The Sunday Intertitle: Limited Edition

Happy to announce the impending release of Arrow Films’ limited edition Blu-ray and UHD NAKED LUNCH. a project we prepared a video essay for a looooong time ago. Finally seeing the light of day, and worth the wait. I wrote and directed the video essay NOTHING IS TRUE, Chase Barthel edited it, and appearing in it are Luke Aspell, author of an excellent monograph on SHIVERS, and Fiona Watson, Mrs. Shadowplay. It was a happy collaboration because all of us are big Cronenberg fans. I also had a preparatory phone call with David Ehrenstein to make sure I understood his objections to the movie, even though as a Blu-ray extra it wasn’t ever going to be about the film’s flaws.

And it has intertitles!

This was before Arrow had an excellent long-distance system for recording interviews, so I spoke to luke over Zoom, and then the futzy quality of the calls (see also Who Is Bill Rebane?) needed some kind of artistic alibi, something to turn the bug into a feature and make a virtue of necessity, so I decided these talking heads had been intercepted from some kind of Videodrome-type pirate signal beamed out of Interzone…

So I created Interzone Broadcasting Service (IBS) test cards. Test cards are kind of intertitles, aren’t they? And it seems appropriate to have a little aberrant humour in any Cronenberg release.

This one is a nod to the BBC’s famous scary clown test card of my 1970s childhood:

The piece also begins with a bit of typewritten text (typewriters are important in this film) which quotes the blurb from the first edition of Burroughs (The) Naked Lunch I ever handled. Explaining the title isn’t a very Burroughs thing to do, and arguably keeping it mysterious is a good thing(never swap an evocative mystery for a boring solution), but it’s a striking and sinister explanation which positions the book’s (and the film’s) horrors as REVELATORY, a hidden truth stripped bare, a feverish and wild-eyed REPORT from a liminal and uncertain zone…

Feature

It can be revealed.

The special project I was working on in the summer is a feature-length interview film with/about Mike Hodges. MIKE HODGES – A FILM-MAKER’S LIFE. It’s included on the Blu-ray of CROUPIER, seen top left, from Arrow Films, coming in December.

It was a great job to have — I miss it. Mike was extremely generous with his time and energy. And Arrow and I are already thinking about doing more long career-covering pieces like this.

Wagons, who?

My copy of Eureka! Masters of Cinema’s JOHNNY GUITAR Blu-ray arrived yesterday, chunky and resplendent with extras, including the video essay I made with Chase Barthel and featuring Jessica Martin as Joan Crawford, Jeff Johnson as Philip Yordan, Isaac Brooks as Nicholas Ray, and my crudely-animated plasticine sculptures of same. Also an interview I conducted with Ray’s widow Susan, covering Ray’s memories of the traumatic shoot, and his lessons as teacher.

The best writing I found on the film to drawn upon was by the late James Harvey in Movie Love in the Fifties, and, especially, by V.F. Perkins, who later collaborated with Ray on an unmade feature project. Must get his book.

Furthermore, Shadowplayer Tony Williams just sent me this link to his review of Arrow Video’s MAJOR DUNDEE, for which I also did a video essay, edited by Stephen C. Horne. Many thanks! Glenn Erickson, who contributes several of the disc’s best features, also reviewed me favourably here.

And I have THREE more exciting projects at various stages of development which I can’t talk about yet. Except to emphasise how exciting they are.