Author Archives: Lloydville

SENSACIONAL!

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The
explosive color and conventional grotesquerie of pre-Columbian art in
Central America mixed with the mordant wit, violence and melancholy of
Spanish art gave Mexico a unique and vibrant visual culture which keeps
manifesting itself in ever-shifting forms — in the playful morbidity
of Jose Posada's 19th-Century popular prints, in posters from the
golden age of Mexican cinema (the 1940s and 50s), in the work of the
great 20th-Century Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, and now in the
bold visuals of Mexican filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso
Cuaron.

This
visual culture also hums along, sometimes magically, in the vernacular
art of Mexican street signs, posters, packaging labels and handbills. 
Unmitigated as these are by the academy or by corporate standards of
slickness and “good taste”, they offer on one level the best insights
into the essence of the Mexican visual imagination.

A
wonderful collection of Mexican street graphics has been published in
book form, called Sensacional!, and it's a real delight.  The arty
and/or academic texts included in the book cannot diminish the charm
and power of its images, which resist traditional (and even
post-modern) critical analysis.  You can find the book here:

Sensacional!

A
nice pendant to this book is Cine Mexicano, a terrific collection of
vintage Mexican movie posters — similar in some ways to Hollywood
movie posters from the same era but inflected with a purely Mexican
sense of color, style and drama.  You can find it here:




Cine Mexicano

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

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Vile, perverse, depraved, this film is nevertheless a 70s noir masterpiece.  In it, Sam Peckinpah indulges his nihilism and misogyny freely — and isn’t misogyny the ultimate form of nihilism? — and through the medium of his protagonist, brilliantly played by Warren Oates, feels sorry for himself in the bargain.  It’s like the later works of Hemingway — a study of alcoholic despair seen from the inside through the eyes of genius. It’s unsettling, fascinating, moving and infuriating all at the same time. The film is also partly a love song to the real Mexico, as it is in between the tourist destinations, and a riff on the romantic theme of Mexico as locus of the dark side of the American unconscious — a theme also found in the works of B. Traven and Malcom Lowry and Tennessee Williams, all of whom are referenced here.  It’s Peckinpah’s most personal film and maybe his best, too — a sick work of art but a work of art all the same, with an absolutely stunning performance by Isela Vega as the earthy whore-madonna and voice of reason the Oates character will not heed . . . until it’s too late to matter.

THE CHAPLIN ESSANAYS

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Check out the three volumes of the Image DVD edition of the
Chaplin Essanays. It's really quite overwhelming. The presentation is
stunning, probably definitive, and the work, it goes without saying, is
beyond stunning.



Obviously
Chaplin was not working at his peak here, either as director or
performer. The images are rarely elegant, the continuity is often clunky
— but in a way these faults only serve to set off Chaplin's genius.
His person alone, his capacity to transform space seemingly by moving
the smallest muscle of his face or body, create riveting cinema by the
second. Even in the same frame with Ben Turpin, a physical comic of
great skill, Chaplin seems to inhabit a different universe of plastic
possibility. (And in the boxing match sequence of The Champion, just
try and watch the other boxer — I mean just try.)



Perhaps
only Fred Astaire has demonstrated the possibilities of performer as
auteur in quite the same way, and Astaire relied on the formal
discipline of dance, lacking the range and depth and particularity of
Chaplin's inspired alter ego, the Little Fellow.



This
character is fully conceptualized in the Essanays, if not fully
developed. There is never a moment when Chaplin the artist leaves the
self-involved, primal, eccentric persona of his creation . . . with one
exception, of course — his extraordinary female impersonation in A
Woman. (Chaplin could have been one of the great leading ladies of the
screen, if he'd been so inclined.)



The
persona of the tramp is, as has often been said, a clown of
Shakespearean proportions, with what Harold Bloom would call an
inwardness that makes him as real as anyone we have ever met in the
flesh, and as unknowable, as unencompassable.



In
this creation alone the whole medium of movies is defined and justified
in a stroke. Chaplin embodies and crystallizes everything that movies,
and movies alone, can do — the aspect of it we can hardly talk about,
only marvel at. When the Little Fellow is onscreen, pure cinema
happens.



I would suggest that this set belongs in every civilized home — and certainly in the collection of anyone who cares about
the movies.




(Is it redundant to add that the stuff is really, really funny?)

