Photo Richard Wong

FILM FREAK ABROAD 2016.

I guess I’ve got to count this year’s trip to Europe as a success. I didn’t ride taxis. I didn’t have a meal in McDonalds and I didn’t take any selfies of myself with a 12th Century Madonna. I also didn’t encounter a single refugee, though I did have a sudden unexpected eye movement finding my lady friend engulfed by Romanian pick pockets.

As far a films go the results were mixed.

Paris as an ever renewing source of vintage American movies is a well known phenomenon but the same thing is true for their Italian films. Rue Champolion has for years had re-runs of Italian sex comedies of the seventies. By and large these are not funny and not sexy as poor Laura Antonelli struggles with her indignities, though Luigi Commenici’s Mio Dio, come sono caduta in basso! /Till Marriage Do Us Part did manage a nice joke strip tease in period costume.

However the choice is widening.

The Cinematheque’s crime movie season provided  Daniele Vicario’s presentable il passato e una terra straniero of  2008 where lawyer Elio Germani's meeting with a woman triggers the flashback of his being sucked into the lower reaches of society. More curious was a three cinema opening of Antonio Pietrangeli’s first movie Il sole negli occhi / Empty Eyes fifty three years after it first appeared. The director went on to make Adua e le compagne / Hungry for Love so I was curious enough to investigate. Pietrangeli’s film however proved a formula weepy about poor young Irene Galter ill used in the big city. The real streets, homes and the local dance hall showed the realist tradition but the plot was from stock with the society of her fellow maids the only mildly innovative element.

Cinema Zero's tote bag."Ce la forza sia con te."

Pick of the batch proved to be Anna Magnani, Toto and Ben Gazzara in what may be Mario Monicelli’s best film, the 1960 Risate di Gioia (Tears of Joy) with Toto getting roped into blonde movie extra Anna’s plan to join the New Year celebration, where they don’t want her, and the pair trapped in Ben’s scheme to mount a major scam before the night is out and his criminal associates close in on him. After unfamiliar plot developments in real settings there’s a startling scene where Gazzara turns on the pair who have woken up to him at last and declares that at least he works at his scams. Otherwise he’d be as pitiful as they are.

A beautiful sub-titled digital copy did justice to Leonardo Barboni’s wide images. It’s sad to think that a film as remarkable as this vanished after a brief first run dubbed as The Passionate Thief in the English language market. It left me frustrated at not being able to get to the other unfamiliar titles in La Filmotheque’s twenty plus schedule.

Film maker introduced screenings are a near daily occurrence in Paris and not just people promoting their new product. Jean Sorel was fronting a selection of his movies from the sixties. Only clashes in timing kept me away. I did however get to marvelous animator Michel Ocelot’s session with a kid audience (we were the tallest ones they had) for his new production Ivan Tsarévich et le princesse changeant - actually three new episodes to his animated series where the silhouette voice actors argue about he plot before we get the story segment. Colour and design are again brilliant and it was interesting to see Ocelot working the children’s question and answer session (“Quoi - vous n’avez pas vue Kirikou?”) till it got stretched to the point where they wanted to get the pastries in the foyer.

 

Michel Ocelot animation.

 One tiny asked him why he worked with black (silhouette)  figures and Ocelot answered that it had been an economy move at first but he persisted because it boosted the use of imagination. I’ve heard a lot less informative exchanges among big people at the Sydney Film Festival.

Mainly I let the new French product slide by on the principal that it would be offered at the French Film Week - and with sub titles - but I did knock out  Bernard Bonello’s Nocturama which may be the first of the inevitable movies on the Paris bombings. No one seems to worry about the fact that the terrorists are the good guys in this one. Not a great film but it does field a few great images - the group filmed in the nose cone of the driverless train as it emerges from the Metro tunnel to show the La Defence arch on the skyline or the face of the golden statue engulfed in flames. Ma loute is the new Bruno Dumont movie with its celebrity stars Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and incredibly Juliette Binoche transformed into grotesques, as the action comes to focus on the cross dressing daughter of the big house making a couple with the brutish fisherfolk family’s son. If Camille Claudel 1915 and Flanders which Dumont also made with  producer Bouchareb are off kilter, this one is totally dotty and not in a good way.

Joachim Lafosse’s L'économie du couple / After Love is a slick relationship piece with the marriage of the comfortably off couple disintegrating. It showcases now hot star Bérénice Bejo opposite busy writer-director-actor Cedric Kahn. I might have liked it better with translation.

