Some Came Running

Driving "Trafic," heading uptown

My musings on Jacques Tati's Trafic, to my mind a wonderful and misunderstood film, have just gone up over at The Auteur's Notebook. The splendid Criterion DVD of the picture streets on July 15.

I've been meaning to head up to Harlem to check out the Maysles Cinema ever since it opened in March, and I now have even more of a pretext to do so and/or less of an excuse not to, as the case may be: Sunday, the uptown arthouse with a documentary emphasis begins its series "Strangers in a Strange Land" which runs through August 5. Curated by the Museum of the Moving Image's astute and, incidentally, personally delightful Livia Bloom, it starts with a bang: a marathon screening of Louis Malle's beautiful, penetrating seven-hour Phantom India. Other delights include an inventive double bill of Vigo's A propos de Nice and Chantal Akerman's beguiling News From Home. The schedule is here; a good news piece about the Maysles Cinema is here.

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.

Nuts to you.

Not for anything, but I would have been delighted if, after stating "and he of course accepts Reverend Jackson's apology," Barack Obama spokesperson Bill Burton had added, "but on the other hand, he is not likely to share a sauna with Reverend Jackson at any time in the near future."

Homages #1

James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, 1970

Kenji Sawada and Setsuko Karasuma, Mishima, Paul Schrader, 1985

On the commentary track of the new and wonderful Criterion disc of Schrader's remarkable film, the director himself points out his "petite homage" to the controversial and perhaps even more remarkable Cammell/Roeg film, which he's also praised in the pages of Film Comment. What's particularly interesting about this homage is how it's embedded in an adaptation—a petite adaptation as it were, of Mishima's 1959 novel Kyoko's House, which I'm betting didn't contain the dialogue line "I'll be your mirror," either...

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.

Then and Now #4

Four Feelies (from left, Glenn Mercer, Stanley Demeski, Bill Million, Brenda Sauter) in Something Wild, Jonathan Demme, 1986

Three Feelies (Mercer, Demeski, Million), Battery Park, July 4, 2008

Damn. Is Bill playing the same guitar in both shots?

Incidentally, did you know that the film that became Stop Making Sense began its life as a Feelies concert movie? Demme had been a fanatical Feelies man for years and was dying to film the band in its natural habitat—Haledon, New Jersey. Possibly at this joint called the Peanut Gallery, which my own band, Artificial Intelligence (which briefly counted Stanley D. as its drummer) had christened as a rock venue. Demme wanted to shoot in black and white and a possible title was Night of the Living Feelies. Given the band's extreme cult status at the time (early '80s) the search for financing was quite the slog. Talking Heads' then-manager Gary Kurfirst was looking to expand into film at the time; I'm not sure who approached whom, but Kurfirst said he wouldn't back a Feelies film but would of course back a Talking Heads film. Demme, a Heads enthusiast (as who wasn't back then?), ran with it. At least that's how I heard it. In any case, Demme remained a stalwart Feelies supporter, casting them as the high school reunion band in Something Wild and directing the Maxwell's-shot video for "Away." I understand he and his son attended the Wednesday night Feelies show at Maxwell's. Could the dream be alive again?

Another literary interlude.

FER Chrrist's sake realize you have given me no "case" to present.

I have your statement. I have a lot of documents proving that a company of players put on a Chesterton play (for which they ought to all be poisoned until dead of gangrene.)

—Ezra Pound, letter to James Joyce, April 11, 1919

That Pound could be quite a humdinger before he got all, you know.

In the above letter he is trying to advise Joyce with respect to a bit of an imbroglio the Irish genius (and borderling paranoid) got into with one Henry Carr, later to be immortalized in both Ulysses and Tom Stoppard's Travesties.

The letter is reprinted in the New Directions book Pound/Joyce, which I'm currently having myself a time with. My Lovely Wife and I have gotten into a little routine whenever the book's in her line of sight. "Pound/Joyce?" she asks. "What's that?" And in my most mookesque voice I respond, "Huh, huh. It's what I'm gonna do to Joyce when she gets home."

My Lovely Wife is in many respects A Delicate Plant, and yet she never fails to crack up at this remarkably crude joke. It just goes to show. You think you know a person....

"Hancock" and the Babel of comic-book myth (contains putative spoilers)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a drunk who can lift cars!...

Lost and found

"Best film news in 80 years," my friend Joseph Failla notes of the report that a complete version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, long only available in a substantially truncated multi-source restoration, has been unearthed in Buenos Aires. (Yes, I wish I could say that Borges had reviewed this movie. But my copy of his selected non-fiction work yields no such notice.) My ever-stalwart pal David Hudson at Greencine Daily has been tracking the story, which is a brilliant jaw-dropper. That the Murnau Foundation, which did all the great work that went into the wonderful version of Metropolis that was released on disc by both Eureka!/Masters of Cinema (my preferred version) and Kino, now has another very substantial job of work before it, must be simultaneously maddening and exhilarating.

I love stories like this, and I kind of hate them, too, because they invite us to dream. If there has been, all this time, a complete Metropolis out there, why can't there be a complete...well, you know the titles. Ambersons. Greed. Some of you may remember the cruel false alarm sounded over Murnau's Four Devils a while back. What this discovery proves is that almost anything is, it turns out, possible. What are the films we should be looking for in the light of this discovery? Whose are the attics that should be (politely) raided?