Some Came Running

The first time I saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr"...

The old woman calls the shadow revels to an end...; Vampyr

...was on November 4, 1980. Election day of that year. I had come into Manhattan from New Jersey to spend some time with a pretty-much-former girlfriend (hope, although for what exactly I couldn't say, tending to spring eternal back then), on just what pretext I can't remember. She made some joke about keeping me out until after the polls closed—she was an avowed Reaganite and wanted some insurance for Jersey, or something.

Or maybe hanging out with the former girlfriend was a sidelight, and I had actually come into town to see Godard's Sauve qui peut, which was playing up at the Lincoln Plaza, and I enlisted the former girlfriend (I guess that about now I ought to dignify her with a name—Debra, it was) to come along on account as she was still pretty much the only person I knew in New York (aside from the Brooklyn Kennys) and she was interested in Godard in the way that many non-film/film studies majors at NYU were interested in Godard at the time, that is, kinda/sorta. I don't know.

The point is we wound up seeing three films that day. First, the Godard, which at the time, coming after such a long period of silence (his last picture to get any kind of meaningful exposure in the States had been Tout va bien in '72; of course he had been working, making video and film, the whole time of his putative exile from "commercial" cinema, but we just weren't seeing the work) was beautiful and strange; Godard the pop artist and agitator was gone, replaced by an elegiac post-classicist. I don't think that's how I actually put it to Debra as we walked down Eighth Avenue and into Times Square.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "The Devil, Probably"

For its first hour or so, The Devil, Probably, Robert Bresson's 1977 film, seems like the most difficult of the inimitable master's works, for the most banal of reasons: that is, the viewer really just wants to give its putative protagonist a sharp smack in the chops.

The film focuses on a group of Parisian young adults who are, quite reasonably, at furious and impotent odds with The World As It Is Today*. It's almost ten years since '68, and as they look about them, things are worse than ever**. They hang out in cathedrals, bookstores, offices, lecture halls; they screen film footage of the destruction of various environments, the clubbing of baby seals, the victims of mercury poisoning in Japan. "These pictures can't be shown too often," one character flatly intones while watching some particularly horrific material.

The putatively charismatic not-quite-ringleader of this group, long-haired genius Charles (Antoine Monnier), is, for a time, the most prickly of Bresson's heroes/heroines. The occasional mulishness of Mouchette in the eponymous film grated on, and eventually shamed, the viewer. The passivity of Au hasard, Balthazar's Marie shocked, and eventually shamed, the viewer. In Devil, when Charles, after a mocking dialogue with earnest writer Michel (whose girlfriend he's pretty much absconded with), makes for another young woman's sports car, telling Michel his acquaintance with her is "comme ci, comme ca," the viewer's blood is, I believe, meant to boil.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Black Narcissus" (Blu-ray) (UPDATED)

Forgive the dodgy qualities of this screen grab; as I don't yet have the equipment to do Blu-Ray disc frame burns directly (and to be completely honest with you, I'm not likely to be getting such equipment for some time), I'm using my Olympus SP-55OUZ to shoot images directly off my Hitachi plasma. As you'll see later, they will suffice for our current purposes.

How long ago was it, that I sat in a now-defunct movie theater listening to a lecture by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff? The film restoration maven Robert A. Harris was in the audience, and during the Q&A period, he stood up and asked: "Is that lavender tint that suffuses the extant prints of Black Narcissus supposed to be there?" and Cardiff looked a bit surprised and said, no, not as far as he was concerned. And a real rustle went through the audience; that lavender tint was not only on prints, but on the venerated Criterion laser disc of the film—the highest quality home video version of the movie available anywhere!—and now we learned that, no, it's not right. Calamity. Something would have to be done.

Something was done—in 2000 Criterion put out its DVD of the film (the company's 93rd DVD) with a new digital transfer created in tandem with Cardiff. No more lavender tint, and a fairly breathtaking image. The Criterion version of the film became a home video reference. As is usually the case.

