Morpheus Descending

Max Ophuls’ LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI is a sort of Italian answer to A STAR IS BORN. While, like SANS LENDEMAIN, it isn’t up there with the Divine Max’s post-war work, it does have its share of passion and poetry, and features plenty of memorably eccentric bits of technique.

Ophuls starts with a spiralling iris-out from a spinning gramophone record, before tilting up to a cyncial movie producer, who starts talking almost straight into the lens, almost like an Ozu character.

Cutting back to the gramophone once more but with the camera now spun 180 degrees, Ophuls now tilts up to an agent, also talking almost into the lens.

The next scene gives us a whirlwind tour of a film studio, with the camera rocketing around at speed as assistants try to locate a missing movie star. You can really feel the weight of the giant blimped sound camera as it swerves round corners, even spinning 360 degrees as a character circles a room before exiting from the door he came in by.

Then we’re tracking through walls in the manner mimicked by Kubrick (a big Ophuls fan) in THE KILLING and LOLITA, and then we get MY FAVOURITE BIT –

Our heroine (the legendary Isa Miranda) has attempted suicide, and lies on the operating table awaiting some kind of potentially life-saving operation. Gloved hands turn a SPECIAL VALVE and an anaesthetic mask descends from the ceiling. Ophuls does what many directors would do in such a situation — he shows us the heroine’s POV as the smothering instrument descends towards her face. This is in line with those subjective camera shots we see in many hospital movies from the ’40s on — wheeling along on a gurney, looking at the ceiling, that kind of thing.

But Ophuls does something else, something maybe only he and Sam Raimi would do — he cuts to the POV of the mask itself, descending towards the heroine’s face until she is pushed into a blurry smear.

And in the midst of that blur, the central flashback can begin…

(LA SIGNORA DI TUTTI is now available on DVD in Italy, and they’ve actually included English subtitles!)

Fog Fog Fog

We started watching ’70s horror BURNT OFFERINGS, and within twenty minutes Fiona was telling me it wasn’t even worth blogging about. A few possible angles did present themselves — the father/mother/son triad arriving by car seemed like a very close match to THE SHINING, and the concept of a building with an inner life of its own seemed relevant to Kubrick’s MUCH BETTER FILM.

Karen Black and Ollie Reed and Better Davis are of course hugely watchable, but Burgess Mereditch takes the acting honours for a dementedly camp turn as a chair-bound nutter.

For a while I thought I might write about the sheer dullness of it all (half an hour in and literally NOTHING has happened) but that might get dull, and as we resorted to the fast-forward button in order to get to the (impressively apocalyptic) ending, it became unfair to really comment on the film at all. So forget that I said it was dull, OK? I’m not qualified to pass judgement because I didn’t watch it.

But I thought I could mention the fashionable ’70s fog filter, which diffuses the whole film with a hazy smear. Then Ollie Reed has a nightmare and things get MAJORLY DIFFUSE:

The haziness is actually fine here — pretty pictures! — but damaging elsewhere because in the story the house is supposed to heal itself, and the filtration kind of blurs the textures so you can’t tell. When Karen Black stares in alarm, the filmmakers have to dub a line over the back of her head, where she expresses her surprise that the house has, in fact, seemingly improved its appearance in an unexpected way. Gosh!

Nestor Almendros used to walk out of films as soon as he saw diffusion being used, which does strike me as a bit hard-line. But in setting rules for himself, Almendros was really shifting himself out of the craftsman-for-hire category and repositioning the cinematographer as an artist in collaboration with the director. If you want extreme artificial lighting effects and filters and so on, get a cinematographer who doesn’t mind working that way — get Mario Bava! Almendros had one particular approach, and if you hired him you knew sort of what you were going to get.

Looking at BURNT OFFERINGS, I’m glad diffusion went out of style. But I wonder if it could be used in an interesting way now. No technique is actually bad in and of itself, I feel. What’s bad is default filmmaking that picks the fashionable approach without regard to the effect desired.

Director Dan Curtis tracks into close-up. Fiona says: “Karen Black’s face is unhappy.”

The hearth moved

Ground-breaking sexual shenanigans from Jules Dassin’s PHAEDRA. Faced with the challenging task of manufacturing sexual chemistry between his wife, Melina Mercouri, and Anthony Perkins, Dassin pulls out all the stops. The result is like a MOVIE MASH-UP of love scene clichés — soft focus; roaring fireplace; clenching hands; rain battering on window; the sweeping music of Mikis Theodorakis on the gramophone (there will be NO remarks about Anthony Perkins and Greek love in this post. Apart from this one). By the end it’s a wonder there’s a stick of furniture intact in that apartment.

David Thomson in his BioDic of Film, writes, “In good company, and a little drunk, HE WHO MUST DIE, PHAEDRA and 10.30PM SUMMER might cure would-be suicides.” I’ll allow that Dassin skirts the edges of absurdity in 10.30, and PHAEDRA looks like it plunges headlong into a basin of ludicrous pomp, but I still get a kick out of this scene. The effect is overdone but the individual elements are orchestrated with great skill — I like the compositions and editing and music.

