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Truffaut and Godard in Defense of The Cinémathèque Française, 1968

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard speak in defense of the Cinémathèque Française.

This 60 second spot ran in numerous French film theaters during the events of May, 1968, when the future of the Cinémathèque Française under the leadership of Henri Langlois was in jeopardy. French cultural minister André Malraux, at the direction of then-president Charles de Gaulle, tried to fire Langlois, who had founded the Cinémathèque Française, and was a hero to young cinéastes. The reaction was immediate – Truffaut, Godard, and the rest of the French Nouvelle Vague directors simply weren’t going to let this happen.

This brief film was shot on March 14, 1968, almost 44 years ago to the date.

The protest against Langlois’ attempted dismissal quickly became an international affair, even in the pre-internet era, and filmmakers around the world threatened to pull their films from the Cinémathèque’s collection unless Langlois was reinstated. Eventually, Malraux backed down, and Langlois was restored to his post, though with reduced government funding. This advertisement played a small part in the affair, and it’s refreshing to see two world renowned filmmakers coming to the defense of cinema as an art form.

Here’s a translation:

Godard: “In general, films are shown commercially for seven years. After that, they’re shown in art theaters, like this one.”
Truffaut: “If their life can sometimes be extended, it’s thanks to Henri Langlois’ efforts in preserving them at the Cinémathèque Française.”
Godard: “If you’ve chosen to see the film you’re about to see tonight, or if you like to see a film you enjoy several times, you are already a friend of the Cinémathèque.”
Truffaut: “So become a member of the Committee for the Defense of The Cinémathèque Française now.”

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Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur)

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Click here, or on the image above, for a clip from Four Nights of A Dreamer.

Robert Bresson spent his life making gorgeous, transcendent films, but Four Nights of A Dreamer (1971) may be his single most stunningly beautiful work.

As M.C. Zenner notes in Senses of Cinema, “To look at, Quatre Nuits might have been released yesterday. Little in its matter and nothing in its manner has dated: so authentic is the reek of its present and so close to us does its ambience still seem, as a testament to the fidelity with which Bresson pointed, rolled, and selected. ‘Retouch some real with some real,’ commands the only repeated note in his Notes on the Cinematographer.

So true is this, that it’s quite hard to believe, as we view, in the antiquity of the generation to which Jacques and Marthe belong. The children of the ‘children of Marx and Coca Cola,’ raised on the video-games that continue its myths, may find it just as hard. They are well within living memory, the last two summers of that affluent, easy time on whose dusky embankments conspiracy-theories enjoyed such efflorescence, and to which the subsequent oil-crisis, inflation, mass -unemployment, the terrorist explosion, all form such an impassable barrier.

The landscaped garden of gestarbeiten, growth, Coca-Cola label designs, the ongoing circus of Viet-Nam, top-forty charts, and low Italian sports-car curves, has dried and died and sunk under new layers — of discarded key-cards, condoms, needles, or lives. It’s as dead as some of its exemplars and premature victims. And if its ghosts can still walk, they can’t bite.”

Sadly, this gorgeous film isn’t available on DVD legally, and circulates only in a terrible bootleg; it’s a shame, because nearly all of Bresson’s work, from his earliest films to his last, has now had a DVD release, but somehow, Four Nights has slipped through the cracks. Let’s hope this remarkable, ineffably romantic film soon gets a legitimate release.

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Joan Crawford on Stardom, George Cukor and More

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Here’s an interesting clip of an interview from British television with Joan Crawford, mid 1960s . . .

in which she discusses working with director George Cukor, her sometimes antagonistic relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, and argues that films have now — even in the mid 1960s — become committee projects, which either “make a lot of money or lose a lot of money,” in the words of the interviewer. One of the last of the MGM stars, Crawford here seems somewhat old-fashioned, and deeply judgmental, clearly longing for the past, but at the same time realizing that the studio system she grew up in — “I was born at Metro” — is now a thing of the past.

