French Film Festival 2016

The 2016 French Film Festival

This one  remains a big ticket scene here - forty eight movies. On the plus side the booklet and celebrity comment trailer were nice this year but visiting film makers were sadly missed. You can query some choices, opening with the inoffensive Rosalie Blum when they had material like Dheepan and Le Tout nouveau testament in their line up,  and they don’t seem to learn. Philippe Garrel’s drear Les amants réguliers held the Academy house record for walk-outs, but they went ahead and programmed his new L'ombre des femmes / Shadow of Women while omitting material like Clément Cogitore’s admired Ni le ciel ni la terre.

In a previous post I covered Arnaud Desplecin’s My Golden Days / Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse account of Mathieu Almaric’s past triggered by the discovery of his passport, given to a Jewish refugee years before, and Michel Gondry’s endearing Microbe & Gasoil with the kids hitting the road in the home built timber car.  Since then Jaco Van Dormael’s great  Le Tout nouveau testament has been up for the Oscar it should have had. The copy in the festival appears to have been slightly modified since the Paris opening. It totally overshadows the other Benoit Poelvoorde movie, Jean Pierre Améris agreeable enough Family for Rent /Une Famille a Louer with isolated rich Benoit hiring Virginie Efira’s battler family to give him the common touch. 

le tout nouveau testamant - Poelvoorde

Also excellent is Stephan Brizé’s The Measure of a Man / La Loi du marché which kicks off with scruffy, fifty something Vincent Lindon being told he’s wasted him time doing a crane driver course as his benefit entitlement ran out, and follows his struggle to survive among the working poor with the plot taking an unexpected twist when he turns up as a security man at the giant Hyper Mart.

The film is compared to the Dardennes but it connects back earlier, to seventies German arbeiter films like Schneeglöckchen blühen im September or Ken Loach’s hymns to the Unions.  Here the focus on the personal is greater and more effective. Convincing minimal production values. Mainly first time actors and technicians producing a grainy long lens look, with some scenes a single take.

Director and star have built up a body of these (Mlle Chambon, Quelques heures de printemps) but this is better.

Also superior and also unexpected is Xavier (Quand j'étais chanteur) Giannoli’s Marguerite with Catharine Frot coming back gangbusters as an heiress who sings worse than Florence Foster Jenkins without anybody being game to stop her giving recitals. The actress has nailed a spot among the notables of French cinema here.

The dark, detailed bad taste - good taste privileged class settings contrasted to the lively decadence of the arts community, all realised in unfamiliar Czech filmed production values, create a kind of early Twentieth Century Sunset Boulevard 

The most imposing scene comes when the mean spirited anarchists have Frot  perform at the Cabaret Marot, where she does the Marseillaise, complete with rosette, trident and three corner hat, behind the sheet on which they project (untinted 16mm.!) battle atrocity footage for an audience of bearded nuns, politicians and affronted soldiers. They can’t match this in the finale they construct. Appealing Christa Théret (Déa in the Depardieu Homme Qiu Rit) seem to have a monopoly on sympathy.

Then I got two exceptional movies in a single day.

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan has raised controversy on it’s home turf by the contrast between its depiction of grubby hostile France and sunny welcoming Britain. It’s one of a handful of films which tackle the refugee experience with conviction, whether you put it in with outsider views like Dirty Pretty Things or Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma or participant cinema like La Pirogue and the Hong Kong film where they train the leads with street maps of Hanoi to pass themselves off as Vietnamese refugees.

Jesuthasan Antonythasan ; Dheepan

Here we kick off in a camp where Kalieaswari Srinivasan searches among the refugees for a nine year old girl needed to complete the family listed on the dead  man’s passport they plan on using. The translator coaches leading man Jesuthasan Antonythasan on the back story he has to invent to be plausible for the interviewing authorities and the newly blended family are accepted as immigrants to France. There Antonythasan becomes janitor to a run down housing project, witnessing the violent behaviors of  gangs that he dismisses as less dangerous than the ones they knew in Sri Lanka - an observation that motivates the savage climax - the girl in the seat next to me was near hysterical watching that.

Paralleling the real life experience of it’s lead, the film uses non pros and a few familiar faces like Vincent Rotttiers, with unobtrusive film craft.  It appears to have a straight forward narrative but also runs on a complex, conflicting perception of their reality by the characters - bogus father, mother, daughter, gang leader wearing a home detention bracelet and Tamil Tiger general. It may be considered Audiard’s best work to date.

You could not get a more different film to Samuel Bentechrit’s Asphalte / Macadam Stories.  Bentechrit has been off the radar since his passably eccentric black and white J'ai toujours rêvé d'être un gangster - that’s a translation of the opening line of Goodfellars incidentally. His two subsequent movies have gotten little attention but now he’s back gangbusters.

We kick off with another dilapidated housing  project, with a couple of skin heads lounging at the entrance, and get into a meeting with the Body Corp, where Gustave Kerven (Aaltra, Dans la cour) gets a laugh by just sitting there. He’s the only one who doesn’t want to pay for a new elevator because he’s on the second floor. He’s excused with the proviso that he can’t use the new lift. Impressed by the chairman’s exercise machine he gets one which puts him in hospital, to be sent back in a wheel chair. Kerven’s enforced nocturnal life style brings him into contact with night nurse Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi.

Meanwhile director Bentechrit’s son, as an abandoned teen, finds ex star Isabelle Huppert moving in next door and the space station insets lead to an escape pod landing astronaut Michael Pitt on the roof in front of the bemused skin heads. He shelters with Arab mother Tassadit Mandi who pretty much steals the picture (she’s also glimpsed briefly in Dheepan) turning him out in her imprisoned son’s Marseilles soccer shirt and feeding him couscous, without them having a common language.

Notice that three by four, the old Academy frame, is creeping back - Imax films, Carlos Reygadas and Grand Budapest Hotel. They use it here for the body of the movie, the image only going into wide screen for Huppert’s video audition, where her performance is modified under Bentchiret the younger’s direction - a considerable set piece in itself.

This one is pretty much unique though it’s been compared inadequately to Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch. It’s enormously enjoyable and likable.

Belle & Sebastian : the Adventure Continues was better than it needed to be for  a sequel to a popular kids entertainment spun of the book by Cecile Aubrey, once H.G. Clouzot’s Manon.

In the picturesque alpine settings of the first film (the Nazis have gone home) Gramps Tcheky Karyo is raising orphaned Felix Bossuet when the plane bringing aunt Margaux Châtelier crashes into the burning forest. The pair seek out grumpy WW2 survivor pilot Thierry Neuvic who doesn’t like dogs, eyeing Belle the giant white Pyrenean.

Their adventures include the plane crashing, Belle fighting an agro bear which could have strolled in from The Revenant and Neuvic using dynamite to blast a path through the fire, the way he learned from WW2 Americans.

Impressively filmed scenes of Alpine life, great air to air material (it looks authentic) and the depiction of the forest fire would all be notable in a production aimed at any age. The cast are all more than equal to the task. We can chalk this up to strong production values and the injection of  Cristian Duguay jobbing director of the surprisingly accomplished Wesley Snipes Art of War. Pity the kid film conventions bend plausibility. Someone should have given that brat a good thumping every time he put someone’s life at risk.

Throw in  Franck Ekonci’s Avril & le monde truqué  from the Persepolis lot, which establishes a fascinating animator’s premise - after the assassination of Napoleon III, the war of 1870 never occurs and the world remains in the steam age, so that in 1947 Paris is a soot blackened low rise metropolis with wood burning automobiles and steam cable car cables. Intriguing to compare this to the cartoon Paris sky lines of  Gay Puree & Monstre á Paris.