 

Pick of the bunch was 2014’s Mon pire cauchemar a reworking of the Theodora Goes Wild formula with slobby Benoit Poelvoorde getting mixed into chic Isabelle Huppert’s life. The switch of audience sympathies between them is more deft than anything I’ve seen in director Anne Fontaine’s other work. This is the kind of picture that wows the sub-titles crowd who should have been offered it by now.

Unfamiliar vintage French cinema is always turning over there. The ever intriguing Le Desperado was doing Raimu & Pierre Fresnay which gave me  a chance to see Jean Delannoy’s 1953 La Route Napoléon with Fresnay heading up a P.R. operation reconstructing the Emperor’s return from Elba with a garish caravan of sponsor labeled vehicles diverted from the chateau the bailiffs had sealed and having to set up in a small village well away from the original progress. This one should have been funnier.

 The kind of film I’m more interested in seeing in Paris is the European made in English language movie. Think Mateo Gil’s Blackthorn, the Matieu Almaric-Arnaud Desplechin  Jimmy P. : Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian or Pupi Avarti’s Bix. These never seem to get significant distribution in Australia and are often  excellent. Accordingly I homed in on Soy Nero a Germany - France - USA - Mexico co production from Iranian director Raffi Pitts, which claims to discuss the green card soldiers, foreigners promised nationality for fighting with US troops and then deported. This one opens out into the whole  question of nationality, with Johny Ortiz born in the US to illegals and accordingly not recognised, meaning he has to smuggle himself back into his country of birth. The second half, about his time fighting in Iraq, is another movie but ingeniously echoes the US material.

It will be more than revealing to see which if any of these make their way through the distribution mechanism to Australia.

 B.P.

PORDENONE 2016

The Pordenone Gionate del Cinema Muto is one of the last hold outs for the serious (or indeed frivolous) movie goer. Even as the train was pulling out of Venice Centrale, the action was starting as familiar faces began the kind of informed conversation that is  missing from the Australian film scene. I would find myself discussing the career of Chow Yun-fat over diner and trading Gian Maria Volonte DVDs in the breaks.

This is all agreeable - no exceptional - but the enthusiastic surface covers serious divisions. Now that there is actually money changing hands, tensions are emerging over who actually owns vintage films (which most of the time means old Hollywood). The companies, the archives and the entrepreneurs all eye one another suspiciously. Kevin Brownlow has lost the right to show the Gance Napoléon, his lifetime project.

My sympathies tend to lodge with the buccaneers. Salaried officers at institutions seem too eager to think that outsiders, who have been sufficiently enterprising to acquire at their own expense work that the civil servants might have been expected to find themselves, should hand it over for nothing. If there really is a question of who owns the material that companies and archives have ignored, sometimes for a century, the answer clearly is the viewers. It was made to their specifications and they paid for it - sometimes not enough but that’s another matter.

This year’s Pordenone Silent Movie week landed their new director Jay Weisberg with the big ask of following last year’s twin highlights, a great Victor Fleming retrospective and the six hour Henri Fescourt Les Miserables, with Neil Brand on piano, doing the whole show and getting a standing ovation.

M. Fescourt was back again this year with his 1929 Monte-Cristo for which they furloughed Neil Brand to offer Donald Sosin and Frank Bockius doing a perfectly adequate score for a mere two and a half hours. The pair had to compete with the still resonant memory of last year.

Montecristo becomes an anti climax, stuck with Jean Angelo (Epstein’s Robert Macaire, Feyder’s L’Atalantide) who could be a passable costume hero but would never match Miserables’ Gabriel Gabrio as a performer. Angelo’s early scenes, made up youthful, get him off to a shaky start. The ever impressive Lil Dagover, Bernard Goetzke, Gaston Modot and young Marie Glory don’t get much scope. The production was ambitiously decorated and a largely forgotten support cast inhabit the familiar characters well enough. The departures from the usual adaptations were minor - giving Angelo time to explore the island of Monte Christo and offering unusual prominence to Tamara Tsezenko’s Hayddée.

Hopes ran high for a William Cameron Menzies season coming in the wake of James Curtis’ book on him as art director phenomenon - creator of the role of Production Designer, populariser of the concept of Story Board and instigator of Bat Man. This proved a bit of a fizzer with Curtis’ book nowhere to be had and no exhibition of the Menzies sketches which would have made a notable event on their own.

