Author Archives: Lloydville

THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE

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If you care about culture — what it is, where it is right now and where it's going — you must read this essay by Jonathan Lethem from a recent issue of Harper's magazine, which deals with corporate efforts to commodify, control and own the conversation of culture that has always been at the heart of artistic enterprise.  You can find the article here:

The Ecstasy Of Influence

An interview with Lethem about the piece can be heard here:

Jonathan Lethem on Open Source

Lethem's essay will very likely become a seminal document in the great fight to reclaim culture in our time.

As an addendum, I offer this quote from Igor Stravinsky:

“I love Mozart, and I steal from Mozart, and I feel I have right to steal from Mozart, because I love him.”

VILLA RIDES

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The Mexican Revolution coincided with new developments in photography,
smaller cameras with faster lenses, and became the first major military
conflict in which action was convincingly captured.  Below is a picture of
the Kodak Graflex camera, introduced in 1902 and constantly improved,
which had shutter speeds up to 1/1000th of a second — it was
considered the best small professional camera on the market and was
often used to record incidents of the Revolution:


Border incursions by Mexican revolutionaries and intervention by the American military made the Revolution hot news in the U. S. and motivated a number of photographers to record images of the fighting for commercial exploitation, mostly through the sale of picture postcards.  They weren’t above staging scenes for their cameras, but they made astonishing images of actual events as well, like the image above of Pancho Villa riding at the side of his troops.  Photographs of the dead were big sellers, and one photographer even caught some shocking images of executions by firing squad, in which we can see the bullets kicking up dust in the wall behind the victims, who are still on their feet after being shot.  Here’s one of them:

The Mexican revolution marked a major development in the depiction of violence in photographic images, adding a new element of action to long-established practices of recording only the aftermath of war’s horror.

Click here to learn how to operate a Graphex camera . . .

SUMMER MAGIC

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I
saw this film when it first came out, in July of 1963, when I was
thirteen. It was showing at a theater a couple of miles from my home in
Washington, D. C. I took a bus to the theater but afterwards I had an
urge to walk home, which I did, in a kind of dreamy state. The film is
not a great one but it has a kind of sweetness you don't find in
movies anymore, and a kind of modesty — it wasn't meant to be an
event, just a pleasing way of passing the time on a summer's afternoon
or evening. If you were a kid in 1963 you'd go see any Disney film that
came out, knowing you'd like it, more or less.


I was
on the cusp of puberty then and Hayley Mills was a person of deep
fascination to me. I might not have identified my interest in her as
sexual, consciously, but she was a sexy girl — not just cute but
self-possessed in an alluring way. Her good-natured charm allowed one
access to her female power, made it approachable.


A few
months after this film came out Kennedy would be assassinated and a
few months after that the Beatles exploded on the scene, and the
Sixties officially got going. It's tempting to think that the dream
state this film induced in me, and the long walk home I took in order
to prolong it, arose from a presentiment that this summer would be the
last innocent one of my life — that sex and tragedy and cultural
derangement would soon transform me and transform America.


I was taking a deep breath, perhaps, knowing that the slow climb of the rollercoaster had reached its zenith and that the
delirious fall was about to begin.


RENOIR ON VON STROHEIM

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When Erich Von Stroheim was supervising the construction of the Monte Carlo sets (pictured above) for Foolish Wives on the Universal lot in 1921, he insisted that a series of real and very large plate-glass windows be installed in the Cafe de Paris facade so that he could film in them the reflection of the facade of the building opposite.



The windows cost $12,000 — an enormous sum at the time.  But as Von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski points out, the effect of the reflections remains startling, if subtle — it creates the illusion of a whole real world, including buildings behind the audience.  It is an effect beyond the means of any theater, and purely cinematic.



It is also emblematic of Von Stroheim's vision of cinema — radical for its time.  Koszarski supplies us with a quote from Jean Renoir which sums up this vision eloquently.  Renoir said he saw Foolish Wives at least ten times, and that it was this film which inspired him to dedicate his life to filmmaking.  Renoir said that the film impressed him with “the possibility of creating within a film a world that might differ greatly from reality but still would be experienced as having a wholeness and coherence like that of the world we live in.”



All great directors from Griffith onwards have at least intuited this fundamental and unique potential of the film medium, but Von Stroheim was the first to use it consciously as the basic organizing principle of his style.



It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Von Stroheim's creative insight to the art and subsequent history of film.  Without it, just for starters, Jean Renoir might have decided to go into some other line of work.