I heard of an English teacher one time who would object to purple passages of sexual action in DH Lawrence with the words, “But it’s not LIKE that!” which is a good argument, though not necessarily one that should take precedence over all other concerns. I don’t think it applies to Dassin — taken metaphorically, his sex scene could be seen as quite authentic. Unless what you’re after is complete authenticity (which would mean SOUND EFFECTS, and none of us wants THAT) evoking the corny (there’s rarely anything ORIGINAL about sex) but overwhelming emotions of what General Ripper calls “the physical act of love” seems reasonable, and doing it without fear of looking silly seems at least commendable.

Kubrick told Michel Ciment that the exhilerating and goofy William Tell Overture time-lapse threesome in CLOCKWORK ORANGE was in part a reaction to the way movies tend to solemnize sex, and he had a point there, but sex is very often quite humourless. There’s plenty of room for giggling at the start, but there comes a point where that could be  OFF-PUTTING.

So, if sex is overwhelming, serious, and best treated in a stylised way — Dassin is surely the man for the job. He was dismissed for his “strained seriousness” by Andrew Sarris, but that seems somehow wrong: it’s no strain for Dassin to be serious. His lighter films from this period, TOPKAPI and NEVER ON SUNDAY, seem far more effortful (though I love TOPKAPI and make allowances for NOS).

Dassin was a Sexual Pioneer! The bisexual triangle of 10.30PM SUMMER must have been strong stuff for 1966. I also think there’s enough textual evidence in his work to deduce a keen interest in sado-masochism (whippings abound in THE LAW, RIFIFI…)

Sex, in the movies, is fraught with difficulty. Maybe because it’s universal but also distinctly personal. There’s a cringe-making story of a well-known actor who, in his first sex scene, grabbed his partner by the hair and began slamming her head off the pillow. “Cut! What are you doing?” He was totally perplexed. What’s the problem? Doesn’t everybody do it this way?

Everybody does it every which way! The first sex scene in a mainstream movie is supposed to be in ECSTASY, in 1933. Director Gustav Machatý attempted to evoke an orgasmic reaction from his star Hedy Lamarr by pricking her feet with a pin. “That would just be really annoying,” says my partner. “Maybe everybody Gustav Machatý slept with found him really annoying.”

Another technique — in RED ROAD, an actress appears to receive oral sex. In reality she was holding half a peach between her thighs for her co-star to munch on. Hey, it’s a system!

In SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, Barbet Schroeder wanted to film a more than usually convincing blow-job, so he purchased a dildo for Jennifer Jason Leigh to fellate: the hope was to show she had SOMETHING in her mouth without offending the censor by showing WHAT. But, perhaps fearful of insulting his male lead, Schroeder acquired a jaw-breakingly enormous plastic dinosaur appendage…

DON’T LOOK NOW is justly famous for it’s cinematically beautiful love scene. One story I heard, from former producer/director turned educationalist Brent MacGregor, who heard it from an assistant editor, casts an interesting light on the scene. Supposedly, Donald Sutherland was more “into” the sex scene than co-star Julie Christie, which resulted in (a) her walking off the set after one take and (b) Warren Beatty bursting into the cutting room and attempting to beat up director Nicolas Roeg.

I don’t generally credit such gossip, but a couple of aspects of it at least make sense — if you look at the actual lovemaking, MOST of what you see is consistent with a single hand-held shot. But bits of the shot were unusable as the cameraman was clambering over the bed, etc. With only one continuous take, partly no good, Roeg was forced to intercut, and all he could intercut WITH was neutral material, the couple dressing to go out (which would have to have been shot deliberately for the purpose, later, if we buy this version of events). And thus is born a thing of immense beauty and poetic resonance.

Donald Sutherland reports being locked in that bedroom “for hours” with Roeg, Christie, and an extremely noisy unblimped camera. But what’s seen in the film isn’t consistent with such a prolonged shoot. And what’s been rumoured about Roeg’s swinging lifestyle might be consistent with the desire to go a little further than usual in the name of realism…

(Also — looking through the scene for not-too-explicit frame grabs, I realised that it’s quite a bit more explicit than I’d previously thought. Much of the “stronger stuff” is compositionally decentred and hard to spot due to the pace of cutting, but… let’s just say I hope Julie Christie remembered to bring half a peach to the set…)

Ottocracy

 

Otto weekend has spilled out into the week and looks like swamping it altogether! What is it with Shadowplay and these unpleasant Viennese? First Fritz Lang (above) rampages through here (mentally, I picture him gallumphing in one of those party costumes where it’s supposed to look like you’re riding an ostrich– he attempts to maintain dignity by wielding his riding crop with Prussian savagery) all through Nibelungen Week. Now it’s the turn of Otto P, another exponent of the Mad Kraut school of direction.

Both, of course, are very considerable film genius types.

(Thanks to Scott Marks’ “KPBS Film Club of the Air” for the memorable image.)

To inaugurate Otto Phase Two, I’ll start with a little anecdote from Bambi Versus Godzilla, a collection of essays by professional word-carpenter and deceased liberal David Mamet. D.M. was approached by Otto “The Man With the Foam-rubber Cummerbund” Preminger for some abortive project or other, and in the process, and anecdote passed from one brain to the other.

