THE SHAPE OF FILMS TO COME.

It’s not encouraging that it’s taken nearly a hundred years for someone to go into print with an ambitious study of William Cameron Menzies. He did after all create the function of movie Production Designer, popularise the Story Board and format Batman. David O. Selznick thought Menzies’ input into Gone with the Wind ranked with his own. Menzies’ contribution to “The Golden Years of Hollywood” was important as any director, writer or producer. 

Now we have James Curtis’ “The Shape of Films to Come.” (416 p. Pantheon 2015) which tries to correct the omission. Curtis has put a lot of effort into the project, working with the surviving members of the Cameron Menzies family and delving into the print record. He even excerpted the fifty year old interview Chris Wicking and I did with Anthony Mann on Menzies’ work on 1949’s Reign of Terror/ The Black Book. 

It would have been nice if he’d asked permission and spelled my name right - but I digress.

This lands Curtis’ book with the familiar problem of secondary sources. He quotes the designer speaking about his 1931 The Spider where Edmund Lowe plays a stage illusionist. Menzies explained that he’d done the severed head effect without edits. Watching the film however you can see our man’s memory playing him false. There’s a jump cut with Lowe obscuring the substitution of a dummy for actress Manya Roberti. It’s the preceding levitation routine which strikingly appears to be one run of  the camera.

We don’t get the impression that Curtis has seen and absorbed Menzies’ films.  We need to read more about concepts that the designer developed, as he suggests with  the air crash in Lottery Bride as a first sketch for later films like Foreign Correspondent. How about his stacking the dancers vertically against the backcloth in Sidney Frankin’s 1925 Her Sister from Paris anticipating his way of showing the Communards in Reign of Terror? Half the fascination of studying Menzies’ career is in this. 

The Black Book's communards - spectacle on a budget. Note the tall windows and painter's circle of interest.

 

 

With his art and illustration training, Menzies saw the screen as a canvas. He would even change the shape of the image, putting a dark tree trunk down the side in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) or a sofa back across the bottom in Gone With the Wind (1938) and in Our Town (1940) he gives up all pretense of reality and just blacks out half the picture, as the drunken choir master goes through the streets at night. In the fifties, even in treadmill TV production, a Halls of Ivy episode he directed has the butler stand back to the camera, obscuring the right of the frame. Turning the camera on it’s side and filming actors lying on the papier maché rock covered floor in his 1951 Drums in the Deep South anticipates the wall climbing shots for TV Bat Man closing a circle begun when Bob Kane saw Menzies' work on Roland West's The Bat.

 

Not just staging screen action East-West, Menzies added North-South bringing characters in from the top of the frame - Tamiroff in his cave mouth introduction in Sam Wood’s For Whon the Bell Tolls or Robert Cummings on Wood’s Kings Row stile. The ship’s mast is lifted into frame from below in the storm in Wesley Ruggles’ 1929 Condemned. Menzies filmed stair cases square on, in the way that the books on movie design say should never be done - removing their dimensionality, so that characters on them appear to rise and fall in the image.

Making visual disorder reflect disorder in the characters is one of Menzies’ best numbers. In Lewis Milestone’s 1943 North Star the regular, parallel telegraph wires are turned into a confused tangle by Nazi bombs. There’s a brilliant piece of design in King’s Row with  lightning illuminating the brick pavement where tree roots have distorted the regular pattern. We see this only momentarily in the flashes, as Robert Cummings scurries along the street on his way to a liaison with a disturbed Betty Field, but it registers more vividly than many complete films.

Cummings & Nancy Coleman - Kings Row.

Curtis comes into his own on Kings Row detailing Menzies' extraordinary staging as a means of avoiding censorship hassles - the syringe or the smashed coffee pot.

It would have been interesting to have him discuss the influences that Menzies absorbed - Aubrey Beardsley, Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia in For Whom The Bell Tolls, the German “Expressionist” cinema with it’s shadows and silhouettes, which arrives via working at Fox in it’s post Murnau period.

