One of the very best features of the neglected Russian filmmaker Boris Barnet, this 1935 feature is, like some of his other talkies, a glorious musical of sorts. Codirected by S. Mardanov, it’s about two buddies, a sailor and a mechanic, who, shipwrecked on an island in Soviet Azerbaijan, both try to woo the same young woman, who runs a fishing co-op. Though seemingly light, it’s as intensely physical as Barnet’s preceding masterpiece, Okraina, and its melancholic undertow makes it distinctly different from the early sound comedies of Raoul Walsh that it sometimes resembles. In Russian with subtitles. 71 min. (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (November 18, 2005). Click on the second photo below. — J.R.
Arguably Louis Malle’s best work (1960). Based on Raymond Queneau’s farcical novel about a little girl (Catherine Demongeot) left in Paris for a weekend with her decadent uncle (Philippe Noiret), this wild spree goes overboard reproducing Mack Sennett-style slapstick, parodying various films of the 1950s, and playing with editing and color effects (Henri Decae’s cinematography is especially impressive), though gradually it becomes a rather disturbing nightmare about fascism. Forget the preposterous claim by a few critics that the movie’s editing influenced Alain Resnais, but there’s no doubt that Malle affected Richard Lester — and was clearly influenced himself by William Klein, whom he credited on the film as a visual consultant. A rather sharp, albeit soulless, film, packed with ideas and glitter and certainly worth a look. In French with subtitles. 93 min. Sun 11/20, 3 and 5 PM, Facets Cinematheque.
From the April 20, 2005 Chicago Reader. More recently, 16 years later, Erika Balsom, a Canadian film critic and teacher based in London, has just published a brilliant short book about this film, a sort of tour de force that I’ve liked enough to blurb. — J..R.
This 16-millimeter experimental feature (2004) by James Benning consists of ten upward views from a stationary camera, each ten minutes long and filmed with sync sound from his backyard in southern California. I expected something minimalist, but in fact this is remarkably full — a mesmerizing study in time, light, movement, and moisture that traces the shifting relations between clouds and earth, nature and people. Benning is so attentive that he teaches us how to look and listen, and once we adjust our plot-driven expectations, things that might have seemed static at first are revealed as constantly changing. If you’re expecting a test or an ordeal, you could be as surprised by this masterpiece, and as grateful for it, as I was. 101 min. Presented by Chicago Filmmakers. Sat 4/30, 8 PM, Cinema Borealis.
Christian Blackwood’s fascinating documentary portrait of Eartha Kitt not only offers a multifaceted sense of its subject — as professional entertainer, private individual, political activist, and self-commentator — but also treats each of these facets in a kaleidoscopic manner. The relationship between Kitt’s champagne-and-furs persona and her traumatic deep-south upbringing is especially suggestive; by the end of the film, one may not be sure how much of Kitt is self-invented, but the sense of dialectical exchange between the aspects of her personality keep all of them intriguing (1982). (JR)
Mitchell Leisen’s 1934 Death Takes a Holiday, based on a 1924 Italian play hy Alberto Cassella, doesn’t regard itself as a comedy. But its realization is founded on what I take to be an unconsciously comic premise: the notion that Death, as played by Fredric March–who comes to Earth as a human for three days to enjoy a holiday in a mansion full of wealthy guests–is a foreigner. Admittedly, Death is actually impersonating a deceased foreigner, Prince Sirki,, in order to consort with humans, but March already has a foreign accent even before he assumes this disguise.
Why? Arguably this is because Death as a metaphysical reality is both exotic and romantic in the movie’s terms, which is apparently part of what makes the Prince so alluring to Grazia (Evelyn Venable). By the same token, whenever March seems to periodically lose his foreign accent and become as American or as pseudo-English as the other swells is when we’re asked to perceive him as a mortal.
In short, Death taking a holiday gives our mortality a reprieve and Death returning is something like a foreign invasion. [3/20/21] Read more
Recommended: LE SPECTATEUR QUI EN SAVAIT TROP by Mark Rappaport, translated [from English to French] by Jean-Luc Mengus, Paris: P.O.L, 2008, 240 pp.
There are 16 pieces here -– including a Preface, a concluding essay entitled “Confessions of a Latent Heterosexual (Complete with Illustrations),” and four sections in between consisting of a Hitchcock Cycle (three stories) and an Eisenstein Cycle (three stories, with Marlene Dietrich playing a significant role in one), interspersed with two sections of four stories each. Some of the topics: The son of Madame de…, Jean Seberg, “The Tourist Who Knew Too Much,” “My Life with Catherine Deneuve,” Gilda’s gloves, Silvano Mangano and Capucine, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Marcel Proust in Marienbad. Whether these are autobiographical fictions, fictional essays, and/or stories about other stories is a matter directly addressed in the Preface. (Don’t expect any conclusive answers.)
