Pordenone 2019

PORDENONE 2019.

 

The 2019 Gionate del cinema muto was not one of their finest hours. There were no

discoveries which turned round our idea of early film the way their showing Maurice Elvey’s The Life of David LLoyd George or Victor Fleming’s To the Last Man did. That said, any Pordenone carries the charge of expanding our knowledge of the great era of silent film which is slipping away from us and brings together people who are sufficiently involved with movies to want to do something about it.

Interestingly a few Australians showed up this year. I’d like to think that was because of sites like this one.

I’ve  already covered the William S. Hart films which proved to be the highlight - my first viewing on his The Narrow Trail and The Aryan but plenty more was happening.

Also featured was star Reginald Denny represented by a couple of surviving episodes of his The Leather Pushers serial and three features. These revise our knowledge of a performer now better known  supporting in sound films like the Metro Romeo & Juliet or Cat Balou.

1925’s Oh Doctor is early Denny and a little rough round the edges. His make up is obvious and the characterisation is broader - closer to two reeler comics.

As a child, Denny’s character becomes a determined hypochondriac. If he dies before the age for his inheritance, the money will go elsewhere.

Alerted by Dr. Clarence Gedart that he’s actually healthy, three sharp operators, regular second banana Otis Harlan included, advance Reginald a fraction of the total against his eventual inheritance,  However when nurse eighteen year old Mary Astor, playing in a more relaxed and natural manner than the rest, shows up, Reg. imagines his Faun & Nymph painting come to life with him in pursuit with a stubby tail enthusiastically wagging and determines to change her opinion of him as a wimp. He takes on life threatening activities.

Reg finds a racing driver who has him in a Stutz Torpedo Speedster on the then new L.A. Legion Ascot Speedway track. He rides a motor bike and determines to overcome his fear of heights by painting the ball on the top of a sky scraper flag pole which sways over the street visible way below - very Harold Lloyd.

Mary determines to get his three quarters of a million back out of the aged speculators, who are now desperately trying to sell their interest.

Happy ending of course. Competent handling in the style of the day. This one survives in a passable copy.

Wanting to move away from the slapstick comedies that Keaton and Harold Lloyd were doing and toward the then current run of quasi bawdy stage comedies like “Up In Mabel’s Room”, “Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath” and “Getting Gertie's Garter”, Denny swapped  director Budd Pollard for William A Seiter.

In What Happened to Jones Denny’s about to marry the appealing Marian Nixon but the night before, his pals including her dad Harlan, lure him into a poker game at this flat.

The cops spot this through a window with the lead duo escaping down the fire escape and involved in farcical complications which take them into the neighbouring reducing parlour where the presence of men creates outrage among the female customers.

Going down to their underwear in the steam cabinet leaves the pair stealing women’s clothing to escape, attracting mashers on the streets.

These complications have Nixon’s family urging pompous old flame William Austin to be the groom in the next day’s wedding. They expect a relative now a bishop and when Denny and Harlan arrive in a stolen milk float, our hero finds himself kitted out in the Bishop’s robes. (compare the bishop finale in Guitry’s Je l'ai été 3 fois!) Though the family have bought the deception, the milkman, come to retrieve his vehicle, is not convinced and the cops are suspicious.

The real bishop is locked in a closet and Reginald is conducting the service with Nixon and Austin when she backs off and (cf. The Graduate)  Marian and Reg. bolt down the aisle for the door and pile into the car that has brought the bishop, persuaded to marry them while they drive.

Zazu Pitts scores in the bit part as the maid constantly bribed not to give the guys away. You can almost hear her voice as she mouths her “I saw nothing” title. The film was re-made with Edward Everett Horton in 1937.

Denny’s already circulating Skinner’s Dress Suit  is ordinary but not disagreeable The work horse plot has clerk Skinner / Denny urged by his wife Honey / Laura La Plante, envious of the neighbors, to ask for a rise. It’s the day the company has lost the Jackson Nuts and Bolts account. Reg gets a zoomed up "No" when he finally works up the nerve but isn't game to tell Honey, claiming a ten dollar pay hike - a week! She orders up big for the town’s celebration of the new minister and his wife, bit parting Hedda Hopper. With his new dress suit and Honey's party dress running up the tailor bills, they've soon spent the non existent increase for a year.

 

Denny & Laura la Plante

The pair are a hit in society, teaching the office secretary's new dance to the nobs - without acknowledging the source. Denny's boss joins in. However disaster is looming and the furniture repo man shows up while Honey is entertaining her new society friends. Reg stalls them claiming to be the millionaire's chum but William H. Strauss, the (very) Jewish tailor gets the "soot" and has to be talked into giving it back for the Arab motif soiree that night, with the promise of payment.

