Coming out of my ears.

Wednesday morning I bussed up to Edinburgh Filmhouse for the official launch of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It was nice seeing some old friends, like Scottish Screen’s Becky Lloyd, whose new baby tried to gum my finger off, Mary Gordon, Shona Thomson, Kristin Loeer, Robert Glassford — and then there was the festival programme as well.

The Jeanne Moreau retrospective includes most of the things I’d want it to, although not her Lillian Gish documetary, and there’s been no mention of Moreau attending. It’d be be a shame if that doesn’t happen. I’m particularly keen to see Joseph Losey’s EVA on the big screen, and Demy’s LA BAIE DES ANGES. Duras’ NATHALIE GRANGER is one of the more obscure films screening, which I should be sure and catch.

New films from John Maybury, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris (who’s attending), Gillian Armstrong, Andrei Konchalovsky, Bill Plympton, Ole Bornedal, Bernard Rose, Terence Davies, Cedric Klapisch, Wayne Wang, Lucky McKee, Shane Meadows, Olivier Assayas, Brad Anderson, plus shorts and lots of films from people I never heard of. I’m going to try and see as many as I can.

Two people from my circle, or intersecting circles — Martin Radich, whom I know, and Chris Waitt, whom I haven’t met, also have features showing.

And there’s Pixar’s WALL-E, and a FEARS OF THE DARK (pictured), a French animation created by Charles Burns (who illustrated the cover of the issue of The Believer I’m in!), which looks rather beautiful.

Appearances by cinematographers Brian Tufano, Christopher Doyle, Seamus McGarvey, Roger Deakins, and actor Brian Cox and stop-motion monster legend Ray Harryhausen (THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS). Fiona squealed in excitement at the thought of the last-named, even though we’ve seen him interviewed in person before.

On that very special occasion, Ray H produced a few of his miniature creations (the skeleton came in a little coffin), and suddenly every child in the cinema was down in front of the auditorium to be close to them. I think we may have been amongst them.

Some kind of a man.

It’s Orson Welles’ birthday! I guess it’s safe to mention since he’s already dead, and the CURSE OF SHADOWPLAY cannot harm him.

Anyway, whatever bad juju may be associated with me, Welles’ VOODOO CURSE probably outranks it. (A Brazilian witch doctor jinxed Welles’ film project IT’S ALL TRUE by plunging a dagger through the screenplay, decorated with a black feather. With Welles, the impossible stories turn out to be true, it’s the plausible ones you must watch out for.)

“I don’t want any description of me to be accurate. I want it to be flattering. I don’t think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully — not in print anyway.”

Orson Welles — thin, young and alive.

It has been TOO LONG since I actually watched a Welles film through. I’m hoping that the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Jeanne Moreau season will feature some or all of her work with O.W. I haven’t seen THE IMMORTAL STORY or CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT on the big screen, ever. And I love THE TRIAL more than even most hardcore Wellesians. The programme is launched tomorrow, so I’ll be able to tell you for sure then.

Flying Under Radar

As a big-shot gentleman of the press at Edinburgh Film Festival, which I’ll be blogging about in June, I’ve started to receive press releases detailing the pleasures in store: the Shirley Clarke and Jeanne Moreau retrospectives, and now a new strand called Under the Radar which, as the name suggests, will concentrate on those feature films of quality teetering on the brink of neglect due to their odd natures, unusual points of origins, or lack of mammoth publicity budgets.

I thought I should probably try and recycle some of these press releases as articles, since isn’t that what professional journalists do?

“From the UK, CRACK WILLOW receives its World Premiere, and is directed by local Edinburgh College of Art graduate Martin Radich. A previous EIFF Best Short Film laureate, Radich makes his feature debut with this shocking and highly original interpretation of the psychological effects of social decay.”

That doesn’t necessarily sound like something that would entice me out of the warm summer rain, but Martin is an old friend. While I never actually taught him that I recall, he graduated from E.C.A. during the time when I’ve been teaching. I well remember his documentary IN MEMORY OF DOROTHY BENNETT, in which a father and son are shown going about their domestic lives, making an extra cup of tea for their deceased wife/mother, and doing everything for each other that she used to do for them: the father washes the adult son’s hair, the son prepares the father’s insulin injection, etc. It sounds like it could easily be just a psychological freakshow, but it’s presented with great sympathy and solemnity.

Martin is a talented cinematographer as well as a unique director, and I’m eager to see what he’s cooked up. But if he PATS MY AMPLE STOMACH again, as he tends to do each time we meet, I may have to break every leg in his body.

The Chills #6: Release the hounds

Major spoiler alert: This is THE END OF THE MOVIE!

Taken me AGES to get to this one, but it’s a goody! Matthew McConkey says:

Another Francophile suggestion from me, but this time an ending rather than opening: The final scene of EYES WITHOUT A FACE.

