Time and Tide

Feb 1st — makes sense to link to this piece, which I had a small hand in, over at The Chiseler, for the sixtieth anniversary of the release of NIGHT TIDE. To the very day!

Stranger from Venice

I picked up Simon Louvish’s book Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey, not sure what I could expect from it. David Robinson’s Chaplin is so very, very good, it didn’t seem as if Louvish could cover the same ground in an illuminating way. At least he had the decency to do it AFTER he’s written about nearly every other comic of the twenties and thirties, I thought.

But the book is EXTREMELY good. Not a replacement for the magisterial Robinson work, but a very useful companion.

It reminded me that THE CIRCUS’s sideshow opening sequence was shot in Venice, California, marking the Tramp’s return to his place of origin (in KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE back at Keystone). Which connects up in a couple of weird ways to the new presence in Hollywood of Robert Florey, Chaplin observer and future collaborator (assistant/whipping boy on MONSIEUR VERDOUX).

Florey wrote of seeing Chaplin on his way to Henry’s, the restaurant run by actor Henry Bergman, one night ~

“There was infinite sadness in the spectacle of Charlie, alone in the night. A man whom the smartest salons in the world would have fought to entertain, was quietly walking, alone in the shadows, his hands in his pockets and the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. It is true that the life of artists in Hollywood, especially in the evening, when the day’s work is finished, cannot be compared to existence in Paris or London, but to see Charlie Chaplin, alone on the boulevard, like some little extra without a job or a place to live, wrung my heart.”

It’s also a very dreamlike, and a very Chaplinesque image. It’s hard to not to imagine a bowler hat when Florey mentions Charlie’s hat, but of course it wouldn’t have been.

By coincidence — not even a meaningful coincidence, just a regular coincidence, I recently picked up Charles Beaumont’s The Magic Man, a short story collection which includes the little classic Perchance to Dream ~

“Right away the dream started.I was walking along Venice Pier. It was close to midnight. The place was crowded, people everywhere; you know the kind they used to get there. Sailors, dumpy looking dames, kids in leather jackets. The pitchmen were going through their routines. You could hear the roller coasters thundering along the tracks, the people inside the roller coasters, screaming; you could hear the bells and the guns cracking and the crazy songs they play on calliopes. And, far away, the ocean, moving. Everything was bright and gaudy and cheap.”

Perchance to Dream was adapted by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone, and directed by Robert Florey. But the filmmaker who captured the exact mood of Beaumont’s dream was Curtis Harrington in NIGHT TIDE. And Harrington met Chaplin at a party, and apparently asked him about, not THE CIRCUS, but his earlier Sternberg production, A WOMAN OF THE SEA ~

“I actually asked Mr. Chaplin about it in person, when I was very, very young. I went to my first Hollywood party and there were a lot of big stars there—Charlie Chaplin and Harlan Pressburger, who produced The Shanghai Gesture, so I spoke to him about working with Von Sternberg. I was very busy at this party, you know, to be in the presence of these people I’d only read about (laughs). Anyway, you can read about The Woman of the Sea. […] Robert Florey, the French film director, he also saw it. He wrote about it in his book but it’s only available in France.”

The full interview is here.

The Edinburgh Dialogues #6: Lynda Myles

Jason Isaacs, Lynda Myles, Ben Miller, at Edinburgh in 2010, under Lynda’s plaque.

Lynda Myles ran Edinburgh International Film Festival in what some have called “the golden age of film programming,” (1973-1980). As Susan Sontag said, “For fifteen years there were new masterpieces every month.”

Lynda inherited a thriving Festival from Murray Grigor, who had turned it around from a moribund spell in the late sixties, with the help of Lynda and her then partner David Will. Grigor, a filmmaker himself, embraced the pair’s cinephile vision and encouraged the Festival to celebrate mavericks like Sam Fuller and Douglas Sirk, who had been largely overlooked by mainstream criticism. Lynda continued this wholeheartedly when she took over as Director, augmenting it with a new focus on theory and ideology.