This event is looked upon enviously by Nuts and Bolt man Jackson's frumpy wife Lucille Ward, the day before he's going to sign with the firm's competitors. The ambivalence to Society (cf. Honor Among Lovers) is there with the rich couple spotting disconsolate Denny ("I bet he's a big wig in Society. Look how bored he is.") and then telling him "Young man you're in a position to do me a big favor" and they all get together prompting a partnership offer by the old boss, who finds the tailor sleeping at the Skinner door to rush off when the suit is handed to him ("That's the kind of service I demand.")

Denny

It’s more suburban sitcom in detailed studio interiors - the Skinner home with its oval frame Laughing Cavalier and monster new radio - intriguingly foreshadowing the adventures of Blondie & Dagwood in Denny's morning dash for the (giant steam loco drawn) train, that the old idlers bet on, and having sound film’s Dagwood, Arthur Lake as the office boy.

Agreeable enough, with our hero's plight never catching up with him and the lively dance interludes. The leads are pleasant though neither sparkle in the best Clara Bow - Bessie Love manner. Denny is more an Eddie Bracken or Chevy Chase than a silent movie clown. Handling is very ordinary, with the scenes filmed straight on.

A welcome one-off was Dongshan Shi’s still silent in 1932 Fen dou / Struggling /Striving /The Romance of Tiger & Sparrow, a Shanghai Lianhua Film Company morality that has re-surfaced in a near impeccable copy.

The content relates to the K.M.T’s New Life movement with it’s two worker leads first seen in their overalls servicing the imposing machines in the spotless factory. They share a boarding house room and both fall for fetching sixteen year old Chen Yan Yan getting rough treatment from a guardian. The guys protect her, fall in love and  come to blows over her, landing in jail. However, when the war with Japan breaks out, Zhen Junli, the chosen admirer, shames his old  friend Congmei Yaun into joining him in enlisting and Yuan is killed in a fixed bayonet battle.

Yan Yan joins the crowds at the station welcoming  troops returning in glory but her beloved is not among them. Just as despair overtakes her, there standing in the prow of an approaching small boat he appears a returning war hero - stirring end.

Not over sophisticated, this is one of the later and better Shanghai films with good production values and that Borzage rip-off double flight of stairs for the camera to crane up again. Marxist director Donshan tries to dramatise class structure with devices like the three levels of the rooming house.

                       

I’ve always enjoyed Cecil B. de Mille’s work, particularly films from the mid thirties on and there’s a buzz in finally getting to see the 1916 Joan the Woman possibly his first film relatable to the later productions. It is an extraordinary advance on its director’s work of only a couple of years before and already has many of the qualities (and flaws) we recognise alternating impressive and risible.

Like the Sign of the Cross re-issue, we kick off with a modern (WW1) story where British Officer Wallace Reid discovers a Joan of Arc relic in the excavation of his front line dug out. This gets us into the historic back story with matronly Opera Diva Geraldine Farrar introduced against a cruciform Fleur de lys. There she is, playing with kittens and tending the sheep. The English are coming and, as the villagers flee, she reproaches a French deserter “No sword once drawn for France - shall be thrown down!”

Joan the Woman - Farrar

Wally, in one of those tin hats that stayed in service till the Katzman serials, leads the Burgundians and he and Farrar soon have a thing going, keeping on saving one another from their own forces.

We get obligatory scenes like Joan recognising King Charles the seventh / Raymond Hatton or Bishop Theo Roberts with a black robe monk spy - an interesting twist when he turns on his master who wants Joan burned rather than to save her soul. Farrar gets into (not very) male gear for for the battle for the tower - the film’s highlight, impressively staged with hoards of extras - one imposing charge and some convincing men at arms hacking away at one another.

The film takes off at this point.

Second half concentrates on Joan’s capture by Wally who gets a title for his perfidy. He tries to ransom her but Roberts just keeps on producing more gold from his trunk to bid against him. There’s the scene of sending Reid’s most debauched ruffian to her cell, while the heavies watch through the ceiling, anticipating Spartacus. King Ray can’t get funds out of his sponsor and settles for an orgy where they serve stuffed swan.

It’s Reid who holds the cross in front of Geraldine/Joan as they set fire to the bundles of kindling in front of her, before he goes to his WW1 doom blowing up an enemy trench on a suicide mission.

The film still asserts itself today - mainly through action spectacle. Performance is not bad for 1916 and the handling is stolid but functional.

Walter Forde’s English films have always been marginal in any study of the movies but a couple of titles have recently reappeared, over-shadowing Forde’s stodgy previously known   thirties dramas like Rome Express and Brown on Resolution / Forever England / Born for Glory. A dodgy copy of Forde’s celebrated 1930 The Ghost Train, long thought lost, has surfaced (it’s on You Tube) and it proves to be the best of a slew of versions including a silent that Michael Curtiz may have had a hand in and Forde’s own Arthur Askey remake. The 1930 film fields Jack Hulbert totally in his element, Cicely Courtnedge, who gets a nice piece getting drunk on Jack’s hip flask, and Ann Todd.

