You Will Go to the Moon

Some instant nostalgia for children of the space age, courtesy of the Dreams of Space site which chronicles and exhibits some of the cool space art found in children's books from 1883-1974. A majority of the stuff dates from the 60s, when the fantasy of space flight was becoming reality, and the possibilities appeared limitless. The illustrations from the early 60s are interesting in that the artists weren't yet constrained by NASA's own project blueprints and were able to let imagination take over. In the late 60s and early 70s, the art was based on actual NASA plans, although still heavily optimistic.

via Boing Boing

Movie Flip Books

Yet another instance of pre-video movie collecting, as referenced in this post about 8mm versions, and early video traders. 5 cents gets you a stick of gum that slightly resembles sweetened pink sheetrock and a set of cards. On each card are two frame blowups from scenes from your favorite Universal horror film. Split the cards in half and you have two seperate cards that you need to compile with others in order to form a flip book. Buy enough gum and you too can have a piece of pocket cinema. Back in 1963, Topps' Monster Flip Movies gave you thrilling vignettes such as Frankenstein Cries Out ("Frankenstein suspects that someone has been in his secret hideout. Angered that he may have been discovered, the brute roars furiously"), Anger of the Wolfman, The Mummy's Wrath, or Frankenstein on Alert.

Flip books have been around for a while, of course, and so have flip books based on movies. Disney printed a bunch. There was a Bruce Lee Flip Book that came out in the early 1970s in Asia. There were even flip books of NY underground films by Jack Smith and Andy Warhol (although, perversely, the flip book of Warhol's Kiss appears to consist of a static image).

Videodrome and Beta Fetishism

One of the upcoming DVD releases I'm most looking forward to is the director approved 2 disc set of David Cronenberg's Videodrome being released by Criterion the end of this month. Of course, it has all the features you've come to expect from Criterion: an excellent and impeccable anamorphic transfer, commentaries galore, documentaries, and so many extras you can't possibly imagine what they could have neglected (including unedited footage of the pirate "Videodrome" transmissions). And dig the packaging! The discs come in a case that resembles a video cassette. And for all those early 80s video tape fetishists out there, it resembles a classic L-750 Beta cassette (I should know -- my family's first VCR bought way back in '81 was a top-loading Sears Beta)!
Speaking of the glory and bittersweet obsolescence of the Beta format, here's a page devoted to the earliest publication geared to the home video enthusiast, a mimeographed typewritten newsletter called the The Videophile's Newsletter that began back in September 1976, when Sony Betamax's were brand new and cost $1500 a pop (and blank tapes that only lasted one hour were $16.95 each, if you could find them). As pre-recorded tapes were still in the future, The Videophile's Newsletter was the only forum that allowed these early video collectors to discuss recording tips and trades in order to build their nascent movie libraries. One subscriber writes:

"... interested in 'bizzare (sic) films' and is particularly looking for: Alphaville, Zardoz, Creation of the Humanoids, Run Home Slow, Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, Homicidal, Nosferatu, Yellow Submarine, Rock All Night, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Suddenly Stopped Living And Became Mixed Up Zombies (!). These must be complete and without commercials.... would like to see though not keep many others including: any movie with Eddie Constantine, any Starman or Prince of Space movie, Station 6 Sahara, Invaders from Mars, H-Man, Murder Party and others..."

Hopefully, this early collector is still around to enjoy the fruits of progress. Most of these films are definitely available, although I can't vouch for the availability of such obscurities like Murder Party (although Station 6 Sahara appears to be available).
It's interesting to note that these early tapers also wrestled with the same copyright issues that P2P traders do today, and they defend themselves in much the same way. Some things never change, I suppose. It's also remarkable that some of these pioneers felt they were performing a duty by recording, collecting, and archiving a lot of stuff that most people would think of as dross. As the newsletter's publisher Jim Lowe wrote:

I'd like to say a word in defense of commercials. Naturally you don't want them in the middle of Gone with the Wind. But with respect to current network shows, I feel that they have a certain historical value, and as we all know (pack rats that we are) it is the throw away culture of today that is so highly sought after tommorrow.