The book follows the record of  its subject’s training with Anton Grot, later head of Warners’ art department, his association with Rudolph Valentino, the Talmadge Sisters and Ronald Colman or Douglas Fairbanks, peaking with The Thief of Bagdad, and with producers Joseph Schenck, Alexander Korda and Selznick and particularly with producer-director Wood (“a stand up fellow”) who is probably better documented here than any place else. The picture that emerges of the pair’s eight film collaboration is conflicted, with Menzies sometimes depicted as uneasy with the associate who was giving his talent it’s fullest expression.

Fairbanks - Raoul Walsh's Thief of Bagdad

We are now hearing the qualities of  Wood’s best films attributed to Menzies. David Kehr also asserted that recently - and Menzies did provide many of them. However no one points out that films that Wood made on his own (include Goodbye Mr. Chips and Kitty Foyle) are  far superior to the ones that Menzies made without Wood, like Wharf Angel or The Maze. Even Menzies’ celebrated Things To Come has self conscious players and bad eye lines.  It was Wood who understood film form, pacing, emphasis and performance to which he was able to add Menzies’ imagery to such effect.

Curtis misses out the aborted Victor Fleming - Spencer Tracy version of  The Yearling, which Menzies was in the process of designing, but he does lay out the extent of  Menzies’ undocumented associations with De Mille, Capra and with Hitchcock, going beyond the credited designing of the wind mill sequence in Foreign Correspondent. Menzies came up with the film’s umbrella assassination (the book has sketches) as well as him handling the burning of Manderlay in Rebeca and the Dali material in Spellbound

What does disappoint is the author’s unwillingness or inability to differentiate among Cameron Menzies uneven output. He speaks glowingly of  his slap dash 1953 Invaders From Mars, where one scene is included twice with the characters in different clothes, to get the piece up to length. (artist Jeffrey Smart liked that one too, seeing it by accident and being gobsmacked told it was the work of the maker of the Korda Things To Come)  The superiority of the Menzies’ 1949 Terribly Strange Bed (mute images timed out to Richard Greene’s reading of the Wilkie Collins story) to his other short films goes unnoticed.

All this belated interest has not exhausted the topic. Questions that Curtis might have cleared up are missing - the lack of any visible Menzies input into his director credited Howard Hughes B movie The Whip Hand? There’s no reference to the resentment among Hollywood colleagues to Menzies’ nailed down control - the ridiculed “arm pit shot” - which is actually a composition through William Holden’s elbow, in Our Town.  

Curtis is reluctant to comment on Menzies as the clown who wanted to play Hamlet. The greatest screen designer of his day and possibly all time, wanted to produce and direct, at which he was less than brilliant. Menzies had no real interest in what the actors were doing in his marvelous images. He traded working on some more of the most imposing films ever - for control of pot boiler B movies.

DVD of Menzies early sound shorts - note Joseph Swickard, co-director of Hell's Hinges in The Wizard's Apprentice (small left) and Paul Fix in Hungarian Rhapsody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know that I wanted to hear that the artist who showed the most masterful control of imagery in the cinema’s history had a drinking problem, was pottty mouthed and constantly menaced with unemployment and unwelcome projects. We can however be grateful to James Curtis for his book and his film seasons in Pordenone and New York, directing more attention to William Cameron Menzies than at any time since the designer’s death and probably during his life time.

     Charlotte Henry, the Duchess mask and Alison Skipworth in the 1933 Alice in Wonderland.

 

 

 

 

 

William Cameron Menzies filming The Shape of Things to Come

JEAN GABIN & BRIGITTE HELM.

How’s this for a trip to the far shores of film freaking? A large slice the generation ahead of mine had decided that Brigitte Helm was the most alluring female on the planet and, after I saw Metropolis at the age of twelve, a bit of that leached through to me.

I was vaguely aware that she had made other films but they were off in countries which had Cinémathèques and serious enthusiasts. 