The films on show were mainly familiar items like Lewis Milestone’s Garden of Eden and better the John Barrymore Tempest both 1928 or they were fragmentary - Roland West’s 1927 The Dove and a couple of Menzies sound shorts. Raoul Walsh’s 1922 Kindred of the Dust had little of design interest beyond building the shack setting on a real shore line and Henry King and Sam Taylor’s 1928 The Woman Disputed lost impetus after a rousing opening with the prisoner going over Menzies shadowed prison wall with gun shots from his jailers shattering the street light next to which Norma Talmadge is peddling her wares. For those first couple of minutes, characters who vanish or become key to the intrigue pile onto the screen, including Gustav Von Seyfertitz reproaching our fallen women heroine. After this, attention falls away and cliché takes over.

The big night was a live orchestra presentation of the Fairbanks-Menzies Thief of Bagdad. This season is being expanded for a New York showing and I’ll get back to Menzies.

Der Adjudant des zaren directed by Vlad Strizhevsky in 1929 added to that gallery of swashbuckling, uniformed Ivan Mozhukhin heroes that continually delight the regulars at Pordenone. Unfamiliar till a copy was retrieved from Der Danske Filminsitutet, I was one of the people who confused it with the Mozhukhin Courier of the Czar, his Michael Strogoff. It turns out to be the most perfect of the star’s vehicles. His other films were sometimes more ambitious, sometimes better but this one is flawless.

Rescuing cloche hat damsel in distress, the winning Claudia Boni, from a crisis at the rail station, Ivan is rapidly smitten. They marry. However she is not what she appears, actually a pawn in the hands of sinister revolutionist Alexander Granach (later in Kameradschaft & Hangmen Also Die). Fearsome Chief of Police Fritz Alberti guards the safety of the Tsar, who they treat with a surreal reverence. When Ivan tumbles the plot, it looks like he will have to sacrifice his great love to the cause (startling moment when they realise she has left her purse with the small pistol in it where Alberti will find it) Troikas race to the border and shots are exchanged.  I felt like cheering.

Blowing the dust off the grim Mozhukhin-Volkoff 1924 Kean one more time was an anti climax.

Most agreeable surprise proved to be Sinclair Hill’s 1928 The Guns of Loos, another glimpse of the little viewed British silent films. This one featured the screen debut of a (brunette) Madeline Carroll opposite Ironmaster Henry Victor (L’Argent, Confessions of a Nazi Spy) as the munitions magnate who leads his workers battalion when shipped to the WW1 Battle of Loos, and is overtaken by “funk”. The film’s great set piece is the scene of galloping the artillery to safety under fire.

It’s comments on class and politics are a bit on the scary side (Victor punches out one of those bolshy workers’ leaders the way Leslie Banks does in Michael Powel’s Red Ensign) but the imposing staging, not obvious in never fielding more than a couple dozen people on screen, gives the impression of great film making skill. All right then, how about Sinclair Hill’s 1927 Boadicea?

The British cinema was also (sort of) represented by US director George Fitzmaurice’s presentable 1922 version of  Three Live Ghosts shot there with a cast that included Norman Kerry and Edmund Goulding. The copy was retrieved from Russia, where it had originally been re-edited to conform to the socialist ideal, removing the inter-titles by Alfred Hitchcock. The competition to have the earliest Hitchcock is fierce, with the British offering one reel of the Seymour Hicks two reeler Always Tell Your Wife where they speculate Hitch worked on the missing half.

It was OK to see the splendid Garbo Mysterious Lady again on the big screen with an orchestra, though Carl Davis failed its ultimate silent movie music test.  The set piece scene of Conrad Nagel pacing his cell in time to the superimposed drum beats of his court martial needs inspired handling.

After that the pickings got thin. There were a few nice pieces among the shorts.  The largely uninspiring Al Christie programs did include the 1923 Navy Blues from Harold and better known brother William Beaudine with Dorothy Devore involved in lively hijinks at sea. Lau Lauritzen Sr’s Danish 1917 Min svigerinde fra amerika was a surprisingly racy infidelity quarter hour. There was another look at George Lacomble’s imposing La Zone. An uncharacteristically serious 1913 Selig Tom Mix The Escape of Jim Nolan stood out in the always intriguing early westerns and it’s nice to see the pre WW1 Emile Cohls. The Japanese Momotaro cartoons were also enjoyable and the unknown 1928 Disney Africa Before Dark in a beautiful copy was a treat.

