The reason that I haven’t delivered my usual “bests” in film for 2012 is that I saw no 2012 films during the year and have seen only two since (both of them documentaries), and the reason for that is that I’ve spent long stretches of time in hospitals and nursing centers. I am ill; I have had pneumonia, a heart attack, and renal failure, and I can barely walk, and I am legally blind. I can barely make out my computer keyboard any longer, but I plan on writing reviews for as long as I can. I had hoped to copy onto this blog my published essay on Edward Albee’s brilliant play Tiny Alice, especially for the chance to correct an error there; but, unfortunately, that may be impossible now. A series of additional surgeries and other medical procedures await—and all this terrifies me; but I will do my best to cope with fear and despair—and, of course, I remain glad to be alive.
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STATEMENT
March 4, 2013JENNIE GERHARDT (Marion Gering, 1933)
February 19, 2013Sylvia Sidney, here exquisitely lovely as well as delicately poignant, gives her finest performance in the title role of Jennie Gerhardt, based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1911 novel. Dreiser, who didn’t think much of the novel, his second, nevertheless admired the film, which he described as “beautifully interpreted.” Director Marion Gering gave this piece of work an authentic Dreiserian texture; Leon Shamroy’s faded gray cinematography, keyed to the bleak, moralistic world in which poor, young Jennie moves without much protest, contributes much to the film’s aura of defeat, helplessness and sacrifice.
Jennie’s odyssey finds her becoming the lover of two auspicious men: a retiring Ohio state senator who showers her and her family with kindnesses when she is scrubbing floors in a posh hotel, but whose middle-agedness and unhandsomeness make Jennie doubt she will ever be able to reciprocate his love for her, and who in any case dies in an accident before they can marry, leaving her alone and pregnant; Lester, the flippant brother of the wealthy woman for whom she works as a housemaid, whose love for her she doubts, even though she also loves him, and whose marriage proposal she rejects, sending him into an unhappy though socially respectable marriage. As long as she could, Jennie kept her illegitimate daughter, Vesta, hidden from her moralistic father (played beautifully by H. B. Warner, no less)—a denial of sorts. Like her father, Vesta dies in an accident. In the novel, both father and daughter die of typhoid.
As is its practice, Hollywood strips the novel bare: eliminated are Jennie’s numerous siblings and the orphans Jennie adopts after Vesta’s death. On this occasion, however, the whittling down works, inflicting perpetual loss and loneliness on Jennie. This is a very sad film—and a recognizably critical one targeting the moralism to which women were bound in the time that the film covers. Here I should note that the film extends the time in the novel to include the “present”: the early 1930s.
What a splendid movie—and one sparked by Sylvia Sidney’s superlative acting.
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MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
THE MINERS’ HYMNS (Bill Morrison, 2011
February 15, 2013Haunting as well as most impressive, British documentarian Bill Morrison’s The Miners’ Hymns mines black-and-white archival material from one hundred years earlier, and more, to assemble a portrait of workers—coal miners—lost to time, and to juxtapose their permanent anonymity with the expanses of land in northeast England below which the mines, long since permanently shut down, retain something of their former aura and cacophonous “melody,” before the mines were stripped bare, before the health of the miners, likewise stripped bare and routinely assaulted, became an issue, before and after labor organized, addressing their exploitation: hazardous work, at long hours, for too little pay. Is this part of the reason for Morrison’s application of careful slow motion to footage of the past? Indeed, Morrison has made a marvelous movie.
The past has been made silent, too—and speechless, all underscoring the anonymity of workers. Who are they—who were they? Almost all of them were already lost to time the moment they stepped, or stumbled, into time. Ownership may have considered them nothings, but workers did all the work. I may be in the minority, but I feel that Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score, fine as it is, intrudes on the film’s vision of the past.
One other element is dubious, whatever the directorial intention. The opening panoramic aerial shots in Durham County—a graveyard of mines, now comforted by a lush cover of gorgeous green—may be too stridently ironical to achieve what Alain Resnais subtly, mesmerizingly achieves in his visit to Auschwitz, whose contribution to the Holocaust has similarly been covered with a blanket of serene grass, as humanity endeavors to obscure, and repress, an awful history, that is to say, traumatic shared memory, in Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a sharper, more penetrating documentary than The Miners’ Hymns.
All that said, Morrison’s film is among the noblest—and nimblest—movies ever made; drawing upon the trenchant, powerful and indeed magical properties of silence, slow motion, and black and white, it composes a hymn to workers and their families and neighbors (at first, we may think the orderly procession is headed for church), whose ghosts confront the police again during a strike protest, and, across time, confront us, eerily spooking us, as ghosts always do. Morrison employs one more feature that we associate with silent cinema: expressionism. Sometimes the miners appear as shadows: figures blackened out by coal and time. But they are also given new life in the light of Morrison’s archaeological eye—for now and for all time.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
SNOW-WHITE (Dave Fleischer, 1933)
September 4, 2012Produced by Max Fleischer and directed by brother Dave, their Snow-White is a masterpiece of animation. The “dwarfs” are (thank goodness!) banished to the briefest edge of the action (and to the Mystery Cave, where they deposit Snow-White to protect her from her stepmother’s jealous wrath), and the Prince is eliminated entirely; from the Grimm brothers’ tale only a single narrative strand has been taken—the only one we ever really cared about: the rivalry between Snow-White and her vicious, ugly stepmother, the Queen. This is a far, far better film than the syrupy Disney version four years hence. The Fleischers’ film is fun!