CHERRY 2000

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Above
is a cool French poster for the film Cherry 2000. It's a vision from
the 1980s (cast in a sort of sci-fi version of Coppelia) of sexual
relations in the 21st Century — and it wasn't far off. It tested
horribly with audiences back when it was made and was never released
theatrically in America, but it's now available on DVD. I don't know if
it's a cult classic yet but it will be, sooner or later. The direction
is not up to the level of the story and script but it's definitely worth
checking out. You can buy it here:



Cherry 2000

THE CIVIL WAR: A NARRATIVE

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Shelby Foote's massive three-volume narrative history of the Civil War is one of the glories of American letters.



You can buy the paperback edition here:

The Civil War: A Narrative

The set is also available in hardback but recent printings are no longer bound in sewn signatures — for a definitive version,
it's worth tracking down one of the earlier hardback editions.




Foote
also recorded two sections of the work as audiobooks, and it's wonderful to
hear him read this great prose in his classic Mississippi storyteller's
drawl.  The Beleaguered City, covering the Vicksburg campaign, and The Stars In Their Courses, covering the Gettysburg campaign, are both out of print but can sometimes be found through online sellers.

THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

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This
is an almost perfect movie, of the sort a Hollywood studio could
produce when all its departments were firing on all cylinders on a
given project. The director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was great with
actors and with literary material but not a great visual artist, is
here taken into a new realm by the ravishing and atmospheric
cinematography of Charles Lang, himself liberated from the flatter
lighting style Paramount normally expected of him by the demands of
this particular show, which he did on loan-out to 20th Century Fox. Rex
Harrison is brilliantly cast as the virile ghost who haunts the widow
Muir's psyche, and Gene Tierney, not an actress of great range, grounds
the film in a kind of sweet commonplace yearning that skews its
comic/romantic tone towards the romantic. The script is sentimental but
leavened with wit, the design and costuming are first-rate and the
truly haunting score by the incomparable Bernard Herrmann is one of his
very finest. The result is a superb fantasy, charged with subtle
eroticism, mystery and emotion. It is a civilized entertainment for
grown-ups and wise children of all ages.


MAR DE CORTES

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The
thing about the Mar de Cortés, about any other part of the ocean you could name, really,
is that it's connected to every other part of the ocean. So theoretically you could
launch a rubber raft into the water at the La Paz marina
and, by a combination of luck with the currents and furious paddling,
end up at the Piazza San Marco in Venice . . . or the Battery in New
York . . . or more likely Espíritu Santo Island.

For
that reason, all seaside places have a common air about them, the feel
of being open directly to all other seaside places. So when I look out
from any one of them I have sense memories of other times
by the ocean:

My
first memory of the sea, when I was two or three, and a wave shoved me
down to the bottom (possibly six inches underwater at that point) and would not let me up. It did let me up eventually, of course, in a matter of
seconds, but it conveyed an intention in those seconds which seemed
inflexible and eternal. I have never learned more about the ocean than
I did then, though I have sometimes forgotten the lesson.

Leaving
Cherbourg at night for an Atlantic crossing, standing at the rail of a
freighter with two ballet dancers, connecting suddenly with the romance
and grave seriousness and joy and terror of every long ocean voyage
ever made by a mariner in the whole history of seafaring.

Sailing
in a dhow, as Sinbad once did, in a choppy sea on the Indian Ocean, as
jet-black Kenyan sailors demonstrated with exhilaration how they
shifted the big stones in the bottom of their keel-less craft to keep
the boat steady in the water.

When I
dip my toes into any ocean I disturb currents that run through every
ocean, even the ones I've never seen, and especially the ones I've set
out on, or under, or crossed, or seen from a window in a beach house,
cleaning fish, or boiling shrimp, or just looking.

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1927)

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This film is a wondrous curiosity.

It was made 12 years after The Birth Of A Nation
and is on many levels a far more sophisticated piece of filmmaking —
and yet it also seems far more old-fashioned than Griffith's
problematic
masterpiece.

In the 1927 film, proscenium staging and histrionic
acting clash with elegant studio lighting and bold camera movement,
throwing the antiquated methods into stark contrast with the modern. 
Every frame of Griffith's film is tense and alive with the impulse of
innovation,
while Harry Pollard's film shifts back and forth deliriously between
styles, as though trying to improvise something respectable out
of a grab-bag of conventions learned by rote.

The most emblematic shot in the film occurs at the
death of little Eva.  From a close shot on the child the camera hurtles
backwards on a track and then holds on a theatrical tableau in which
angels appear by the magic of double-exposure to waft the soul of Eva
to heaven.  A bold and expressive camera movement takes us into a shot that
harks back to the stodgiest effects of an early Edison potboiler.

The whole film reels maddeningly between such
extremes.  It's filled with some of the boldest and most beautiful
images of the silent era, such as the lyrical passages on the riverboat
and the banks of the Mississippi, and yet is drawn back relentlessly
into visual
mediocrity by a director who clearly had no vision of the medium as a
coherent form.  His wife Margarita Fischer, who plays Eliza in the
film (pictured in the still above,) said that Pollard, a product of the stage, always looked down on
movies, even as he was cranking out hit after hit for Universal in the
Twenties.  This movie was not one of them, though it did eventually
make its money back in a series of re-releases — one of them as late
as 1958 (!) in a narrated sound version that eliminated the intertitles.