On the other hand, the screening of Hans Werkmeisters’ 1920 Algol with Emil Jannings demonstrated that no matter how good the restoration is, a nice copy of a pretentious and boring film is still a pretentious and boring event. The English Shakespeare primitives could also have been left on their DVD. 1913’s Ventianische Nacht, an early film by Max Reinhard no less, with Alfred Abel (Metropolis) proved just a ballet in real location curiosity, though, among the primitive material, I did enjoy the German Chromolithograph loops printed from the hand painted coloured films made for the projector toys in the pre WW1 era.

The novelty of repeated street scapes and City Symphonies wore off and the so called canon programs revived items like Mauritz Stiller’s drear 1920 Erotikon (Lars Hanson & Tora Teje) and Renoir’s grubby 1926 Nana with the lackluster duo of Jean Angelo and Catherine Hesling fronting Werner Krauss and Valeska Gert. We scored an even tackier 1917 version with one Tilde Kassay. Bring back Martine Carol I say! The legendary Esther Shaub Fall of the Romanov Dynasty  compilation offered terrible lab work and pedestrian assembly.

Also outlasting its welcome was the serial - actually series - Who’s Guilty? where the same players enact different social reproach dramas in each half hour episode. Howard Estabrook, Anna (Q.) Nilsson and Tom Moore figured. No connection to the Columbia fifties serial beyond the name.

Too many featured seasons proved unrewarding, like a John H. Collins retrospective. It was interesting to watch his awareness of film form develop from 1915’s On the Stroke of 12 through to his Riders of the Night of 1918, as he realised that editing could be a tool rather than a just means of recording and the quality of his collaborators improved with John Arnold (The Wind) on camera but his sensitivity remained stage melo. Collins’ celebrated Blue Jeans even has the hero rescued from a great big saw that gets nearer and nearer. Collins’ wife and star, the pixieish Viola Dana, who has a double role in his 1917 The Girl Without a Soul, would turn up years later as the lead in Frank Capra’s That Certain Thing.

There’s always the spot the star game - Richard Alexander, Flash Gordon’s Prince Barin and Ike Clanton to Walter Huston’s Wyatt Earp, makes a pass at Garbo in Mysterious Lady, already venerable Russell Simpson presides over his court room in  Blue Jeans and there’s a spunky young Hermoine Badley speaking up for the factory girls in The Guns of Loos.  

Poland contributed a dispiriting selection. Opera director Richard Ordynski’s draggy, incomplete 1928 costume drama Pan Tadeusz  (also on U-Tube in a nice tinted but untranslated copy) lacks a rousing finale in it’s present form. 1929s Mocny Czlowiek / The Strong Man  has a more modern feel but fails to involve as ambitious protagonist Gregori Chmara steals his dead friend’s MSS and finds his multiple duplicities catching up with him during a stage presentation of the work. Henryk Szaro’s 1930 Janko Muzykant was a ring-in where where they’d lost the track, with lengthy shots of the lead bowing away soundlessly on his violin. I was sitting there watching the l919 frock coat melo Ludzie bez jutra without any enthusiasm, thinking maybe I was being too hard on Polish movies when the man in the next seat started snoring.

Historical material like this has a place in an event like Pordenone, though how big is speculative. (I just wish they’d play it on the years I don’t go) It’s a bit much to expect the event to string masterpieces end to end when they have so many academic, business and national factions to satisfy. I guess it's enough that they are there and that they offer the satisfactions that they do.

NOT MY MADAM BOVARY. 

Fan Bing Bing - I Am Not Madame Bovary.

At the George St. Centre, possibly only till Wednesday, we’ve got Xiaogang Feng’s  Wo
Bu Shi Pan Jinlian / I Am Not Madame Bovary. 

It occurs to me that what I know or think I know about modern China comes mainly from watching the films of  Xiaogang Feng - If You Are the One, Aftershock the first Chinese IMAX movie or Personal Tailor. He’s had his feet off the pedals lately but Madam Bovary is a serious effort. Pity about the dumb title - Emma Bovary’s predicament is totally different from that of Bing-bing Fan in the new movie, for which they struggled to find a cultural equivalent.

The normally glamorous Fan, who has been in English language multiplex movies, is a wife involved in a One Child Family apartment scam divorce, which left her without a child or a husband. Seeking redress she goes to a distant relative in the legal bureaucracy, with a gift of meat she has personally cured, and works her way up the chain of local officials (“Who cares what a peasant woman wants?”) till she decides that people in Beijing are smarter and gets the ear of a Chairman at a Party Conference.