During this cinematic revolution, Lynda’s critical acumen put Edinburgh at the forefront of the field, with retrospectives on Raoul Walsh, Max Ophuls and Jacques Tourneur, and helping discover both the New German cinema and the New Hollywood cinema. And Lynda co-authored with Michael Pye the first study of the post-Corman generation, film school generation, The Movie Brats, How the Film Generation took over Hollywood.

Since Edinburgh, Lynda has enjoyed a distinguished career as film producer, with DEFENCE OF THE REALM, THE COMMITMENTS and THE SNAPPER among her credits. Now she combines teaching at the National Film School with filmmaking: several new features are in development. No wonder a plaque in her honour is mounted outside Edinburgh’s Filmhouse.

I spoke to Lynda via futuristic Skype machinery and managed to get most of the conversation recorded… then we met up and discussed the interview, enabling me to add more information in parenthesis —

DC: What I’ve been starting with, uncontroversially, is asking all the directors to choose their favourite memories of doing the job…

LM: If it’s not going to complicate things too much, I think one thing to remember is I was actually there over thirteen years. Kind of missed the ’71 Festival, but there was a kind of continuum: Dave Will and I were asked to go and work with Murray [Grigor, previous director], so I was at the Festival for about four or five festivals as programme editor and then deputy editor [before becoming director].

DC: So, during Murray’s time as director, what was most memorable?

The first major, major moment for us was, it had been Dave’s idea to do the Sam Fuller retrospective. It’s very difficult to talk about such ancient history… I know when I talk to students, and I try to talk to them about a time when Sam Fuller, Douglas Sirk etc were not household names, it’s hard. Post-Tarantino, everyone embraces Sam, but when Dave came up with the idea it was a very radical notion and it flew in the face of what the traditional British critical view of the cinema was, which was very much European art cinema. So the moment that Sam Fuller touched down at what we used to call Turnhouse [now Edinburgh Airport], and we met Sam – in a very kitsch way with a bagpiper – we got special permission to meet him with a piper on the tarmac – that was a major thing… we saw it as our intervention with Edinburgh.

http://vimeo.com/27511160
Sam Fuller on a return visit to Edinburgh in 1992.

We were attacked by all sorts of people. I remember a BBC producer meeting Sam and saying, sniffily, “He’s not an intellectual.” But it was our first gesture of oppositional film culture to which Dave and I were committed. We were about twenty at this point, Sam was the first Hollywood director we’d ever met, and you couldn’t have got someone more extraordinary, who threw himself into the Festival, checked out of his hotel, went to stay with Murray at Inverkeithing. So Sam was a major thing.

Probably the most important single person for me was Douglas Sirk. I was sort of in charge of setting up the Sirk event with Jon Halliday, and Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey co-edited the book of essays on Douglas. And Douglas was one of the most phenomenal people I’ve ever met. He’s remained an enormous influence in all sorts of ways. Roger Corman coming the first time, in 1970: again, when we also published a book.

[This was the period when Edinburgh really got into publishing a book with every retrospective and conference. The Sirk book is now extremely rare, as it was cheaply bound in a manner that caused it to self-destruct upon opening: if you have a copy (as Todd Haynes does), treasure it!]

These were all things that we loved, the directors, we loved their work, but also it had an agenda, which was our whole oppositional culture position.

DC: And it SUCCEEDED!

LM: I could go on and on…

DC: Do! And from your own years as director?