OP: “When I voss makink EXODUS,” (okay, enough with the accent) “I needed a crowd of ten thousand people, to celebrate the founding of Israel. And I couldn’t afford to pay them.”

“What did you do?” asked the young playwright. 

“I charged them.”

Ads were taken out: “Be in a movie! Only five dollars!”

This is the peculiar kind of genius that has often caused Otto to be dismissed as a huckster rather than an artist. While holding in one’s mind the idea of Otto as a major artist (along with the image of him in foam-rubber belt and Fritz Lang in ostrich costume), I suggest we also make space for the crafty showman aspect of his personality, a major feature of the OP persona and an influence on the films he made — in the same way that Kubrick’s work was influenced by his desire to emulate the success of the biggest box office hits of all time — BARRY LYNDON/GONE WITH THE WIND (check out the identical death of the firstborn), THE SHINING/THE EXORCIST, AI/ET. The intent may sometimes have had to do with vulgar commercialism, but art got in the way.

Babelsberg Psychos Go America

 

A Fever Dream Double Feature.

Following in the mighty footsteps of Christoph Hubert, whose Fever Dream pairings were published hereabouts recently, I present for your delectation and sweaty perusal another brain-bending duo of movies that go together all wrong. I have selected two films, and I call them Film One and Film Two.

(Note the flag attached to David Wayne’s lamp to keep his face in shadow.)

Film One is “M”. Not the celebrated Fritz Lang-Thea Von Harbou 1931 classic, but the generally denigrated Joseph Losey remake from twenty years later. As films maudit go, the don’t come much mauditer than this. While Losey is much admired, mainly for his British films of the ’60s (the blacklist having driven him from Hollywood), his U.S. work is a mixed bunch, much of it rarely screened. The excellent noir THE PROWLER (many noirs tackle the theme of “wrong values,” but none so starkly as this) rubs shoulders with the curio that is THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR, a jejeune anti-war parable that passes the time acceptably just by being very very odd. In this company, the M remake is just one more mis-step in Losey’s shaky Hollywood career arc, but fortunately it’s a bit closer to the intensity of PROWLER than the fey loopiness of GREEN HAIR.

The perennially prissy David Wayne essays the Lorre role, doing well with the hysteria but entirely missing Lorre’s uncanny, bug-eyed froth. The script pads out the predestined devil with some unconvincing dollar book Freud cod psychology.

Losey scores a little better with his cops and crooks — one detective is a virtual fascist, with less respect for the rule of law than the “punks and tinhorns” he yearns to subject to the rubber hose treatment. Luther Adler plays an alcoholic mob lawyer (called Langley in presumed homage, though old Fritz didn’t appreciate the gesture, turning up to single-handedly picket the premiere). This figure’s presence helps set up the kangaroo court more plausibly, but he’s an annoying character wrapped around an annoying performance (dialogue scribe Waldo Salt may have to shoulder some blame here. Salt, later blacklisted himself, made a glorious comeback as writer of MIDNIGHT COWBOY in the ’70s, but his work here is mostly on a Dick Tracy level, with a few corny left-wing pretensions). The rogues’ gallery gets livelier around the intense, ferret-eyed Martin Gabel (also director of one movie, the terrific THE LOST MOMENT, a labyrinth of sinuous camera moves with a centenarian Agnes Moorehead at its heart) and his henchmen: Raymond Burr, more hench than man, doing a gravelly voice like Putney Swope; Glenn Anders, not as soapy as in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (”Just doing a little taaaaarrrget practice,”) but sort of CHUNKIER; and Norman Lloyd, always always always a reliably sneaky face to fill out a frame.

But this “M” has its greatest success in the use of locations. Losey makes fine use of Bunker Hill and outstanding use of the Bradbury Building. Best known now as the site of BLADE RUNNER’s climax, this striking construction came to its architect in a dream, and Losey captures both the sharpness and the illogic of nightmare in the clamorous conflict he stages there. Each angle provides a bizarre and startling new perspective to affront the eyes and make giddy the mind.

And Losey’s eerie mannequin warehouse is better than Kubrick’s eerie mannequin warehouse in KILLER’S KISS. In moments like this one can feel that Lang’s cautionary horror tale has found a new home in the city of angels.

Film Two is DR. CALIGARI, another U.S. remake of a German classic, this one directed by Stephen Sayadian, (A.K.A. Rinse Dream / François Délia / Sidney Falco / F.X. Pope / Ladi von Jansky) maker of the cult sci-fi porno CAFE FLESH, which I’d previously seen and failed to admire.

This struck me as much better! Sayadian, whose speciality is production design, crafts a low-budget expressionist world and stages a sort of Cartoon Network VIDEODROME ballet in it. Everything is over-stylised to the point of panic-attack claustrophobia, the movements are choreographed and the blocking avoids standard continuity and settles for a snappy succession of ruthlessly composed tableaux, shuffled like smutty playing cards in the hands of a stoned dealer. Imagery tends to the nauseating (weeping sores) and peculiar (a wall with a giant mouth) rather than the sexy, but most effective porn is totally boring as art anyway. Sayadian is probably more interested in arousing the pineal gland or something weird like that.