Indeed, a lot of the local TV programming from the 1970s that exists today exists only because some early taper, either intentionally or not, kept it around (the originating TV stations, in most cases, certainly didn't). Will DVR hard drives provide the same in the year 2034, or even later?

Hitchcock/Truffaut

Courtesy of Radio France, a series (Real Audio) devoted to the famous interview between François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in 1962 that ultimately formed one of the most famous books on film, Hitchcock-Truffaut (which I monkishly re-read and studied throughout my teen years). After all these years, it's interesting to finally hear the audio that formed the book. In today's installment, Truffaut and Hitchcock discuss The Wrong Man and Vertigo. Hear Hitchcock describing James Stewart's character in Vertigo, as he waits for Kim Novak to emerge from the bathroom, having "...an erection like this!" One can imagine Hitch raising his fist in a triumphant salute of masculine potency.

The series is beautifully bilingual, as Truffaut did not speak English, nor Hitchcock French; but both are ably assisted by the seamless translation skills of Helen Scott, who worked for the French Film Office in New York at the time. The entire series is archived here.

Hooray for Nollywood

Rambunctious low-budget genre movie-making is alive and well in Nigeria. Shot on video on ridiculously meager budgets ($8000 to $10,000 on average), they are sold on street corners throughout Nigeria and surrounding countries, usually as $3 VCDs. These films are also becoming popular among African immigrant communities here in the states, where people want a little taste of back home. If you want a taste of what this new Nigerian cinema is all about, you can check out the downloadable trailers from this site. If you're overly acclimated to Hollywood production standards, these movies may seem shoddy and amateurish; but these action-adventures, family dramas, and witchcraft pictures seem to have a home grown, fly by the seat quality that American films can't touch. You can also buy them at africamovies.com.

The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made

More canon fodder, courtesy of the New York Times. The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made! As these sort of lists go, it's a fairly inoffensive and safe one, covering all bases with popular and critical favorites, domestic and foreign classics, but like the AFI top 100 American list from some years back, it gives the silent era the cold shoulder. Films not included: Keaton's The General (although Boorman's is), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, The Gold Rush, Metropolis, Man with a Movie Camera and The Birth of a Nation (which people usually shy away from including in lists like this for its incendiary racism, but you can usually replace that with Intolerance so at least Griffith's influence can be acknowledged). I'm not exactly a silent movie maven, but anyone with a cursory knowledge of film history and its evolution knows of the importance of these films. Have silent films fallen so out of favor with critics and the popular consciousness that they are no longer acknowledged, much less considered part of the canon? In a half-hearted defense of the list, these films were probably never reviewed in the pages of the Times as, in those early days, "the paper of record" considered movies an amusement and not as an artform worthy of serious discussion (that is, if I'm assuming correctly that a review in the Times is a prerequisite for inclusion).

It's also interesting to note that George Romero's gut-chomping classic Dawn of the Dead was included in the hot 1000, as its original review in the Times by Janet Maslin is (in)famous for its snide and dismissive tone and the fact that Maslin, sickened by the film's brutality, walked out of the movie after only 15 minutes. It's also interesting that this original review is not directly linked from the best 1000 list, only this laudatory appraisal by Cavett Binion from the All Movie Guide.

Dementia / Daughter of Horror

Where do avant cinema and exploitation meet? Somewhere on the crusty margins of '50s Hollywood, perhaps. Consider the case of Dementia, written and directed by John Parker, shot in 1953 in poverty row studios in Hollywood, finally released in 1955 in a small art-house in New York after two years of censorship battles. Completely without dialogue, with only the eerie music of firebrand composer George Antheil and a sparse use of sound effects to accompany the images, a woman's descent into madness and dark isolation meanders with the dream logic and visual archness one usually finds in the "poetic cinema" of the period, although harsher and crueller than what you would find in Maya Deren.

