Quote of the Day: Nothing up my sleeve

“I’ll snatch this story from the depths, by shock tactics. And if fate’s against me I’ll deal with fate. I’ll cheat it with a card trick.”

“The best of films is that it’s all a card trick done in front of the audience without letting them see what’s up one’s sleeve.”

~ Jean Cocteau, Diary of a Film.

Inspiring words! I urge filmmakers to keep them in mind and to remember also the words spoken to the poet in Cocteau’s OPRHEE: “Astonish me.”

Quote of the Day: the stone head kids

More from Jean Cocteau’s Diary of a Film ~

“The kids who play the stone heads are incredibly patient. For they’ve got the most uncomfortable positions, having to kneel behind the set with their shoulders fixed in a sort of armour of plastic and resting their hair which is all gummed and bepowdered against the pillar with the arc lamps full in their faces. The effect is so intensely magical that I wonder if the camera can possibly get it. These heads are alive, they look, they breathe smoke from their nostrils, they turn following the artists who are unaware they are being watched. Perhaps as objects which surround us behave, taking advantage of the fact that we believe them to be immobile.”

Beautiful!

And the camera DID get it.

Quote of the Day: Guess who’s coming to lunch?

Can I just recommend Cocteau’s Diary of a Film very very wholeheartedly? It’s tremendously reassuring to us filmmakers, and I would think amazing and fascinating to everyone else too, that the making of such a beautiful, graceful, seemingly “effortless” work like LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE should be nothing but physical and mental anguish. Cocteau is having such an exaggeratedly bad time it becomes perversely amusing, even as you feel for him. Just as you can open Klaus Kinski’s autobio at random and find him trashing some colleague or shagging some actress (usually both) on any given page, so Cocteau’s pages are stuffed with skin rashes, toothache, carbuncles, rain, faulty electrics abd general existential angst.

It’s what I call a PAGE-TURNER.

“Wednesday the 26th, 11p.m.

“My face is only a shell of rashes, ravages and itches. It’ll take me all my strength to forget this task, and go on living underneath it. Rained this morning, but the barometer was up. Built the scaffolding etc. for the cameras whilst the artists were making up a changing. At eleven o’clock we’ll do the two shots which we missed yesterday. The light was very difficult owing to the smoke machines. Marais won’t use a double. And does the jump from the terrace with the help of a spring-board. After which we remember that he’d carried his hat in his right hand yesterday, whilst today he hasn’t got one at all.

“Marais and I lunched at Madame de Labédoyère. A strange meal. I sat on the right of the old lady; she was dressed all in black, while Marais, on her left, was still made up as the Beast. I dare say her little girls will always remember it.”

I first read this right after making my own first short, THE THREE HUNCHBACKS, and I identified deeply. It’s all so unpleasant, why do we do it? As Cocteau and Marais are afflicted by carbuncles, I developed an unheard-of boil at the base of my spine, like the attachment for a Cronenberg gamepod, only EXISTENZ hadn’t been made yet. Horrible.

You make a film; it gets inside you; and then it EMERGES through your skin.

Experiment on your kids!

 

New parents out there, this is for you.

My best friend, going way back to secondary school, Robert Thomson, ran some pretty interesting experiments on his kids when they were little. He showed them movies which, while not by any means falling into any area that might be deemed UNSUITABLE, nevertheless would not be found anywhere on a conventional list of SUITABLE films for kids aged between three and ten.

Item: Jean Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE.

This was when all three of the kids were two young to follow the subtitles, so the movie had to succeed on sheer visual magic, and whatever parts of its story that came across pictorially. Of course, those of you who have seen it know that it has much to offer in these areas. “It’s the same story as the other one!” the kids declared, delighted. They had seen the Disney.

Item: the silent Lon Chaney version of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. Again, with Disney to guide them, reading inter-titles wasn’t altogether essential. This was a very scratchy print on a cheap DVD label specialising in out-of-copyright stuff at low, low prices.

“What do you think of the picture quality?” Robert asked his youngest.

The lad removed his thumb from his mouth, looked thoughtful, and said, “It’s…fizzy-facky.”

Please jot down this new terminology to use later.

The point is, kids will watch just about anything. All that’s needed to make proper cineastes out of them at an early age is to expose them to a wider than usual range of different film-stuff. The pernicious bias against black-and-white is something that comes from peer pressure, when the kids start school. But if they’re already enjoying Laurel and Hardy (in the uncolorized versions) then such prejudices can hardly find a foothold.