The second half strays from this great exposition, which is unfortunate. Figures are closer to bande desiné than the digital detail we get now days. Marion Cotillard and Jean Rochefort do voices.

Rosalie Blum itself an eccentric French small town comedy, from Jean Paul Rapeneau’s son Julien, with Rapeneau jnr.’s brother doing a pleasant score, defies expectation. 

Balding Kyam Khojandi has loser stamped firmly on him.  He bikes around the small town streets he knows blindfolded, having inherited Salon Marchot, his dad’s hair dresser business. This comes with  mean widowed mum Anémone who manages to blight his life in most known ways. “Up tight old ladies quickly become bitter.” His unseen lives-in-Paris girl friend hasn’t been around for a while and his hearty cousin is scornful.

In the neighborhood store small store he is so struck with the belief that owner, mousyNoémi Lvovsky is familiar that he starts stalking her - to the Japanese movie, the local Centre Penitentiaire, her church choir practice and the bar where Luna Picoli-Truffaut sings in English and plays guitar.

He’s beginning to enjoy this but strange things start happening to him. Then Lvosky ‘phones to make a hair appointment. We think this is the point where she is going to take off those ugly glasses.

Here the narrative switches to unemployed and aimless niece Alice Isaaz who shares the flat of a wannabe street entertainer with his own pet crocodile, and events start to take shape.

This all holds up nicely until it’s twisty construction gives way to romance melo. Good local atmosphere and appealing leads, who register above the demands of the slight, agreeable material. Pity it loses drive when the trick double narrative cuts out.  

Christian Vincent's L'Hermine / Courted is a presentable French ‘scope A feature with “ten up” (his sentences) judge Fabrice Luchini wracked by flu but still conducting the trial of surly Victor Pontecorvo, accused of stomping his seven month old to death. One of the selected jurors turns out to be Sidse Babett Knudsen (After the Wedding), the nurse he came on for after his hospitalization.

This gets to be two movies wrapped in with one another. The court material outlining unfamiliar French legal rituals is intriguing - the judges and lawyers assembling at the court door to make an entrance, the Juge d’instruction in with the jury during deliberations and Luchini, fresh from doing one of his Racine style interventions in the case,  entering the jury room to dismiss the notion of certainty and saying that a trial is to assert law. This can stand with the best of André Cayatte’s legal dramas. Think Gabin in Le verdict.

However the mature age romance complete with lingering fades on Knudsen and glimpses of their home lives has the conviction of a TV soapy despite the excellence of the performers.

One disappointment I did catch was actor Clovis Cornillac’s director debut Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglement / Blind Date  which labors to make a silly premise into another endearing rom com.

Cornillac and Melanie Bernier have apartments either side of a wall which transmits any noise. They battle (she wins with an amplified metronome) reconcile and become lovers without physically meeting, before her big piano competition.

The people are appealing and the filming is glossy. The audience seemed to swallow it all.

L'attesa / The Wait soon gets to the half close up of Sicilian mother Juliette Binoche with the sound of hammering - crepe being nailed over the mirrors where the family have gathered for a funeral. Binoche’s son’s French speaking fiancée Lou de Laâge is driven in and the film gets to be about the two women (“Sono suo madre”). Language switches from Italian to French as Juliette delivers the film’s central lie. They stress the contrast of the pair - Lou swimming in her scanties which Juliette refuses. “I’m used to seeing some parts of my body only in the dark.”

Two strong lead performances, great images and a remote link to Pirandello but does it have to be so boring?

Director Piero Messina was an assistant on Il Grande Bellezza and he wants us to know it, with significance writ large - for openers the somber lit Christ on the cross which foreshadows the Madonna we see being trucked in for the Sicilian religious festival, with the penitents in KKK hoods. However he film is really a clearer demo of the lingering influence of Antonioni with static, still photo like insets - the pink inflatable mattress blows about the courtyard of the so nice beige wall villa, the distractingly appealing meal run up from home made carob flour pasta, two glasses on their sides roll on a table, a helicopter scoops water out of the lake, the distant hair pin bends with no traffic on them.  It’s even got a missing lover - I mean - Jeez.

Director René Ferét’s last film Anton Tchékov 1890 also has high seriousness stamped all over it. Hollywood gave up on these Great Artist bios in the fifties after Moon & Sixpence, Song to Remember or  Lust for Life - all right maybe Amadeus. I think of Bright Star as the tail end of the Ken Russell comet.  French film makers hang in there Guy De Maupassant, Camille Claudelle, Renoir and the rest.

Anton Chekov 1890 joins the tradition - weighty themes (should Nicholas Giraud/ Tchékov serve humanity as a doctor or writer?), men in frock coats and beards, classical music, sustained shots of writing long hand on brown paper, and (very little) nudity - which will look good in the trailer. They even provide a walk on Leon Tolstoy.

The opening isn’t bad with  the film’s two familiar faces Philippe Nahon and Jacques Bonnaffé appearing at the provincial home, where the family has to shut up religious dad doing prayers at meals. However it doesn’t get any better. Married Jenna Thiam joins sister Chammah’s literature classes to get it on with Giraud but that, like his friendship with hair cut short for lice Shikhalin Pentitentiary Island teacher Marie Féret doesn’t go all that far. When his formerly dissolute brother dies of TB Giraud undertakes his “devoir” to the icy prison island where he witnesses flogging, meets murderers and tends the ill (“Il faut agir”) coming back to write “The Seagull”, for which we see him giving not particularly helpful stage directions to the cast.

Craft aspects are good. Ferét achieved his aim in making a Chekovian art movie. It’s a bit much to expect an audience to enjoy the result.

Claude Lelouche is the great survivor of French film and, despite aberrations like his dippings into mysticism, he’s provided an enormous amount of quality entertainment.  Hopes were high for the new Un + une in which the shape of  his Un homme et une femme can be vaguely seen.

Zylberstein and Dujardin : Un + une

It kicks off with ‘Scope shots of pilgrims river bathing at Benares and shifts into a girl’s failed Indian Dance audition and a non sequential coverage of a Silver Store robbery and chase intercut, the two becoming the subject of a B&W "Juliet & Romeo" production by Rahul Vohra an Oscar winner art film director, who hires in French movie musician Jean Dujardin to score it. Elsa Zylberstein shows up sitting next to Jean at French Ambassador Christoph Lambert’s diner and we get to the concept of her spirituality against his pragmatism, with Elsa off to enable her to have a child after being hugged by famed woman  healer Mata Amritanandamayi Devi.

Jean is diagnosed with the life threatening tumor and follows to the healer, catching up with Elsa a  rail station and traveling by train, bus and small boats through all the scenics. The leads are ultra charming but  all the will they or won’t they strains patience.

Coda has Jean encounter Elsa on the so nice Seine house boat. The film stops at the start like Toute une vie.
 It comes arrives full of set pieces like Dujardin asked by Zylberstein how he’d put music to their real life encounter and his suggestions being used as the scene runs or action broken up with unexpected flashbacks. Technically exceptional - great scope images, Francis Lai score, the monochrome film in a film getting video vignetted into subsequent action. It’s kind of like thumbing through a glossy woman’s magazine for two hours at a time.

Julie Delpy was such an endearing presence in  that it would be nice to find her films as director were equally appealing - or at least better than the new Lolo.

