25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by “Noirchaelogist” Eddie Muller

in Film | February 19th, 2014

Film noir received its name in 1946 when French crit­ic Nino Frank expressed his fas­ci­na­tion with dark Hol­ly­wood melo­dra­mas of the time. But noir as a genre only took shape ret­ro­spec­tive­ly, and the bit­ter argu­ments over what it is con­tin­ue to the present. I’ve always thought of film noir as the off­spring of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, pulp fic­tion, and the hard-boiled crime nov­els of Ray­mond Chan­dler. Its characters—dangerous seduc­tress­es and “fall­en” women, cyn­i­cal detec­tives, sadis­tic vil­lains and amoral deviants of all kinds—are exag­ger­at­ed out­law mir­rors of the era’s vir­tu­ous every­man pro­tag­o­nists. Most noirs seem express­ly cre­at­ed to defy the Hays Code’s strong sug­ges­tion that “the sym­pa­thy of the audi­ence shall nev­er be thrown to the side of crime, wrong­do­ing, evil or sin.”

Alain Sil­ver, edi­tor of the Film Noir Read­er, dates “the clas­sic era of film noir” to “a fif­teen year span from You Only Live Once (1937) to Where Dan­ger Lives (1952).” But films as ear­ly as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M are dis­cussed in noir terms, and the aes­thet­ic per­sists, if only in homage or par­o­dy, as in the obvi­ous noir take-off Sin City. Roger Ebert con­cise­ly defined the genre in a short list of ten essen­tial fea­tures. Despite its French name and styl­is­ti­cal­ly Ger­man ori­gins, Ebert called it “the most Amer­i­can film genre, because no soci­ety could have cre­at­ed a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betray­al, unless it were essen­tial­ly naive and opti­mistic.”

What­ev­er the genre’s bound­aries, I think it’s safe to say that film noir’s his­to­ry rests in good hands. The Film Noir Foun­da­tion has ded­i­cat­ed itself to “res­cu­ing and restor­ing America’s Film Noir Her­itage”; Film Noir Stud­ies aims to be a crit­i­cal resource for stu­dents, schol­ars, and fans alike. And per­haps best of all, we have Eddie Muller—self-described “word­slinger, impre­sario, noirchaelogist”—on the case. A very noir-ish char­ac­ter him­self, Muller, a sea­soned San Fran­cis­co reporter, barfly, box­ing enthu­si­ast, and adult film his­to­ri­an, defines film noir as “the flip side of the all-Amer­i­can suc­cess sto­ry.”

It’s about peo­ple who real­ize that fol­low­ing the pro­gram will nev­er get them what they crave. So they cross the line, com­mit a crime and reap the con­se­quences. Or, they’re tales about seem­ing­ly inno­cent peo­ple tor­tured by para­noia and ass-kicked by Fate. Either way, they depict a world that’s mer­ci­less and unfor­giv­ing. 

On his site, Muller has com­piled a list of “25 noir films that will stand the test of time.” His picks range from acknowl­edged clas­sics like Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Sun­set Boule­vard to less­er-known pic­tures like Raw Deal. Below, I’ve list­ed his favorites in the reverse order he prefers. Call­ing his list “End­less Night,” Muller asks us to “take this with a grain of salt” and to “con­sid­er the list­ing a sort of car­ni­val barom­e­ter, rang­ing from INFATUATED to PASSIONATE.”