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Jean-Luc Godard on Film Criticism, 1963

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Here’s a remarkable interview with director Jean-Luc Godard shot for French television in 1963, just after the release of his masterpiece Le Mépris (Contempt).

It’s both fascinating and a bit sad that Godard describes film criticism of his era as essentially an “honest” field, noting that critics are always “sincere,” whether he agrees with them or not, compared to today, when film criticism has become primarily a fan-based enterprise, and the daily critics are more under pressure than ever before to conform to commercial demands. Godard, of course, started out as a critic before he became a filmmaker, and as he admits in this clip, some of his early reviews were often “cruel” towards certain filmmakers and their works.

But at the same time, he doesn’t seem to mind the same slings and arrows when they’re directed at him, just so long as the critics really mean what they say. Godard also speaks frankly of the commercial pressures brought to bear on him by producer Joseph E. Levine during the making of the film, and demonstrates enormous grace under pressure in the process. It’s a rare glimpse into the mind of one of the world’s most innovative and often controversial directors; absolutely essential viewing.

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Moving Image Archive News

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Jan-Christopher Horak at the UCLA Archives.

Arguably, the most important task facing film historians today is the preservation of the images themselves. At the Moving Image Archive News website, there are a group of interviews with some of the country’s foremost archivists on the challenges they face on a daily basis.

As their website notes, they recently conducted these interviews with some of the top professionals on “moving image archiving, preservation, and restoration about what they do in their jobs, how they got involved in the field, and the like. Over the next few weeks, you can see what they said, here on the site.If you know anyone who might be interested in working in the field, these clips should be informative and hopefully inspiring. Or, perhaps you already work in the field and are interested in finding out about other people in your line of work. So, here goes. Today, to get things rolling, here are three people with varied roles in the moving image world.”

Click here to go this essential website, right now.

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Get Yourself A College Girl (1964)

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Click here, or on the image above, for a brief clip from Get Yourself A College Girl.

And while we’re on the subject of 60s California pop, here’s a truly amazing film which has just been released on archival DVD — no masterpiece, this, but a wildly disparate cast in a completely nonsensical plot — featuring a truly amazing group of recording artists of the period, all shot in 6 days in glorious Metrocolor.

Get Yourself A College Girl was produced by the legendary “speed artist” Sam Katzman, who had an iron clad rule that no film he produced would take longer than six days to get in the can — until he lengthened his schedules in the late 60s to a lavish 15 days for some of Elvis Presley’s later films — and directed by former child actor Sidney Miller, whose other credits include directing episodes of Get Smart, The Addams Family, The Smothers Brothers Show, My Favorite Martian and even The Mickey Mouse Club.

Mixed into this cinematic stew are Nancy Sinatra, Chad Everett, Hortense Petra (Katzman’s wife, a “good luck” charm in all of his later films), plus musical guests The Standells, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, jazz organist Jimmy Smith, jazz sax player Stan Getz with vocalist Astrud Gilberto, and a whole lot more, none of it making any sense at all, but featuring that slick, candy-colored sheen that typified California pop music of the era.

As critic Mel Neuhaus noted on the TCM Website, “A curious 1964 hybrid of teen movie musical with pre-feminist overtones as well as a parody of moralistic anti-rock message films, Get Yourself a College Girl is a must-see due to its strange guest-star cast, who help elevate the formula narrative into a near-surreal ’60s happening. The basic plot follows Mary Ann Mobley’s transition from songwriter to a controversial figure in the music industry who’s wooed by a song publisher (Chad Everett) and a politician seeking the youth vote [. . .]

The choice of music guest stars is one of the most freakish conglomerations in any movie musical. Let’s face it – any picture featuring rockers The Dave Clark 5 (Thinking of You Baby, Whenever You’re Around), The Animals (Blue Feeling, Around and Around), and The Standells (Bony Moronie, The Swim) alongside the Jimmy Smith Trio (The Sermon, Comin’ Home Johnny), plus jazz greats Stan Getz and velvet-throated vocalist Astrud Gilberto (doing their cornerstone of ’60s cool, The Girl from Ipanema) has got to be seen (and heard) to be believed.”