Transparently Freudian in a way that belies its 1950s vintage, the film follows the "gamine" (as the young lady is called in the credits) as she saunters through the expressionistic skid row of Venice, California (with the long shadows and locations Orson Welles would appropriate with greater success in Touch of Evil). She accepts a ride from a cigar chomping fatcat, then retreats to a memory of an apparent patricide which takes place in a misty graveyard lorded over by a man with a black stocking mask. Then back to the here and now where our heroine watches in disgust as the fatcat noisily slurps and chomps on a chicken dinner. The gamine produces a switchblade and (in a really nice shot) the fatcat falls to his death several stories below. She finds her victim's body on the street surrounded by passersby, all wearing black stocking masks. The victim clutches her huge olympic sized pendant. She attempts to remove it but the death hand won't relinquish its grip. In a scene that upset the New York state censors, the man's lifeless head rocks back and forth while she saws his hand off with the switchblade. We follow her to a hepcat cellar where she unwinds to bebop provided by Shorty Rogers and his combo. Things get frenetic when her handless victim appears at the club's streetlevel window. She retreats to her dank noir apartment, where all is well, except for the man's hand writhing in a bureau drawer.

While the storyline seems grimly adolescent, one must remember that Dementia was shot in 1953 and that it was intended as an arty but earnest exploration of abnormal psychology. It's also not hard to see in its influences several antecedents from earlier avant garde films: the disembodied hand seems straight out of Luis Buñuel and Un Chien Andalou, the long shadows and harsh lighting from German Expressionism. Also, Dementia's composer George Antheil also provided the music for painter Fernand Leger's 1924 experimental smash Ballet Mécanique. Alas, this sort of pedigree does not usually spell boffo biz on Main Street America, or even on the piss scented streets of midtown Manhattan where it had a short-lived engagement (along with a co-feature documentary on Picasso) in 1955 at the 55th St. Playhouse After that, despite a glowing testimony from Preston Sturges (!)(who called the film "a work of art... It stirred my blood and purged my libido..."), the film known as Dementia simply disappeared, never to be seen again for decades.

Enter Daughter of Horror. Its history is pretty hazy, but, apparently, an outfit called Exploitation Productions Incorporated thought Dementia was just good enough to add some voice-over narration (courtesy of an announcer from Philadelphia named Ed McMahon), rename the effort Daughter of Horror, grind out a few prints and push them through the drive-in circuit. Once the prints have been too tattered and fried from way too many spook shows, Daughter of Horror would have been lucky to be shown on late night television.

Interestingly, it was its inclusion as the feature shown in the movie theater attacked by the blob in The Blob that may have saved Dementia/Daughter of Horror from complete ignonimity. Many fans thought the title on the marquee ("MIDNIGHT SPOOK SHOW - DAUGHTER OF HORROR also BELA LUGOSI") was some imaginary generic horror movie title dreamt by The Blob's makers, and discussions raged in the pages of early 60s horror movie magazines as to the film's existence.

It was probably an essay by Jim Morton in Re/Search's seminal Incredibly Strange Films book from 1986 that created a resurgence of interest in this little off-beat piece of marginal cinema. Until recently the film (as Daughter of Horror) was only availible as the crappiest of VHS dupes. Many thought that the original source of Dementia had been destroyed in the manufacture of Daughter of Horror. Fortunately, that was not the case. Indeed, the pristine original negative of Dementia had been unearthed and brought out by Kino in a very nice DVD package double-billed with a nice looking version of Daughter of Horror. Watched back to back (which is only recommended to the heartiest of souls), one finds that, except for the inclusion of McMahon's boogie-man narration and very short appearance in the beginning of the movie, the two films are essentially the same. It's interesting to ponder that the same film exhibited at a small Manhattan art house also played at drive-ins in the South and Midwest. Such is the strange democracy of cinema.

For more info on this film(s), Flickhead has a good piece, as does DVD Savant.

Adios Jingo!

Adios, Jingo! -- Happy Independence Day, everyone, both here in the states, and abroad as well. In honor of this patriotic holiday, I offer this humble list of 10 American films that best exemplify certain qualities that seem to me uniquely and terrifically American. Some of these may cast a critical and jaundiced eye on the various excesses of the American scene, and some may excorciate us for sins and transgressions, both past and present. But some also celebrate those things like tolerance and sacrifice that make the ongoing American experiment worth pursuing, and the "more perfect union" worth achieving. In this crucial political year, it's more important than ever to realize that patriotism is not the sole province of the lazy few who blindly follow leaders and swallow their empty platitudes. It's not a bad thing to be proud of your country, but it's also not a bad thing to question and criticize the direction and policies of your country. This list of movies is not a best-of list by any means, but these are movies that make me proud to be an American.

