The Nokia Short 2011 competition wrapped up this weekend at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the jury gave the first prize to Splitscreen: A Love Story. Shot with a Nokia N8 mobile phone and a hand-held dolly (watch the “making of” video here), the film elegantly weaves together scenes from Paris and New York. A synchronized tale of two great cities. Then, it all comes together in London. Kudos to director JW Griffiths, and don’t miss his original pitch.
It’s with some discomfort that the author names Gone with the Wind, published exactly 75 years ago today, her favorite childhood book: It was thick, it was romantic — and perhaps most crucially for any awkward, bespectacled preteen girl — it featured a headstrong heroine whose appeal to the opposite sex derived more from her charm than her physical beauty.
Nonetheless, there’s no way around the profound failings of both the book and the MGM epic film based on it: Novel and film treated slavery as an incidental backdrop to the war; they glorified and misrepresented the actions of the Ku Klux Klan; and most egregiously, they portrayed the master-slave relationship as one which neither master nor slave should ever dream of altering. In the words of historian and sociologist Jim Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong:
[Gone With The Wind] laments the passing of the slave era as “gone with the wind.” In the novel, Mitchell states openly that African Americans are “creatures of small intelligence.” And this book is by far the most popular book in the U.S. and has been for 60 years. The book is also profoundly wrong in its history. What it tells us about slavery, and especially reconstruction, did not happen…it is profoundly racist and profoundly wrong. Should we teach it? Of course. Should we teach against it? Of course.
Meanwhile, Hattie McDaniel took home a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Scarlett O’Hara’s loyal house slave, Mammy. She was the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award. The fact that she was not allowed to attend the film’s premiere in Atlanta makes her acceptance speech (1940) even more poignant. It appears above.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Peter Falk made his career playing a quirky detective in the 1960s and 70s television show Columbo. But the art world will remember a moment when Falk played himself in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. In the credits, he was listed simply as ‘Der Filmstar.’ This is our 1:46 tribute to Falk, who passed away Friday at age 83. H/T @SteveSilberman
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In 1982, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth directed 66 Scenes from America, a film that stitched together a series of lengthy shots, each a visual postcard from a journey across America. And, taken together, you have a tableau of the American experience.
Along the way, the pop artist Andy Warhol makes his appearance. The man who coined the expression “15 Minutes of Fame” takes four minutes to eat a hamburger, mostly without saying a word. And simply because of his fame, we watch … and watch. About this scene Leth gives a few details:
[Warhol] is told that he has to say his name and that he should do so when he has finished performing his action, but what happens is that the action takes a very long time to perform; it’s simply agonizing. I have to admit that I personally adore that, because its a pure homage to Warhol. It couldn’t be more Warholesque. That’s of course why he agreed to do it.
This was presumably not a paid placement by Burger King.
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Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, Nico, and More
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Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ of Bob Dylan: A Classic Meeting of Egos
Before clicking on this extraordinary video — which shows a meeting of civilizations that may never happen again on our planet — be sure to turn the sound off and spare yourself the awful soundtrack. The expressions on the faces of the Toulambi tribesmen are enough anyway, and even though history tells us that these parties end badly for the team with the fewest toys, you can’t help feeling a certain amount of awe and joy while watching the encounter.
This footage was shot in Papua New Guinea by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, a Belgian filmmaker and activist perhaps best known for his Academy Award-nominated 1979 documentary Raoni: The Fight for the Amazon. You can visit Dutilleux’s web site to get more photos and a little more backstory on the Toulambi. Have a good weekend…
via Metafilter
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Over at Escape Into Life, Luke Grundy directs us to a marvelous short film that is as deceptively simple as its title would suggest. At first viewing we thought the effect of LA filmmaker Douglas Burgoff’s “Animals” should be credited mostly to the haunting music by famed British composer Michael Nyman. But then we watched it again with the sound off, and we were just as impressed as before, if not more so. Just take a look at the series of close-ups on the monkey’s face between the 1:54 and 2:14 marks.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
It’s hard to do cinematic justice to any good novel, let alone the greatest of Russia’s many great novels, Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace. But Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk somehow managed to pull it off. Reviewing Bondarchuk’s film back in 1969, a young Roger Ebert wrote:
“War and Peace” is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and — yes — splendid movie. Perhaps that’s just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.
No corners were cut, and no expenses spared, in making the film. Indeed, the film (available on DVD here) was made “at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to recreate Napoleon’s battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened.” What’s more, 35,000 costumes were made for the production, and many Soviet museums contributed artifacts for the production design. That’s staggering, even by today’s standards.
Released in four parts between 1965 and 1967, the Academy Award-winning film runs more than seven hours and you can now find it playing on YouTube. You can watch Part 1 here, and here you have Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. And if you need subtitles, click CC at the bottom of the videos. The film is, of course, listed in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Thanks Ammar for the heads up on this film!
The New York Times has posted A.O. Scott’s 3‑minute look back at the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou. Scott describes the surrealist classic, a collaboration between painter Salvador Dalí and a very young first-time filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as an “old dog with an endless supply of new tricks.” The short’s procession of seemingly absurd, unconnected images, he adds, does not follow the logic of narrative but rather the “logic of dreams.”
Even though its most famous (or infamous) images — a severed hand, a hand covered with ants, and most finally a hand slicing into a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade — seem less shocking now than they did 80 years ago, Un Chien Andalou is still a pleasure. Our reality has changed since the 20s. Our dreams, less so.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou in its entirety, along with L’Âge d’Or, another Buñuel/Dalí production, in our collection of Free Online Movies. But proceed with caution: About 25 years ago, I slipped a copy into the family VCR, expecting a cute cartoon about an Andalusian dog. I’m still recovering.
Related:
Salvador Dali (and Other VIPs) on “What’s My Line?”
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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