Desert Island DVDs

Via Jim Emerson, Matt Zoller Seitz has initiated a new kind of meme - Movies for a Desert Island. The rules are simple enough - "You can list 10 feature films, one short and a single, self-contained season of a TV series" - and "Every slot on the list must be claimed by a self-contained unit of media." So - no combining Godfather movies, that sort of thing.



It's a fun exercize - and comes in time for my Sunday Screen Grab, which is an invitation, I suppose. So up first - a short? there are good choices, but I am going to stick with something necessary - Buster Keaton's One Week. Holes, you know...



As for TV - in the end, this is not very hard: Season 2 of Monty Python's Flying Circus. That's the Piranha Brothers and Silly Walks, the Spanish Inquisition, Blackmail, Scott of the Antarctic, Archeology Today, the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook, the Lifeboat sketch (how long is it?) It's great stuff, and beats out the nearest competition (the first and third year of Mpnty Python, I imagine), by a hair.



And now to movies. This gets a bit complicated - there are certainly more than 10 films I don't want to live without. But I guess the fun of a thing like this is the pain of separation, and the joy of choosing what you choose. So - here goes, with comments and pictures, most of the time.

1. I'm going to start out cheating, sort of. It's a film I have never, in fact seen - and I don't think it's actually available anywhere, at least not legally: it's Out One: Noli me Tangere - 13 hours of Jacques Rivette? Oh yeah, I'd take that sight unseen without worrying that I'm wasting a slot.

2. Next up, something obvious - It's a Wonderful Life. I waffled on this, to tell the truth - I've seen it many many times, to the point of memorizing it just about... I could take something else, I thought, and memorize it. But then - I will be trapped on a desert island; whatever I take, it won't be long before it is as familiar as this is. And will it (whatever that film is, that I leave off in favor of this - say - Seven Samurai) be as endlessly revelatory as the Capra? Well - probably - but which will I miss more? No - how better to remember what you had (and what you're finally free of) than It's a Wonderful Life?



3. The Maltese Falcon - another one I've seen many many times and considered skipping - in favor of, oh - a Hawks? (His Girl Friday?) Yeah but - proof is in the pudding, I still have to watch this every few months. (Same with His Girl Friday, of course, but what can you do? there are only 10 films.)



4. M - this is another one I have seen many times, but I would never for a second consider leaving it off.



5. McCabe & Mrs. Miller - another film that never seems close to exhausted.



6. Early Summer - I'm not going anywhere without Ozu.



7. Duck Soup - here, I think I'm moving more into the comfort food section. Some of the films above can be kind of rough sledding - but this is plain joy. I don't think I have to defend this, though.



8. Bride of Frankenstein - similarly - I put this on and am happy with the world. Just to listen to the voices, even...



9. Finally, a couple recent films - Rushmore.



10. O Brother Where Art Thou - I also considered Big Lebowski, but in the end, this is better, and more fun, and more - moving. And a musical.

Memories

July is not a good blogging month for me - there is too much to do: vacations, mine and people visiting me - softball games - baseball to watch, too hot, usually to do a lot of writing... And I suppose I've been a bit burnt out, after taking too classes in the spring, then knocking out a bunch of Japanese film posts in June... not a lot of posts, but longish posts...

Excuses excuses. There are things to do - one thing to do is post a response to Joseph B's Mr. Bernstein Meme. The principal is simple - a memory, with the same kind of disproportionate importance of the girl in white on the ferry, cited by Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Which also puts me in mind of Caveh Zahedi's monologue in Waking Life about Holy Moments... I have been thinking about memory - I have been scanning slides - which create whole webs of associations. The knowledge about who is in the pictures, where, what they are doing - the memories, the sense memories, of the things in the pictures (when I remember them) - and the memories of watching slides themselves. My family had - well, probably thousands of slides. Once a month or so, we would set up a screen, make a big bowl of popcorn, turn off the lights and go through them - grabbing boxes of them blind, going through them almost randomly... An event.

So - that is what I should write about - but it is harder work than it should be. And - I have a lot more slides to go through - making it easy to procrastinate.... Now: I can stick pretty close to Bernstein's memory - a girl, spotted once... In this case - an Asian girl, college aged, throwing a frisbee with some friends in JFK Park, in Harvard Square, 12-15 years ago. Summer - she had short hair, shorts and a tee shirt, she was really good with he frisbee... I don't know what about her stuck - I have spent lots of afternoons in JFK park, eating lunch, reading, whatever - lots of kids throwing frisbees (and playing soccer and volleyball and sunbathing and walking dogs and kids and everything else people do, lazy summer afternoons...) But I remember her.

