Some Came Running

The current cinema, art history edition

The daily grind: Tim Jenison learns to make pigments prior to attempting a Vermeer.

Tim's Vermeer reviewed for RogerEbert.com; Brightest Star reviewed for same. One's good and interesting, the other not so much. 

While I note, with bemusement, that a commenter below has taken me to task for some "same-old same-old" critic bashing, and hence I ought to be more maybe more circumspect before making note of this, but hey, YOLO and all that: I was a little surprised that my friend Manohla Dargis took such a hostile tack against Tim's Vermeer in her review of the movie in the Times today, expressing, in her customary vivid and vigorous language, a real distaste with pretty much all of the people responsible. I cite this not to take Dargis to task, but merely because the movie she describes is pretty much the movie I was dreading before I saw Tim's Vermeer at the New York Film Festival. I thought the actual film sidestepped glib reductionism and offered fascinating casework detail (while also, less fortunately but not fatally, sidestepping a lot of aesthetic ind philosophical implications). Manohla makes a case, though, and in a lively way. See the movie and decide for yourself, as they say.

"Natan" at the Museum of the Moving Image

"The Jews, Masters of the French Cinema," reads the head of an appalling photo-mural from pre-Vichy France, an upsetting and striking image from Natan. 

David Cairns, the blogger behind shadowplay, is also the co-director, with Paul Duane, behind Natan, a remarkable short feature documentary having its New York premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, on Sunday January 19th at four in the afternoon. Duane will be present for a post-screening Q&A. 

The movie opens with a series of sepia-toned images as the smooth but hefty tones of Scottish actor Gavin Mitchell address the audience: "Imagine a man has been murdered. The body has been burned. What's left..." Yes, what is left? The movie got its hook into me right away, and never let up. 

Natan is, among other things, a remarkable piece of cinephile detective work. Its subject should be a celebrated legend of French cinema. As an overseer of the great French studio Pathe, which for a time also bore his own name, Bernard Natan produced and/or presented films by Rene Clair, Raymond Bernard, and Marcel L'Herbier. He was also, it seemed, a tireless innovator with respect to distribution and exhibition. He was also, according to some sources, an early producer of pornographic films and a some time actor in them. He was indisputably a Romanian-born Jew, finally, and that proved his undoing in Vichy France—thanks in part to anti-Semitism stoked in the country well before Hitler's troops ever set foot in it. 

When David, who's a pal, gave me a heads-up on the movie, he said that he hoped that I would find it "packed with information, outrage, and emotion." Indeed. The movie does not attempt a "rehabilitation" of Natan so much as insist that such a state of affairs in which such a treatment were needed is, in itself, an awful injustice. It does this using methods that are risk-taking by conventiona documentary standards, with an actor silently standing in for Natan as narrator Mitchell assumes the man's voice. Scholars and writer such as Serge Bromberg and an especially impassioned Bart Bull, and Natan's own granddaughter, express indignation over Natan's fate even as Cairns and Duane carefully unpack all the available data concerning certain allegations against the man, and reach a tacit conclusion that there are some things about the man that we'll never be able to know. The tragic, convoluted story isn't just for cinephiles—it's for anyone consumed by the mysteries of mankind and the glories it aspires to, and alas, the atrocities it commits. See it. 

Amiri Baraka, 1934-2013

The audio on the above imbed is not, you know, safe for the workplace, and may in fact piss you off in some way even if you listen to it in complete private. 

Which, you know, was part of what Amiri Baraka was about. There is SO much about various of the things he wrote and pronounced that I find/found infuriating, but he always had my calloused respect because he could write, he could read, he had, for better or worse, a genuine and full voice, and of course because he was from New Jersey and remained of New Jersey. 

