Cinematic History – The Cinematic Journal

The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part III

Stella Lungu — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 15:01:27 +0000

El Cid (1961)

Miklós Rózsa
Mario Nascimbene

Directed by Anthony Mann and produced by Samuel Bronston, El Cid is a 1961 epic historical drama film that is based on the life of the Castilian knight Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, called ‘El Cid’, who sets upon defending Christian Spain against the Moors.

Samuel Bronston had just finished his epic film King of Kings (1961), and decided to materialise his life-long dream of bringing the story of El Cid to the big screen. MGM had partially financed King of Kings, which meant they had a say in every major decision. Wanting more freedom and control over this new epic, Bronston produced El Cid with his own company, Samuel Bronston Productions, in association with the Italian company Dear Film Produzione. This meant that in order to receive financial assistance from the Italian government, certain compromises had to be made, such as Bronston having to employ a certain number of Italian artists and technicians to work on the project. As such, despite wanting to hire Miklós Rozsa, with whom he had worked on A King of Kings, Bronston went ahead and hired the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene. This collaboration, however, would be short-lived, as Bronston’s requirements would infuriate the composer. Nascimbene writes:

Bronston called me and asked me to score EL CID, which was being shot by Anthony Mann. I read the screenplay first, and they told me to write some dance themes only. The music had to accompany a kind of fighting dance for scenes taking place on the beach, so I wrote some cues for tympani, with a rather brutal, violent rhythm, without any real melody. Director Mann liked what I had written and shot his scenes, using the cues as background. Then, when shooting EL CID was about halfway, I was asked to come to Malaga to discuss the score itself. Samuel Bronston met me there when I arrived, showed me a pile of records of Massenet’s ‘El Cid’ and told me: “This is the music for the film”. Apparently I had to sort of “adapt” Massenet’s music for the film. Samuel Bronston behaved in an offensive way, and I told him that I am used to discussing the score with a director, and with him only. So I returned to Rome, where I tore up the contract already made.

This outcome worked wonderfully for Bronston, who managed to hire his first choice, Miklós Rózsa. It is speculated that the producer never intended for the score to be an adaptation of Jules Massenet’s opera to begin with, but it was merely a sure-fire plot to get Nascimbene to back out of the picture.

Be that as it may, Bronston did go to great lengths to get Rózsa to score his picture, even managing to get him out of a pre-existing contract with MGM to score Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Mutiny would end up being scored by another MGM in-house composer, Bronislau Kaper. As a concession to their co-producers, another Italian composer’s name (Carlo Savina) appeared on the credits as co-composer on the picture, but only on the Italian prints.

Bronston flew Rózsa and his family to Madrid for the whole summer and offered him a lovely house for him to work from and the same weekly living expenses the producer himself was getting. Besides Spain itself being a huge inspiration for the score of El Cid, the composer set out to research the history of El Cid and the Spanish music in the Medieval Ages. He turned to ninety-two-year-old Dr Ramón Menéndez Pidal, a Spanish philologist, historian and expert in El Cid, who introduced him to the twelfth-century musical poems of ‘La Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Furthermore, Rózsa studied Felipe Pedrell’s collection of Spanish folksongs, which the musicologist had compiled throughout his life. The composer spent a month of intense study, analysing these two very different sources after which he began working on translating what he had learned into the new score.

Despite Rózsa’s seamless collaboration with Bronston, the composer was shocked to realize, during the premiere of El Cid, that the director and his sound editor had chopped and binned some of Rózsa’s cues in favour of the film’s sound design. As a result, Rózsa cancelled his publicity tour, stating that, ‘I could not talk about music which nobody was going to hear.’

The above issues notwithstanding, the film was a commercial success earning more than four times its production cost of $6.25 million and garnered three Academy Award nominations including Best Art Direction, Best Film Score and Best Song. El Cid would be Milós Rózsa’s last epic score.

‘HATARI!’ MOVIE POSTER

Hatari! (1962)

Henry Mancini
Hoagy Carmichael

Hatari! is a 1962 American adventure romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks. It portrays a group of professional game catchers in Africa who entrap wild animals and sell them to zoos before a female wildlife photographer disrupts their ways.

Hawks was planning on hiring his long-time collaborator, Dmitri Tiomkin, to write the score for the picture. The director’s only requirement was for Tiomkin to completely leave out the string and woodwind sections and instead use authentic African instruments. Thinking Hawks was joking, the conservative composer showed the director a score that included strings. This misunderstanding would lead to them parting ways and the pair would never work together again.

HOAGY CARMICHAEL’S SKECTH FOR ‘HATARI!’

The director then turned to prolific singer-songwriter Hoagy Carmichael who played Cricket in the director’s 1944 picture, To Have and Have Not, after Hawks had discovered the musician at a party. Hawks wanted to work with someone who had never scored a picture before and had no preconceived notions of what a score is supposed to sound like. And although the director was happy at first with Carmichael’s material, they ended up disagreeing on the direction of the music and Hawks had to turn to another composer yet again.

As it turned out, the third time was the charm as the director’s next choice, Henry Mancini, would go on to score Hatari!. Mancini did end up using violins in his music, however, he masterfully entwined them with tribal rhythms and an array of native instruments that Hawks had brought back with him from Africa. Mancini would use instruments such as the thumb piano, shell gourds and giant pea pods to score the animal scenes. Among the shot material was a scene that Hawks was contemplating on cutting out, but asked Mancini to have a look at it regardless. The scene featured Anna Maria D’Alessandro (Elsa Martinelli) taking three small elephants to a watering hole to bathe them. The composer loved the scene and immediately knew what to do with it. He superimposed an E-flat clarinet over an electric calliope (the only one in the world at that time), and the result would give birth to one of cinema’s most memorable themes, ‘Baby Elephant Walk’. The composer recalled:

[…] As the little elephants went down to the water, there was a shot of them from behind. Their little backsides were definitely in rhythm with something. […] it reminded me of something. I though, Yeah, they’re walking eight to the bar, and that brought something to mind, an old Will Bradley boogie-woogie number called “Down the Road a Piece”, a hit record in the old days, with Ray McKinley on drums and Freddie Slack on piano. Those little elephants were definitely walking boogie-woogie, eight to the bar. I wrote “Baby Elephant Walk” as a result.

Interestingly, the next track after ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ on the soundtrack recording is ‘Just for Tonight’, which was Hoagy Carmichael’s reworking of ‘A Perfect Paris Night’ and the only material retained from his work in the film. Luckily, all of Carmichael’s recorded music, as well as the written score were preserved and are archived at Indiana University.

‘TORN CURTAIN’ MOVIE POSTER

Torn Curtain (1966)

John Addison
Bernard Herrmann

Torn Curtain is a 1966 Cold War political thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock. …of an American scientist (Paul Newman) who is secretly a double agent who publicly defects to East Germany to discover Soviet nuclear secrets.

By that time, the celebrated director had enthralled audiences worldwide with masterpieces such as Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). However, following the box office failure of Marnie (1964), Hitchcock started to doubt himself as his cinema was beginning to show its age. Universal Studios saw Hitch’s hesitation as an opportunity to get their claws into the film’s post-production. Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal, instructed Hitchcock to bring in a new sound to the picture and go for a pop-oriented score more in tune with the times.

Having previously successfully collaborated with Bernard Herrmann on eight of his pictures which constituted one of the greatest director-composer partnerships in the history of cinema, Hitchcock turned to the composer once again, this time with precise instructions in tune with the studio’s demands:

I am particularly concerned with the need to break away from the old-fashioned cued-in type music that we have been using for so long. […] The audience is very different from the one to which we used to cater; it is young, vigorous and demanding. It is this fact that has been recognized by almost all of the European filmmakers where they have sought to introduce a beat and a rhythm that is more in tune with the requirements of the aforesaid audience.

Herrmann was not crazy about the film but agreed to score it as by that time Hitchcock was his only regular source of feature film work. The independent-minded composer went ahead with music he thought was appropriate for the film. Granted, Hitchcock had asked Herrmann to sketch the music ‘in advance because we have an urgent problem of meeting a tax date’, so the composer had to come up with the cues blindly. When Hitchcock arrived at the Goldwyn Studios on 24 March 1966 for the first recording session, he was shocked to realize that Herrmann had gone against his wishes and wrote bold, unusual symphonic music using atypical orchestrations and an unorthodox line-up of instruments consisting of twelve flutes – doubling on piccolos, alto flutes and bass flutes – sixteen French horns, nine trombones, two tubas, double timpani, eight cellos and eight basses. He also composed music for the murder scene, even though Hitchcock had expressly requested be left without music.

The orchestra musicians were ecstatic about Herrmann’s score and gave him a standing ovation right after the recording. Hitchcock, however, was furious and dismissed the composer in front of everyone. The two never spoke again, ending a twelve-year-old collaboration.

