We Jam Econo

For your viewing pleasure -- a trailer for the upcoming Minutemen doc We Jam Econo. Besides the promise of seeing some smoking Minutemen footage, you can also see how gracefully your favorite '80s punk rocker has aged in some present day interview clips. Ian MacKaye looks the embodiment of straight edge health; J. Mascis looks like someone's hippie mom; ed fROMOHIO doesn't look so hot; George Hurley looks like a cross between a robust and healthy Zuma Beach lifeguard and Freddie Blassie; and, yeah, Thurston, we know you have a badass record collection.

Weekend Poster Feast

Weekend Poster Feast. Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy, done up Japanese pop art style. Here's a nice Barbarella site, which professes not to "honor Jane Fonda or her political views". Oh well. Click on the image on the left for a larger version.

Godard on Monster Movies

Godard on Monster Movies (from a series of lectures presented at the Conservatoire d'Art Cinématographique de Montréal in 1980). Portions of the lectures are included in these film film notes from the Pacific Film Archive (as gif image files). Some excerpts:

"The true monster film is Grease, or Saturday Night Fever... Because one has no fear.....

"I believe that there were few movies in the genre of Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein where [the monster] was not totally invented; frightening, but separate from reality.... A movie was never made about a worker's strike using Dracula, which would be useful; or films about the mafia. Suck the blood or take the money - there's no real difference....

"One could imagine Germany, Year Zero being made in another manner; it would not be disorienting to see, all of a sudden, Bela Lugosi cross the screen....

"There are few films that attempt the two together. When Frankenstein was made, one could have put him into a monstrous social situation... the Depression.... It appears at moments, but the film doesn't treat it, it treats it separately.... I would rather try to treat the two together.....

"Dracula is somebody from another world in today's world. One says Dracula doesn't exist, but through 3/4 of the film you have only to see how the people are dressed.... Still today on all the boards of directors, in all of high society, people are dressed like this. So, where are the monsters? Who are the monsters? Dracula's house is absolutely the house of Dupont de Nemours.... Do you think they would have had the idea of shooting in another kind of house? Your ideas come from the world you come from... you get ideas only from seeing things. If I had seen only Dracula, I never would have had this idea. But as I see Germany, Year Zero just before or after, I find... cosmic links between these films.... Berlin is the tomb of Dracula. It's effectively Hitler's genius.... If you had put a little mustache on Dracula...."

Ingrid Bergman - Swedish Magazines

Nice collection of scans of Swedish magazine covers featuring Ingrid Bergman, including some that predate her Hollywood career.

Pepsi Vs. Coke

The trailer for Rialto's re-release of Godard's 1965 paeon to youth and pop Masculine Feminine is up, a snazzy little montage of clips from the movie set to a hip little number by one of the film's stars, Chantal Goya ("Tu m'as trop menti", to be exact). Curiously, the trailer's tagline is "Paris, Sex, and the Pepsi Generation", while Godard always claimed it was about "The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola". Surely, Marx may have fallen out of favor with the young, but Coca-Cola? Cola wars aside, it's still a cause for celebration, and no doubt a Criterion DVD edition is around the corner.

Video Nasties in the UK

In Britain they were called "Video Nasties", European and American horror films with explicit sex and violence that could never be passed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for theatrical exhibition, but because of the nascent home video explosion in the early '80s, were found on the shelves of video shops without any sort of restrictions. Vying for the attention of the discriminating video consumer, many of these videos were packaged in the biggest and most explicitly garish boxes possible. The yellower segments of the British press get wind of all this and raise holy hell, and the government, of course, follows suit. Some distributors are prosecuted, and some "Nasties" seized. By 1984, the Video Recordings Act is passed by Parliament, and the brief flame of the "Nasties" era comes to an ignominious end. A very good history can be found here, and a brand new database of pre-certification "Nasties", built in conjunction with an upcoming book from Fab Press, can be found here, complete with over 7000 video cover scans.