See this thing! It’ll make you feel weird, which you ought to enjoy if you like reading this stuff. In addition to the purely visual pleasures (and the retro fun of the ’80s synth-score), Sayadian makes the best use of porno-style acting I’ve ever seen, creating an expressionistically oneiric B-movie vibe out of his performers’ limitations, reminiscent in its delirium of Ed Wood’s avant-garde trash aesthetic.

Madeleine Reynal, with clipped Mittel-European delivery, essays the role of Caligari’s grand-daughter, following in her “grrandvasser’s vootschteps,” as the late Kenneth Mars might put it, while Laura Albert brings agreeably mannered body language, and an agreeably mannered body, to the role of science project Mrs. Van Outen. Albert slices through the film, nipples primed to at any instant pierce some unsuspecting fellow thespian and pump them full of silicone. It’s not surprising to learn that when she’s not playing characters with “names” like “Bambi” and “Strip Joint Girl” and “Whipped Cream Girl” (in the TV show Dream On — some may remember this) L.A. is a stunt artist: she has a robust physicality to her and in a way this whole performance — nay, this whole film — is a death-defying piece of stunt art.

If you see Losey’s “M”, I hope it’s the same copy I have — a glitchy AVI file of a fuzzy DVD of a chewed-up VHS of a ropey telecine of a speckly print — because you get the surreal impression that the ’50s remake is older than the ’30s original.

If you see DR. CALIGARI… say hi.

I’m quite staggeringly indebted to Shadowplayer Brandon  for providing these movies, after I mentioned having never seen the J-Lo “M”. I should mention right now that I am in no way averse to FREE STUFF. If you stay alert you may catch me dropping the occasional hint, such as “I’ve never seen this film,” which you may all take as your cue to offer me complimentary bootlegs. I promise I won’t mind.

Anatomy of a Gag

 

I’ve linked to my short film, CRY FOR BOBO, before, but the YouTube version doesn’t really do justice to Scott Ward’s luminous photography, or the costume designs of Ali Mitchell and her team. Dissecting a few scenes in frame grabs gives me the chance to write some more about it and also show off how nice it looks (but even nicer in 35mm, obviously).

This is the jail-break scene. We start with a pleasingly dull establishing shot.

I sort of like the greyness. There’s something nice about a shot that’s sort of black-and-white-in-colour, especially if you rupture that by injecting something bright-hued. It’s the whole aesthetic of William Wellman’s frenzied allegorical melodrama TRACK OF THE CAT. Martin Scorsese used the idea for the music video section of BAD, his short Michael Jackson film (not the greatest moment of Scorsese’s career, but an important move in re-establishing him as a commercially viable force).

We’re also going for a Keatonesque flatness in the framing: the edge of the wall runs exactly parallel to the top and bottom edge of frame, like a kid’s drawing. I first noticed this simple framing approach in Richard Lester films, and discovered later it came from Buster Keaton. In this film we apply a bit of Kubrickian symmetry to it as well, sometimes.

We had a huge discussion about what to call the clown prison. It turns out there just isn’t a good pun out there. We considered Clownschwitz and Clownditz, but they were too heavy, and the wrong kind of prison. Luke, the props guy, came up with the best suggestion. In the film you don’t really have time to read it anyway.

(If anybody can suggest anything better, I’ll digitally add it in when I become George Lucas.)

Anyway, Coco, the more cunning of our two clown protags, has built a cannon in the prison workshop. (When challenged about this, he pretends it’s an ashtray.) There’s a BOOM!

– and a tiny figure flies over the wall. This is a Masters of the Universe doll belonging to our production designer, Tom Clay, who has a substantial collection of action figures and robots. The costume department went crazy dressing the figurine up as Coco, down to the last detail, even though I assured them it would only be glimpsed for a second.

The wall is only about five feet high. The design department built several, for reasons that will become clear.

After the doll falls out of the bottom of frame, Coco rises up and dusts himself off. (His cigar has been crushed by the fall.)

It’s a traditional false perspective effect. No special effects involved, it’s all in-camera. The miniature wall is right behind Coco, balanced on top of a short stone wall to give it extra height. You can just see some real tree branches at top left, which add a little more “reality”.

Creating the illusion that Coco came over the wall is mainly down to timing: he stands up just a second after the doll’s exit. It’s a balance between making it clear what’s meant to be happening, while making it obviously fake-looking.

Coco turns to the wall and there’s another cannon blast on the soundtrack: Bobo is following Coco.

A second doll smashes through the wall. This is on a wire fed through the part of the wall where the fake brickwork has been prepared. That’s why we needed several walls. I think we had five but only used two or three.

We had quite a few outtakes where the first doll failed to clear the wall. And there’s one where the second doll just hits the wall on the other side, you see the wall bulge, and that’s it. The Bobo doll was spreadeagled flat against the wall, just like when Wile E Coyote swings into a cliff face.

This isn’t the perfect take: on this one, the doll kind of PAUSED on its path through the wall, held up by the “brickwork”. In the end I liked that better than the smoother take we did next. Dubbing an “Argh!” onto the impact helped too.

(In the great single-shot heist scene in THE KILLERS, director Robert Siodmak ended up using the first complete take, the one where everything went wrong — it looked much more real.)