A few days later, British composer John Addison was hired and flown to Los Angeles. Ironically, Addison’s replacement music wasn’t pop-oriented either and neither did it manage to salvage the picture which flopped.

Bernard Herrman’s score for Torn Curtain remains one of the best known ‘might have beens’ in the history of film music. And although it never ended up in the film, his music was released on CD no less than three times over the years.

‘2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’ MOVIE POSTER

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Classical compositions by various composers
Frank Cordell, Alex North

2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick’s magnum opus and is based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Kubrick worked together with Clarke on writing the script, which they completed in January 1966, which would eventually prompt Clarke to publish his science fiction novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As was his custom, Kubrick used temporary music throughout his film in order to find the film’s pulse and to help carry the narrative. And thus, over the next two years, as the project was taking shape, he acquired multiple records of classical music, listened to countless hours of orchestral pieces and put together a temp track (temporary music used in a picture during production). Among his favourites were Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (which became the movie’s signature track), a waltz by Frédéric Chopin, Johann Strauss’ The Blue Danube, Aram Khachaturian’s Gayene, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Kubrick actually approached Orff and tried to persuade him to compose the score, however, Orff politely declined saying that this task was too large for his advanced age (the composer was seventy-one at the time).

Kubrick became convinced that his film didn’t need an original score as his carefully-curated selection of classical oeuvres would do the film justice. The MGM bosses, however, disagreed. They were adamant that a movie of such magnitude required an equally-great composer. And so, at the end of 1967, the director approached two composers – English composer Frank Cordell and well-established Hollywood composer Alex North (with whom Kubrick had worked on Spartacus (1960).

The collaboration with Cordell was stillborn, as at that time, Kubrick wasn’t very clear about what he wanted and instructed the composer to adapt Mahler’s Third Symphony. Cordell’s score got rejected and Kubrick then turned to Alex North.

Alex North recalls:

I was living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York (where Arthur Clarke was living) and got a phone call from Kubrick from London asking me of my availability to come over and do a score for 2001. He told me that I was the film composer he most respected, and he looked forward to working together. I was ecstatic at the idea of working with Kubrick again (Spartacus was an extremely exciting experience for me), as I regard Kubrick as the most gifted of the younger-generation directors, and that goes for the older as well. And to do a film score where there were about twenty-five minutes of dialogue and no sound effects! What a dreamy assignment, after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, loaded with dialogue.

I flew over to London for two days in early December to discuss music with Kubrick. He was direct and honest with me concerning his desire to retain some of the “temporary” music tracks which he had been using for the past years. I realized that he liked these tracks, but I couldn’t accept the idea of composing part of the score interpolated with other composers. I felt I could compose music that had the ingredients and essence of what Kubrick wanted and give it a consistency and homogeneity and contemporary feel. In any case, I returned to London December 24th [1967] to start work for recording on January 1, after having seen and discussed the first hour of film for scoring. Kubrick arranged a magnificent apartment for me on the Chelsea Embankment, and furnished me with all the things to make me happy: record player, tape machine, good records, etc. I worked day and night to meet the first recording date, but with the stress and strain, I came down with muscle spasms and back trouble. I had to go to the recording in an ambulance, and the man who helped me with the orchestration, Henry Brant, conducted while I was in the control room. Kubrick was present, in and out; he was pressured for time as well. He made very good suggestions, musically. I had written two sequences for the opening, and he was definitely favorable to one, which was my favorite as well. So I assumed all was going well, what with his participation and interest in the recording. But somehow I had the hunch that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss’ Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch. Also, how could I compete with Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, I thought I did pretty damned well in that respect.

In any case, after having composed and recorded over forty minutes of music in those two weeks, I waited around for the opportunity to look at the balance of the film, spot the music, etc. During that period I was rewriting some of the stuff that I was not completely satisfied with, and Kubrick even suggested over the phone certain changes that I could make in the subsequent recording. After eleven tense days of waiting to see more film in order to record in early February, I received word from Kubrick that no more score was necessary, that he was going to use breathing effects for the remainder of the film. It was all very strange, and I thought perhaps I would still be called upon to compose more music; I even suggested to Kubrick that I could do whatever necessary back in L.A. at the M-G-M studios. Nothing happened. I went to a screening in New York, and there were most of the “temporary” tracks.

In an interesting twist, North found out that his score had been rejected only during the film’s premiere in New York, an experience that, according to author Michael Benson, left him ‘shocked and humiliated’.

Thankfully, Alex North’s original score was brought to life in 1993 via a full recording conducted by Jerry Goldsmith.

The post The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part III appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part II

Stella Lungu — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:00:36 +0000

Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942)

Louis Gruenberg
Igor Stravinsky

Commandos Strike at Dawn is a 1942 Second World War propaganda film directed by John Farrow and adapted by Irwin Shaw from a short story entitled The Commandos by C.S. Forester that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1942. The film tells the story of a Norwegian fisherman who is outraged by the atrocities committed by the Nazis against his peaceful, bucolic village and escapes to Britain to form a resistance force.

Toward the end of 1941, Morris Stoloff, musical director at Columbia Pictures Corporation, met with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to discuss the possibility of his composing the score for Commandos Strike at Dawn. Stravinsky had been living in the United States since 1939, following the deaths of his wife and daughter from tuberculosis. Just before emigrating, Stravinsky himself had spent five months in hospital, during which time his mother died.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Alexandre Tansman was appointed as Stravinsky’s assistant and Hollywood advisor on the score due to the latter’s lack of experience with the Hollywood scoring system, and they both sought out Miklós Rózsa’s advice on the technicalities of scoring a film.

In the end, the negotiations didn’t pan out. Similar to Arnold Schoenberg’s attempt to score The Good Earth, Stravinsky began working on the score long before signing a contract. His approach was to create a pastoral atmosphere with his score by basing the music on Norwegian folk songs. This was an unusual perspective, considering that war films at the time had a very specific sound and featured heroic marches and fanfares.

Stravinsky ended up salvaging the material he had written and turned it into a four-movement concert suite entitled Four Norwegian Moods, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 13 January, 1944. Stravinsky had based his compositions on pieces found in The Norway Music Album, three of which were arrangements by Edvard Grieg. Stravinsky vehemently denied to have drawn inspiration from Edvard Grieg’s music, stating, ‘All the themes in my Norwegian Moods were taken from a collection of Norwegian folk music my wife found in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles – and not from Grieg, as some writers on my music have stated!’

‘FOUR NORWEGIAN MOODS’ ALBUM COVER

The replacement composer for the project was another composer of Russian descent, Louis Gruenberg, who not only delivered the score quickly but was exactly what Columbia was looking for. His work earned him an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Score category in 1944.

As for Stravinsky, during the 28 years he lived in the United States, he tried his hand at scoring two more times, but to no avail, on both occasions due to clashes with producer Darryl F. Zanuck. In 1943, he was informally approached to compose the music for Song of Bernadette (1943). He managed to compose music for the ‘Apparition of the Virgin’ scene, however, the project ended up going to Alfred Newman, who won an Oscar. Stravinsky recycled his music which made its way into the second movement of his Symphony in Three Movements. Similarly, in February 1943, upon the personal request of Orson Welles, Stravinsky began composing music for 20th Century Fox’s Jane Eyre (1943). After Bernard Herrmann replaced him, Stravinsky ended up turning the music he had composed for a hunting scene into ‘Eclogue’ to his Ode for orchestra, which premiered in 1943.

Despite never making it as a film composer in Hollywood, Stravinsky remained in Los Angeles until 1969 and his stay in Southern California triggered fresh approaches to his compositional techniques.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ FILM POSTER

Since You Went Away (1944)

Max Steiner
Alexandre Tansman

Since You Went Away is a 1944 American drama film directed by John Cromwell for Selznick International Pictures. The movie was adapted and produced by the legendary producer David O. Selznick from the 1943 novel Since You Went Away: Letters to a Soldier from His Wife by Margaret Buell Wilder. The film tells the story of a housewife who is left home alone to take care of her two daughters and a pair of lodgers while her husband is away to fight in World War II.

Selznick wanted his Oscar bait to demonstrate his patriotic support for the war effort but did not want to make another traditional war movie. As was typical with his productions, he personally wanted to oversee all aspects of the production, including the music. However, finding the right composer for the picture turned out to be quite the challenge.

DAVID O. SELZNICK

Selznick’s initial choice was MGM’s in-house composer Herbert Stothart, with whom he had collaborated a few times before. However, Stothart was already attached to four other films. The producer then reached out to Bernard Herrmann, but Herrmann declined, as the project was of no interest to him.

Selznick then asked for a list of all the available composers in Hollywood and their credits and thus ended up hiring freelance composer Alexandre Tansman to score the picture. A prolific concert composer, Tansman was an émigré from Poland who moved to Paris in his twenties and had only worked on one Hollywood film, Flesh and Fantasy (1943). He was unattached to any of the big studios, a position Selznick found to his liking. Hiring Tansman, an established composer of symphonies, operas, and ballets, would carry ‘a certain little extra distinction’ and would help with publicity. Selznick then hired Charles Previn, a music director at Universal, to oversee Tansman’s work and Louis Forbes as Associate Music Director.

