For the Love of Film III: Alfred Hitchcock's Spy Anti-Thriller

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—[This is my contribution to the currently ongoing third annual For the Love of Film blogathon hosted by Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films and This Island Rod. You can read more about what this year's blogathon is funding—something Alfred Hitchcock-related; thus this post—here and donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation here.]

In trying to figure out what I’d contribute for this year’s For the Love of Film blogathon, I knew I wanted to do something Hitchcock-related—but what? So much ink has been spilled on his behalf over the years that, unless one felt confident that one had a fresh angle to take, it would be overkill to write the umpteenth piece on something by-now-canonical like Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho or The Birds. So I decided to see if I could perhaps come up with something to say about a less widely celebrated film by the Master of Suspense. Immediately, I thought of…

Though some of his late films—Marnie (1964) and his swan song Family Plot (1976)—have been critically rehabilitated since receiving indifferent or cold receptions upon their initial theatrical releases, his 1969 film Topaz remains a problem child for even the most diehard of Hitchcockians, especially coming on the heels of his even less fondly remembered 1966 thriller Torn Curtain. Personally, outside of that one agonizingly drawn-out murder sequence midway through that film (a scene Ang Lee may have had in mind when he staged a similar death scene in Lust, Caution), I can’t even summon up much enthusiasm for Torn Curtain. Topaz, on the other hand…

The disappointing thing about Torn Curtain is that, up until that murder scene, Hitchcock is able to sustain a tone of moral inquiry that lends initial intrigue to missile scientist Michael Armstrong’s mysterious decision to defect to East Germany. What are his real motives for doing so, and even if we knew those motives, would they turn out to be worth all the trouble he subjects himself to? That brutal murder sequence brings those hovering questions home in a deeply sobering way; unfortunately, after that point, the rest of the film becomes a standard chase movie, with Hitchcock showing the barest minimum of interest in the narrative.

Topaz, by comparison, shows Hitchcock in fuller control of his material—material that, like Torn Curtain, deals with espionage, politics and morality. The film’s form, however, is more inventive than the far more straightforward narrative of its predecessor. Screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor’s adaptation of Leon Uris’s bestseller takes a vignette-like structure in depicting this Cold War world of intrigue and deception; there is a central character running through the plot—French intelligence officer André Deveraux (Frederick Stafford)—but the screenplay isn’t shy about straying from Deveraux in order to follow other characters, like French intelligence agent Philippe Dubois (Roscoe Lee Browne) and son-in-law Francois Picard (Michel Subor), for lengthy periods of time. Heck, the whole film begins not with Deveraux, but with Boris Kusenov (Per-Axel Arosenius), a Russian who defects to the U.S. with his wife and daughter. (Taylor’s screenplay, for all its emphasis on plot complications, isn’t above the occasional colorful character detail, as in the way it makes Kusenov a bit of a hardass, especially when he castigates an American intelligence agent after he’s extracted from Russian clutches by saying “That’s not the way I would have done it.”)

But the film’s cold-sober demeanor isn’t just a matter of the script’s exploratory narrative structure. A sense of omniscient detachment hangs over the film; Hitchcock, for the most part, seems more interested in the bigger picture than in the individual human dramas that play out. Admittedly, some of the dispassionate feeling the film inspires may have as much to do with the uneven performances of its cast than in anything Hitchcock does as a director; it must be said, for example, that, as Deveraux, Frederick Stafford is a black hole as far as charisma goes, making it hard to get too worked up in whatever happens to him. And yet, the stiffness of some of the acting is paradoxically a boon to the film's cumulative effect as something of a deliberate anti-thriller, taking the romance out of these spy games the way that one brutal death scene in Torn Curtain gave lie to the usual quick and easy movie murders. (If anything, casting a major star on the order of a Cary Grant or a Jimmy Stewart would most likely have detracted from that effect.) Thus, even scenes where characters reveal fancy new gadgets—the kind of sequence that would be a source of near-fetishized wonderment in a James Bond picture—are treated fairly matter-of-factly. There’s nothing “cool” about them in Topaz; these are just part of the job.