LM: John Huston attending with FAT CITY. And when Scorsese came. I had the privilege of having Robbie Coltraine as my driver that year, before Robbie really started acting, and Robbie had a habit of partying, and not turning up to get me out to the airport, including the morning Scorsese arrived, but moments like that, having Brian DePalma… There were all sorts of directors we loved… before talking to you today, I did look at most of the programmes  except my last year which was a bit of a haze because it was mostly about parties… But it’s interesting the recurring things: we showed David Cronenberg’s early avant-garde features, David came almost every year, we got involved with Jonathan Demme when he was still a writer with THE HOT BOX, and then we showed his first film as a director. I think we had a Jonathan Demme film almost every year. And there was a whole New York underground, Amos Poe, Yvonne Rainer, Warhol, lots of that, lots of avant-garde… George Romero… I mean, one of my favourite nights was when we used to view at Filmhouse, we used to view all summer, films that had been sent to the Festival, and I’ll always remember the night we started watching this film which turned out to be ERASERHEAD… which was an extraordinary moment.

[Many people have claimed they founded the Edinburgh Television Festival, but Lynda wants to stake her claim here: Gus MacDonald and Lynda Myles started the TV Festival, along with a committee including Clive Goodwin, Barrie Hanson and Brian Gibson. The Film Festival begat the Television Festival, partly because much of the best filmmaking in the seventies seemed to be happening on TV (Stephen Frears, John MacKenzie) but the work couldn’t be screened at the Film Festival for legal copyright/licensing reasons. The TV Festival found a way round that, and John McGrath delivered the first MacTaggart lecture, trashing the TV industry for the “endemic naturalism” that still plagues it today.]

So there’s endless stuff. But one of the things I wanted to say about my time there was, I think I was very lucky because I think the ‘70s is recognized as the Golden Age of Programming, so I was incredibly lucky because I hit New German Cinema. We’d actually shown some of Wim’s [Wenders] shorts, we’d shown some Fassbinder from about 1970, but I was very lucky because the time I took over as director coincided with New German Cinema kind of exploding and I think one year we showed about 24 German movies. And they all came, and we all stayed very involved with them.

[There was also greater co-operation amongst festivals, with Edinburgh active in helping set up a support network of independent Film Festivals, so they could help each other instead of fighting over films — a great idea which, sadly, didn’t last, but is perhaps due for revival in the modern age of thousands of competing festivals…]

So there were very clear loyalties at Edinburgh to a lot of these people. Very much the School of Corman, everyone to whom in a way Roger gave birth, Monte Hellman, Joe Viola, Jonathan, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Harrington. We liked the mavericks, what we didn’t like was the sort of films the liberal establishment liked at that point. So we were the first film festival to show a lot of horror, B-movies, a lot of rock and roll – we got involved with Don [D.A.] Pennebaker very early on, and obviously things like THE LAST WALTZ, etc. And Bill Forsyth, Bill Douglas…

One of my favourite memories is, I think the best Festival party we gave was the legendary party at the Commonwealth Pool, when it had just opened. Where we rashly put on the invitation, “DO NOT bring swimming costumes as you will not be allowed to enter the pool.” We had an explicit ban. And of course, at midnight, Chris Auty stripped off and jumped in, followed by about sixty people… I just remember it was a great party, I remember Nick Nolte was there, and his girlfriend of the time and his producer… we had good times.

And that’s why, in a way, I was especially happy when Mark [Cousins] was there, and Lizzie {Francke], because Mark had that sense of the playfulness and the transgressiveness, and that was kind of what we were doing, I mean most of the time it was fantastic, so most of it’s very happy memories.

Festival directors on parade: Mark Cousins, Lizzie Francke, Murray Grigor, Hannah McGill, Lynda Myles, Jim Hickey, and producer Ginnie Atkinson.

DC: So, balancing that, what were the frustrations of the job? I guess everyone has things that they wanted to do and couldn’t.