I can’t wait for this to come out somewhere in English [2021: you can ccess it now online in English here, and both parts of Rappapot’s The Secret Life of Moving Shadows are also available on Amazon]–even though P.O.L, publisher of the quarterly film magazine TRAFIC (as well as the French translation of my own first book, MOVING PLACES, also done by Jean-Luc Mengus), has done a very handsome job with it. Read more
A column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted in May 2021. — J.R
One of my major recent activities, probably shared by most of my readers during the pandemic, is finding “new” (that is to say, unfamiliar) films to watch online. So, after reading a 1970 interview with the usually publicity-shy Elaine May in the New York Times, where she cited “Holiday for Henrietta” (La fête à Henriette, 1952), a film I’d never heard of, and Anchors Aweigh(1945), an MGM musical I only dimly recalled fromchildhood, as particular favorites, along with The Wizard of Oz (1939), I treated the first two of these idle references as recommendations, meanwhile wondering if they might also provide certain clues to or predictions of May’s own filmmaking practices in A New Leaf(1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1985), and/or Ishtar (1987).
Well, Anchors Awayat least offers some predictions. It costars Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors on leave in San Diego and Hollywood—Kelly a brash extrovert and womanizer, Sinatra a shy introvert, anticipating the respective male duos of Nicky (John Cassavetes) and Mikey (Peter Falk) in May’s third feature, and even the blatant casting-against-type of Chuck (Dustin Hoffman) and Lyle (Warren Beatty) in her fourth. Read more
The following letter was published in the May 2021 issue of Harper’s magazine. Violet Lucca, the Letters editor, invited me to respond to the March issue’s cover story, by Martin Scorsese, “on Fellini and the lost magic of movies”. — J.R.
The moment cinephilia links up with personal nostalgia, as it does in Martin Scorsese’s “Il Maestro,” intellectual distinctions become tenuous. He laments the devaluing of art as “content” by his dumb employers and people accessing cinema in their homes, yet he has no trouble admitting that he first saw La strada on TV with his parents. Moreover, he grew up with movies as an art form before having to wrestle with it as a business, whereas I grew up in a family of Alabama exhibitors and eventually underwent the reverse trajectory, discovering film art in New York around the same time he did.
Scorsese’s clearly a cinephile who has done extraordinary and generous work in making world cinema more widely available, but you’d never guess this from reading him on the subjects of Fellini and contemporary film culture. Here he seems to confuse personal choices and predilections with history, but my choices as a consumer aren’t his.
For me film culture remains as vital in some ways as it was in the 60s when Jonas Mekas could put out a magazine plausibly pretending to celebrate all of it. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (February 1, 1988). — J.R.
Like William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of the Emily Bronte novel, as well as Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevant, Luis Buñuel’s 1954 Mexican version discards the original novel’s framing strategy of telling the story from the viewpoint of two outsiders—a regrettable elision in all three cases, because much of the novel’s power and meaning stem from this crucial distancing strategy. Yet Buñuel’s low-budget melodrama has a certain gothic ferocity that’s missing in the other versions; the results are mixed, but seldom unworthy of the master. With Iraseme Dilian, Jorge Mistral, and Lilia Prado; in Spanish with subtitles. 91 min.
From Film Comment (September-October 1975). Some of this article, especially the early stretches, embarrasses me now for its pretentiousness, but I think it still has some value as a period piece.
A few brief footnotes to my interview with Chaplin: (1) We shared a joint at one point while doing it; (2) her comments about working with Rivette made it seem a lot less fun and more difficult, at least for her, than working with Altman (she described it at one point as having to show Rivette various kinds of acting like a rug merchant to see which one he liked); and in fact (3) a few decades later, when I met her again at a film festival, reminded her of our interview, and asked her what she thought of Noroit, she told me that she’d never seen it. — J.R.
London Journal
Or should I call this my NASHVILLE Journal? On March 19, I saw a monaural print in London at a private screening. Writing over three months later, shortly after its New York opening and a projected five before it’s supposed to surface in the rural West End, I can only wish it well on its way. Regular readers of this column may froth at the mouth if I drag Tati and Rivette into the case once more; in that case, froth away, folks — I’m sorry, but it’s Altman’s doing, not mine. Read more
At Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in the summer of 2015, Ehsan Khoshbakht and I launched a “Jazz Goes to the Movies” program, and reproduced below are our catalogue descriptions of what we showed. Late in June, Ehsan and I will be presenting a sequel to this program, with shorts featuring Duke Ellington.– J.R.