In fact there were nearly forty of them. She had been paired with an extraordinary roll of leading men - Jean Gabin, Hans Albers, Ivan Mozjoukine, Joseph Schildkraut, Jan Kiepura, Gustav Diessl and Gustav Fröhlich, rolling over the transition to sound without pausing. 

A few of the films were brilliant - Hanns Schwarz’ 1929 Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna and George Wilhelm Pabst’s 1932 L’atalantide - and she was brilliant all on her own in a few more - Pabst’s 1928 Abwege, Karl Hartl’s 1934 Gold and Marcel L'Herbier’s 1928 L’Argent with her in the silver lamé number winding around financier Pierre Alcover to extract his secret during his murderous rage.

Now some of the rest are bubbling to the surface, I enjoyed Karl Hartl’s 1932 Die Gräfin von Monte-Christo (twice re-made in Hollywood as The Countess of Monte Christo) so my enthusiasm mounted when Gloria, one of her Gabin films, turned up on U-Tube. The German copy was fair but the piece was untranslated in a language where my peak achievement occurred in Vienna ordering two hot dogs, a bun and a cup of coffee.

Gabin & Helm

 However as a reward for my patience, the French dual language version appeared in a murky tinted copy with dodgy subtitles. I homed in on that and disillusion set in. Gabin is not one of those dashing aviator heroes of the day (think Henry Victor in L’Argent or Jimmy Cagney in Ceiling Zero). His character is closer to side kick parts offered to Frank McHugh. He gets to play a womanising navigator with a drunk scene. Gabin’s only in a couple of scenes where Helm appears. The lead is uninvolving but durable, brilliantined Andre Luget who tries hard to be imposing with no success.  Helm, who appears to speak faultless French, is notably more animated in German with her Metropolis co-star Gustav Fröhlich a much more commanding intrepid bird man. The two versions are otherwise pretty much interchangeable, beyond the fact that Luguet flies into a  Paris complete with Eiffel Tower montage while Fröhlich is greeted with a banner that says “Welcom in heimat.” The French version is slightly shorter.

Long serving director Hans Behrendt, whose career started with the 1923 Alt Heidelberg, is unable to make the central triangle situation compelling and the long distance flight generates only mild suspense. The piece is full of awkward transitions where an unrelated cut-away fails to cover the difference between the shots either side. Brigitte is not even attractively filmed, though she manages to generate a few characteristic moments on the dance floor or in big close up.

Peter de Herzog’s biography of Helm had her dissatisfied with the films they delivered her and eyeing the rise of the Nazis with unease, quitting at the age of  twenty nine to be a house wife in Switzerland.

Well you can’t win them all.

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2017







 

Scaramouche - Let Us Do the Fandango

The mob from the Ingram Scaramouche.

FILMS OF 2016

I can tell that it’s that time again because the drunks throwing up outside in the streets of Surry Hills are wearing Santa Hats. I list out the films which I saw for the first time and impressed me during the year to get my own recollections in order as much as for any benefit that may accrue world wide. I discover that IMDB stared as a similar exercise.

That’s (in some kind of order of preference) Rex Ingram’s 1922 SCARAMOUCHE with Ramon Novarro finally, a demonstration that major work started earlier in the twenties than I’d thought. The GOOD DINOSAUR Peter Sohn wonder of an animation,  STEVE JOBS from Danny Boyle, FLORENCE FOSTER JENKINS Stephen Frears back on form, YOUTH the same true of Paulo Sorrentino, Tom Ford’s NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, extraordinary for a second film, Tom McCarthy’s scathing SPOTLIGHT, William Wellman’s 1932 SO BIG with the first great Barbara Stanwyck performance, Salvador del Solar’s MAGALLANES appearing from nowhere, Anne Fontaine’s 2011 MON PIRE
CAUCHEMAR (My Worst Nightmare) with Isabelle Huppert and Benoît Poelvoorde, WO BU SHI PAN JINLIAN  (I Am Not Madame Bovary) a piece of extraordinary complexity from Xiaogang Feng who also headed up the cast of the Hu Guan & Runnian Dong  Lao pao er / Mr. Six , Vladimir Strizhevsky’s 1929 Der ADJUDANT DES ZAREN (L’aioutante dello zar/ Zarens Adjudant /The Adjudant of the Tsar) with Ivan Mozjoukine (figuring again), Jacques Audiard’s DHEEPAN, Shane Black’s The NICE GUYS, SAINT AMOUR from Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern, also regular offenders here.

