The Sunday Intertitle: Missing Bologna

I have to get organized and raise some cash so I can go to Bologna next year. Cinema Ritrovato is an annual event and I need to be present at it annually. At least.

This year, there was no A HARD DAY’S NIGHT to lure me — that seemed an unmissable way of closing the book on my Richard Lester piece, PICTUREWISE. But there are a lot of things on which are pretty unrepeatable. Today, on Facebook, accompanist Neil Brand posted that RAPSODICA SATANICA, which has had its original score by Mascagni carefully reconstructed by Timothy Brock, only works with this music. Above is a fab intertitle plucked from my un-scored disc. And here is an image —

AAARGH! It’s another of those creepy portraits that come to life! I love/hate those things. Here, the use of tinting is fantastic — it both accentuates and erases the difference between the three-dimensional, physical world and the flat world of the portrait. See also THIS.

They are also showing KISS ME KATE in 3D — there’s some hope that such an event will be repeated nearer me, but you never know. The only place likely to screen it would be Filmhouse, which bought expensive 3D apparatus and then decided “Our audience doesn’t like 3D.” Which is true for a lot of people who go to Filmhouse, I guess, particularly the retirees. But they have never shown PINA and CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS in 3D, so do they really know?

Meredith Brody informs me that Renato Castellani is one of the great discoveries this year. I can do a bit of armchair discovering of his oeuvre, I guess.

I would certainly be checking out some of the rare Leo McCareys.

Have I ever seen ANY Jacques Tourneur on the big screen? GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING would be a wonderful start.

At long last — Julien Duvivier’s submerged cinema starts to resurface. During the Great Duvivier Giveaway I allowed more than a hundred readers to experience LA FIN DU JOUR in a scrappy off-air recording from the eighties. Now it can be seen projected in pristine-o-scope. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.

Quite a few filmmakers of particular importance to Shadowplay are featured — Duvivier, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey. MON GOSSE DE PERE is a 1931 film from Pathe-Natan — I own a fuzzy off-air recording, but it’s unsubtitled so I haven’t explored it in any depth.

Buster Keaton! SHERLOCK JNR and ONE WEEK on the vast open-air screen of the Piazza Maggiore!

Oddly enough, I feel OK about missing 2001 because I don’t know that the occasional distractions of police sirens and barking dogs you hear in the open-air environment would enhance Kubrick’s vision. They don’t seem to matter in silents or in chatty films.

There’s a surprise movie! Surprise movies often don’t work — Edinburgh abandoned the practice as the majority of punters always seemed discontented with what they got. I think typically the film would be a last-minute offering grabbed opportunistically after the programme went to press. But since EVERYTHING IS AWESOME IN BOLOGNA, and all the films are rediscoveries, restorations and possible classics deserving further study, it can be guaranteed that whatever the surprise was, it was a good ‘un.

Now I’m starting to feel melancholic. Apart from anything else, Bologna is a fantastic PLACE…

Still, next year I think I can get some cash from my place of work under the heading of “research”. So that will be just ~

Roll Credits

lester credits from David Cairns on Vimeo.

The last of the deleted scenes from PICTUREWISE 3, my Richard Lester piece. Ending with an unmade film seemed too similar to the first installment (available on the Blu-ray of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT).

Images are from Bob Willoughby’s The Platinum Years, which Lester recommended highly as about the best set of movie stills he’d seen. I picked the book up in Toronto and scanned the relevant pages on PETULIA.

I somehow got the impression from Lester’s impassioned description of Joseph Conrad’s VICTORY — which lays emphasis on aspects that are lightly brushed over in the screenplay he commissioned from Pinter — that the book has a real personal significance for him. Without speculating on what that is (the dollarbook Freud approach), I thought illustrating it with images of Lester would be a suitably oblique approach, having rejected the idea of using lots of stills of book jackets, illustrations etc…

UK: A Hard Day’s Night: 50th Anniversary Restoration [Blu-ray]

US: A Hard Day’s Night (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray + DVD)

PICTUREWISE III

Farce Among Equals

lester ritz from David Cairns on Vimeo.

The penultimate outtake from my second video essay on Richard Lester. Someone complained that THE RITZ always gets left out, which is true. It’s not that it isn’t good — Rita Moreno as Googie Gomez makes it a near-classic — but it doesn’t fit the overarching narrative of the second phase of Lester’s career — the period movies and explorations of heroism. I wonder if, having been part of the Beatles’ public image machine gave Lester his fondness for peeping behind the curtain and exposing the feet of clay or whatever mucky body parts are involved. Or possibly his work in advertising — if you spend a lot of time erecting a pristine edifice, there’s probably pleasure to be had in iconoclasm. Here’s a bit of a 1969 interview I found in a book called Directors in Action (bought in Toronto) —

“But I’m quite proud of some of those early commercials. The After-Eights Chocolates, for instance. I did all of them from the beginning and I was faced with a new project and an image which needed to be put over. This is what pleases me–when a problem is present and solved.

In the After-Eights the problem was: these things are going to cost four shillings a packet and are bloody expensive! How are we going to sell it? In terms of making a film image, we decided to go for the fake classy stuff–dinner jackets among the pseudo-luxury. It was half a dream world, and half what people had no money imagined luxury to be. It was a callous attempt–and it worked. They sold out after the first commercial!”

I have no idea if this is one of Lester’s After-Eights ads but it fits the pattern — and the feather boa matches the one’s worn by Julie Christie in PETULIA and Shirley Knight in JUGGERNAUT… (This sort of thing is why Ken Russell found he couldn’t work in ads. He did one for a new washing powder where the advantage was supposed to be that the suds drained faster from the old-fashioned washing machine. But they didn’t — they just clogged the bottom up completely. Ken suggested starting with a clean, empty machine and then pumping a lot of suds in, then running the film in reverse. Everyone was delighted with this solution, and Ken was guilt-stricken and stayed out of ads from then on. There’s an echo of this in  when Ann-Margret is bathed in the products of various commercials as they spew from her TV set.)

Anyhow, THE RITZ — Lester here talks about the difficulties of filming farce, which I think are a more intense version of those involved in filming any play — you are faced with a bunch of limitations, usually, which are essential to the theatre and irrelevant to movies. Do you cling to them, or explode them, or what? Farce as a form can be highly successful in cinema, but it’s notable that Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, which has many aspects of farce, was an original work for the cinema and indeed could hardly be more cinematic, using a different set of limitations — the limits of what the camera can see of a bunch of complicated simultaneous events. Fun fact: Renoir was a big fan of Lester’s HELP! Buy: The Ritz Rules of the Game