It starts out as another glossy rom com (bring back Annie Giradot or Michele Morgan!) with long divorced sophisticated Paris designer Julie on holiday in Biarritz, where she gets to meet local Danny Boon when he dumps the giant tuna caught for the barbecue that night in her lap. They make out, with her seeing him as a hoon fling only to find herself jumping on him at any opportunity and the pair setting up together when he moves to Benugravelle in Paris with an impeded view of the Eiffel Tower.

So far so so with the talking dirty with friend Karen Viard the best element.

However the film takes a right turn with the introduction of  Julie’s nineteen year old son Vincent Lacoste, who turns out to be a “vrai psycho” sabotaging mum’s relations with men since he was in kindergarten. I didn’t like this format all that much in Tanguy a few years back

George Coraface shows up briefly as Viard’s Greek squeeze. The talented cast deserve better material. Best element is location filming with material shot in the Pompidou Centre, Place de la Republic, Paddington Station etc.

At fifteen bucks a time for largely unfamiliar material, mistakes rapidly become expensive for the viewer and I only sampled about half of what was on offer but that did suggest that new French film remains the most approachable of current national cinemas and one spiced with innovative and accomplished material. A bit of civilisation in our movie going is welcome.

The Dalton Trumbo Story

 TRUMBO

Trumbo - Cranston & Mirren.

 

 

   Now, curiously, the heroes of my distant youth are coming back as characters in movies - John Houseman and George Coulouris in Orson Welles & Me, Orry George Kelly in Women He’s Undressed, a couple of 2012 Alfred Hitchcocks (Hitchcock & The Girl)  and even Sam Wood (fleetingly) in Trumbo.

Actually Sam Wood was a more significant figure and a more interesting story than Dalton Trumbo but getting into that would require a talent more substantial than the new movie’s Jay Roach, director of Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. That’s full bore Sidney Lumet material.

Trumbo shows Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo back from a stint as WW2 correspondent signing an MGM contract that made him the best paid writer in the world. However the Cold War gives leftists public enemy status and he becomes one of the “Hollywood Ten” sent to jail when they tried to use their First Amendment freedom of speech rights as a shield against the attacks of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The fifth amendment doesn’t get a look in in this movie.

Cranston & Roach

The film has a total disinterest in accuracy. It kicks off in black & white with Edward G. Robinson about to fill a stoolie with lead under Sam Wood’s direction, while writer Dalton Trumbo is hovering on the set. Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, the film Trumbo wrote for Robinson was a weepy and the 1939 modern girl drama Kitty Foyle was the only recorded time Wood and Trumbo worked together.

The Trumbos didn’t retreat to suburbia with a fink neighbor. They settled in Mexico City. Dalton Trumbo was working for the King Brothers long before 1953’s Roman Holiday though it would be nice to think that Frank King did see off the man from the IATSE by waving a baseball bat. The most off-putting material is in the depiction of Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg excellent again) disturbing for the things it misrepresents. The star has been composited with people like Sterling Hayden and Lee J. Cobb to the historical figure’s discredit, though Stuhlbarg does get the film’s best line, offering to sell another painting to fund bribing the jury.

All this information is easily found and the makers of Trumbo must have had it and chosen to play footsie with the facts because they thought that would make what they were doing more involving or more relevant. Their story was the iniquity of the Hollywood black list.

Most unsettling is the film’s handling of Bryan Cranston’s Dalton Trumbo himself. Inexplicably they sideline “Johnny Got His Gun”, Trumbo’s pacifist signature work as book, play and finally the self directed 1971 movie which all the friends I shipped off to watch, in its one week, one theater London release, wanted to go back and see again. That comes with the film’s side step on the acceptance and rejection of Moscow directives, which had the real Dalton Trumbo suppressing that text at one stage.

Well it’s only a movie, Ingrid.

Cranston in Trumbo

They do have Trumbo’s swimming pool socialist coming up against the reality of Adewale Akinnioye Akbaje’s jailed black murderer. However the film’s one fully shaded character is Helen Mirren as the odious Hedda Hopper. Her authoritative defiance and decline is an arc that balances Trumbo’s triumph in a way that is more striking than what is going on around it. I wonder whether the actress had any input into the scripting. It makes an intriguing comparison with Ilka Chase’s rendition of Clifford Odets’ version of Hopper in the Robert Aldrich film of Odets’ The Big Knife.  There are a couple of TV adaptations of that one too.

It is nice to see Cranston’s Trumbo playing the giant egos of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger off against one another, though people like Stanley Kramer and Edward Lewis miss out any nod for their work in breaking the Hollywood blacklist. The committee screwed up big time. They wanted to have celebrity subjects to get publicity for their accusation and they are the reason people are still deriding their blunders.

The film making is undistinguished, with just the odd flourish like Diane Lane meeting Cranston at night on his release from the Kentucky prison. Technically the integration of new footage into HUAC news coverage or Spartacus is impeccable. Performances are good enough and occasionally, as with Louis C.K., Mirren and Stuhlbarg, better than that.

Dalton Trumbo in the bath

 They have a go at the creative process with Cranston doing liquor and pills with a typewriter in the bath to sustain the killing output of black market scenarios stuck together with scotch tape.

Cranston’s reconciliation with Elle Fanning is genuinely touching and his watching TV surrounded by the family who have suffered with him, when his name is read out at the Oscars is rousing.  Roach’s ambition to extend his range pays off. He does ultimately turn the notion that the Red Scares of the fifties were a battle between freedom of expression and dim witted right wing bigots into Twenty First Century multiplex entertainment.

We do however have more penetrating accounts of the events of the blacklist from writers who lived through it - Arthur Miller’s essay on Elia Kazan’s participation, Walter Bernstein’s script for The Font and Trumbo’s own take on it, represented here by Cranston delivering his great Writer’s Guild acceptance speech  (“no heroes and villains - only victims”) nicely prefaced by the uncredited Ring Lardner jr. introduction. It was Lardner who met the chairman of the HUAC committee in jail and, rather that zap him with a sharp one liner, they didn't speak.

Kitty Foyle, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, along with Gordon Wiles’ The Gangster, the Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy and Terror in a Texas Town and his own Johnny Got His Gun - Trumbo’s is a formidable body of work. 

There are so many other narratives that beg to be explored here - the left’s disenchantment with the Moscow line, the relation between ideology and serious (or indeed frivolous) art. How come films which Dalton Trumbo wrote for cheap jack production are so much better than multi million dollar spectaculars like A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Hawaii made from his scripts?

Well we had two Hitchcocks, two  Truman Capotes. How about another Dalton Trumbo?

Barrie Pattison

Excessive.

Excessive.

Tropa de Elite/ Elite Squad  & Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro/  Elite
Squad 2: The Enemy Within

So I skimmed through the SBS program for the week and they had something Brazilian called Elite Squad as the late, late film. Well, being a curious insomniac movie completist I am the target audience for such presentations. I tuned in and it wasn’t long before my jaw was hanging open.

In contrasty colour José Padilha (previously director of the festival hit documentary Bus 174) offers grim faced star Wagner Moura narrating as commander of the elite Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police). He wants to spend time with his wife and new baby and is  searching for his replacement as the Pope’s nearing visit dictates a clean up of the hill top favellas made no go areas by murderous drug gangs.

Moura - Tropa de Elite

 We’ve seen this juxtaposition of the prosperous ground level privileged and the desperate slums in South American film before, as early as Bruno Barreto’s 1978 Amor Bandido or in City of God. Here the film  flash backs contrast police recruits hard head Caio Junqueira and glasses wearing law student André Ramiro. The fact that Ramiro is black is never an issue. They find law enforcement seething with corruption bankrolled by kick backs from the drug dealers.

