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Happy 104th Birthday, Manoel de Oliveira!

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

Manoel de Oliveira directs Claudia Cardinale in his new film Gebo and the Shadow (2012).

I simply can’t get around it; Manoel de Oliveira is my favorite director working right now, period, and at the age of 104 — it’s just astounding — he has released a few film, Gebo and the Shadow (2012). His birthday was actually December 11th, but he’s been making films since 1927, and directing since 1931 — also simply astounding — which means he has been directing films for 82 years. There’s no one else who can even approach that record, and the most amazing thing is that Oliveira is still vital, active, writing and directing films that are among the best he’s ever done, really only hitting his stride in his late 80s. In this latest film, working with such topflight talent as Claudia Cardinale, Jeanne Moreau, Michael Lonsdale and Ricardo Trepa, Oliveira spins the tale of Gebo, a man living in a house in reduced circumstances with his mother and daughter in law, whose son Joao has long since vanished for parts unknown. Suddenly, one night, Joao returns. Is it for good, or for ill?

As Boyd van Hoeij of Variety notes of the film, which screened at the Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2012, “the dean of helmers, [the then] 103-year-old Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira, adds another striking entry to his ever-lengthening filmography with Gebo and the Shadow. The French-language adaptation of a Raul Brandao play, about a poor Lusitanian family awaiting the return of its vagabond offspring, offers a variation on the parable of the prodigal son. In a late-career standout, Claudia Cardinale limns the role of the impressionable mother, who’s been kept in the dark about her son’s nothing-to-write-home-about ways.”

Oliveira’s long career has long been a source on wonderment and inspiration for me; even now, at the age of 104, he is currently working on pre-production for his sixtieth film, The Church of the Devil. His 2010 film The Strange Case of Angelica marked the first time Oliveira used digital special effects work, but he handled it with his typical restraint and mastery. It’s a shame that his work doesn’t get the distribution in the US that it so clearly deserves, since 1997 in particular, he’s racked up a stack of absolute masterpieces, including Voyage to the Beginning of the World, I’m Going Home, A Talking Picture, Magic Mirror, Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl and many others.

Click here, or on the image above, to see the trailer for Gebo and The Shadow.

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Posted in Digital Cinema, Film Industry, Films That Need a DVD Release, Foreign Films, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff | Comments Off

Federico Fellini’s Television Commercials

Saturday, January 12th, 2013

Yes, Federico Fellini directed television commercials — click here, or on the image above, to see them!

Just posted by the website Open Culture, here are a series of television commercials (!!) that the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini directed shortly before his death. Perhaps the most interesting one is for the Bank of Rome, in which Fernando Rey appears as a sympathetic psychiatrist. As the Open Culture website notes, “in 1991 Fellini made a series of three commercials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Notti or The Bad Nights. ‘These commercials, aired the following year,’ writes Peter Bondanella in The Films of Federico Fellini, ‘are particularly interesting, since they find their inspiration in various dreams Fellini had sketched out in his dream notebooks during his career.’

In the commercial The Picnic Lunch Dream, the classic damsel-in-distress scenario is turned upside down when a man (played by Paolo Villaggio) finds himself trapped on the railroad tracks with a train bearing down on him while the beautiful woman he was dining with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psychoanalyst (Fernando Rey). The analyst interprets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be restful if he puts his money in the Banco di Roma.”

Really worth watching; you can see Fellini’s masterful touch in every image.

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Posted in Film History, Foreign Films, History, Pop Culture, Television | Comments Off

Top Ten Films of 2012

Friday, December 28th, 2012

With the new year almost upon us, for what it’s worth, here are ten films that really impressed me, all released in 2012, in no particular order:

This Is Not A Film by Jafar Panahi

The Queen of Versailles by Lauren Greenfield

Bernie by Richard Linklater

A Late Quartet by Yaron Zilberman

Tabu by Miguel Gomes

How to Survive a Plague by David France

The Invisible War by Kirby Dick

Wild Bill by Dexter Fletcher

Side by Side by Christopher Kenneally

Farewell, My Queen by Benoît Jacquot

There are lots of other excellent films, of course, and all “top ten” lists are inherently ridiculous, since there’s so much out there that never gets even a VOD release, so this is just a very small slice of a much larger pie. There were a lot of excellent documentaries this year, as well as last year, and all of these films certainly had their moments.

I found myself drifting back though, to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia or J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (both 2011), as films that, for me, were really transcendent experiences, and none of these films, with the possible exception of the mesmeric Tabu, really came up to that level. That said, This Is Not A Film signals a new era in do-it-yourself cinema, smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a birthday cake, proving that you don’t need much in the way of physical materials to make a compelling film; all it requires in genius, and a talent for improvisation under pressure. A Late Quartet is perhaps the most conventional film here, but it still packs a punch, and Side by Side, though also veering towards the quotidian, nevertheless addresses the most central issue facing cinema today; film or digital. Really, it isn’t a contest any more; digital has won. Film is gone.

In Fall 2012, I projected a DCP (Digital Cinema Package) of one film in my film history class, which looked sharp, hard, and glossy; and then after that, a 35mm print of another film, which seemed, in comparison, warm, romantic, and inviting. What can I say; film looks better. But there’s no use bemoaning the death of film, though; it’s an accomplished fact. Christopher Nolan is still carrying the torch for celluloid, but it won’t be long before 35mm vanishes completely – something I predicted as far back as 2000 in a lecture in Stockholm, when one theatre in New York switched, even back then, to all digital projection. The Jazz Singer (1927) opened in one theater, as well; within two years, silent films were gone.

It’s taken digital longer to gain market dominance, but when one looks at the cost savings for the studios in shipping, storage, and print costs, as well as the level of control DCPs give the majors. Digital Cinema Packages must be unlocked by KDMs (Key Delivery Messages) for each screening, so studios always know where and when their films are being screened – the shift was ultimately inevitable. I’ve blogged about this before in detail. The shift was ultimately inevitable. So it’s a digital world, and film – as we knew it – is no longer part of the landscape.

That’s the major story for 2012, and a host of aesthetic and pictorial values vanish with the switch. But sheer economics drive the process, and film is above all a very costly medium, so with distribution and advertising costs rising, to say nothing of above-the-line budgets, mainstream fare will continue to rule the multiplex, while most of the films listed here played “selected theaters,” and never reached the general public.

That’s another problem, and for that, there seems no solution in sight.

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Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-1955

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

Here is an essential volume on the history of color (or colour) in British cinema.

Sarah Street’s groundbreaking study, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-1955, on the development of color in the British cinema, is that rare film history text which is at once absolutely authoritative, and pitched at a very high level in terms of discourse, but still readily accessible to the general reader. In addition, the volume is richly — and I mean intensely – illustrated with numerous, exquisitely printed frame blowups from the many films it examines, all in full color, and Street’s analysis of the development of color, not only in the commercial British cinema, but also in the the experimental work of artists such as Len Lye, is meticulous and detailed.

As the British Film Institute’s website for the book notes, “how did the coming of colour change the British film industry? Unlike sound, the arrival of colour did not revolutionise the industry overnight. For British film-makers and enthusiasts, colour was a controversial topic. While it was greeted by some as an exciting development – with scope for developing a uniquely British aesthetic – others were deeply concerned. How would audiences accustomed to seeing black-and-white films – which were commonly regarded as being superior to their garish colour counterparts – react? Yet despite this initial trepidation, colour captivated many British inventors and film-makers. Using different colour processes, these innovators produced films that demonstrated remarkable experimentation and quality.

Sarah Street’s illuminating study is the first to trace the history of colour in British cinema, and analyses the use of colour in a range of films, both fiction and non-fiction, including The Open Road, The Glorious Adventure, This is Colour, Blithe Spirit, This Happy Breed, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann and Moulin Rouge. Beautifully illustrated with full colour film stills, this important study provides fascinating insights into the complex process whereby the challenges and opportunities of new technologies are negotiated within creative practice. The book also includes a Technical Appendix by Simon Brown, which provides further details of the range of colour processes used by British film-makers.”

One of the most interesting aspects of British color cinematography that Street takes pains to point out is the ways in which British cinematographers changed the “look” of the three-strip Technicolor process from the hard, bright, bold colors used in many American films during the same era, such as Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and other Hollywood projects. As she demonstrates, color was used in a variety of ways in the British cinema, with much more variation than in the States; effectively muted in the superb film This Happy Breed to convey the drabness of workaday British life during World War II, or strikingly bold in the films of The Archers — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), of which my favorite is probably A Matter of Life and Death (known as Stairway to Heaven in the United States).

There are a number of books presently available dealing with the use of color in film, and the problem with many of them is that in describing the works they examine, they often fall back on black and white illustrations to demonstrate their case, astonishing as that may seem. Color printing is expensive, but in this case, using an excellent and sensitive paper stock, Street has managed to create a book at a very reasonable price that is bursting with color images from the many films she discusses, so much so that the book becomes almost a coffee table book, gorgeous simply for the images it contains, as well as an excellent study of the various color processes used in the UK from 1900 to 1955.

The is a prodigious accomplishment; indeed, it is a masterwork. Essential for anyone with a serious interest in color in the cinema, British or otherwise.

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Posted in Books, Criticism, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film History, Film Industry, Film Preservation, Film Theory, Foreign Films, Inside Stuff, Reviews | Comments Off

Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci

Monday, December 24th, 2012

I have a new article out today in Film International; “Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci.” Click here to see the entire article, or on the image above.

As I argue in my essay, “the films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually lumped in with those of other ‘gore’ specialists, but it seems to me that this is just one component of Fulci’s work. Running through all his films is a strangely dreamlike, hyper-violent abandonment of narrative, which seeks to disrupt normative social values, perhaps as a result of Fulci’s youthful excursions into Marxist political thought.

In such films as The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead and other works, Fulci continually works against audience expectations, both in terms of characterization and plot. In The Beyond, for example, a young blind woman’s faithful guide dog turns on her without warning, tearing her throat out; in City of the Living Dead, a young couple are making out in the front seat of a car when the girl’s father discovers them, and drags the young man to a drill press, which he uses to push a huge bolt through his skull.

Zombies roam hospitals, highways lead into the ocean with no end or beginning in sight, protagonists discover themselves trapped inside an oil painting, and there’s no logic to any of this. Fulci usually makes some desultory stab at a framing story, but once a central premise is set forth, the rest of the film is given over to random, unconnected, and seemingly unmotivated sequences that follow with no discernible order or reason. I would argue that the chaotic non-narrative structure of Fulci’s films puts him closer to the work of Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau; he creates a walking dream state from which the sleeper never awakes.”

My thanks to Daniel Lindvall for his patience in editing this piece; this essay is dedicated to the memory of an old friend, Rick Lopez, who first introduced me to Fulci’s work.

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Posted in Career Retrospectives, Criticism, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Film Industry, Film Theory, Films That Need a DVD Release, Foreign Films, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Interviews, Pop Culture | Comments Off

Frame by Frame Video: Film Journals

Wednesday, November 28th, 2012

Here’s a new video I just finished, directed by Curt Bright, on film journals and magazines.

As I note in this brief video, there are really three types of film journals: fanzines, which are designed for the general public; trade journals, which keep abreast of developments within the industry; and more scholarly journals, which seriously examine film as an art form. This brief list of cinema journals isn’t by any means exhaustive; for example, Film International has recently emerged as one of the most important scholarly film journals available on the web, and also publishes a print edition; and Hollywood Wiretap has recently changed its name to Studio System News, offering inside industry information on a daily basis, also free; all you have to do is sign up for a subscription.

There’s also Cinema Journal, one of the most important of all scholarly film journals, published by The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and numerous other journals that could also have been mentioned in this video.There are many, many other journals to choose from. What I really wanted to do here was not to be a completist — otherwise the video would be thirty minutes long – but rather to give the viewer some idea of the general outlines of what’s available in film journalism beyond the “daily reviews” and blogs that proliferate on the web and in print, which offer more detailed analysis that daily reviewers can possibly offer.

In any event, check out the video for yourself, and also the journals it mentions, as well as other publications in the field, available either online, or at your local library; they’ll give you a much better picture of film as a business, and an art form.

Click on the image above to see the video.

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Posted in Criticism, Digital Culture, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film Industry, Film Theory, Foreign Films, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Publishing, Reviews | Comments Off

Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku

Sunday, November 25th, 2012

Who would have expected this from Criterion; a box set of classic Japanese horror?

Following years of a certain radioactive beast’s domination at the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating, if short-lived, dives into that fiendish deep end was the one by Shochiku, a studio better known for elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies, tales haunted by watery ghosts, plagued by angry insects, and stalked by aliens—including one in the form of a giant chicken-lizard. Shochiku’s outrageous and oozy horror period shows a studio leaping into the unknown, even if only for one brief, bloody moment. This four DVD set contains impeccable transfers of the following films, at least two of which are much better than the promotional material suggests:

THE X FROM OUTER SPACE
Kazui Nihonmatsu 1967
When a crew of scientists returns from Mars with a sample of the space spores that contaminated their ship, they inadvertently bring about a nightmarish earth invasion.

GOKE, BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL
Hajime Sato 1968
After an airplane is forced to crash-land in a remote area, its passengers find themselves face-to-face with an alien force that wants to possess them body and soul—and perhaps take over the entire human race.

THE LIVING SKELETON
Hiroshi Matsuno 1968
In this atmospheric tale of revenge from beyond the watery grave, a pirate-ransacked freighter’s violent past comes back to haunt a young woman living in a seaside town.

GENOCIDE
Kazui Nihonmatsu 1968
The insects are taking over in this nasty piece of disaster horror directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu. A group of military personnel transporting a hydrogen bomb are left to figure out how and why swarms of killer bugs took down their plane.

Of these, Genocide and The Living Skeleton are easily the most interesting entries. Genocide is an intriguing genre hotwire fusing elements of the Yakuza crime films, horror and science fiction films, melded together with a political subtext which becomes more pronounced as the film rockets through its brief 84 minute running time. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that the American occupation forces in the film are clearly the villains of the piece, and when the film finally crashes to an abrupt halt with an appropriately apocalyptic conclusion, I guarantee that you won’t have seen it coming. It’s a fascinating pop culture commentary on the uneasy truce between East and West during the waning years of the Cold War, when the tensions of World War II — particularly in Japan — were still omnipresent.

The Living Skeleton, the only film of the group shot in black and white CinemaScope, comes off like a moody mixture of Carl Th. Dreyer meets Lucio Fulci, with nods to Val Lewton and the early films of AIP along the way. The film is, to my mind, the most accomplished and sophisticated of the quartet in terms of its visual structure and narrative, while Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell and The X From Outer Space are more traditional Japanese horror movies, though Goke does have an usually downbeat conclusion, as do all of the films here; happy endings are definitely not on the menu.

My only caveat is the liner notes, which occasionally descend into dreaded fanboy territory; factually accurate, they nevertheless display an unfortunate condescension to the films — partially deserved, it must be admitted — but in doing so, the notes miss much of the pop culture relevance of the films, even though they allude to this in passing. Still, this is essential viewing for anyone interested in pop culture of the 1960s, genre films, or the ways in which various genres can be used to deliver a potent social and political message in the guise of escapist entertainment.

But no matter; here they are in immaculate transfers, and they’re well worth owning.

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Posted in Criticism, DVDs, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Foreign Films, Pop Culture, Reviews | Comments Off

A Short History of Film, Second Edition

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

A Short History of Film

Second Edition

Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

Rutgers University Press

A history of world cinema that makes its past as vibrant as its present—now revised and updated through 2012.

Praise for the previous edition:

“This is the film history book we’ve been waiting for.” —David Sterritt, Chairman, National Society of Film Critics

“Highly recommended for all collections.” —Library Journal (starred review)

The second edition of A Short History of film provides a concise and accurate overview of the history of world cinema, detailing the major movements, directors, studios, and genres from 1896 through 2012. Accompanied by more than 250 rare color and black and white stills—including photographs of some of the industry’s most recent films—the new edition is unmatched in its panoramic view of the medium as it is practiced in the United States and around the world as well as its sense of cinema’s sweep in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster present new and amended coverage of film in general as well as the birth and death dates and final works of notable directors. Their expanded focus on key films brings the book firmly into the digital era and chronicles the death of film as a production medium.

The book takes readers through the invention of the kinetoscope, the introduction of sound and color between the two world wars, and ultimately the computer generated imagery of the present day. It details significant periods in world cinema, including the early major industries in Europe, the dominance of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the French New Wave of the 1960s.

Attention is given to small independent efforts in developing nations and the more personal independent film movement that briefly flourished in the United States, the significant filmmakers of all nations, and the effects of censorship and regulation on production everywhere. In addition, the authors incorporate the stories of women and other minority filmmakers who have often been overlooked in other texts.

