Leave-Takings and Homecomings
Share
On Tuesday, the editors of Narrow Margin will be at Light Industry in Brooklyn to present two films starring Joel McCrea, Alfred E. Green’s Four Faces West (1948) and André de Toth’s Ramrod (1947). The fourth issue of the quarterly, The Western: From B-Z, is “dedicated to westerns made at the margins, produced with little means, and made from the scraps of the studio system: cheap programmers of Poverty Row, seventy-minute features of cowboys with guns ablaze on the backlot. At once popular and peripheral, these westerns were the morass upon which American cinema was built, the crude oil that fueled an empire.”
Later this month, Light Industry will host two more events to plan ahead for. To mark the recent publication of Anne McLean’s new translation of Aside from My Heart, All Is Well—the novel by Héctor Abad inspired by the life of a fellow Colombian, the Claretian priest and film critic Luis Alberto Álvarez—the Theater of the Matters and Archipelago Books will present four films by Álvarez’s friend and student, poet and filmmaker Víctor Gaviria.
Álvarez advocated for “an authentic, regional cinema grounded in the place, people, and tongue of the country, particularly the poor of the Antioquia region and the street youth of his city.” The program Love Is Strong as Death: The Antioquian Cinema of Luis Alberto Álvarez and Víctor Gaviria begins at 5pm on Sunday, October 18. And then on the following Sunday, October 25, Light Industry will open its Benefit Book Sale, accompanied by a program with the congenial title Lush Themes from Motion Pictures: Film Music and Easy Listening, 1955–1975.
This week’s highlights:
- Tonight, Media City Film Festival and Trinosophes Projects will present Starshine & Clay, a program of ten films by Kevin Jerome Everson, in East Lansing, Michigan, and then from Thursday through November 14, Everson’s new installation Gises will be on view at the Detroit Public Library. In conjunction with these free events, Three Fold Press presents Clocking Time, a dossier by Yasmina Price on Everson, whose films “travel across intergenerational family stories, the auto industry, sitcoms, migration, beauty pageants, unionized and unsanctioned labor, gossip, non-event activities, auditions and rehearsals, media artifacts, moonshining, and climbing telephone poles. Figures as varied as the painter Caravaggio, filmmaker Lav Diaz, comedian Richard Pryor, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, photographer Garry Winogrand, and musical collective Parliament-Funkadelic are all amongst his influences.”
- Once they settled into their hour together on stage at the New York Film Festival, James Gray and Jim Jarmusch seemed to be having a pretty good time. Gray is “the least heralded major American filmmaker now working,” writes Charles Taylor in Liberties. “The voluptuousness in his movies, a melancholy one, lies in the depth of the emotions.” Gray’s films “can be seen as a series of leave-takings and homecomings, the former never guaranteeing anything like freedom, the latter often as much trap as sanctuary.” To watch Gray’s first feature, Little Odessa (1994), and his latest, Paper Tiger, “back to back is to see two movies engaged in a fascinating conversation with each other,” writes Jim Hemphill at the top of his interview with the director for IndieWire. “Really,” says Gray, “it’s an act of insanity when somebody allows a first-timer to direct, because those people don’t know anything. Even Orson Welles didn’t know what he was doing on Citizen Kane—which is part of why it’s great.”
- Lucky Star is running Jhon Hernandez’s new translation of a piece by critic and filmmaker Axelle Ropert (The Wolberg Family, Petite Solange) that ran in a 1998 issue of La Lettre du Cinéma, “the short-lived Paris film journal that forged its own path and specialized in resurrecting ’70s French auteurs,” as Nicholas Elliott has described it. Ropert plays “The 7 Families Game,” writing about actors she divides into seven clusters such as “The Blind” (Henry Fonda, Christopher Walken), “The Revenants” (Robert Taylor, Sterling Hayden, Robert Forster), or “The Tomcats,” who deploy “an impressive aristocratic disdain in which a terrible oratorical power is revealed: from the definitive and vengeful sermon of George Sanders as Addison DeWitt to Anne Baxter in the shabby décor of a hotel room (All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz), to the splendid amorous ultimatum delivered to Jeanne Crain on a hotel terrace one evening (The Fan, Otto Preminger), by way of Victor Mature’s supremely inspired declamation of Shakespeare (My Darling Clementine, John Ford)—the Tomcats take the floor.”
- There’s a slender bridge between two pieces published in Bright Lights Film Journal this past week. Stanley Kubrick told those close to him that he considered Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to be his best film, and Jonathan Kirschner observes that “the nominal narrative belies the depths of this movie’s prodigious ambition and profundity, as the stakes appear to fall well short of epic, especially in comparison with Kubrick’s landmark reflections about World War I (Paths of Glory, 1957), the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove, 1964), and the possibilities of human evolution (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).”
- And Ben Schwartz points out that Roger Ebert’s 1997 piece on Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979) “contains an insight of stunning prescience”: “Being There is a film about a man whose mind works like a rudimentary AI program.” Chance (Peter Sellers) is a gardener and a vessel for nothing but what he’s seen on television. All around him glean from whatever he says only what they yearn to hear. Biographer Roger Lewis “said Sellers ‘put all the nothingness he had’ into the part,” writes Schwartz. “Chance’s affectless speaking voice resembles nothing so much as cinema’s most famous AI, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; intentionally or not, Ashby nods to this through his inclusion of Eumir Deodato’s jazz-funk arrangement of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ when Chance first steps out into the larger world.”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