THE LADIES MAN (1961)

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Back in the Sixties, during his most radical phase, Jean-Luc Godard said
that Jerry Lewis was the only director making progressive movies in
America. Lewis’s work was so strange and subversive that even now it’s
hard to assess it — though one can trace its influence clearly in the
work of Godard, Coppola, Scorsese, Wes Anderson and (perhaps
indirectly) Charlie Kauffman. The Ladies Man, the second film he
directed, from 1961, is vintage Lewis — a discombobulating blend of
brilliant sight gags, hilarious vaudeville routines, dumb mugging,
cartoonish action and deeply surreal deconstructions of the Hollywood
studio style. Lewis doesn’t make me laugh very often, but when he does,
I laugh really hard. What’s important about his work, though, is its
radical assault on cinematic convention — which still seems brazen
and/or lunatic, depending on your point of view. You might not like his
work — you might even hate it — but if you love movies you need to
come to grips with it.

THE SILENT TITANIC

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For intellectuals, the best way to appreciate James Cameron’s Titanic might be to imagine it as a silent film. In other words, start with its images and work backwards towards its literary structure, seeing how the latter serves the former, instead of the other way around.

Instead of criticizing Cameron’s screenplay for its clunky dialogue and melodramatic excess, try to think more clearly about what a screenplay is, or ought to be — a framework around which images can coalesce to tell a story quite beyond the range of words on a page.  It would be silly to try and appreciate Don Giovanni by analyzing Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto for the opera as a work of literary art. Better to start with what it served — the music of Mozart, and what that music achieved . . . a sublime evocation of transient sexual love, and one of the supreme masterpieces of lyrical theater.

All of Cameron’s primary effects reside in his images. The real climax of his story lies in old Rose’s eyes — the gaiety and adventure and peace they convey, Jack’s gift, earned by her faithfulness to him and to her promise. Cameron uses digital effects as eloquently as camera tricks have ever been used in a film to link old Rose to the period tale we think we’re watching — morphing from the young Rose’s eye to the old Rose’s eye, from Jack and Rose “flying” on the bow during the ship’s voyage to their ghosts lingering on the encrusted wreck at the bottom of the ocean.


Cameron has a gift for orchestrating movement on screen to create an almost hallucinatory sense of space within the individual frame, and an ability to preconceive digitally composited shots as though he were photographing the real thing from a seemingly inevitable perspective.

The vehicle for Cameron’s imagery in Titanic is, as it was so often in the silent era, unapologetic melodrama, a simple structure pitting irreconcilable forces against each other and creating suspense about the outcome of the collision — and less about the nature of the outcome than about its how and when. That is the source of the film’s narrative momentum, and of that alone — no one has ever experienced the plot of a melodrama as anything more than a ride. It’s the inflections of the tale delivered in the images that give the film its depth — that make us experience the crude conflict as interior emotion . . . just as we do with the crude conflicts summoned up in dreams to express complex psychic states.

Melodrama remains a potent artistic strategy, but it’s one lost on a modernist who has been trained to reject as “phony” anything that smacks too closely of the Victorian. Fourteen year-old girls, who don’t know what 19th-Century melodrama is, and thus don’t know that it is intellectually discredited, experience its power and expressiveness as forcefully as intellectuals of the Fifties experienced Brecht.

The good news for all intellectuals is that, with a little thought and study — and perhaps a little humility in the face of what you don’t know about the history of film, about melodrama, about antique but still wholly viable dramatic forms — it is possible to enjoy Titanic with your brain as well as your heart.

As artists of the Renaissance discovered, a backward glance at forgotten masters — like Griffith and Vidor, in this case — can sometimes revivify an art, and take it more surely into the future than an avant garde that has lost its way.

CARTOON MODERN

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Above is a beautiful concept painting by an unidentified artist for the Disney cartoon Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom from 1953.  It’s done in a style now called “cartoon modern” that will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the 50s, from animated cartoons, children’s book illustration and advertising art.

It’s hip again, and Amid Amidi has published a book on the subject
— Cartoon Modern, from Chronicle Books.  Here’s a link to his blog
dedicated to the book, where the the image above was posted:

Cartoon Modern

The style is influencing contemporary gallery artists like Amanda
Visell — that’s her work below.  You can see more of it, and buy some,
on her web site:

Amanda Visell

TWO QUOTES ABOUT MOVIES

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At the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy saw a moving picture show, and wrote this about the new medium:



“It
is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We writers shall
have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine.
A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I
can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of
scene, this blending of emotion and experience — it is much better than
the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed.
It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by
before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The
camera has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.”

