Courtesy of the Met Museum comes the 1984 documentary, In a Brilliant Light: Van Gogh in Arles, narrated by Edward Herrmann:
Near the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh moved from Paris to the city of Arles in southeastern France, where he experienced the most productive period of his artistic career. During his 444 days there, he completed over two hundred paintings and one hundred drawings inspired by the region’s light, wildlife, and inhabitants. This film presents the stories behind many beloved works alongside beautiful footage of daily life in Provence, as well as glimpses of rarely seen canvases held in private collections.
For some of us (no names) the world of TikTok is baffling and bizarre. Why does Gen Z flock to it? Who knows, but they do, in droves. Anyone can be a “creator” on what Jason Parham at Wired calls “the most exciting cultural product of this time.” It also happens to be a place where “digital blackface” has evolved—an online cultural phenomenon in which Black users of a platform get disproportionately censored while others who adopt the trappings of Black American culture, often in exaggerated, stereotypical ways, rack up followers and views.
21st century forms of blackface persist for all sorts of reasons. The intent may not be consciously to demean, but the effects are usually otherwise, especially given the long history of blackface as a way of mocking Black Americans, while forcing Black actors to themselves perform in blackface to gain an audience and get work. Minstrelsy performed by white stage actors, comedians, musicians, etc. set a tragically low bar for Black actors.
A once-prominent example comes from the career of performer Bert Williams. “Largely forgotten today,” Claudia Roth Pierpont writes at The New Yorker, Williams was “the first African-American star: the most famous ‘colored man’ in America during the early years of the twentieth century.” He performed at Buckingham Palace, was the only Black member of Ziegfeld Follies (and a headliner) and played “alongside Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor—for nearly a decade.”
He did all of it in blackface, decades after the original Jim Crow character appeared in 1830. Born in 1874 in the Bahamas, says Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips, Williams “was an outsider in all sorts of ways… He didn’t see himself to be fully a part of African American traditions, so in a sense he didn’t quite understand the full implications of the blackface performance. He saw it as part of his costume.” That may not necessarily be so. In his stage act, Williams and his partner resisted the practice for as long as they could, until they realized that they would be subject to constant violence from white audiences without it.
Blackface affectations helped Williams cross over into a film career. He “produced, wrote, directed and starred in two short films for Biograph,” the San Francisco Silent Film Festival notes, “A Natural Born Gambler (1916) and Fish (1916). Produced by a black man for white audiences, they were groundbreaking, however, these films featured characters and storylines that still satisfied dominant racist stereotypes of black men.”
In contrast, a third film, produced three years earlier, titled Lime Kiln Club Field Day, “one of a handful of surviving silent films with an all-black cast,” told a very different kind of story. Williams appeared in blackface, but the other actors did not. “The film … features one of the first examples of on-screen intimacy between a black man and a black woman—a kiss—along with scenes of middle class leisure; story elements that challenged the mostly negative, sometimes evil, depictions of blacks in the majority of white-produced films, which reached a distressing nadir in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released two years later.”
Lime Kiln Club Field Day was never completed. Its many unedited reels of film were only recently rediscovered, a century later, in the archives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. See the film above, restored by curator Ron Magliozzi and preservation officer Peter Williamson, who conducted research “over nearly a decade,” the MoMA writes, to decipher the plot of the film and recover its production history, even going so far as to employ a lip reader and explore Staten Island and New Jersey in search of locations.”
Film historians do not know why the project was abandoned. They do know that Williams suffered significantly for the racist caricatures he felt forced to perform. Read more about his extraordinary career at The New Yorker and learn more about the Lime Kiln Club Field Day restoration project at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival site.
It takes a fearless filmmaker indeed to adapt Dune. Atop its rich linguistic, political, philosophical, religious, and ecological foundations, Frank Herbert’s saga-launching 1965 novel also happens to have a plot “convoluted to the point of pain.” So writes David Foster Wallace in his essay on David Lynch, who directed the first cinematic version of Dune in 1984. That the result is remembered as a “huge, pretentious, incoherent flop” (with an accompanying glossary handout) owes to a variety of factors, not least studio meddling and the unsurprising incompatibility of the man who made Eraserhead with large-scale Hollywood sci-fi. The question lingered: could Dune be successfully adapted at all?
Well before Lynch took his crack, El Topo and The Holy Mountain director Alejandro Jodorowsky put together his own Dune adaptation. If all had gone well it would have come out as a ten-hour film featuring the art of H.R. Giger and Moebius as well as the performances of Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Alain Delon, Mick Jagger, and Salvador Dalí.