Without having some other examples of Chills to refer to I might have missed the point a little, but the first thing I thought of was chills as in a “chiller film”. Then I re-read the words “beauty” and “otherness” in your description and realised I’d misinterpreted you. But to me horror + beauty + otherness = the end of Eyes Without A Face.

Franju pretty much was the champion in exploring that ambiguity by combining “horror chills” with “beauty chills” and the serenity of Christiane stopping to release the birds amid the carnage going on always manages to raise the hairs on my neck and send a shiver down my spine.

That’s a textbook example of The Chills right there. Georges Franju’s surgical romance played at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1959, where women screamed and strong men fainted. “Now I understand why Scotsmen wear skirts,” remarked the director.

Nevertheless Franju, who had previously investigated bloody slaughter in the poetic documentary LE SANG DES BETES, served up more bodily mutilation than audiences were used to seeing at the time, and in a manner that was both clinical and beautiful. Too methodically slow to really function as a thriller, the film defies categorisation, except that which Franju himself offered:

“It’s an anguish film. It’s a quieter mood than horror, something more subjacent, more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.”

Hugely influential, the film kickstarted Jesus Franco’s career, with THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF starting a series featuring Howard Vernon’s mad plastic surgeon, and other face transplant sagas like FACE / OFF following in due course.

I was even mixed up with one myself, a feature script written by my partner Fiona, MIRROR MIRROR, which attracted European Script Fund money but then never got made, partly I think because people couldn’t understand the principle that, like Franju’s classic, it was a fairy tale.

Press for Time

PRESS FOR TIME is the name of a Norman Wisdom comedy from 1966 in which he’s a journalist. “Press”, you see. I always remember that because the title has to be the lamest non-pun in the history of English-speaking cinema. The only comparably lousy title is the ’90s thriller OUT OF DEPTH, which vanished without a trace. While the Wisdom flick attempts to be a sort of innocent double entendre but doesn’t actually achieve a singly functioning entendre, the crime movie is only trying to mean one thing, and fails. Did nobody point out, “You know, that isn’t actually a phrase…“?

I mention all this irrelevance because I’m apparently getting a press pass to the Edinburgh Film Festival in its new June incarnation, so I will be live-blogging the fest like a man possessed, during the run-up, when they start the press shows, then all through the event proper, until I drop to the ground, exhausted, spasming and barking with pain. It’ll be great.

I did offer to be their Official Blogger, saying only nice things (integrity is my middle name — I never use it), but they’re quite happy to have me as a rogue element saying whatever the hell I feel like. Which is even better.

Back to Sir Norman. He was HUGE in the UK through the ’50s and ’60s. A sort of sub-Jerry Lewis gump-clown. His stuff hasn’t worn that well, I find, but he still has loyal fans. Animator Nick Park (WALLACE AND GROMMIT) loves those tatty movies. Norm made a stab at a Hollywood career, appearing in THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY’S for William Friedkin (makes a great trivia question: what film has Jason Robards, Britt Ekland, Norman Wisdom and Bert Lahr?) and when that didn’t work out, came back to the UK and appeared in WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE? a sex comedy that shows Norman romping naked with a rather young Sally Geeson (19). Directed by Z-list hack Menahem Golem, who became a serious movie mogul before falling from “grace” and winding up a Z-list hack again, produced by Tony Tenser’s Tigon pictures, a low point for everybody — even Golan, and that’s LOW. Actor Stevie McNicoll watched the film and was appalled. I asked if it was worse than NOT NOW DARLING, for me the low-water-mark in awful British sex farce. “It makes NOT NOW DARLING look like the fucking Mahabharata,” he replied.

But Norman had a strange renaissance in the ’90s, when it emerged that old prints of his films were doing the rounds in Albania, and he was a major star there. I guess the Wisdom-Albania thing is equivalent to the Jerry Lewis-France paradigm, only this one is true, and it’s rather lovely. And anyway, those French critics who admire Lewis are RIGHT.

Our Norm is now 93 and afflicted with Altzheimer’s, which has had the rather strange effect of turning him into his own movie persona. He seems fantastically lively and fit, but with a childlike intellect and sense of mischief. In a recent TV profile, he turned to the documentary camera and attempted a greeting which seems to encapsulate the essence of all actors:

“Thanks… awfully… for looking at me.”

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

 

…which brings us back to Fritz Lang. Yes, our Waltz of the Eye Patches concludes with the monocled maestro himself, who suffered an eye injury as a cavalry officer in the Great War, necessitating the monocle which became a symbol of his dictatorial, “Prussian” style of directing in Hollywood. But in later life he suffered from progressive deterioration in the other eye, bringing on the eye-patch years — his bad eye became his good eye, and he now wore both monocle and patch — the belt-and-braces approach to being a crazy film director.