I first imagined this as a full-scale wall, with obvious dummiesbeing slung about. Tom was happy to build a strip of full-sized wall in between two existing walls, but we couldn’t find a set-up where we could do that. He suggested miniatures, and I said okay, as long as we could still do it in one shot… We practiced with a set wall and a doll and a camcorder and me standing up in the foreground. Everybody said “Naw, that doesn’t work.” We tried some kind of variation with the timing, and that was worse. Then I said, “Let’s watch the first version again.” This time we all loved it. Weird.

Now Bobo stands up in the foreground, holding one of the bricks.

The movie is part of a scheme called Tartan Shorts, which was in its tenth year, and had most often concentrated on a kind of social realist working class miserabilism. It felt good to be breaking out of that prison. Scott, the cinematographer turned to me after this and said, “I think we just did the best shot ever in a Tartan Short,” which pleased me no end. I think Scott did more beautiful work eslewhere in the film, but the idea here is so mad, I’m proud we did it.

We were filming in a children’s playground, since it provided enough space to shoot without distracting buildings in the background. So throughout the shot we had an audience of little kids, asking the usual irksome questions: “Is this going to be on telly?”

A tiny four-year-old asked a more intelligent one: “Why did the big clown go like that?” and she made a dusting motion, like Coco had done.

“Because he had come over the wall,” I said.

She looked at my like I was an idiot. “No, the big clown.”

I think I passed the question onto one of my assistant directors.

Super-costumier Ali snapped this additional false perspective shot as we were filming. I’m in the foreground wearing a reject clown costume (the stripes were too small).

At the premier, the audience went wild for this scene. A nice lady who works at the funding body, Scottish Screen, said to me, “I don’t know how you did that.” So I proceeded to explain it. She smiled and said, “I don’t know how you did that,” at which point I realised she didn’t CARE how we did it, she just liked it.

I ought to be content with that.

Perfectionist, my ass!

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

 

‘I’m getting a little weary of the “crazed perfectionist” tag.’ ~ Stanley Kubrick.

This is about KUBRICK’S MISTAKES. I like mistakes. As Lars Von Trier’s T-shirt said during the making of BREAKING THE WAVES, “Mistakes are good.” Only sensible thing he ever said.

“A director is someone who presides over accidents,” as Welles said.

And all the talk about Kubrick’s meticulousness, while it certainly describes a real phenomenon, can get rather predictable, can become a barrier to seeing the films. So this piece is about the OTHER Kubrick, the goofy bungler whose films are a collection of cock-ups and fumbles.

Yeah, right.

But let’s see what we can find. Evidence of errors in Kubrick’s work would point to a filmmaker willing to allow a bit of slippage as long as it’s in the service of creating an interesting scene.

EYES WIDE SHUT. Start at the end — because early stuff might look like youthful inexperience. This movie has a real beaut: during the bathroom scene early on, where Cruise treats a girl who has overdosed, Kubrick and the camera crew are reflected in a bathroom mirror on the far right of the frame. No mistaking it.

When David Wingrove saw the film with his partner Roland Man, Roland was incandescent at this aggravated howler: “They — had — over a year – to — shoot — it!” he hissed.

But by the time the film came to video and DVD, the offending edge action was gone, either masked out by the transfer to 4:3 framing, or removed by some digital jiggery-pokery by the Kubrick heirs. Yet they had been adamant that the film was “finished” at the time of SK’s death — if so, what business did they have tinkering subsequently? Either Kubrick somehow missed the offending material not only during filming, but all through post, or he decided it didn’t matter to him, or he had some plan to eliminate it but neglected to tell anyone: any way you cut it, this was an amusing Ed Woodian slip-up, and that just makes me like Stan more.

Kubrickians either love or are embarrassed by EWS, but what of FULL METAL JACKET? One correspondent to a film magazine pointed out that Kube’s careful reconstruction of Viet Nam in London’s docklands failed because the cloud patterns were all wrong, and they have a point — if what we’re after is complete realism. South East Asian skies, as seen for real in South East Asian films, look hazy and diffuse compared to those of Southern England.

The IMDb lists 59 mistakes in the film, mostly continuity but several factual and a few anachronisms. This kind of stuff can get pretty boring to enumerate, but I like the fact that Private Pyle shoots himself on different toilets according to different camera angles, and that there’s a crewmember in blue jeans lying in the rubble during a long steadicam shot going into battle.

Some continuity problems may stem from the delay in shooting during the training scenes: R. Lee Ermey caved in his rib cage crashing his motorcycle in Epping Forest and shooting was suspended until he’d recovered. So the fact that extras swap places while standing to attention, for instance, is not altogether surprising.

The numerous errors listed with firearms, such as full cartridges than should be empty, and guns firing without being cocked, mainly suggest that Kubrick was not so very concerned with technical accuracy in minor details, unless it helped his dramatic purpose — he would play fast and loose with authenticity when it made life easier, and during the “battlefield” of shooting there would be numerous minor screw-ups which were not worth re-shooting.

(PLATOON has only 29 mistakes listed, surprising when you consider how low the budget and short the schedule were, compared to FMJ, and also when you consider how many drugs Oliver Stone supposedly takes.)

Only idiots really care passionately about continuity mistakes (and blog about them). Kubrick was no idiot.