The fact that a film this disjointed could break even,
and still be in theaters 30 years after its initial release, is a kind
of confirmation of the old theatrical saw that Uncle
Tom's Cabin is actor-proof and production-proof.  It's such an
effective piece of melodrama that audiences are inclined to go with it
no matter what.  I certainly found that to be true with this version,
discombobulated as it is.  I could be gritting my teeth one moment over
the black-face mugging of the actress playing Topsy, and fighting back
a tear the next as stony Aunt Ophelia clasps her to her breast and says she'll love her.

Melodrama is a highly abstracted form whose stark
dynamics work as a catalyst for emotions we may not have ready access
to on a conscious level.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, by contstructing a
finely calculated conduit for the often unconscious racial tensions of
American society
— ferocious in her time and still potent in ours — created a
masterpice of the genre.

[The Kino DVD of this title has a superb piece on the
film by David Pierce, included as a textual supplement.  It's a model
of clear, informative writing and meticulous research.]

THE GLASS BOTTOM BOAT

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Certain Hollywood comedies from the 60s seem to have been designed to work as sedatives.  Nothing much happens in them, the plot complications are so trivial that one never really worries about their resolution, and everyone involved in the production seems to be half-awake.

There’s something pleasant about the phenomenon, in a mindless sort of way — like watching golf on television while under the influence of a mild pain-killer.

The Glass Bottom Boat is such a film.  Doris Day and Rod Taylor have some minor misunderstandings on the road to romance.  A crowd of fine character actors involve themselves in the proceedings to one degree or another, with nothing much to do except display their amusing personae in the absence of any scripted wit.

The film was directed by Frank Tashlin, who had one of the wackiest imaginations in Hollywood at the time — but he confines his energy to a few tepid bits of slapstick.  Dom DeLuise puts his foot in a pie, then gets it stuck in a trashcan — then Doris gets her foot stuck in it, too, trying to help him out of the jam.  When they both jerk free, Dom falls into a fish pond.

Everyone seems to be going through the motions, waiting for lunch, or recovering from it.  Yet the tone of distance is so consistent, so assured, that you have to think it was deliberate — offering an anesthetic for anxiety duly indicated and professionally administered.  Arthur Godfey, the personification of the entertainer as somnambulist, makes his film debut here — his practiced nullity anchors the film in its odd nether world, its sleepiness.

I don’t know why it’s all so delightful, so soothing — but I don’t really know how codeine works, either.

Perhaps these films did for audiences of the 60s what Jared Hess’s films do for us today — tell us not to worry so much, tell us that everything, as improbable as it might sound, is going to be o. k.

Vote for Pedro.

THE SILENT KONG

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Peter Jackson’s King Kong has one of the most extended and impressive silent (non-dialogue) passages I’ve ever seen in a sound film — the love story between Anne Darrow and Kong. It’s a real love story, too, complex and moving — sort of like a little silent film nestled inside what is otherwise a bloated andself-indulgent mess.

I thought the overall script, and the dialogue especially, was dreadful
— veering between clumsy thought-balloon character exposition and
failed wit. The long build-up to the arrival at the island in the
original film is masterful by comparison — breezy, suspenseful, funny
and entertaining. The build-up in the new film is just tiresome. About
twenty minutes into it I seriously considered walking out and waiting
to see the rest of the film on DVD someday — but that would have been
a mistake. The film really takes off with the brontosaurus stampede —
and when Darrow and the ape hook up, the film elevates itself to a
higher plane (as it were.)

Naomi Watts and the CG ape give star performances, particularly when they interact, and the battle with the T-Rexes is not only thrilling visually but exciting emotionally, because it drives the relationship between Darrow and Kong.

Finally, in the stunning, breathtaking — almost nauseating — vertigo of the
climax on the Empire State Building, the Darrow character is given a
chance to repay Kong in kind for his earlier heroics in her behalf.
It’s a genuine dramatic climax to this wondrous silent film within a
film.

It’s too much, I guess, to hope for an “audience cut” of the film on DVD
some day — one that eliminates most of the pre-island stuff and
concentrates on the real magical heart of the film, a brilliant new
take on an old theme . . . beauty and the beast.

APOCALYPTO

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There’s something exhilarating about Mel Gibson’s total repudiation of
the conventional wisdom of Hollywood these days — which is to say, the
conventional wisdom of large corporations slowly and inexorably losing
touch with their audiences.

