19Nov09
It’s well known that Alain Resnais’ beautiful New Wave puzzle Last Year at Marienbad was as fashion-forward as it was artistically progressive. But it surprised us to learn that this high-concept masterpiece was on the cutting edge in another respect. A 1962 Life magazine article recently brought to our attention demonstrates that the hairdo worn by Delphine Seyrig in the film set its own trend. This “comfortable, easy-to-keep summer style” called, appropriately, the Marienbad, was, as the piece describes, “cut straight and short with back ends pushed forward under ears and a deep diagonal bang on the forehead.” The entire article is featured on Kimberly Lindbergs’s blog Cinebeats, in case you want to print it out and bring it with you to the salon. Thanks to Girish for the Facebook tip.
13Nov09
Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who made the utterly bonkers 1977 kinda-horror film House, currently getting a first-time American theatrical run from Janus Films, is profiled by Paul Roquet in a new essay for Midnight Eye. One of the few pieces that’s been written on Obayashi in English, Roquet’s essay presents a fascinating overview of his career, following him from his early experimental films to his work as an artist for Dentsu, Japan's largest advertising firm, where he became a stylistic innovator. This led to his making his first film for Toho Studios, House, based on, as Roquet lovingly calls it, “his own completely incomprehensible script.” Roquet goes on to detail Obayashi’s many formal experiments and contributions to Japanese cinema in this invaluable piece.
11Nov09
“If American independent cinema could be said to have a birthday, November 11 is as good a date to celebrate as any,” writes Elbert Ventura in a terrific new article in Slate. The occasion is the fortieth anniversary of the release of John Cassavetes’s Shadows, that most unassuming and unpolished of trailblazers, which, writes Ventura, “isn’t just a historical curio or an academic footnote. The surprise is that it still surprises.” Ventura digs into this low-budget, highly inventive classic, describing Cassavetes’s workshop process, detailing the controversy surrounding the film’s cuts and reedits, and making the case that Shadows “not only anticipated Mean Streets, Stranger Than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It, and Slacker, among countless others—it helped will them into being.” As a bonus, Ventura’s insightful piece is supplemented by three eye-catching clips from the film.
11Nov09
Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, which arrives on Criterion special-edition DVD next week, is remembered today primarily for its winning star performance. Yet as evidenced by this November 1969 piece from the Sports Illustrated archives by author and sports columnist Dan Jenkins, when the film came out, its male lead, some young whippersnapper named Robert Redford, was an unknown entity, an actor “who may be more familiar to moviegoers as the subtly humorous sidekick of Paul Newman in the new western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Geared toward skiers, Jenkins’s piece profiles the soon-to-be megastar but is mostly about his love of the sport (Redford studied Alpine racing in Europe) and his determination to get a movie about it made.
11Nov09
When one thinks of Orson Welles, one can’t help but imagine a genius alone, monolithic—an image perhaps fostered by his greatest creation, the colossus Citizen Kane. Yet as the new book In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by his eldest child, Chris Welles Feder, reminds us, he was also a dad and husband. In a lengthy Bright Lights Film Journal review of this “beautifully written, disturbing, and painfully sad memoir,” Joseph McBride describes the author’s revelations about the difficult relationship she had with Welles growing up. The daughter of the first of the filmmaker’s three wives, she writes about Welles’s “chaotic” parenting, long absences, and inability to exist within any domestic parameters, and McBride does a terrific job of summarizing all the trying years the child spent—or didn’t spend—with her father. But McBride proposes a light at the end of this dark tunnel, ultimately calling In My Father’s Shadow “a poignant account of a girl and woman struggling to carve out her own personality and triumphantly succeeding, despite great odds, unlike many children of Hollywood figures who wind up being crushed into oblivion by their parents’ shadows.”
4Nov09
Anthony Asquith is remembered primarily as the director of Pygmalion, The Browning Version, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all stage-to-screen adaptations comfortable flaunting their own theatricality. Yet as critic Jay Weissberg writes in the latest issue of Sight and Sound, a new BFI restoration of Asquith’s 1928 silent film Underground proves that the son of a prime minister was not, as his detractors claimed, “an aristocrat without a proper feel for realism” but a maker of vivid, socially engaged cinema. This film, his first solo effort as director, is a populist love triangle; Weissberg writes that it is “about the social interactions that can only exist in the confined, democratic spaces of the London Underground” and is marked by “thrilling location work.” Also in the piece, Weissberg delves into the restoration process that brought Underground (which played on October 23 at the BFI’s London Film Festival) to shimmering new life, and composer Neil Brand, who contributed a new musical score, sings the film’s praises.
