A new edition of The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook, takes off on a tangent from what has become NIGHT OF THE HUNTER Week here on Shadowplay — a brief consideration of Charles Laughton’s only other film-directing gig, THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER.
Pour yourself a pastis (whatever that is) and enjoy.
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A new edition of The Forgotten, over at The Daily Notebook, takes off on a tangent from what has become NIGHT OF THE HUNTER Week here on Shadowplay — a brief consideration of Charles Laughton’s only other film-directing gig, THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER.
January 20, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Perhaps the most ghastly of the cheap colour processes was something called Gevacolour – which was widely used in Europe in the 50s.
I once saw Raymond Bernard’s 1953 film of LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS starring Micheline Presle. Utterly exquisite, except the Gevacolour is now so faded that the film barely exists!
January 20, 2011 at 4:16 pm
It’s rather funny to read about all those color processes when they were first introduced (all were the greatest advancement in film ever! My old American Cinematographer handbooks say so!), now that we know how fragile they all were. I wonder which really was the worst – Ansco/Agfa (they should be the same film post-WWII), Gevaert, DuPont, early Kodacolor or (gasp!) Ektachrome. (I think I’m missing one or two here, and don’t know exactly when Fuji , Sakura or Ferrania came out with color film). None of the early negative or positive chemical processes really stood up to time except for Kodachrome. I have some lovely strips of pink Eastman prints from the early ’60s.
January 20, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Agfacolor can look good when used right. Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE is a high point. Sovcolor, which derived from Agfa(the plants that fell in the East), tends to wear badly but when used right like in Kozintsev’s DON QUIXOTE, it can be lovely.
There’s also the apparently used-just-once Thompsoncolor which Tati shot ”Jour de Fete” in, it was so impractical he was forced to release it in B+W until his daughter reconstructed the colour version in the 90s, it has a real handpainted quality. Nothing like the really sophisticated work of MON ONCLE and PLAYTIME or the B+W in ”M. Hulot”.
Jacques Tourneur used Anscocolor when he shot STRANGER ON HORSEBACK, all his other colour films were shot on Technicolor, you can only imagine the demoralization he experienced after shooting CANYON PASSAGE(one of the greatest colour westerns).
January 20, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Technicolor doesn’t fade. The trouble is, most of the films shot on it were on nitrate stock, which is unstable. And at the same time we switched to safety stock, we adopted Eastmancolor, which turns pink over time.
I quite like the look of Sovcolor. Tarkovsky’s The Steamroller and the Violin looks very attractive and distinctive, even if it doesn’t particularly suggest his later work.
January 20, 2011 at 9:59 pm
You asked about Pastis? Here!
January 20, 2011 at 10:04 pm
That picture sent me on an interesting train of thought, beginning by thinking about Rene Clair’s use of the Eiffel Tower in Paris Qui Dort:
and then I started thinking about those films that seem to be in love with high rise construction, particularly the accompanying film on the BFI’s DVD of James Broughton’s The Pleasure Garden, which details the construction of the BBC’s television transmitter in the same location some years later. The Pheonix Tower is also up on YouTube (the wobbly bit at the bottom, along with the washed out colours, appears to be inherent in the material as it also looks the same on the DVD):
And then THAT vertigo-inducing film reminded me of that fascinating video ‘Climbing Towers’ that was put up on YouTube half way through last year. As someone who is afraid of heights I felt quite queasy through a lot of it, especially the free climbing sequences. Unfortunately this became a subject of some controversy as the original poster of the video, once the video went viral, tried to remove it due to worries about the ‘reckless’ behaviour of climbing without the safety harness attached being commented upon. Of course the video is still out there, but is often becoming inactive – I think it a quite amazing piece leaving me with many questions, the main one being: how do they get down again? I presume it is more time consuming and difficult that the upward journey!:
January 20, 2011 at 11:01 pm
Bizarrely, I’ve just re-watched that video of Paris Qui Dort with the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy playing, and it synchs up beautifully – the light, fun antics getting amusingly contrasted with the tense strings, portentous brass and electronic loops!
January 20, 2011 at 11:04 pm
That camera angle would induce vertigo (and motion sickness) at ground level.
Just acquired a Rene Clair short documentary about the Eiffel Tower, presumably inspired by his experience shooting there. The hairiest footage of all is in Duvivier’s Mystere de la Tour Eiffel, which shows a dozen or so characters clambering all over the thing. You can find a review of it around here somewheres.
January 21, 2011 at 10:16 am
Reading a little bit about Anscocolor, apparently Metro scooped it up, and later used it to shoot SEVEN BRIDS FOR SEVEN BROTHERS, KISS ME KATE etc. was shot. The final film is a high point, Minelli’s LUST FOR LIFE, a significant film outside its achievements(which are considerable though not a masterpiece). Scorsese described a viewing of this film’s faded print to inspire him to his second career as a preservationist/restorer of films. In the restored version, the opening scene of the mine(one of the best scenes in Minelli) has this naturalism that’s not there in Eastman(which I generally find glossy).
February 6, 2011 at 6:14 am
Anscocolor really makes Tourneur’s STRANGER ON HORSEBACK, a beautiful, otherworldly little Western, what it is. To quote Fujiwara:
Ansco Color enhances the surprising austerity of Stranger on Horseback. Too detached from the forms they decorate to be consoling, the colors wash gently over the hard-built images. Tourneur, whose previous color films had been in Technicolor, disliked the Ansco Color process, which he complained gave Stranger on Horseback the bloodless look of a “grisaille.” Still, such color suits a film that is like the memory or the thought of a western, an experience reconstructed from fragments, a conception all but fully abstract that only a fraying memory of life keeps tied to the concrete.
February 6, 2011 at 1:29 pm
Beautiful! I’ve been meaning to see that one. There is a sense, as Fujiwara says, that the colours aren’t quite PART of the objects they associate with.