25. Raw Deal (Eagle-Lion, 1948) — Avail­able on YouTube
24. City that Nev­er Sleeps (Repub­lic, 1952)
23. Touch of Evil (Uni­ver­sal, 1958)
22. Scar­let Street (Uni­ver­sal, 1945) — Avail­able on Open Cul­ture or watch above
21. Detour (PRC, 1945) — Avail­able on Open Cul­ture
20. Tomor­row is Anoth­er Day (Warn­er Bros., 1951)
19. The Prowler (Unit­ed Artists, 1950)
18. Gun Crazy (Unit­ed Artists, 1950)
17. Act of Vio­lence (MGM, 1949)
16. Odds Against Tomor­row (Unit­ed Artists, 1959)
15. The Killing (Unit­ed Artists, 1956)
14. They Live By Night (RKO, 1949)
13. Thieves’ High­way (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1949)
12. Sweet Smell of Suc­cess (Unit­ed Artists, 1958)
11. The Killers (Uni­ver­sal, 1946)
10. Moon­rise (Repub­lic, 1948) — Avail­able on YouTube
9.  Out of the Past (RKO, 1947)
8.  Night and the City (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1950)
7.  Night­mare Alley (20th Cen­tu­ry-Fox, 1947)
6.  The Mal­tese Fal­con (Warn­er Bros., 1941)
5.  Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty (Para­mount, 1944)
4.  The Asphalt Jun­gle (MGM, 1950)
3.  Sun­set Boule­vard (Para­mount, 1950)
2.  Criss Cross (Uni­ver­sal, 1949)
1.  In a Lone­ly Place (Colum­bia, 1950)

See Muller’s orig­i­nal arti­cle for his price­less com­men­tary on each film. And if his list piques your inter­est, be sure to vis­it our con­sid­er­able col­lec­tion of free online film noir clas­sics, all oth­er­wise found in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fritz Lang’s Cen­sored Noir Film, Scar­let Street, Star­ring the Great Edward G. Robin­son (1945)

Detour: The Cheap, Rushed Piece of 1940s Film Noir Nobody Ever For­gets

Watch D.O.A., Rudolph Maté’s “Inno­v­a­tive and Down­right Twist­ed” Noir Film (1950)

The Third Man: Film Noir Clas­sic on YouTube

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies

in Film, Technology | February 19th, 2014

Why have cinephiles, from the era of Laserdiscs through that of DVDs and now Blu-rays, so con­sis­tent­ly respect­ed The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion? Speak­ing as one such cinephile, I could point to a num­ber of fac­tors: their cura­to­r­i­al bent toward impor­tant films, their pro­duc­tion of rich sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures, their always impres­sive pieces of cov­er art. But Cri­te­ri­on has become increas­ing­ly known for the con­sid­er­able work they put in not at the end of the process, when they pack­age a clas­sic or poten­tial­ly clas­sic motion pic­ture for max­i­mum aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al appeal (and your pur­chase), but at the begin­ning, when they track down the actu­al cel­lu­loid film in the first place, often aged or dam­aged, and engage in the often painstak­ing task of return­ing it to the prime of visu­al and son­ic life.

In the short Giz­mo­do video at the top, Cri­te­ri­on direc­tor Lee Kline and his team talk about the work they did to restore Alfred Hitch­cock­’s 1940 For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent, which includ­ed acquir­ing the neg­a­tive from the Library of Con­gress, scan­ning the whole thing at high res­o­lu­tion over two days to a week, doing the research nec­es­sary to fig­ure out how the film “should have looked,” clean up scratch­es and film dam­age, and fil­ter out the clicks and pops on the sound­track. (And yes, we get some insight into its “snazzy” cov­er design as well.) The Kline-nar­rat­ed video just above offers a demon­stra­tion of Cri­te­ri­on’s restora­tion process on anoth­er piece of clas­sic Hitch­cock, the first, 1934-made ver­sion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a pic­ture with no known neg­a­tive still in exis­tence. A for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge, but if we film geeks entrust that job to any­one, we entrust it to Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

The Restora­tion of a Mas­ter­piece, as Nar­rat­ed by Mar­tin Scors­ese

Watch The Plea­sure Gar­den, Alfred Hitchcock’s Very First Fea­ture Film (1925)

Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Some of the First Words Ever Spo­ken on Film …. and They’re Saucy Ones (1929)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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Watch 13 Experimental Short Films by Tezuka Osamu, the Walt Disney of Japan

in Animation, Art, Film | February 18th, 2014

Tezu­ka Osamu (1928–1989) is known as “the God of man­ga” in Japan. He cre­at­ed clas­sics for both chil­dren and adults in every genre – from hor­ror to romance to action. The sheer amount of work pro­duced in Osamu’s rel­a­tive­ly short life is stag­ger­ing; some esti­mates have it that he drew over 150,000 pages of comics.