 

From Masculin Feminin, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1966:



“It wasn't the film we dreamed; the film we carried in our hearts; the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted
to live.”

LOVING YOU

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This film, has nothing — whatsoever — to recommend
it . . . except Elvis Presley in his prime and a bunch of decent early
Elvis songs.  Of course, that's enough.

The story, which riffs superficially on Elvis early
career, is contrived, the dialogue thuds along without even a whiff of
wit or believability, the photography is dull and the directing is
ham-handed.  But the young Elvis prowls through this wasteland of
mediocrity with an almost feral grace — as innocent as a panther, and almost as beautiful.

He
doesn't seem to realize himself the power his
combination of virility and sweetness projects, and that naivete is
part of his charm.  Unless you were there, and of a certain age, it's
probably impossible even to imagine the effect his persona had when it
appeared as if from nowhere in the middle of the Eisenhower years. 
America still hasn't gotten over it, and probably never will.  He's
become part of what it means to be American.

When you watch this film — Elvis's third, and first in
color — just sit back, endure the exposition, and wait for the miracle
to manifest itself . . . every time Elvis shows up on screen.

DEAD CHRISTMAS TREES

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Las Vegas these days has a wretched air, like a
whipped cur, as it begins its pitiful capitulation to the neo-Puritan
culture
of Orange County.  The ghosts of the outlaw princes who founded the
place, who somehow kept its rebellious spirit alive well into the new
corporate era, recede on every hand, become more insubstantial, as
though unwilling to stick around and watch the glittering Granada they
conjured up out of nothing become exactly like the dreary places they
came
here to get away from.

In this mournful atmosphere I dragged my dried-out
Christmas tree down to the car and took it to the Christmas tree
recycling station at Sunset Park.  Hank Williams sang on the car's CD
player, mournfully.

But then on the drive home Rubber Soul kicked
in and
things looked more cheerful.  The tree will be ground up for mulch,
something new will grow out of it.

Not
here, where the soil is being
sterilized into a state less fertile than the surface of the desert
itself — but somewhere . . .

THE SILENT LAWRENCE

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I
saw Lawrence Of Arabia when it came out in 1962, in the sort of grand
roadshow presentation big movies used to get back then — reserved
seating, an overture and intermission and an expensive souvenir program
on sale in the lobby (I still have mine.) My dad used to take me to
these big roadshow presentations of big films — it was one of the
great rituals of my childhood.


Lawrence blew me away back then, at the age of twelve. I saw it a few times
later and was less impressed. As an adult (and apprentice screenwriter)
I found the dialogue excessively literary and aphoristic — every line
was a bon mot, a philosophical nugget, an intellectual construction.
Real people, I thought, in real wars, don’t talk like that — even if
they’re Oxford-educated British officers or wise old Bedouin
chieftains.


Then I saw the restored version back in the Eighties, on a big screen, and
realized how wrong my second thoughts were. What I’d lost touch with
was the power of the images — the extent to which the images are the
story of this film, its narrative and its subtext, its spectacle and
its subtlety. The moment of revelation came watching the shot where
Lawrence walks along the top of the captured train. His Bedouin
followers run along the ground below him. In the shot, we only see
Lawrence’s shadow on the sand — his followers chase his shadow.


This is the whole film in a single image — the essence of the filmmaker’s
view that Lawrence both invented himself in Arabia and lost himself . .
. created an image that had no substance beyond the events it inspired,
yet cast a real shadow into the future. In the last shot, as Lawrence
is driven away from the scene of his betrayed triumph, we see his face
through the windshield of an open car. A reflection on the windshield
suddenly obliterates his face, and the film is over.


This is a mode of filmmaking — in which a film’s deepest truths are conveyed
by images alone — that characterized the silent era of cinema and which is
rarely seen today except in the theoretical film experiments of
Jean-Luc Godard. I began to see the dialogue of Lawrence in a
different light — as the functional equivalent of title cards, which
offered a kind of running literary commentary on or clarification of
the images but did not drive the narrative or the drama.