It’s light! It zips by in seven minutes. It’s dynamic—a whirlwind of energy.
Here is an example of the difference between the two films: whereas the magic mirror, which tells the Queen how beautiful she is, hangs on her castle wall in the Disney version, the Fleischers make it a hand mirror. What difference does this make? In order to justify the mirror’s initial response, Ditzy Disney made the Queen beautiful (an offense) and made a trapped “slave” the “voice” emanating from the mirror (a literary conceit); not the Fleischer boys! They concisely convey their idea visually: that the mirror tells the Queen what she wants to hear because it is in her grip, terrified of her power and of her propensity for wielding it. When the mirror answers that the Queen is the “most beautiful” in the land, it is lying out of fear; when it tells Snow-White, superbly played by the one and only Betty Boop, that she is the most beautiful, the mirror is telling the truth, emboldened precisely by that beauty of hers.
To put this another way: whereas Disney’s film is pro-Hitler, the Fleischers’ film is anti-Hitler.
The film’s fun, of course, principally derives from all the magical transformations that the creative animation—Roland Crandall is the animator—makes possible, such as when, outraged by the mirror’s judgment against her, the Queen’s sour puss bolts out from under her hair, making her uglier still; or when the tree to which she is tied, to face execution, itself frees her; or when Nature protects Snow-White by encasing her in a block of ice—a mimicry of a laid-out corpse ready for burial. In the Mystery Cave, a skeleton and assorted ghosts fly. The Fleischers’ film proceeds at a breakneck pace.
Koko the Clown—Cab Calloway, this time, sings and swings “St. James Infirmary Blues”—and Bimbo the Dog, although ostensibly in the Queen’s service, are on hand to protect Snow-White; they defy the Queen’s order to behead her. They’re sweet on Snow-White. And so are we.
Mae Questel is the indubitable voice of Betty Boop, one of the models for Marilyn Monroe’s screen persona.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
AFONYA (Georgi Daneliya, 1975)
April 2, 2013A Soviet tragicomedy written wonderfully well by Aleksandr Borodyanskiy and directed by Georgi Daneliya at a fast clip, at least in its urban phase, Afonya charts the slippage into regretfulness of an “indifferent,” self-absorbed 42-year-old plumber who drinks excessively, including on the job, and pursues one woman after another, without giving much thought to them. His fantasies reveal the impossible idyllic life he desires to root out the general dissatisfaction that is the foundation of his oblivious, borderline hedonistic existence. Its immense popularity suggests that the film struck chords of recognition in Russian audiences.
Afanasy Nickolaevich Borshchov—“Afonya”—is this protagonist. Early on, Afonya brings home Kolya, that night’s drinking companion, and his irate girlfriend, who has been waiting for his arrival for hours, blows a fuse, jabs him repeatedly, throws Kolya out twice, and declares she has wasted two years of her life with him before leaving Afonya for good. This is the hilarious trigger for Afonya’s descent into a darker disposition, the feeling that his life is slipping away from him and that he missed opportunities in the past that might have shored up things now. Borodyanskiy and Daneliya do not overtly criticize either Soviet society or culture, but almost every moment shimmers with analytical import underscoring the relevance of this portrait beyond the confines of a character study. Afonya possesses the contextualization and breadth that something like, say, Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) lacks.
Afonya keeps losing. No students are assigned to him because he is presumed to be incapable of training any budding plumbers properly. He begs for students; but the two boys who are assigned to him beg off from him after just one day. This loss of potential surrogate sons introduces to us Afonya’s likely despair at not having actual children of his own. Rather, A fantasy he has of being married includes a backyard of numerous children arranged in a row.
His wife in this fantasy, it turns out, in reality has no interest in him, a mere plumber.
As it happens, we are in store for a(n unconvincing) happy ending since along the way—not that he is all that interested in her—an attractive young nurse falls in love with Afonya. Before this conclusion arrives, however, Afonya packs up, leaves the city and visits the village where a loving aunt raised him. There, the film’s pace slows down to underscore a frustrated man’s journey into the past. The sheer beauty of the countryside—the open space, the green fields, etc.—adds poignancy to Afonya’s discovery that Aunt Frosya died two years earlier. He was sent a telegram at the time informing him of her death, but it somehow missed connecting with his heart. He now learns that Aunt Frosya had written a stack of letters to herself pretending they were from him, whom she “never tired of waiting for,” although he never came. The insertion of a fantasy-image of this aunt, alive and looking out a window in her home, pierces.
Afonya, the Soviet experiment: what lost opportunities!
A very good film, this—and Leonid Kuravlyov is wonderful as Afonya.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
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