ALEXANDRE TANSMAN WITH HIS FIRST WIFE ANNA ELEONORA BROCINER

Tansman was an unknown to the producer, and Selznick was anxious about entrusting a production of such proportions to a composer relatively new to Hollywood. So he requested that Tansman record only a couple of reels of music – or as he put it, ‘the minimum required from a cost standpoint’ – so that the producer could decide early on, before losing too much time and money, if the music worked.

Tansman was then asked to arrange a few versions of ‘Together’, a 1928 song that was the centrepiece of the film’s music, and was only given the length and the overall mood of the scene – he was not informed as to the application of his music to the scenes. This temporary recording was to be produced using a chamber ensemble, so Tansman had to reorchestrate his score for his reduced resources. Naturally, the music did not sound as good as it would have employing the power of a full orchestra, and needless to say, Selznick was less than impressed.

In other words, Tansman had fallen into a trap by agreeing to compose to script, without final footage. This was Selznick’s typical requirement, as he wanted composition to take place before the picture was edited in order to allow composers more time and avoid time crunches during post-production. Max Steiner and Alfred Newman had refused to work like this, being aware of how much a picture could change between script and locked picture. Tansman, however, did not, so when Selznick viewed the synchronised footage and musical mockup, the composer’s fate was sealed.

‘SINCE YOU WENT AWAY’ SOUNDTRACK ALBUM COVER

With little time left and a very long film in need of music, Selznick’s reached out to Warner Bros. music director Leo Forbestein and asked to borrow Max Steiner. Forbestein agreed but warned Selznick that hiring Steiner on such short notice would not be cheap. Desperate, Selznick agreed to pay Warner Bros. an astounding $3,300 a week for Steiner’s services. Steiner took the assignment with a bit of anxiety, as he was well aware of Selznick’s habit to micro-manage the scoring process. Ironically, Selznick had considered replacing Steiner during the postproduction of Gone with the Wind, when the composer stated he was unable to deliver the score before the set deadline.

Selznick was very grateful to the composer, considering the time constraints and the fact that at the time, Steiner was going through a rough time in his personal life, as his father was dying and had been hospitalized, his marriage to Louise Klos was falling apart and Steiner himself was suffering from a back tumour that required surgery. ‘Thank heavens for Maxie.’, the producer is said to have affirmed.

Steiner’s score features an astonishing number of themes, several popular songs of the era and traditional works, as well an infusion of several of Steiner’s themes from earlier Selznick pictures. A recording of ‘Together’ from Tansman’s score was retained.

Since You Went Away would mark David O. Selznick and Max Steiner’s final collaboration and was both a commercial and critical success, earning nine Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Score. This was the first time Selznick’s company would receive the award for best music.

‘CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA’ FILM POSTER

Caesar and Cleopatra (1945)

Georges Auric
Arthur Bliss

Caesar and Cleopatra is a 1945 British Technicolor film directed by Gabriel Pascal and is based on the play by George Bernard Shaw and was the most expensive film ever produced in Britain at the time. Gabriel Pascal was the only director Shaw trusted to film his plays after successfully delivering Pygmalion (1938) and Major Barbara (1941). Shaw praised Pascal by saying, ‘Pascal is doing for films what Diaghilev did for ballet.’

The story focuses around a middle-aged Julius Caesar, who, at the height of the Roman Civil War, takes possession of the Egyptian capital city of Alexandria, where he meets a young Cleopatra and teaches her how to rule Egypt.

Shaw himself recommended Sir Arthur Bliss to score the picture, and so, on 6 June 1944, the British composer signed the contract. However, the deal was with the author rather than the director. Bliss, who in 1953 would become Master of the Queen’s Music, was a well-established composer of classical concert music and had only a few movies to his name, including the most expensive film of its time, H.G. Well’s Things to Come. Bliss’ score for Things to Come would have been a pillar in British film scoring had it not been ruined by the perpetual re-editing of the picture and the poor quality of contemporary dubbing technology.

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF SIR ARTHUR BLISS’ ALBUM COVER

Shaw, who was a former music critic, was in charge of all the communication regarding the music of Caesar and Cleopatra and provided Bliss with some helpful suggestions, including to write music in his own style and not to compose a clichéd imitation of Egyptian music. ‘In Heaven’s name, no Egyptian music!’, the author pleaded. Shaw also sent Bliss a letter offering him serious advice before the contract was signed:

“Be careful not to let yourself be placed in the position of an employee of Pascal or of the film company, as anything you compose for them in that capacity will belong to them and not to you. If I were a composer writing for a film I should make a skeleton piano score of an orchestral suite consisting of overture, nocturne, barcarole, intermezzo and finale. I should copyright this in my own name in England and America. Then, being in an impregnable position as sole owner of the music, I should license the film people to use the material as an accompaniment to their film for a stated period on stated terms, giving them no rights whatever. . . Remember that an orchestral suite by you will long survive Pascal’s film and become a standard concert piece quite independently of my play, like Grieg’s Peer Gynt. Let no parasite fasten on it.”

‘THE FILM MUSIC OF GEORGES AURIC’ ALBUM COVER

Following Shaw’s advice, Bliss started work on a score, writing 100 pages of music in his signature style, sketching out cues such as ‘Memphis at Night’, ‘Ftatateeta’, ‘Soldiers’ Chorus’ and ‘Barcarolle’. His instrumentation did call for a buccina, an ancient Roman wind instrument, which was the only exotic instrument Bliss used in the entire score.

However, the project came to a halt after Bliss had met Gabriel Pascal. Pascal was known to be tough and uncompromising in all departments of production, especially in music. Bliss later recalled, ‘I have had unforgettable experiences with one director who, where music was concerned, was a certified lunatic, and I had to discontinue collaboration.’ In his autobiography, Bliss explains, ‘One look at him made it self-evident that he would never be a sympathetic collaborator, and I withdrew from the assignment.’

The director wanted a ‘French-sounding’ score, so Bliss was replaced by Georges Auric, who was a member of the celebrated rebellious group of Parisian composers known as Les Six. The prolific composer took a different approach and composed the music using very colourful orchestrations and employing instruments such as strings, piano, celeste, xylophone, bells, harp, saxophone, tuba, and woodwinds. His music ended up being one of the highlights of an otherwise messy production.

A nine-minute suite containing ‘Main Titles’, ‘At the Sphinx’, and ‘The Battle’ was later recorded and published on a compilation album by Chandos Records. Similarly, Bliss’ rejected score was also turned into a suite consisting of eight short movements lasting 17 minutes, which was edited by Giles Easterbrook and Malcolm Binney. It was published several decades later also by Chandos Records.

‘THE NAKED CITY’ FILM POSTER

The Naked City (1948)

Miklós Rózsa, Frank Skinner
George Bassman

The Naked City is a 1948 American film noir directed by Jules Dassin and produced by Mark Hellinger. With a story written by Malvin Wald, the film marks the birth of the modern police procedural. The movie portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young girl and places the criminal underbelly of New York City under the microscope.

Hallinger was known for granting his directors a lot of artistic freedom, however, he only had one request for Dessin, that he use Miklós Rózsa to write the film’s score. Hallinger had worked with Rózsa before, the composer having scored two of the producer’s previous movies, The Killers (1946) and Brute Force (1947). Dessin, however, insisted that they hire George Bassman to score the picture. Bassman was a famed MGM arranger and composer who had scored three earlier Dessin films: Young Ideas (1943), A Letter for Evie (1946), and Two Smart People (1946). Both Dessin and Bossman had worked at MGM but were asked to leave; Dessin on account of his political views, and Bossman ‘for a different reason’.

The pressures of the film’s production took their toll on Hellinger, who suffered a heart attack while working in New York. Disregarding his doctor’s pleads for him to rest, Hellinger continued with the production. He even attended the recording sessions of the musical score, conducted by Bassman. Hellinger, however, felt that Bassman’s music was too similar to an Aaron Copland composition. Knowing Bassman’s background as an arranger, he feared that the composer might simply have reworked pre-existing music, a situation that could have serious legal repercussions. Outraged, Bassman insisted that his music was completely original and told Hellinger what he thought of him and his musical tastes. As a result, Hellinger immediately called Miklós Rózsa and asked him to replace Bassman as soon as possible. According to Rózsa, upon hearing Bassman’s score, Hellinger ‘nearly had another heart attack.’ As it happens, Hellinger did in fact die of another heart attack that very night.