But all did not go well, and cinema was deprived of what would have been a singular spectacle no matter how it turned out. At least one element of Jodorowsky’s Dune has survived, however, in the latest attempt to bring Herbert’s complex bestseller to the screen: the music of Pink Floyd, heard in the just-released trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, starring Timothée Chalemet as the young hero Paul Atreides (as well as Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, and a host of other currently big names), scheduled for release in December.
If a credible Dune movie is possible, Villeneuve is the man to direct it. His previous two pictures, Blade Runner 2049 and the alien-visitation drama Arrival, demonstrate not just his capabilities with science fiction but his sense of the sublime. Beginning with its setting, the desert-wasteland planet of Arrakis, Dune demands to be envisioned with the kind of beauty that inspires something close to dread and fear. (The first director asked to adapt Dune was David Lean, perhaps due to his track record with majestic views of sand.) Villeneuve has also made the wise choice of refusing to compress the entire book into a single feature, presenting this as the first of a two-part adaptation. And as a lifelong Dune fan, he understands the attitude necessary to approaching this challenge: “Fear is the mind-killer,” as Paul famously puts it — so famously that the trailer couldn’t possibly exclude Chalamet’s delivery of the line.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
If you weren’t in the indie cinema exhibition industry in the 1980s, you probably haven’t heard of Showest. But this was *the* convention back then, a chance to travel to Las Vegas, shmooze with film distributors and Hollywood studios, smoke cigars, drink single malt Scotch, run up your company’s tab and have a dim memory in the morning of visiting a strip club. You know: Business, American Style!
And so what we have here is a promotional film for an up-and-coming 1984 movie called Ghostbusters. Not the trailer, you see, that’s for the general public. Instead, this is two of the film’s lead actors, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray, directly addressing attendees, imploring them to check out what could be the sci-fi comedy of the summer. “It’s gonna make E.T. look like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Murray quips.
There’s a few things apparent from this promo film: Ackroyd and Murray are completely winging it, and this probably took as long to shoot as it takes time to watch. Also, perhaps: they’ve been “celebrating” if you know what I mean. Maybe. Allegedly. Either way, you can tell these guys are goofing about and making each other laugh. And it also ends with a Ghostbusters theme that isn’t the Ray Parker, Jr. classic. It’s…well, it’s this, if you need to hear the whole thing.
And finally: there’s a few jokes that, if not totally “rapey” per se, do assume a woman-as-sexual-favor vibe. To that I would posit: Ackroyd and Murray knew their audience (unfortunately). (It was the Reagan era, and don’t forget, the main villain of Ghostbusters is the Environmental Protection Agency!)
But let’s not end on a down note. Instead, let’s just quickly add that as of this writing, the *other* Ghostbusters star, Rick Moranis, has just appeared after years in seclusion to appear with Ryan Reynolds in a cellphone commercial. Yes, it’s also advance promo for a Honey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, but I’ll take what we can get these days.
P.S. If you’re wondering what happened to Showest, the convention arm of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO, for short, go figure), you can read all about it here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt–along with guest Mike Wilson–discuss the director’s films from Eraserhead to Inland Empire plus Twin Peaks and his recent short films. We get into the appeal and the stylistic and storytelling hallmarks of his mainstays–Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive–and also consider outliers like Dune, The Elephant Man, and The Straight Story.
What’s with the campy acting and the weird attitudes toward women? Why make us stare at something moving very slowly for a long time? Are these films appealing to young people interested in something different but not on the whole actually enjoyable? Is there actually a “solution” to make sense of the senseless, or are these wacky plots supposed to remain unassimilable and so not dismissible?
Some articles we drew on included:
“David Lynch Films Ranked from Worst to Best” by Swapnil Dhruv Bose
The dozens of filmmakers in the diagram above belong to a variety of cultures and eras, but what do they have in common? Some of the names that jump out at even the casual filmgoer — Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jarmusch, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick — may suggest a straightforward connection: cinephiles love them. Of course, not every cinephile loves every one of these directors, and indeed, bitter cinephile arguments rage about their relative merits even as we speak. But in one way or another, all of them are taken seriously as auteurs by those who take film seriously as an art form — and not least by Paul Schrader, one of the most serious auteur-cinephiles alive.
This transcendental style in film “seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism, and, finally, rationalism.” It “stylizes reality by eliminating (or nearly eliminating) those elements which are primarily expressive of human experience, thereby robbing the conventional interpretations of reality of their relevance and power.”