Sexploitation Film Mags

We're not talking about Positif, Cahiers du Cinema, Sight and Sound, or Film Culture here. When these colorful slicks emblazoned their covers with the words "Art Films", don't expect any pontifications on Bergman or Brakhage, but instead expect a "Full Color Center Spread" and a special pre-release preview of the film Hot Miami. Titles like Cinema Close-Up, Barred, Bizarre Films, and Cinema Keyhole seemed to proliferate under the radar of the Look and Life mainstream in the '60s until the early '70s when hardcore reared its ugly, gnarled head, and rendered these magazines quaint, and perhaps not so daring.

From a very interesting site called Bad Mags, which details the sleazier aspects of magazine publishing in the '60s and the '70s, and which will be the subject of a volume coming out of Headpress, a publisher of fine books. And, yes, some of these links may not be work safe.

El Vampiro Sangriento

A meticulous labor of love: more than a hundred frame grabs from The Bloody Vampire, K. Gordon Murray's English language version of the Mexican horror film El Vampiro Sangriento. Alas, there's no text to explicate the images, so unless you've seen the movie (I haven't), you may be at a loss to know the significance of each image and how they relate to each other, except to possibly discover the odd, dusty poetry of some of them: the skeletal coach driver; the sloping arches; this mixture of eros and science; the vampire's tome; the frightened maiden and the jiggling ornate doorknob; a dinner table borrowed from Citizen Kane, and this outtake from L'Age d'Or; and a whole lot more. It looks exceptionally well shot in any case. Piece together the images and form your own narrative. Or check out the movie. It's probably not bad.

From the K. Gordon Murray website.

Welles' Quixote

Scroll down a bit and find an audio report (from PRI's Studio 360) on the long and strange history of Orson Welles' film production of Don Quixote. Self financed and languorously shot over a period of twenty odd years, it was the film masterpiece that never was, and most probably never will ever be completed to anyone's satisfaction. Not that some haven't tried to piece together Welles' footage that sits in various libraries, cinematheques, and personal collections throughout the world, most notably Eurotrash icon Jesus Franco. Franco, who served as second unit director on Welles' Chimes at Midnight, assembled what material was available (mainly in Spanish collections) and produced Don Quixote de Orson Welles in 1992. It was almost universally reviled on release, although some suggest it was Franco's participation (and his reputation as a cheapo porn director) that engendered the disdain (critic Jonathan Rosembaum called Franco "biggest hack in all of Spanish cinema!"). At any rate, this was the first time I've heard anything about Jess Franco on an American public radio program, and it contains some audio clips from Succubus and Venus in Furs! More importantly, there are clips from the Quixote soundtrack itself, with Welles voicing both Quixote and Sancho Panza. A very interesting listen. You can also find some screen captures of some European DVD editions of Don Quixote de Orson Welles here, courtesy of the great DVD Beaver.

Playing the Audience like an Organ

One can usually find interesting sources from the online syllabi of college film instructors. From a cinema history course taught by David Clearwater from the University of Lethbridge in Canada we find several audience reaction shots from a screening of Psycho during its original release in 1960. Read their faces from 45 years back in time. Their tension is palpable. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. "It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film. "

Slouching out of oblivion

Slouching out of oblivion. No, Bitter Cinema is not on permanent hiatus. Yes, I've been slacking. And yes, I've been watching and thinking about movies, and I've found a fresh new impetus to write about them again. And no, I didn't see the Golden Globes.

Speaking of fresh, courtesy of Bedazzled!, a cool and nifty audio and video blog I stumbled upon the past couple of days, a hoary little Scopitone of a strange 1968 French number by De Giafferi entitled Sado-Maso. Monsieur De Giafferi appears and sounds like a poor man's Gainsbourg, also recalling the cruel insouciance of Christopher Lee, particularly in late '60s international Harry Alan Towers productions. And speaking of Lee and Towers, doesn't the clip's frenzied and psychedelicized mise en scene resemble Jesus Franco's S&M Eurotrash chic of the same period? Had Franco a hand in this little endeavor?