The producer’s death did not slow down production and Rózsa immediately began spotting The Naked City, as he was given only two weeks to do the work on his own. The picture’s Music Supervisor and the head of Universal’s music department, Milton Schwarzwald, offered to bring in Universal in-house composer Frank Skinner to help shoulder the burden. Finding that time frame untenable, Rózsa agreed to score the chase sequence at the end and leave the first part of the film to Skinner, which featured less music-dependent dialogue scenes. Rózsa’s score went on to become a classic.

Interestingly, both Jules Dassin and George Bassman would soon be blacklisted for their Communist associations.

The post The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part II appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part I

Stella Lungu — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 16:54:41 +0000

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Max Steiner
W. Franke Harling

The Most Dangerous Game is a thriller adapted from a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, in which a deranged Russian Cossack hunter makes sure ships are wrecked on his island so that he can hunt the survivors for sport.

Producer Merian C. Cooper took charge at RKO Pictures during the Great Depression and was entrusted to go over all the projects that had accumulated with a fine-tooth comb and to greenlight the suitable ones. During that time, Cooper had two jungle adventures on his plate: King Kong (1933) – which required a large budget – and The Most Dangerous Game.

With a great reputation for delivering quality while being mindful of budgets, Cooper decided to test the feasibility of a jungle movie and went ahead with the production of The Most Dangerous Game. One of his ingenious ideas was to build film sets that were reserved for King Kong during the day and could be used for The Most Dangerous Game during the night.

MAX STEINER

Composer Max Steiner, who was Director of Music at RKO at that time, persuaded RKO’s bosses, who initially wanted to use ‘library music’ (old tracks), to go with original scores for these two movies. Steiner agreed to score King Kong at a reduced fee and Cooper said he would pay for the orchestra. Steiner already had a large workload on his shoulders, so W. Franke Harling was assigned to score The Most Dangerous Game.

Harling was well-known for having composed the music for A Light from St. Agnes, a popular jazz-oriented opera. Cooper, however, wasn’t pleased with his approach, complaining that his score was too ‘Broadway-light’ and unsuited for an adventure thriller.

Max Steiner was then begged to write a replacement score in only two weeks. Due to the very tight deadline on The Most Dangerous Game, Steiner had to work on this score almost in parallel with King Kong. And although it is often said that King Kong is the first great original film score of the ‘sound era’, some argue that this honour actually goes to The Most Dangerous Game, as it premiered sooner.

‘THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME’ AND ‘THE SON OF KONG’ SOUNDTRACK COVER

The music Max Steiner wrote for The Most Dangerous Game might sound all-too-familiar to most of us today, for it has been imitated countless times ever since. Steiner incorporated the leitmotif (Count Zaroff’s theme) he used throughout the film into ‘Russian Waltz’, a tune played by Count Zaroff at his piano in the film. This piece of diegetic music (AKA source music) was written by the composer himself. This ground-breaking technique of marrying the underscore with the source music would be used from then on in numerous films as a storytelling method. Furthermore, his music for the final chase scene is a masterclass in action and suspense scoring, employing techniques that are still used in sci-fi, thrillers, and horror movies today.

One of the problems faced by Steiner during this time was the small size of the orchestra that he had to work with. And while the players were some of the best in the business, the reduced number of the performers meant that the orchestra simply wasn’t able to convey the music penned by the composer in all its complexity so concessions had to be made. The recordings that exist today, performed by Moscow Symphony Orchestra and conducted by William Stromberg, are accurate reconstructions made by John W. Morgan for a full symphonic orchestra and are based on Steiner’s original handwritten sketches, thus reflecting the composer’s true musical intentions.

‘DON QUIXOTE’ FILM POSTER

Don Quixote (1933)

Jacques Ibert
Maurice Ravel

In 1932, Austrian film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst embarked on the task of adapting Miguel de Cervantes’ celebrated novel, Don Quixote, a tale about an elderly man who goes mad from reading too many books on chivalry. He filmed three separate versions of the film, in English, French, and German. The legendary Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin would go on to play the title role in all three languages. Chaliapin was already familiar with the character, having portrayed him in Jules Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte in 1910.

The producers had reached out to five composers to write songs for this film, including Maurice Ravel, Marcel Delannoy, Manuel de Falla, Jacques Ibert, and Darius Milhaud. Little did the composers know that this was, in fact, a contest. Each of them was certain that their music would be featured in the film.

The contract signed in June 1932 specified a heroic song, a serenade, and a comic tune, with the deadline set for August and a warning that Chaliapin preferred not to have too many high Cs, Ds or E flats.

The winner was the great composer and master orchestrator, Maurice Ravel, who was asked to compose four pieces. The producers were happy with the choice, for Ravel was one of Europe’s most prominent composers and they were hoping that with his name attached to the project, together with French author’s Paul Morand – who provided the lyrics – the project would attract investors. Furthermore, Ravel had a proven affinity for Spanish music which is what the project required.

Ravel, however, had suffered health problems since 1919 and at this time his health was in decline, specifically after having suffered a head injury in a car accident which prevented him from putting the music that he heard in his head on paper. This, in turn, slowed his progress in delivering the music and Ravel was eventually fired as a composer, having completed only three songs. These would become the three-part song cycle Don Quichotte à Dulcinée and would cover other facets of the story than Ibert’s work. Chanson romanesque portrays the noble lunatic as a lover, Chanson épique as a holy warrior, and Chanson à boire depicts the protagonist as a drinker. Although his songs didn’t end up in the film, they have become some of the most performed songs in the Baritone repertoire. The songs were later published and were premiered on 1 December 1934 in Paris with baritone Martial Singher performing and Paul Perey leading the orchestra. These are Ravel’s final compositions before his death in 1937.

Pabst then turned to French composer Jacques Ibert, who, as it happens, was a friend of Ravel’s. Learning about the contest, both composers became outraged, Ravel even considering a lawsuit against the producers, an idea he later dropped.

Ibert provided four songs for Don Quixote, Chanson du depart, Chanson à Dulcinée, Chanson du Duc, and Chanson du mort. He also wrote a song for Sancho Panza, titled Chanson de Sancho. The song texts were written by Pierre de Ronsard and Alexandre Arnoux, with Ibert himself conducting the recording used in the picture. Ibert’s music ended up in all three productions and he went on to arrange the songs for voice and piano, which were later published under the title Chansons de Don Quichotte, for Voice and Piano.

‘THE GOOD EARTH’ FILM POSTER

The Good Earth (1937)

Herbert Stothart
Arnold Schoenberg

The Good Earth is an American drama based on Pearl S. Buck’s eponymous novel which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. It depicts the life of a Chinese family of farmers as they navigate through life’s up and downs.

The composer who was first approached with scoring this picture was none other than the great Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, a revolutionary and highly-influential 20th-century compositional method. Schoenberg was living in California at the time in exile, having fled Europe to escape the Nazi regime. He was contacted by Irving Thalberg, the celebrated young producer at the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Thalberg, who was a rather cultured movie mogul, met with Schoenberg at MGM’s studios in November 1935 and expressed his appreciation for the composer’s music. Thalberg explained that the music he imagined for this picture would be similar to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, op.4, which he had heard on the radio earlier that year.

SCHOENBERG’S SKETCH FOR ‘WANG’S UNCLE’ ©ARNOLD SCHOENBERG CENTER

Unfortunately, Schoenberg got a little too involved in the project, long before signing any contract with the studio. He proceeded to carefully read the short novel that was sent to him by the MGM library and made numerous markings on its pages. Two of Schoenberg’s notebooks contain over thirty sketches of roughly worked out tonal, chromatic and pentatonic motifs and themes for The Good Earth. Among them are ‘a motif of an eventful growing crowd of people’, a motif to ‘the uncle of Ching’, a ‘lotus’ theme, a ‘fishpond’ motif, themes for ‘Wang’s Uncle’, ‘funeral/death’ motifs, motifs of a ‘turbulent folk scene in connection with the revolution’, motifs about the ‘fear of the Wang family because of the soldiers’, as well as a ‘pearl/wealth’ motif. It has to be noted that Schoenberg did all of this even before a second meeting took place.

Unaccustomed with Hollywood’s film-scoring process, Schoenberg requested full control of the soundtrack – including dialogue – and demanded a staggering fee of $50,000 for his services. He is also said to have requested to work directly with the actors and have the director shoot the film to match his music – not the other way around. The main stumbling blocks with contracting concert composers to score a picture were money and time, as they were used to their highly-priced concert music commissions and they liked to take their time to write the music. These were two issues that were not compatible with the film studios’ way of doing things since the production of a film was under a tight deadline – and so it remains to this day – and the studios had their own experienced composers that could do the work at a fraction of the price and in a short period of time.

The collaboration never came to fruition and three weeks after their initial meeting, Schoenberg addressed a letter to Thalberg expressing his disappointment with the former’s silent treatment.

Herbert Stothart and Edward Ward were eventually engaged to provide the music for The Good Earth.

