“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall.” So tweeted The Humphrey Bogart Estate today, letting cinephiles everywhere know that Hollywood lost yet another great one this week. She was 89.
Bacall, of course, met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1943. And they became one of Hollywood’s legendary couples, starring together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). Above you can watch Bogie and Bacall share some light moments together during a costume test for Melville Goodwin, USA, a film the couple never ultimately made. The footage was shot on February 20, 1956, just after Bogart learned that he had esophageal cancer. He passed away less than a year later, on January 14, 1957. May Bogie & Bacall rest in peace.
Note: The costume test, like many from the period, doesn’t have sound. As you’ll see, you hardly need sound to appreciate the scene that unfolds. Don’t miss the part where the camera zooms in.
When we discover Jorge Luis Borges, we usually discover him through his short stories — or at least through his own highly distinctive uses of the short story form. Those many of us who thereupon decide to read everything the man ever wrote sooner or later find that he ventured into other realms of short text as well. Borges spent time as a poet, an essayist, and even as something of a film critic, a period of his career that will delight the sizable cinephilic segment of his readership. “I’m almost a century late to this party,” writes one such fan, Brendan Kiley at TheStranger, “but I recently stumbled into the movie reviews of Jorge Luis Borges (in his Selected Non-Fictions) and they’re fantastic: gloomy, sometimes bitchy, hilarious.” He first highlights Borges’ 1941 assessment of Citizen Kane, which Interrelevant provides in its incisive, unsparing, referential, and very brief entirety:
AN OVERWHELMING FILM
Citizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two plots. The first, pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits: a vain millionaire collects statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, man and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually ascribed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that this cornucopia of miscellany is a vanity of vanities: all is vanity. At the point of death, he yearns for one single thing in the universe, the humble sled he played with as a child!
The second plot is far superior. It links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined. The same technique was used by Joseph Conrad in Chance (1914) and in that beautiful film The Power and the Glory: a rhapsody of miscellaneous scenes without chronological order. Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him.
Form of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonio Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man is anyone.) In a story by Chesterton — “The Head of Caesar,” I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.
We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous. Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth.
The production is, in general, worthy of its vast subject. The cinematography has a striking depth, and there are shots whose farthest planes (like Pre-Raphaelite paintings) are as precise and detailed as the close-ups. I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as a certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have “endured”—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.
“A kind of metaphysical detective story,” “a labyrinth with no center,” “the work of a genius” — why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Borges here describes his own work. Welles himself didn’t go ignorant of his film’s Borgesian nature, or at least of the tendency of others to point out its Borgesian nature, not always in a positive light. “Some people called it warmed-over Borges,” Welles recalled in a conversation 42 years later with the filmmaker Henry Jaglom. Nor did he forget Borges’ own critique: “He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is that there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out. Borges is half-blind. Never forget that. But you know, I could take it that he and Sartre” — who thought the film’s image “too much in love with itself” — “simply hated Kane. In their minds, they were seeing— and attacking — something else. It’s them, not my work.” Defensive though this may sound, it identifies the impulse that had the author of Labyrinths seeing all those labyrinths in the movie: to quote Anaïs Nin, a writer contemporary though not often brought into the same context with Borges, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
If you, as a filmgoer, have anything in common with me — and if you happen to live in Los Angeles as well — you’ve spent the past few weeks excited about the Andrei Tarkovsky double-bill coming up at the Quentin Tarantino-owned New Beverly Cinema. We’ve previously featured the famously (and extremely) cinephilic Tarantino’s listsoffavoritefilms, but what about Tarkovsky? What movies did the man who made The Mirror and Nostalghia — to name only two of his most strikingly personal films, not to mention the same ones coming up at the New Beverly — look to for inspiration? Nostalghia.com has one set of answers in the form of a list Tarkovsky once gave film critic Leonid Kozlov. “I remember that wet, grey day in April 1972 very well,” writes Kozlov in a Sight and Sound article re-posted there. “We were sitting by an open window and talking about various things when the conversation turned to Otar Ioseliani’s film Once Upon a Time There Lived a Singing Blackbird.”
Tarkovsky struggled toward an assessment of that picture, eventually deeming it “a very good film.” Kozlov then asked the filmmaker to draw up a list of his favorites. “He took my proposition very seriously and for a few minutes sat deep in thought with his head bent over a piece of paper,” the critic recalls. “Then he began to write down a list of directors’ names — Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Vigo. One more, Dreyer, followed after a pause. Next he made a list of films and put them carefully in a numbered order. The list, it seemed, was ready, but suddenly and unexpectedly Tarkovsky added another title — City Lights.” The fruit of his internal deliberations reads as follows:
Among respected directors’ greatest-films lists, Tarkovsky’s must rank as, while certainly one of the most considered, also one of the least diverse. “With the exception of City Lights,” Kozlov notes, “it does not contain a single silent film or any from the 30s or 40s. The reason for this is simply that Tarkovsky saw the cinema’s first 50 years as a prelude to what he considered to be real film-making.” And the lack of Soviet films “is perhaps indicative of the fact that he saw real film-making as something that went on elsewhere.” Overall, we have here “not only a list of Tarkovsky’s favorite films, but equally one of his favorite directors,” especially Ingmar Bergman, who places no fewer than three times. The esteem went both ways; you may remember how Bergman once described Tarkovsky as “the greatest of them all.” Still, as cinematic mutual appreciation societies go, I suppose you couldn’t ask for two more qualified members.
No Eli Roth gorefest or low-budget video nasty, no Hubert Selby or Thomas Hardy adaptation, no Michael Hanecke gutpunch nor the bleakest noir can compare with the work of Werner Herzog when it comes to existential dread. His documentaries and absurdist tragicomedies reach into the heart of human darkness and doomed obsessive weirdness. Even his turns as an actor and producer take him into shadowy, amoral places where grim, sure death awaits. Do you, dear reader, dare follow him there?
If so, you must first brave the application for Herzog’s Rogue Film School. Lessons include “the art of lock-picking, traveling on foot, the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully, the athletic side of filmmaking, the creation of one’s own shooting permits, the neutralization of bureaucracy, and guerilla filmmaking.” Have technical questions? “For this purpose,” Herzog writes in his 12-point description of Rogue, “please enroll at your local film school.” This is no beginner’s workshop; it is “about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible.” This being Herzog, “excitement” likely involves death-defying danger. Prepare for the worst.
But you who are applying for the Rogue Film School know this already. You are up for the challenge. You also know that Herzog doesn’t put himself bodily and psychologically close to—and over—the edge of civilization just for the sake of a thrill. This is art—raw, confrontational, and utterly uncompromising. And so, Rogue Film School will also “be about poetry, films, music, images, literature.” There is a required, eclectic reading list: J.A. Baker’s document of hawk life, The Peregrine, Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories, Virgil’s Georgics. Suggested readings include The Poetic Edda, The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and—somewhat unexpectedly—The Warren Report.
And of course, there is film, “which could include your submitted films,” but will also include a required viewing list: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home? (if available, he writes—watch it here)—an Iranian coming-of-age movie on BFI’s “Top fifty films for children up the age of 14” list. You will discover ways to “create illumination and an ecstasy of truth.” But do not for a moment think this will involve some middlebrow New Age brand of self-discovery. “Censorship will be enforced,” Herzog warns, “There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.” You will probably eat meat raw from a predatory beast you’ve killed with your bare hands.
Alternately, you may have canapés and drinks at a secluded bar in the UK while Herzog chats you up about your latest project and his. So began the orientation to Rogue Film School for filmmaker and sound designer Marcelo de Oliveira, who chronicled his experience as a Herzog apprentice in a two-part write up on the Scottish Documentary Institute’s Blog. On day one, Herzog advised his pupils to “be prepared to step across the borders.” De Oliveira quotes the master saying “Film school will not teach you that we have a natural right as filmmakers to steal a camera or steal certain documents.” And though Herzog does not explicitly advocate such activities, he strongly implies they may be justified, referring to his own act of stealing a camera from the Munich Film School—the same camera with which he shot the crazed and visionary Fitzcarraldo. The theft, Herzog has said, was no crime, but “a necessity.”
Herzog is not a guru, transmitting instructions for enlightenment to cross-legged disciples. He is a catalyst, encouraging his students to “go absolutely and completely wild” for the sake of their individual vision. His film school sounds like the kind of opportunity no daring filmmaker should pass up, but should you apply and get rejected, you can still learn a thing or two from the great German director. Just watch the video above, “Werner Herzog’s Masterclass.” Herzog shared his wisdom and experience with a rapt audience at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Among the many pieces of advice were the following, compiled by Indiewire. See their post for more essential highlights from this fascinating session.