Nocturnal Creatures - Amy Adams

 

 

 Also considered were Ken Cameron’s 2012 Dangerous Remedy,  Stéphane Brizé’s La loi du marché / The Measure of a Man with Vincent Lindon, Avril et le monde truqué / April and the Extraordinary World/  April and the Twisted World steam punk toon from Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Ogro  / Operación Ogro of 1979 with Gian Maria Volonte, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, Lee Tamahori’s Mahana / The Patriarch,  Bertrand Tavernier’s Voyage à travers le cinéma français/  Journey Through French Cinema, Samuel Benchetrit’s Asphalte/  Macadam Stories, David Mamet’s 2013 Phil Spector,  Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, Álex de la Iglesia’s Mi gran noche/ My Big Night, Martin Zandvliet’s Under sandet / Land of Mine, Mario Monicelli’s Risate di gioia / The Passionate Thief, Larmes de joie / Tears of Joy, Roar Uthaug’s Bølgen, Vittorio Cottafavi’s 1943 winning I nostri sogni / Our Dreams with De Sica, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake - indignation as entertainment, Cesc Gay’s Truman, Jay Roach’s Trumbo,  Stephen Chow’s Mei ren yu/ Mermaid, Doris Dörrie’s Grüße aus Fukushima /Greetings from Fukushima / Fukushima Mon Amour, Sinclair Hill’s 1929 Guns of Loos,  Barbara Kopple’s Hot Type: One Hundred and Fifty Years of  The Nation, Adam McKay’s The Big Short  and for the fun of it William Wyler’s 1935 The Gay Deception.

 
  There is minimal connection with the lists put out overseas.

Andrew Garfield - Hacksaw Ridge

I Daniel Blake seems to appeal and Hacksaw Ridge, and Nocturnal Creatures get mentions. This can be put down to my taste (or lack of it) late delivery of product here and also the fact that, now that there is a bigger pool to draw from, a lot of  films just never come up for consideration. Unless they crack it for the festival circuit and usually not then, Indian, Chinese or Arab (but not Israeli) film are considered either too inferior or alien for critics to admire or even watch. I feel the same way about the franchise spectaculars myself .

There has also been a shift. The replacement of 16 mm. by video should have meant a wider range of specialist material. However the electronic media has failed to produce significant long form work - most notably in porn and activist product.

Works of high seriousness like Piero Messina’s ponderous  L'attesa / The Wait or the output of celebrity directors like Pedro Almodovar or Jim Jarmusch have the inside track and popular entertainment - think Two Guns or We’re the Millers or indeed Mon pire cauchemar and Risate di gioia - are considered beneath consideration.

Also you might think it’s a bit early to bemoan productions missing in the Australia scene with the catch up of festivals, a limping SBS and special events still to come, so I went back to the New York Times’ ten best lists of  2011 and of their chosen material I can’t recall the appearance here of  A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang); Cedar Rapids (Miguel Arteta) Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz) Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino), Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean), Abracadabra (Ernie Gehr) Aurora, (Cristi Puiu) The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica), My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa), Poetry (Lee Chang-dong), Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs) and Voluptuous Sleep (Betzy Bromberg) and a few more I left out to be safe. I don’t have a team of subsidised interns to verify this list, so my apologies to any diligent festival director or entrepreneur who may have got around to them but just suppose my impression is correct and down the years admired material has regularly just not hit our shores - not to mention the popular or specialised titles. Wouldn’t this have an effect on the quality of film awareness and all the things that flow on from it?