LM: Actually, very little. I got away with murder, basically [laughter]. I had a couple of things going for me – the ace up my sleeve was Colin Young. Colin, as you know, was Scots, who came back from being Dean at the film faculty at UCLA to start the National Film School. And Colin was my chair [chairman of the EIFF board] and he protected me. I find it quite upsetting, reading Matt Lloyd’s book [How the Movie Brats took over Edinburgh], which I think is terrific, to remember all those ghastly board meetings when Forsyth Hardy was trying to get me fired, because the old guard, the Griersonian documentary lot, absolutely hated what we were doing.  And there were endless battles, and Matt manfully ploughed through all the minutes of these meetings. They really tried to get me out after THE PARASITE MURDERS [AKA SHIVERS], which was Cronenberg, 1974. That was very frustrating. But Colin’s background was in ethnographic filmmaking, and I don’t think Colin was all that keen, certainly wasn’t in tune with my taste, or lack of it as many people thought, but he saw it as his role as chairman to protect me, which he did, to an extraordinary degree.

Forsyth Hardy (right) with John Grierson at the first ever Edinburgh Film Festival.

[DC: I recall reading a ’50s film book by Forsyth Hardy in which he negatively reviewed REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, saying that Natalie Wood’s distress over her father’s withholding of physical affection was impossible to sympathize with or even believe in. A very Scottish view.]

LM: And the other thing, which I think I’ve never had the chance to stress anywhere is, I had the most unbelievable diaspora of support. I was incredibly lucky. Obviously with Murray, Dave and I working together, and then Jim joining in ’69, I think, and Jim is theoretically my deputy, but obviously we worked very closely together. But apart from that, I had Peter Wollen, and Laura Mulvey, and I think more and more in retrospect that Peter was probably the most brilliant mind of that generation. I mean, he was just phenomenal. And then people like Paul Willemen, Phil Hardy, the late Claire Johnston, Joe Medjuck in LA, Kay Armatage in Toronto, and in London, people like Simon Field, Dave Curtis… David Meeker at the BFI, without whom the retrospectives would have been impossible. Tony Rayns…

There was a phenomenal group of people, completely engaged with what we were doing, sharing the same agenda, so obviously although I was director for the last eight years, there was endless, endless, endless discussion about what we were showing, what we were doing. Maybe that was a phenomenon of the time, because in a way the political-aesthetic agenda was much clearer at that time.

One of the areas where I was blessed was I had an incredibly brilliant, committed staff, who were Ellen Galford and Isabel Hilton, Rebecca O’Brien, now Ken Loach’s producer, Simon Perry for two years, Penny Thomson, Jane Balfour, Ginnie Atkinson and Archie Tait… I had an amazing group of people. We ran the Festival with a staff of about twelve, nobody was permanent apart from me and an assistant.

And actually, when I looked at the programmes I could see… my programmes really tail off. I mean, talking about ’77, between Murray’s period and mine, when we were very clear what we were doing, but by ’78 it had got sort of hazier. Not that the festivals weren’t fun, but they didn’t have the clarity.

[After the interview, Lynda looked again at her collection of souvenir programmes, and asked to revise what she said above. Here’s why –filmmakers whose work screened in ’76: Hollis Frampton, Straub/Huillet, Yvonne Rainer. In ’78: Bill Douglas (MY WAY HOME), Monte Hellman, Gabor Body, Ulrike Ottinger, Jonathan Demme and a Max Ophuls retrospective. In ’79: King Hu, Chantal Akerman, Demme, Straub/Huillet, Les Blank, a Nick Ray tribute, plus ALIEN, SCUM, MANHATTAN,WISE BLOOD, THE TEMPEST (Jarman), MAD MAX, THAT SINKING FEELING (Forsyth), the new Philippines cinema, a celebration of the origins of the UK documentary movement, and a second conference on feminism in cinema. If that’s tailing off, we need more of it.]

DC: I guess as well the maverick stance had almost become mainstream by the late ‘70s.

LM: Yeah. What happened, partly, was that the NFT in London started taking our retrospectives, so they’d move onto London. There’s a tribute going on to the programming at the Scala. It’s fascinating, looking at all their posters. [Scala programmer and later film producer]  Stephen Woolley came to Edinburgh when he was very young, very bright, has very much the same taste… And by the late ‘70s, we’d kind of done what we wanted to do.