Pordenone came up with the 1928 feature Wait and See where Forde directs and stars. This late British silent proved entertaining even if it lacks any great style.

Forde figures as a klutz youth without any obvious comic persona. His assembly line work

Forde

mates ridicule his day dreaming and one of them produces a fake solicitor’s letter saying he’s inherited a half million. Delighted Walter quits his job, offering to buy the factory as a souvenir, and sets out for the lawyer’s office in a building where the sign reads “No solicitors. We only have honest people.”

Meanwhile factory manager Sam Livesey is facing a crisis with the board threatening to withdraw their capital if he can’t get a needed injection of cash and the story of Walter’s legacy has circulated in figures inflating at each telling. It reaches the press who pursue him to his lodgings. Sidekick Frank Stanmore uses the samples hopeful suppliers have sent to kit out our hero to show up at the Livesey home, putting out of joint the nose of Charles Dormer, long hair rival for boss’ fetching daughter Pauline Johnson.

There’s a bit missing but we find Walter getting held up on his way to her wedding in a race with Dormer in open cars, buses, taxis, bikes and a plane, each calamity forcing Walter back to the cut price clothing store for another dodgy outfit.

The film is quite engaging, an agreeably jaunty rendering of working class reality and the handling is competent. Its plot echoes Skinner’s Dress Suit, Brewster’s Millions and Car of Dreams among others and is re-cycled for the 1933 Zoltan Korda If I Were Rich / Cash.

There’s a sudden rush of director Edmund Goulding around now - more on this later. Pordenone aired his 1925 Metro Sally Irene & Mary, an early collaboration with  Joan Crawford anticipating their work together on Grand Hotel. Joan said she’d still be dancing on tables if Eddie Goulding hadn’t shown up.

Here she’s a show girl sharing the lead with glamorous blonde Constance Bennet (“a flame skilled in the ways and wants of men”) and spunky young Sally O’Neil who has pushy plumber Billly Haines to fall back on. It’s an early example of the plot that rolls on through 42nd Street, the Gold Diggers movies and Ziegfield Girl and is still with us in Bombshell with the fate of the older glamor girls as a warning to a new comer.

Sally Irene & Mary - Bennet, O'Neil, Goulding & Crawford.

High point is the dressing room scene with the chorus celebrating Crawford’s marrying rich only to have the stage manager blurt out “She’s dead!” and the show going on as the girls do a listless presentation spooked by the double exposure of Joan‘s Charleston.

There’s little in the way of show business detail, no rehearsal, lots of half naked cuties making up at the mirrors and a bit of cracking wise “You practicing for jiu jitsu?” “Is that the Japanese word for it?”

Rather than a strong narrative it’s a film already showcasing MGM glamor, particularly the Erté decor and costumes. It develops a grip on attention through craft skill and setting up an anticipation of something racy that never actually arrives. This one has minimal connection to the thirties Fox film distantly derived from the play of the same name.

Pordenone also aired 1926's Beverly of Graustark another early Metro exercise in lush artificiality, this time it's Marion Davies in Ruritania delivered briskly on a large budget - closer to a Metro Forbidden Paradise than Anthony Hope. There was also a static 1914 version of this with Linda Arvidson, D.W. Griffith’s wife.

Davies is totally in her element  emerging as a a comedy star. She is winning and the others are just there to show case her. Normally sedate director Sidney Franklin is surprisingly at ease here giving proceedings just the right amount of ridicule and high gloss.

In the USA, Davies’ cousin Creighton Hale (weakest element) learns that he has become heir to to the throne of Graustark. Marion joins him on the trip to his new kingdom but he is injured, meaning he may miss the inauguration banquet enabling mean, scenery chewing General Roy d’Arcy (who else) to claim the throne.

Beverly of Graustark : D'Arcy's arm round Davies.

 

 

 

 

Her hair cut short, Marion can pass for the new ruler that no one has ever seen. Her escort prove to be the General’s men but dashing, uniformed goat herd Antonio Moreno is on hand to rescue her and make sure she gets to the crucial banquet where she is called upon to drain enormous horn flasks of beer, ho ho!

The cousin rides in at the appropriate moment to sort things out.  We get the usual cross dressing gags. Beverly is actually a boy. The goat herd is actually a prince. This is a competent, modest effort where Metro’s already evident Cedric Gibbons fantasy land is the attraction.

Davies wanted to do “Twelth Night” but that didn’t happen.

1916’s The  Moment Before had a special interest being the work of Italian born Robert G. Vignola who Pordenone regard as a native son and partly being set (they try to convince us) in Australia, “the land of oblivion.” I can see where they are coming from there.

This far fetched melo opens with the aged Duchess of Maldon (made up Pauline Frederick) collapsing in the family estate church after doing her Good Works there. A gypsy’s curse told her that she would die on the sound of the steeple bell. She treats bishop Henry Hallam to a long flash back of her past life as a (tempestuous, chain smoking) beauty who had been won by gypsy Jack W. Johnson in a fight with a rival. She captivates Thomas Holding, son of Duke Frank Losee, thus outraging his older brother heir to title.