45 years on, Schrader revisits this concept in the Toronto International Film Festival interview clip above. “Most movies lean toward you. They lean toward you aggressively with their hands around your throat, trying to grab every second of your attention.” But transcendental films “lean away from you, and they use time — and as other people would call it, boredom — as a technique.” They linger on the everyday, the uneventful, the repetitive. Used adeptly, this “withholding device” is a way of “activating” viewers and their attention. Then comes the “decisive action,” the moment in which the film does “something unexpected”: the “big blast of Mozart” at the end of Bresson’s Pickpocket, the “big blast of emotion” at the end of an otherwise reserved Ozu picture. “What are you going to do with it, now that he has totally conditioned you not to expect it?”
In the new edition of Transcendental Style in Filmpublished in 2018, Schrader includes the diagram at the top of the post. It illustrates the three major directions in which filmmakers have departed from traditional narrative, represented by the N at the center. Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer all go off toward the meditative “mandala.” Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant, and the Italian neorealists start on path that leads to the “surveillance cam,” with its unblinking eye on an unchanging patch of reality. The likes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Michelangelo Antonioni, and David Lynch point the way to the audiovisual abstraction of the “art gallery.” Floating around these aesthetic end points are the names of filmmakers known for the “difficulty” of their work: Stan Brakhage, Wang Bing, James Benning.
Their work resides well past what Schrader calls the “Tarkovsky Ring,” named for the auteur of Mirror, Stalker, and Nostalghia. When an artist passes through the Tarkovsky Ring, as Schrader put it to Indiewire, “that’s the point where he is no longer making cinema for a paying audience. He’s making it for institutions, for museums, and so forth.” Within the Tarkovsky Ring appear a fair few adventurous directors still working today, like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kelly Reichardt, Alexander Sokurov, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Schrader has neglected to include his own name on the diagram, perhaps leaving his exact placement as an exercise for the reader. He certainly belongs on there somewhere: after all, some critics have called his last feature First Reformed his most transcendent yet.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Yesterday, Film at Lincoln Center unveiled the poster for the 58th New York Film Festival (September 17-October 11, 2020). And it’s created by none other than filmmaker, artist, and “Pope of Trash,” John Waters.
The New York Film Festival writes: The “poster is both a fond tribute and witty parody of the historic festival, poking fun at the long-held stereotypes, valid critiques, and presumed pomp and circumstance of the annual Lincoln Center event. The concept was developed before the current health crisis, in collaboration with and inspired by Globe Poster, the legendary press of Waters’s hometown. Founded in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, Globe Poster delivered eye-catching posters to promote concerts, drag races, circuses, carnivals, and more. Fluorescent colors, bold wood type, and lettering that shook and shimmied defined Globe’s iconic style, attracting clients from James Brown and Marvin Gaye to Tina Turner and the Beach Boys.”
For a little laugh, study the poster closely above. And then head to the Relateds below for more.
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Madman or visionary? A little of both? A genius? A brand? A mensch? David Lynch is all these things and more, and this fan-made video above is a quick reminder of the career and the consistency of the film director/artist/transcendental meditator who turned 74 this year.
Early in the video we see one of the director’s publicity stunts, when he sat in a chair on the corner of La Brea and Hollywood, next to a cow and large poster of Laura Dern. No, the cow had nothing to do with the film he was promoting—2006’s Inland Empire—but it did stop traffic and draw attention. Lynch didn’t have an advertising budget to promote Laura Dern’s lead role in the film, so the cow had to do.
Laura Dern has been in a majority of Lynch’s films since 1986’s Blue Velvet, and the video honors their friendship (he calls her “Tidbit”) as well as with Kyle MacLachlan (who Lynch calls “Kale”) and Naomi Watts. All three obviously adore this man.
There’s also a compilation of Lynch swearing like a champ. Product placement in film is “bullshit,” problems on set are “fucking nuts,” and for those who sat through the “peanut sweeping” scene in Twin Peaks The Return, you’ll understand his outburst on set: “Who gives a fuc&ing $hit how long a scene is?”
We’ve linked previously to Lynch’s video where he makes quinoa, and this short edit sums up that video nicely. It’s also nice to see attention given to The Straight Story, which usually gets passed over in his filmography, despite (or maybe because of) being his sweetest movie.
The video ends with Lynch’s theory about catching ideas like fish—we’ve also highlighted this before—and then a lovely montage of title cards, reminding us all that “Directed by David Lynch” is a guaranteed sign of quality.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
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