While focus­ing just on man­ga would have been enough for most mor­tals, Osamu was also a trail­blaz­er in ani­ma­tion. He cre­at­ed Astro-Boy, the huge­ly pop­u­lar char­ac­ter that spawned com­ic books, TV shows, video games and a cou­ple of movies. The visu­al style of Osamu’s ani­mat­ed work — Astro-Boy and oth­ers — proved to be very influ­en­tial. Those trade­mark giant eyes on ani­me char­ac­ters come straight from Osamu (who in turn was influ­enced by Walt Dis­ney and Max Fleis­ch­er).

Osamu relent­less­ly chal­lenged the lim­its of what man­ga and ani­me could do. He’s cred­it­ed with mak­ing the first ever X‑Rated ani­mat­ed fea­ture film, Cleopa­tra, Queen of Sex (1970) — imag­ine Dis­ney doing that. He also made a series of exper­i­men­tal ani­mat­ed shorts, which show­case not only Osamu’s cre­ativ­i­ty and range but also his phi­los­o­phy, which was heav­i­ly influ­enced by Bud­dhism.

His 1962 work Tale of Street Cor­ner is a sur­pris­ing­ly mov­ing short about the day-to-day life of a city street cor­ner as seen through the eyes of some anthro­po­mor­phized mice and sen­tient street posters.

And if you want get a sense of Osamu’s ver­sa­til­i­ty, check out his 1966 movie Pic­tures at an Exhi­bi­tion. The work is an omnibus film fea­tur­ing ten small­er shorts, all set to Mus­sorgsky’s famous suite. Osamu recre­at­ed each short in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent style from the oth­ers.

His 1984 short, Jump­ing is a tech­ni­cal tour-de-force told with admirable sim­plic­i­ty. Seen from a first per­son point of view, the movie is about a young child who is jump­ing down a coun­try road. As each jump gets high­er and longer, the cam­era pass­es through cities, fields and oceans and even­tu­al­ly into a war­zone. The sharp-eyed view­er will see R2D2 and C‑3PO make a sur­prise cameo at around the 2:57 mark­er.

And final­ly, here is an inter­view with the mas­ter him­self as he talks about mak­ing these movies. And you can see all 13 of the ani­mat­ed shorts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Des­ti­no: The Sal­vador Dalí – Dis­ney Col­lab­o­ra­tion 57 Years in the Mak­ing

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Japan­ese Car­toons from the 1920s and 30s Reveal the Styl­is­tic Roots of Ani­me

How to Make Instant Ramen Com­pli­ments of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion Direc­tor Hayao Miyza­ki

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.

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Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

in Film | February 17th, 2014

sunrise-movie-poster-197

Ger­man direc­tor F.W. Murnau’s silent mas­ter­piece Sun­rise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a rare exam­ple of a for­eign auteur who man­aged to keep his vision in the face of the Hol­ly­wood machine.

Pri­or to this movie, F. W. Mur­nau was arguably the most impor­tant film direc­tor of his time. He direct­ed a string of Ger­man Expres­sion­ist works that were as bleak and brood­ing as they were tech­ni­cal­ly bril­liant. Murnau’s eeri­ly, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Nos­fer­atu (1922) rede­fined the hor­ror movie. The spec­tac­u­lar­ly depress­ing Der Let­zte Mann (1924) fea­tured a rov­ing cam­era, dou­ble-expo­sure and forced per­spec­tive to bril­liant­ly evoke the shame, humil­i­a­tion and (in one tour-de-force sequence) drunk­en­ness of a proud door­man demot­ed to a wash­room atten­dant. And his adap­ta­tion of Faust (1926) was the most lav­ish, expen­sive movie Ger­many had ever pro­duced at the time.

