Detour on Poverty Row: New Ulmer Book

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“We see him behind every image and feel we know him intimately when the lights go back on”

-- François Truffaut on Edgar Ulmer.

کتاب تازه ای دربارۀ ادگار جی المر، کارگردان مهاجر آلمانی در هالیوود و متخصص ساخت فیلم های ارزان و سریع که بعضی از آن ها بهترین فیلم های مستقل هالیوود در نیمۀ نخست قرن بیستم محسوب می شوند، چاپ شده است. اسم کتاب هست «ادگار جی المر راه انحرافی در مجمع الفقراء» (نمی دانم مجمع الفقراء را از کجا در آوردم! اصل عنوان هست Poverty Row که اصطلاحی است نه چندان ادیبانه و معطوف به استودیوهای کوچک و فقیر متخصص ساخت فیلم های B در هالیوود عصر طلایی). کتابی که بخش های ناشناخته کارنامۀ المر، مانند فیلم های ییدیش، اوکراینی و سیاه پوستی او را هم مرور می کند، نگاهی که امروز به خاطر علاقۀ مطالعات سینمایی به خرده فرهنگ های در حاشیه مانده حتی کسانی که با وحشت و اضطراب فیلم های مشهور المر کنار نیایند را هم راضی نگه خواهد داشت.

خبر چاپ کتاب و یکی دو جمله ای که دربارۀ آن آمده را مدیون آقای لانس دوئرفارد هستم. به جز این کتاب و «ادگار المر، مقالاتی در باب شاه فیلم های B » (که هیچ کدام از این دو را نخوانده ام)، دربارۀ این کارگردان بزرگ دو کتاب دیگر هم وجود دارد که خوشبختانه آن ها را خوانده ام؛ یکی از سری «حرفه های هالیوود» که کتابی مختصر و مفید است و المر را در کنار هوارد هاکس و فرانک بورزیگی معرفی کرده و یکی کتاب «فیلم های ادگار المر» که فیلم به فیلم پیش می رود و هر کدام از فیلم/مقاله ها را یک نفر نوشته است. ویراستار کتاب «فیلم های ادگار المر»، برنارد هرتزوگنارث (Bernd Herzogenrath)، در مقدمۀ کتاب می گوید: 

“Ulmer’s sustained engagement with American mass culture and European art cinema is an engagement riddled with idiosyncrasy and contradiction, as he frequently drew on elements of both traditions in depicting home (familiarity , identification, belonging) and homelessness (rupture, disorientation, despair). For Ulmer, the two poles tend to remain aesthetically interwoven--inextricably bound up together in his life story--and in productive, if also painful, dialogue with each other, rather than in simple binary opposition. It is this constant feeling of “not belonging” that may have urged Ulmer.”

المر در ایران کارگردانی کاملاً ناشناخته است و تا جایی که من می دانم به جز عدۀ محدودی از دوست داران Detour (یکی از بهترین و بدون شک مشهورترین فیلم او که فیلم-نواری اعلاست ) و گربۀ سیاه (فیلم ترسناک بی نظیرش برای یونیورسال که در همین جا یادداشتی دربارۀ آن نوشته بودم) آدم های زیادی – منتقد و غیرمنتقد – او را نمی شناسند. دربارۀ زندگی و کارنامۀ او هم چیزی به زبان مادر وجود ندارد. امیدوارم به زودی بتوانم در این جا یا در ماهنامۀ فیلم این غفلت را جبران کنم.

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John Barrymore on Acting

John Barrymore on acting:

"There are lots of methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass, and some cracked ice."

My Most Recent "Top 10"

Recently I participated in Film Monthly's poll for selecting top 10 films of Iranian leading film critics. To me, it wasn't, and still is not, a serious game. Though my selected films represent the essence of cinema, there are hundred titles like them. So this list could be altered any moment. If I were free to pick more, any Max Ophuls, any Bresson and all Tati films from L'École des facteurs to Playtime could be placed in my list.

At first I wanted to arrange a list of "big" films that I've seen and those who had an immediate influence in me; films like Big Clock, Big Combo, Big Sleep, Big Heat and then bigger than big names like Criss cross, Out of the past, Raw deal , Asphalt jungle, Double indemnity and the film of films, In a lonely place.

As an anti-climax to the Critics' "usual films" (plus appearances of some sentimental flops like Cinema Paradiso), the following are my choice of the best films that eight of them didn't appear on other "Ten Best" lists:

(without any specific order)

• Playtime (Jacques Tati.1967)
• Colorado Territory (Raoul Walsh.1949)
• F for Fake (Orson Welles.1975)
• Steamboat round the bend (John Ford.1935)
• Europa '51 (Roberto Rossellini.1952)
• City Lights (Charles Chaplin.1931)
• Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir.1936)
• Shadow of a doubt (Alfred Hitchcock.1943)
• Seven men from now (Budd Boetticher.1956)
• 12 O’clock High (Henry King.1949)

Last month I also picked my favorite films of the 1930s that could be found here: [1]
See other critic's choices: [2]
See final result: [3]
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Blog & Site Recommendations#5