THE SHINING. I swear to God, when the camera crash-zooms in on the slain Scatman Crothers, he blinks.

Typo: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot.” There are LOTS of typos, and of course I’m being silly, they’re meant to be there.

When the phone rings in the kitchen (Jack’s got the job), Shelley Duvall moves smoothly to answer it as if she knew it was going to happen. It’s not quite a gaffe, but it suggests the downside to all those retakes: things can get a little too rehearsed-looking.

The really nice, suggestive one, is how the previous caretaker is named as Charles Grady when he’s first discussed, then Jack Nicholson calls him Delbert Grady when they meet, and Grady is fine with this. What’s going on? How does a filmmaker get a major character’s name wrong? It just adds to the weirdness, so I’d argue that it WORKS, but I don’t think it’s intentional.

Shadowplay: There are lots of camera shadows visible in Kubrick’s films, because he moves the camera a lot. I never used to notice camera shadows until I started making films, then I realised what a nightmare they are. In one shot on a student film, I edited, the crew put an actress’s wig on the camera, transforming a camera shadow into a character shadow.

BARRY LYNDON. A few minor anachronisms: the term “strychnine” is used, a Yellow Labrador appears (not bred until 1899). The intriguing one is the car driving through shot in the duel with Leonard Rossiter — I’ve never managed to see it, but more than one source insists it’s there. My T.V. is not that small, plus I’ve seen the film projected several times. But I’d love the rumours to be true.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Patrick Magee’s entire performance is one glorious misjudgement.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. During the Russian Leonard Rossiter blather on the space station, Kubrick is guilty of one of the most egregiously ugly shot changes ever. It’s just a slight jump in shot distance, but it’s really LOUSY film-making. It’s about the only thing of note. Oh, when Heywood Floyd is on the vidphone to his/Kubrick’s daughter, the phone-camera TILTS to keep her in frame as she wriggles about. Pretty clever phone!

DR. STRANGELOVE. My favourite here is Peter Bull, as the Russian ambassador, struggling to keep a straight face behind Sellers’ Strangelove monologue. People laughing is never funny, but people trying NOT to laugh is delicious torture.

I like how George C. Scott falls over in mid-spiel. It feels like it HAS to be either an accident (nobody would script that, it just wouldn’t be funny on the page) or, possibly, Scott goofing around to keep himself entertained during the countless retakes. It’s said that his rather extreme performance came about through boredom, and he was a trifle dismayed when Kubrick cut together the film using only the most exaggerated and grotesque takes. A lot of those re-takes appear to have been motivated by a DESIRE for something to go wrong, for something fascinating and unrepeatable to happen. Thus, Kubrick’s most famous directions: “Do something remarkable,” or, as he liked to quote Cocteau, “Astonish me.”

LOLITA. I like this one — the IMDb suggests that Kubes can be seen walking through frame right at the start, as Humbert enters Quilty’s house. It’s certainly a mistake, but it’s not SK onscreen: why would he be in front of the camera at the start of a take? It’s the clapper boy, running for cover. SOMEBODY made a mistake when editing the dissolve from the previous scene. When you edit rushes for a 48-frame dissolve, you simply cut in the centre of where the dissolve will be, then mark the timing of the dissolve with a chinagraph pencil (I learned old fashioned film cutting just before it died out), 24 frames on either side. Whoever cut this part made the cut right after the clapper boy left, instead of waiting another 24 frames. So even though he wouldn’t have been visible in the cutting copy, when the dissolve came back from the lab, there he is in all his inappropriate glory, disappearing from view exactly halfway through the mix. So either there was no money to recut, or Kubes didn’t notice, or BETTER, didn’t mind. (It’s very brief.)

(You can see the Clapper’s arm at bottom right here.)

SPARTACUS. A truck definitely DOES drive through this one! Plus Tony Curtis wearing a Rolex, and the full panoply of Hollywood anachronism and discontinuity.

PATHS OF GLORY. The IMDb lists four goofs, including another blinking corpse. One character says he’s unmarried at the start and talks about his wife at the end. This makes me pbscurely happy. A whirlwind engagement!

John Gavin is cast in the film, despite not being a very good actor.

THE KILLING. A few continuity and firearms goofs. Supposedly most of what the V.O. says is inaccurate because Kubes didn’t want a V.O. in the first place.

KILLER’S KISS. The warehouse fight. SK “crosses the line” repeatedly during the fight in the dummy warehouse. He does this deliberately in other films, jumping exactly 180º in odd ways in FULL METAL JACKET and THE SHINING, but here the effect is disruptive and confusing, all but ruining the film’s most promising sequence. A beginner’s mistake.

FEAR AND DESIRE. Too many screw-ups to list. I think Stan should have cast his hot wife, Toba, in it. That would have helped.

We could take the Malcolm McDowell view: “The human element will trip you up every time. If it wasn’t for that, he could make the perfect film,” which presupposes that the “perfection” aimed at is chimeric and the quest for it quixotic. But Kubrick was well aware of the problems. Steadicam operator Garrett Morris has said, “We would have long conversations about the elusive nature of perfection. After ten takes the thing falls off the wall because the tape holding it there peeled, entropy takes over, we’re all getting older…”

I prefer to think that the obsessive repetition was just what Kubrick always said it was: a desire to keep filming until something happened that was worth putting in a film. It’s not a futile quest for an unattainable ideal, just the desire to keep going until something wonderful occurs in front of the lens. Kubrick’s opinion of what’s wonderful may differ from yours, sometimes, but it’s perfectly commendable to strive for it, and to not care too much how many mistakes are made along the way.