Ramiro’s law degree studies compromise him when his fellow students are smoking the dealers’ pot and the privileged class white girl from the charity NGO he makes it with turns out to be a dope runner’s mistress.

The breaking point comes for Junqueira when a distraught mother can’t bury her dead drug look-out son because the body can’t be located while the cops shift cadavers out of their jurisdictions to stop the murders appearing on their unit statistics.

The two room mate cops have been put to work in the police garage, which is near inoperable because corrupt officers sell the motors out of new cars and replace them with old clapped-out ones. Junqueira hits on the plan to buy the spare parts they need by putting the commander’s car out of action, so that his usual pay off collection is delayed and the duo send in their own vehicle to get the cash. What’s the commander going to do - call the police?

This ends up with the pair transferred to canteen duties and their master mechanic peeling potatoes. Part time brothel owner police lieutenant Wilhelm Cortaz is sure the cops, who want him to go with them on the next pay off pick up, plan on doing him in over taking the bribe money, so the pair set off to cover him with sniper fire from the opposite hill, only to find themselves out gunned.

At this point - flash back to the opening - the  Elite Squad arrive and save them with their own merciless attack. The boys are hooked and sign up for the BOPE selection process which makes marine training in Officer and A Gentleman or Vietnam boot camp in Tigerland seem genteel. The brutal recruitment procedure  usually eliminates all but eight of the hundred applicants. This time it goes down to three. The instructors deliberately target corrupt trainees, crushing Cortaz. Their preparation includes abseiling the cliff face and live fire exercises in the real favella alley ways, where Junqueira proves too gung ho.

They move on the slums and the retaliation takes out Junqueira when he delivers the glasses Ramiro had promised a local kid. Finding  the BOPE skull  tattoo on Junqueira’s body, the gang bangers realize they are doomed - securing the danger area  for the Pope now forgotten.

The dope gangs are equally appalled to find the NGO had a cop among them. They shoot and burning tyre necklace a NGO couple, causing a protest march. The girl friend tries to help, getting their promise that they won’t injure the fugitive killer’s girl - cut and the squad have a blood filled plastic bag over her face to get his whereabouts. The unit raids the favella and takes down the dealer, who lies on the ground pleading not to be shot in the face so that his body can be shown in an open casket.

Twisted time structure, high contrast greenish colour, maximum violence and cynicism. This is rivetting.

I’m still digesting it when next week SBS slap on the sequel in the same small hours time slot. We pick up seven (?) years later with hero Moura again narrating as the BOPE methods (“a police force with a skull for it’s symbol”) are the subject of a condemnatory lecture theater session by liberal reformer Irandhir Santos.

The situation is even worse now that armed raids have all but cleared the slum areas of the drug gangs, leaving the corrupt police militia to take over the rackets. There’s now an  alliance of the populist media, the governor going for re-election and the bent coppers. Maura’s ex-wife Maria Ribeiro has married Santos and they are raising Moura’s son.

Shift to Bangui prison, controlled by the murderous street gangs who continue their feuds inside. One lot revolts, finds an opposing leader and sets on fire the cell full of bedding where they have him. The prisoners demand Santos as negotiator and he goes in without a Kevlar vest and manages to stabilize the situation but the Skulls have been called (“BOPA doesn’t give a shit”) with Ramiro in charge and the CCTV shows them waiting guns leveled behind the door the prisoners tried to smash to get more weapons - very Fritz Lang. When the door is opened there is  a massacre leaving the armed prisoners dead and Santos with blood spatter all over his "Human Rights" shirt.

Outraged Santos is on about social cleansing but the public love the TV coverage of the jail shoot-out, stoked by the fat rabble rousing news commentator who does dance steps on his show, so the governor promotes Moura (“I fell upwards”) to sub-commander of intelligence, where he is given control of ‘phone intercepts.

Meanwhile he is growing away from his son, who accepts the outlook of Santos, Moura’s biggest critic. However Moura is called in to retrieve the boy and his girl friend from jail for a marijuana offense for which the kid takes the blame to spare the girl. Father and son get to bond in a judo work out.

The police station in the uncontrolled area of Tanque is held up and their weapons taken. The Tanque station commander has spotted the fact that the raiders’ knowledge of procedure - and their boots - indicated rogue police rather than drug gangs. In retaliation Ramiro and his men secretly replace the bought police at a station in an area where the heavies expect no resistance and gun them down. The captured gang leader reveals the truth to Ramiro who vows vengeance, so he is shot in the back by the crooked cop, in front of Commander Cortaz, who considered him the friend who had saved his life - surprise twist disposes of the central character of the first film. Think of him as a Brazilian Han Solo.

The poor’s most valuable asset is not the protection money they pay out for police monopoly cable TV and bottle water but their vote in the coming election. The girl journalist on the case tracks down the house where they heavies have stored the stolen weapons and election material together. She is ‘phoning Santos when the bad hats come back and rape and murder her - grim scene of an impatient heavy pulling the teeth out of her charred skull.

Moura gets the copy of her last ‘phone call off the illegal intercept he has placed on Santos’ phone and takes the recording away before his superiors come for it.

He realizes that they will try to off Santos, who is with Moura’s ex wife and his son, and he waits for them taking out the hit man’s car with his pistol, though the boy is shot in the exchange of fire. The scene of reduced-to-a-Suit Moura picking up the machine gun brought by the skulls and blasting rounds into the nasties is cheer worthy.

The resulting publicity returns Santos to parliament and he gives the rostrum in the House of
Representatives to Moura, who declares two third of the members he is speaking to be corrupt.

Same gritty hi-con look with even better production values. Imposing visuals - the chopper over flying the kids playground or the final airials of Brazilia as still corrupt survivor whore monger Cortaz flies in.

I’ve gone into surprise killing detail on these because they are unlikely to get any real distribution. I can’t find them on SBS on Demand but, for the determined, they are on You Tube in good English sub-titled copies.

We can see that José Padilha’s admiration goes out to the skulls, glimpsed drilling impeccably in their black uniforms and advancing under fire, leaving the regular police to cower behind them. Pot smoking do gooders are going to be burned alive by the impoverished mob they believe they are helping. Ramirez  notes contemptuously when the population turns out in the street over their deaths. “There are no demonstrations when policemen are killed.” The free press is a clown TV newsman and and an editor who refuses to follow up when one of his own is killed. Padilha’s solution is a not all that plausible parliamentary alliance between the shoot ‘em up lot and the reformers.

I was feeling superior about discovering these outstanding, gritty, obscure action pieces. Not indicated as a repeat, this must be presumed to be the local premier. Then I found they were the most successful Brazilian films of all time, the monster hit in the Spanish language market and Berlin Grand Prix winner. Here they  just sink into the void as most of the outside the festival net material does. It’s disturbing but not surprising that the pair reached us without  promotion, turning up as small hours movies on SBS the week that Australia's multi cultural broadcaster was busy trailering it’s series on Walt Disney. The Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide for the day featured Will Ferrel in Elf.  This was the week Star Wars 7 opened in the multiplexes and The Bélier Family was in the art cinemas. What kind of film is going to be made in an environment where this is the frame of reference? Answer - the kind that gets made in Australia.