Enter William Fox, a Jew­ish-Hun­gar­i­an immi­grant who found­ed the Fox Film Cor­po­ra­tion. Though his stu­dio was mod­er­ate­ly suc­cess­ful pro­duc­ing Tom Mix seri­als, he aspired to some­thing greater; he aspired to art. Fox con­vinced Mur­nau to make the jump to Hol­ly­wood, in part by agree­ing to build a $200,000 set for the movie — an astro­nom­i­cal sum in those days.

Sun­rise opens with a series of title cards that announce just what this movie is about:

This song of the man and his wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it any­where at any time. For wher­ev­er the sun ris­es and sets in the city’s tur­moil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; some­times bit­ter, some­times sweet.

Mur­nau and his screen­writer Carl Mey­er (who also wrote Der Let­zte Mann) made the plot­line so sim­ple, so uni­ver­sal that the char­ac­ters don’t even have names.

A strug­gling farmer is smit­ten with a femme fatale from the city. She invei­gles him to drown his young wife and run off to the city with her. But when it comes time to do the deed, he real­izes that he can’t do it. When the wife flees from him, he fol­lows her into the city, apol­o­giz­ing pro­fuse­ly. Even­tu­al­ly, he and his remark­ably for­giv­ing wife rec­on­cile and rekin­dle their love for one oth­er. The sto­ry is so ele­men­tal that it could be a fairy tale.

Yet Murnau’s abil­i­ty to spin absolute­ly daz­zling images — using tech­nol­o­gy per­fect­ed in Ger­many – is what makes Sun­rise so mem­o­rable. At one point in the movie, the cam­era seem­ing­ly floats over a crowd in an amuse­ment park; at anoth­er the lovers walk down a city street that, with­out a cut, trans­forms into a flow­er­ing mead­ow. Com­pared to his Hol­ly­wood con­tem­po­raries – D.W. Grif­fith for exam­ple – Murnau’s movie seems vital, mod­ern, and sur­pris­ing­ly poignant.

Though the movie earned a few Oscars – includ­ing one for Best Unique and Artis­tic Pro­duc­tion and one for Best Actress for Janet Gaynor — Sun­rise suf­fered the fate of many cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces: It flopped. Yet over the years, its crit­i­cal rep­u­ta­tion has only grown. In 2012, it was named the 5th best movie of all time by Sight and Sound mag­a­zine just ahead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike Kubrick’s sci-fi saga, how­ev­er, you can watch Sun­rise for free on Archive.org. Check it out. Also find the clas­sic on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, Named the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Watch Ten of the Great­est Silent Films of All Time — All Free Online

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

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.

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Animated Video: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter Against the Padres While Tripping on LSD (1970)

in Film, Sports | February 17th, 2014

For a sport obsessed with sta­tis­ti­cal aver­ages, base­ball seems to thrive like no oth­er on out­ra­geous anec­dotes and sin­gu­lar char­ac­ters. One of those char­ac­ters, pitch­er Dock Ellis, had a drug-fueled run in the 70s with the Pitts­burgh Pirates, claim­ing that he almost nev­er pitched a game sober, includ­ing sev­er­al Nation­al League East Cham­pi­onships and a 1971 World Series win. The drugs even­tu­al­ly became too much and he got help, but they gave Ellis his career best anec­dote, the sto­ry he tells in the short film above, “Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No.” It’s ani­mat­ed by James Blag­don from an inter­view Ellis gave to Don­nell Alexan­der and Neille Ilel that aired on NPR in March of 2008.

In June 1970, Ellis took a day off, dropped acid at the air­port and, “high as a Geor­gia pine,” checked into a friend’s girlfriend’s house to enjoy the rest of his trip. He woke up two days lat­er, still trip­ping, went to the sta­di­um, took some stimulants—which “over 90% of the league was using,” he says—and got to work, pitch­ing a no-hit­ter against the San Diego Padres. “I didn’t see the hit­ters,” Ellis says, “all I could tell was whether they were on the right side or left side.” Above, his col­or­ful nar­ra­tion gets a full com­pli­ment of sound effects and day-glo excla­ma­tions. (We also see allu­sions to Ellis’ oth­er sto­ried antics, like appear­ing on the mound in curlers and bean­ing oppos­ing play­ers with fast­balls.) “It was eas­i­er,” he says, “to pitch with the LSD because I was used to med­icat­ing myself.” In this instance at least, the meds were mag­ic.

