Six Jobs… and a Seventh

I only just realised I’m in a very (for me, anyway) unusual position. I have completed six jobs, video essays or text essays for Blu-ray releases, which I don’t have copies of yet. For four different companies.

But I can’t talk about all of them yet as they haven’t all been announced. The Albert Lamorisse box set from Criterion is one that has, and that was a pleasure to write a career overview for, renewing my collaboration with NATAN researcher Christine Leteux who dug up and translated lots of valuable stuff. And Masters of Cinema have announced PANDORA’S BOX, which Fiona and I both made pieces for, working with editor Chase Barthel. Review copies have gone out so our own comps should come soon.

Fiona and I, with Chase again, just finished a bunch of pieces (one big and three small) for a very exciting MoC release but I can say no more just now. I got a whole bunch of friends and strangers and students to contribute voice work to this, so the pieces will certainly SOUND interesting.

One I haven’t mentioned before is MURPHY’S WAR, the Peter Yates pic with Peter O’Toole — Chase and I made a video for Arrow’s US release of that. But I did another for the same company, with Timo Langer cutting, that’s still under wraps.

And I just finished my second video essay for Radiance, edited by Laura Wiggett, which went very smoothly and should be announced soon. A hint has already been given.

Finishing up a script for a seventh piece, which I might even get around to recording over the weekend — recording VO is my least favourite part of the process — so it’s always nice to get past that and into the edit…

3X3

I love David Kalat. I love his commentary tracks. But I’m reading in many of the reviews of the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray of Buster Keaton’s THREE AGES that Kalat has “debunked” the idea that Keaton ever considered that the film could be released as three shorts. Since some of the reviews are saying that my video essay on the same disc “repeats the canard” or whatever, I kind of want to debunk the debunking.

This is the quote from Rudi Blesh’s Keaton biography, written while Buster was alive, well, and cooperating fully.

This does stop short of Keaton saying, “I was considering cutting the film into three shorts if it didn’t do well as a feature.” But Blesh pretty much comes out and says that’s what he was thinking. And we presume Blesh had longer conversations than the one he excerpts here, so he was able to sound Keaton out about it.

Blesh’s book does contain plenty of errors, due, I think, to the difficulty in viewing the films and the faulty memories of some of his interviewees (Clyde Bruckman, for example, recalls Buster being matted into the shot of the animated dinosaur, which would have been awesome but certainly didn’t make it into the film that’s come down to us).

But consider this: Keaton, making his first feature, chooses to tell the same story three times. Clearly he’s to some extent looking to bridge the gap between shorts and features in the gentlest way. But do we seriously think it never occurred to him that, if the film flopped, he could subdivide it, as Griffith had done with INTOLERANCE?

It wasn’t his PLAN — and nobody has ever argued that it was. It was a fall-back option. But to suggest that it’s an option Keaton didn’t have somewhere at the back of his mind is to push the idea of Keaton as naif and idiot savant further than it should be expected to stretch.

Now, I don’t have my copy of the disc yet (come ON, Eureka!) so I don’t know exactly what DK says. But I feel moved to defend my stance.

Pandora’s Box Set

New from Masters of Cinema — PANDORA’S BOX, in a limited edition box set. Fiona and I have each written a video essay for it, and I also got to interview Martin Koerber, who supervised the remarkable restoration of the film, making ground-breaking use of VFX technology. And we brought in our pal Jessica Martin to voice extracts from Louise Brooks’ writings and interviews.