Frederick’s gypsy lover kills the heir and has Holding blamed. The gypsy couple flee to Australia where Johnson keeps Frederick in outback servitude until fugitive Holding locates them and gives up his successful mine to carry her away

Evil Johnson sees this as a way to dispose of Holding the way he did his brother and they pace out a duel with revolvers which is ended by Frederick snatching up one fallen on the ground and offing the dastard with it. She and Holding, exonerated of his bother’s murder, then return to England to reclaim his title and live exemplary lives on the manor.

The performances are uninteresting and the film craft only just gets by for the day, never redeeming the simple minded sub “Beau Geste” plot.

Also uninvolving was once celebrated Alberto Carlo Lolli’s 1918 Italian Frock Coat melo La morte che assolve, the only surviving work of multi skilled film maker Elettra Raggio who was a star of the day in films and in her stage work with Ermete Novelli.

 

Elettra Raggio

Tubercular Raggio’s child is abandoned by her loan shark father Novelli, then under the protection of Count Ettore Piergiovanni she's placed with an American foster mother to grow up to be Raggio back again. The count has taken in Novelli as game keeper, giving him a chance to stride about in knee pants carrying  a shot gun

When the benevolent Count comes on for Raggio Mark II, dead beat dad Novelli has to step in (“Io sono tuo padre”), getting shot by the now villainous (!) Count.

Pordenone is however committed to raking over Italian cinema and has also come up with busy Mario Bonnard whose eighty five movie career never filled me with admiration. 

Pordenone fielded his appearance in a tinted 1909 Othello and his 1920  Il Fauno di marmo / The Marble Faun. The then celebrated Hawthorne novel original was once in the best “Da Vinci Code” manner responsible for tourist interest in it’s Roman (and Vitebo) locations - the Catacombs of St. Domitilla, the Colosseum and St. Peters’ basilica - used to background the story where star Elena Sangro, one of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s muses and an established costume melodrama star, is involved in the plot which costs her anti-government husband Duke Giorgio Bazzini his life. Count Carlo Gualandri urges “You must help me save the state” and uses the knife she gave him in the killing.

Years later Sangro has left her convent and married and Gualandri become a monk still desires her. Sangro persuades her lover to kill him.

This undistinguished melodrama comes early in Bonnard’s directing career. It’s already old fashioned for 1920.  The surviving copy is mainly notable for the reproduction of Stencil color.

However the big picture was Bonnard’s assured 1928 Seymor Nebenzal production Das Letze souper / Theatre / The Last Performance, an elaborate and not uninteresting theater melodrama turning into a murder mystery, a high point in the career of director Bonnard where the skills of the final period of silent film making push along a pedestrian script. 

George

Heinrich George, the mechanic from Metropolis, goes full bore as Impresario Stroganoff (!) heading up an opera company where he hires dancer Marcella Albani (Volkoff’s Geheimnisse des Orients) for his prestigious new production. She’s been looking after baritone Jean Bradin (Dupont’s Moulin Rouge & Hitchcock’s Champagne) who doesn’t get all that much to do here.

Tensions grow during rehearsal till we get the actual performance - set piece with on stage action, musicians and George conducting, all montaged from elaborate filming to the score which we of course can’t hear.

After a shooting, police inspector Otto Kronburger extracts confessions from Bradin and Albani which he doesn’t buy because he can count a full load of bullets in their unfired pistol. Chorus girl, bit parting Slovak star-to-be Ita Rini, finds the murder weapon and the Inspector has a tape run out along the path of the shot till it comes to the guilty party - nice piece of staging.

More under clad chorus girls and ambitious production values are well served by expert technicians. Unfortunately George gives the only strong performance.

Ita Rina’s career peaked at this point with a re-make of Scherben, Machaty’s Erotikon  and films by Manfred Noa and Richard Oswald. Pordenone gave us a chance to see her as the heroine of Wladimir Gajdarov’s 1930’s Estonian  Kire Lained  / Wellen der Leidenschaft / Waves of Passion the only film to be directed by actor Gajdarov (Jules Verne in the 1924 Mozjoukine Michael Strogoff)

He features as as an undercover cop battling smugglers in a simple minded action adventure.

Our hero is on a passenger boat to Estonia, claiming to be a journalist collecting

Gajdarov

background for a book about smuggling liquor across the Baltic into alcohol free Finland. However he gets into a fight with fellow passenger Ernst Falkenberg. This convinces boss smuggler Fritz Greiner (in the pre-Hitchcock Number 17) that Wladimir should be taken into their operation. The newcomer meets inn keeper (?) Raimondo Von Riel and becomes romantically involved with his blond daughter Ita Rina - though dark haired Jutta Jol, who he dances with in the father’s bar, shows more life.