None of that is intended to suggest that the generally calm and collected Topaz is itself bereft of cinematic pleasures. The film has its share of virtuoso setpieces—most notably a lengthy sequence in which Hitchcock methodically details Philippe Dubois’s attempt to steal important missile documents from Cuban strongman Rico Parra (John Vernon). As is the case with the equally masterful opening sequence involving three KGB agents tailing Kusenov’s family, this section is mostly wordless: We’re not allowed to overhear Dubois’s dialogue exchanges with his Cuban contact, forcing both Deveraux, and us in the audience, to track his progress simply through body language and gestures. (Hitchcock primes us for this stylistic approach when, in a greenhouse, he has Deveraux deliver a big batch of inaudible exposition to Dubois behind a closed door.)

Even some of the dialogue scenes in which speech is heard are somewhat enlivened by Hitchcock’s direction of them. Note, for instance, this first encounter with Deveraux and fellow spy/adulterous love interest Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), in which these two extreme close-ups of the characters in their romantic bubble...

...opens up when Deveraux moves away from the camera, the camera still in the same position, when he’s forced to discuss job-related matters with Juanita.

And of course, there’s this shot, arguably the most famous in Topaz, of Juanita’s death at the hands of Rico after he discovers her treachery to the Cuban cause:

As Juanita falls to her death, her dark-purple dress extends from under her as if blood was spreading around her. Eventually, we see her actual blood marking the scene:

Topaz ends on a note of resignation that may, in the moment, strike you as unduly rushed and disappointing. It wasn’t the ending originally planned; after the original, more dramatic but similarly bleak ending tested negatively with early audiences, Universal forced Hitchcock to shoot a different one. Nevertheless, to my mind, coming on the heels of a purposefully deglamorized take on the spy-movie genre, the ending acquires its own fitting perfection. Despite the jaunty Maurice Jarre score underscoring its final moments—the same bombastic cue that plays under the film's opening credits—Topaz ends with a shrug rather than a sense of triumph. It may be a triumph for the world at large, but for these characters personally, it's merely the end of a job—"the end of Topaz," as Deveraux says in a bit of winking self-reflexivity, being that that is the film's own final line of dialogue—with all the baggage that entails.

Now, I'm not making the case here that Topaz is some undervalued masterpiece that deserves to be considered on the same exalted level as, say, Vertigo (still my favorite Hitchcock film, and an all-time favorite). It's a wildly uneven, deeply flawed film, afflicted at times with slack pacing and indifferent acting. But if you are able to get on its near-defiantly un-sensational wavelength, there is still much to admire and even a fair amount to truly enjoy. Of all Hitchcock's late films, this one strikes me as arguably the most deserving of reassessment.

Darkness Falls: The (Black) Beauty of Film Noir

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—

Last year, the great film bloggers Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films and Farran Smith Nehme of Self-Styled Siren hosted a fundraising blogathon geared toward film preservation. Called For the Love of Film, the blogathon raised about $30,000 for the National Film Preservation Foundation to help rescue a couple of silent short films from the 1910s. I contributed some of my hard-earned dough to that, and even contributed a blog post to it.

Now, those two intrepid bloggers are back with For the Love of Film (Noir), this time trying to raise film-preservation funds for the Film Noir Foundation. And unlike last time, we actually know from the outset the film that this latest blogathon is trying to restore: a 1950 crime drama directed by Cy Endfield called The Sound of Fury. I haven't seen the film, but for those who want to know more about it, you can read R. Emmet Sweeney's and Imogen Smith's posts about the actual film, then read the Siren's interview with Eddie Muller, founder of the Film Noir Foundation, here.

Maybe these blogathons just come at a bad time for me. My blog contribution to it last year came at the veeeeeery last minute, and this year, the week of For the Love of Film (Noir) has found me focusing more on scrambling to nail down reasonably priced housing and flights for South by Southwest next month. Believe it or not, yes, this has taken up much of my time this past week...though thankfully, I think I finally have secured both. But I've already missed one blogathon deadline this week because of all the attendant stress (it looks I won't be participating in this year's White Elephant blog-a-thon—a shame because I thoroughly enjoyed writing about the against-all-odds fascinating masterpiece of trash that was Michael Winner's 1984 film Scream for Help), and it looks like, while I won't technically be missing out on For the Love of Film (Noir), once again I'm holding my own contribution down to the wire. (For what it's worth, I've already made my donation...which you can do here.)

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Ah, film noir! It's such a wide-ranging subject that honestly, I've had trouble coming up with a specific topic to write about for this latest blogathon, or at least one that I feel comfortable and authoritative enough to discuss at the moment. Perhaps, then, I'll start with what it is about film noir that fascinates me so much.

Maybe it's because of my own sheltered suburban upbringing that, over the years, I've developed a certain fascination with the kind of art that dares to shed light on the darker sides of human nature—the sides in all of us that we may suppress in the interest of good taste and decorum, but which often simmer underneath the surface. Film noir, at its most potent, is all about drawing out those buried tensions and exploring them to the limits, and sometimes even exploding them altogether.

I didn't get to see as many of the films in Film Forum's recent "Fritz Lang in Hollywood" series as I had initially hoped (blame my extended illness for that), but the Lang films I did see all made a deep impression on me for the depths with which Lang was willing to go to explore the forbidding corners of the human psyche. Neither Fury (1936) or You Only Live Once (1937), or, later in his American career, The Big Heat (1953) or Human Desire (1954)—all of those which I saw during the Film Forum retrospective—have a whole lot in common as far as the stories he tells. What makes them legit film noirs is, as Paul Schrader famously noted in his classic essay "Notes on Film Noir," "the subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir,' as opposed to the possible variants of film grey and film off-white." And indeed, all of those Lang films share a doom-laden mood suggested as much by his dark-hued expressionistic visual sensibility as by the deterministic bent of their respective plots. Witness, for instance, the near-surreal mist that envelops the prison that a desperate Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) tries to break out of in You Only Live Once, or the pool of shadow that engulfs Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy) when his brothers first see him after his supposed death by lynch mob.

Such visual coups, though, are put in service of portraits of human nature that refuse to shy away from people's less savory potential. Fury, most notably, features as its protagonist a character who becomes so consumed by his increasingly inhuman sense of justice that he even threatens to cast off his devoted lover (Sylvia Sidney) when not even the conviction of the townspeople who "killed" him seems to bring him the satisfaction he desires. (The fact that his humane side eventually wins out doesn't lessen the pungent aftertaste left by Lang's otherwise pitiless depiction of mass hysteria and personal bloodlust.)

For me, though, it's not enough for a film to throw up appalling human behavior on the screen, surround the film with genre archetypes (hard-boiled gumshoes, femme fatales, and the like), bathe it all in an attractive visual style and call it a black-hearted noir. The best film noirs may feature disturbed characters and unsavory subject matter, but they have a sense of moral and spiritual anguish that adds genuine heft to their genre conventions. For all the world-weary wisecracking he does, Jeff Bailey, the trampled-on p.i. Robert Mitchum plays in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), seeks to be delivered from his troubled past; his sense of honor, in part, eventually pulls him back into the depths, as often happens in film noirs...but Tourneur and Mitchum manage to involve us emotionally in this character anyway, making you feel the full weight of his quest, and the pathos of his eventual, tragically inevitable failure.

Or consider Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), one of the doomed thieves at the heart of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). During the Great Depression, Dix's family lost control of their horse farm in Kentucky; Dix—who functions as the muscle for the heist masterminded by Erwin "Doc" Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe)—sees this robbery as his ticket to buy back the farm and regain his lost livelihood. When the heist doesn't go as planned, however, a series of deceptions and double-crosses leads an injured Dix, towards the end of the film, to drive all the way down to that horse farm and eventually die, as horses surround hims dead body. Unlike Tourneur and Lang, Huston adopts a naturalistic style in his film; much of the film plays as cool-headed dissection of a heist gone wrong. Within that style, though, The Asphalt Jungle manages to lavish utmost attention on the desires that drive the various characters in this drama; we end up developing a genuine stake in seeing these characters succeed—a subversive feat regarding characters that, in real life, we might merely dismiss as mere lowlifes and hoodlums.

