Poster of the Week - Countess Dracula

Poster of the Week! - Inspired by Curt's fantastic work feeding us all sorts of '70s era Dracula artifacts this month at his Groovy Age of Dracula (or Groovy Age of Horror), I offer this modest image of a British poster for the 1970 Hammer horror, Countess Dracula.

The film has nothing to do with Dracula, of course. It has something to do with Elizabeth Bathory, the real life monster who ordered the killing of more than 600 women and girls and bathed in their blood. Author Andrei Codrescu, who is also a descendent of the countess, wrote his first novel about her. Another descendent, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz, has composed an opera on Elizabeth Bathory, and also runs a fairly comprehensive site about Bathory and about his opera. A whole host of Bathory links can be found on the same site. For reviews of the movie (which, I confess, I haven't seen), you can go here, here, and here.Click on the image on the left for a larger image. 373K

Poster of the Week - Jekyll and Hyde (1931)

Poster of the Week! -- The creepy image of Hyde as Jekyll's cubist shadow distinguishes this poster advertising the 1932 Swedish release of Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. American Cinematographer has a great and very informative article about the making of this landmark film, highlighting the groundbreaking and sometimes experimental work of its director, Mamoulian, and the film's cinematographer, Karl Struss.

Struss himself had a career in cinematography that spanned 5 decades with close to 140 credits, from silent classics like the original Ben-Hur and Murnau's Sunrise (for which he earned an Oscar) to some of Chaplin's sound films (The Great Dictator and Limelight) to humbler efforts in the tail end of his career like Rocketship X-M, The Fly, and The Alligator People. Before his cinematographic career, Struss was an accomplished and recognized pictorial photographer who sold work to the top fashion magazines of the day (the 1910s), and was a member of Alfred Stieglitz's group. Here's a long essay excerpted from an illustrated exhibition catalog. Here's an eerie shot of a waterfront on the East Side of New York; a clash of modernity and tradition in a seemingly random shot of a Columbus Day Parade in 1912; a color shot of the Boardwalk in Long Island from 1910; some Struss shots here; some more shots here; some nudes from 1914 here (very tasteful, but the models are nude); also, a short article on Struss' work in stereo photography and in 3-D movies.

Gabriel Figueroa

Gabriel Figueroa is one of Mexico's greatest artists. Indeed, some have called him the "fourth muralist", after the three great ones, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. Figueroa was friendly with all three, and the cinematographer admittedly borrowed pictorial elements from the muralists, and, surprisingly, the painters admitted they borrowed from the filmmaker as well. As Figueroa's son revealed in an interview: "Whenever my father was invited to one of his exhibits, he would come in and Siqueiros would tell him, 'Now you come and see what I stole from you.' And my father would say 'Oh no. I come to see what I can steal from you.' Composition-wise and theme-wise.... The only time that my father recognized openly that he took a composition out of a painting, from a muralist, it was Orozco's. It was a water color that Orozco made of a funeral of Velorio. This water color is called The Requiem. And my father, in a picture called Flor Sylvestre with Dolores del Río, took this very same composition and interpreted it. So it happened that the day that the film was screened for the first time, Dolores del Río invited all her friends, and among her friends was Orozco. It happened that Orozco sat right next to my father. And when the scene came on, Orozco jumped out of his seat. My father said 'Maestro, I am an honest thief. I took that from one of your water colors'. Orozco said 'Of course, the depth and the volume you have in this composition is something that I didn't get in my water color. You must show me how you work so that I can see the magic of this scene.'"

Like the muralists, Figueroa's subject was Mexico itself, which he lit and photographed as the biggest, greatest movie star in the world. He made her landscapes gorgeous and, yes, even glamorous with a shimmering texture that rivaled the erotic; but also harsh, lonely, and sometimes cruel. But he was not merely a landscape photographer; he also explored the topographies of the human face, the luscious openess of smiles, the weight of centuries of sadness behind a poor woman's gaze, the grisly and grimmest gravity of a bad man's grin. Like the muralists, Figueroa took elements that seemed classically Mexican and made them universal.