Euphoria #26: “Throw me a frickin’ bone here!”

 

Newly-declared Shadowplayer Mike Paterson writes from the other side of the planet to suggest this slice of Cinerama Euphoria, a brilliant example of cinematography and editing with awe-inspiring scale and scope, and one of the most daring and imaginative transitions in film history.

“There’s something about the scale of the cinema experience that seems to heighten our emotional response isn’t there? One that gets me every time is the famous edit in 2001; A Space Odyssey where the ape, triumphant (euphoric even) flings the bone into the air for it to become a satellite floating in stately orbit. Cue big lump in the throat and welling of the eyes at the greatness of it all. Actually, when I saw the re-released, restored version at The Curzon, Mayfair in 2001 I began to lose it from the first frame when the opening throb of Thus Spake Zarathrustra announced itself. It’s all a childhood thing. Like Life on Mars. And yes, The Iron Giant gets me too.

“2001 is a film that has haunted me every since I was taken to see it in glorious Cinerama (I think) at the old Colosseum in Glasgow’s Gorbals (now a Bingo Hall I think) in 1968 as a five year old. Its images seared themselves onto my consciousness. In 2006 I was lucky enough to attend a screening of a new print at St Kilda’s Astor Theatre here in glorious, cinema-filled Melbourne and met Keir Dullea. He was charming, courteous and patient as was his wife who chatted with us about the art galleries they’d visited.

David, your blog is like some Elysian afterlife. Thank you.”

Thanks! But — “afterlife”? You’re not dead, I hope? Not that there are any prejudices here at Shadowplay.

(Stanley Kauffman, who sneered at this ”dissolve” when it is, in fact, a breath-taking instantaneous CUT will burn forever in the legendary Critics’ Circle of Hell.)

I couldn’t resist leaving the whole of the Blue Danube space station docking scene attached too.

Where did the idea for the bone to spaceship cut come from? Where do ANY ideas come from? The most one can do is trace the moment of inspiration, which Arthur C. Clarke helpfully does for us in The Lost Worlds of 2001:

‘The skull-smashing sequence was the only scene not filmed in the studio; it was shot in a field, a couple of hundred yards away–the only time Stanley went on location. A small platform had been set up, and [ape-man] Moon-Watcher (Dan Richter) was sitting on this, surrounded by bones. Cars and buses were going by at the end of the field, but as this was a low angle shot against the sky they didn’t get in the way–though Stanley did have to pause for an occasional aeroplane.

‘The shot was repeated so many times, and Dan smashed so many bones, that I was afraid we were going to run out of wart-hog (or tapir) skulls. But eventually Stanley was satisfied, and as we walked back to the studio he began to throw bones up in the air. At first I thought this was sheer joie de vivre, but then he started to film them with a handheld camera–no easy task. Once or twice, one of the large, swiftly descending bones nearly impacted on Stanley as he peered through the viewfinder; if luck had been against us the whole project might have ended then. To misquote Ardrey [author of African Genesis] “That intelligence would have perished on some forgotten Elstree field.”‘

(If you watch FILMING THE SHINING you can similarly see the exact moment when Kubrick thinks of filming Nicholson from the floor of the food locker as he talks to Shelley Duvall through the door.)

It’s amusing to note that when Kubrick was looking around for some sci-fi writer to write with, and Clarke’s name came up, his reaction was, “But isn’t he a crazy recluse?”

Clarke, it turned out, was not living “up a tree in Sri Lanka” because, like some aloof Garbo of SF,  he wanted to be alone – he was delighted to collaborate with the Great Stanley K.

Fastward to decades later (I hurl a can of film in the air, and we jump cut to a flying DV tape): when the Prince of Wales was about to present Clarke with an award, rumours spread that Clarke’s real motivation in moving to Sri Lanka was the plentiful supply of affordable boys. Clarke issued an odd non-denial-denial: “I haven’t been sexually active in years,” and the matter was dropped.

Perplexing. But in the absence of any actual aggrieved Sri Lankan ex-rentboys baying for his blood, I think Mr. Clarke deserves every award the British Empire can cough up, in recognition of his major contribution to the Greatest Science Fiction Film Ever Made.

“I can feel it. I can feel it.” ~ H.A.L.

The Prophecy

While this poor chap is catching 40 winks in Murnau’s THE HAUNTED CASTLE…

…who should turn up but Graf Orlok, the bald vampire from NOSFERATU, two films too early? (This is all we see of him, but I’d know that hand anywhere!) What’s he doing here?

Friedrich Murnau is perhaps the greatest exponent of prophetic cinema, and his life and death have some mysterious corners worthy of exploration…

One thing that has struck me in the past is how, in the magic carpet ride from FAUST (insert obligatory reference to Murnau’s WWI experience as a pilot HERE), the landscapes traversed resemble those, initially from earlier Murnaus, like these, which echo NOSFERATU:

 

But later, the lanscapes seem to emerge from films Murnau was YET TO MAKE!