Diligent movie viewers are saying it’s the plot of Jang Yimou’s 1992 Qiu Ju da guan si and that’s part of the point. That film’s message was that village whistle blowers just don’t get the big picture (compare other socialist country pieces like  Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Amator/ Camera Buff). Here we start hearing about looking outwards not upwards and the spread of the Internet. It’s a film about listening to the people uncannily anticipating Brexit and the Trump era. It’s argument is complicated but not difficult. Fan is barking but a real society should be able to accommodate crazy people. Even if you reject it, it’s something to be considered.

On top of that, the film making is remarkable. Feng shoots most of the action through a round matte, making for unfamiliar compositions and providing striking moments as in going though a tunnel or when the camera moves sideways, uncharacteristically following her lover-rapist who keeps on coming back into frame further undressed, or the transition to a vertical format when the action arrives in the capital, along with an ultra wide screen coda. The visuals are continually strikingly beautiful. They need to be viewed on a big screen.

What we are seeing at two hours plus may be the uncensored version. The piece has had a rough passage on it’s home turf. You may not get another crack at this one.

Tavernier - Voyage

Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema 

Script & directed by Bertrand Tavernier     

   

 It’s kind of suitable that the end of my European movie excursion should be Bertrand Tavernier's Voyage a travers le cinema francais his three hour plus answer to the Martin Scorsese films about Scorsese’s discovery of US and Italian movies. The Taverrnier documentary arrived with a Gaumont logo stating “from the very first...” and packed the 2.00 o’clock at UGC Les Halles.

The opening montage, of great shots from key movies beautifully reproduced, immediately wins over an audience. We are going to see usually exceptional material in the correct format. The film isn’t an account of Tavernier’s own work or a run through of French cinema history. It’s about the director’s discovery of French movies. We kick off with the story of WW2 shortages leaving young Taverier with TB for which he was sent to a sanatorium where they ran Le Dernier atout long before he became aware of it’s director Jaques Becker and his career, of which we get an analysis. We learn that Jean Paul Gaultier watches Becker’s Falbalas every year for it’s analysis of the fashion industry.

Starting with Tavernier’s dad filmed in the family garden the director used for l'Horloger de St. Paul, autobiographical elements like the Nickleodeon Cine Club and the time spent in the now demolished Cinémas du Quartier, along with Tavernier’s work on enthusiast
movie writing get coverage, in with his job as assistant to Jean Pierre Melville, who told Tavernier he was the worst assistant he’d ever had and introduced him to a producer friend who put him to work as a press officer. Missing is the story about Tavernier telling Sam Peckinpah that he might be a great director but he was a total menace to publicity, winning Tavernier the choice of promoting any film the approving  producer had on his books.

Also under the microscope are Jean Renoir (“How could the nephew of Auguste Renoir become an American citizen?”) and Jean Gabin, with whom Tavernier did a long interview and whose career is analysed giving as much time to films like Gas Oil as the acknowledged masterpieces. Tavernier finds it revealing that Gabin produced the reviled le Chat. 

Jean Gabin late career.

The Von

 Particular emphasis goes to Edmond T. Greville (“the ultimate cult director” – well his
1937 Mlle Docteur is better than the Pabst film it cannibalizes). I loved the story of
Greville being told by Von Stroheim that the actor intended to play an amputee in  his role in Menaces and the director, desperate, coming up with the half  mask to cover the character's WW1 injuries - the Janus face, War and Peace. The Von was totally absorbed with the mask idea and forgot about the amputee thing.

The surprise is when we get to Eddie Constantine, whose films are to Tavernier a break with the tepid French crime movies that precede  them. The punch up with the director in John Berry’s 1955 Ça va barder - gets as much time as Alphaville.

Voyage ends surprisingly with a long section on French film music repeating Trufaut’s endorsement of Maurice Jaubert, though I’m puzled how Tavernier can say that Le Jour se leve has no theme when the same nine note phrase repeats from the titles to the ending even coming up as the music behind Jules Berry’s music hall dog act.  Tavernier rightly picks out the great Joseph Kosma (triply forbidden to work on Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis as a Jew, a Communist and a fugitive, but still providing the music for the mime scenes) and resolves the question of why, earlier in this production, the ending of Renoir’s Partie de Campagne wasn’t shown when Tavernier described it as the most touching scene in the cinema.

Watching his documentary is like talking to Tavernier himself. I keep on wanting to disagree with what he's saying while admiring the passion and effort behind his choices and there's always the odd moment of connection - our shared delight in Delannoy's 1939 "Von Sternbergian" Macao, l’enfer du jeu which gets early prominence equal to Renoir and Gabin - and Eddie Constantine and Jean Sacha.

I sweat on it turning up locally with subtitles. Part Two is said to be on the way.