Since little kids will stare contentedly at pretty much ANY moving image that isn’t too disturbing, showing them foreign films will do no harm and may eventually help their reading skills. Improve their negative capability by showing them mind-bending stuff they cannot possibly hope to get their little heads around:

Try it on YOUR kids.

After all, it never did ME any harm.

(Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha…)

“Mirrors are the doorways through which death enters the world.”

 

Reflections on reflections: 

Welles loves his multiple images.

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

TOUCH OF EVIL. I like the way Welles mixes from the above shot to the below: for a brief moment we get two shots with four images, all at once.

In spite of this enthusiasm for reflections, and those long lap dissolves in KANE, and various other devices for fragmenting the frame, Welles never got interested in split screen, unlike his fellow Wisconsan Nick Ray. I suspect split screen, like wide-screen, was seen by Welles an aspect of the modernity he so disliked. (On ‘Scope: “I don’t believe the public deserves anything bigger than they’ve been getting.”) That’s why I suspect TOUCH OF EVIl was actually composed for the old 4:3 ratio, despite being cropped to something like 1:1.85 in the restoration.

But Welles did shoot ‘Scope once, when he took over direction on THE SOUTHERN STAR, a rather trashy African adventure story, when director Sidney Hayers got sick. The opening sequence, shot by Welles, is full of dynamism and wit in its zippy reframings, resembling Sergio Leone as much as Welles, and it’s photographed by Raoul Coutard so the colour is really pretty – see it if you get the chance.*

*Apart from scene one, and Welles’ amusing gay villain, the film has little that’s memorable except an amazing line mis-reading by Ursula Andress. As she splashes around an African river, no doubt contracting bilharzia and cholera, during her obligatory nude scene, she shouts at George Segal, “I am trrrrying to whush away a memnory!”

The Twinkler

When top cinematographer Henri Alekan came to the Edinburgh Film Festival, I think I was the first person in the audience to shoot my hand up with a question (helpful hint: there’s usually a lull before anybody volunteers, so if you have a question ready, jump in there).

I asked about Jean Marais’ first appearance in Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BETE. As “The Beast” steps briskly into view, sideways, his eyes appear to FLASH. I asked if this was deliberate, and if so, how was it achieved?

Well, I should’ve known better. The Great Cameraman affixed me with his bright gaze.

“It was deliberate,” he replied, through his interpreter. But either the second (non-dumb-ass) part of the question hadn’t been translated, or old Henri preferred to be enigmatic on the subject, because he never answered it.

And then everybody else in the audience took their cue from me and asked a lot of questions about whether the colour in WINGS OF DESIRE “was deliberate”, or whether the beautiful lighting of Audrey Hepburn in ROMAN HOLIDAY “was deliberate”. Embarrassing.

Anyhow, freezing the image, or going thru it in Still-Advance seems to provide an answer: the eyes have probably been retouched somehow, either with an optical or with neg-scratching. I didn’t want to believe this because I like the way low-tech FX work predominates in LA BELLE and Cocteau’s other films. The effects literally harken back to the days of Melies, and we don’t have to spend any time “wondering how they did it” — we KNOW at first glance how they did it, and so we get over that and just accept it as magic.

Of course, it’s just possible that Marais has little pieces of mirror affixed to his eyelids and is blinking as he emerges in order to sharply reflect the strong light that’s hitting his upper face…

I love that effect, quite unreal, where somebody has particularly bright light on their upper face. Of course such lighting CAN happen in real life, but in movies it can and should happen MUCH MORE OFTEN.

Alekan shot Jules Dassin’s continental caper TOPKAPI using a lot of lurid opticals, filters and gels, to create a kaleidoscopic, quintessentially silly ’sixties vibe. I love it, but seemingly not everybody agrees. One film archivist I met, who was given the job of scanning the movie for location shots of Istanbul (dunno why) said it gave him a headache for a week. This miracle advance in Neurological Cinema is only possible when you have fine artists like Alekan and Dassin who are willing to lay aside all the good taste they’ve cultivated over the years and just wallow in glorious photochemical kitsch:

This last image features another favourite thing of mine: an obviously fake set!

Mmmmmm…

Henri Alekan goes to work…

…and magic happens.