The other thing that’s quite weird, looking back over the ‘70s, is that there’s hardly any British cinema at all. Because that was when the pound had suddenly got very high against the dollar, and that was when the Americans pulled out. And I remember doing a programme for BBC2, on the Festival in 1979, because I had six British films: this was seen as amazing! We’d always shown some BFI Production Fund films, but ’79 we had an incredible midnight screening of ALIEN, and RADIO ON, which was very important…

The other thing I should mention as a highlight: we did the first major women’s film event in Europe, in ’72, which was a lot of fun, and BBC2 wanted to make a film about it, and very much in the spirit of the times, we said “No, give us the means, give us the cameras and the stock etc,” and we made a film, during the Festival. Which exists, somewhere.

DC: We should talk about how you became involved in it this year.

LM: I got involved because the Festival had interviewed people for the job of Artistic Director, and had failed to appoint anyone. So, in the vacuum, when it looked like nothing might happen, Mark came up with this ingenious plan of a festival which he described as being a cross between the Venice Biennale and Meltdown. And he got Tilda [Swinton] involved and they asked me to join them. And the final document, had it been possible to realise it, would have ended up in an absolutely extraordinary event.

We felt the Festival needed to be rethought, that it had got kind of a bit weary. Unfortunately, for reasons that are complex and difficult to describe, the blueprint wasn’t followed up. The blueprint would have needed certain people on the ground to deliver it. It was always clear that Tilda was going to be doing the Jarmusch film, Mark finishing his epic [The Story of Film TV series] and June is one of my busiest times in my life at the National Film School, so we were never going to be there. But for some reason, it wasn’t brought to life. So it remains this blissful, platonic ideal of an event which didn’t happen. Except tiny bits of it: I mean, it was lovely having Bela Tarr there.

DC: Matt Lloyd talked in the comments section about how, really, when you’re dealing with Mark Cousins ideas, maybe you need Mark Cousins to execute them. Was that an overall flaw in the plan? If you three couldn’t be on hand to make it happen, who on earth could be trusted to see this through?

LM: I think there might have been people who could, but it wasn’t the right combination.

DC: I think they’ve got a very good staff, but I think they were demoralized after having to reapply for their own jobs. And then I think James, coming in, didn’t really speak the same language, because his staff are cinephiles and he speaks the language of brands, and low-hanging fruit… the language is different. I don’t know if they saw him as a festival director. It wasn’t clear when I spoke to him: something I’d heard is that he was hired as producer and then became the director…

LM: My understanding was that he was hired to be the producer.

DC: And a good choice in many ways. But maybe not the right man as director for this particular event. So, is there anything you can say, or would like to say, about this year, or shall we move on?

LM: One thing that slightly cheers me up is that [laughs] history has shown that Edinburgh can rise from the ashes. When we got involved in ’68, the Festival had been absolutely appalling. One of the things we had to stop was, the films were selected by committee.

DC: Oh…

LM: When Murray had come in around ’67, he inherited this, there was a committee which watched the films every night. The Festival was attacked in the Scotsman… The thing about what happened, in a way, from ’69, was that it showed Edinburgh’s reinvented itself before. So I’m optimistic. I think in some ways, having a year that goes… awry, like this, in a way maybe it’s good.

I don’t know if I’ve even got the energy to talk about the dates. I think it’s an absolute no-brainer that the Festival should be back in August. I think the move to June was insane. Edinburgh, when it started, as you know, was the third film festival in the world. When you have 2,000 festivals out there, everything’s looking for specificity. The fact that Edinburgh is potentially part of the world’s largest arts festival seems to me a useful addition to making Edinburgh specific. Apart from the fact that no film students can go because everyone’s shooting in June. When we had the 60^th anniversary and Brian DePalma came back, for the first time since I’d invited him in ’76 or whatever, Brian stayed quite a long time, going to three or four movies a day, and then going to stuff at night. I just think it’s crazy when you’ve got the fantastic Book Festival, you’ve got all the shows… it seems to me it’s a time when cinema’s more engaged, when you’ve got people like Steve McQueen [HUNGER] coming from visual arts, lots of dramatists going into cinema, I just do not understand.