It’s a very dangerous thing to have a video village, a video output. Avoid it. Shut it down. Throw it into the next river. You have an actor, and people that close all staring at the monitor gives a false feeling; that ‘feel good’ feeling of security. It’s always misleading. You have to avoid it.
I always do the slate board; I want to be the last one from the actors on one side and the technical apparatus on the other side. I’m the last one and then things roll. You don’t have to be a dictator.
Never show anyone in a documentary, rushes. They’ll become self-conscious. Never ever do that.
Sometimes it’s good to leave your character alone so no one can predict what is going to happen next. Sometimes these moments are very telling and moving.
Dismiss the culture of complaint you hear everywhere.
You should always try to find a way deep into someone.
What is Film Noir? Ask that question to the Film Noir Foundation and this is what they’ll tell you:
Film noir is one of Hollywood’s only organic artistic movements. Beginning in the early 1940s, numerous screenplays inspired by hardboiled American crime fiction were brought to the screen, primarily by European émigré directors who shared a certain storytelling sensibility: highly stylized, overtly theatrical, with imagery often drawn from an earlier era of German “expressionist” cinema. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger, among others, were among this Hollywood vanguard.
During and immediately following World War II, movie audiences responded to this fresh, vivid, adult-oriented type of film — as did many writers, directors, cameramen and actors eager to bring a more mature world-view to Hollywood product. Largely fueled by the financial and artistic success of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novella Double Indemnity(1944), the studios began cranking out crime thrillers and murder dramas with a particularly dark and venomous view of existence.
In 1946 a Paris retrospective of American films embargoed during the war clearly revealed this trend toward visibly darker, more cynical crime melodramas. It was noted by several Gallic critics who christened this new type of Hollywood product “film noir,” or black film, in literal translation.
Few, if any of the artists in Hollywood who made these films called them “noir” at the time. But the vivid co-mingling of lost innocence, doomed romanticism, hard-edged cynicism, desperate desire, and shadowy sexuality that was unleashed in those immediate post-war years proved hugely influential, both among industry peers in the original era, and to future generation of storytellers, both literary and cinematic.
If you want to get another angle on the question, you can always take into consideration Roger Ebert’s 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films. But our suggestion, especially on a long Sunday afternoon, is to spend some time watching the classic movies gathered in our collection of 50 Free Noir Films. The collection features public domain films by John Huston, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles and other celebrated directors. Here’s a quick sample of what’s in the archive:
Beat the Devil – Free – Directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, the film is something of a comic and dramatic spoof of the film noir tradition. (1953)
D.O.A. — Free — Rudolph Maté’s classic noir film. Called “one of the most accomplished, innovative, and downright twisted entrants to the film noir genre.” (1950) Five Minutes to Live — Free — Memorable bank heist movie stars Johnny Cash, Vic Tayback, Ron Howard, and country music great, Merle Travis. (1961)
Quicksand - Free — Peter Lorre and Mickey Rooney star in a story about a garage mechanic’s descent into crime. (1950)
Scarlet Street — Free — Directed by Fritz Lang with Edward G. Robinson. A film noir great. (1945)
The Hitch-Hiker - Free — The first noir film made by a woman noir director, Ida Lupino. (1953)
The Stranger - Free — Directed by Orson Welles with Edward G. Robinson. One of Welles’s major commercial successes. (1946)
We recently added another 15 films to the collection of free noir films. So even if you’ve perused the list in the past, there’s now something new to enjoy.
Is it possible for a short film made during the Nixon administration to perfectly describe America’s current, completely screwed up political situation? Sure, Lee Mishkin’s Oscar-winning animated short Is It Always Right to Be Right? (1970) might date itself through oblique references to hippies, the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights movement, not to mention the movie’s groovy animation style, but the message of the movie feels surprisingly relevant today. You can watch the movie above.
The short, which is narrated by none other than Orson Welles, describes a land where everyone believed themselves to be right, and where indecisiveness and complexity were considered utterly weak. “When differences arose between the people of this land,” intones Welles at one point, “they looked not for truth but for confirmation for what they already believed.”