That's the beauty of not only film noir, but of cinema as a whole: the ability it has to bring us into the lives and desires of characters we may never think of observing or even sympathizing with, as well as the possibility of being drawn to consider a way of looking at the world that might disturb and discomfort. As long as humanity carries desires, however unsettling, that we mostly try to suppress, and which sometimes rise to the surface in terrifying fashion, there will always be a place for noir. Now and forever.

The 4th Annual White Elephant Blogathon: Screaming For A Trash Masterpiece

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—(The following is my contribution to the White Elephant Blog-a-thon.)

Yes, fellow cinephile bloggers: This year, I decided to throw my hat into this four-years-running annual blogathon and take on whatever random piece of possible cinematic junk I got randomly assigned. And boy, I got a real doozy for my first time out!

For those of you who don't know what this particular blogathon is all about—or what the hell blogathons are in the first place—see this post by Paul Clark over at the blog Silly Hats Only which inaugurates this year's installment. Once you've absorbed that, come back here and read about what I got to see for this one-day event over the weekend.

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Okay, back now? Here it is:

 

Scream for Help is a 1984 film from director Michael Winner, a British hack best known for helming the first Death Wish (and, um, Death Wish II and 3). It appears to have fallen through the cracks since its release; as of now, it's available only on used VHS, via a torrent download or on YouTube in nine parts. But it doesn't deserve to be; this one deserves a place in the annals of movies that are so bad they end up being almost kinda good.

It begins with our young heroine (Rachael Kelly), shot in silhouette as the sun sets behind her, ominously intoning in voiceover: "My name is Christina Ruth Cromwell. I'm 17 and I live in New Rochelle. I think my stepfather is trying to murder my mother." Right then, the film cuts to an exterior shot of the Cromwell household at night...

...and composer John Paul Jones's melody for the opening credits literally crashes through. Oh boy, listen to that music! As Winner and cinematographer Robert Paynter try to ease us into the mood with a montage of establishing shots, here is this bombastic melody blasting away on the soundtrack, a music cue that plays like a second-rate imitation of Bernard Herrmann-esque swooning romanticism. (By the way, yes, that is the same John Paul Jones who played bass for Led Zeppelin.)

If you thought that was an oddly misguided directorial choice, check out the sequences about 10 minutes later in which Christie rides around town in her bicycle tailing the suspicious stepfather (David Brooks): This time, during these supposed moments of mystery suspense, Winner has called upon Jones to provide...big-band jazz music? What the heck???

The cheesiness doesn't end there. The acting in Scream for Help is generally pretty crummy, or in the case of some of the actors, laughably campy. (I assume Winner recorded the sound live; I say "I assume" because the dialogue often sounds dissociated from the actors speaking them, that's how dreadful the acting is.) Does the indifferent acting fail scriptwriter Tom Holland's dialogue, or is the dialogue already lame as it is? Considering Holland's later credits—writer/director of Fright Night (1985) and cowriter/director of Child's Play (1988), both films that straddle the line between intense horror and witty comedy/satire—I can't help but wonder...but then, maybe lines like "Don't listen to me; just wait until he kills you" and "Kissing you made me want to vomit" wouldn't do even the most experienced of actors any favors. Most damagingly, the storytelling is so brisk and choppy that attempts at sustained suspense barely register; all Winner provides in his direction is the sense of a storyline whizzing past you on a motorcycle.

So just on a technical level, this film is often plain embarrassing to watch. And yet...when you consider it on some of the bigger-picture levels—of plot, theme and even style—the film is, I submit, actually rather fascinating in its trashiness.

This is not a film that lacks ambition. From its simple premise, Holland's script wades into, among other things, matters of teenage sexuality, throwing its virginal heroine into the maelstrom of immoral adult sexuality to the point that she eventually expresses disgust with sex altogether. This unspoken moralism, of course, was a common thread among most slasher films made during that decade, many of which took perverse pleasure in punishing teenagers who acted on their horny impulses. Surely none of those slasher flicks, however, feature the image of a recently deflowered girl reacting to the sight of vaginal blood on her hand, as seen below:

Scream for Help also aims to be tonally and stylistically ambitious. Horror, mystery, teen-angst drama: Winner and Holland attempt to mix them all in, and just when you think there's nowhere else the film can go, in its second half it becomes a kind of low-rent Desperate Hours, then evolves further still into a Straw Dogs rip-off, with our heroine forced to play the Dustin Hoffman role in protecting her mother from harm. Much of this ends up registering as unintentional comedy, by the way—but the film so rapidly devours its plot points and tonal shifts that that almost doesn't matter.