To make a 40-50 million-dollar film with your own money, in the Mayan language, with an
all-unknown and mostly inexperienced cast, is downright heroic — and someday Gibson is going to be numbered among the rebels and mavericks who finally brought the tottering empire of Hollywood to its knees.



Apocalypto isn’t going to be a mega-hit, the way The Passion Of the Christ
was.  Though it opened well, its word-of-mouth was terrible and it
will be lucky to earn back its cost, but it’s a fine film — not just
admirable from a conceptual point of view, but very well made, moving
and entertaining.

Gibson gets remarkable performances from his neophyte cast who, like
silent film actors, need to communicate with us primarily with their
bodies, faces and eyes.  Gibson has cast extraordinarily striking,
charismatic people in the main roles, but he’s also given them the
creative space and the confidence to wholly inhabit their characters,
to convey their essence to us.

I really don’t see how anyone could call the film racist, though some have — Gibson is an
easy mark for that kind of criticism these days.  But to set a whole movie inside a lost and alien culture demonstrates a kind of respect Hollywood, for all its political correctness, would never have the guts to back up with cold hard cash.  Gibson’s film is violent, and the tale he chooses to tell might be fairly accused of over-emphasizing the violence of a very violent society — but at the same time we’re not asked to condemn it in a patronizing sort of way, and we’re encouraged to sympathize deeply with many of its characters, without moral qualifications.



There are many bold and powerful images in the film, but there’s also a lot of quick
cutting of blurred shots that create a kind of synthetic excitement, quickening the pulse but taking us out of the environment of the story and into an editing room.

Still, it seems churlish to complain that the film isn’t a masterpiece, since it re-animates and throws us into the middle of a world we could never imagine as clearly through any other medium.  What we should complain about is that movies don’t do this sort of thing more often —
that it takes an eccentric filmmaker, working outside of all conventions, to make a film as ambitious as Apocalypto.

THE BRIDE

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“Some women possess an artificial nobility which is associated with a movement of the eye, a tilt of the head, a manner of deportment, and which goes no further.”

— La Bruyère

This surely is the nobility of Elsa Lanchester’s “bride” of
Frankenstein — a cinematic vision which lasts just a few minutes on
screen but instantly becomes iconic, unforgettable.  But is her
nobility truly artificial?  Is she truly artificial?  Pieced
together out of corpses she may be, but how can we be sure she doesn’t
have a new and authentic identity of her own?  How much further
might her nobility go — or have gone if Frankensten’s monster hadn’t
destroyed her moments after she was born?

There is a world of mystery hidden in these questions.

THE GREAT K & A TRAIN ROBBERY

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I
caught “The Great K & A Train Robbery” with Tom Mix on the Western
Channel once in the wee hours of the morning. It was a pretty good
print, from the Killiam collection, with a piano score by William
Perry. It was the first Tom Mix feature I'd ever seen.


The film knocked me off my feet. It's a mad, delirious juggernaut of a movie — preposterous, breathtaking and brilliant.



It
has the sort of silliness of set-up and incident that one associates
with serials. Mix makes his entrance dangling from a rope sling up
under a sheer rock overhang a couple hundred feet in the air. He's
wearing a Lone Ranger mask — since he's working undercover as a
railroad detective. When the train robbers he's eavesdropping on
discover his presence he slides down the rope directly into the saddle
of his horse Tony and gallops away.


From
that moment on the pace rarely slackens — it's as though all the
action climaxes of a twelve-part serial have been strung together into
an hour-long feature, with just enough space in between to tell a very
simple story. And what action climaxes they are. Gasp-inducing stunts
on horses and moving trains, some of the most exciting and beautiful
running inserts in the history of Westerns — most of it shot in the
awesome landscape of Royal Gorge, Colorado and vicinity.

The
tone is lighthearted but never campy — the impeccable photography, the
rigor and daring of the stunts, and the frank virility of Mix himself
lend it all a kind of muscular gravity. Yet its speed and the
virtuosity of its photography and action staging give it a lyrical
quality, too — a lilt that is intoxicating.


We're a long way from the grit and grim morality of William S. Hart's Westerns. The tone is in fact closer to that of
a Buster Keaton silent feature, and very nearly as sublime.



There
are some disappointing lapses — a few cheesy-looking moving cycloramas
outside the train windows and behind Mix and leading lady Dorothy Dwan
as they ride double on Mix's horse . . . some lame ethnic humor
involving a black servant . . . an anti-climactic final round-up of the
bad guys in a cave with an underwater entrance (!), which is a real
let-down visually after the earlier confrontations on the hurtling
train.

But Mix and Tony make a lovely screen couple, Dwan is charming and energetic, the intertitles are witty — and the film
is filled with exquisite, unforgettable images.



It's superlative entertainment — one of the genuine miracles of silent cinema.



[The first two images above are from the Silents Are Golden web site — one of the great Internet resources for silent film.  Check it out!]