Vex and Silence

OK, so Gillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities delivered two stunningly bad takes on Lovecraft yesterday, all sound and fury, signifying more sound and fury. Within minutes I could tell each one was going to be leaden. Pickman’s Model buried the story in irrelevant self-mutilations and was among Lovecraft’s least filmable works anyway — even Nyarlathotep would do better as basis for a scenario — since it’s about unbelievably horrible paintings. Imagine – some poor commercial artist had to try to produce paintings so repulsive they warp the mind of the onlooker.

Now, admittedly, Albert Lewin’s THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY managed to come up with a rotting portrait equal to Wilde’s conception, or near enough. But what Lovecraft seems to be requiring is beyond even that.

While Pickman’s Model falls into all the inadequacies the story’s nameless narrator credited himself with, in his strained attempts to mimic Pickman’s morbid style, and adds grotesquely amplified squelching sounds in a last-ditch effort to gross us out, Dreams in the Witch House starts out at peak volume and proceeds further and further over the top as it goes on. Actually, it starts with the Shostakovich waltz from EYES WIDE SHUT, thereby proving that the filmmakers have no interest in being original.

Altogether more agreeable to me is DAUGHTER OF HORROR, the film playing in the movie theatre in THE BLOB (version originale) and its director-approved first cut, DEMENTIA. John Parker’s not-quite-a-feature (well, I guess it’s around the same runtime as SHERLOCK JR…)

DEMENTIA is completely wordless, apart from the printed text of the credits. DAUGHTER OF HORROR had a hammy voiceover added, spoken by Ed McMahon, thereby subtract (in part) the film’s USP. The narration just makes everything more obvious, and the story of a man-killing sex worker already has a somewhat rote symbolism to it. The imagery and George Antheil’s score (with vocals by Marni Nixon) provide all the exposition we need.

As a wordless film I thought it sort of less interesting than Ray Milland’s THE SAFECRACKER Russell Rouse’s THE THIEF. In DEMENTIA, we see people talking but we don’t hear them — the suggestion is we’re never close enough. In the Rouse film, nobody talks to him and he’s party to no conversations, and the sense of loneliness created is quite striking. DEMENTIA could have done with that. But the absence of dialogue takes it closer to dream, which is the goal.

Possibly the only movie whose origin lies in a dream recounted by the director’s secretary — John Parker went on to cast Adrienne Barrett in the movie, which seems only fair: It’s your nightmare, now live it.

You could group the film with oddities like ERASERHEAD, SPIDER BABY, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, NIGHT TIDE. Outsider art that’s horror-movie adjacent without quite committing itself — more disturbing because less definable. If the opening scenes, where Barrett walks through a skid row hellscape of varying forms of male oppression towards women, have some of the hectoring obviousness of a commercial, it’s nonetheless all strikingly shot: Parker is determined not to allow a flat or ordinary image into his movie. It’s all expressionist gloom and cartoony forced angles, with continuity and naturalistic behaviour alike sacrificed to the jazzy morbidity.

Packing visual pleasure into every frame, the film nevertheless feels like one of those nightmares where you’re running without making progress — the 56 minutes never seems to end, until of course it does. But that seems entirely appropriate, even if it’s not a sensation you could call enjoyable. When a sleazy guy throws a dress at Barrett and all at once she’s wearing it, we seem to have entered the visual language of, not the horror film or noir (the Venice, California locations prefigure TOUCH OF EVIL) but the musical, and the film’s unending vibe aligns with those distended Gene Kelly ballet sequences which threaten to overflow the movies they’re part of.

The ensuing nightclub scene made me think of SIMON OF THE DESERT, that other underweight surrealist fever dream, and its new York conclusion — are they dancing the Radioactive Flesh? And is that Shelly Berman? It is!

SIMON is it — the perfect double feature pairing for DEMENTIA. When the money ran out, Bunuel’s producer considered showing SIMON with Renoir’s PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE. No. (Great though the Renoir is.) This is the one. Am I too late with that blinding insight?

The First Day

Over at the always exhilarating Observations on Film Art, David Bordwell, whom I finally met in Bologna along with his lovely partner Kristin Thompson, summarises the Cinema Ritrovato experience by writing up a single day’s viewing, thus giving us a sorta-kinda idea of what the overall buzz is like. I thought I’d steal the idea, as a way of reliving the glory and because there are plenty of enjoyable screenings that wouldn’t quite make a full blog post on their own.