But there's one particular angle that offers a tantalizing way of looking at this film, one that almost explains away its many, many shortcomings.

Christie, it is revealed early on in the film, previously had to be treated by a psychiatrist in the wake of her mother's divorce from her father, and so the film generates a bit of intrigue with the possibility that her suspicions about her stepfather's murderous intentions may well be all in her head.

It doesn't work out that way; Christie turns out to be 100% correct about her stepfather, and in no time he and two others are invading her home, threatening to kill them both and steal their money. There are no last-second "it was all a dream" twists in this one. Nevertheless, is it possible that those jarringly overwrought music cues are meant to call attention to themselves? That the acting is intentionally awkward? That the storytelling is deliberately choppy? That, in other words, Scream for Help as a whole is meant not to be taken at all realistically, but instead seen as a (clumsily executed) fever dream—one that, I daresay, is almost Marnie-esque in its twisted intensity—of one young girl's sexual fears and familial anxieties?

Imagine the possibilities! In such a context, then, of course the scenes of Christie doing her own surveillance work on her stepfather would feature music that seems largely brash and self-confident. Of course the moment she loses her virginity would feature wildly over-the-top throbbing love music. And, perhaps most hilariously, of course the film would end with Christie, having slain the last remaining villain, calling up the detective who dismissed her claims earlier and triumphantly intoning, "Maybe this time you'll believe me," and then cutting to an end-credits roll featuring a godawful tune with these words (I kid you not): "Christie / Don't ever listen to the words they say / You wouldn't have to change your ways / Talking to my Christie."

You see what I mean? Scream for Help is bad in such unusual ways, and with such conviction and fervor, that it gradually achieves a kind of euphoria reserved for only the most special of bad movies. It's some kind of trash masterpiece.

John Williams: My Personal First Film Composer

(This is my contribution to the John Williams Blog-a-thon hosted by Ali Arikan and Matt Zoller Seitz over at the blog Edward Copeland on Film.)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—For me, when it came to film music, John Williams's was the first that made me aware of the music as music, whether in concert with the film or not.

Of course, when you're pulverized by the kinds of overwhelming brass fanfares of Williams's famous themes for the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones films, and Jurassic Park (1993), among others, it's perhaps difficult not to take notice. But none of those films were my introduction to the man's film music. For me, it was his more delicate work for Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) that first perked up my ears not only to his music, but to film music in general. From the spooky opening ondes-martenot moans underneath the opening credits to the full-orchestral surge of unabashed sentimentality in its final frames, Williams's music for that film fascinated me almost as much as the film itself moved me as a young kid, with little more than a passing interest in movies, on the verge of teen-hood. (Also, I grew up listening to classical music, so I was probably primed to respond enthusiastically to the kind of grand orchestral sound Williams frequently employed in his scores.)

Older and wiser now (ostensibly), I'm more aware of the composers behind the music in movies, and there are probably a few others I might name either alongside Williams or maybe even above him in stature: Jerry Goldsmith; Bernard Herrmann; Nino Rota; hell, even Carl Stalling, who scored many of those Warner Bros. cartoons. But John Williams is the one who opened the door to a personal awareness of music in the movies—helped in no small measure by the amount of exposure to him I had whenever I watched him conduct the Boston Pops on PBS back in the day.

For that, I salute him.

I will defer further commentary on John Williams's art to others participating in this blog-a-thon; those others would probably have deeper insights into the intricacies of his genius than I do. The blog-a-thon's two hosts already have a fine inaugural post up at Edward Copeland on Film about the subtleties of his approach to scoring George Lucas's Star Wars prequels, a post which a) actually makes me somewhat interested in finally getting around to seeing Episodes II and III, and b) emphasizes that, for all the bombast Williams may be known for as a film composer based on some of his famous themes, the real measure of his brilliance is how selflessly and imaginatively he adopts his approach to the film he's scoring. You may remember the rousing, endlessly catchy music in Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or E.T., but that doesn't make his relatively hands-off approach to, say, Presumed Innocent (1990), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or Munich (2005), among many others, any less impressive.