It’s a fascinating time capsule of a time long vanished, and worth savoring for the sheer explosion of musical talent on the screen. And, of course, everyone looks like they’re having a lot of fun.

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The Wrecking Crew — The Hidden History of Popular Music

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

A new book by Kent Hartman, The Wrecking Crew: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Best-Kept Secret, is highly recommended, and will change the way you look at pop music forever.

It’s no secret that pop groups from the 50s to the present day have used backup musicians to augment their sound, but Hartman’s book, which takes the reader inside Los Angeles pop music in the 1960s with a depth unequalled anywhere else, makes it clear just how pervasive and influential this practice was. Nearly every page contains a jaw-dropping account of a pop hit of one sort or another in which The Wrecking Crew, a highly talented group of Los Angeles-based session musicians, played an essential part.

As Wikipedia notes, “the Wrecking Crew’s members typically had backgrounds in jazz or classical music, but were highly versatile. The talents of this group of ‘first call’ players were used on almost every style of recording, including television theme songs, film scores, advertising jingles and almost every genre of American popular music, from The Monkees to Bing Crosby. Notable artists employing the Wrecking Crew’s talents included Nancy Sinatra, Bobby Vee, The Partridge Family, The Mamas & the Papas, The Carpenters, The 5th Dimension, John Denver, The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, and Nat King Cole.”

Just a few examples, according to Hartman:

*they kicked The Byrds out of the studio when recording Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, except for Roger McGuinn, because they felt they could play it faster and better themselves;

*they forced the use of a “temp track” of Barry McGuire’s vocal on Eve of Destruction, featuring a raw, raspy performance by the singer, by secretly rushing a rough tape of the session to a major Los Angeles radio station, which immediately put the song into heavy rotation, and forced the label to capitulate to popular demand;

*they played an integral role in helping Frank Sinatra make a comeback in the 60s with such iconic hits as Stranger in the Night;

*and they’d sometimes improvise songs in the studio that became major hits, such as the time when Wrecking Crew member Billy Strange dreamed up a tune he derisively dubbed Monotonous Melody, which later became the instrumental hit Tequila;

and a whole lot more. The book has gotten rave reviews, and it deserves it; the list of artists whom The Wrecking Crew enhanced is truly amazing, and this really is the hidden history of American 60s and 70s pop.

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Wal-Mart Pacts With UltraViolet? Problem: ALL Existing DVDs Must Be Part of The System

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Click on the image above for more on this by Greg Sandoval in CNET News.

Hold the phone. Right after my previous post on the new UltraViolet system comes news of a potential — and I would say highly likely — deal between Wal-Mart and the UltraViolet consortium to help to roll out the UltraViolet system, with one really crucial new wrinkle; for the first time, much to my surprise, they’re thinking of “authorizing” some existing DVDs in your collection so they work in the new system, which would certainly give the entire process a boost. Apparently, as Greg Sandoval notes, Wal-Mart have been in talks with UltraViolet for quite some time, but now it seems a deal may be imminent.

But even with this potential deal, the UltraViolet system won’t really catch on until all existing DVDs can be “authorized,” which is still, apparently, not on the table.

According to Michelle Kung and Miguel Bustillo in the Wall Street Journal, “Wal-Mart is in discussions to provide an in-store service that will assist customers in registering DVDs they already own with the movie industry’s UltraViolet system, according to several people familiar with the matter.

The UltraViolet system, which has been slow getting off the ground, is a digital ‘proof of purchase’ system that allows a consumer to store movie or TV titles in a free, online personal library. Once a video has been added to the UltraViolet Library it can be streamed over the Web or downloaded for viewing on a computer, TV, or a range of mobile devices.

UltraViolet, which is backed by a group of more than 70 entertainment, technology and retail companies, was announced in January 2011, but so far has only about one million users in the country. The industry’s hope is that, with UltraViolet, it can encourage consumers to pay for content they might be tempted to download illegally from the Web. While UltraViolet accounts are free to set up, the initial process has been criticized as cumbersome.

That’s where Wal-Mart comes in. Employees of Wal-Mart will help customers create UltraViolet accounts, according to the people familiar with the plan. Wal-Mart staff will also check DVDs that shoppers already own, adding titles that are part of UltraViolet system to their accounts for a small fee, the people said. Wal-Mart is a member of the UltraViolet consortium.

The Wal-Mart service is expected to include several thousand movies, drawn from every major studio except Walt Disney Co., which isn’t a member of the coalition behind UltraViolet. The disc-to-digital service is to be offered in the photo-printing area of many, if not all, U.S. Wal-Mart stores.

An announcement is expected in early March, followed by a $30 million marketing campaign. It isn’t clear when the service would begin operating. A Wal-Mart spokeswoman declined to comment except to say: ‘We’re supportive of the UV coalition and are still thinking through how this technology can come to life in our stores and benefit our customers.’”

If this happens, given the fact that the UltraViolet system will allow users to download movies to a number of devices, and if the costs can be kept low, UltraViolet may take off. The “we’ll only let you use the system if you buy all new DVDs or Blu-Ray discs” bit has got to go; people are more than tired of replacing their entire collection from one platform to another as technology evolves.

The only problem with all of this is the sentence “Wal-Mart staff will also check DVDs that shoppers already own, adding titles that are part of UltraViolet system to their accounts for a small fee.” All — repeat ALL — DVDs should be authorized under the UltraViolet system. Without this, the selection will be too small to be meaningful. “Several thousand” movies is simply not enough. The service should allow ALL existing DVDs to be authorized by the UltraViolet system, and if a customer brings a title that isn’t in the system, there should be a process to add it right then and there, to keep expanding the library. If this isn’t done, the system will never catch on.

Allowing users to take their existing collection of DVDs to the Wal-Mart photo service counter, and have them uploaded while they shop, might make this whole thing work. It’s clear that all the studios, with the exception of Disney, are behind the new system; if they can get the nation’s largest retailer to go along, and include all existing DVDs — such as those in the Warner Archive — this whole thing might just work. Stay tuned.

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Tabu (2012)

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Click here, or on the image above, to see the press conference at The Berlin International Film Festival for Tabu (with English translation).

Just back from The 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, Marco Abel raves about Miguel Gomes’ Tabu (2012). a dreamy narrative that nods towards the Murnau/Flaherty Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), but with a decidedly different spin. Tabu won the prestigious Alfred Bauer Award as well as the FIPRESCI Prize at Berlin, and was nominated for the Golden Bear, so it seems that all the commotion is not without substance. This was the world premiere, so obviously I haven’t seen it, but it sounds delicious, and I can’t wait to check it out for myself.

Here’s a brief review by Patrick Gamble from Cinevue: “Miguel Gomes‘ third feature Tabu (2012) is an impassioned love story which draws its influences from the early romantic era of 1930’s Hollywood filmmaking – and is already one of the stand-out films at this year’s Berlinale. Aurora (played by Laura Soveral in her old age and Ana Moreira during her younger years), an elderly Portuguese women with an eccentric personality and a destructive taste for the local casino’s slot machines, lives with her African maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso) in an imposing Lisbon tower block. Her next door neighbour is Miss Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a compassionate and caring catholic who finds herself caring for Aurora as her mental state starts to show signs of deteriorating. When Aurora is admitted to hospital, Pilar is assigned the task of finding a long lost companion of hers, an Italian man with an outlandish tale of love against adversity set within the shadows of Mount Tabu in Africa.

Tabu is stepped in nostalgia, with Gomes painterly presenting his characters in romanticised black and white – a fact only emphasised by Gomes’ decision to name his movie after [an F.W.] Murnau film. It results in a film that radiates a warmth that perfectly compliments its heartbreaking story. Crossing back and forth through time, Tabu successfully differentiates past from present with subtle lighting techniques and the gentle use of soft focus – creating a dream like atmosphere that feels like crossing through a jungle of memories and regrets [. . .] Playfully switching from the gloom of the present day to the warmth and perceived simplicity of life in the past, Tabu is an enthralling, lighthearted stab at a society unable to escape from imprisoning itself in a cloud of nostalgia.”