In the real world the Elite Squad films were reviewed widely, usually by people who called them fascist & cited The Godfather.  The movie characters themselves dismiss the comparison with Mafia, the hoods saying the Italians eat lasagna while their lot chow down on rice and beans. This one is very ethno specific, complete with samba street carnivals.

Place the films instead in  a sequence where the answer to disorder is to send in the troops. Think President Walter Huston having the army stand gangsters against the wall in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and shoot them in  the 1933 MGM Gabriel Over the White House. Phil Karlson’s 1955 Phenix City Story ends in martial law but it introduces the caution against vigilante-ism. Elio Petri’s 1970 Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of  Citizen Above Suspicion  is a caution against the excesses of state control and the military, as is Daniele Vicari’s splendid 2012  Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood (title in English).

I have no way of knowing how accurate the two Padhilha films are. Brazilians I asked endorse them but, whether it is sensationalized fiction or documentary actuality, the sure crafted, savage indignation of the production gives them plausibility. Tropa de Elite 1 & 2 make the movie product we are offered here insipid by comparison.

Films of 2015.

 Below are the films which I saw for the first time in 2015 which most impressed me. Each year I think that the crop is getting thinner and each year I end up chopping off a dozen titles that I feel really should get get in, on the don't be greedy principle. Don't ask me what need it all serves.

Cooper: American Sniper

BOYHOOD - now there's determination, INSIDE OUT (Pete Docter) which was playing on every second seat back when I looked round the plane. To the Last Man (Victor Fleming 1923) amazing that something so accomplished could vanish for the best part of a century. LOIN des HOMMES/ Far from Men (David Oelhoffen), RELATOS SALVAJES (Wild Tales Damián Szifrón), RICKI & THE FlASH (Demme), Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko (The Dancing Girl of Izu Gosho 1933) on U-Tube with sub titles. Potop/ The Deluge (1965) Extended but still incomplete, FOXCATCHER  (Bennett Miller),The DESCENDANTS (Alexander Payne), Les misérables (Henri Fescourt 1925), BRIDGE of SPIES,

Dancing Girl of Izu

DIPLOMATIE (Diplomacy Schlöndorff), PHOENIX (Christian Petzold) Resurrectio (Blasetti 1930) first Italian talkie , In the HEART of the SEA great in 3D,  WOMEN HE’S UNDRESSED (Gillian Armstrong's Orry Kelly doc.)  KISHIBI NO TABI (Journey to the Shore Kiyoshi Kurosawa) LISTEN TO ME MARLON (Stevan Riley) Le TOUT NOUVEAU TESTAMENT (The Brand New Testament  Jaco Van Dormael), where Benoît Poelvoorde strikes again, Mr. Holmes (Condon) Musarañas (Shrew's Nest Roel & Andrés for De Iglasea) American Sniper (Eastwood),  Prologue (Richard Williams short), The 50 Year Argument (Scorsese & Tedeschi documentary on the NY Review of Books), Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor), Tigers (Danis Tanovic), Alles inklusive (The Whole Shebang -  Doris Dörrie),  Kiga kaikyô  (Straits of Hunger Uchida 1965).

That's 21 in theatres, including one off events, four on broadcast TV, one on You Tube and two on DVD.

I compared this with the Sight and Sound poll which netted 288 titles. Even given that they have better access than someone in Australia, there is remarkably little relation. Their people of course see different films and like different films and some of the difference will be ironed out as the material finally gets to me. A few of mine were on their last year's list and a few of theirs, surprisingly, on mine. Both lists include in re-issues.

Still I find it curious that twenty of the films I've singled out don't figure in their three hundred.

B.P.

FILM FREAK ABROAD '15.

 Going back to Europe was confronting. It’s become more sinister. I never even saw a Libyan refugee, let alone got to interact with one but traveling over night on the Thello train was a was a disturbing experience. Last time I did that was an extended fun conversation with a Paris family and a regular who pointed out that the rats in Venice outnumbered the people, probably the longest time I’d ever had to speak French.    

Now I walked past the line of single black men that the police had lined up at the rail station to get into a compartment where an African couple decided to giggle in Wolof all night, despite my suggesting it was time to get some rest. When I finally did go to sleep, the door flew open and there was a Glock automatic six inches away from my face as the French border cops came in, threatening to deport the girl who had been breast feeding her baby. I was glad to get out of there.  

The street musicians seem to have vanished, though Chatelet Metro managed a Russian choir in full voice.  The spectacle of entire beggar families sleeping on the street in the rain was an off-puter but they can be a surprisingly up beat element.  One clochard was stretched out absorbing the warm air from a Metro grating while he made calls on his cell ‘phone. Another had paper streamers anchored to the grating providing a twirling display round his spot. 

In Paris, the Institute of Arab studies did one of the several Omar Sharif retrospectives running there. This time it was the films he made with Youseff Chahine at the start of his career. I had to go through metal detectors, which were turned off fortunately, because I still had the blister pack with my new Opinel knife in in my bag . The films were so so but that was an important gap filled.

 Movies are still all around. I was walking along the barge mooring area and found a German Graffiti artist doing a Flip the Frog themed painting on the wall. He was intrigued to learn that the character existed in colour and we had a conversation about purloined imagery.  The time I turned on French radio, someone, who had made a study of Leni Reifenstahl, dismissed the idea that she got it on with Adolph Hitler. Goebels did put the hard word on her and was speedily dismissed, which made relations icy. Leni was into physical
types. The Olympics film gave her access to stud athletes. Screen Tarzan Glenn Morris was apparently one of the recipients of her favors. 

All the old ambiance remained spaced by Greek Sandwiches eaten on the Seine Bank but  film-going was not as good as it had been. The rue Champollion still comes up with screenings of vintage Gary Cooper. Cloak & Dagger has been running there for sixty years, though it hardly scores a footnote in English language film writing. However  appealing one day  screening outfits seem to be always canceling sessions. My beloved Le Desperado announced a Belmondo season but Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine couldn’t be found and démons de l'aube didn’t show for their Simone Signoret retro, though they did locate a warming Eastmancolor copy of Michel Drach's grim 1981 Guy De Maupassant, a truly bad movie mixing  high culture references and T&A. Miou Miou proves to have had a great build, as does (who would have believed it?) a young Catharine Frot. 

 Which brings us to Gaspar Noé’s new, English language Love, the most explicit movie to get mainstream showing that I’ve seen . If you like close ups of penises coming in  3D, it's certainly better than Last Tango on which it's modeled. I figured that it was unlikely to push through Oz attitudes and regulation but I understand the Underground Film Festival did a run while I was away. I’d seen Tsui Hark’s Zhì qu weihu shan/ The Taking of Tiger Mountain in the same theater earlier in the week and chatted with the manager about its great scene of the digital tiger chasing the hero up an ice covered tree. On the way out I suggested to him that the Noé film could have used a tiger.

Last time the Cinémathèque provided Conrad Veidt in Le  Jouer des Echecs, Maria de Medeiros’ first movie, a beautiful surtitled copy of Helmut Käutner’s Unter den Brücken and Sylvie as a teenager in André Antoine’s Le Coupable. 

 

This trip their only rarity was a Reginald Barker from the teens that I missed. They were doing a Sam Peckinpah season. Ho Hum I thought (been there, done that) but it did include a large selection of his TV work - good news bad news. A lot of the showings were  from old murky VHS tapes. After a few of these, I told the desk that I had better copies on film. They said come back when the program department was there. I did and was referred to a young woman who said down the ‘phone they were prepared to accept them as a gift. The suggestion of a deal meant the end of that conversation. I never cease to wonder at the way people who are paid to deal with serious film expect other people to give them things for free and couldn’t help thinking that Henri Langlois would have been into the foyer like a flash, thrown an arm round my shoulder and starting working on a plan to steal them from me. I miss Langlois.