یکی از عجیب ترین سایت هایی که در هفتۀ گذشته به آن برخوردم، سایت یک خورۀ سینما به نام استیون هیل بود که تخصص استثنایی اش جمع کردن یک آرشیو بزرگ از نوشته های عنوان فیلم در تیتراژ اول فیلم هاست. این سایت 8 ساله که سینمادوستان و دانشجوهای گرافیک را از این همه وقت و دقتی که صرف تهیۀ آن شده شگفت زده خواهد کرد، بیشتر از شش هزار عنوان را از سال های 1900 تا فیلم های روز گرد آوری کرده است. تمام عکس ها دقیقاً با نسبت های اصلی فیلم ها و بدون تغییر کادر به آرشیو استیون هیل اضافه می شوند.

نمونه ای که در بالا می بینید از همان سایت برداشته شده و نوشتار ابتدای فیلم ماجراهای شاهزاده احمد لوته راینیگر است با تلفیقی از زبان آلمانی و رسم الخط عربی.

سایت را در این جا می توانید ببینید.

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A Hyperbolic Attack on Ordinary American Existence

In A Place in the Sun - the latest and glummest remake of An American Tragedy - there is enough gimmicky, pretentious footage to keep one's eyes glued to the screen while one's common sense and muscles beg for respite. For all its flash, occasional power, and streaks of frighteningly natural acting, this extra-earnest Paramount production is one long, slow, hyperbolic attack on ordinary American existence – an attack whose renewal in one recent film after another is obviously part of Hollywood's strategy to jerk its audience back from the ingenuous attractions of television.

We are given, for instance, the oh-so-languid rich; the pious, magisterial M.D.; billboards that out-Petty Petty; distant sirens playing a counterpoint of doom to ordinary phone calls; the beefy, hysterically shrill D.A.; a thick undergrowth of portable radios everywhere the camera goes; juke-box joints sprawling with drunks. And I am getting very tired of stock shot 32-B, which feeds us the myth that all the windows in depressed urban areas face out on huge, blinking neon symbols of wealth and achievement.

The script by Harry Joe Brown is remarkably faithful to the plot of Dreiser's bleak novel: the complicated love life of a not quite bright social climber (Montgomery Clift) puts him finally in the electric chair. But Brown's dialogue is so stylish and unalive ("You seem so strange, so deep, so far away") that it appears to drift out of the walls and furniture rather than the twisted, jittery, or guppy-like mouths of Clift and his two ladies -- Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. An even more troubling factor is Brown's determination to modernize a tale that is hopelessly geared to an outdated morality and a vanished social set-up. (An American Tragedy, published in 1925, was based on the Chester Gillette case of 1906. By its contortionist avoidance of the verboten subject of abortion - or less drastic alternatives - and its black-white demarcation of the worlds of luxury and drudgery, this "modern" version cuts the ground from under its own feet).

But Producer-Director George Stevens turned Brown's arty, static nonsense into something almost as visually interesting and emotionally complex as Sunset Boulevard or The Asphalt Jungle – one more key example of Hollywood's recent desperate commitment to misanthropic expression via elegant, controlled, mismated power effects. Ordinarily a soft-hearted poetic realist, Stevens is particularly good at getting natural performances out of his actors and at putting across the gauzy, sentimental gestalt of a popular song, a kiss, an important dance, a ritualized seduction. Here he has blown such elements larger than life -- building them into slow, parabolic choreographies of action and camera movement in which you are more dazzled by the incredible control and purposefulness than repulsed by the schmaltz of the whole thing. The Clift-Taylor kiss – repeated in three double exposures – is a huge, intimate, extended business that practically hammers an erotic nail into your skull. It is preceded by Taylor's curious Tin Pan Alley line: “Tell Mama – tell Mama all.”

Stevens squeezes so much of their "real" personalities out of his actors that the screen is congested with discordances. Most of the honors go to Miss Winters, who at long last gets to show that she can do a Mildred -- just like Bette Davis; but a far more complex one-man show is that of the non-aging late adolescent, Montgomery Clift. To some spectators his performance expresses the entire catalogue of Greenwich Village effeminacy -­ slim, disdainful, active shoulders; the withdrawals, silent hatreds, petty aversions; the aloof, offhand voice strained to the breaking point. To others he is a sensitive personification of all those who knock themselves out against the brick wall of success. Clift can stare at a Packard convertible or slump down on his spine with fatigue and by supply not acting make you aware of every dejected, mumbling success-seeker on a big city street. Finally, for the more he is a childish charade on all the fashionably tough, capable outcasts who clutter up "hard­boiled" fiction: cigarette dangling from mouth, billiard cue carelessly angled behind his back, Clift makes a four-cushion shot look preposterously phony.

The exploitation of a talent like this goes far to prove that ace directors no longer make movies as much as tight­knit, multi-faceted Freud-Marx epics which hold attention but discourage understanding in a way that justifies Winchell's name for their makers – "cine-magicians".

--Manny Farber (April, 1951 / The Nation)