Sure, great film music deserves to be heard on its own...but I would argue that the full measure of a film score's brilliance can only really be gained in concert with the film it's accompanying. On both counts, John Williams, for lack of a better word, scored high more often than not.

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In the meantime: I recently got an earful of John Williams when I visited Universal Studios Hollywood during my trip to Los Angeles—Jaws this, E.T. that, and Jurassic Park all over. I'm still working on that video summing up my trip out there, but here's a preview that fits quite nicely with this John Williams blog-a-thon.

Hope this all makes you hungry for my eventual vacation-video main course:

Odds & Ends for the Week Ended Feb. 20, 2010

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

My main regret from last week is not being able to find time to post a blog entry for this film preservation blog-a-thon hosted by two elite film blogs, Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films, etc.

I had been planning to craft a spiel about one silent-era masterpiece that, as far as I know, has yet to be properly, and rightfully, restored: King Vidor's 1928 film The Crowd. Turner Classic Movies, that television haven for cinephiles, showed the film during primetime on Thursday, Feb. 18; I was going to post an appreciation for the film in correspondence both with the blog-a-thon and with that TV screening.

But last week, I was called upon to once again lend my copy-editing eye to the upcoming March issue of WSJ. magazine. Knee-deep in proofs and obsessively editing and fact-checking articles about all sorts of high-end lifestyles, hobbies, clothing styles and merchandise, I found little free time both during and/or outside of work to be able to write a carefully considered post about the film.

And now the blog-a-thon is more or less drawing to a close. Well, for what it's worth, at least I contributed monetarily to the cause of film preservation, making a tax-deductible donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation. That's at least one of the raison d'êtres of the whole enterprise, anyway.

I'll let the following boilerplate—or, part of it, at least—give you all an idea what this blog-a-thon is about:

The National Film Preservation Foundation is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.

The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.

Well, I for one think this is a worthy cause...not just for geeky cinephile reasons, but for important historical reasons. The United States was perhaps the most instrumental in pushing the motion-picture medium in its infancy into the realm of popular art; and so much of 20th-century history has been documented through motion pictures—not only through documentaries and newsreels, but even through fiction. What is 1940s and '50s film noir, for instance, if not an implicit reaction to the national anxieties and horrors of World War II, refracted through a genre framework? Heck, even the most low-grade American International Pictures flicks from the '50s and '60s can be said to give us an idea of what turned on American youth during the decades of the Cold War and Vietnam. If nothing else, it's worth saving these kinds of films not just as catnip for film completists, but as potentially revealing barometers of our national history.

So that's my plug—a bit late in the game, perhaps, but there you go.

Oh, and as for The Crowd: I had the privilege of seeing Vidor's film twice during my Rutgers undergrad years—both times on laserdisc—and both times I found myself moved and gratified by its deeply sympathetic look at its ambitious working-class main character trying to make a name for himself while raising a family amidst the anonymity of big-city living. Its view of the falseness of the American Dream may be bleak in many ways, but the film is ultimately not without a certain measure of hope in the end...even if that hope comes more from accepting one's given situation rather than striving like hell to rise above it.

Vidor's film isn't exactly a long-lost classic: it was nominated for an Academy Award in 1928, and it was picked for the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1989. So it's pretty widely acknowledged as an important work. And yet, the film for some reason remains crucially absent on DVD, joining the company of such films as Greed (1924) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). If this blog-a-thon will somehow help even a film like The Crowd stay in the public eye, then yeah, I'm all for it.

(If you want to contribute to the cause of film preservation, DONATE NOW TO THE NATIONAL FILM PRESERVATION FOUNDATION.)

