Some Came Running

Image of the day, 11/8/12

Percussionist Jamie Muir tosses leaves into the air. King Crimson, Live In The Studio, Bremen, October 17, 1972, no director credited.

Images of the day, 10/30/12

The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel, 1962.

But seriously, folks...

Here's a downed tree on Carroll Street between Smith and Court. My Lovely Wife (follow her on Twitter!: @ClaireicalError) were among the very lucky ones in terms of Hurricane Sandy last night, coming through with power intact and only a measly interruption in various digital services. Our neighborhood is a mess but not nearly as much as others are. This was no joke and continues to be no joke. 

It's tough after all the anxiety and post-storm confusion to know exactly HOW to help, beyond extending an immediate hand to neighbors who might be in need. I'd say to anyone out there who wants to lend aid from afar or not so afar, a visit to the website for the Food Bank For New York City is a good place to start. As is, as always, the Red Cross, both the nationwide site and the Greater New York site. 

If you have more pertinent links, or stories to tell, or just wanna check in, the comments are open for that. Be well, all. 

Literary interlude, with image from "Holy Motors"

Elise Lhomeau and Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2011

She sank upon her knees beside his pillow, took his thin hand in her own; begged him not to make an effort—not to tire himself. 

His face was of necessity serious—it was incapable of the muscular play of a smile; but its owner apparently had not lost a perception of incongruities. "What does it matter that I am tired, when I have all eternity to rest?" he asked. "There is no harm in making an effort when it is the very last. Don't people always feel better just before the end? I have often heard of that; it's what I was waiting for. ever since you have been here; I thought it would come. I tried two or three times; I was afraid you would get tired of sitting there." He spoke slowly, with painful breaks and long pauses; his voice seemed to come from a distance. When he ceased, he lay with his face turned to Isable, and his large unwinking eyes open into her own. "It was very good of you to come," he went on. "I thought you would; but I wasn't sure."

"I was not sure either, till I came," said Isabel.

"You have been like an angel beside my bed. You know they talk about the angel of death. It's the most beautiful of all. You have been like that; as if you were waiting for me."

"I was not waiting for your death. I was waiting for—for this. This is not death, dear Ralph."

"Not for you—no. There is nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That's the sensation of life—the sense that we remain. I have had it—even I. But now I am of no use but to give it to others. With me it's all over." And then he paused. Isabel bowed her head further, till it rested on the two hands that were clasped upon his own. She could not see him now; but his far-away voice was close to her ear. "Isabel," he went on, suddenly, "I wish it were over for you." She answered nothing; she had burst into sobs; at last he gave her a long groan. "Ah, what is it you have done for me?"

"What is it you did for me?" she cried, her now extreme agitation half-smothered by her attitude. She had lost all her shame, all wish to hide things. Now he might know; she wished him to know, for it brought them supremely together, and he was beyond the reach of pain. "You did something once—you know it. Oh, Ralph, you have been everything! What have I done for you—what can I do to-day? I would die if you could live. But I don't wish you to live; I would die myself, not to lose you." Her voice was as broken as his own, and full of tears and anguish.

"You won't lose me—you will keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I have ever been. Dear Isabel, life is better; for in life there is love. Death is good—but there is not love."

"I never thanked—I never spoke—I never was what I should be!" Isabel went on. She felt a passionate need to cry out and accuse herself, to let her sorrow possess her. All her troubles, for the moment, became single and melted together into this present pain. "What must you have thought of me? Yet how could I know? I never knew, and I only know today because there are people who are less stupid than I."

"Don't mind people," said Ralph. "I think I am glad to leave people."

She raised her head and her clasped hands; she seemed for a moment to pray to him.

"Is it true—is it true?" she asked.

"True that you have been stupid? Oh no," said Ralph, with a sensible intention of wit.

"That you made me rich—that all I have is yours?"

He turned away his head, and for some time said nothing. Then at last—

"Ah, don't speak of that—that was not happy." Slowly he moved his face toward her again, and they once more saw each other. "But for that—but for that—" And he paused. "I believe I ruined you," he added softly. 

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Chapter LIV), 1881, from the 1985 Library of America edition 

Image of the day 9/1/12

Ugestu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953.

There has been an awful lot of...stuff written pertaining to the "Greatest Films Poll" sponsored by the British Film Institute and Sight & Sound magazine (which I was fortunate enough to have been invited to vote in); I am not inclined to contribute to any of the polemecizing per se but would like to note that the top picks in both the final poll result itself and the individual ballots is giving me an incentive to revisit some pictures I haven't seen in some time or perhaps maybe not at all. Mizoguchi's haunting ghost story, which I myself threw under the bus in favor of Sansho Dayu, and then threw Sansho Dayu under the bus and PUT NO JAPANESE FILMS AT ALL ON MY BALLOT (like many have said, in more polite ways, doing these ballots is completely fucking impossible), is now available, like Sansho, in a wonderful high-def edition from Eureka!/Masters of Cinema if you are fortunate enough to own an all-region Blu-ray player. On my coffee table right now: Arrow Cinema's U.K. Blu-ray of Wajda's Ashes And Diamonds (Martin Scorsese's ballot; also Francis Ford Coppola's ballot; it would be lovely to think they maybe hashed it out in a phone conversation but probably not, and in a sense it's sweeter to think of this affinity as having long gone un-reiterated); Tartan DVD's U.K. standard-def edition of Ingmar Bergman's 1949 Prison (Abel Ferrara's ballot; a reading of the synopsis for the film suggests an inspiration for Ferrara's own very underrated Snake Eyes/Dangerous Game); and Kino Video's Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema Of The 1920s And '30s, which features Joris Ivens' 1929 Regen, which is on Apichatpong Weerasethukal's ballot. 