In short, I realized that Lawrence is essentially a silent film — in
the same sense that Titanic is essentially a silent film, a film
whose dialogue is virtually irrelevant to the actual meaning of the
work. Relatively unsophisticated twelve year-old boys and girls, for
whom the experience of a film is primarily visual and visceral, who
feel no intellectual need to translate a film into literary terms
before being able to appreciate it, have easier access to such
sound-era “silents”. They are, in this, sometimes wiser than their
elders.

AMY CREHORE

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Check out the art of Amy Crehore, who makes delicious images that combine the sang-froid of Magritte with the innocence of antique vernacular icons and the insinuating eroticism of a high-class Parisian strip show from the Twenties:

The Art Of Amy Crehore

She also has a blog filled with curious images and objects that clearly nourish her strange imagination, like the wondrous fruit crate label below:


Her blog:

Little Hokum Rag


SUMURUN

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In
Ernst Lubitsch's Sumurun, from 1920, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes meets
the Keystone Kops, and the result is an inspired piece of lunacy,
slight but very entertaining.



It's yet
another variation on the mood of silliness that seemed to grip Lubitsch
in the late Teens and early Twenties — a silliness that feels quite
un-Germanic.  Edgar Ulmer said of Lubitsch that “he really should
have been a Frenchman,” but Lubitsch's silliness is not quite French,
either.  When a Frenchman is being silly he'll always take care to
let you know how elegant his silliness is, how artful and
respectable.  Lubitsch could certainly be elegant and artful, but
he was not above using vulgarity when it took his fancy.  In the
early films at least he never seems to stand on his dignity, or his
genius — he strews his effects about like flower petals, or cow pies.



In this film,
we can see the two sources of Lubitsch's early style — the broad
comedy he specialized in as a cabaret performer and the more elegant
spectacle of the theater of Max Reinhardt, for whom Lubitsch did small
character roles.  Sumurun is based on a Reinhardt pantomime, and
it's full of stylish (though silly) choreography and charming scenic
effects.  Lubitsch himself plays the role of a grotesque clown in
love with a dancing girl in his troupe, and offers a few examples of
his eccentric dancing along with a bigger dose of his highly stylized
acting.  His performance has been criticized for its exaggeration,
but I see a lot of art in it, and the theatricality doesn't seem out of
place amidst all the artificiality of the film as a whole. 
Lubitsch doesn't seem to be taking himself too seriously, even when his
character is.



The narrative
feels disjointed and is hard to follow at times, probably because the
version that survives is missing about four reels cut by its American
distributor.  It hardly matters, though, because the story is not
all that important — it's just an excuse for some pleasant diversion
in an Arabian Nights vein.



Pola Negri
plays the dancing girl mentioned above, and she's a real
revelation.  I guess she's technically playing a vamp here, a
dancer who drives men mad, but she plays her with all the freshness and
spunk of a Kansas farm girl or Broadway hoofer.  (She seduces the
Mighty Sheik with what look like cheerleading routines.)  She
seems more like a flapper than an exotic femme fatale and she gives the
film a cheerful tone that matches Lubitsch's blithe approach to the
material.  She must have been a breath of fresh air to film-goers
used to the ponderous dignity, and dignified poundage, of traditional
European divas.

CAULIFLOWER AND GRUYERE

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How often do we take a moment from our busy lives to think about Gruyere? Not very often, I suspect. And yet it is a cheese of deep philosophical interest, simple, distinctive and useful.

There was a time when I thought of it only in connection with French onion soup, for without the Gruyere that’s melted on the piece of thick toast that floats on top of the soup, it is not French onion soup at all. It’s just brown stuff made out of onions.

I began thinking about Gruyere seriously and appropriately due to a chance remark by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, speaking of dining alone. She observed that it’s just as easy to eat a piece of Gruyere with a loaf of crusty sourdough bread as to down some fast-food alternative, and more nourishing to the soul, more respecting of one’s dining companion — you.

By a simple taste test, I discovered that she was right. Rarely has a philosophical observation been so easy to prove.

I began reading other gastronomical observations by Fisher with a keener interest. I could not test all of them practically, since my kitchen facilities at the time were limited — no oven, just two electric burners and a toaster oven.

But then I read about the first kitchen Fisher presided over, in Dijon in 1931. It had no running water (which had to be carried in from the landing) or ice box . . . and its stove consisted of two gas burners with a tiny cover that could be fitted over them by way of an oven. My excuse vanished, and I decided to make one of her specialities from that time, for which she gives no rule, just a vague description. But it was enough.