‘THE THIEF OF BAGDAD’ FILM POSTER

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Miklós Rózsa
Oscar Strauss

The Thief of Bagdad is a 1940 film marketed at the time as an ‘An Arabian Fantasy in Technicolor’. The film was produced by the renowned director and producer Alexander Korda of London Films, who had long dreamt of remaking the 1924 silent film of the same name. The story takes inspiration from the classic Arabian tale One Thousand and One Nights, as well as the novel The Tower and the Elephant by Robert E. Howard, and features a classic hero, a villain, a love story, magic, and adventure.

Korda began working on the project early in 1939 and chose German filmmaker Ludwig Berger to direct the picture. Interestingly, the production team at London Films comprised almost entirely of Hungarian émigrés, including Alexander Korda and his brothers, director Zoltán Korda and art director Vincent Korda, screenwriter Lajos Biró, and composer Miklós Rózsa, who had already scored Knight Without Armour (1937) and The Four Feathers (1939) for the firm.

Alexander Korda was planning on hiring Rózsa once more for this film, promising him a significant increase in his salary – which, according to Rózsa, had been quite low up to that point – and that his contract would begin immediately. However, Berger insisted that they should instead bring Austrian composer Oscar Straus on board, as the pair had collaborated before on Ein Waltztraum (1925) and Les Trois Valses (1938). It was agreed then that Strauss would write all the pre-production music and Rózsa would provide ‘all the dramatic and colouristic music’. Rózsa had no choice at that point than to agree to this arrangement.

Strauss was taking a cure in the French town of Vichy at that time so he sent all his music to London by mail. A composer of waltzes and operettas, Strauss’ musical input proved to be unsuitable for the film, or as Rózsa himself put it, ‘It was impossible – typical turn-of-the-century Viennese candy-floss.’

The musical director, Muir Mathieson, was furious with the outcome and didn’t hold back in expressing his frustration during a tense meeting with Alexander Korda and Miklós Rózsa. While publicly siding with Berger on the issue of the music, Korda was unhappy with Strauss’ sketches as well and secretly instructed Rózsa to re-write the music and call him when he’s ready. A week later, Rózsa had the music ready and Korda had the brilliant idea of giving him an office next to Berger’s, where he had a piano installed. He then asked the composer to keep playing his music until Berger came out of his office. Rózsa started to work and play fortissimo in that office, and after three days, Berger finally came into his office and enquired about the music. After listening to a few of the pieces Rózsa had composed, Berger realized that this music was much better suited for the film.

MIKLÓS RÓZSA

A telegram was subsequently sent to Oscar Straus notifying him of his dismissal from the production. Strauss threatened to sue, stating that this incident was ruining his reputation, but soon had a change of heart after Korda paid him his fee in full.

Rózsa went on to compose the score and songs for The Thief of Bagdad, which would become instant classics. Due to the outbreak of WW2, the production was forced to move to California where the film was completed, a move which prompted Rózsa’s prolific Hollywood career.

The critically acclaimed film became a commercial success and earned four Academy Award nominations including Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Special Effects and Best Film Score, winning all but the award for Best Film Score.

The post The Ones that Got Away: Rejected Film Scores, Part I appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

A Study of Black American Cinema: The Second Half

Jules R. Simion — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 07:00:15 +0000

Forty Years of Black Masterpieces

There are plenty of illustrious titles to work with but, as usual, a selection must be made for the sake of brevity. One film that has withstood the test of time, over and over again, is Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989). Its success is mainly owed to its sincerity and Mr Lee’s uncanny ability to deliver a wide range of characters without swerving into dangerous stereotype territory. With the United States always described as a melting pot of sorts—albeit idealistically, it’s no surprise that the eminent Black director chose New York as the ‘melting pot’ for his colourful and beautifully diverse characters before he brings it all to a boiling point.

The story is brilliant in its navigation of inner-city life and the struggles brought forth by racism—the latter a defining trait of Black American existence. ‘Do the Right Thing’ examines the very ethics of violence and prejudice before it offers a startling truth: good and bad are abstract moral constructs, at best. Few people are truly evil, yet so many have the potential for kindness. Mr Lee tells us that racism can be overcome, that there is beauty in diversity, and that Black Americans have been looked down upon for far too long. It was as relevant in 1989 as it is today.

‘DO THE RIGHT THING’ (1989), ©40 ACRES & A MULE FILMWORKS

‘Inside Man’ (2006) is yet another seminal work by Spike Lee—one of many, I might add. Packed with ridiculous amounts of tension and thrills, the film offers a glimpse into one of the greatest heists ever imagined by a screenwriter’s mind. With a stellar cast and exceptional performances under Mr Lee’s equally proficient direction, ‘Inside Man’ made history for Black Cinema, garnering plenty of awards along the way, including Movie of the Year at the AFI Awards and nods from both the AAFCA (African-American Film Critics Association) and BET Awards.

Antoine Fuqua’s ‘Training Day’ (2001) is such a rich work of cinema that it is rightfully referenced in film school studies today. It got Denzel Washington an Academy Award for his portrayal of a streetwise but crooked cop charged with training Ethan Hawke’s wet-behind-the-ears rookie. While the majority of Mr Washington’s thespian performances brought him forth as a model for righteousness and decency, his Alonzo offers a different take—a man who has tasted the dark side of power, who has forced fragile partnerships and alliances with the underbelly of city crime, and who cannot be ousted without losing everything, including his life.

Mr Fuqua’s directorial talent transforms the screenplay penned by David Ayers into an extraordinarily chilling drama about corruption within the ranks of those who are supposed to serve and protect.

‘TRAINING DAY’ (2001), ©WARNER BROS.

Before he dazzled Hollywood with ‘Black Panther’, Ryan Coogler wrote and directed ‘Fruitvale Station’ (2013), which tells the story of Oscar Grant’s last day before he was shot in the back and killed by a police officer. This Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner delivers a punch in the gut with its opening—security footage of the real Oscar Grant, and with its ending—a clip of his daughter, now left without her father. It was a complicated project to undertake, given that there were living relatives that Mr Coogler and his lead, Michael B. Jordan, had to consider.

Oscar Grant is portrayed in a realistic manner. He is a flawed man trying to make better choices and aware of his responsibilities toward his family, which is why he decides to take the BART train on the last night of 2008 and of his life. ‘Fruitvale Station’ does not intend to offer any kind of remedy for the social issues of police brutality aimed particularly at Black Americans. It only recreates the final hours of a man who did not deserve to die the way he did.

‘FRUITVALE STATION’ (2013), ©FOREST WHITAKER’S SIGNIFICANT PRODUCTIONS

Based on Sapphire’s novel ‘Push’ and directed by Lee Daniels, ‘Precious’ (2009) is a tour de force. Rarely do we see comedians sliding into dramatic roles with an ease that delivers staggering performances. Among them, I can think of Jim Carrey and Robin Williams. Yet there is also Mo’Nique, who is simply outstanding as the Harlem mother from hell who sexually abuses her illiterate teenage daughter, exquisitely portrayed by a young Gabourey Sidibe.

Sidibe’s Precious is a girl who has known nothing but trauma and misery, yet she finds kindness and freedom in others who help elevate her until she severs ties with her mother and becomes a better version of herself. Beyond Mo’Nique’s Oscar-worthy performance, however, what I also find memorable about this film is that it got Geoffrey Fletcher an Academy Award for the screenplay, making him the very first Black American to win a Best Screenplay Oscar (Original or Adapted).

‘PRECIOUS’ (2009), ©LIONSGATE

‘Barbershop’ (2002) by Tim Story offers a softer take on black culture. It’s a light-hearted comedy drama that features Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Eve, and Michael Ealy—an easy-to-digest movie offering realistic conversations to which viewers have been glad to relate. Before there were talk-shows like ‘Meet the Press’, barbershops used to be great meeting spots for people to go and chat about pretty much everything while getting a haircut. Mr Story’s film follows a family-owned barbershop and those who are sewn into its very fabric, employees and customers alike. It registered impressive box office figures, enough to later release two sequels and a spinoff for Queen Latifah.

Few movies have rattled their audiences like Steve McQueen’s ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ (2014), based on the eponymous book written by Solomon Northup. The film, equal parts powerful and excruciating through its depiction of 19^th century America and the superb performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita N’yongo, and Michael Fassbender, tells the story of Solomon Northup. His abduction and bondage into slavery despite having been a legally free black man forms the core of this devastating account and it brings forth a troubling question for its Black American viewers. What would they do if they were forced into Mr Northup’s circumstances? Would they fight back with everything they’ve got, or would they become pliable as a means of self-preservation in a society designed to keep them down, like he did?

STEVE MCQUEEN AND CHIWETEL EJIOFOR ON THE SET OF ’12 YEARS A SLAVE’ (2013), ©JAAP BUITENDIJK/FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

‘Moonlight’ by Barry Jenkins took the festival circuit by storm and won Best Motion Picture of the Year at the Oscars. For good reason, too. A character like Chiron had never been portrayed in Black American cinema before, thus proving that the range devised for black men in movies could spread wider and could offer new, enthralling dimensions. With only a couple of exceptions, few black characters had struggled with masculinity up to that point. Adding Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali’s resplendent renditions (let us not forget that Mr Ali won an Academy Award for this role) only served to turn ‘Moonlight’ into a cinematic phenomenon and proof that black films have a lot more to give, still.

