News department: Cannes has announced its line-up, and to our disappointment, the film Paul Duane and I made, NATAN, is not featured. This despite our slipping the film to the top man with a recommendation from Costa-Gavras. Yes, Costa-frickin’-Gavras. Oh well.
We do have some thrilling news to impart about where the film is showing next, but we aren’t allowed to share it with you yet. It may seem at this point that things are moving slowly, but in fact leaps and bounds have been made…
Meanwhile ~
Every now and then, I like to give you a rundown of all the David Cairns products out there. So far, these consist of DVDs and Blu-rays to which I have contributed essays, but soon I hope to have my name on a line of fragrances, sailor suits, battleships and small boxes of earth from my native country. But until that day…
Available to buy now –
“The Telephone is usually dismissed as the weakest of the three episodes, which is probably true, but it sets up a persistent motif of the other stories: offscreen sound as a source of fear. And aptly, for an Italian horror film, it’s practically a film about dubbing. The placement of one actor’s voice in another’s mouth foreshadows a theme developed through each panel of this cryptic triptych: the frightening mutability of identity, the fatal instability of reality.”
Incidentally, if you click through to Amazon using these links and buy a copy, I get a tiny percentage. And I like tiny percentages, almost as much as I like big percentages. They keep the wolf from the door, or the basilisk from the catflap as the case may be.
Other movies with essays by me –
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? [Masters of Cinema] (Dual Format Edition) [Blu-ray] [1957]
The Lost Weekend [Masters of Cinema] (Ltd Edition Blu-ray Steelbook) [1945]
“In fact, what suits Milland to the role is his slightly dissolute air, embodied in those hamster cheeks, that double chin; and his officer-class Britishness, which seems to project a weary distaste for whatever he’s acting in (a quality which would serve him well come The Thing with Two Heads, 1972).”
Rififi [Dual Format Edition DVD + Blu-Ray] [1955]
And from America –
Stagecoach (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
The 39 Steps (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
“The shaggy-dog story that gave Alfred Hitchcock his pet name for “the thing the spies are after” but that is of no real importance to the audience may have been told to him by Angus MacPhail, an English screenwriter with a very Scottish name. If so, it’s all too apt, since The 39 Steps(1935), the first Hitchcock film to really crank up the MacGuffin as plot motor, is full of Englishmen who sound like Scots and Scots who sound like Englishmen. It also features two traveling salesmen in a train compartment who seem about to break into the MacGuffin sketch at any instant but never quite do . . .”
And the latest, and most massive bit of film writing I’ve ever attempted –
“Who is Pierre Étaix and where has he been all your life?
This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in dropped from a blue sky and ensnared him. Lips moved noiselessly behind the impermeable seal, passers-by passed by, until finally nobody could see him any more than they could hear him. A hole opened up in film history—a small hole, Étaix would argue, just large enough to fit him into, but a hole nonetheless, weakening the overall structure and preventing a proper vision of the comedy lineage that gave rise to the satirical visual comedy of filmmakers as diverse as Woody Allen and Terry Gilliam, and that influenced such established contemporaries as Jerry Lewis and Blake Edwards.”
Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]
Pierre Etaix (Criterion Collection)