3Nov09
The term holiday movie doesn’t have to conjure Christmas carols or miracles at Macy’s. Case in point: the personal, even skewed, films chosen by a few filmmakers as their holiday favorites for a seasonal special section in the New York Times; a couple of them hail from the Criterion catalogue. Jan Chapman, the producer of Jane Campion’s The Piano and Holy Smoke, is particularly enamored of Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding—not a holiday film per se, but its family gathering and celebration invoke the spirit of the season (“All the tragic and comedic misunderstandings and misadventures of a Shakespearean comedy, with a fresh and knowing eye,” Chapman rejoices). Rebecca Miller, director of the upcoming The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, takes the opposite tack, choosing Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, perhaps an anti-holiday film, or, as she writes with affection, “the sort of holiday film that makes you never want to go home again.”
29Oct09
For the new issue of Interview magazine, Wes Anderson sat down in Paris with another of our favorite contemporary auteurs, Arnaud Desplechin, who interviewed him in anticipation of the November release of Anderson’s animated Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox. As you can imagine, these movie-mad men—of the funny-sad family dramas The Royal Tenenbaums and A Christmas Tale, respectively—had a lot to gab about, from Paris weather versus Texas to their different takes on reading Proust. Of course, their most energetic discussion had to do with their favorite directors. Here’s a short exchange in which Anderson describes how Scorsese and Bogdanovich opened his eyes to a world of classic filmmakers.
DESPLECHIN: You’ve seen a lot of movies. I wonder if you learned to watch a lot of films from someone like Martin Scorsese. One could say that there are two kinds of directors: those who love to see films and those who actually don’t see that many.
ANDERSON: If you are going to pick directors that make you feel like you should watch old films, I think that would be Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich. There are so many films I was introduced to by them in one way or another. For example, on the laserdisc commentary of Raging Bull [1980], Scorsese mentions something about Michael Powell, and I had never heard of the Powell and Pressburger films before. From Bogdanovich, I think I first learned about Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey. Bogdanovich saw everything. He had this metal file cabinet with drawers filled with notes. Every time he saw a movie, he typed up a little card that would list the title, director, writer, description, the date he saw the movie, and what he thought. He’d give it a rating. Then if he saw it again, he’d take the card and add a note: “I saw it again, and actually I thought it was a little better this time.”
DESPLECHIN: Do you do that?
ANDERSON: No.
DESPLECHIN: I think it’s a critic thing.
23Oct09
The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most recognizable in movie history) to Italian art cinema (Fists in the Pocket, Salò) to French comedy (La cage aux folles) to American horror (The Thing) and pulp (White Dog). In anticipation of this extraordinary (and extraordinarily prolific) composer’s first-ever performance of his own music in Los Angeles (which was postponed as of October 21), LA Weekly assembled an impressive roster of composers—including Mark Mothersbaugh, Marco Beltrami, and Daniele Luppi—to write tributes to Morricone, eliciting not only gushing praise but also irreverence (writes musician and professor Christopher Young: “This guy could knock off tunes like you or I could piss in a bucket”).
23Oct09
Sheila Heti of the Believer had a chance to talk to Agnès Varda during the Toronto International Film Festival—or rather, a chance to be one of a group of reporters whom Varda, at the festival with her film The Beaches of Agnes, addressed in her Toronto hotel room. Varda was a bit skittish about the event, directing attendees’ attention to her press kit and suggesting that they needn’t hold the gathering at all: “You could even invent that you met me!” Heti decided to take that cue, in part. “This interview is invented; many of the questions are made up,” she writes. “She was not interested in speaking to each reporter individually, and since her latest films, in particular, are more interested in the feeling of truth than the truth, there is no reason for me to argue with her method.” The result, published in this month’s issue of the magazine, is a fittingly unorthodox conversation with the proto–New Wave artist, in which she touches on how filmmaking is different from carpentry, her hairstyle, the difficulty of getting in touch with Harrison Ford, turning Chris Marker into a cartoon cat, and the speedlike properties of rosemary—plus humanity’s need for the idea of family, her relationship with Jacques Demy, and how and why she became a director.
Trained as a photographer, Varda made her first film, La Pointe Courte (included in Criterion’s 4 by Agnès Varda set, which, Heti writes, “shows her mastery, her sensitivity, her imagination and range”) at a time when, she says, “cinema was just following the path of theater. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense!” Having seen only a few movies in her life, she made a cinematic debut that was both instinctual and assured. As she says in the interview, “I made a film. Then when I finished, I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful—I should be a filmmaker!’”