Wow, that sounds just like cable news. As the divisions grew and deepened, the land eventually ground to a halt. “Everyone was right, of course. And they knew it. And were proud of it. And the gap grew wider until the day came when all activity stopped. Each group stood in its solitary rightness, glaring with proud eyes at those too blind to see their truth, determined to maintain their position at all costs. This is the responsibility of being right.” Wow, that sounds like Congress.
Then someone tried to temper this stark black-and-white world by saying things like “I might be wrong,” which starts a cascade of introspection and tolerance. Ah, the 70s – that innocent time before the 24-hour news cycle. A time before network execs realized that bloviating morons preaching the rightness of their own position just plain makes good TV.
A year later, you might be interested to know, Orson Welles narrated another animated parable. Watch Freedom River here.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
Think back, if you will to the dawn of the 60’s, or failing that, the third season of Mad Men, when Broadway musicals could still be considered legitimate adult entertainment and Bye Bye Birdie was the hottest ticket in town.
The showcase also afforded the American viewing public their first glimpse of the man who would outlast Sullivan as a fixture in their living rooms, Hollywood’s most outrageous Square, Paul Lynde.
Lynde had his camp and ate it too in the role of a solidly Midwestern father of two who, by virtue of his association with his teenage daughter, finds himself appearing on none other than… The Ed Sullivan Show! It’s a truly meta moment. The studio audience seems to enjoy the joke, and Sullivan appears pleased too, when he wanders on after “Hymn for a Sunday Evening” as the song is properly called. According to his biography, Always on Sunday, his response upon first hearing was less enthusiastic. When the merry Broadway crowd turned to check Sullivan’s response to Lynde’s gulping final admission, (“I love you, Ed!”), Sullivan reported that he wanted the floor to open up and swallow both him and his wife.
Way to get with the joke, Ed!
Later in the episode, there’s some graceful Van Dyke footwork on “Put on a Happy Face,” a song that even the most seasoned theatergoers tend to forget originated with this show, probably because it does nothing to advance the plot.
Lynde and Van Dyke reprised their roles in the 1962 film, but in a typical tale of stage-to-screen heartbreak, Susan Watson, Lynde’s original Birdie daughter, was replaced by 22-year-old bombshell, Ann-Margret. (The deliciously bitchy remark Maureen Stapleton made about her at the wrap party turns out to be apocryphal, or at least intended more kindly than it would seem.) See what she brings to “Hymn for a Sunday Evening” below.
Stanley Kubrick’s perfectionism extended well beyond his films themselves. He even took pains to ensure the promotion of his projects with posters as memorable as the actual experience of watching them. The poster for Barry Lyndonremains perhaps the most elegant of all time, and who could forget the first time A Clockwork Orange’s promised audiences (or threatened audiences with the promise of) “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence, and Beethoven”? Though less often seen today, the bright yellow original poster for The Shining, with that unidentified pointillist face and its expression of shock, may well unsettle you more than even the film itself.
It came from the office of famous graphic designer Saul Bass, known not just for storyboarding Kubrick’s Spartacus but for creating the title sequences for movies like Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (whose poster Bass also designed), North by Northwest, and Psycho (whose immortal “shower scene” Bass may also have come up with). Kubrick rightly figured Bass had what it took to deliver the considerable impact of his psychological horror picture in graphic form.
“This poster design wasn’t a ‘design and done’ deal however,” writes Derek Kimball in a DesignBuddy post on the evolution of the image. “Many of Bass’ concepts were rejected by Kubrick before settling on the final design.” You can see three of them here in this post, and the rest there. Each one includes Kubrick’s handwritten notes of objection: “hand and bike are too irrelevant,” “title looks bad small,” “too much emphasis on maze,” “looks like science fiction film,” “hotel looks peculiar.” You’ve got to admit that the man has a point in every case, although I suspect Bass knew in advance which design the auteur would, once through the wringer of revisions, have the least trouble with. “I am excited about all of them,” Bass writes, “and I could give you many reasons why I think they would be strong and effective identifiers for the film,” but one in particular, “provocative, scary, and emotional,” “promises a picture I haven’t seen before.”
You have to appreciate that kind of confidence in his team’s work when dealing with such a famously exacting client — and, looking at the letter itself, you really have to have to appreciate the kind of confidence it takes to sign your name with a caricature of your own face on the body of your namesake fish.
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