Bertrand Tavernier.- Voyage á Travers le cinema Français

SWORDMASTER KILL (3D) and the Good Old Days.

In the nineteen seventies Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers Studios dominated the Chinese speaking market. They had obliterated the colony’s small screen, black and white productions and the mainland’s Marxists had thrown in the towel for the Cultural Revolution.

The kung fu film was conquering world markets and a sub section of that, the wu xia pian or swordsman film modeled on the work of King Hu, was their most prestigious offering.

This cycle came to be dominated by the films simplified by Chu Yuen, the one important survivor of the pre-Shaws era, from the convoluted newspaper serials of writer Ku Lung. Master swordsmen battled killer clans in studio fields sewn with paper flowers and dominated by the red lamp sun hung above them. In the company of  his Xiu hua da dao / Pursuit of Vengeance (1978) or Chu Liu Xiang zhi You ling shan zhuang / Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman (1982) Chu Yuen’s San shao ye de jian / Death Duel (1977) was a relatively minor entry, with it’s highlights being guest shots by Shaw stars David Chiang, as a master who they have to keep in a cage, driven to madness by his kung fu studies, and Lo Lieh as one anguished to the point of smearing his face with blood after a killing. Though he was notably overshadowed by opponent Lin Yun, it did however launch the stellar career of  Chiang’s brother Derek Tung-Shing Yee, who joined the ranks of costumed heroes in these films.

Derek Yee and the gang - Shaws' Death Duel.

Forty (!) years later Yee is an established director (Shinjinku Incident) and great survivor Tsui Hark  has produced his re-make of  San shao ye de jian as Swordmaster Kill (3D) and that turns out to be an event movie.

Very little of the seventies plot survives - injured master shelters with the village family of  a brothel girl and opponents face off for the death duel to establish supremacy in the Divine and the Demonic world.

The old buzz of recognising the preposterous Ku Lung plot complications & imagery is back, this time transforming his universe into one of the most extraordinary things contemporary cinema has to offer. The Palaces, brothels and villages we remember from the Shaw’s films are now visualised with more complexity and scale and the film doubles back with flash backs to account for all those inexplicable plot developments we used to take for granted. It’s realised with an extra four decades of  digital effects technology. Elaborate studio decors played against a coloured sky are divided into planes by 3D camera work. The jug is split with a slomo sword stroke that shows us the liquid suspended in it’s two halves. We are regularly showered with digital spears and arrows.

San shao ye de jian / Swordmaster Kill.

The film is a succession of extraordinary moments. The ice shattering under the impact of the fallen warrior, the disgruntled lieutenant, who has talked white robed Princess Yiyan Jiang out of slaughtering the handmaidens to accompany the perceived faithless deceased Kenny Lin Gengxin into the nether world, impales the eager one he has been offered as a swap for his royal love object. Snake tattooed Peter Ho splits the timber memorial to his fallen adversary, the Third Master of  Supreme Sword Manor, with a single stroke. (“Losing a rival is like losing your soul mate”).

He goes off to sleep in his coffin in the flower covered mountain cemetery. The whore house handyman psyches out the hoons, who refuse to pay, by standing there while they stab him four times. There’s the great scene of Ho arriving in the background hauling his grave stone as Kenny takes down the nasties menacing the village. The Master of Supreme Sword Manor (Norman Chu, once the lead of Hark’s 1980 Di yu wu men/ We are Going to Eat You) realises the skull masked attackers are using poisoned weapons and sends in his girl fighters, as he forms an array on the castle steps, and streaked black doplegangers emerge from Ho in the battle where each combatant has too much respect for his opponent to hold back.

I’m not sure that all this is an advance on the sensuous created decors and studied ridiculousness of the Chu Yuen movies but it’s certainly a fascinating comparison and a great movie experience all on it’s own.

If you’re looking for insights into the human condition, you’re in the wrong theater but if you can deal with some of the wildest imaginations at play, right now rush to the multiplex. Small screen won’t do it justice.

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 as 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 the 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.