films

Have been enjoying this 1990s interview with the late Terry Southern, a writer smack in the middle of the 1960s zeitgeist with projects as diverse as Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Magic Christian, and Easy Rider.

Am especially interested in The Loved One, a black comedy send-up of Los Angeles hucksterism through the metaphor of a high-pressure corporate funeral home. Before your eyes America's twin sacred values of religion and sales motivation stand revealed as pure, dark, necrophiliac lust. Southern tells an amusing anecdote about how this subversive gem got made at all:

The Loved One has been the most underrated film I've worked on. However, it has recently been released on video cassette and will finally be seen, and presumably, recognized. The cinematography by Haskell Wexler should have received an Academy Award. Everyone who knows anything about film agrees on that. The cast which included John Gielgud and Rod Steiger is one of the finest ever assembled. And working with Tony Richardson was extraordinary. He had just come off Tom Jones which won every award possible and made everyone connected with it a fortune - and yet such is the total sleaze and corruption of the studios that MGM refused to renegotiate his contract and made him abide by his pre-Tom Jones commitment to The Loved One for a minuscule fee. They thought they were being "shrewd." Well, Richardson was so completely pissed off at them that he cast an American actor, Robert Morse, to play an English poet (at a time, when Tom Courtney, James Fox and Albert Finney, to mention a few, were available) and he barred Martin Ransohoff from the set. We started each morning in the production office by opening a magnum of Dom Perignon. The dailies were shown at the screening room of The Beverly Hills Hotel, with plenty of canapes laid on. In other words, their "shrewd" avarice cost them a pretty penny in the end.

Southern split screenplay chores with Christopher Isherwood and it would be great to know who did what. We can guess that Isherwood handled the "pompous British expats in LA" scenes and Southern the parts that make fun of commies and the perverse sex lives of the powerful but of course they were also adapting Evelyn Waugh, and incorporating details from a scathing book on the funeral home industry.

But once you say there is a trick and once you accept this untenable situation - which is how dare you presume to fuck around with the work of a great artist like Evelyn Waugh or Nathanael West - you have to do your best as a screenwriter. With Evelyn Waugh I initially couldn't do it. Then I was finally persuaded, reasoned and convinced that it was possible because it was relevant and that we would maintain the spirit. What Tony Richardson wanted to get into his film, which wasn't in the original, was Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death, which he read and for some reason he identified with because he had been involved in burying some one in America. He was able to persuade me to change the book from the thirties to the sixties and I participated in the film throughout the production. As it turned out I was happy with the results.

More thoughts on a JPEG --I haven't seen this printed out. It's from Chris Marker's final NY exhibition -- shots of subway passengers taken with a hidden camera. (See previous post.)
This has been "done": one example is John Schabel's photos of people in airplane windows snapped with a telephoto lens. OK, precedent noted.

Almost 50 years separates the woman subway rider from this frame from Marker's 1962 film La Jetee.
You can't miss the continuities. Both images feature a face in calm (yet anxious) repose surrounded by a vortex of angles and converging lines. The actual and reflected subway railings and the woman's bag strap suggest tubes and wires surrounding a comatose patient. Like "The Man" in La Jetee we could imagine she is dreaming or time traveling. From the physical tension of her arms and clawlike hands it's possible things aren't going so well.

The earlier image gained much of its impact from the stark blacks of silver nitrate photography. The subway rider is a study in slightly sickly colors: the green that you'd see on no American train and the green-and-brown fractal pattern on the wall and seats that resembles vegetation or cell-division. The clawing hand touches and interacts with this pattern in the woman's dream theatre. Both images are cinematic: "The Man" because the shot inspires tension and concern in the context of the overall story and "The Woman" because the shot is so dynamic, like a moment in a film where a camera lingers on a face in the midst of expressionistic chaos. The sensibility or vibe uniting the two images is fairly remarkable - how many photographers are this consistent even from month to month?

When an artist reaches 90 you want to write about him with respect. This is especially true if his work remains active and vital across the decades. RIP, Chris Marker.

Filmmaker Chris Marker died recently. Hadn't paid much attention to his art career but felt moved to write this last year in response to a blog post smugly putting down his work:

This is the filmmaker who made La Jetee. A legend, yadda yadda, but readers might want to know how the iconic still photography in that and other earlier works compare to what he's doing now. Does his careful style of framing and eye for vernacular street scenes make the jump from "quasi-documentary" to "urban flaneur" modes of working? How much of the magic of his photos lay in chemical darkroom technology? That sort of thing.
From his Wikipedia bio I see he was a digital pioneer, and made an "art" CD-ROM in the '90s. Another avenue to explore in writing about him is how such (now dated) media have informed current so-called (and likely-soon-to-be-dated) image aggregators such as Tumblr, and where he fits in the spectrum.
Reviewing cliched writing in the press release is usually kind of a low blow. You are privileged to be in New York seeing the actual work--others have to travel here.

Images from the show in question suggest no diminution of the artists' powers late in life. (I didn't see them installed so this is a jpeg review.) The photos of random subway riders taken without their knowledge conjure painted portraits and religious icons (an unfortunate handful make this connection explicit by photoshopping in familiar masterpieces) but at the same time are as dynamic as cinema. Each photo inserts you at some fraught or charged point in a film-like narrative and you immediately find yourself working out the back story and conclusion. Answering a question above, connections to La Jetee's frame-by-frame style abound: in the dramatic angles, the lighting, the melancholy mood. Photoshop manipulation of light and saturation substitutes more than adequately for the chemical darkroom effects of the earlier work. It's what makes the imagery now rather than some emulation of the '60s. As for the Tumblr connection suggested by the original blog post: nah.

More.

Was thinking about a "It's Only Humanist"-style essay that considers the movie 300 as the dark side of digital creatives' supposed fascination with all things ancient and Greek. The pitch would go something like

300 reflects young filmmakers' yearning for manly virtue and ancient rituals of violence in the disconnected, affectless time of the Internet. The Spartans' CGI abs and pecs conjure a warrior cult of the body, in contrast to the aestheticized holistic beauty favored by the Athenians: free-floating signifiers of sweaty buffness but also a grotesque cyborg "skinning" of the human form.

Unfortunately writing this would entail watching 300 in its entirety.