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Yesterday, as part of its Film Comment Selects series, Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a program of rare Godard films and videos at Walter Reade Theater. Entitled "Godard Rarities," the approximately 90-minute program, conceived by BAMcinématek curator Jake Perlin, not only featured select short films/videos made by Godard and segments from other directors' films featuring the French New Wave legend, but also trailers for some of his features (including one for his upcoming film, Socialisme). It was a fascinating and provocative program, as Godard's work itself usually is. Another typical feature of Godard's work: it made me feel like I was endlessly playing catch-up to Godard's ceaselessly experimental and inquisitive aesthetic and philosophical sensibility. Godard is, for better and worse, a filmmaker for whom the phrase "ahead of his time" still feels startlingly true today.

There are two "rarities" from the program that I wanted to mention here:

1. Il Nuovo Mondo (1963): This was Godard's contribution to the omnibus film RoGoPaG (Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti contributed other segments), and it cheekily anticipates his 1965 "sci-fi" film Alphaville by conceiving a vision of the future simply by defamiliarizing the present. Paris is hit by fallout from a nuclear bomb 120,000 meters above ground, but the effects of this apocalypse are mental rather than physical; Paris still looks like Paris, not some bombed-out sub-Third Man-like ruin. Human emotion is the main casualty, as the nameless main character (Jean-Marc Bory) notices people acting more robotically and inexplicably ingesting more pills; this brief 20-minute film is thus appropriately arid and detached in style. Still, it's startling to see how eerie even the present can feel in a film that is ostensibly about some faraway future. Of course, Godard would run with that idea in Alphaville...and beyond. Because, I mean, what is a film like Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) about if not the broad idea of deconstructing and examining the environments in which we all live?

2. Lettre à Freddy Buache (1982): Having been commissioned to make a documentary film commemorating the 500th anniversary of Lausanne, Switzerland, Godard then came up with this 11-minute short, one which amounts to a "videotaped refusal" to fulfill the assignment. To the hypnotic strains of Ravel's "Boléro," Godard lays out his reasons for not going through with the assignment with an intriguing marriage of sound and image. Allowing his camera to roam freely over various landscapes, both scenically splendid and dreary, Godard, providing running voiceover commentary, ruminates on what he perceives as the shortcomings of the documentary form to truly dig deep into what makes Lausanne and its inhabitants tick. Perhaps, he ultimately concludes, fiction provides a better entryway into the essence of this town...because, as he says towards the end of this incredibly dense short subject, "cities are fiction"—merely a state of mind. (You can view Lettre à Freddy Buache on YouTube here.) 

And finally, here is a clip featuring Godard from Wim Wenders's 1982 TV film Room 666, in which Wenders, during the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, invited various directors to discuss their views on the future of cinema in front of a solitary camera set-up. This segment closed out yesterday's program, and it's startling how much of what he says is still pretty relevant today, especially his thoughts of film versus television. But I'll let Godard do the talking:

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Though I've heard bits and pieces of Mozart's famous opera The Marriage of Figaro over the years, only last week did I finally listen to the whole thing, from start to finish, recitatives and all. It's pretty terrific, though my enjoyment of it doesn't stem so much from its undoubted human-comedy aspects. No, for me, it's basically all about the music, some of Mozart's wittiest, most lyrical and creative musical inventions.

Here's a video clip of perhaps my favorite number of all: Figaro's teasing mockery of army life in the closing number of Act I, "Non più andrai," here with Ruggero Raimondi playing Figaro, Frederica von Stade as the increasingly flustered Cherubino and James Levine leading the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, from 1985:

For those who are interested: I listened to the 1955 Decca recording with Erich Kleiber leading the Vienna Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra, featuring Cesare Siepi as Figaro and Hilde Gueden as Susanna. It's a wonderful performance—and not bad-sounding recording at all, considering its age. At mid-price, it's worth picking up.

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And finally, on a more personal note: congratulations to Mike and Ally, a couple of Rutgers friends, both of whom recently got engaged to each other. But the road to that engagement was, um, not a smooth one, to say the least. So convoluted it was, in fact, that a friend of theirs (and also a friend of mine) put together a four-part video series detailing the twists and turns leading up to the engagement. I found this so entertaining that I figured it'd be worth sharing with all of you.

Here, in all four parts, is the "Most Epic Proposal Ever." I think it'll be worth your while. But being that friends of mine are involved in this, maybe I'm biased: