MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

More documents

Recommendations

Info

<strong>MOVIETONE</strong> <strong>NEW8</strong> "The best publication on film in the English language" -Molly Haskell Highlights of recent issues: MTN 38: "Best Films of 1974"-choices and comments by Contributing Writers; "Moments out of Time"-special shots, scenes, stances from 1974 movies, recollected and savored; "Weddings, Etc., in Blood"-Ken Eisler on Oshima's The Ceremony; James Monaco on "The Apprenticeship of Mordecai Richler"-an interview with the author of Duddy Kravitz; quickie reviews of The Night Porter, The Seduction of Mimi, The Towering Inferno, juggernaut, The Man with the Golden Gun, Erotic/Wet Dreams, l.e Petit-Tbedtre de jean Renoir, etc. MTN 39: Special issue on Luis Buiiuel, featuring independent essays on Un Chien andalou, CAge d'or, Las Hurdes, and Los olvidados (R C Dale), Subida at clelo and Viridiana (Peter Hogue), Belle de jour (Kathleen Murphy), Tristana (David Willingham), and Le Charme discret de to bourgeoisie (Richard T. Jameson); also quickies on Amarcord, Young Frankenstein, Gold, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman, Tendresse ordinoire, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Murder on the Orient Express, etc. MTN 40: Three Howard Hawks articles: Peter Hogue on Only Angels Have Wings, Kevin Cooney recording some very personal reactions to Scarface and His Girl Friday, and Richard T. Jameson on To Have and Have Not; plus Part One of "Freedom and Entrapment," an article on Scenes from a Marriage by Birgitta Steene; "Morricone Encomium" (Robert C. Cumbow); an index to MTNs 29·38; plus quickies on Love among the Ruins, The Four Musketeers, Rejeanne Padovanl, Love and Anarchy, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, Rancho Deluxe, etc. MTN 41: "Caliban in Bodega Bay"-Robert C. Cumbow on The Birds; Alan Williams on montage and mise-en-scene in Fahrenheit 457; the conclusion of "Freedom and Entrapment" (Birgitta Steene); Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (Bernard F. Dick); also quickies on The Passenger,Get to Know Your Rabbit, Antonia, Shao Lin Martial Arts, Hanqup, Lacombe Lucien, Brannigan, etc. MTN 42: "John Ford Reprints the Legend"-David Coursen on judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright; "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me"-Jon Purdy on A Woman under the Influence; "The Passenger: David Locke's Discovery of David Robertson's Body" (Catherine M. Hendricks); James Monaco on "Sound and Sight"; book reviews (Women in Focus, jack Nicholson Face to Face); also quickies on The Return of the Pink Panther, jaws, The Wind and the Lion, Super vixens, A lice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, The Drowning Pool, W.W.and the Dixie Dancekings, Bring Me the Head of A Ifredo Garcia, French Connection II, etc. MTN 43: Richard T. Jameson on Nashville; Ken Eisler on the Vancouver Film Festival (esp. Les Ordres, The Middle of the World, The Goat's Horn); also quickies on Day of the Locust, The National Health, Hennessy, At Long Last Love, Night Moves, The Great Waldo Pepper, etc. MTN 44: "A Dalmation Called Nixon"-the adventures of a moviemane (Ken Eisler) in Mexico; Jorge Ayala Blanco's commentary on Mexican director Matilde Landeta; "Alice in Wanderland" (Maria Gargiulo on Scorsese's Alice); reviews of Raymond Durgnat's Renoir and Hitchcock volumes; Cukor's Travels with My Aunt (Jessie S. Brandt); also quickies on A Boy and His Dog, Smile, And Now My Love, Farewell My Lovely, Posse, etc. MTN 45: Special Raoul Walsh issue, featuring a major essay by Peter Hogue concentrating on 13 of Walsh's most characteristic films; plus Rick Hermann on High Sierra; also quickies on Rooster Cogburn, Peau d'ane, 92 in the Shade, Three Days of the Condor, etc. MTN 46: Robert C. Cumbow on two films of Bernard Girard ("Mad Rooms"); Douglas McVay on Chaplin's Limelight; Ken Eisler 'on Nanni Loy's Why-?; Peter Hogue's and Richard T. Jameson's views of the 19th San Francisco Film Festival; also quickies on Blanche, Capone, Le Secret, Hard Times, Captain Kronos- Vampire Hunter, etc. MTN 47: John Belton on the restored version of Touch of Evil; "On the Absence of the Grail"-Bresson's Lancelot du Lac (Alan Williams); Best Films of 1975; "Moments out of Time" (Jameson and Murphy); also quickies on Dog Day Afternoon, The Nickel Ride, La Vie revee, Conduct Unbecoming, The Sunshine Boys, Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, The Romantic Englishwoman, etc. M(JVIt~TON[ NEW6 is distributed exclusively in the United Kingdom by The Motion Picture Bookshop at the National Film Theatre, South Bank London SE1 8XT (Tel: 01 9283517)
tions of a Nashville over the passionless perfection of a Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's film is assuredly more than a "collection of pretty pictures" as some critics have charged. But at its very center there is a void which all of Kubrick's intelligence and technical grace cannot fill. And that is the feeling that something man does redeems his more venal side. On the basis of Barry Lyndon, I'm not sure Kubrick feels there is much: in condemning Barry, he condemns us all. Douglas F. Palau THE MAGIC FLUTE HEARTS OF THE WORLD (1917-18) Direction: David Wark Griffith. The players: Lillian Gish, Dorothy 'Gish, Robert Harron, George Siegmann, Ben Alexander, Erich von Stroheim, Noel Coward. Let's face it. No matter how much homage we pay (and rightly) to D.W. Griffith as the father of narrative cinema, no matter how many 'sublime's and 'magnificent's we garnish our appreciations with, The Master made his share of films that, as watched movies, are bummers. The film scholar and the diehard film freak want to see them all, and should. The film programmer has