The cornfields in CITY GIRL have the same aura of white gold as these, viewed in FAUST…

The frothing streams of TABU are pre-echoed by this miniature landscape, from FAUST again.

Could it be that the other vistas in this amazing sequence are environments drawn from the films Murnau WOULD HAVE MADE, had he not died so abruptly?

(These faustscapes, by the way, are among the Impossible Places I would most like to visit, along with the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki and the strangely glazed countryside flown over after the Tunnels of Light sequence in 2001. My bags are packed.)

Ironically, some of these shots were taken here in Scotland. I am ALREADY THERE!

THE DEATH OF MURNAU

Murnau’s death mask, illegally photographed by the author.

The rather good documentary that accompanies Masters of Cinema’s new DVD of NOSFERATU focuses on production company Prana Film’s intention to make films on mystic and supernatural themes, since the company founder was something of a sorcerer himself. But the documentary draws a blank when it ponders the question of whether Murnau himself believed in occult forces.

The enigma can be simply cleared up by referring to Lotte Eisner’s definitive study of Murnau:

In 1931, Murnau, she tells us, hadn’t visited his mother in Germany for some time, so he made plans to go and consulted a fortune-teller, “as was his habit.”

“You will arrive at your mother’s on April 5th, but in a different manner than you expect,” intoned the psychic, perhaps adding, “Wooo-oo-oooo-oo!” (My speculation.)

Rose Kearin, Murnau’s secretary, had some kind of bad feeling about this trip and urged Murnau not to take a plane to catch the boat. So Murnau hired a car and Filipino driver to get about on the continent, and another car, a Rolls, to take him to the boat. Murnau objected to the Rolls’ chauffeur, “But how ugly he is!” and insisted that his own driver should take the wheel. The journey began, with Murnau, the two drivers, Ned Marin, who managed the company that did the post-synching on Murnau’s last film, and a German shepherd dog called Pal.

Here we must discount the version narrated by Kenneth Anger in his entertaining smear-fest Hollywood Babylon. Ie. Murnau did not cause the car to crash by fellating the driver. My adaptation of Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum runs, “Once we have eliminated whatever entertaining myth Kenneth Anger is peddling, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” 

As the Rolls sped along at top speed, a lorry came in the opposite direction, and the pulchritudinous chauffeur lost control. The car left the road and hurtled down a bank. Murnau, who’d been dozing, awakens to find himself in a vehicle plunging nightmarishly into the void. At this point — classic example of a guy who’s seen too many movies — he throws himself out of the car. Rolling at high speed he cracks his head on a fencepost and fractures his skull. Death follows rapidly.

Everybody in the car is fine. Even the fucking dog is fine.

Murnau’s body arrives in a box at his mother’s on April 5th, as predicted. Woooo-oo…

Murnau’s death mask sits on Greta Garbo’s desk in Hollywood for years.

A young Persian gardener said to his Prince:

‘Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning, and he gave me a threatening look. I wish that tonight, by some miracle, I might be far away, in Ispahan.’

The Prince lent him his swiftest horse.

That afternoon, as he was walking in the garden, the Prince came face to face with Death. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you give my gardener a threatening look this morning?’

‘It was not a threatening look,’ replied Death. ‘It was an expression of surprise. For I saw him here this morning, and I knew that I would take him in Ispahan tonight.’

~ Jean Cocteau, The Look of Death.

EUPHORIA 1

Regular reader B. Kite suggested I blog about euphoric scenes, little film moments that induce detectable amounts of happiness in the viewer. He nominates the clip below, and it’s a good one! The real bliss starts about four and a half minutes in.

“something abt this number just makes me incredibly happy. as well as a beautiful arrangement of a great song (the first!), it’s the FACES”

Reminds me of Kubrick’s nice line about the last shot of THE SHINING: “Every face around Jack is an archetype of the period.”

Boy, if we could actually reincarnate in a Fred Astaire movie, just by freezing to death in a maze, who among us would have the courage to resist? It’s a very real problem.

Mr. K goes on:

“If I were going to nominate the greatest moments in movies, this wdn’t be in my top choices, but if we’re talking abt little moments that just make one v. happy…”

I propose to run a SERIES of such posts, with scenes nominated by YOU, the Shadowplayers, all you wonderful people out there in the dark! Send me links or just describe the scene you have in mind and I’ll try to get ahold of it (and Chris, no porn).

If, as David Lynch believes, we could solve all the world’s problems by getting the square root of the Earth’s population to transcendentally meditate at the same time — “And bango!” — then imagine what we could achieve if all the readers of this blog, the many millions, clicked on Fred Astaire at the same time. Let’s unroll some euphoria!

I’ll go next, to keep the ball rolling, but please, EVERYBODY, give me your thoughts.

(Oh, the film clip is from DAMSEL IN DISTRESS, directed by George Stevens — whom BK still doesn’t accept as a Great American Filmmaker, despite loving Stevens’ Astaire films — and it’s based on a story by the sublime P.G. Wodehouse, and features Joan Fontaine and Burns and Allen.)