Chevalier

 The competing Forum des images did it’s Fantasy Movie and Korean seasons, which certainly provided unfamiliar material. Best thing I saw was Girls' Night/ Out/ Chunyudleui jeonyuksiksah, a nicely handled 1998 skin flick along the lines of the Hong Kong Erotic Nights. It was  the first film by Sang-soo Im, who did the Housemaid re-make. I would have liked to put in more time on these.

The price of a ticket to a movie there also gets you into their Mediatheque which currently has nine thousand allegedly Paris related items. I watched Kurt Bernhadt’s Le Vagabond Bien Aimé, the parallel French version of the Maurice Chevalier Beloved Vagabond, which was minor for a film with the talents of Darius Milhaud, Franz Planer, and André Andrejew, and Portraint d’un assassin another disappointing  use of celebrities - Maria Montez, Erich Von Stroheim, Pierre Brasseur, Aletty, Jules Berry & Dalio no less, in a  noirish post war French circus drama.

Fondation Jérome Sedoux

They are actually still building cinemas in Paris and Pathé, who now seem to own all the movie houses in Amsterdam, have moved into the serious movie business in a big way.  They set up their The Fondation Jerome Sedoux auditorium in a Building with an Auguste Rodin entrance near Place d’Italie to run silent archival movies and show a permanent exhibition of photo materials. With four hundred films running in Paris on a Sunday, I and a colleague I hadn’t seen in years met when we both homed in on same showing of a Lev Kuleshov serial there. Across the way Pathé are finishing a new main street cinema which will run seasons of Archival hits. Interesting to see how that goes.

I did see a bit of film making - hand held with a man walking through the Luxembourg Gardens and in the restaurant where they still have a photo of Woody Allen shooting Midnight in Paris, down stairs from the Hotel.  That was a big production - seven trucks including a generator van for the make up trailer on it’s own. Couldn’t work out what the films were because we don’t have the clapper board which gives the information any more. I saw a unit shooting in Milan and hopped out of the tram to watch. Turned out to be a Bollywood crew filming five shivering playback dancers in skimpy outfits between bursts of rain.

 

New French film was uneven. Pick of the batch was Benoît Poelvoorde in Le Tout Nouveau Testament. Benoît is a cranky old God (capital G) living in Brussels and tyrannizing his wife and child by confining the TV watching to the sports channel. Jesus is a one foot devotional statue who animates to give his sister advice. She revolts, steals the key to Benoît's computer and sends everyone in the world a text message giving them the date of their death, before escaping through linked washing machines. When Benoit follows indignantly, he arrives during a wash cycle and the alarmed house wife maces him.  On the record of Poelvoorde's great Le Boulet and Nouveau Monde this one is unlikely to surface here.

The Michel Gondry Microbe et Gasoline  is a fun departure with the kids taking their home built car on the road disguised as a timber shack; The Arnaud Despechin Trois Souvenirs de Ma Jeunesse/My Golden Days is also substantial, with Mathieu Amalric (himself currently getting a Cinematheque retro) remembering his youth. Yves Angelo's new Sylvie Testud movie Notre Fils takes a while to assert as it shifts between soap and issues. The Joann Sfar 2015 The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and the Gun (as well as the Anatole Litvak film made in France in 1970, there is a Baltic version) is mainly a voyeurist exercise with  leading lady Freya Mavor in various stages of undress, though the Japrisot plot occasionally asserts.

Marco Bellochio introduced his new Sangue Del Mio Sangue in person and I understand it even less well after he explained it. Great Carravagio styled images, a deliberately disorienting change of tone, terrific performances (Alba Rowacher does a walk on - just to be perverse). Attention grabbing stuff, but ultimately frustrating as all this significance loaded material proves to mean something only to Marco and his mates. I was tempted to be one of the people he went on talking to outside the Lumina but I figured I'd look doubly dumb not understanding the movie and not understanding the language.

My last night the Belmondo film didn’t show so I watched the new Jean Pierre Mocky Tu es si jolie ce soir in it’s place. The cashier was surprised I took on that. It turned out to be a barely competent slasher film.

 Rather that let that be my final impression I caught the last session of Kuroshi Kurosawa’s Kishibe no tabi/Journey to the Shore/Vers l’autre rive  which proved to be atmospheric and intriguing. The release of that had been supported by a retrospective of the director’s work.  

So I arrived at Pordenone after a battle with  cut price Ryanair who bring a full force to the term cattle class. It's really no faster than  the train or bus, with all the traveling to their chicken wire depots and waiting time. This was to be followed by another struggle with Trennitalia who specialize in making things not work. The flat share I was booked into proved to be a mile out of town, as the accommodation people explained indicating a point about a foot outside the map they gave out, and when I got there (after the taxi had left) there was no one home. That meant I was stranded somewhere I didn't know in a country where I didn't speak the language with a pile of luggage and rain looming. I thought things couldn't get worse and then I dropped my glasses and the lens fell out.

I guess I rose to the occasion because I got it all sorted out in time to catch the two O’clock session. Alessandro Blasetti's life's work in DVD was spread out on the dealer table at twenty five bucks a time. Being in terror of running out of cash I only bought one and the next day they were all gone - shades of the Sydney Ethnic Video hire store whose Blasettis all got stolen on their first week?

Anything after Pordenone was going to be an anti-climax but Milan was an abrupt return to movie goer reality. The DVD business, which was a major incentive to hit Italy, has shrunken out of all recognition. Ricordi Galleria had the best selection I ever saw but they have sold out to Feterinelli, who filled the space with (!) books. There was one shelf of familiar title discs. Feterinelli did have a more substantial selection in their store in the Stazione Feroviere but all the rare and unexpected material has vanished along with most of the outlets. There goes Salvatores, Tornatore and Aldo Giacomo and Giovanni from my understanding.  Whether movie enthusiasts have died out or shifted into the Internet ether I can't tell.

The so elegant Odeon Space Cinema has reverted  to the old Primo Tempo routine, inserting a sales interval arbitrarily into the middle of their movies. Subbura was the pick of what I saw, playing a pre-9/11 plot in a scenario of excesses - naked B girls O.D'ing on smack (I think), name stars, elaborate production and a victim hit by vehicles in two opposite traffic lanes. They were doing a red carpet gala while I was in the building. I left a movie early and found my only way out was UP the red carpet among the glittering celebrities. I wonder whether I made it into the TV coverage. Well L'Arlechinno around the corner is also a beautifully appointed auditorium, despite it's unassuming street level foyer and they didn't feel the need to flog Pop Corn and Coke in the middle of the movie but in both theaters I found myself sitting next to people who were texting through the show and couldn't be persuaded to stop.

When my wheelie bag (I felt that made me one of the people I always felt like hitting with their selfie sticks when they trundle the things down marble stairs)  rumbled round the luggage Carousel at Kingsford Smith, I had the sensation that I'd survived. By that time I had advanced disentery (again) hadn't slept for thirty hours, been on three trains and  three planes being directed to five different departure lounges in Jakarta, so I wasn't accentuating the positive.

 

Barrie Pattison

Pordenone 2015.

It’s not hard to see why I keep on wheeling back to Pordenone. The organizers’ range of enthusiasms is a remarkably good match with my own - Maurice Elvey, Michael Curtiz, Ivan Mozjoukine, the complete David Wark Griffith and silent films from Victor Fleming. They even came up with 1924’s Serdsya i dollarri/ Hearts and Dollars, the first known film where Anatol(i) Litvak gets a credit (for editing), with him clearly visible among the comic clerks.  They were even going to do a retrospective on William Cameron Menzies but couldn’t put it together in time for this year, so there’s the prospect of another trip.

About three days in the Teatro Verdi, as the screen filled with another correct paced, tinted copy, forty foot across and backed by more of their exceptional live musicians, it hit me that there’s nowhere else in the world, certainly not in Australia, where I could be doing this and nowhere I could do it knowing whoever was in the seat next to me realized what a privilege it was, even if my chance of sharing my enthusiasm might be limited by them only speaking Bulgarian.

Best in show was Victor Fleming’s majestic To the Last Man. How unjust that a film, which should have established him as one of the world’s leading directors, has been lost for the better part of a hundred years. Unlike revered directors like John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock, the work on show suggested that Victor Fleming’s silent period output was as impressive as his sound (Gone with the Wind) films and as neglected.

Of course we’ll never know about that as the greater part of his silents are lost, unlikely to be recovered. That’s it for his Lord Jim with Percy Marmont or Flemming’s then large scale 1927 The Rough Riders. We have to mentally composite his admired Emil Jannings vehicle Way of All Flesh from brief extracts on show and the Akim Tamiroff re-make. Fleming's Call of the Canyon was represented by short, washed-out clips of an opening  where Richard Dix (like Glenn Ford in  The Violent People) is told his chance of survival is the dry air of the Arizona desert.

In To the Last Man, Dix is totally in his element as the Rough Rider come back to his home valley to find the a blood feud (derived from the Grahams and the Tewksburys, not the Hatfields and McCoys this time) which he is reluctantly drawn into. The notion that the confrontation will continue to the last man is a great, sober plot dynamic. The film continually out guesses us. Normally jolly Eugene Pallette is a nasty who’s mean to heroine Lois Wilson’s pet lamb. The “frightful” bad man is the prototype of Shane. The shoot-out gets interrupted by the widow with the shovel who won’t leave her man’s body to be picked over by the critters.

Parallel with the great cowboy action material, we get a romance with Lois Wilson, who’s “good name”  as the only woman in the bad hat’s camp is a surprising, dominant plot theme. The kiss on the mountain peak with the western landscape spread out below the leads is an iconic image copied many time over but never equaled. The Tonto Basin avalanche is also the most impressive thing of it’s kind.

The film is a succession of great cowboy movie scenes rendered in great images (James Wong Howe on camera), which had no need for sound. The presentable 1933 Randolph Scott - Henry Hathaway re-make is obliterated in any comparison.

To the Last Man  slots in between The Covered Wagon, again starring Lois Wilson, and the Gary Cooper The Virginian, directed by Fleming, making the Paramount westerns one of the movies’ great cycles. Think The Vanishing American with Dix, Union Pacific, California, the Alan Ladd Whispering Smith and Shane.

I found a surprisingly large number of people who agreed it was the best film running at Pordenone.

Under the heading of hostile fate, note that, while To The Last Man was represented by a murky Russian copy with jumps, the other unfamiliar Fleming feature on show, the 1929 Wolf Song turned up in a sharp, full-range-of-tones print. Here Gary Cooper is one of those moving on heroes who eyes glamorous, mantilla wearing Lupe Velez. Her father, grandee Michael Vavich, takes a dim view of that, warning Coop “Speak to my daughter again and I will kill you. ” The titles by Julian Johnson (Wings, Docks of New York) are particularly adept. Lupe of course rides off double with Gary. The story is romance novel silly but you can see later Fleming lust-driven plots like Red Dust in it and there are a couple of brief, effective bursts of violence showing the director’s hand - Louis Wolheim taking advantage of the bottle on the bar in his fight scene and Cooper downing the two Indians. He also gets to do a bare assed scene, washing on the river bank.

The most significant thing about Wolf Song is that it shows Gary Cooper was a star personality before he ever said a word for the microphone.

Fleming was also represented by his first two credited films as director, the Doug Fairbanks When the Clouds Roll By and The Mollycoddle. A beautiful copy of the first made me up-grade my assessment as it became clear that what we were watching was the point where Fairbanks transitioned from athlete comedian to spectacle super hero. Plot has evil shrink Herbert Grimwood trying to make his point by psyching Doug into doing himself in, with digressions like shots of indigestible vegetables dancing in his stomach, human fly activity and the first (?) use of the rotating set we get again in The Navigator and Royal Wedding. The Buster Keaton connection is re-enforced by finding the word “saphead” in the titles (the name of the play with Fairbanks, redone as a movie by Keaton) and the ambitious flood finale clearly anticipating Steamboat Bill Jr.

The Mollycoddle was equally a departure, with Doug as the Europeanized Yankee restored to his pioneering ancestors tradition by work in the steamer stoke hold and foiling diamond smuggler Wallace Beery - a Fleming regular from this point on.

The director’s Mantrap had been seen before. Presentable enough, it’s trashy presentation of the Clara Bow character makes an interesting contrast with Frank Lloyd’s later, remarkable Hoopla.

Other program streams included the Russian Comedies, which Pordenone has been investigating. Hearts & Dollars was a bit on the incoherent side as a couple of those Americans lost in Russia (think Kulseshov‘s Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) are shuffled between the wrong relatives before finding romance and opportunity. Alexei Popov’s Dva Druga, Model I Podruga/ Two Friends, A Model & a Girl Friend is more approachable and an agreeable enough first run through for Volga Volga, when the evil box factory capitalist attempts to sabotage the young inventor duo as they take their prototype to the planner bureaucrats in the big city. Star Russian actors we don’t know featured.

 

Popov’s 1930 Krupnaia Nepriyatnost/ Big Trouble is more of the same with the Revolutionary Speaker sent to  the worker’s meeting getting switched with the priest arriving to address the Church across the square. The satire is surprisingly gentle if not particularly funny. Ivan Pryev, later to handle imposing Dostoievsky productions contributed Gosudstvennyi Cinovnik/The State Official 1930, a compromised morality where the clerk who hides a recovered a bag of state cash stolen from him, becomes a local hero and is elected to the Soviet only to achieve a comeuppance.

Victor Shestakov’s Nelzia Li Bez Menia/ Delicious Meals from still silent 1932 is more of the same, with the disgruntled husband going off to eat at the newly established state canteen, part of the first five year plan, and unwittingly becoming an element of it’s reform and triumph. Throw in the 1934 children’s film Razbudite Lenochku about late school attendance and we’ve more than filled our work quota on these.

The Japanese Chuji Tabonikki of 1927 was irritatingly fragmentary but did show the great Daisuke Ito making a striking effort to reproduces traditional painting in his three part account of warrior Denjiro Okochi’s rise and fall. A couple of German silents provided some curiosity value. William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel proved to be an earlier filming of the Bernard Kellermann story with one Frederich Kayssler in the role in which we would later see Jean Gabin, Paul Hartmann and Richard Dix. The narrative content was pared down and uninvolving but, as in the later sound films, the scenes of panic and disaster had a striking, stark quality,  here anticipating Metropolis. It's early Herman Warm design. 1920’s  Romeo & Juliet im Schnee was a new (to me) Lubitsch comedy in the unappealing lumpen style of much of his already familiar work, shifting the familiar plot into the snowy Alps for a happy ending.