other criteria besides his own curiosity to bear in mind, though. If he wants to bust out of the official-classics repertory of The Birth of a Nation, IntoleranCe, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm but has seen (and probably has had opportunity to see) nothing else, he proceeds at his and his audience's peril. The colossal miscalculation of a Dream Street or the choppy turgidity of an America may be the reward for his commendable adventurousness. Now, just incidentally, True Heart Susie and Abraham Lincoln are two titles I'd add to any must-see/must-show list of Griffiths; and having just seen Hearts of the World I'm eager to recommend it as well. As Alanna Nash wrote in her excellent Take One article on the occasion of Griffith's centenary, the mysterious rarity of prints may have something to do with the neglect of this, one of Griffith's finest works. Also, Lillian Gish has recorded that Griffith regretted his propagandistic overkill of German brutality (the British War Ministry acted as semi-official coproducer) and doubtlessly encouraged downplaying the film in later years. Upon actually seeing the movie, one is bewildered at the director's retrospective slur against himself: although the titles get a bit hysterical and there is a sequence which makes clear-without quite showing-that Erich von Stroheirn and a couple' brother officers have raped and murdered several French maidens, again and again the action of the film insists upon the fact that there were good, decent-minded Germans caught up in the war just as there were good, decent Frenchmen. One of these intercedes to Direction: Ingmar Bergman. After the opera by Mozart and Shikaneder; adaptation by Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Music conducted by Eric Ericson. The players: Ulrik Cold, ) osef Kostlinger, Erik Saeden, Birgit Nordin, Irma Urrila, Hakan Hagegard, Elisabeth Eriksson, Ragnar Ulfung, Britt Marie Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, Birgitta Smiding , Urban Malmberg, Erland Van Heijne, Ansgar Krook, Gosta Pruzelius, Ujf ) ohansson. Out of the Past While in the past I've been struck by a certain, sometimes openly selfconscious interplay between roles and "reality" in Bergman's films-sand while I've often felt sorely put upon to endure its exposition-it's a similar sense of an interface between what is real and what is staged in The Magic Flute that prepares for one of the continued on .page 36 spare Lillian Gish when her potato-hauling efficiency falls below the optimum level and a guard begins brutalizing her; another speaks up for Justice when an Ubermenscn gives out with a might-makes-right rationalization. (Trivial surprise: The chief hun bully named Von Strohm turns out not to be: played by Von Stroheim.) Hearts of the World displays Griffith's celebrated epic sweep via some purportedly actual trench-warfare scenes, but the director's sense of space in the battles is surprisingly inchoate-by Griffith standards, at least-and one All Quiet on the Western Front-like conceit, in which opposing armies attack and counterattack over the same terrain, fails to make good on the absurdist payoff Milestone would achieve a dozen years later. The true glories of Hearts of the World are to observed in the privileged intimacy of Griffith's interpersonal mise-en-scene, in those unimpeachably timeless moments that require no historical defense. Indeed, the first, prewar half of the film is the richer, not the least because that doomed and beautiful boy Robert Harron is permitted so many opportunities as "the poetic youth" to glance round at a world whose tranquillity he would scarcely outlive. Harron owns this stretch of the movie, and his utterly natural playing-vis-a-vis the spiritual Lillian Gish, the hilariously, dynamically physical Dorothy, or an equally hilarious Ben Alexander as his adoring younger brother (a lovely relationship Griffith treats with surprising drollery)-manages to lend his "poetic" quality great validity, and make decency immensely likable and reassuring. This is scarcely to denigrate that irreducibly luminous emotional center of Griffith's finest works, Lillian Gish, who has several moments here when her psychological concentration and the fascinated long-take integrity of Griffith's mise-en-scene combine to literally awesome effect: her reactions to the death of her mother (prefiguring that extraordinary cascade of conflicting emotions at the parlor door in the 1919 True Heart Susie), and to Harron's reappearance from somewhere offscreen after he has been presumed dead-an apparition as beautiful as, and even more com plex in its effects than, the Little Colonel's homecoming in The Birth of a Nation. RTJ 33
Page 1 and 2: ~-~-~--~---------------------- MOVI
Page 3 and 4: [I]@\'!l@[J' [ID@0®[J'@ ~[J'@~@ITi
Page 5 and 6: William K. Howard as a prosecuting
Page 7 and 8: and been sentenced to die, the frie
Page 9 and 10: photos this page: Museum of Modern
Page 11 and 12: The Seattle Film Society is proud t
Page 13 and 14: 1).C).ll. liNI) rl'lll~ NCtrl'ICtNC
Page 15 and 16: cannot be distinguished from them.
Page 18 and 19: . I I But if Detour can reward the
Page 20 and 21: IN BLACK & WHITE "8" MOVIES. By Don
Page 22 and 23: I I I · Geduld picks up the story'
Page 24 and 25: ," I I \ I Emlyn Williams, Robert N
Page 26 and 27: 'II I Clark and Susan Tyrrell are,
Page 28 and 29: operates in relation to the key the
Page 30 and 31: -- .. - - ~- - ...., _~ !_---:;n -
Page 34 and 35: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Ja
Page 36 and 37: , I , I with the kinds of people he
Page 38 and 39: 'I payroll robbery at a nickel plan
Page 40 and 41: individualized perception (can thre
Page 42: . -",.'~ 6EATILE FILM 60Clt:'I'Y 52

MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?