There’s a shoot out with the border control over the liquor containers tins and an informer tries to frustrate forces of law and order by steering their ship into neutral waters.

Made in 1930, this one looks like a talkie that has lost its track. The handling is competent but the content is too formulaic to be involving. Gajdarov makes an imposing, good looking lead.

They also managed to show Juku the Dog in Kutsu-juku seiklusi the country’s first cartoon film - basic but an agreeable novelty.

One of Pordenone’s core functions is to give substance to names we’ve always seen in film history documentation without ever getting to catch their work. This year they hit the less than appealing Mistinguett and the team of Suzanne Grandais and writer-director-star Léonce Perret working in France in the teens.

That duo intrigued with oddities like 1912’s Le Christhanthème Rouge (suitor Perret uses his blood to stain the flowers the color love object Grandais demands) or Le Homard /A Lucky Lobster from 1913 where Léonce fakes a trip as trawler man to get her the delicacy.

Quite impressive was their three quarter hour 1912 Le mystère des roches de Kador / In the Grip of the Vampire, a suspense melodrama shown in a beautiful tinted copy,

Evil guardian Perret takes a dim view of Captain Max Dhartigny sending Susanne love letters. If they get together that will deprive Perret of her inheritance which he needs in order to to placate an indignant associate ready to prosecute and expose Leonce’s scurrilous dealings. He plots to drown her and her lover in a sea shore cave but the officer manages to save them.

Most interesting element has Head of the Sureté Louis Leubas drag in a therapist who stages a filmed re-enactment on the original stretch of Brittany shore line using Dhartigny and a stand-in for Susanne. She is shown this - the frame within the frame people note in  the director’s output - a remarkably steady image on the black half screen.

Shocked into recovery, she confronts Léonce at a masked ball (elaborate costumes but shot from a single angle where a curtain frames the participants. Perret denies all but the Sureté uses his incriminating note and he cracks and confesses. 

Filmed mainly in in full figure shots cutting at the ankle, not exactly great drama but advanced as frock coat melo goes and having Grandais and Perret on form. Plausible setting and costumes add to a smooth finish. This one did intrigue.

They also rounded out last year’s season of the John M. Stahl silents which had been thought lost, with Florence Reed in The Woman Under the Oath and a couple of reels of The Wanters with Marie Prevost. Time for a Stahl re-assesment. I’ll have a stab at that later. 

I passed on the live music accompanied runs of The Kid, Fragment of an Empire and (more reluctantly) Neil Brand doing The Lodger.

Linder

This quite lengthy coverage ends up being a highlights reel. It doesn’t do justice to the collections of oddities jammed in around the features - Fred Guiol’s 1927 Duck Soup a pre teaming of Laurel and Hardy along with Cocl Als Hauser, a 1913 Austrian version of the same sketch which was written by Stan Laurel’s uncle, Weimar short films, Scandinavian advertising filmlets, movies about film making (and handling) complete with Adrien Brunel’s feeble Cut It Out : a Day in the Life of a Film Censor and another look at the amiable Coleen Moore Ella Cinders and Max Linder in Raymond Bernard’s 1919 Le Petite Café filmed again a decade later in Hollywood with Maurice Chevalier.

Surprise connections appear in this seemingly random selection. Costuming acquires unexpected importance, with Susanne Grandais’ vertical striped outfit or Chen Yan Yan’s one piece spotted dress directing attention to their wearers. Silk hats take on significance with Max Linder demonstrating that he can stand on a pillar of them or those of the factory board members lined up in  front of them on the table, making one of the best gags in Wait and See. Without such styling, Joseph A Golden’s rediscovered 1919 U.S. serial The Great Gamble came over as drab at the length it was shown, even with leading man Charles Huchison’s neck-risking stunts. You can't win 'em all.

The Great Gamble - you can't win'em all.

Throw in the event's remarkably well produced Catologo. Even after a lifetime of hard scrabble movie going, Pordenone still has the ability to surprise and to make me re-assess my notion of  cinema. I come away thinking I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that - even if they did cancel the last program (print still in Moscow) without a replacement, just when I was working up a movie high too.

Movies of 2019

2019 and the Movies.

 Hard to draw any conclusion from the movies I saw (for the first time) in 2019. The appearance of TV series episodes is a new development and Streaming is asserting. The most striking - and welcome - pattern is diversity, a range of sources and subject matter which the local scene is falling behind.

 

Pitt, De Caprio & Tarantino : Once Upon a Time...

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD may be the best thing we get from Quentin Tarantino. Conflating the decline of Studio Hollywood with the Manson murders was a brilliant idea and the performances and production are remarkable. This one still seems to be the big picture everywhere in the world. 

MARRIAGE STORY was Netflix giving Noah Baumbach room to lay out his view of a destructive American society at the length he needed, not too far away from SORRY WE MISSED YOU, maybe Ken Loach's best work. His Cathy Come Home formula of piling all the real life horrors into one story still grabs attention. 

