Sunday 2 February 2014

Abroad

Abroad



This rambling account covers my attempt to up-date myself with the European movie scene - once my home ground. It took place in an environment that still has an ability to surprise me, as when I came round one corner off the rue des écoles and there was a teenager necking with an Asian girl a couple of yards away from a man on the footpath polishing a new coffin - only in Paris.

Street music is worth an article on it’s own - a thirteen piece string orchestra determinedly doing Vivaldi in the Chatelet Métro or the Seine bridge, which they closed in the evening so a jazz band could set up there, not too far from the racked seating in the Notre Dame forecourt, where a man had the crowd there joining in the choruses of “Stand By Me” - inEnglish. For virtuoso I nominate the Mexican group outside the restaurant in Milan, where the leader ended the round playing two trumpets, complete with fingering simultaneously - and very well.

First thing I noticed on getting back to London was that Time Out has vanished or, as it turned out, been reduced to a super market giveaway. In Paris, L’Officiel des Spectacles and Pariscope are both still going gangbusters. The English magazine saw itself as a rallying point for the politically correct and the Internet blew it away, as soon as it’s one time readers found it easier to get the prices and starting times they’d bought the magazine for from the net. In Paris, their publications see their function as informing the people, who want to pick through the city’s smorgasbord of enjoyments and their public is still in place.

Those who confuse the two are delusional - not wanting to point the finger locally.

Photo: Jaqui Wise.
The range of movies available in walking distance from my left bank Paris hotel was
staggering. It takes a lot to beat having an impeccable digital transfer of The Trouble With Harry in theatrical exhibition five minutes away, at ten at night.

The aging of movie enthusiasts was obvious looking at the turn out for a Lino Ventura season at Le Desperado there. That one did provide us gray beards with Molinaro’s nouvelle vague style Un Témoin dans la ville from a Boileau & Narcejac story and William Dieterle’s Die Herrin der Welt, a companion piece to Fritz Lang’s Tiger von Eschnaper. The Bercy Cinematheque played the 1938 Conrad Veidt-Jean Dreville Joueur des echecs in it’s fourth auditorium, the Salle Lotte Eisner, actually a viewing theatrette up four flights of stairs, and after that climb, there was an alarming amount of heavy breathing among the (almost all) senior citizen audience.

The pickings were thinner this trip. Bercy was in the middle of a Michel Piccoli retrospective, a giant talent but one whose work is largely familiar. I’d hoped to see the Great Man himself but he didn’t show for the sessions I attended. I did watch his l949 debut Le point du jour with some interest - the only mining film without a cave in? However Piccoli’s previously unknown work as director proved heavy sledding. TheirCiné Club was pretty scary too - terrible film, weak intro, feeble discussion - and this is movie enthusiast central! 

 At one stage, I had operations going on three floors of the Bercy building, selecting Sergio Corbucci photos in their Iconotèque, selling books to their Librairie, and watching the L’Herbier Mystere de la Chambre Jaune, first of an early sound Joseph Rouletabilletrilogy, in their Vidéotheque, while waiting for the library staff to get back from lunch.  They cut off my viewing on Autant Lara’s L'affaire du courrier de Lyon because they were closing the video area early to lay out the champagne flutes for the Cohens' opening their retrospective.  

I was happier at the Les Halles Forum des images. Their Vidéo space is more luxurious. You can book a conference room to watch items from their libary in a suitably dimmed luxury area - and it’s in the centre of Paris. The outfit’s one screening of Edgar Neville’s La torre de los siete jorobados filled up before I got there but the box office lady let me sit on the floor, she said because she liked me, though more likely having a lost looking Australian tourist show up to see an obscure nineteen forties Spanish fantasy movie appealed to her notion of strange.

Having competing film museums in the one city - that’s entertainment. Boy Do We Need It Now! Between these they have seven auditoria. How come Sydney has zero?

Gerard Jugnot opened in the new Francis Veber play to some enthusiasm. I got stuck with
a terrible seat and found the piece was full of techno jargon about financial advice, that out distanced my broken French, so that didn’t work out too well but it was interesting to see Jugnot, an ultimate movie actor, absolutely in his element on stage. Later in Verona, the town was packed out by tourists come to see the arena presentation (!) of “Romeo and Juliet.”  Tony Servillo was doing Eduardo de Filipo there but I felt I’d paid my dues to foreign speak live theater by then.

You have to work hard now to find the movie memorabilia, which used to be an industry but I was agreeably surprised to pick up a nice repro Testament of Dr. Mabuse poster (for the French version with Jim Gerald!) in Spitalfields Market. The decline in movie book shops is near complete, with Contacts in Paris closing while I was there, following Ciné Memoire. Even so, there are more copies of my Litvak and Curtiz books on sale in Paris than there are in all Australia.

Of course European TV puts our local operators to shame. In Lille, I found one French speaking channel half way through a William Wellman season going back to the thirties. While I was in Italy, Giuliano Gemma died. Next day, TV Iris managed an Angel Face (the Morricone theme name of his Ringo character) evening, following The Return of Ringo with Damiano Damiani’s impressive 1980 Un uomo in ginocchio/ Man on His Knees. What their public made of the Ringo copy, when it turned out to be dubbed into French, is speculative.

Everywhere I went in Italy I saw closed movie houses, which was a bit of a downer but, for a foreigner it was a was a disappointment that the world's most beautiful cinema, the Odeon Space in Milan was only showing dubbed US movies. I enjoy visits to that one.

However their DVD business is fabulous - even though the few subtitled discs are likely to be for deaf Italians. Every little neighborhood video store is packed with unseen-in-Oz work by Leonardo Pietraccioni, Puppi Avarti, Daniele Luchetti and the rest, following their commercial releases there. Better, one proprietor in Venice was able to casually pull off the shelf  the seventy year old De Sica Maddalena zero in condotta and Castellani’s Un Colpo di Pistola. Ricordi Milan, in the historic Galleria, has an entire bay filled with silent movies - in with a few that they think are silent. That’s several times over the BFI Filmstore and the Cinémamathèque Française Librairie combined.

And there was always the thought that no matter how good it all was, it was going to get better when I made it to Pordenone for fifteen hour days of unfamiliar silent movies under optimum conditions - usually. Years back I said to David Robinson that if I got to stage his event (which drew more than a thousand people this year) in Australia, I’d be doing well to get twenty souls. Subsequent developments seem to indicate that was a good guess.

So what did I learn? Well the enthusiast sector has changed - and not for the better. There is still interest - now in the enormous pool of specialist movie material that video has generated - but how it’s communicated, if at all,  is no longer obvious. Whole areas, like Eurotrash movies, porn, experimental or activist films have all but vanished from theatrical exhibition, along with the sixteen millimeter circuit. Kevin Brownlow doing his five hour version of Napoléon is still a buzz event but it only happens on his rounds once in a decade. The crowds that used to chatter with excitement in the foyer after one-off screenings, clutching their favorite movie magazines, seem to have evaporated. God, a lot of them are dead!

... I miss all that. 
 
Barrie Pattison