Jazz Goes to the Movies
Now that jazz is no longer assumed to be automatically synonymous with decadence and the forces of darkness, it can finally be experienced and evaluated on its own terms, and we can begin to look back on a century-long partnership of jazz and film with a certain objectivity. Both are relatively new arts roughly contemporaneous with the 20th century, having grown out of socially disreputable origins and having fought for serious recognition.
Part of this partnership has yielded the “jazz film,” a subgenre basically devoted to the recording of performances. But there are also successful collaborations between the expressive possibilities of jazz and film. And the ways in which jazz has been used in movies invariably tells us a great deal about the social, ethnic, aesthetic, and cultural biases of diverse societies and periods. The various responses of film producers to integrated jazz groups in the thirties, forties, and fifties, provide a kind of thumbnail social history. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (November 18, 1994). — J.R.
You can figure out a lot about the differences between our culture and French culture by comparing two current series of low-budget TV features about teenagers. The French series, Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age (“All the Boys and Girls of Their Age”), produced by the French “cultural” channel Arte, has yielded half a dozen features, most of them first-rate. The idea is for the filmmaker to make a fictionalized version of his or her own teenage years set in the appropriate period (different in each film) and to include at least one party scene in which pop songs of that era are used. (The series is financed in part by Polygram, which has furnished the appropriate recordings.) The first of these, Patricia Mazuy’s Travolta and Me, showed at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival; four others were programmed at the festival last month — Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water, André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds, Cedric Kahn’s Too Much Happiness, and Chantal Akerman’s Portrait of a Young Girl From Brussels — but unfortunately the first and best of these was canceled at the last minute. One more, Claire Denis’ Boom Boom [later retitled U.S.Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1974 (vol. 41, no. 489). –- J.R.
Drummer of Vengeance
Great Britain, 1974
Director: Robert Paget
The American West, shortly after the Civil War. A rebel soldier who goes over to the Union army returns home to find his Indian wife and his son murdered — the former after having been raped — and their house burned to the ground by vengeful Confederates. Coming upon a wind-up toy drummer in the ruins, he vows to track down and kill all the men responsible. His usual method of revenge is to wind up the toy, place it on the ground, and ask his victim to make his play — whether armed or unarmed – before shooting him. He pays a carpenter to make the necessary coffins in advance and quickly dispatches six of the men he is after. The angry townsfolk, eager to be rid of the avenger (known only as the Stranger) and anxious for Sheriff Mason to apprehend him, are spurred on by the fanatical Bible-spouting of the town’s gravedigger — actually the Stranger in disguise. The Stranger also impersonates an Indian in a lance-throwing act in O’Conner’s Travelling Show in order to kill his next victim. Read more
From Film Comment, November-December 1972 and Discovering Orson Welles (California, 2007) — the latter of which includes the following introduction. My apologies for some occasional glitches in the formatting, which I haven’t managed to rectify. — J.R.
The following article was inspired by my having been lent Welles’s first film script by the late, Cuban-born film critic Carlos Clarens while we were both living in Paris. This was supplemented eventually by my meeting with Welles, and initially by research in the library at that city’s American Center and correspondence with Richard Wilson, a longtime Welles associate who was probably unique among his close collaborators in his scholarly meticulousness (as evidenced in his suberb rebuttal to an article by Charles Higham about IT’S ALL TRUE, appropriately entitled “It’s Not Quite All True,” in the Autumn 1970 issue of Sight and Sound — an essay that lamentably had no sequels)
As a former graduate student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in English and American Literature (1966-69) who had dropped out shortly before moving to Paris, I was still somewhat under the sway of that academic training when I wrote this piece, which partially accounts for its literary orientation.Read more
A column for the Spanish monthly Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted on February 16, 2021. — J.R.
I can’t decide which is more depressing — the capitalist suppression of Woody Allen’s latest comedy (Rifkin’s Festival) in the U.S. for stupid reasons or the stupid film itself and all that it doesn’t have to say (i.e., as little as possible) about Spain, the Basque country, San Sebastian, sex, romance, growing old, cinema, publicity, film festivals, Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel, Welles, Godard, and Truffaut — to mix metaphors, a veritable flood of empty holes. Film historian Joseph McBride, who like me sneaked an unauthorized look, finds “pleasurable” and “relaxed” what I find juiceless and inert. (What other film removes most of Gina Gershon’s sex appeal?)
The fact that some colleagues can find fun in Rifkin’s Festival epitomizes for me a particular American pathos — a sadness akin to labeling some of Donald Trump’s Republican slaves heroic martyrs if they briefly broke away from his directives after spouting and supporting his dangerous nonsense for months. But I’m susceptible to the same sort of foolishness when I pass some post-surgery recovery time enjoying the audiobook of Mark Harris’ Mike Nichols: A Life (over 20 hours long), as undemanding in its professional polish as all the Nichols films I’ve wasted my time watching. Read more