 PARIS SONG (Amre Jeff Vespa) has its 1930s Kazakh lead meeting GeorgeGershwin & Irving Berlin in Paris with Abbie Cornish near stealing the show doing Flaming Youth. LAZZARO FELICE (My Bitter Land, Happy as Lazzaro) is Alice Rohrwacher mixing grim reality and fantasy in the best Miracle in Milan tradition. PETERLOO's historical reconstruction is an impressive change of pace for Mike Leigh.  Jonathan Levine's LONG SHOT shows the old Hollywood feel good mix of rom com and topical can still be a grabber - go Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen. 

ARTICLE 15 (Anubhav Sinha) gets into corruption and the caste system in India with extraordinary force. How many more like this are out there?

FLASKEPOST FRA P (A Conspiracy of Faith) shows the impact  Hans Petter  Moland  can squeeze out of a Department Q feature episode.

 

 

Rainy Day in NY : Chalamet, Gomez & Allen.

 A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK is Woody Allen rising above it all back on his Manhattan home ground. WERK OHNE AUTOR (Never Look Away) has Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck giving the Nazi's another Art Movie serve. NARARERU (Flowing 1956) is possibly Mikio Naruse's best film finally catching up with me while The NARROW TRAIL (Lambert Hillyer, William S. Hart 1916) has the same function for Hart. LA TORTUE ROUGE  (The Red Turtle Michael Dudok de Wit) makes a quite hallucinatory entry in the animation stakes. PROMISE ME gets Oz onto the chart with Rachel Perkins' Redfern Now feature episode.

 UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (David Robert Mitchell) gives La La Land noir a welcome innings. JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi) defies all rules and socks it to fundamentalists. ANAGA APARA JOL  (The Road to Mother Akan Satayev) is the Kazakhs back again with a historical epic.  UND DER ZUKUNFT ZUGERWANT (Sealed Lips  Bernd Böhlich) blows the Evil Empire another raspberry.  COME DIO COMANDA (As God Commands Gabriele Salvatores 2008) reverses our expectations of its racist dad. For BACURAU (Nighthawk Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendonça Filho), think a Brazilian Hounds of Zaroff. BOOKSMART (Olivia Wilde) American Graffiti on speed. GISAENGCHUNG (Parasite)  Joon-ho Bong's flavor of the month, jokey re-work of Les Felines. WHAT SHE SAID - Gary Garver's Pauline Kael doc.

A Conspiracy of Faith - Fares & Kass

Strange Films.

ETRANGE FILM FESTIVAL 2019.

Conveniently in the month before Pordenone, they do L’Etrange Film Festivalv at Le

 Forum des images in the Les Halles development in Paris, an event dedicated to everything weird in movies. It’s a concept that could go anywhere, heir to the seventies, when fans of exploitation cinema were ticked off that their favorites were excluded from the respectable (subsidised) festivals and went into business for themselves.

The organisers are calling this their Twenty Fifth outing but I remember the Paris Fantasy festivals fifty years back in the great days of Paul Naschy and Ishiro Honda who would be hard pressed to relate to some of the latest offerings. That was the first place I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock and here it was back again, one of the extensive Australian entries spread among the guest programmers retrospective and new releases, along with Barbarosa, Walkabout, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Justin Kurzel’s Tue History of the Kelly Gang and Kiah Roache Turner’s Nekrotronic.

The only one I caught was Serge Ou’s  Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks stitched together by a collection of Australian State Film Corporations, another Oz compilation of the (mainly) Asian Exploitation films - think Not Quite Hollywood or The Search for Weng Weng.

This one runs to four thousand plus edits put together in five months, kicking off with the sixties martial arts adventures of Chen pei pei & Jimmy Wang Yu. There’s no mention of pre Shaw Brothers activity. They describe a massive demand following the U.S. distribution of Chang Che’s 5 Fingers of Death revoiced in one all night, beer fueled session. A clip shows how slap dash the matching was. When Bruce Lee dipped out to David Carradine for the Kung Fu series, he went back in disgust to Hong Kong where Run Run Shaw passed him over, missing the cycle’s greatest phenomenon. The film samples the Bruce Lee imitators and the mash ups represented by Game of Death and films carved out of his child star movies & funeral actuality, along with offering an interview with his niece.

The martial arts films connected with minorities producing blaxploitation where it got mixed in with hip hop music & break dancing. Jackie Chan, Liu Chia liang and Kung Fu comedies get a nod. Video and grind house stars Richard Norton, Cynthia Rothrock, Dan The Dragon Wilson, Ron Van Clief comment.  Brian Trenchard Smith is in there and Sammo Hung is represented by The Man from Hong Kong (!) Jane Fonda’s exercise videos are good for a laugh,  Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, Ong Bak & U-Tube stars lead to African child champions whose skills inspire resistance to a wave of kidnappers. 

This later material is largely unfamiliar and the old Hong Kong clips come nostalgia laden. The film is thrown together from what the makers could get but it might have been a lot worse.