His very tough play Dutchman was made into a movie by, of all people, Katharine Hepburn's best friend and all-around Caucasian Person of Refinement Anthony Harvey. And Harvey made it as a passion project; it was the Dr. Strangelove editor's first directorial effort. Godard lifted a scene from the play and plunked it right in the middle of 1966's Masculin féminin, a year before Harvey's film version of the drama was released. The scene fits right in and sticks out, just as it is meant to; its electricity, its immediacy, even with Baraka/Jones' words transposed into French, is still palpable today. I am infuriated by Baraka's flirtations with anti-Semitism, with his 9/11 trutherism, just as I'm appalled by Céline's virulent racial idiocy, even as I'm dogged by the intuition that what's objectionable about them is part of what makes them valuable; they are problem artists; the negative space of their creative output and public pronouncements, what's abject about them, provides a discomfort that in some ways is necessary. But obviously there's a line. "Who Blew Up America?" took the Socialism Of Fools into the lunatic asylum, definitively, and he deserved all the dishonor and disapprobation he got in its wake, and more. I figured I was done with him, but, you know...[sigh]...dig this passage from his essay "You Ever Hear Albert Ayler?" written two years after "Who Blew Up America?" and included in Baraka's 2009 book Diggin': The Afro-American Soul Of American Classical Music (n.b., all inputting sic):

One night Albert, Black Norman, and I, at Albert's insistence, journeyed up to Lincoln Center. It was a Trane concert, armed to the teeth with some of the most impressive of the new musicians, who were now magnetized to the master. Eric Dolphy, Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Rashied Ali, and Elvin Jones. We arrived backstage, Norman's eyes shifting the shadows of the darkened staircase from which we checked and dug the fantastic out bad doom a doom whooah out of the heavy jam.

The whole of the mise en scene entered the playing, as the playing danced and hugged everybody (alive's) tender screamings or head casted to the rest of the audience like a transfusion, the blistering molten blood swishing through our hearing.[...]

At the top of that nuclear "My God!" What emotional convergence turned Albert into the horn he suddenly had in his hands? He began to stride out onto the stage. The horn raised high above his head, as if he wanted to take Pres manque all the way out. The bell pointing as much as possible at the embroidered ceiling of the place. And then, Lord, with that pose as his heart's signature, he began to open a hole in the roof so his angels could descend, summoned by his exploding plaints. 

See what I mean? Anyway. I do not write this as an attempt to present anything like a fully formulated theory, or rationale, but to explain my regard for a figure who has been and will be widely reviled. Also, he was pretty funny in Bulworth.

David Fincher, cheeky monkey

The tableaux of Bette Davis and Claude Rains

Bette Davis in Deception, 1946, directed by Irving Rapper, shot by Ernest Haller.

Claude Rains in same. The two subsequent shots are joined by a dissolve; the above screen capture of the Rains shot is taken from the middle of a slow dolly-out from a tighter framing. 

I watched Deception on the recommendation of my friend Ali Arikan, who was surprised and mesmerized by it when he caught it on television recently. It is a juicy, stylish romantic melodrama but it didn't take me as aback as it did my friend, but as I watched it occured to me that the dutch-angled portentous mirror shots that derive from a certain cinematic Expressionist mode that goes all the way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and were perfected in this mode by Michael Curtiz in the likes of, say, Mildred Pierce, made a year before this film for the same studio, Warner Brothers, were either staples of the romantic melodrama genre or even part of a Warner "house style" back in the day. As we know, we really don't get this kind of thing in romantic melodramas anymore. 

There are many reasons why. Watching the new Blu-ray of Roberto Rossellini's 1954 Journey In Italy the other day, it occured to me that this—the movie, that is—was one of them. Not that Journey is a visually drab film but it's certainly distinctly, deliberately unaffected (relative to the likes of Deception) in its POV. Today's dramas focusing on couples don't overtly owe much to either Rossellini or Cassavetes, which is too bad, but those filmmakers broke a certain visual stranglehold, or mold if you prefer, and Rossellini made a point of doing it in a film that featured two big movie stars (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) as his leads. A lot of critics and cinephiles these days are insisting that "neorealism" wasn't a real thing, but whether or not it was, Rossellini did something. Who could have predicted that once the mold was broken, what would eventually take its place would be, in urban romantic melodrams, faux-industrial apartment porn, and in rural ones, faux-Maxfield Parrish or worse yet faux-Thomas Kinkaide?