Prior to ‘Selma’ (2014), Ava Duvernay was already enjoying a rapid ascension among the filmmaking ranks of Hollywood. It was this biopic oeuvre that brought forth the massive reaches of her talent and vision. It is imperative to observe the sheer force of will that she exudes as a Black American woman in an otherwise mostly white industry.

‘Selma’ does more than just recount that epic march for voting rights that carried Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, however. It gives us the man behind the legend, a being of titanic dreams and complexities, whose faults and qualities are presented from multiple angles—a feat genially accomplished through David Oyelowo’s interpretation and Ms Duvernay’s directorial guidance.

‘SELMA’ (2014), ©PATHÉ

F. Gary Gray had already done music video work with Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and other rap artists of the era that saw the rise of N.W.A. before he took on the gargantuan challenge of telling their story in ‘Straight Outta Compton’ (2015).

Naturally, the end result had everything that the iconic rap group’s fans could wish for: N.W.A.’s permission to use their original music; fantastic performances from the three leads, one of them being none other than O’Shea Jackson Jr., who played the role of his father, Ice Cube; and the kind of energy that is not easily found nor easily forgotten. It was the U.S.’s number one film for three weeks in a row and held a stupefying box office figure of $200M, but it will be remembered not only as a commercial success, but also as the now-second highest-grossing music biopic—after ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (2019).

‘STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON’ (2015), ©UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Forty Years of Black Directorial Brilliance

Many have garnered praise and attention for their works in Black American cinema, though few have become powerhouse names with multiple titles under their belts.

Naturally, we have Spike Lee at the forefront. We’ve already touched on ‘Inside Man’ and ‘Do the Right Thing’, but those are only two of his most popular movies. Once he made his debut with ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ (1986), his first feature-length film, Mr Lee did not stop creating and telling cinematic stories with roots deeply sunk into African American culture in one form or another.

Through ‘Malcolm X’ (1992), he built a biographical profile of the authoritative and controversial Black Nationalist leader, following Malcom X’s rise from his early days as a small-time gangster to his ministry, his advocacy for the Nation of Islam and discourse for civil rights—though his approach was always more aggressive than Dr King’s. The esteemed director’s more recent foray into racial issues gives us ‘BlacKkKlansman’ (2018), which tells the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer played by John David Washington who managed to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan branch in Colorado.

Known best for his studies of race relations, urban crime and poverty, and colourism issues within the black community, Spike Lee has earned his Academy Awards and Golden Globes nods for some of his works—mostly for ‘Do the Right Thing’. Finally, his Oscar win came in 2019 for Best Adapted Screenplay, which he shared with Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, and Kevin Willmott for ‘BlacKkKlansman’.

‘BLACKKKLANSMAN’ (2018), ©FOCUS FEATURES

John Singleton became a household name of prolific Black American cinema with Oscar-nominated ‘Boyz n the Hood’ (1991), leaving an indelible mark on the industry with other works of true depth such as ‘Poetic Justice’ (1993), starring Janet Jackson, Tupac Shakur, and Regina King, and ‘Shaft’ (2000), which gave us Samuel L. Jackson like nobody had ever seen him before. The film world lost him in 2019, but his legacy remains.

I, for one, remember his critique of American studios, in particular, regarding their refusal ‘to let African Americans direct black-themed films’ during an event at Loyola Marymount University, a speech which later became viral. ‘They ain’t letting the black people tell the stories’, he added, and for good reason. Great films have come out of Hollywood with Black Americans as the heroes and heroines, in projects helmed by white directors. The nuance and authenticity are lost, however, regardless of artistic quality. There is something that only those who live through a specific experience can add to make a story feel undeniably real.

‘BOYZ N THE HOOD’ (1991), ©COLUMBIA PICTURES

Allen and Albert Hughes, better known as the Hughes Brothers, have become more popular recently across television and streaming audiences thanks to ‘The Defiant Ones’ (2017), a biographical documentary series that studies the business relationship between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, both heavy influences on contemporary culture. But before this Emmy-nominated project, the Hughes Brothers first garnered acclaim for ‘Menace II Society’ (1993) which despite having been frequently compared to ‘Boyz n the Hood’, it offers nothing downright pleasurable in its viewing experience. Unlike John Singleton’s signature piece, this Hughes Brothers’ showpiece is ugly and violent, painfully realistic and lacking in uplifting specks of hope. It pushes the viewers into wishing more from the world, since the characters clearly couldn’t.

They followed up with a slightly less bleak but just as troubling tale of black men who survived the Vietnam War, though not without emotional and psychological scars. ‘Dead Presidents’ (1995) approaches a rather difficult but necessary subject—the way in which the US government uses and abuses young men (in this case, especially black men) before it abandons them upon their return home. Pushed by PTSD, substance abuse, and the difficulties of providing for their families, these men who once fought for their country in the mosquito-infested jungles of Vietnam become criminals and spiral downwards until they land in prison. Few films have managed to incapsulate life after the war better than ‘Dead Presidents’.

‘DEAD PRESIDENTS’ (1995), ©CARAVAN PICTURES

There are plenty more Black American filmmakers who have left their own impressions onto the silver screen. F. Gary Gray made waves beyond ‘Straight Outta Compton’ with ‘Set It Off’ (1996) and ‘Friday’ (1995), the former a black-female-driven action piece featuring Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox, and Queen Latifah, and the latter a chilled comedy starring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker—both films illustrating the director’s versatility and ability to tackle a complex range of themes and genres whilst keeping his cast and screenplays black.

Gina Prince’s ‘Love & Basketball’ (2000) also deserves an honourable mention, splendidly split into quarters and unravelling like a basketball game that tells a story of… well, love and basketball at the centre of a complicated relationship between Omar Epps’s Quincy McCall and Sanaa Lathan’s Monica Wright. Allow me to applaud George Tillman Jr.’s ‘Soul Food’ (1997), too, as one of the first Black-American-led movies I remember watching, a tale of love and family and all the complications that come attached, set around the dinner table.

‘SOUL FOOD’ (1997), ©FOX 2000 PICTURES

And last, though certainly not least, a tip of the hat should go to Robert Townsend’s ‘The Five Heartbeats’ (1991), which earned a nomination for Outstanding Motion Picture from the Image Awards (NAACP). While its story is fictional, ‘The Five Heartbeats’ tells the familiar tale of Black American artists’ struggle during the ‘60s, at the climax of racial tensions in America. It carries twists of its own, however, with the singers’ personal demons threatening to shatter the troupe’s integrity in front of their growing audiences.

While hoping that the film industry will continue to grow, evolve, and embrace racial diversity and its potential, one can only look forward to what the future might hold for Black American cinema. There are some hard truths waiting to be told along with great stories.

The post A Study of Black American Cinema: The Second Half appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

A Study of Black American Cinema: The First Half

Jules R. Simion — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 12:00:03 +0000

Of Oscar Micheaux, True Pioneer

J. Ronald Green once wrote of the African American filmmaker that he hit a ‘straight lick with a crooked stick’, which accurately describes Oscar Micheaux’s cinematic ingenuity. He built his name on genres like the melodrama, the crime drama, and romance, producing 44 films to his name.

Among them, I’m compelled to bring up the embedded flashbacks from ‘Within Our Gates’ (1920), which offer complex and layered lives (and afterlives). Its crosscutting and temporal treatment speak against D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915). In a most brilliant move, Mr Micheaux uses Mr Griffith’s own language to disprove his racist claims by showing a reality that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ refused to address, despite its cinematic prowess. The Black American director depicts the white lynch mob as opposed to the romanticized gallant Klan, choosing to show a truth that black people knew, and white people refused to acknowledge.

OSCAR MICHEAUX

Oscar Micheaux wasn’t without controversy, however. More than once, he was harshly criticized by black elites regarding representation, which is a hot button topic even today. One relevant example is ‘Body and Soul’ (1925), which irked the African American press for its treatment of a false preacher, splendidly portrayed by Paul Robeson. Black American stereotyping was already bad enough, they said, thus seeing no need to further engage in such deliberate debasing. But Micheaux counterpunched with a simple argument: realism was the key to the progress of the race.

‘I am too much imbued with the spirit of Booker T. Washington to engraft false virtues upon ourselves, to make ourselves that which we are not. Nothing could be a greater blow to our own progress. The recognition of our true situation will react in itself as a stimulus for self-advancement’, the luminary director once said.

‘BODY AND SOUL’ (1925), ©MICHEAUX FILM

Of Interracial Film Production Companies

Self-representation was rare in the writing and production of Black American films in the early 1900s. Most companies behind such titles were usually interracial ventures. Only a handful were fully black-owned and operated. Nevertheless, it is not easy at all to accurately observe the difference between how White Americans and Black Americans treated racial themes. Both types of productions offer a compelling impression of how cinema and storytelling were perceived by black and white people in the United States, but it would be a mistake to assume that films made by white-owned companies were more compromised than those authored by African American filmmakers.

Most of the interracially-produced ‘race films’ are best accepted as collaborations between writers, directors, producers, performers, camera operators and editors of different backgrounds that worked together to deliver cinematic experiences specifically for Black American audiences. Their goal was to produce stories of black life that went against the salacious and downright vicious mainstream movies. One such noteworthy oeuvre is white filmmaker Richard E. Norman’s ‘The Flying Ace’ (1926), its story exclusively set in the African American world. Focused on a returning war pilot and his rival for the love of the local railroad stationmaster’s daughter and modelled after famed Black American aviator Bessie Coleman, ‘The Flying Ace’ weaves its fictional narrative with the real heroism of African Americans that was already familiar to its desired audience.

‘THE FLYING ACE’ (1926), ©NORMAN FILM MANUFACTURING COMPANY

Of Early Black American Stars

The Criterion Channel collection boasts an impressive array of black cinema, revealing the exceptional diversity of the roles that Black Americans undertook within the film industry—both in front of and behind the camera. It’s truly a pleasure to mention silver screen legends like Charles Sidney Gilpin, Lorenzo Tucker, Evelyn Preer, Flournoy Miller, and Paul Robeson, among many others.

Charles Gilpin was best known for his stage work, but ‘Ten Nights in a Barroom’ (1926) raised him to nationwide stardom in the African American community. Lorenzo Tucker is remembered to this day as ‘The Black Valentino’, admired for his dark and athletic complexion, and a darling of African American films—especially Oscar Micheaux’s, of which he did 18.

‘The First Lady of the Screen’ was Evelyn Preer’s nickname, and for good reason. She was a stage and film actress, as well as a jazz and blues singer who captivated the American public from the 1910s well into the 1930s. By most historical standards, Ms Preer was the first black actress to earn popularity and celebrity, appearing in pivotal movies and stage productions, including ‘The Chip Woman’s Fortune’ by Willis Richardson, widely regarded as the first dramatic play by an African American playwright to be produced on Broadway.

EVELYN PREER IN ‘WITHIN OUR GATES’ (1920), ©MICHEAUX BOOK & FILM COMPANY

Flournoy Miller was one of the seminal figures of Black Broadway, earning a Tony nod for his performances, renowned as a vaudevillian entertainer alongside Aubrey Lyles and as Slim Perkins in ‘The Bronze Buckaroo’ (1939). But when it comes to astonishing greatness, one need to look no further than the magnificent Paul Robeson, a bass baritone with exquisite thespian talents who turned Eugene O’Neill’s plays into otherworldly masterpieces. Of course, given the difficult times he was born into, Mr Robeson became not only famous for his cinematic contributions but also notorious for his Cold-War-era advocacy for human rights. The latter, sadly expected, led to the eventual ruin of his illustrious career, though he remains today an everlasting symbol of Black American pride and consciousness.

I have to mention Francine Everett, dubbed ‘the most beautiful woman in Harlem’ and one of the most beautiful black actresses to grace the silver screen with her hypnotic presence. Ms Everett was one of the more frequent credits in race films, preferred by black audiences to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge because she never transformed her screen persona into something more aloof, designed to please white audiences. In fact, she insisted on keeping her warmth and down-to-earth nature best evoked in Spencer Williams’s ‘Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.’ (1946).

FRANCINE EVERETT IN ‘DIRTY GERTIE FROM HARLEM U.S.A.’ (1946), ©SACK AMUSEMENT ENTERPRISES

Let us not forget Herb Jeffries, either, who once sang with Duke Ellington’s orchestra and can be easily admired as a singing cowboy in several black-cast westerns for Richard C. Kahn, a white producer—‘The Bronze Buckaroo’ pops up again for this. And the Moses sisters, first noticed as Cotton Club chorus dancers, should also be applauded. Lucia Lynn Moses can be seen in ‘The Scar of Shame’ (1929), produced by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, and Ethel Moses appears in Oscar Micheaux’s ‘Birthright’ (1938).

Of Early Black American Filmmakers

There were restrictions that made filmmaking more challenging for black artists in the Jim Crow era. Few businessmen were willing to invest in black-made films—even the interracial endeavours had their share of financial hiccups due to racism. One consequence of restricted budgets was that filmmakers would frequently shoot outside the studios and turned to nonprofessional actors alongside the professional leads. The results are mesmerizing today because we’re given shots of real streets, shops, churchgoers, and many other elements of Black American communities.

Going back to Oscar Micheaux’s ‘Body and Soul’, where Paul Robeson’s false preacher delivers a passionate sermon to a congregation filmed on set, the director adds snippets of real churchgoers in the rural landscape, appealing directly to the people it aims to represent. ‘The Blood of Jesus’ (1941) by Spencer Williams may be a fiction film, but its narrative is built around elongated scenes of religious practices performed by the very real Reverend R.L. Robertson and the Heavenly Choir in the company of members of the Texas community in which the story was shot.

‘THE BLOOD OF JESUS’ (1941), ©AMEGRO FILMS

Delving deeper into the aspect of realism presented by race films, one will find home movies of Reverend Solomon Sir Jones included in the ‘Pioneers of African American Cinema’ collection. The Reverend was a Baptist preacher of Oklahoma who documented black communities across the United States from 1924 to 1928, painting them as bold clusters of self-determination. Other unique documents of Black Cinema include films by James and Eloyce Gist, which are fictionalized biblical parables used for demonstration during religious sermons. ‘Hell-Bound Train’ of 1930 is one such production.

Zora Neale Hurston’s contributions are an integral part of the Criterion selection, as her anthropological fieldwork non-fiction movies offer splendid images of late ‘20s’ Alabama and Florida, and of the Gullah people from a Sea Island community in South Carolina, dated about two decades later. The latter can be connected to Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ (1991).

STILL FROM COMMANDMENT KEEPER CHURCH, BEAUFORT SOUTH CAROLINA (1940), BY ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Of Stories Lost in History

Unfortunately, one too many gems of Black American cinema are lost. Bits and pieces can be found in archives and the aforementioned Pioneers collection, including a few surviving fragments of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s last film. Lincoln Motion Picture Company was one of the first race film producers, owned by George and Noble Johnson. You will remember the latter as the earliest of black movie stars and a renowned character actor in Hollywood.

Four minutes of ‘By Right of Birth’ (1921) remain today, but each frame is incredible, the whole piece filled with comedy, romance, action, and intrigue—not an easy feat to accomplish on film in a medium that young. Another endangered work is ‘Regeneration’ (1923) by Richard E. Norman, a high seas thriller whose nitrate decomposition is a heart-breaking reminder of what became of most silent films. Mr Norman is fondly remembered as one of the few white filmmakers who devoted his career to black-oriented movies and hired black casts for his productions. Survival rates are even lower for Black American films, for which fewer copies were made.

Ultimately, none of the films signed by the earliest black filmmakers of the 1910s have made it. Works by George W. Broome, William Foster, Hunter C. Haynes, and Peter P. Jones are forever lost, which makes what we do have all the more precious and important, not only for Black American culture but for our entire civilization, where cinema is concerned.

POSTER FOR ‘REGENERATION’ (1923), ©NORMAN FILM MANUFACTURING COMPANY

Of Risky and Complex Racialized Performances

Early Black American cinema, both black- and white-produced, was not without its blunders and controversial scenes. Take ‘Two Knights of Vaudeville’ (1915), for example, a comedy produced by the white-owned Historical Feature Film Company from Chicago that shamelessly flaunts racist tropes. Oddly enough, it’s also a surprisingly interesting depiction of the vaudevillian stage and an imagined all-black performance space. With comedy especially prone to criticism, it was no surprise that the Chicago Defender railed against the producers for their ‘buffoonish portrayals’. The paper went even further and proclaimed that they ‘want clean Race pictures or none at all.’

Ebony Film Co. were also heavily criticized by the Black American press for some of their general-release comedies—good examples being ‘Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled’ (1918) and ‘A Reckless Rover’ (1918), despite having respected African American businessman Luther J. Pollard at the helm. Once again, the Chicago Defender warned their readers: ‘Keep your money in your pocket and save that dime as well as your self-respect.’

Oscar Micheaux does not evade critique, either. One might have trouble to reconcile some of his ‘30s works with his noble portrait as a ‘race man’. After all, in ‘The Darktown Revue’ (1931), one of his first sound projects, the filmmaker incorporates black actors in blackface makeup. To contemporary viewers, this and ‘Ten Minutes to Live’ (1932) may be less palatable. Yet such snippets of Black American cinema give us a broad picture of the many tensions that persisted in the industry at the time. Micheaux’s motivations are not easily discerned, especially since films like ‘The Darktown Revue’ function on now-decrepit and compromised aesthetics.