The main festival program was a bizare collection of programmer favourites including King Kong,  Robert Patinson in the Canadian The Lighthouse, Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC, David Gregory’s Blood & Flesh, his life of Al Adamson, along with Adamson’s 1969 Satan’s Sadists, Cornel Wilde’s superior 1965 The Naked Prey, William Wyler's The Collector, Vera Chytilova’s Sedmikrasky / The Daisies, a Meyer Deren program, Bunuel’s El Angel exterminador, Gerard Potterton ’s 1981 Heavy Metal, Jackie Chan’s Police Story, Kevin Brownlow’s 1964 It Happened Here and a couple of Alexander Jodorowskis. Try and draw a straight line through that lot.

I concentrated on the new and unfamiliar titles which proved a smart move - a jolting reminder of what present day cinema has become. A few of these had already made it to Australia. Among those, Zhang Yimou’s stylish Ying / Shadow benefited from the big screen and the design, with black and white settings and constant rain, is extraordinary. The battle when it finally arrives - the blade umbrellas against bows and spears - is the best thing in the director’s work since the attack on the calligraphy school in Hero but all the Florentine court intrigue that takes up the body of the film is just tedious.  

Zhang Yimou's Ying

 

 

 

 

 Also already seen, Penny Lane’s Hail Satan is a passably surprising account of a Satanist movement whose branches are popping up round the globe, focused on the outfit taking a stand against US Religious Right groups like Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-LGBTQIA demonstrations. The cult registers quite sympathetically marching under Black & White Stars & Stripes flags and complaining when they can’t get tax breaks because they are considered a protest movement rather than a religion.  The line between show business and faith is suitably blurred. “Atheists are dull. They have no iconography.”

In the unfamiliar material, Japan’s Hatsukoi / First Love showed Takashi Miike in good form even if it does outstay it’s welcome.

We start as we mean to go, with boxer Masataka Kubota working out with ear ‘phones & punching out an opponent - cut to the severed head of the Philippino gangster hurled into the street still grinning. The boxer collapses in the ring when he has the match sewn up, to his manager’s exasperation and he’s told he has a fatal tumor. This makes him indifferent to death.

A deluge of sub-plots follows - girl junkie Sakurako Konishi isn’t cutting it as a whore paying of her dad’s debts. The specter of her old boy friend wearing glasses under a bed sheet haunts her. The Yakusa boss comes out of jail and one of his soldiers plots knocking off a drug haul in association with a crooked cop, taking the girl along. (don’t ask) Knocking off the drug courier sets off the gun in his pocket injuring his attacker. The madam who has been abusing the girl becomes distraught about her fate, bursting into the Yakusa boss’ dignified meeting waving a sword, even giving the gangster driver a blow job while he’s at the wheel like the Ringo Lam Full Contact. Sheet man who only the girl can see, dances to the head phone music in the subway train.

Takashi Miike's First Love

Striking moments abound even if the film can’t keep up the pace. After the night of frantic incoherent activity, we get  a totally momentum killing finale which would be more welcome if we’d worked up more sympathy with the young leads.

Coming from fashion photography and modeling, Alice Waddington offered Spanish made Paradise Hills, an orchidacious take on the body snatcher movie - a mix of Seconds, Pat McGoohan’s The Island series & The Stepford Wives. She herself cites Picnic at Hanging Rock  and Alice in Wonderland.

 At green lipped Emma Roberts fancy dress wedding, guests are choreographed to St. Saens “Carnival of the Animals.” Emma does a runner - time laps and she wakes up in some kind of verdant Escher maze, which the white suits describe as Paradise. Turns out she’s in an island boot camp for rich wayward girls where Milla Jovovich presides over their retooling - nice study in fading beauty malice. The design aspect dominates - pink parasols, brass butterflies, greenery, holograms and the glamorous girls become an element.

  Jovovich & Roberts Paradise Hills.

Avoiding the drugged nightcap Emma discovers the underground laboratory where lab coat technicians work with white bandaged subjects.

A welcome shift of loyalties produces a change of outcome. With all this, the subject and the style end as up-market Bertrand Mandico. Maybe decadent is what people are buying this year.

New Zealand promoter Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy is a Canada-New Zealand-Ireland-U.S. co-production shot in New Caledonia with Hollywood leads, an agreeable though hard edged departure from the expected.

Summoned by a father he doesn’t know, Elijah Wood takes the bus to a Vancouver Island forest verge stop and makes his way to the isolated “UFO” timber home to be greeted with incomprehension by a ravaged, bearded Stephen McHattie. There are rumblings in the night. Wood’s one of twenty numbered Gold ‘phones gets knocked into the lake and McHattie drunk comes at him with a meat cleaver only to succumb to a heart attack. 

Turns out there’s a history of criminal conspiracy and Wood has to take down the heavies at a Swinger’s convention with a call girl bondage mistress and a menacing document spike. “He’s got a flaming cross bow and I’ve got nothing.”