Though I hope I can write something about this, say:



A train, photographed somewhere on the line from Northern Vermont, NIagara Falls and Toronto, sometime in the summer of 1977 or 78. Nothing spectacular - and honestly, it doesn't really spark any memories. What it does do, though, is remind me of James Bennings' RR - and that film sparks memories. All of it - but especially, starting with shot #4 (the link above has pictures of all the trains in the film), of waiting or trains to cross roads. I had forgotten that - it's rare, now, to have to wait for a long train to cross a road - but when I was a kid, it happened quite a lot. Maybe it happened most when we were traveling in Canada - I remember long trains, trains crossing roads, or running alongside roads. I remember counting the cars of trains, especially when they were crossing the highway. And - some of those big monsters - 100 plus cars - I remember some of those. I remember counting cars on trains - one of the games we played when we were driving (my family) - counting horses, counting snowmobiles, not to mention road bingo - games we played, driving to Vermont, Canada, etc. There's a lot there....

And finally - that train, that trip, to Niagara falls - that's the picture at the top. I haven't come to the rest of the Niagara slides. That's likely to bring back some memories, when I dig them up.

Books - Very Lush and Full of Ostriches

First - goodbye to David Carradine - I can't say I watched a lot of Kung Fu as a kid, but it was one of those shows everyone seemed to breath - at least, everyone my age.... Every time I've seen him since he's held the screen... Keith probably means more to me, given my Altman worship, but David Carradine's presence in anything was reason to watch it.


Now - trying to keep from backsliding into the postaweek mode of this spring, I think I'll try my hand at one of the memes going around - the Reading the movies meme, courtesy of The Dancing Image... I don't know if I've been tagged, but it looks like everyone's diving in with enthusiasm, so me too. The twist is - I did this 2 1/2 years ago, during Andy Horbal's Film Criticism blogathon: two posts of it, in fact! But that's no reason not to do it again...

I'm not sure I can improve on the 10 books listed then (see below, or the posts linked above) - but I can add to them.

1. Noel Burch - To the Distant Observer - on Japanese films. Probably where I became a formalist. Not that I bought everything he said, especially his value judgments - but I loved that he dug into the formal elements of films, how they work, and how they relate form to meaning. My interest in the difference between representational and presentational art, between expressionism and formalism (and my ideas about what those things mean) come from reading Burch. I stilll find myself thinking in those terms, usually hearing Burch's claims in the back of my head....

2. Godard on Godard - probably not surprising how often this comes up in these lists - Ed Howard, Glenn Kenny, etc. - for good reasons, Godard is simply a superb essayist, a characteristic that carried over to his films. He's also, when pinned down, as clear and careful an analyst of his own work as any filmmmaker gets - his essay on Two or Three Things I Know About Her got me a paper once - about McCabe and Mrs. Miller...

3. Sergei Eisenstein - though Eisenstein was no slouch. I read a few of his books - Film form or Notes of a Film Director, maybe Lessons with Eisenstein, a long long time ago - I saw Ivan the Terrible on TV one night, out of the blue with no preparation, and decided I had to learn more... I read all of them, before I read anything else about film, or before I had seen much more than Ivan the Terrible of the films one might see as a cinephile... I was probably a film formalist before I'd seen an appreciable number of films, come to think of it...

4. Paul Schrader - Transcendental Style in Film - This is another book I don't quite believe, but I still admire it deeply. It's a fascinating attempt to put films in the context of the rest of the culture - philosophy, the arts, religion, and though I can't accept all his claims, the attempt is inspiring.

5. Rick Altman - any of several, but The American Film Musical is one that really set me going a few years ago. Though the truth is - the Busby Berkeley films touring a few years ago sent me to Altman, and Altman sent me on from there... I could list a couple other of his books - A Theory of Narrative, for instance, from last year, was a treat - I find myself thinking in his terms: single focus narratives, double, multiple...

6. More recently, by German Film Class put me onto a couple works that live up to any standards: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler is a seminal work, and argument aside, is one of the most detailed broad scale works of criticism I know....

7. and Tom Gunning's The Films of Fritz Lang is, like the books on Ozu, Capra and Kurosawa noted below, a magisterial assessment of the career of one of the essential directors.