I do cherish Lotte Eisner’s story about trying to introduce Lang and Bunuel, but failing because Lang was to short-sighted to recognise Bunuel and Bunuel was too deaf to hear Eisner. Human frailty is a great subject for art and anecdote.

I also admire, in a strange way, the contrasting approaches to cigarette smoking shown in the archival interview clips of Lang and Nick Ray in A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN FILMS.

Lang, minus his usual long cigarette holder (possibly his lungs by now were too swampy to get the smoke up the tube) clutches his ciggie Alec Guinness-style between the second and third fingers of his flat hand, and sucks eagerly on it mid-phrase, as if unable to make it to the end of a clause without another wheezing puff of the life-giving cancer.

Ray lets his cigarette hang from his lip, paper grafted to dry skin, bobbing like a sprinter’s erection as he mumbles away, ignoring the clinging coffin nail and only managing to inhale what drifts his way through natural air circulation, passively smoking his own cigarette.

Ray, I forgot to mention earlier, is the only one of the five canonical patch-wearers to have suffered injury to the eyeball in the line of duty, apparently bursting a blood vessel due to the stress of making WE CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, his final film.

My only other eye-patch-related story concerns another Edinburgh Film Festival, the year of VELVET GOLDMINE as opening film. A perfect film to theme a party around, which may have more to do with opening and closing film selections than anything else, but nobody much minded this choice, especially with Todd Haynes in attendance. (Actually, it’s one of his lesser films, with a half-hearted engagement with narrative but a great deal of visual and aural pleasure to compensate.) Festival director Lizzie Francke wore an eye-patch through the entire two weeks, as a result of a tragic glitter accident during her party preparations. Still, it was another injury in the line of duty, and an eye-patch does in fact make an excellent glam rock accessory.

One-Eyed Jacks

I also draw! Here’s one I did of André De Toth. I’ve made his head massively overlong, unlike any of his films. I think this looks like one of those pieces of fan art, pencil drawings of Marilyn or Elvis with their eyes too far apart. Not a problem one can have with André. Unlike most of the Hollywood eyepatch directors (Ford, Ray, Lang) who had two eyes, one impaired, De Toth was genuinely cyclopean, like Walsh.

Yes! I am writing something this week about each of the eyepatch directors. I take the view that old-time directors had much in common with pirates, and this accounts in part for the plethora of patchwork.

De Toth came to Edinburgh Film Festival for a retrospective of his work. He was greeted by a festival employee, herself wearing an eyepatch. She had to explain that she really needed it and was not just taking the piss.

Adding to his unique appearance, De Toth sometimes wore a neck brace, the result of his twice having broken his neck. In Fragments, his quirky autobio, De Toth reports that the second time he broke it was the lowest point of his life, somehow implying that the first time was a cakewalk.

As if that weren’t enough, upon arriving at Edinburgh Filmhouse, the Great Man expressed admiration for the punky close-shaved haircut of the man operating the box office. “Who did it?” “I did it myself.” Whereupon De Toth had the guy shave his own head. So now he was monocular, neck-braced and bullet-headed. And Hungarian. Fearsome.

Though in his late eighties, he had an incredibly vigorous, forceful manner. You assumed he was totally fit, but my friend Andy Gonzalez saw him attempting to descend the three steps to the Filmhouse bar, with the aid of a handrail, and reported, “It took him fookin’ ages.”

Somehow both severe and charming, De Toth made an impressive guest, and I was much taken with the few of his films I managed to see — PLAY DIRTY is a very considerable war film, with the most extraordinary ending. There was always the hint that De Toth could be a tough egg, which was confirmed when I read here how he conspired to have Paul Picerni, his leading man in HOUSE OF WAX decapitated. I exaggerate, but only slightly.

‘Andre says to Frank Lovejoy, “For the next shot, Frrrank, you come in with the other policemen. You see Buchinski! He’s got Paul in the guillotine! [...] You lift up the block of wood, you pull out Paul and, zoooom!, down come the blade! That’s the next shot! Light it!” I say, “Andre — excuse me. You’re gonna shoot this in separate cuts, aren’t you?” He says, “No, no, no! We do it in one take, one cut! Frrrank pulls you out, zoooom!, down come the blade!” Now, bear in mind I’m a young actor under contract.

‘I say, “Andre, I don’t wanna intercede on your job as director, but how do you propose to do it in one take?” He indicates Red Turner, the prop man. [...] Andre says, “Red Turner will sit on top of the guillotine; he will hold the block of wood between his legs; when Frank pull you out, Red will release the blade. And we see it all in one take!” I say, “Andre — supposing Red drops the blade prematurely?” He says, “Only hurt for a second. Now don’t t’ink about it, it’ll make you nervous.” And he walks away!’

Read the whole interview at The Astounding B Monster, it’s an eye-opener. As Wallace Beery said to Louise Brooks, when she asked why he never did his own stunts, “All directors want to kill actors.”