, but no stars. You spot an assistant. You explain to him that you are not who he thinks you are. You directed a public debate at the Ciné-Club de Chamalières in Puy-de-Dôme on pure cinema before at least eighty people, and there is nothing you don't know about the theme of failure in John Huston or about the misogyny of American cinema. Supposing this first or second assistant hears you out, you ask him the ritual question, "What are you filming?" To which he replies-what could he reply?"We're filming a linking shot." And that's French cinema: three hundred linking shots end to end, one hundred ten times a year.
If Aurenche and Bost were adapting Le Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), they would cut sentences, even words. what would remain? A few thousand suspension points; that is, rare angles, unusual lighting, cleverly centered. The notion of a shot in France has become concern for clothing, which means following fashion. Everything happens to the right and to the left, off the screen.
This preamble, in order to introduce a film that is completely different. An American film. David Miller is the director of Sudden Fear. He made Love Happy (1950) and Our Very Own (1950). Before that he assisted in Why We Fight. While respectable, nothing in his recent career led us to suspect that David Miller would give us the most brilliant "Hitchcock style" known in France.
Outside of two very short but fairly unpleasing sequences (a dream and a planning sequence in pictures), there is not a shot in this film that isn't necessary to its dramatic progression. Not a shot, either, that isn't fascinating and doesn't make us think it is a masterpiece of filmmaking.
If the audience laughs when it isn't suitable to do so, I take that as a sign of daring, of finish. The public has lost the habit of intensity. Twenty years of adaptations that are guilty of excessive timidity have gotten the public accustomed to golden insignificance. Filming Balzac has become impossible. Put into pictures, Grandet's deathbed agony reaching for the crucifix would cause gales of laughter in the same people who swoon with admiration when a legless cripple hurtles down a street at fifty kilometers an hour.
The "in" public, the public of the Ciné-Clubs, is hardly any different. Although they may allow Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (no doubt because of Diderot and Cocteau), they are ready to burst out laughing at all of Abel Gance's films. What Ciné-Club has shown Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night or Robert Wise's Born to Kill the most "Bressonian" of the American films? As for the films, films of psychological anguish, laughter is a form of revenge of the spectator on the auteur of the story, which he is ashamed to have believed in. Yes, twenty years of fake great subjects, twenty years of Adorable Creatures and Return to Life.
The Sudden Fear's casting: it is permissible to have forgotten Crossfire (1947; Dir. Edward Dmytryk), but not a young blond woman who was better than an intelligent extra. As a prostitute, she danced in a courtyard. Even professional critics noticed the dancer; it was Gloria Grahame, whom we saw again in Merton of the Movies (1947; Dir. Robert Alton) playing opposite Red Skelton. Then Gloria Grahame became Mrs. Nicholas Ray and made In a lonely place, with Humphrey Bogart as costar, under the direction of Nicholas Ray himself. Gloria is no longer Mrs. Ray, as far as we know, and is filming Man on a tightrope in Germany under the direction of Elia Kazan. We will see her again even sooner in Cecil B. DeMille's Greatest Show on Earth. It seems that of all the American stars Gloria Grahame is the only one who is also a person. She keeps from one film to the next certain physical tics that are so many acting inventions and that can only be vainly expected from French actresses. It took all the genius of Renoir, Bresson, Leenhardt, and Cocteau to make Mila Parely, Maria Casarès, Renée Devillers, and Edwige Feuillère appear to have any genius. That and the bill for American cinema, often perfect right down to "Series Z" films, upset the hierarchy that could not be the same in our country where the only things that count are ambitious screenplays and the producer's quote. In reality there are no directors of actors in France, except those four names whose praises can never be sung enough: Renoir, Bresson, Leenhardt, and Cocteau. Gloria Grahame's acting is all in correspondences between cheeks and looks. You can't analyze it, but you can observe it. Let us make ours the definition by Jean Georges Auriol: "cinema is the art of doing pretty things to pretty women," and let us wager that as he wrote that, he was thinking more of Jean Harlow than of Lisette Lanvin.
Jack Palance has been known to us since Elia Kazan's good film, Panic in the Streets. His character here is that of a young man with unusually fine physical qualities and who, by his exceptional charm, acquires the favors of women whose experience with men has made them less demanding and, at the same time, more so.
Joan Crawford? A question of taste. She takes her place in a category that I label rather crudely the "Raimu/Magnani tradition." But if it's really true that we owe the existence of this film to her as a co-producer.
Each follows his own path. The one that Jack Palance and Gloria Grahame have chosen will lead them to death. Joan Crawford's path is also the San Francisco street that seven years of American cinema from The Lady from Shanghai to They Live by Night have made familiar to us. An ingenious screenplay with a fine strictness, a set more than respectable, the face of Gloria Grahame and that street of Frisco whose slope is so steep, the prestige of a cinema that proves to us every week that it is the greatest in the world."
[Truffaut's article from The Early Film Criticism of François Truffaut, translation by Wheeler W. Dixon]