I got into Bologna — or at any rate the outlying suburb-thing of Pianora, on the Saturday the fest began, late at night, so I missed such goodies as BEGGARS OF LIFE (recently enjoyed in Bo’ness) and Aleksandr Ford’s THE FIRST DAY OF FREEDOM, acclaimed as a masterpiece by those who saw it, and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE on the big, big screen in the Piazza Maggiore. And finding a bus on a Sunday to take me into town proved troublesome, so by the time I’d arrived and registered and had a cappuccino alongside new best pal Jonathan Rosenbaum and met longtime correspondent Neil McGlone and fellow Scotsman Mark Cosgrove, it was 12.15 and the only thing to see before the long, civilised lunch break, was the program of musical shorts previously discussed here.

Said program also featured YES WE HAVE NO… (the missing word is BANANAS), a silhouette-film seemingly directed by the ludic Adrian Brunel (it was found in his collection, anyway) and produced by Miles “He won’t be doing the crossword tonight” Malleson. A cartoonish treatment of the torment inflicted by catchy earworms, popular songs of the moronic variety that burrow into your consciousness and jam the controls on “REPEAT.”

After lunch with the man I really must stop calling J-Ro, who gave me some useful pointers for stuff to see, I made perhaps a mistake and went to see a William Wellman double feature instead of THE TEMPTRESS, which looked extremely alluring, was only on once, and proved to be one of the hot tickets of the fest, the kind of thing for which the safety inspector averts an eye as the aisles fill up with perspiring bodies. But the Wellmans were good/interesting — YOU NEVER KNOW WOMEN starred Clive Brook, Florence Vidor, El Brendel (ack!) and Lowell Sherman, whose villainous smoothy is excellent value. Wellman starts with a spectacular building site disaster. A labourer rescues the chic Vidor from cascading scaffolding. Sherman steps in and takes the swooning beauty from his muscular but filthy grasp. “I think I can do this sort of thing better than you,” he suggests, via intertitle, and proceeds to take credit for saving her life.

The story goes on to be a backstage melodrama with Clive Brook as jilted lover, Sherman as interloper, El Brendel as a colossal pain in the ass even without dialogue, the whole thing a warning as to the inconstancy of woman. But it’s not nasty about it or anything.

THE MAN I LOVE was an early talkie, and showed Wellman struggling, sometimes inventively, with the new technology. Sometimes he has three cameras running on a scene but they’re all badly positioned for the action as blocked, so the editor’s attempts to maintain audience engagement by shuttling from one bad view to another come to naught. But sometimes he throws the microphone aside and shoots mute, as in the boxing scenes, which have some impressively RAGING BULL-esque movement and vigour. And sometimes he simply stays on a decent shot, and lets the actors, a mulish Richard Arlen and an uncertain Mary Brian, wreck things for him.

Just up the hill at the Cinema Jolly, I could see UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE and LA CHIENNE, so I did. I’d never seen the latter, so comparing it to Lang’s remake, SCARLET STREET, was extremely interesting. Obviously the original is not a noir, and has a weird serio-comic tone of its own which leaves some strange moments undigested in the Lang, particularly the big punchline of the dead husband’s return. And Renoir is able to end the film in an anti-moralistic way: with a change of emphasis Lang could have his hero cheat the law and get away with murder, but be nevertheless destroyed by his guilt, and by the fraud already perpetrated against him. But in Renoir, the protagonist may be down on his luck, but he no longer cares. To society, he would seem to have been punished most severely, but he’s a perfectly happy guy. That’s much more unsettling.

UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE is a masterpiece, of course.

Jonathan R had recommended Paradjanov’s SAYAT NOVA, which I had always known under its Soviet-imposed name of THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES, so I clocked in for my last show of the day at 9.30 at the Sala Mastroianni. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen all of it before — it’s that kind of film. But the familiarity induced by the abrupt ending convinced me I must have, probably in Derek Malcolm’s Film Club on BBC2 or something. Probably a VHS recording of same, in fact.

A film about a poet that is in itself poetic is a rare thing. In fact, it’s very hard to tell whether Mr. Nova was any good as a poet — much of his verse is presented solely as title cards in Cyrillic, so you can’t even tell what it would sound like. And the bits that are translated have an almost adolescent whining tone — “I’m a really unhappy guy. Life stinks. Everybody hates me.” The one line that stuck out was “The world is a window.” Which is, you know, GREAT. Especially with Paradjanov’s stunning images as accompaniment.

Worrying about the poetry turned out to be part of a pattern with me — the last film of the day was usually one I had trouble getting into, owing to tiredness (with two magnificent exceptions — THE MERRY WIDOW and A HARD DAY’S NIGHT.)

The film, now restored in its Ukrainian version, is so fantabulous that it’s quite wrong of me to want to use it simply as a stick with which to beat Peter Greenaway. The temptation still arises, though, because it would make such a terrific, all-annihilating stick.