You take a head of cauliflower and split the fleurs apart, in clusters that
are not too small or too large — enough of them to cover the bottom of
a baking pan. Boil them for about three minutes, no longer, drain them
and lay them in the pan. Pour heavy cream over each of the fleurs, enough so
that the cream covers the bottom of the pan to a depth at least halfway
up the sides of the fleurs, and then perhaps a little more if you feel
reckless.

Put a lot of fresh grated Gruyere on top of the fleurs and the cream, enough
to make a somewhat less than solid layer of cheese over the whole
thing, part of it floating, part of it on the fleurs. Then grind fresh
pepper over it all.

Bake it in an oven at maybe 350° (Fisher doesn’t say, because her little oven probably didn’t have a thermostat.) Certainly no lower.

When the top of the thing is toasty brown, take it out. (Fisher wasn’t quite
sure why her little oven browned the top of the dish. It must have been
because enough of the Gruyere stayed on top of the bubbling sauce to
get toasted, and it worked the same way in my toaster oven.  In a
real oven you need to place the pan on a high rack to get the same effect.)
Eat it immediately, with some full-bodied red wine of whatever
simplicity. A Cahors would be cool, if you could find it.

cahors90

Have some good bread to dunk in the strange, rich sauce in which the Gruyere has and has not quite merged with the cream.

This is the meal — barring some salad or desert afterwards, if you care about those things.

When you eat this meal, the word elegant will not spring to mind. The words perfection, miraculous and inspiring will.

First of all you will have a connection with certain evenings in Fisher’s long-vanished life in Dijon — a connection which can only be described as complex. It makes you feel sad and hopeful, all at once.

Second, you will never think about cauliflower again in quite the same way — and I say this as someone who almost never thinks about cauliflower at all.

Third, you will discover a new aspect to the complicated personality of
Gruyere. As with French onion soup, its flavor will make you feel like
a virtuous old peasant. In this dish, it will make you feel like a
virtuous old peasant whose kindness has touched the lives of heroes and
saints. (This is the inspiring part.)

I am perhaps diluting the absolute virtue of the experience by sharing it here, but really, how can I keep quiet about a thing like this? Any more than Fisher could?

THE BELLBOY

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It’s impossible to categorize Jerry Lewis’s movies, and that’s why it’s
always been hard for critics to appreciate him — or even to see his
work for what it is. It has roots in vaudeville and silent film and
circus clowning, and owes much to the antic, animation-inspired cinema of Frank
Tashlin, who directed some of Lewis’s early films, but the influences
are all mixed up in an eccentric blend that has no obvious continuity with any cinematic tradition. He was a genuine radical whose popularity kept his films free from the
controls of corporate Hollywood and gave him the opportunity to follow
his instincts wherever they happened to lead him.  There’s a
resulting lack of discipline in his movies that makes them disconcerting on an
intellectual, aesthetic level — unless, like the French, you find
their conceptual incoherence intellectually and aesthetically
satisfying.


The Bellboy, the first film he directed, remains
unsettling a quarter century after it was made. It embodies a unique
sensibility unmodulated by the cinematic conventions of its day, or
ours. It’s best viewed and enjoyed as a critique of those conventions,
spiced with moments of hilarious visual and verbal comedy — and as the
debut of the most original provocateur ever to function within the nominal
boundaries of the Hollywood mainstream.

WALT AND SKEEZIX

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It’s an exciting time for fans of the classic American comic strip.  A few small, quality-minded publishing houses are issuing handsome new reprints of some of the glories of the genre — including, from Drawn and Quarterly Press, the start of a complete run of Frank King’s masterpiece Gasoline Alley.  Volume two has just appeared, continuing the adventures of Walt, a genial car nut, and bachelor, who one days finds an infant on his doorstep and decides to keep and raise him.

King began his domestic epic in the 1920s (the strip premiered in 1918 but the kid didn’t appear at Walt’s door for a couple of years) and kept it going into the 1950s (when he turned it over to other artists), allowing us to watch the child, named Skeezix, grow up in real time.  The strips of the early years constitute a sweet, sharply-observed paean to single parenthood and, more importantly, a deeply-felt celebration of the joys of fatherhood without equal in American art.

The strips have been unavailable for years, and never presented in complete form — check them out and cherish a rare treasure from our culture’s not-so-distant past.