Images of the day, 8/20/12

Meiko Kaji in Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (Joshuu sasori: Dai-41 zakkyo-bô),Shunya Ito, 1972

Claudia Cardinale and Frank Zappa

Just because.

Image of the day, 7/28/12

Jacqueline Wells and Boris Karloff, The Black Cat, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934.

It's useful to go back to the well every now and then, rediscover what got you entranced by film in the first place. For me it was stuff like this. I caught it on a bigger-than-normal screen on Friday night with Bride of Frankenstein and It Came From Outer Space at Film Forum; all screened for the house's invaluable Universal 100 series. This shot in particular says an awful lot to me. Its existence also compensates for much else. Good to be reminded of it.

Five frames from "Targets," Peter Bogdanovich, 1968, interpolating one frame from "The Terror," Roger Corman et alia, 1963

With Boris Karloff and Tim O'Kelly. See also here. 

Palate cleanser

Jack Lemmon, Virna Lisi, and Claire Trevor in How To Murder Your Wife, Richard Quine, 1965.

The trouble with cinephiles

Edmund Wilson once remarked, apropos his soon-to-be-sundered friendship with Vladimir Nabokov, that he felt for the great author "warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation." That phrase springs to mind sometimes when I read my pal Richard Brody. Aside from being an unfailingly kind and generous person, Richard's also a critic and cultural enthusiast of incredible vivacity and perceptiveness. But my, can he sometimes say the darnedest things. 

I am grateful, for instance, for the canny, erudite digging that led Richard to a dishy interview with Shirley MacLaine in the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and his translated quotes from that interview. But my exasperation sets in when he discusses the fact that MacLaine turned down the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's. MacLaine says she wouldn't have done as good a job as the 1961 film's actual star, Audrey Hepburn. Richard begs to differ. "I think she'd have been much better. What's utterly implausible in Hepburn's performance is the backstory; MacLaine would have been persuasive as the former Lula Mae Barnes and Doc Golightly's fugitive wife."

Well, indeed, she might have. In a different movie. And by that I don't even mean the different movie that Breakfast At Tiffany's necessarily would have been had MacLaine played Holly. No, I mean a movie rather entirely different from Paramount and adapter/director Blake Edwards' conception of it. Part of that conception being that it's a movie in which Lula Mae Barnes is never seen. I haven't read any accounts of the making of the film in which the issue is discussed, but it always seemed to me that part of the power of the revelation of Holly's past, and part of what makes Buddy Ebsen's single, lonely scene (and an exquisitely performed scene it is, of course) in the film so powerful, is how it preserves the Hepburn portrayal of Holly, a clear case of how Screen Presence=Character, while at the same time challenging the audience's perception of her. Whether or not Hepburn "is" or could have made a "plausible" Lula Mae Barnes is not the point. Edwards' genius in handling the matter is in asking the audience to make an imaginative leap: that is, to picture the poised, insouciant but also sad and, in the word of the character so delightfully incarnated by Martin Balsam, "phony" Holly as a barefoot and possibly even pregnant teen bride. The viewer may go as far as he or she wishes in this exercise; and whether you take it to an ad absurdum level or don't even bother to mentally limn the difference, nothing detracts from the believability (which is, I might add, something entirely distinct from the rather banal "plausibility"—there's a good reason Alfred Hitchcock, a director recalled with fondness by MacLaine in the interview Richard cites, had a dubious attitude to viewers who relied too much on said quality) of Hepburn's portrayal, from what is so actually and gorgeously there on the screen whenever she fills it. 

I remember once, in the midst of a multi-format spat/discussion of the Duplass brothers' use of zooms in Cyrus, Richard saying that the zoom was an "expression of the filmmaker's desire." I think sometimes we cinephiles and critics have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which filmmakers gauge, and honor, the desire of the audience. I think Blake Edwards' use of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's is an absolutely stellar and still exceptionally rewarding example of that. As for MacLaine, I love her too, but I don't blame her for not taking the Holly Golightly role, and one rationale for her refusal may be inferred by looking at her filmography in the late '50s and early '60s. So I'll end by saying that had Ginnie Moorehead dodged that bullet, ditched that mopey Dave Hirsch when he failed yet again to complete A Great American Novel, and caught a bus to New York, well, she coulda given Holly Golightly a run for her money.