‘Darker, tonight, without the moon, but lots of high tiny white pinpoints of stars in clusters and lines and patterns all across the black sky, looking as though they really ought to mean something. If only the thousands of white dots were numbered, you could connect them, and then you’d know it all. The secret of the universe. But nobody even knows which dot is number one.’ ~ Donald E. Westlake, Drowned Hopes.
(Images from STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR and THE ELEPHANT MAN.)
I always show this to students and friends and anybody who passes my door. Everybody always gets a big kick out of it (study the editing — it must have been cut by somebody who WASN’T LOOKING).
And yet, when I say to them “Someday I would like to make a film as good as this,” they look at me in a strange way.
(From the extras on the Warners DVD of LITTLE CAESAR.)
When we have successfully gathered fifty of these little moments of movie bliss, we will make a quilt.
Meanwhile, writer / producer / documentarist Mark Cousins, hereafter known as “Mark Cousins Off The Telly,” reached into his memorybanks and thrust forth a glittering array of cinematic baubles.
‘My euphoric moments?
Seeing the boy Babek for the first time in Through the Olive Trees after his inexplicable absence from And Life Goes On.
The rain after the cinema in Distant Voices, Still Lives
The Smoke gets in Your Eyes dance in Petra Von Kant.
The climactic confrontation of the Chisso MD in Minamata: The Victims and Their World.
The fireworks scene in Hyenas.
The Ya Ya Rolly, Rolly piano scene in Pillow Talk.
Noodles visiting the burial chamber in Once Upon a Time in America.
The Yesterday musical moment in Once Upon a Time in America.
The flight of the buddhas in King Hu’s A Touch of Zen.
Looking at this list, dialogue plays little part, and music is very, very evident.’
And then, with a vague suggestion that we consume pasta together sometime, HE WAS GONE.
I’ve plumped for those levitating lads in saphron, as they were hanging around the flat anyway, and as we have not had a smidgin of Taiwanese martial arts cinema as yet, here at Shadowplay, and it’s about blummin’ time, frankly. Though I have to question Mark’s assertion that the gentlemen aerialists are in fact BUDDHAS, since I reckon they could more correctly be termed BUDDHISTS, which they’d probably prefer.
It’s a short clip, but it should whet your appetite for this three-hour epic of unfettered energy and unlimited imaginative resource, inspiring to anybody who sees it. Just ask Ang Lee. Go ahead, ask him.
But be that as it may, what this is about is celebrating the most awesome feelgoodfactor emanating from the work of martial maestro King Hu. “King who?” I hear you ask, but I reply ENOUGH OF THAT, for punning about oriental names is a very low form of wit indeed.
Hu worked in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, variously as art director, actor and director, and his art exemplifies the values of low-budet make-do and bricollage, even when he’s working on a large scale with an extensive budget. What I mean is that he’s not ashamed of using obvious cheap tricks like jump cuts and hidden trampolines, as long as he can do it with wit and elegance and verve. He actually throws himself so wholeheartedly into the action cinema domain that he hits the far wall and penetrates partway through into the realm of Meliés and Cocteau, where simple cinematic illusions take on the quality of poetry.
Take this clip — the boingy buddhist boyos are, on one level, if you want to see it that way, hilarious. Their serene majesty as they gallumph through the air has a kind of preposterous grandeur, but then the odd edits — those flashes of river and sky and forest — put across with style and simplicity a very unusual idea with total clarity, viz, that these gymnastic monks are so in tune with the forces of nature and the universe, that they can channelling said power through the force of will or meditation or whatever.
What’s the midpoint between a giggle and a gasp?
*
Was delighted to help Mark out lately with a copy of THE LOST HONOUR OF KATHARINA BLUM, which he needed for the New German Cinema section of his forthcoming series, The Story of Film, based on his book of the same name. Think of that — The Story of Film… ALL OF IT!
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FILM, Mythology, literature | Tagged: Donald Westlake, Dortmunder, Drowned Hopes, Stranger on the Third Floor, The Elephant Man | 
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