“I’m just taking these to the garage with the others”
Both the recent series of “Good Eye” columns written by Amy Gentry in the Austin Chronicle, and our upcoming event with costume designer Michael Wilkinson have us thinking about the special language of movie clothing design. For years, especially during the time when women were less welcome as writers, directors and producers in Hollywood, a number of female (and also-marginalized gay male) designers expressed themselves wonderfully through their costumes. This is no small contribution to the creation of character and the work of such masters as Edith Head puts them on an auteur level in many cases.
Here, Edith Head – who really seems like someone who would be a lot of fun to work with, talks about her method a bit, using tests of Audrey Hepburn as a visual aid. It’s a little too brief, and it’s basically a flak piece for ROMAN HOLIDAY but it’s so good.
This short piece from the Women Make Movies YouTube channel shows us some rare footage of the great Chinese-American star Anna May Wong. She was a true star, though sometimes the parts she played were smaller than she deserved. She is one of those stars who makes an instant connection with audiences today, who have more of a sense of the burden she carried and therefore a greater appreciation of her remarkable grace in bearing it.
Most of Wong’s appearances in movies amount to a tantalizing flash. She is credited in countless small roles as “Chinese Girl” or “Lotus Blossom” or “Oriental Flower” or some other such name. Maybe the best Anna May Wong role was in the 1929 silent PICCADILLY, in which she plays Sho-sho, a Chinese dishwasher in a posh nightclub who fascinates the club owner and becomes a star with her mysterious seductive dance moves. It’s a part that would normally be played stereotypically, but she fills out the contours of the character and assumes authorship of the film in a shockingly powerful way.
You can get a sense of her command of the screen in this excerpt from PICCADILLY. The movie is well worth your time and Anna May Wong’s cult status is worthy of yet another renewal.
If you’ve haven’t read “This Is Orson Welles”, the big book of interviews between Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles, you should. It’s as important as “Hitchcock/Truffaut” and it may be argued that there’s more practical knowledge to be found there. Welles was as much a self mythologizer as Hitchcock but he switched out his material more often.
Texan filmmaker, actor and writer L.M. Kit Carson died last night at the age of 73 after a long illness.
In 1967 the Irving-based Carson and his collaborator Jim McBride made a movie that forever changed the face of film. It is called DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY and in the opinion of many it marks the beginning of microbudget independent film. It was widely shown on campuses and at the kind of small home-made film societies that existed at the time and, along with the documentaries that inspired this (first?) mockumentary, firmly established the light, handheld 16mm camera as the M-16 rifle of the independent cinema revolution.
Today the film, which is about a young man obsessed with what we would today call vlogging, seems shockingly prescient about our own times. If it were in color and had the low contrast, high compression look of digital video, it could be one of the many such ego exercises which appear on YouTube. Except it’s much, much funnier. DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY, a film made for $2500 now resides in the Library Of Congress National Film Registry.
If Carson had never done anything after DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY his legacy would be secure, but he was only getting started. He made one of the very best documentaries about the intersection of creativity and madness, THE AMERICAN DREAMER (1971), about Dennis Hopper’s long journey to a final cut of his (some say) disastrous film THE LAST MOVIE. It’s prime time Hopper and prime time Carson as well.
Carson and McBride reteamed in 1982 for a version of BREATHLESS (1982) which is not exactly a remake at all, but rather a really very interesting, very American update of the characters from the Godard film. It’s well worth watching. Carson’s script imagines a manic vision of American youth that was out of step with the times, but that (stop me if you’ve heard this already) gets better as it ages.
Next, Carson adapted Sam Shepard’s PARIS TEXAS (1984) for the screen. It is one of the finest films ever made. If you haven’t seen it, you should not waste any more time reading this. Just go watch it. It’s a film that made an entire new generation of filmmakers proud to be from Texas. Director Wim Wenders, who is a German, relied upon Carson’s sense of the authentically Texan. The results speak for themselves.
Carson wrote a number of other scripts in the next few years. One that stands out for us is the extremely witty and subversive TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 (1986), filmed in Austin. Carson and director Tobe Hooper had a blast with this one and it stands as one of the funniest satires of the decade.
In between all of these screenwriting gigs Carson had time to produce a bunch of films, co-found a film festival, live a pretty full life, marry actress Karen Black, explore new technology, and encourage many others. Among the folks he encouraged were the Anderson brothers and Owen Wilson, whose short BOTTLE ROCKET he executive-produced. He later produced the feature version as well and has been cited many times by Wes Anderson as a formative influence.
Selected Shorts is an ongoing series in which we invite some of our favorite people to select and introduce short films that they may have missed. Here, author and bon vivant Bryan Connolly (DESTROY ALL MOVIES) shares a movie that no one ever knew about before and no one can ever live without from now on, THE HAIRCUT (1982).