The Fantastic Disappearing Rommel

At one point during his excellent commentary for the New Yorker Video edition of Robert Bresson's L'Argent, my friend Kent Jones takes a minute or two to lambaste what he calls a "ridiculous" onetime staple of Premiere magazine, a little box titled "Gaffe Squad" in which readers crowed about the continuity mistakes they discovered in both current and vintage films. Kent's rationale being that such gaffes pretty much have fuckall to do with the aesthetic worth of a picture and merely provide a somewhat meritricious method by which one can allow oneself to feel superior to a picture. Kent put it more eloquently than that, and I'm pretty sure he didn't use the word "fuckall." Anyway...since one is actually rendered incapable of "telling tales out of school" once a) most of said "school" has been bulldozed and b) you've been expelled from what portion of said "school" remains, I'll admit that I wasn't much of a fan of "Gaffe Squad" either, for reasons not dissimilar to Kent's. That's one of the reasons I thank God for the Internet: with the advent of such sites as MovieMistakes.com and such (what, you think I'm actually gonna link to it?), I could argue, as the print version of "Gaffe Squad" lay dormant, that online sites handled such things so much more briskly that it made no sense to revive it, much less move it into my beloved Home Guide section. And when such arguments stopped working, I just did my variant of the old "lalalalaicanthearyou" routine.

That isn't to say that there aren't some continuity gaffes out there worth noting. Some bring a kind of peculiar poetry or frisson to an otherwide ordinary film. And THAT isn't to say that 1962's The Longest Day is ordinary. I've been fascinated by this film forever, largely because, for all the drama of the event it depicts (that would be D-Day, World War II, y'all) the movie is so peculiarly scrupulous that it contains practically no drama. It's an environmental picture with big stars; it's not so much the percursor to Saving Private Ryan as it is a peer to Andy Warhol's Empire. (Incidentally, just as I would love to screen Todd Haynes' I'm Not There for a teen who has no idea who Dylan was, I'd love to get a reaction to Day from someone who's never heard of Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Richard Burton, et al. Don't kid yourselves; there are such people out there.) If Douglas Gordon had real conceptual cojones, he'd have forged a 24-hour version of this film rather than Psycho.

But I'm getting away from my point, which is the gaffe. It's a pretty spectacular one, occuring only about five minutes into the film. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Werner Hinz)—you know him—is looking out at the English Channel, and musing. It's a rear projection shot—Hinz is standing in front of a screen. So, anyway, he's musing, in German, as we see below:

...and then all of a sudden he just disappears—but keeps on talking, contemplating the mere strip of water separating England from the blah blah blah.

The shot continues for several seconds, with Rommel continuing to muse.

This is such a blatant error that one could convince oneself it was deliberate. As in, "what a remarkable artistic coup on the part of German director Bernhard Wicki, to drop in this blatant demonstration of Rommel's supernatural powers, and then never make reference to them again for the rest of the film!" Watching the remainder of The Longest Day under that particular spell could be the cinematic equivalent of reading Pierre Menard's version of Don Quixote.

Can digital video make you ill?, OR, Datapanik in the Year '08

What with all the online controversy about the new Blu Ray disc of Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton, I was finally motivated to check out the thing myself the other night. Got up to the intermission point, almost. It was, to my eye, pretty much the scrubbed-clean digital nightmare described by film restoration maven Robert A. Harris in his 6/23/08 column over at The Digital Bits; seriously, anyone who believes that this thing faithfully reproduces the clarity and detail of a 70MM film image needs quite a bit more than an eye test.

But hey, that's just my opinion, right? I would like to state, however, an absolute fact, which is that at one point in the film the image nauseated me. Literally. As in, gave me an experience of I dunno what—vertigo, perhaps—that made me feel sick to my stomach.

The shot is in the scene between Patton's slapping of a shell-shocked soldier and his beating British General Montgomery to Messina. It's a brief rendezvous between Patton (George C. Scott) and Omar Bradley (Karl Malden). The opening shot of the scene follows Patton's jeep as it goes up an incline, turns left, climbs another incline and then makes a right into a plaza. The camera appears to be on a crane following. The shot goes from 1:27:57 to 1:28:21. Here's a section from it:

Now at this point in the shot the camera is still moving to the right, following the jeep (which here has just straightened out) along. But the camera and the jeep are not moving at the same speed. And to make it worse, in this high-definition digital video rendering, the white buildings behind the plaza seemed to be moving as well—also at a different speed than the camera and the jeep. I've looked at the shot several times and the effect on me is always the same—a moment of dizzyness followed by queasiness.

I know why this is happening—the picture has been translated into data, and lost its solidity. But if anyone reading has a more detailed technical explanation, please chime in in the comments. In the meantime, I wonder if Fox would consider putting a "May Induce Nausea" warning sticker on the disc, the way Ken Jacobs and theater producers have to put up warnings about the use of strobing effects...

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Make Way For Tomorrow" ("Place aux Jeunes")"

First, the bad news: as the above screen capture testifies, the image is soft. Sometimes softer than this. Acceptable, but soft, most likely from the source. Also, the French subtitles are not removable.

So. That's the bad news. And, on the other hand, this is an entirely watchable DVD of one of the most underseen classics of golden age American cinema, a movie that is as unusual today as it was on its 1937 debut, arguably the most perfect jewel in the auteur crown of the great Leo McCarey. Not to mention one of the most emotionally devastating films you are likely to see, ever. I'll admit that shortly after the playful moment recorded in the screen cap above—in which soon-to-separate couple Barkley "Pa" Cooper (Victor Moore) and Lucy "Ma" Cooper (Beulah Bondi) make to kiss, but demur because, it seems, of the camera's gaze—I started bawling like a baby and didn't stop until the end title some fifteen minutes later. And I've already seen the picture a couple of times.

Image of the day

Barbara Stanwyck in Anthony Mann's 1950 The Furies, a top-knotch psychological Western just recently released on disc by The Criterion Collection. It's very strong stuff but suffers a bit from what I call "Gilda Syndrome:" that is, after serving up a tantalizing nest of vipers for your viewing pleasure over the course of an hour and twenty minutes, the movie kind of takes it back and insists that the vipers were just a couple of crazy American kids trying to make good. Ah, convention. But up to the point when it's obliged to give us figures to root for, it's absolutely exemplary in terms of ratcheting up tension after tension.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Margin For Error/A Royal Scandal"

This BFI two-disc set is quite the nifty package for the would-be Preminger completist who's not overly troubled by the varied vicissitudes of the current global economic situation. Error is the pumped-up-for-wartime 1943 adaptation of a (by all accounts lousy) 1939 Claire Booth Luce play. Preminger directed and costarred in the Broadway version, playing the slimy New-York-stationed German counsul. He agreed to reprise his role for the Fox film version, however, only in exchange for the opportunity to direct. This machination allowed him to relaunch a film career that had foundered in the wake of a feud with Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck. For that reason alone, Error is an important film.

Other extra-diegetic points of interest include the above-pictured Preminger's pin-prick sharp performance, in which, among other things, he trades barbs with future "Uncle Miltie" Milton Berle, here playing a Jewish cop reluctantly safeguarding the German embassy. Said barbs, with Berle mouthing a lot of patriotic New-Yawkisms, were largely crafted by Preminger and young Samuel Fuller, a Preminger discovery.

Eventually a convoluted whodunnit with a wrapup that wouldn't satisfy the most perfunctory Ellery Queen reader, Error is also replete with blackmail, sexual and otherwise, and speculative trading in human life...pretty squalid stuff, were it allowed to register. But this dish is garnshed with so much wartime propaganda corn that one barely notices the manifestations of evil that we're supposed to be warring against. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his recent critical biography of Preminger, Error is "earnest and empty, surprising and eerie in its hollowness." As the screen cap above attests, the BFI disc of it looks pretty damn good.