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Hollywood Pushes UltraViolet Cloud Movies — Will It Work? One Problem: Your Existing DVDs May Not Work On The System

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Click here to view a brief promotional video on the UltraViolet system.

As noted in my previous blog, and as I’ve discussed before, Hollywood is embracing the web to distribute its films, and the new UltraViolet system of cloud authentication as the most profitable and promising alternative to the rise of streaming video.

As Daniel Frankel reports in a web journal forthrightly titled paidContent.org – tag line, “The Economics of Digital Content” — the studios are pushing Ultraviolet because it allows them total control over the downloading of their product. According to Frankel, “Hollywood is betting that its cloud initiative UltraViolet will become the new way the people buy movies for the next decade. But so far there have been questions around how many people are actually using the service—and, perhaps more importantly, doubts about when it will gain a foothold in a big consumer-electronics chain, a step that is critical to its success.

UltraViolet is dwarfed by other offerings that allow people to use content in the cloud—Apple’s iCloud, for example, which also launched in October, now touts 100 million users. But unlike iCloud, UltraViolet isn’t dealing in music—- its main thrust is movies. In fact, for the movie industry, it’s the most elaborate and expensive collaboration around an emerging technology since the Blu-Ray. The service is trying to rebound from reports by earlier adopters of technical glitches [. . .]

[The studios are] trying to assemble a cloud-based rights management system whereby purchasers of studio DVD, Blu-ray and electronic sell-through movie and TV show titles can access their video content on a range of electronic devices and share them with family members. As it stands right now, four studios—Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony  and Universal—are packaging their physical discs with instructions on how to authenticate digital copies in the UltraViolet cloud.

UltraViolet’s backers hope that by establishing flexibility and playback choice, and discouraging consumer fears about format obsolescence and interoperability, they can reverse a trend whereby consumers are increasingly engaging in low-margin rental streaming and forsaking higher margin movie purchasing.”

As Wikipedia notes, the UltraViolet system doesn’t store the DVDs themselves, just an authenticating code: “UltraViolet does not store files. It is not a cloud storage platform. The rights for purchased or rented content are stored in the cloud. UltraViolet only coordinates and manages the rights for each account, but not the content itself. The content may be obtained in any way, in its standardized multi-DRM container format.

By creating a digital-rights locker rather than a digital media storage locker, UltraViolet bypasses the cost of storage and bandwidth used when the media is accessed. In addition, by only managing the rights and licensing of content, UltraViolet insulates itself from future technological advances, allowing users to keep watching content they have purchased,” so that consumers can stream movies to their cellphone, iPad, laptop, television set, or other device.

The consumer will pay an initial fee to “autenticate” their DVDs with UltraViolet, which calls itself a Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem – right — and then one has the ease of not having to drag out a DVD and put into a player at home; you can access a movie anywhere, which more and more people seem to be doing.

But there’s one big problem, which, of course, is designed to make the studios more money — with UltraViolet, you can only access DVDs that are part of the system, and your entire existing collection of DVDs may never make it into the system, unless you own only mainstream movies.

As Arthur Pignotti elaborates in an article on UltraViolet, “for those of you who bought a large VHS collection, only to be replaced by a larger DVD collection, which was then replaced by an even larger Blu-ray collection, those days hopefully will be over …. soon … after repurchasing everything in the UV system.”

It does seem a bit much to buy a DVD, and then have to pay an additional fee to “authenticate” it for the UltraViolet cloud, and who knows — UltraViolet may eventually charge a monthly fee, just like your cable bill, and then you’d be paying for access to something you already own physically. There are no plans for this monthly charge, right now, but I’m just saying . . .

So, all in all, interesting. Will it work out, or crash and burn? Only time will tell.

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About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of numerous books and more than 70 articles on film and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at 402.472.6064 or wdixon1@unl.edu.

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