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SCREENING LOG
- 7/21-7/27, 2003
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I watched LOLA, shorts by D.W. Griffith, THE BITTER TEA OF
GENERAL YEN, UN CHIEN ANDALOU, LAS HURDES, THE TOLL OF THE
SEA, BLACKMAIL and JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK.In order of preference:
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933, Frank Capra)
second viewing
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0023814
An easy candidate for Capra's best is a most uncharacteristic
film in his career: an exotic, exciting and ultimately lyrical
adventure tale of an American missionary woman in China who
is captured by a sinister and cruel warlord, only to develop
a complex relationship with him that ultimately leads to his
ruin. As a film that explores the gap between East and West,
this is in many ways a better film than Griffith's BROKEN
BLOSSOMS, more multifaceted in its drama and not as patronizing
to the Other culture. Barbara Stanwyck looks startlingly nondescript
compared to her later sexpot roles, but does a good job in
conveying her character's emotional development. Nils Asther
plays the title role in yellowface (which apparently ruined
his career) and achieves the impossible task of encapsulating
pretty much every stereotypical notion of the Asian persona
(effeminate, barbaric, civilized, humble, haughty, erotic)
into a deeply complex, three-dimensional human being. Amazingly,
this 70 year-old film perhaps has more interesting and revealing
things to say about race and culture than practically any
film being made today.
DerVin, Luis Luis, oh no, we gotta go, yah yah yah yah
film of the week
Un Chien Andalou (1929, Luis Bunuel) second viewing
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0020530
When I first saw this several years ago I judged it as a
series of clever, even brilliant camera and editing tricks
with no apparent purpose except to elicit a number of surreal
shocks on the viewer -- one big fat provocation. This time
around a sense of the uncanny, one's unconscious being unleashed,
was strongly felt in this sequence of highly sensual visual
non sequitirs; the experience was charged with a sense of
psychic transgression. If the purpose of surrealism in cinema
is to elicit a response of liberation from the constraints
of ordinary earthly logic in the viewer, this film embodies
that aim as well as any.
Las Hurdes (1933, Luis Bunuel)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0023037
Bunuel's non-fiction account of an impoverished village scraping
out an existence on the mountains of western Spain remains
one of the most shocking instances in the history of the documentary.
The film is by no means the objective depiction of a village's
ordinary life that it claims to be, but, much in the way that
UN CHIEN ANDALOU functions, it steers us through a series
of outrageous, near-surrealistic observations on the backward
ways of a people that confound conventional notions of human
existence, shocking to the point of disbelief, eliciting responses
anywhere between hilarity and horror. The dispassionate, travelogue-like
voiceover in the English language version I saw only compounds
the dissonance in the viewer's response.
Lola (1961, Jacques Demy)
http://www.imdb.com/Title?0055093
Having seen THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, LES DAMEOISELLES
DE ROCHEFORT, and this masterful debut feature by Jacques
Demy, It's evident to me now that Demy was one of the very
best French filmmakers of the 60s (which is saying a lot).
Anouk Aimee plays a club dancer holding on for the father
of her child to make his return; meanwhile a childhood friend
emerges as a more plausible and practical lover to challenge
her convictions. Demy, a true cinephile, quotes from other
films, from Aimee's inspired riffs on Marilyn Monroe to the
gorgeous use of tracking shots here are straight out of Max
Ophuls. Demy stands alone in consistently capturing the feeling
of how people cope everyday in the face of their unfulfilled
longings, and (with tremendous help from composer Michel Legrand)
investing those emotional aches with a musical grace.
shorts by D.W. Griffith
in order of preference:
A Corner in Wheat (1909)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0000832
The Lonedale Operator (1911)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0001740
The Unchanging Sea (1910)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0001431
Griffith demonstrates his lyrical side to moving effect.
The New York Hat (1912)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0002391
Mary Pickford had already been in nearly 200 pictures by
the time she made this one, at age 20!
An Unseen Enemy (1912)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0002553
Another exciting rescue movie that gets a lot of mileage
out of the Gish sistersÕ virginal charms.
Those Awful Hats (1909)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0001062
Apparently, even Griffith was a disciple of Georges Melies.
The Mothering Heart (1913)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0003170
The Sealed Room (1909)
http://www.imdb.com/Title?0001032
His Trust (1910)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0001680
Moral: the only good black man is the one whoÕs loyal to
the death. Ugh.
Having watched these 9 early shorts I am as persuaded as
ever that Griffith was a genius, who had an understanding
of cinematic space and time that took the state of the art
to a new level through his breakthrough achievement in Òparallel
editingÓ (cutting between two or more scenes). The most conventional
application of this technique is in building suspense by cutting
between two scenes in the process of colliding with each other
(bad guys busting into the house of an innocent woman while
the heroes are charging at full speed in train or car), as
seen in THE LONEDALE OPERATOR and AN UNSEEN ENEMY. But his
most ingenious and profound use of this technique is in A
CORNER IN WHEAT, in which Griffith intercuts three scenarios:
harvesting farmers, a greedy wheat tycoon successfully plotting
a monopoly, and urban workers starving on a breadline. Brillianty,
Griffith shows how seemingly non-connected scenes have everything
to do with each other to create a multifaceted analysis of
the capitalism system at its most abusive, using juxtapositions
of scenes and images that are comparable to the best of Eisenstein.
(It also gets much of the point of INTOLERANCE across in 1/20th
of the time).
Hal-900 very Hitchcockian film of the week
Blackmail (1929, Alfred Hitchcock)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0019702
Regarded as Britain's first talkie, this story of a police
inspector's girlfriend who is attacked but kills her would-be
rapist, only to be blackmailed by the incident's sole witness,
amounts to more than a historical experiment. The sound recording
is spotty, though Hitchcock makes inspired use of dialogue
in a few moments (a woman screaming played to a shot of a
cop nonchalantly passing by). What really emerges are Hitchcock's
themes of victimization and guilt, given memorable treatment
in a disturbing, morally dubious conclusion. His techniques
of using recurring imagery (in this case, the knife motif)
to suggest psychological inner states within characters is
put to ample use here, almost to the point of self-parody;
happily he developed more subtle ways of applying these tricks
through the remaining 35 years of his career.
DFC-flix special delivery of the week
The Toll of the Sea (1922, Chester M. Franklin)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0013688
On record as the first film to employ a two-strip technicolor
process (predominantly reds and greens, employed to a dazzling,
otherworldly effect), this story of a Chinese girl who is
seduced and abandoned by the American sailor she rescues lifts
heavily from MADAME BUTTERFLY -- the story is given life only
through the remarkable performance of Anna May Wong in the
lead (back then the press expressed shock that the role of
an Asian woman was actually being played by an Asian woman).
Juno and the Paycock (1930, Alfred Hitchcock)
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0021015
If anything, this cumbersome early sound effort -- a filmed
version of a Sean O'Casey play about the swift rise and fall
of an Irish family's fortunes which, save for a couple of
laborious zoom shots amounts to canned theater -- may serve
as testimony to two things: a) why Hitchcock stayed well clear
of theatrical adaptations for most of his career (it seems
that his films are weakest when they rely the most on dialogue);
b) why Hitchcock famously said "Actors should be treated like
cattle" (here they seemed to have taken over the barn, chewing
up scenery left and right). Whatever Hitch saw in taking on
this project, it's not on the screen.
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