In no particular order:

Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz) -- I've always loved this movie. Early WW2 patriotism at its most transparent, yet at its most sincere. Cagney sings and dances, and still plays the lovable tough guy. FDR is shown in silhouette as he presents George M. Cohan a medal. Favorite scene: the older Cohan tapdancing down the stairs in the White House after receiving said medal.

The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola) -- The promise of America is expressed when the new immigrants pour to the side of the ship to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty when the boat pulls into New York Harbor. The curse of American largesse is coldly seen in the last shot of the movie: Michael Corleone alone in his compound in Nevada, his power and wealth consolidated, yet his family and soul destroyed.

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader) -- Very few American films deal with the working class. Schrader's directorial debut is one of the few that do. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphett Kotto play work buddies who try to screw over the system. Ultimately, the system screws them over, playing the race card to divide them. It would be hard to see a movie like his be made nowadays, not unless it deals with Wal-Mart employees. Another plus: great American artist Captain Beefheart sings over the titles.

Nixon (Oliver Stone) -- A lot of people can't stand Oliver Stone. I find him one of our more interesting writer/directors, although he's in bit of a slump lately. His ham-fisted style is at its best and most garrulous in 1995's Nixon. Richard Nixon, as brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, is ultimately a tragic figure, a man with a chip on his shoulder who attempts to control events but soon finds himself the victim of them. Not as overbearing and outrageous as J.F.K. or Natural Born Killers, but it still has that that visually excessive style that exemplified his filmmaking at the time. It's forever playing on cable. Give it a chance if you haven't already.

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero) -- The film's first shot is an small American flag fluttering in the foreground of a western Pennsylvania graveyard. The terrible strife of 1968 as horror film. Americans eat their own. Children kill and consume their parents. A crisis of leadership leads to the most pessimistic ending in any American film from the '60s. The monsters are us.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford) -- I'm not a big John Ford fan, but I really like this stark black & white western. Image and myth transcend truth and nuance. Its message seems more relevant today than it did in 1962. Too many legends becoming fact.

Nashville (Robert Altman) -- America as widescreen canvas. But instead of the grandeur of American landscapes, Altman concentrates on funhouse faces, dialogue bumping into dialogue, the carnival of politics, singers drowned out by the roar of automobiles, the sting and danger of celebrity. It's a long, meandering mess, heartbreakingly beautiful in places, uch like the country it both mocks and celebrates in equal measure.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock) -- On the faces of great men scurry the small and insignificant, the merest of pawns in the grandest of geopolitical matches. "War is hell, Mr. Thornhill," cants the professor, played by Leo G. Carroll. "Even when it's a cold one." Cary Grant answers: "If you fellas can't lick the Vandamms of this world, without asking girls like her to bed down with him and fly away with him and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars!" Simple decency butts against the imperatives of outfoxing your opponent, even when one's ideals form an obstacle. Hitchcock fought to retain these lines in the picture against the desires of the MGM brass. Heavy for a Hollywood movie in 1959.

Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner) -- Right wing poem on the thrill and glory of military victory and achievement, or ironic post-Vietnam rumination on the anachronism and utter absurdity of warrior-wise men in the age of automated war? Either way, it's simple but powerful cinema. At the film's end, Patton walks among windmills, too tired and resigned to tilt at them any longer as he may have in the past, aknowledging his day is done. The pastoral impulse need not be peaceful or gentle.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) -- Not American created, but this great western touches on all the great American themes of reinvention, the retention of perhaps outdated ideals, the usurping of the wild and unspoiled by creeping civilization. This movie is enriched by a great American cast (Fonda, Robards, and, yes, Bronson), and by Leone's first opportunity to shoot in Monument Valley and other locations in the USA. The great American film genre was never the same after Leone borrowed enough to create something bright and new.