And the argument about space, well my God, if Teviot [University building and 2011 delegate centre], that ghastly – and I know that place because I was an undergraduate – it felt like a student event. It just felt amateur. If that’s one of the glories of June, well, let me out.

DC: There must be other choices in June, you should theoretically have your pick…

LM: You might think so. The sad thing at the moment is, I dealt with about four directors of the Edinburgh Festival [the arts festival, as opposed to the Film Festival], and they weren’t all terribly user-friendly towards film, but the irony is that with Jonathan Mills there, you’ve probably got someone who would be very open to collaboration.

Oh what a gorgeous cat!

DC: Yes, this is Tasha.

LM: Oh WOW. Anyway, I’m sorry, I can get very boring, don’t get me started on August. I do think that there would be lots of possibilities for crossover.

The other thing is, the last time I went up in August, last year, I got a taxi at Waverley, and in two minutes in a taxi you get that unbelievable excitement. That Festival, I walked home on my own, at two in the morning, and it was fantastic. And I’m afraid you don’t get that in June. I love that sense of excitement.

DC: This is great because you’re the first Festival director I’ve spoken to who’s come out strongly for August.

LM: Here endeth the first lesson. Hardwired. I went to the Festival when I was about 17, not the Film Festival, it was the theatre, music. I absolutely love it, I think it’s unbeatable, it’s crazy not to be part of it.

DC: What else would you say for the Festival’s future?

LM: [small voice] I would move back to August – which also gives them more time. Which they’re going to need. I would make it shorter, I think two weeks is too long. I would make it ten days.

DC: I think it is ten days.

LM: Is it ten days? It feels very long.

[It’s twelve days. I think Shane Danielsen cut it to ten in the early 2000s, but it’s spread again]

LM: Ten days would be fine. I think they’ve got to get someone who really has a grasp of international cinema, someone who can talk to directors, someone who can talk to distributors, and sales agents. Again, I was very lucky, when I was there I basically dealt with directors, to some extent with distributors in London, but it was basically pre- sales agent days, and I mostly just asked directors for their movies after I’d seen them.

I think whoever’s coming in should be someone that the distributors trust, that they feel knows the business. It’s quite a hard brief because the Edinburgh Festival I love was about ideas, it’s more about ideas than anything else. But to keep the ship going, it’s got to engage with the public. What I’d hate is for it to become a local event. Local festivals are fine but there are lots of them in Britain, and Edinburgh for many years was the festival that set the agenda for everyone else. If it shrinks into being just a local event, maybe that’s OK at one level, but I think it’s a terrible waste. Because the other thing that’s very clear over what’s happened this year is, I must have had hundreds of conversations since November, and what is interesting is how people care about it. Contrary to what certain people around the Festival think, there’s a huge amount of concern about the Festival and what’s going to happen with it from people who worked there, people who have movies there, people who’ve been there.

I could conjure up a brilliant advisory committee with ten people I’ve spoken to here who would immediately become part of that to help get it back on its feet. But I think you’ve got to get someone who can talk both to directors and to the industry. It’s got to be someone with some sort of vision because it also ought to be different from London. I think Sandra [Hebron] did a brilliant job with London, but it’s a different kind of Festival. And I think Edinburgh has to be about ideas, about innovation. But it has to be the leader of the pack in terms of what’s happening in cinema.

Read more about Lynda’s revolutionary role in film critical history: How the Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh: The Impact of Cinephilia on the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1968-1980

Read Lynda and Michael Pye’s book: The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took over Hollywood

See a Lynda film: The Commitments [1991] [DVD]

From the 1978 programme:

“The following publications will be available at The Filmhouse:

Douglas Sirk                                                     £0.90p

Frank Tashlin                                                   £1.10

Jacques Tourneur                                          £1.00

Perspectives on British Avant-Garde    £1.50