8. And the class reminded me what a great book the Herzog on Herzog volume is. Herzog is as good a talker as anyone alive, and Paul Cronin guides him through his career in a fine way. It's revealing and fascinating (though I doubt I'd take much of it as gospel truth) - though, as he might say, that's just the accountant's truth. What he says illuminates the films, the ideas behind the films, himself, and he is endlessly fascinating....

9. Speaking of filmmakers who are totally compelling speakers, and writers - Guy Maddin's From the Atelier Tovar is another wonder. Trtuth is, Maddin's commentaries might rival Herzog's - and this book is a marvellous read. I can always find a quote there (or a post title.)

10. Oh god - another dozen possibilities occur to me, from Christian Metz (Film Language) or Peter Wollen (Signs and Meaning) to Jane Feur on the American musical (again) to Bunuel's My Last Sigh to Robert Ray's ABCs of Classical Hollywood Cinema - but no - let's actually dial it back: to Halliwell's Film Guide - which one? I don't know - 1994, I think, is the one I bought, way back in, about, 1994. And used as just that in those dark days before the IMDB. I'm not sure I ever agreed with its judgments - it didn't matter, because it was where I could find information, about pretty much anything, as long as it had been released in the UK.....

So that's that! And for old times sake - here are the first 10, from 2006 - all of which I value as much as ever now...

1. David Bordwell on Ozu
2. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa book.
3. Stanley Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness
4. Ray Carney on Frank Capra
5. Pier Paolo Pasolini - Heretical Empiricism.
6. Sarris' American CInema
7. Audie Bock - Japanese Film Directors
8. Stephen Teo - Hong Kong Cinema
9. Truffaut/Hitchcock
10. James Sanders' Celluloid Skylines (on New York in the movies)

Blogathons of the Future

The blogathon seems to have fallen into disuse lately - used to be, you'd get three a week (look at the entries for last spring and summer on my index - three a week may be an exaggeration, but one a week isn't...) Now? they are few and far between. Summer, though, seems to be an inspiration to try a few more - three coming up in June/July, all of them looking good. A Japanese cinema blogathon is obviously my cup of tea - that should get me to actually write a post....

June 15-21: Wildgrounds hosts a Japanese Cinema Blogathon.

June 21-30: Claude Chabrol blogathon, hosted by Flickhead.

June 28-July 4: Michael Mann week at Radiator Heaven.

One reason blogathons seem to have disappeared in the last year is the number of memes going around - favorite characters, favorite actors, various A to Z memes - fun stuff, without the challenge of forming quite so many complete sentences... There are a couple of those underway right now - which, judging from the early entries, do require the use of complete sentences: well worth checking out and returning to....

The Dancing Image asks about Reading the Movies. "A list of the movie books which had the greatest impact on me." He offers - he invites.

And Getafilm fires up a meme - Favorite movie period/place. There are rules:

1.) Think of a place (real or fictional) and time (past, present, future) portrayed in a movie (or a few) that you would love to visit.
2.) List the setting, period, applicable movie, and year of the applicable movie's release (for reference).
3.) Explain why, however you'd like (bullet points, list, essay form, screenshots, etc.). If this is a time and place that you have intimate knowledge of, feel free to describe what was done well and what wasn't done well in portraying it.
4.) If possible, list and provide links to any related movies, websites, books, and/or articles that relate to your choice (s).
5.) Modify Rules #1-4 to your liking. And come up with a better name for this meme.
6.) Link back to this Getafilm post in your post, please.
7.) Tag at least five others to participate!

And finally - Iain Stott is conducting a poll for the 50 Greatest Films of all time.

UPDATE: Jason Bellamy just announced a Pauline Kael week, June 15-19. He will post Kael excerpts, and loose the dogs of Internet Commentary upon them... people generally have opinions about Pauline Kael, so that should be lively...

Some Things to Love in Old Movies

Jacqueline Lynch and the Self-Styled Siren have started something that should be a meme: Ten Things They Love About Old Movies. It is a rich vein: rather too rich - I did not set out to post 38 pictures, but how can you choose just one of the hats in 42nd Street? how can you have too many pictures of Warren William, anywhere? Once you get started, you know... Here, then, are 10 things I love about old movies - illustrated to a fault...

1. Hats



2. Credit sequences using footage of the actors.




3. Warren William!






4. Rear projection, painted backdrops, and models.





5. Tinting.





6. Trains - and movies named after trains.





7. Telephones.





8. Hard bitten reporters



9. Hotels, hotel rooms, hotel dicks, room service...






10. Ocean Liners and freighters...





Etc....