R.I.P. Marlon Brando

R.I.P., Marlon Brando --

PLAYBOY: And you didn't feel that acting was worth while or fulfilling enough?

BRANDO: There's a big bugaboo about acting; it doesn't make sense to me. Everybody is an actor; you spend your whole day acting. Everybody has suffered through moments where you're thinking one thing and feeling one thing and not showing it. That's acting. Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage. . . . It's very difficult for people to have an extended confrontation with themselves. You're hiding what you're thinking, what you're feeling, you don't want to upset somebody or you do want to upset somebody; you don't want to show that you hate them; your pride would be injured if they knew you'd been affected by what they said about you. Or you hide a picayune aspect of yourself, the prideful or envious or vulnerable, and you pretend that everything's all right. 'Hi, how are you?' People look at your face and it's presentable: 'And I shall prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet.'

So we all act. The only difference between an actor professionally and an actor in life is the professional knows a little bit more about it--some of them, anyway--and he gets paid for it. But actually, people in real life get paid for acting, too. You have a secretary who has a lot of sex appeal and a great deal of charm and she knows it, she's going to get paid for that, whether she delivers sexual favors or not. A very personable, attractive young man, who reflects what the boss says, is smart enough to know what the boss feels and likes and wants and he knows how to curry favor . . . he's acting. He goes in in the morning and he gives him a lot of chatter, tells the right kind of jokes and it makes the boss feel good. One day the boss says, "Listen, Jim, why don't you go to Duluth and take over the department there? I think you'd do a bang-up job." And then Jim digs his toe under the rug and says, "Oh, gosh, I never thought, J. B. . . . Gee, I don't know what to say. . . . Sure, I'll go. When?" And he jumps into the plane and checks off what he's been trying to do for four years--get J. B. to give him the Duluth office. Well, that guy's acting for a living, singing for his supper, and he's getting paid for it.

From Brando's Playboy Interview, 1979.

FanTasia Festival 2004

Montreal's FanTasia Festival advertises itself as "North-America's premier genre film festival", and who can doubt it looking at the festival's hefty line-up showcasing the latest and best and wildest of Thai, Korean, Japanese genre cinema, and also adding some homegrown Quebecois efforts into the mix. Also spotlighted with special retrospectives are Spanish horror movie icon Paul Naschy and Hong Kong kung fu moguls the Shaw Brothers. The FanTasia Festival is credited with introducing international audiences to the imaginative excesses of Takeshi Miike and having the international premiere of Ringu, which sparked interest in the current cycle of Japanese horror. It seems like quite a show, and worth a trip if you're near by (I, unfortunately, am not... maybe next year).

Il Thrilling Italiano

More giallo stuff-- By far, this is the best English language introduction and overview to the perverse thrills of Italian giallo films I've found yet on the web. From The Uppers Organization, "Your Guide to the Pleasures of Modern Living". Also check out their overviews of 60s Italian fumetti.

Carlo Jacono

While some may know that the incredibly violent and sexy Italian murder mysteries filmed in the 60s and 70s known as giallos inherited its name from a series of mystery novels published by the publisher Mondadori which were easily recognizable by their bright yellow covers and garish illustrations, very few know of the contributions of the cover artists of these cheaply produced paperbacks. One such artist is Carlo Jacono, whose work has a simple pulp grace and pop craftsmanship that sets it apart from other pulp artists in Italy, or elsewhere for that matter. Jacono also did some interesting work for the Italian Urania science fiction series.

Some Films by Finns

Here's an interesting collection of Finnish movie posters from the 50s through the 70s. Most of the films are not from Finland, but some are.

Leone on Ford

Sergio Leone on John Ford:

"'As Romans, we have a strong sense of the fragility of empires. It is enough to look around us. I admire very much that great optimist, John Ford. His naivete permitted him to make Cinderella - I mean, The Quiet Man. But, as Italians, we see things differently. That is what I have tried to show in my films. The great plains - they are very beautiful, but, when the storm comes, should people bury their heads in the sand of the desert? I believe that people like to be treated as adults from time to time. Because a man is wearing sombrero and because he rides a horse, does not necessarily mean that he is imbecile...