Engaging and accessible, this is the best one-stop source for the history of world film available for students, teachers, and general audiences alike.

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON is the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His many books include Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood, 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster), A History of Horror, and Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (all Rutgers University Press).

GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER is a professor of film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and with Wheeler Winston Dixon, Editor in Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Her many books include 21st-Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation (co-authored with Wheeler Winston Dixon) and Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture.

Second edition available in paper, hardcover and Kindle March, 2013 from Rutgers University Press.

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Posted in Criticism, DVDs, Digital Cinema, Digital Culture, Documentaries, Experimental Cinema, Festivals, Film Business, Film Criticism, Film Genre, Film History, Film Industry, Film Noir, Film Preservation, Film Theory, Foreign Films, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Life, Pop Culture, Publishing, Reviews | Comments Off

Global Cinema Journal Collection (1904-1946) Online

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

The Media History Digital Library has a new and valuable resource available to scholars: their collection of international film journals from 1904 to 1946, all online for the first time.

As the site notes, “the history of media is a global history – involving the exchange of workers, styles, and technologies across national borders. French publications, such as Cine-Journal and Cinéa, reveal the important contributions of French filmmakers to film history. However, these French periodicals also contain advertisements for American films and demonstrate the popularity of certain global stars, such as Charles Chaplin and Sessue Hayakawa (both of whom had careers that criss-crossed national borders).

Some publications themselves were transnational creations. American and Canadian film enthusiasts were among the readers of Home Movies & Home Talkies, the British magazine for amateur filmmakers. Meanwhile, J.P. Chalmers—publisher of the American trade paper Moving Picture World—also published Cine-Mundial for the Spanish language market. As a global history, media history has also been greatly influenced by the course of international events. The increased number of American film advertisements in Cinéa (1921-1923) compared to Cine-Journal (1908-1912) speaks to the global market dominance of the American film industry that occurred due to the devastation of European lives, economies, and film industries during World War I (1914-1918).

The Italian journal Cinema championed film as an art form, and it contains articles by future art cinema icons, such as Michelangelo Antonioni. However, no film or publication exists in a political vacuum. Just look at the masthead and see the name of Cinema’s editor-in-chief: Vittorio Mussolini, son of the nation’s dictator Benito Mussolini.”

Definitely worth a look for inside information on international cinema from the first half of the 20th century.

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Posted in Criticism, Digital Culture, Film Criticism, Film History, Film Industry, Foreign Films, History, Humanities, Inside Stuff, Publishing, Reviews, Web Culture | Comments Off

New Frame by Frame Video: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

Wednesday, September 19th, 2012

I have a new Frame by Frame video out today, directed and edited by Curt Bright, on the 1945 films Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne by Robert Bresson.

I have blogged about this film before; as I wrote then, “one of Robert Bresson’s most incandescent works, this early film also marks the teaming of two of France’s most personal and idiosyncratic artists: Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau (whose 1949 film Orpheus [Orphée] mesmerized post-World War II audiences), in addition to his numerous other accomplishments, wrote the dialogue for Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, loosely based on Denis Diderot’s short story Jacques le Fataliste et Son Maître. Elina Labourdette plays Agnès, a young woman who has been forced into a life of prostitution in wartime Vichy, France, in order to support herself and her ailing mother (Lucienne Bogaert).

At the same time, Hélène (the serpentine Maria Casarés) is breaking up with her longtime lover, Jean (Paul Bernard), and, feeling jilted by him, concocts an elaborate plot for revenge. Contacting Agnès and her mother, Hélène offers to take over their debts, move them out of the brothel they call home, and set them up in a sleek, modern apartment, with no strings attached. We discover too late Hélène’s true motives; she is doing all of this so that Jean will ‘accidentally’ meet Agnès, fall in love with her, marry her, and then become the subject of public ridicule because of Agnès’s past. All of this goes off with clockwork precision, but Jean, when confronted with the monstrousness of Hélène’s treachery, shakes off his bourgeois prudishness, embraces Agnès despite her fall from grace, and the film ends on a note of hope and Bressonian redemption. This film never fails to stun me with its sheer, vibrant beauty and psychological insight; I return to it again and again, and it never disappoints.”

I wrote an essay on the film in Senses of Cinema 46; you can read it here.

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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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