The short film pre­miered at Sun­dance and film fes­ti­vals world­wide in 2010, and the Dock Ellis leg­end has only grown since. The same inter­view become part of Beyond Ellis D, a “mul­ti­me­dia book” for iPads devel­oped in 2012 by Don­nell Alexan­der and ani­mat­ed by Hei­di Per­ry. (See Part 1, “Super­fly Spit­ball,” above.) In an essay for Dead­spin, Alexan­der laments that Ellis—an out­spo­ken crit­ic of racism in baseball—has been large­ly reduced to the LSD no-hit­ter, which he calls “a short take on a big life.” While it’s a hell of a good sto­ry, Alexan­der also sees Ellis “on a con­tin­u­um with Jack­ie Robin­son” (who advised him to tone it down), “a black ballplay­er strad­dling the reserve-clause era and the arrival of free agency, a man who brought many of the old ways with him into baseball’s new, Day-Glo epoch.” Ellis—who died in 2008 of liv­er fail­ure at age 63 after years as a drug counselor—certainly lived up to the hype. His wild life and career get a full treat­ment in the doc­u­men­tary No No, which just screened at Sun­dance this past month. Watch the film’s trail­er below.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

Errol Mor­ris’ New Short Film, Team Spir­it, Finds Sports Fans Lov­ing Their Teams, Even in Death

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis

in Film, Literature, Radio | February 13th, 2014

Peter Capal­di is best known in the States for being the most recent actor to play Doc­tor Who. But did you know that he is also an Oscar-win­ning film­mak­er? His bril­liant short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Won­der­ful Life took the prize for Best Short Film in 1995.

The movie shows Kaf­ka, on Christ­mas Eve, strug­gling to come up with the open­ing line for his most famous work, The Meta­mor­pho­sis.

As Gre­gor Sam­sa awoke one morn­ing from uneasy dreams he found him­self trans­formed in his bed into a gigan­tic insect.

Capal­di wrings a lot of laughs out of Kafka’s inabil­i­ty to fig­ure out what Sam­sa should turn into. A giant banana? A kan­ga­roo? Even when the answer is lit­er­al­ly star­ing at him in the face, Kaf­ka is hilar­i­ous­ly obtuse.

Richard E. Grant stars as the tor­tured, tight­ly-wound writer who is dri­ven into fits as his cre­ative process is inter­rupt­ed for increas­ing­ly absurd rea­sons. The noisy par­ty down­stairs, it turns out, is pop­u­lat­ed by a dozen beau­ti­ful maid­ens in white. A lost deliv­ery woman offers Kaf­ka a bal­loon ani­mal. A local lunatic search­es for his com­pan­ion named Jiminy Cock­roach.

You can see the film above, help­ful­ly sub­ti­tled in Ger­man. Also find it in our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More, plus our list of 33 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able on the Web.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find Works by Kaf­ka in our lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

Watch Franz Kaf­ka, the Won­der­ful Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

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.

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What Happens When Your Brain is on Alfred Hitchcock: The Neuroscience of Film

in Film, Psychology, Science | February 13th, 2014

If you have 22 min­utes, why not sit back and watch the clas­sic piece of tele­vi­sion above, Alfred Hitch­cock Presents’ 1961 episode “Bang, You’re Dead”? You may well have seen it before, quite pos­si­bly long ago, but you’ll find it holds up, keep­ing you in sus­pense today as art­ful­ly as it or any oth­er Hitch­cock pro­duc­tion always has. But why do we get so emo­tion­al­ly engaged in this sim­ple tale of a five-year-old boy who comes into pos­ses­sion of a real hand­gun that he mis­tak­en­ly thinks a harm­less toy? Here with detailed answers root­ed in the mechan­ics of the human brain, we have “Neu­rocin­e­mat­ics: the Neu­ro­science of Film,” a pre­sen­ta­tion by Uri Has­son of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty’s Neu­ro­science Insti­tute.