Here’s Bryan:
A record executive (John Cassavetes) only has fifteen minutes to get a haircut. Meshach Taylor and Nicholas Colasanto (Coach from Cheers) are the two barbers up to the task. This is the first film written and directed by Tamar Hoffs (mother of Bangles member Susanna Hoffs). Cassavetes is having a blast. Watch him get a massage, drink, get tickled and dance. I love this short. I stumbled upon it as an extra on the DVD for Hoffs 80s party feature THE ALLNIGHTER. Who doesn’t want to hang out with Cassavetes in a barbershop?
We aren’t normally in the business of wishing dead people happy birthday, but in the case of Bela Lugosi there is definitely some room to dispute whether or not he’s actually dead. We know he was buried – in his Dracula cape – in 1956, but to date no one has verified that he is not rising from the grave every night to roam the earth in search of blood or delicious Kool cigarettes.
Many of you may only know Lugosi from Martin Landau’s fine but broadly stylized portrayal in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. If you’re interested in watching Lugosi at his best let us recommend Edgar G. Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT (really one of the weirdest movies ever made). It’s one of the best-written parts that Lugosi ever played. Bela Lugosi was far from an everyman type. He’s best when the role is tailored for him and THE BLACK CAT nails it, down to the post WWI animosities.
WHITE ZOMBIE is a lunatic clash of art-film beauty and misguided light romance. The parts of WHITE ZOMBIE that work – which is to say all of the parts with Lugosi, and a few other sequences – are well worth your time. There are scenes in the film which compare well with Dreyer – and then some other kinds of scenes too.
We also can’t much recommend Tod Browning’s original DRACULA with Lugosi. Lugosi is pretty good, though it’s impossible not to hear his famous Rumanian accent through a cultural-historical echo chamber. It’s a pokey, pointless movie and it may now be of mostly historical interest, apart from a Lugosi speech or two.
Happy birthday Bela Lugosi. There’s a pack of Kool 100s in the mailbox for you.
And now this week we get an article about the many blue dresses worn by Isabelle Adjani in POSSESSION. Even when we all watch a movie together we are having very distinct experiences of it. Gentry (who saw the AFS screening of the film) is watching it on a whole different track than I am. I really appreciate the difference and I look forward to following the thread of her analysis all month in her subsequent columns.
While the US and the Soviets were busy using Third Reich rocket technology to send jocks into space, the joint French/Polish Space Program were deploying creativity and imagination to create this film, which may very well prove to have benefits which outweigh those of the more well known space programs.
Walerian Borowcyck is an interesting case, and one that we will get around to in January at AFS. His short films begin to give a glimpse at the fascinating obsessions which come into play in his really far-out features of the ’70s.
Codirector Chris Marker was a Zelig-like catalyst for seemingly every great film movement of his lifetime. You should know his work already. If you don’t, start with LA JETÉE.
As always, there is a wealth of exciting, challenging new Polish features, ranging from the marriage-on-the-rocks LOVING to the sweet coming-of-age ONE WAY TICKET TO THE MOON, whose lead actor Filip Pławiak will be in attendance. Polish film critic/professor/festival curator Zbigniew Banaś will be introducing many of the films in the festival.
Long-time world-class filmmaker Andrzej Wajda is represented by his latest masterpiece, WALESA, about the dock worker/union leader who lit the fuse igniting the beginning the long struggle for freedom from Soviet tyranny over Poland.
Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker whose work will make you think hard about a lot of things. Gender, sexuality, taboo, power, for example. Her films (36 FILLETTE, ROMANCE, FAT GIRL, THE SLEEPING BEAUTY, etc.) place her among the most interesting and rewarding auteurs working today. She is a true original and a master.
Here is one of her most direct statements of purpose. And if there are signs of contradiction and perversity here – welcome to Breillat.
Those who saw Ruben Östlund’s new film FORCE MAJEURE at Toronto or Fantastic Fest already know that Östlund is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. In this wide-roving discussion (long, discursive interviews are now just called “master classes” apparently) he talks about instinct, face-saving, and the predominant place in image culture now occupied by YouTube.
Spoiler alert, for people who care about that kind of thing.
Not sure how many people would use a hyped up version of “Surfing Bird” to underscore a series of humorously deadpan injustices, maybe only Roy Andersson, Swedish director of SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR, YOU THE LIVING and the new A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE. He has also directed a ton of shorts and, thankfully, a bunch of the best commercials you’ll see anytime soon.
Here are some more, in better quality. I especially like the ones where the woman bashes her husband’s head in with different pieces of cookware:
