Source: http://belog.jigaram.com/
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Film Ads in Iran, Part 14
Monday, 18 January 2010
Truffaut and the Criterion of Gloria Grahame
One of the missing points in current scene of film criticism is explaining the methods in which a critic uses or the courage and knowledge of expanding a piece into a personal observation of cinema and society; using films as a pretext for explicating a critic’s criteria or even turning it into a personal manifesto in which one’s critical concerns are laid out. Though each written text reflects writer’s personal view to the subject, sometimes we need to go beyond that and address directly about why we think in a peculiar way, beside the film we are dealing with. As a critic, cin inema or any other art, Once in a while it’s necessary to reveal the structure of our thoughts and make way for reader to grasp the mechanism of our observation, rather than the object of the observation. One of the best examples of this approach is evident in French film criticism of 1950s , written by future Nouvelle Vague filmmakers . Here is an exemplary piece on Sudden Fear, a film noir directed by Norman Miller and starring Joan Crawford, written by Francois Truffaut in a discursive style and lot of personal statements:
"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.
Sudden Fear
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.
Gloria Grahame
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]
"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]
The Song Remains the Same (1976)
آواز يكجور ميماند
كارگردان: پيتر كلينتن، جو ماسوت.
1976/ رنگی/ 136 دقیقه.
***
مستندي از سفر گروه لِدزپلين به آمریکا و کنسرت مشهورشان در مدیسون اسکوئرگاردن نیویورک. فيلم تركيبي آماتوري از سكانسهاي فانتزي با اجراهاي گروه در تور سال 1973 آنهاست كه فقط براي گروه جذاب است و گوشهاي عادتنكرده، نميتوانند خروش همزمان دههزار وات گيتار الكترونيك جیمی پیج را تحمل كنند. یکی از دوستان من، مهدی، که در اجرای مدیسون اسکوئر حاضر بوده می گوید وقتی پیج اولین نُت را زد درست مثل این بود که زمین از زیر پایت خالی شود!
Sunday, 17 January 2010
Remembering Louis Lumière
لویی لومیر (1948-1864) شیمی دان و مخترع و پسر کارخانه داری متخصص تهیه مواد شیمیایی مخصوص عکاسی و امولوسیون بود. بعد از دیدن دستگاه کینه توسکوپ ادیسون در نمایشگاهی در پاریس با برادرش آگوست به روی دستگاهی اپتیکال برای پخش تصاویر متحرک کار کرد و نتیجه شد دستگاه "سینماتوگراف لومیرها"، یا آغاز تاریخ سینما. اولین فیلم آن ها خروج کارگران از کارخانه لومیرها (1895) بود. اولین برنامه نمایش فیلم دنیا را با اعلان و تبلیغات، فروش بلیط و مراسمی که شبیه به آیین سینماروی امروز بود در گران کافه (بلوار کاپوسین) در 28 دسامبر 1895 برگزار کردند. تأسیس انجمن سینماتوگرافی لومیر در 1896. اولین نمایش فیلم روی پرده واقعاً بزرگ (5 در 6.5 متر) در نمایشگاه جهانی پاریس 1900. از 1905 بخش فیلم سازی شان را بستند و خود را وقف ساخت بقیه ابزارهای مکانیکی مربوط به عکس برداری و فیلم برداری کردند.
لومیرها اولین و کامل ترین شکل تألیف در سینما را ارائه کردند. خودشان آن را اختراع کردند، وسایلشان را ساختند، فیلم ها را فیلم برداری کردند و آنها را در سینمای خودشان به نمایش گذاشتند و خودشان آثارشان را در گوشه و کنار جهان عرضه کردند. اما هنوز چیزی به نام هنر سینما وجود نداشت و حتی امکان وجود صنعت سینما نیز جای تردید فراوانی داشت. اما بعد از یک قرن فیلم های آنها به شکلی تکان دهنده نشان دهنده روح جاری در سینمایند. روحی که ورای خودآگاهی و ناخودآگاهی فیلمساز به تصاویر متحرک راه پیدا می کند.
البته تردیدی نیست که فیلم های آنها اولین و آخرین فیلم های کاملاً ناخودآگاه جهانند. دوره ای خیلی کوتاه از تصاویر سیال که گویی مو به مو از ضمیر ناخودآگاه بیرون آمده، با خروج کارگران آغاز شده و با باغبان آب پاشی شده به پایان می رسد. هیچ رهگذری از ماهیت دوربین سینماتوگراف خبر ندارد. نهایتاً همه به عنوان دوربین عکاسی که یک لحظه را ثبت می کند به آن نگاه می کردند. کلیدی ترین عنصر سینمای آنها زمان بود، چرا که هنوز عنصری به نام فضا وارد اثر سینمایی نشده بود. فیلم های لومیرها که معصومیت محض خالق و سوژه ها را به نمایش می گذراند در گذر زمان به معیاری برای سینمای ناب بدل شده اند. لحظاتی از رنوار، لحظاتی دیگر از هاکس، بیشتر یا تمام فیلم های ژاک ریوت و هر جا که تصاویر متحرک دل بیننده را می لرزاند این لویی و آگوستند که با صورت گوشتالو و ابروهای پرپشت و حرکات آرام و نجیبانه شان به ما لبخندی ابدی می زنند.
Film Ads in Iran, Part 13
A poster, French, Farsi and Russian, from an unidentifiable Lil Dagover film. She was a prolific German star who appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as well as in some Murnau and Lang films. The Persian title is The Last Day Before the Execution.
Source: http://belog.jigaram.com/
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Super 8 Stories (2001)
قصههای سوپر هشت
كارگردان: امیر كوستوریتسا
باحضور: الكساندر بالابان، زوران ماراجانوویچ سیدا، نناد گایین سوسه، گوران ماركووسكی گلاوا، درازن جانكوویچ، داكتر نلی كاراجلیك، امیر كوستوریتسا، جو استام.
2001/ رنگی و سیاه و سفید/ 101 دقیقه.
***
بررسی موسیقی و زندگی گروه Smoking No شامل تمام فیلمهای مربوط به كنسرت در مكانهای مختلف. این هم فیلمی راضیكننده و سرخوشانه است، اما گروه موسیقی امیر كوستوریتسا (فیلمساز بوسنیایی) صرفاً یك گروه غیرواقعی نیست. موسیقی این فیلم جزئی جدانشدنی از داستان فیلم گربه سیاه، گربه سفید است و راك محلی اروپای شرقی هم ــ وقتی كوستوریتسا گروهش را بهراه میاندازد ــ ما را تحت تأثیر قرار میدهد. جو استامر ــ خواننده گروه Clash كه در یك مرحله از كار به آنها میپیوندد ــ این موسیقی را «موسیقی دیوانهوار یونانی/ یهودی ویژه عروسیها» میخواند و این تعریف بهخوبی حق مطلب را ادا میكند، چون شور و شوق، عشق، طنز وخشونت مردمان بالكان تماماً در این قطعهها نهفته است.
Friday, 15 January 2010
Popcorn (1969)
پاپكورن
كارگردان: پيتر كليفتن.
1969/ رنگي/85 دقيقه.
***
مستندي از اجراهاي زنده يا استوديويي انيمالز، جيمي هندريكس، جو كاكر، جرولينگ استونز، ترافيك، وانيلا فاج، بيجيز و اوتيس ريدينگ. اثري بيارزش از نظر سينمايي، اما جالب توجه براي بخش موسيقي آن كه بهدنبال موفقيت وود استاك در سينماها به نمايش عمومي درآمد.
Film Ads in Iran, Part 12
Source: http://belog.jigaram.com/
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Tuna Clipper (1949)
Tuna Clipper
Director: William Beaudine
writer: Scott Darling
Music: Edward J. Kay
Cinematography: William A. Sickner
Art Direction: Dave Milton
Cast: Roddy McDowall, Elena Verdugo, Roland Winters, Peter Mamakos, Rick Vallin.
Director: William Beaudine
writer: Scott Darling
Music: Edward J. Kay
Cinematography: William A. Sickner
Art Direction: Dave Milton
Cast: Roddy McDowall, Elena Verdugo, Roland Winters, Peter Mamakos, Rick Vallin.
"Here is a little film from Monogram, [shot in 12 days] that modest company that said "no" to the crisis and decided to double the number of its productions.* A scenario whose charm lies in its modesty and honesty: a captivating tuna fishing expedition. William Beaudine's mise-en-scène is completely creditable, as we would have liked it to be for the same director's Charlie Chan. We are drawn by the one-and-only female actor with the promising bodice; no, generous; or rather, willing, I would say; that bodice is still well behaved, friendly also, and sort of hospitable, promised to the most deserving one, the nicest one. Let us recall together the name of this delicate personage: Elena Verdugo."
-- François Truffaut, Cahiers du Cinema, December 1953
*Truffaut here refers to the cutback in Hollywood production in the early 1950s due to the inroads of the early days of television.
Contemporary Cinema According to Mervyn LeRoy
''Nowadays, movies aren't made by great creative minds, but by a cartel of businessmen on the one hand and a haphazard group of young and undisciplined rookies on the other. Today's films are made too fast and too dirty and cost either too much or too little. Too many directors today make movies that puzzle and offend and confuse the audience. They seem to equate bafflement with art.''
Mervyn LeRoy (1900-87)
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