Ford, because of his European origins - as a good Irishman - has always seen the problem from a Christian point of view ... his characters and protagonists always looks forward to a rosy, fruitful future. Whereas I see the history of the West as really the reign of violence by violence'"

From Fistful of Leone.

Nick Ray on Metafilter

Extraordinary Metafilter uber-post on Nicholas Ray with 42 (yes, 42!) Ray-related links. Way to go, matteo! Might as well take a day off!

Kubrick Meets Escher

Another 2001 conundrum -- It's one of the most impressive shots from a movie that's loaded with impressive shots: the Pan Am space hostess walks up a circular walkway until we see her upside down and she delivers meals to the craft's cockpit. While 2001 has been rightfully lauded for its scientific accuracy and plausibility, Agostino Ambrosio has explicated from the evidence offered from the film how the physical geography of the Aries 1-B spacecraft is completely illogical, and how it more resembles an Escher illustration than a scientifically sound ship.

Popcorn For Your Head

Popcorn for your head -- For your perusal, a list of films divided and catagorized by philosophical theme. Film buffs may find the list lacking as it seems to only include recent Hollywood efforts (although in defense of the list's creator, it appears to be a list made primarily for beginning students), and most of those are science fiction or fantastic in nature. SF, as a literary genre, has always been one to put ideas and hypotheticals to the forefront, and it would seem to follow that SF films should do likewise. However, instead of constructing taut trampolines intended for philosophical leaps, films such as The Matrix, Minority Report, and Vanilla Sky tend to use these ideas (usually the problems of identity, perception, and deception) as a plot twist to take us to the next shock and awe action sequence. It seems like so much window dressing. Even a great movie like 2001 (probably my all-time favorite) has this problem. While one can wrap their mind around the meanings of the monolith and the star-child (which after 36 years of media promulgation seems almost kitschy), it only gets in the way of enjoying some of the most beautiful cinema and sly satire ever accomplished. For a more satisfying philosophical climax in a science fiction film, look no further than the defiantly existential ending of Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man. Maybe it's dime store metaphysics, but it's quite unique, especially for a Hollywood film from the '50s. "To God, there is no zero. I still exist!"

Joyce and The Volta Cinematograph

As we celebrate the Bloomsday Centenary, we also mustn't forget that James Joyce was also an early champion of the nascent art form of the cinema. After some time abroad, Joyce and his family returned to Dublin in 1909. It was at this time that Joyce opened and ran Ireland's first cinema, The Volga Cinematograph. According to film historian Luke McKernan, Joyce's programming at the Volga was eclectic and diverse. He exhibitions ran the gamut from exotic travelogues to Louis Feuillade. These films are now being compiled as The Volta Programme by McKernan, an attempt to replicate an evening of Joyce programmed films and to maybe show the influence the very young medium had on his work.

The Volga did not succeed, and Joyce headed to Trieste and to bigger and better things. But he never lost his enthusiasm for cinema. After Ulysses was published, he asked Eisenstein to consider a cinematic adaptation of the novel. Joyce even preferred actor George Arliss to play Bloom.

More on I, Robot

More on I, Robot -- Director Alex Proyas wasn't too crazy about the trailer Fox put together for his sci-fi opus so he edited his own version and posted it on his Mystery Clock website. Frankly, I'm still not impressed. Via The Movie Blog.

I, Not Amused

I have to admit it's been 20+ years since I've read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, but when I recently viewed the trailer for the new film version (you can watch it here, if you so desire) I found myself a bit perplexed. I saw nothing of Asimov's collection of robot stories within the standard Will Smith sci-fi actioner except the inclusion of the classic 3 Laws of Robotics, which every SF fan knows by heart. And even then, the 3 laws are thrown out the window when the robots start killing people.

Apparently, the title of the movie is I, Robot not because it was an adaptation of Asimov's book, but because the director, Alex Proyas, probably thought it was a kick-ass title for a summer blockbuster. Jayme Lynn Blaschke of RevolutionSF has a fairly comprehensive wrap-up of what seems to be another classic case of Hollywood bending over backwards to do anything but the right thing.