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…

Traveling Matte Finish

Joe May’s career has a curious shape. From detective series starring Anglophone-sounding heroes called Stuart Webbs and Joe Deebs, he graduated to epic adventure films starring his wife Mia, then sold his studio and went to work for UFA, reaching an artistic pinnacle with HEIMKEHR and ASPHALT. When sound came he turned his hand to musical comedy, and kept at that as he emigrated rapidly through France and Britain and wound up in Hollywood where he made another, MUSIC IN THE AIR.

His American career was patchy, and declined rapidly to B-pictures, but these are not terrible. He never made a little classic like his protege E.A. Dupont’s THE SCARF, but he never made THE NEANDERTHAL MAN either, so there’s that.

During his speedy passage through France, he managed to make three films, and two of those he made twice: PARIS-MEDITERRANEE (1932), for instance, was shot in French, and again in German (as ZWEI IN EINEM AUTO). Presumably the French contacts helped May get out of Germany the following year. The French version was a Pathe-Natan production, and I got hold of a scrappy off-air recording of it back when we were making our documentary NATAN. Somebody subsequently made very good subtitles for it, and Fiona and I just watched it.

Charmant! Annabella is lovely as ever and her then-husband Jean Murat essays a totally convincing English accent throughout. Scenic views of the Riviera. All very fuzzy, with an intermittent sound problem that makes everyone like they’re snorting helium at the bottom of a well while wrapped in vinyl sheets.

The movie is nothing remarkable, except that the early sound musicals are full of invention, even when the stories are souffle-light and not particularly memorable. This one ends, for instance, with the two comedy relief idiots hanging off a tree over a cliff on the Riviera, with the jealous Spaniard (José Noguéro) biting the buffoonish accountant (Frédéric Duvallès) on the bottom. It’s not exactly LE REGLE DE JEUX.

More big thick matte lines for us to enjoy, though! Tricky to be making a romcom road movie a year before the Translux scene was gifted to the film industry by its inventor, Yves Le Prieur, making rear-projection a vastly more effective technique, and making KING KONG possible. If the film had been silent, May could have filmed the car stuff for real, but a talkie needed to be filmed in the studio, so we get Jean Murat and Annabella haloed with wavering jagged white outlines that keep biting off portions of their heads you would not think they could do without. Excellent stuff. Even if the film were not as charming as it is, that kind of thing could make it endlessly diverting. Elsewhere May rapidly cuts together real car POV shots with our heroes outlined against a perfectly blank whiteness, as if driving into Jimmy Stewart’s nightmare limbo in VERTIGO.

Watch Party

We’re having a watch party and YOU are invited!

The film is NATAN and the party’s on Twitter at 11pm Irish-Scottish time.

@dcairns and @MrPaulDuane (directors) and @eoinmcd (editor) will be discussing the film as it unrolls on Vimeo, with @silentlondon attempting to impose some measure of order.

NATAN is here.

#BernardNatan