Complementing the Fleming material were several programs of early western shorts. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about the sessions of  lackluster silent city actuality movies, unremarkable even when issuing from the hands of people as diverse as Eugene Deslaw, animator Anson Dyer,  Boris Kaufman (later to shoot On the Waterfront) or celebrity Constructivist artist Moholy Nagy. Their admirers were also being subjected to this barrage of  primitive movie cowboys which I find intriguing. Nice to have endorsed the conviction that Broncho Billy Anderson was leading the pre- William S. Hart field. His films like A Mexican’s Gratitude (1909) Under Western Skies (1910) or A Pal’s Oath (1911) had stronger narratives and more connection to the western movie ethos to come.

You had to study the Catalogo when dealing with these or you’d miss the unrecognizable presences of Ben Turpin playing a Mexican for Anderson, J. Warren Kerrigan doing one for Alan Dwan, Tom Mix as a horse breaking express rider for Sellig or director to be George Melford as a variety of authority figures. Lots of noble red men and heroines in drag made up a couple of streams in this selection.

Such material was not to far from Enrique Rosas’ celebrated Mexican serial El Automovil Gris of 1919, though the use of real events separates the film from other contemporary serial movies. Like the French anarchist Bonnot gang, the criminals wearing military uniforms here pioneer the use of a motor vehicle in the robberies and kidnappings they commit. The film follows the exploits of individual gang members and characters, like a victim who joins law enforcement to pursue them, or real life Police Chief Juan Manuel Cabrera appearing and working on the script. Undercharacterised and short on action or dramatic highlights at a reconstructed fuzzy pink four hours, it remains an intriguing artifact when you consider it’s enduring popularity on it’s home turf. Companion piece Gabriel Garcia Moreno’s El Tren Fantasma from 1927 mimicked the form of the American B western (punch outs on moving trains etc.) haltingly.

One-off  Hollywood contributed a routine 1923 China-set Tod Browning called Drifting which only picked up when Wallace Beery and a plausibly teenage Anna Mae Wong were doing the drifting, Edwin Carewe’s by the numbers 1928 Ramona, with Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter, and, rather better, Al Santell’s lively 1928 Dixie Dugan movie Show Girl, with Alice White at her peak, in its quite presentable mute version.

Pagano in Maciste Alpino

Another program stream dealt with Italian body builder heroes and featured the most famous in Luigi Maggi’s Maciste Alpino of 1916 where Bartolemeo Pagano still in his Cabiria spray tan gets involved in the war with the Austrians. At one point a sentry is about to shoot him and Pagano demands “Are you mad? I’m Maciste!” and presents his Torino Film business card. The film is better crafted and more entertaining than most of what was being done in it’s day and for some time after and leaves one hoping to see more of the burly hero’s series of adventures.

Several of these muscle men moved to Germany and Pordenone aired Luciano Albertini as Nunzio Malasomma’s Mister Radio, an eccentric electronics genius who does feats of daring in the Alps and Luciano Albertini in Max Obal’s Der Unuberwindliche as a Circus Rossi escapologist battling jewel thieves. These remain entertaining curiosities.

 More ambitious and much longer was Manfred Noa’s lavish Helena - Der Unterdang Trojas with Aldini among the shirtless leads that also included Wladimir Glaidarow, Carl de Vogt and Karel Lamac. Albert Basserman unrecognizable in crepe hair beard and Adele Sandrock also showed. The familiar plot line - Aldini/Achilles’ “I do not race for women’s flowers” - is undermined by the dated notion of beauty Edy Darclea’s Helen represented. Jokes about a face that couldn’t launch a row boat from all sides.

Similarly centering the film in Georgette Leblanc’s aging diva undermined any interest generated by the striking decors of the L’Herbier 1924 L’inhumaine, that kitschy cornerstone to French twenties culture, with its high art connections - Fernand Leger no less. Not hard to see where Marienbad came from.

Can’t help feeling that it belongs in the been there seen that basket along with Graham Cutts’ grotesque The Rat with Ivor Novello and Mae Marsh (“Just a couple of kids. They’re in a bad way”) and yet another run on Eisenstein's October in a copy that wasn’t even as good as the one that had our attention wandering fifty years ago. Pordenone is clearly showing that so called montage classics like this and Arsenal have already had more than their share of attention. Have we really run out of  Dita Parlo, Alan Crosland, Frtiz Rasp and Maria Jacobini to the point where these merit another go round?

The celebrated Bert Williams’ output couldn’t avoid evoking indignant Spike Lee and Melvin Van Peebles bristling at the depiction of black America in movies, not helped by the fact that the selection of his material on show just wasn’t funny.

Screenings of WW1 actuality material produced On the Firing Line with the Germans of 1915, where Henry Durghborough and Irving Ries (later to direct King of Chinatown & The Fourposter) can be seen as prototype imbedded journalists filming the war against the Russians. It’s a switch to see the German side of WW1 and the team were skillful, though the production is of specialized interest. More intriguingly however, the showing produced a background of the largely forgotten Peace Movement of the day and it’s delegates forbidden access to the Versailles Treaty discussions.

Pordenone tends to look after it’s own, inviting applause for members of the archive community and screening Tatiana Brandrup’s Cinema: a Public Affair about the ousting of the genial Naum Kleiman from the Russian film museum, with Nikita Mikhalkov in the real life role of villain. Paolo Cecchi Usai got a run on his sixties style abstract feature Picture and  Richard Williams aired his striking new short Prologue. One fun development was that the accompanists took to scoring Williams’ festival trailer in their sessions. The Japanese using wood blocks and flute was particularly arresting.

Gabrio

Attention focused on the restored seven hour 1925 Henri Fescourt Les Miserables surfacing in a beautiful tinted copy and backed for the entire event by Neil Brand with a side drummer. After seven hours I was on a music high but I couldn’t have hummed one of the motifs he had been using if my life depended on it.  Whether or not it’s a great film, this was a great show, with the audience spontaneously leaping to their feet to give Brand a sustained standing ovation. That’s not the first time I’ve seen that happen and I rate Brand as one of the great phenomena of the serious movie scene, even more so than the other gifted musicians that Pordenone attracts. His accompaniment turned the pedestrian Fred Niblo-Fairbanks Mark of Zorro, also on show, into a fun interlude.

Les Miserables itself is pretty impressive though the Harry Baur - Raymond Bernard version or even the Depardieu TV series are really better movies. Gabriel Gabrio is the stand out element,convincing in all the different Valjeans the story presents. The program book writes off Gabrio’s other work, ignoring his confrontation with Charles Vanel in Maurice Tourneur’s splendid Au nom de la loi, his Cesare Borgia and God knows what else among his inaccessible titles. The film’s kids are OK but of the rest only Sandra Milovanoff in her oppressed Fantine rather than her youthful Cosette, registered among all the wardrobe department outfits and crepe hair. Building tension on the barricades is particularly effective (a striking contrast to the growing tedium of similar material in October) and the film’s one departure from the more familiar versions rings, where Cosette/ Milovanoff sees the spitting condemned prisoners on their way to the galleys and asks “Are they still human?” to have Gabrio, now Fauchelevent, answer “Some of them.”

Even with further cut backs (the free computers have joined their magazine and full size movie market as happy memories) Pordenone remains the epi-center of  movie enthusiasm and we wait nervously to see what effect the departure of  respected twenty year director David Robinson will have.

It's kind of like making the Haj. You're not a true believer unless you've been.