The final scene with Martin Donovan actually manages to be quite touching.

Sakamoto's Aragne

 Saku Sakamoto’s Aragne: Sign of Vermillion is a stylish, sinister Japme feature “Animated for the big screen with a production crew of one."

Rin, the whispy student heroine made the mistake of buying off the plan into an apartment development, gleaming in the sales brochure, to find it’s a grubby, diseased high rise slum, its elevators and mail boxes already rusting. Disgust increases when an ambulance carries a body away and she sees a giant larvae emerge from the arm of the dead woman. Girls are found with their heads twisted at right angles - super yuk.

This one uses imaginative design and a feeling for the grotesque to hold its own with big budget animations.The film’s emphasis on decay and morbidity evokes a more sinister Roland Topor, coming with the much same shock that  first viewing Suspiria provided in back 1986.

Avez vous vu Carolyn Harper?

Chicago film maker Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin got off to a flying start when she threw lapel badges reading “Cunty Sluts” into the audience and announced she wanted to introduce feminism into the area of Hitchcock & David Lynch. The gore in her films is menstrual blood (“very hard to wash out”) She added “In the Trump area, art & culture will save us.” I joined the applause. The video Alice Wadington sent of  blowing a kiss to the camera was totally eclipsed.

In Knives & Skin, Mid West Middle River High School Band girl Raven Whitley is parked with the school jock, scratching a light up  “C” on his brow (?). When she determines not to come across, he throws her out of the car to die in the woods, a bit of a stretch but it introduces the River’s Edge model the director is working too.

Whiteley’s mother Marika Engelhardt starts a search. Her day job is leading the school choir with a Prom Dress over her work clothes, setting up a number of the film’s best elements - a song  joined by characters including the dead girl, a choir session where the girls’ asides are put up as sub-titles over the music or Engelhardt being comforted by the female quartet (two black and one wearing a hijab) who re-assure her by breaking out in a choral version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”

Throw in the black sheriff whose wife is having a false pregnancy. The jock’s sister, Grace Smith has a line in taking cash for her mum’s used underwear from the town’s prominent men, including her school’s principal. When Olwyn demands his team jacket back from one conquest, he finds she has stitched “Andy Kitzmiller treats girls like shit” into it. Even he gets some sympathy, visiting Whitley’s memorial to put her lost glasses on a deposited teddy
bear.

The ending has the kids on the play ground shout at the black student on the roof not to jump but he calms them, explaining that he goes up there to see the highway. “I want to know that there is a way out of this place.” It all makes Middle River an effective addition to the awful American movie small towns like the ones in the Edward G. Robinson Dark Hazard, Helmut Kautner’s The Wild and the Innocent / The Wonderful Years, The Deer Hunter and the rest.

Reeder’s attempt to jam so much into the piece makes it incoherent at times but hers is a strong voice waiting to be heard.

... and for those who have seen everything they added the second screening in ninety years of the 1921 silent La galerie des monstres directed by Jaque Catelain the leading man of Marcel L’Herbier's dreadful L’Inhumaine. Turns out Catelain’s an even worse director than he was an actor.

Doubling as star, Catelain plays one of the tribe of gypsies who sleep in the snow outside the Castilian walled town. He & local girl Lois Moran (with Al Jolson in Mammy) in her first role, decide to pair up and they go to see her grandfather who instead of protecting them shows them to the door. 

Galerie des Monsters : Catelain

 Later (how much later?) they are raising a baby in the Buffalo Traveling Circus arriving in Toledo. Jean Murat the Lion tamer has eyes for Moran and a chubby tootsie in spangles moves on Catelain. Montage of acts - a tumbler, cowboys, clowns, musicians and a fakey menagerie with a rigged human torso, a bearded lady who is obviously a bloke & the skinny girl as a mermaid - a shadowy anticipation of Freaks. The owner lusts after Moran and, when spurned, while she dances in a cage (so so montage) he lets the lion in. Catelain is made to do his act while they are waiting for the doctor. The locals in flat hats go wild for this - implausibly. Hard to see how Catelain-Riquets' sub-Harlequin dance has made him the star of the company.

The circus performers turn on boss Buffalo and the leads and their baby get to drive their caravan back to her village (!) Flossie the spangles girl and the cowboy lion tamer who stole a kiss from from injured Moran are considered to have redeemed themselves.

La galerie des monstres had only curiosity value, even with it’s excellent Lobster Films restoration in a square format. The company's Serge Bromberg did a nice piano accompaniment at the Forum des Images show.

That’s just a dip into their eighty plus programs. I should have got to more of those and cut for instance a draggy Cinémathèque season of French forties movies but there’s no way any one viewer can do that much material justice - that’s one Paris event doing more Cinémathèque than any Australian center can muster in a year - superior too, even with the clunkers.

Elijah Wood in Come to Daddy