There are many places where you can see some of the best of Figueroa's work. Here are a few: his official site, run by his son Gabriel Figueroa Flores, Jr., complete with a gallery of Quicktime video; a Spanish language site with plenty of images from the films and production shots as well; another Spanish language site with images and video; some erotic photgraphy by Figueroa (very tasteful, mind you); also, the odd apocryphal story that Figueroa had a hand in the creation of The Creature from the Black Lagoon; more trivia: he also helped shoot Johnny Weismuller's last Tarzan movie (along with Raul Martinez Solares, who photographed many of the Mexican horror and wrestling films from the '50s through the '70s)

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Poster of the Week - Belle du Jour

Poster of the Week! -- A stylish and striking Japanese advertisement for Luis Buñuel's Belle du Jour.
Buñuel on Belle du Jour (from the excellent book of interviews with Buñuel, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel by Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez Turrant:
Colina: Of course it's useless to ask you what is in the small box that the Asian client shows Severine.
Buñuel: (He laughs) I know the little box is upsetting, especially because of the buzzing noise it makes. After seeing the little box, one prostitute rejects the Asian, but Severine looks inside and accepts what the client proposes. I myself don't know what is in the little box. It must be something extraordinary, something used for an unheard-of perversity. It produced more curiosity than I expected. Once, Dr. Mendez, head of pharmacology at the Mexican Cardiological Institute, invited me to lunch at his home. The great cardiologist Dr. Chavez had also been invited because he wanted to talk to me. Chavez arrived late, hung up his Spanish-style cape, excused himself for being late... When he was seated, he suddenly asked me, "Listen, Buñuel, what is in the little box?" He surprised me: an eminent scientist, a savant, preoccupied with the contents of the little box.
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Turrent: I have asked several friends about this and we all agreed that there must be some insect in box. A bumblebee, for example.
Buñuel: It could be, because there is buzzing. Now I ask you: what can I do with a bumblebee?
Colina: To me, it seems clear as day: the Asian wants to put the bumblebee into Severine's sex organ.
Buñuel: And the bumblebee would devour her sex: Zzzzzzzzz! (laughs) It's not a bad little depravity.
Some interesting reviews of Belle du Jour from Slant, and Mondo Digital. Also, a French Catherine Deneuve tribute site has some wonderful production shots and stills from the movie (I particularly like this shot of Buñuel and a radiant looking Deneuve) and some excerpts from interviews with Deneuve concerning the film.
As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 271K.

¡El Cine Mexicano en TCM!

A viewing tip for those of you with cable... As reported by Flickhead a couple of days ago, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting 5 (count them 5!) Luis Buñuel films: Los Olvidados, Nazarín, Viridiana , El Angel Exterminador and Simón del Desierto. Fantastic films all, and none available on DVD in the US.

And it's not just Buñuel -- TCM is also planning a month long tribute to the best of the Mexican cinema. Certainly, the Cinco de Mayo holiday provides a convenient placemat for this embarrassment of riches, but who cares? It's high time that Mexican films are receiving some mainstream recognition in the US, along with such great actors and personalities such as Cantinflas, Maria Felix, Pedro Armendáriz, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Infante, Silvia Pinal (who appears in several of the Buñuel films already mentioned) and Tin Tan, directors like Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez and Roberto Gavaldon, and the ridiculously great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. I grew up on the border and saw many of these movies on Mexican TV, and for a lot of people of my parents' generation and older, these figures were stars that rivaled the brilliance of those coming from Hollywood. If your knowledge of Mexican films is limited to recent arthouse hits and horror and wrestler movies (great and fun as they may be), treat yourself to some of the best pictures of the Golden Age of Mexican Film, la Epoca de Oro. And for those of you without cable TV (like me), ¡la vida no vale nada!

Big in Japan!!!

Babelfish translates the title of this fantastic and cool blog from Japan as "Monstrous Beast", which may or may not be the best translation. At any rate, this site specializes in monsters from Japan, and even if reading machine translations from the Japanese is not your cup of tea, at least you can feast your eyes on a bunch of images of the most delirious creatures ever dreamed up by Nippon's most creative minds. Very cool stuff!! Via Filmtagebuch.

Poster of the Week! - Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

Poster of the Week!-- Creepy German Expressionism illustrates this 1933 poster for Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. This was the last film Lang made in Germany until the late '50s, when he returned to make his "Indian" films and one more Mabuse (the excellent The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Lang's last film, and a blueprint for a lot of the pulp cinema of the '60s). Testament was also the film that Lang claimed to have placed Nazi slogans into the mouth of the raving madman and arch-criminal Mabuse (some historians doubt this). More Mabuse stuff: A review of the dubbed American version of Testament, The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse in Bright Lights Film Journal; a review of the 1962 remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, known in the US as Terror of the Mad Doctor; Who is Doctor Mabuse?; images from a 1000 Eyes/Return of Dr. Mabuse double feature pressbook (Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe vs. Dr. Mabuse! - Dr. Mabuse is on the loose! His Evil and Fiendish Power Unleashes a Blood-Bath of Chemical and Electronic Terror!!); actually, a bunch of cool Mabuse content from Evilskip's Movie Joint. As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version. 306K.