Hitch­cock con­ceived of his style of cin­e­ma, says Has­son in the clip below, as “doing exper­i­ments on the audi­ence,” and of a movie itself as “a sequence of stages designed to have an effect on your brain.”

The brains of every­one sit­ting in the the­ater thus, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, all become “res­o­nant and aligned with the movie in a very pow­er­ful and com­pli­cat­ed way.” Var­i­ous types of research bear this out, from mea­sur­ing the skin tem­per­a­ture, per­spi­ra­tion, and blood flow in the brains of sub­jects as they watch Hitch­cock­’s young pro­tag­o­nist add more “toy” bul­lets to the “toy” gun he bran­dish­es around the neigh­bor­hood. In the clip below, you can see exact­ly how the sci­en­tists’ func­tion­al MRI machines scan the view­ers as they watch the episode, whose plot, as one of the research team puts it, “keeps the par­tic­i­pants a bit on their feet,” flat on their back though they need to remain for the dura­tion. You’ll find the watch­ing expe­ri­ence much more com­fort­able in your chair. It won’t pro­duce much data for the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, but at least now you’ll know what goes on in your brain as it hap­pens, some­thing about which even Hitch­cock him­self could only guess. To con­duct your own exper­i­ments, see our col­lec­tion of 21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

Alfred Hitch­cock on the Filmmaker’s Essen­tial Tool: ‘The Kuleshov Effect’

Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

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Painters Painting: The Definitive Documentary Portrait of the New York Art World (1940–1970)

in Art, Film | February 12th, 2014

Emile de Anto­nio is one of those peo­ple who sim­ply had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was a Har­vard class­mate of John F. Kennedy. He knew all of the core mem­bers of the Beat move­ment, even help­ing to dis­trib­ute the sem­i­nal Beat movie Pull My Daisies. And De Anto­nio was a friend with vir­tu­al­ly every­one in the New York art scene from Jasper Johns to Willem de Koon­ing. He once drank him­self into a stu­por for Andy Warhol’s exper­i­men­tal movie Drink. Warhol even famous­ly praised De Anto­nio say­ing, “Every­thing I learned about paint­ing, I learned from De.”

De Anto­nio was also a major voice of dis­sent dur­ing the Cold War. He direct­ed a series of scathing doc­u­men­taries includ­ing Point of Order (1964), about the McCarthy hear­ings; Rush to Judg­ment (1966), a sta­ple among JFK assas­si­na­tion the­o­rists; and the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed anti-Viet­nam war movie In the Year of the Pig. (1968)

For his 1972 movie Painters Paint­ing: The New York Art Scene 1940–1970, De Anto­nio man­aged to get artists like Warhol, Johns, and De Koon­ing along with Robert Rauschen­berg, Frank Stel­la, Bar­nett New­man and Helen Franken­thaler to talk about their craft. It is the defin­i­tive doc­u­men­tary por­trait of the New York art world.

De Anto­nio talked about Painters Paint­ing in a 1988 inter­view:

I was prob­a­bly the only film­mak­er in the world who could [have made Painters Paint­ing] because I knew all those peo­ple, from the time that they were poor, and unsuc­cess­ful and had no mon­ey. I knew Warhol and Rauschen­berg and Jasper Johns and Stel­la before they ever sold a paint­ing, and so it was inter­est­ing to [do the film about them]. They appeared in the film along with De Koon­ing, whom I knew very well, and Bar­nett New­man, who is now dead. They talked to me in a way that they would nev­er have talked to any­body else because they knew I knew the sub­ject.

The film, a tad grainy, appears above. A high­er res ver­sion of the film can “rent­ed” on Ama­zon. Ama­zon Prime mem­ber can watch it for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:
Watch Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock, the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by Melvyn Bragg

635 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Rauschen­berg Eras­es De Koon­ing

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.

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