Jim Henson was one of the great, visionary creators in the moving-image field. But before all the big projects and multimedia success, Henson and his crew paid the bills by making TV commercials.
These commercials are witty, smart, funny and cool. You really get a sense of Henson’s varied and diverse skills here, and his great influence on culture.
An enormous, fire-breathing dragon helps out in the kitchen
A can of spray-on fabric conditioner brings clothes to life, literally
A blue monster tricks a circus weightlifter, and enjoys a weird soda
The new AFS Viewfinders podcast episode is up. You can listen to it here or search AFS Viewfinders in iTunes to listen to it there. In this installment we talk to Austin Chronicle editor, SXSW co-founder, AFS founding board member and Texas Film Awards Lifetime Achievement Award winner Louis Black.
Louis Black, an unidentified Disney staffer and Leonard Maltin
Black grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, just a short hop from Manhattan, which during the ’60s had the most thriving film exhibition scene imaginable. In the podcast he talks about how he and his best friend Len (known to the rest of us as Leonard Maltin) used to spend all weekend going into the city, browsing through film stills and memorabilia at the many bookstores and bookstalls near Union Square, then visiting museum screenings where they had to ask adults to get tickets for them, and then attending 16mm screenings at some of New York’s film societies, which met in leaky office buildings and basements.
Black recalls encounters with the man who inspired Robert Bloch to create Norman Bates, and a memorable meeting with Buster Keaton, while Samuel Beckett stood nearby and tapped his foot. Our conversation digresses at times into television of comic books but I hope you’ll forgive us, it all helps to paint a picture of this marvelous, irretrievable culture.
This morning’s Times brought much delight with long-time art critic Roberta Smith’s take on her favorite new films about art, focusing specifically on MR. TURNER and NATIONAL GALLERY. She found that each of these films “says so much about the activity central to both making and experiencing art, which is simply the act of looking, whether as work, pleasure or exploration of both the world and the self.” Her insights on MR. TURNER are a particularly rewarding read, but she also points out the reasons why any art lover needs to see Frederick Wiseman’s newest masterwork.
(If you are in Austin, you can catch NATIONAL GALLERY this Sunday at the Marchesa followed by a virtual Q&A with Frederick Wiseman. For readers in other cities, there will also be video Q&As Sunday at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre and Dallas’ Texas Theatre).
“I don’t see how you could possibly make a true film. Because by bringing all this machinery in, you create a situation that’s unnatural anyway. It’s not you. It’s, I think, one of the problems with film.” – Hunter S. Thompson
There have been a number of interesting films about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson and inspired by his work. For those who don’t know, Thompson was a freelance journalist who stumbled onto a method of covering stories by becoming involved and enmeshed in them, covering the story itself only glancingly, focusing on the externals and his own first-person experiences with drugs.
Most white American young men who read books go through a Hunter S. Thompson phase, kind of like the equivalent of an Ayn Rand phase but with more mescaline and Wild Turkey. But Thompson’s work has lasting journalistic and literary value. It is a helpful aid for understanding an era when men went to the moon, the best leaders in the world were assassinated, and a president was driven from office for reasons of his own greed and stupidity.
The BBC doc, FEAR & LOATHING ON THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD is one of the best documents of Thompson’s persona and aesthetic. Thompson hijacks the very medium of the road documentary by being an unwilling subject and soon the whole crew is in on the joke – albeit with an appropriate shaky wariness. There are guest appearances by artist Ralph Steadman and Bill Murray, along with his brother Brian Doyle-Murray and Nixon’s General Counsel and Watergate star witness John Dean.
Thompson and the filmmakers make some pretty interesting points about the reality of a person versus the legend that grows up around him. It’s not facile. It’s not rock-star, catch-phrase Thompson. It’s good stuff.
Plus, it’s nice hearing a BBC voice as warm and familiar as a piping cup of Earl Grey saying things like:
“Day three. Las Vegas. 12 o’clock noon. We should have left for Hollywood at 9 but Thompson has locked himself in his hotel room. When he finally lets us in his face is covered in white makeup.” Here’s that film:
Every time a movie was made during the classical Hollywood period, a large number of test photography was done. Sometimes there were filmed screen tests to look at different make-up, hair-styles and costumes, but more frequently this was done with still photographs. The star would get into the test makeup or the proposed costumes and the resultant stills could be used to compare the different effects in preparation for filming the scenes.
Barbara Stanwyck made an awful lot of movies for an awful lot of studios. Here are some test shots as well as some behind-the-scenes and publicity photos of Stanwyck. These pictures show something of the diversity of looks this outstanding actress could portray. In real life she was the outdoors type, an accomplished horse rider who was most comfortable in unpretentious outfits, but onscreen she could wear clothes with the best of them. Enjoy this assortment of Stanwyck’s looks.
By 1915, the French writer/director Louis Feuillade had been making films for 9 whole years, in the earliest stages of the art form. His shorts had done well enough and satisfied audience demands for light comedies, but his 1913-14 FANTOMAS series had been a major sensation. At the same time, American serials, multi-part films extending over 10 or more episodes, were landing on French shores. Feuillade was engaged to make another serial, and the result was Feuillade’s great achievement, LES VAMPIRES. To watch LES VAMPIRES now is to be struck by its pre-Griffith film grammar (though Griffith was a contemporary) and its amazingly convoluted plot and padded storyline.
The convolutions and reverses in the plot make it difficult to follow, to say the least. Like the pulp novels and magazine serializations it grew out of, LES VAMPIRES has some of the logic of a fever dream. It seems to come from the same steadily-encroaching dementia that intrudes upon a penny-a-word pulp author as he falls under the rhythmic spell of his own typewriter keys at 4 in the morning and lets his dreams take over for a page or two. The surrealists have always been attracted to pulp art, perhaps because it seems to grow and flower from the pre-symbolic unconscious. Surrealist poets Andre Breton and Louis Aragon called LES VAMPIRES “the reality of this century. Beyond fashion. Beyond taste.”
I can’t recommend a straight-through viewing of LES VAMPIRES. You may sprain your brain if you try it. But if you watch the episodes one-by-one with ample recovery time between each you will get a sense of a different cinema, one that did not, as it turned out, provide the prevailing commercial signposts for future movies, as Griffith’s did, and was too lowbrow to influence the mainstream of high art film.
Decades later, Georges Franju made films that honored Feuillade’s aesthetic legacy. His EYES WITHOUT A FACE is the most famous of these, but he also made a beautiful adaptation of Feuillade’s JUDEX (1963) and a very nice Feuillade-inflected film called NUITS ROUGE (SHADOWMAN) (1974) which shows us the basic spiritual similarities between Feuillade’s primitivism and the quick-and-dirty exploitation movies of the ’70s.
Gayle Hunnicutt in SHADOWMAN (NUITS ROUGES)
The films of Jean Rollin are also in the Feuillade tradition. Think of 1970’s THE NUDE VAMPIRE’s secret societies, masked initiations, hidden panels and animal headdresses. Rollin was also ostracized by the high culture gatekeepers because his sex and crime-filled films were loved by students and the working class. But the influence persists, it’s a little like a secret society in itself.
Masked initiation from Jean Rollin’s THE NUDE VAMPIRE
Olivier Assayas’ 1996 film IRMA VEP is a poetic essay about this cinematic strain and the madness and beauty that shadow it. It’s one of the best films of our time and it says more about Feuillade-ism than I can hope to here with words. You should see it. It is readily available.
Maggie Cheung takes to the rooftops in IRMA VEP
Here is chapter one of LES VAMPIRES. I recommend turning the sound off and watching it dead silent, but do what you like:
Star quality is a mysterious thing. We can’t produce it, can’t really measure it, can’t really define it either. Some of the most beautiful people can’t exude a watt of star power, while a potato-faced troll may be a virtual nuclear reactor of the stuff.
Marlene Dietrich has so much of it that she threatens to burst out of the screen in this 1930 screen test cut by Josef von Sternberg for DER BLAUE ENGEL (THE BLUE ANGEL). She smokes a cigarette in the toughest/most seductive way imaginable, sings a bit, upbraids her pianist, sings some more, then climbs atop the piano to show off her legs. It’s magnificent.
Can’t embed it here, but you can click here and watch it.
The Alamo Drafthouse theater chain is known for a lot of things – the food and drink service during films, the no-talking policy, the eclectic programming mix… but the thing that those among us who go to a LOT of movies appreciate most is the preshows – the not-so-random assortment of videos that play before the trailers start. The guy in charge of these is named Laird Jimenez and I knew that when I asked Laird to select a short film for this feature he would not disappoint.
Here’s Laird:
My parents were either too lazy or too indifferent to censor what I saw as a child, so I got my first glimpses of decidedly not-for-kids things like BLUE VELVET and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD by wandering into the room when my parents were watching TV. When I was about six years-old my dad acquired a promotional Ralph Records VHS that contained, among other videos, The Residents “One-Minute Movies,” I was transfixed by the sing-song melodies, the outrageous costumes, the puppets. I was terrified by the slightly “off” quality to the melodies and the vocals, the warped analog synth sounds, the bizarre imagery, the puppets. It was the first thing I ever saw that felt appealingly “dangerous” to be viewing: I wanted to watch, but I knew it would give me nightmares.
As an adult, I’m only a little bit less creeped out by The Residents. For those that haven’t heard their story: They are a group of Bay area artists (originally from Louisiana) who formed in the late 60s and have, for the most part, remained entirely anonymous to this day. As legend goes, their very name comes from a Warner Bros. rejection letter addressed simply to “The Residents,” because they deliberately left their names off of their demo tape. To preserve the anonymity, they have always performed live in various costumes, more recently using fabricated names and personalities.
By the mid-1970s The Residents were experimenting with film and video in a way that made them a decade ahead of their time. Their “Third Reich and Roll” video (from the album of the same name) featured their fractured take on golden oldies mashed up into a primal stew that is at once reverent and irreverent. “One-Minute Movies” was made for 1980’s Commercial Album, 40 one-minute “pop” songs numerically significant in referencing the “Top 40” format, and the idea that most pop songs have no more than one-minute of unique musical ideas in them. In “One-Minute Movies” we see alien arms probing a mannequin a gauze covered mannequin, a sad old man who loses track of gravity, a Lord-of-the-Flies-esque tribal dance, hand puppets, The Residents’ iconic tuxedo-wearing eyeball costumes, and the most polite music video of all time (Unless there’s another that ends by saying “THANK YOU!” to the audience). The imagery is great, some of it downright gallery worthy, and it has a homemade look that is very inspiring. The late 70s, early 80s seemed to be such a fertile period for “weird” and for DIY. Grab a mannequin and some gauze, some road flares and a pig, and you can make yourself a darn music video! The music video was still such a novelty that the nascent MTV, who today wouldn’t give The Residents a milisecond of airtime, were running their videos around the clock. That’s okay, though, The Museum of Modern* Art has The Residents early music videos in their permanent collection, which is probably a better place for them anyway.
*”Randy” of The Residents had this to say: “You know why they call it ‘The Museum of Modern Art?’ Cuz they got mo’ dern art in that building than you can shake a stick at!”
For 30 years beginning in 1933, Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc. set the gold standard for creativity and technical excellence in animated shorts. But by the ’60s the operation was no longer sustainable and the division folded. Two of the leading figures of the WB operation weren’t ready to hang up their brushes yet though and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (DFE) was born. Longtime producer/director Friz Freleng and producer David H. DePatie set up shop in the former Warner Bros. Cartoons shop and began turning out commercials and other work for hire.
When writer/producer/director Blake Edwards contracted them to create an animated title treatment for his caper movie THE PINK PANTHER, their design was so successful that they joined forces with the Mirisch brothers and spun it off into a series of theatrical shorts. Thus the golden age of animation was prolonged for a few more years. These have the wit and technical wizardry of the WB cartoons along with the cool, somewhat socially transgressive spirit of the age.
These were all over television for 25 years, but it’s rare to see them anymore. That’s too bad because they’re a lot of fun. Henry Mancini’s music is to these cartoons as Carl Stalling’s music was to the old WB classics. These shorts are like a lavender expressway to the mid ’60s zeitgeist.
Here’s one of the best and weirdest Pink Panther cartoons, and a socio-historical time-capsule of the period if there ever was one.
A while back, after Eli Wallach died, I was having a discussion about the greatest living screen actor and who that might be. While he lived, Wallach was my nominee. But there are a lot of really great ones still with us. Think Duvall, Streep, Pacino, Hackman, Rowlands, Moreau.
A few weeks later, it occurred to me that I had forgotten one, and the more I thought about it I realized that I would consider Liv Ullmann our greatest living film actor. Of course she was fortunate to work with Ingmar Bergman. He was also very fortunate to find Ullmann. Their collaborative work is the best, or very nearly the best the art of film has ever seen. No other actor has played so many deeply intense parts, but she helped to create those very parts as Bergman’s close collaborator. He would not have written those parts had she not existed to play them, just as no composer would write a piece that could never be performed.
Think of her work in SHAME, THE PASSION OF ANNA, CRIES AND WHISPERS, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, PERSONA… (this list can go much longer). Now try and replace her with anyone. To call her a powerful, open, giving actor is a little like saying Shakespeare had a flair for words. She is a great artist of the screen as a performer (and a very fine director as well).
Liv Ullmann is 76 years old today. Happy birthday. Have many more and make many more films please.
All around the world Austin is known to be one of the filmgoing (and filmmaking) capitals. We have a long history of critical viewing and adventurous film programming. Now a resource has become available that sheds light on some of the formative years of Austin’s film scene.
It’s the CinemaTexas Notes Archive. CinemaTexas was a 16mm film exhibition program that ran throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s. The tireless faculty, grad students & volunteers of CinemaTexas presented world class film culture to not only University Of Texas but to the public at large, four times a week. In addition to the screenings, comprehensive program notes were offered in mimeographed “zines.”
This archive is nothing less than the DNA of Austin’s film culture. It paints a fascinating picture of the attitudes and tastes that formed the beginning of Austin’s very idiosyncratic film scene. For instance, Austin’s film scene is known for taking the lowbrow with the highbrow and accepting the values of each on their own terms. Surely this is a recent development right? Nope, the CinemaTexas notes are full of monster movies and women-in-prison movies, considered alongside highly regarded foreign films and Hollywood auteur classics. There is 2000 MANIACS alongside IL BIDONE & GOING MY WAY, for instance – and that’s a fairly typical juxtaposition.
There are many familiar Austin names here, Louis Black and Nick Barbaro (Austin Chronicle & SXSW founders) are all over this. Same with Ed Lowry, namesake of AFS’ current program that offers free films for students. There are current UT professors and mysterious correspondents who are really very good. It’s a very interesting walk through the Austin time tunnel and an important cultural and historical resource that is being continually updated.
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