1945's A Royal Scandal is another anomaly, a would-be Lubitsch film (indeed, its title card calls it "Ernst Lubitsch's 'A Royal Scandal'") whose direction was taken over by Lubitsch's friend and apostle Preminger after Lubitsch health disallowed him from helming the film. A comic treatment of the loves of Catherine the Great, it stars stage legend Tallulah Bankhead in one of her infrequent screen turns.

Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Hiroshi Shimizu Film Collection Volume One: Landscape"

At a symposium on films and film criticism held last fall in Brookline, Massachusetts, the great critic and essayist Phillip Lopate, in the middle of an eloquent and inarguably correct disquisition against narcissistic '70s nostalgia and for a film history that privileges beauty and integrity over "edge," allowed that he now preferred films that had "something to do with humanity" to any other pictures. While fully respecting that perspective, the genre aesthete in me had to raise a hand in favor of putative genre formalists (I think Mario Bava came up).

Which is not to say I object to pictures that have something to do with humanity. I just like films that offer something to do with humanity in ways I haven't seen. And it's true that such films can be found in all periods—but alas, these days, you're more likely to find the most eloquent and startling expressions and explorations of humanity in the films of the past. Such as, say, Toni, the Renoir picture released by Masters of Cinema and featuring a commentary by Phillip and Kent Jones, which I reviewed here.

All of which is a roundabout way of offering an unqualified recommendation for this first box set of the work of Japanese director Hiroshi Shizumi, who lived from 1903 to 1966, directed for 1924 to 1957, was admired by Ozu and Mizoguchi, loved to take his camera on the road instead of setting it down in a studio...and who seemed to live to provide notes and images of humanity that always surprised with both their truth and artistry.

In lieu of a "Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report": A slightly belated "High-Def DVD Consumer Guide"

I've made a number of inquiries with my former employer as to whether a piece of text I filed with them in early May was actually going to be used at a website of said employer, and have received zilch in response. As nothing sets action into motion like just going out and doing the damn thing you're asking permission to do, I thought I'd just go ahead and post what would have been the May edition of my High-Definition DVD Consumer Guide here. I mean, sure, the releases aren't brand-new anymore, but it's not as if they themselves have changed in the interim. Also, I'm interested in feedback: is this something you find even potentially useful? Entertaining? Anybody out there want to pay me to syndicate new installments? Etc., etc., etc. Please respond in comments, and enjoy.

High Definition DVD Consumer Guide #5: Please Put Out Better Movies Edition

Our monthly roundup of the latest in High Definition DVDs has us fiending for, well, better movies to watch. Not everything we got this month was a dog, but the roster was low on anything like a classic, which has led us to question the marketing decisions that go into what gets upgraded to Hi-Def and what doesn’t. Seems like the studios are still favoring the money-to-burn home theater mavens (nothing wrong with such consumers, of course) over library-building cinephiles. Help, at least of a sort, seems to be on the way—but we won’t get to sample such classic or just generally excellent or maybe just epic films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Master and Commander, and Patton until next month’s edition. In the meantime, we sought solace in some comedic classics in an obsolete Hi-Def format, and were satisfied if not blown away. And there were some other delights as well.

The 6th Day (Sony Blu-Ray)
It looks as if High Definition video has given studios some useful new ideas in chasing the sow’s-ear-to-silk-purse fallacy, e.g., if you can’t make the movie less putrid, make the Blu-Ray disc look as phenomenal as possible. Hence this lame-ass latter-day Schwarzenegger sci-fier (made in 2000) gets one of those ultra-popping, 3-D looking transfers. It’s so breathtakingly vivid that for long stretches you actually don’t notice stuff like the anti-cloning Ahnuld character musing, “look, it’s the natural process of life,” re a pet’s death, or how thoroughly uninspired all the fake Total Recall stuff is. And then a drippy (literally!) hairless unfinished clone version of Michael Rappaport’s character shows up and you think, “Why am I watching this?” Whether the eye candy will be worth the guilt is entirely your decision. Extras are largely EPK grade. Grade: B