‘THE DARKTOWN REVUE’ (1931), ©MICHEAUX FILM

Early African American film history remains plagued by unknowns. There is still so much for us to rediscover, to study, and to better understand, not only about the movies themselves but about their cast members and production crews, too. Alas, race films’ decline occurred in the late 1940s, mostly because of the increasingly racist policies enforced by the American government, leading to frustrating segregationist measures that almost killed Black Cinema. Fortunately, 1964 brought forth the Civil Rights Act. With it came fundamental changes, but without these earlier filmmakers, none of the modern productions would be what they are today.

Race films continue to inform black filmmaking, with the collective experiences of its audiences at its very core.

The post A Study of Black American Cinema: The First Half appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

Cinematic History: Defining Moments in Japanese Cinema, 1958-1988

Jules R. Simion — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 07:00:11 +0000

‘Sansho the Bailiff’, 1954

A mother’s sorrowful call echoes across time and space in Kenji Mizoguchi’s mid-century masterpiece, a scene that is ultimately enhanced by the director’s use of a near-infinite expanse. ‘Sansho the Bailiff’ is a burning drama centred on a family torn apart by medieval brutality. Two children were kidnapped and sold into slavery on the Japanese mainland. They’re now grown, and we only learn that their mother is still alive when we see her atop a hill, gazing out into the distance and toward the mainland, as she calls out their names. ‘Anzu… Zushio…’

The men have taken other names, in the meantime, which further adds to this moment’s poignancy. Mizoguchi’s decision to accentuate the sound of the children’s names—the extension of the vowels, in particular, seems to evoke the vast space and years that separate these three characters. The affecting transience suggested here of individual lives in the face of history ends up resonating with what is arguably one of the most emotionally wrenching sound snippets in Asian cinema.

‘SANSHO THE BAILIFF’ (1954), ©DAIEI STUDIOS

‘I Live in Fear (aka Record of a Living Being)’, 1955

Dr Harada must judge the mental competence of Nakajima, a foundry owner who is desperate to leave Japan before what he considers an inevitable nuclear holocaust. It’s a moral dilemma for the judge, really, as he represents the typical bourgeoisie of that era. He fails to understand that this particular problem cannot be resolved in clinical terms of ‘sanity’ or ‘insanity’. On the opposite side of the ideological spectrum in Akira Kurosawa’s ethically and morally loaded drama is Nakajima, who is best described as ‘designed to simply take everything too far’.

In the final shot, Kurosawa demonstrates his ability to condense the overall theme of the film into standalone images of extraordinary resonance. On the left of the screen, we’ve got Harada walking down a staircase. He’s leaving the asylum where Nakajima has been committed. On the right, Nakajima’s mistress walks along a corridor, though she is framed as if moving toward the top of the screen. An unchangeable, descending old man is juxtaposed yet separated from a woman ascending—the latter gives Nakajima money and makes it clear that she has no interest in having him acknowledge that he’s the father of her child. This entire moment is an overlap of pieces that boil down to one hard truth. Asako, the mistress, is the truly ‘Living Being’, not Nakajima, for she is motivated by something other than self-interest.

‘I LIVE IN FEAR’ (1955), ©TOHO COMPANY

‘When a Woman Ascends the Stairs’, 1960

Mikio Naruse’s film is artistically defined by the narrow confines of space in which its leading lady is forced to dwell—and by confines, I mean not only physical tight spots but also social and emotional. As Keiko feels the world turn in a moment of incredible expressive power in what I’m comfortable defining as the climax of ‘When a Woman Ascends the Stairs’, the character, the plot, the setting, and the camera movement merge and become one.

The staircase itself is as narrow as a coffin and dimly lit. It’s an integral part of her tiny world at Ginza, where Keiko begins to realize that she is no longer young yet still a prisoner, still stuck in cramped spaces, unable to… ascend. She’s got debts to pay, a family to support. Her only choice is to keep smiling while she tries to find her way out. When she is finally out in the open, climbing a hill in the Tokyo suburbs, we’re briefly fooled into thinking that this is it. Keiko’s true freedom is right at the top of the mound. Alas, here, she learns that her supposed escape route has been foiled. The camera doesn’t stop, moving with Keiko and studying the panoramic views that have been missing from the movie until now. For the first time, the CinemaScope frame is bursting with a landscape, yet Keiko looks out at the endless possibilities—of which none are nor ever will be hers.

‘WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS’ (1960), ©TOHO COMPANY

‘The Mad Fox’, 1962

Because he’d taken to using an extremely diverse range of styles, Tomu Uchida had yet to make his mark on the West. His films were remarkable pieces of cinema, of course, but Americans and Europeans had yet to adjust to his multitude of narrative and audio-visual elements. Nevertheless, ‘The Mad Fox’ propelled him to international fame because of its surprisingly singular style. It’s a widescreen period piece about love and betrayal, heightening artificiality with stunning results.

We’re mesmerized by the Van Gogh yellow fields and papier-mâché décor, charmed by the fairy tale vixens and even animated flames. The hero of the story surrenders unto madness, delving into a finale that is downright theatrical. Realizing that his dreams of love and happiness were nothing more than illusions, his whole world falls apart—quite literally, as the stage-scenery-house in which he lived them collapses in on itself. In this singular fusion of film and theatre, Mr Uchida offers an eye-popping, hysterically colourful fantasy that delves into the protagonist’s mind before he tops it off with a literal and astonishing breakdown.

‘THE MAD FOX’ (1962), ©TOEI KYOTO

‘Tokyo Drifter’, 1966

Seijun Suzuki was better known for his struggle between genre and art. In contrast, this film symbolizes his career shift and foreshadows the following year’s ‘Branded to Kill’, which was deemed ‘incomprehensible’ by Nikkatsu boss Kyusaku Hori and led to the director’s ousting. However, the fan protests resulting from his dismissal became representative of a period’s end in Japanese cinema—the death of the studio era, to be specific. ‘Tokyo Drifter’ was pretty much the catalyst, and one scene from it stands as the most memorable.

In this gangster masterpiece, Tetsu walks down an exceptionally narrow corridor before the final battle. Geometric, emblematic spaces define the film, courtesy of art director Takeo Kimura, in direct opposition to Tetsu’s own nature. He only has one chance to get this right. He counts out the steps he must run along the rail line before firing the fatal shot. In the climax, Tetsu desperately needs room to move, and so emerging from that corridor to finish the job is the right choice—much like Seijun’s own career choices were risky but ultimately led to greater successes.

‘TOKYO DRIFTER’ (1966), ©NIKKATSU

‘A Man Vanishes’, 1967

The moment we realize that we’re no longer watching a documentary is a key point in the evolution of Japanese cinema, made possible by Shohei Imamura’s unyielding filmmaking vision. Orson Welles pulled off something relatively similar later in 1973 with ‘F Is for Fake’, where he promised to tell only the truth for precisely an hour, then swiftly slipping back into magic and lies. Yet Imamura’s shape-shifting of reality is even more enticing, since the film begins as a documentary. A promise of factual truths has already been made, and it doesn’t have an expiration date.

But as Yoshie the faithful wife persists in a rigorous search of her missing husband, taking us to a tea house toward the end of the movie, we learn that the man may have last been seen with another woman. A moment later, Imamura can be seen in the shot. Someone tells him something. ‘OK, strike the set’, he replies, and we cut directly to a scene where stage hands knock down hardboard walls. We’re on a set! Somewhere along the investigative thread of ‘A Man Vanishes’, Yoshie lost interest in finding her husband and became enamoured with Imamura.

‘A MAN VANISHES’ (1967), ©IMAMURA PRODUCTIONS

‘Minamata: The Victims and Their World’, 1972

Noriaki Tsuchimoto was a law-school graduate and student activist before discovering his passion for filmmaking, which he approached with a clear socio-political vision of the role that cinema and the media might have. Mr Tsuchimoto was one of the first who recognized the soft power that this medium held, if wielded properly. He’s best known for his work documenting the mercury poisoning effects on Minamata, a fishing community on Kyushu’s west coast, where he made over fifteen films across decades.

‘Minamata: The Victims and Their World’ is deeply troubling and extremely important to its genre, as the director is intent on documenting the daily lives of those devastated by exposure to such poisonous industrial waste. He refuses to gloss over the banality and tranquillity of their lives while also underlining their gradual radicalization. In one scene, the villagers confront the corporation responsible—a startling and painful event to watch. The victims desperately plead for any kind of reaction to their situation, while Chisso’s representatives carry through their shareholder meeting without responding, publicly and shamelessly choosing to ignore the death and disfiguration that their company directly caused. Sadness and indignation can’t not move us at this point.

‘MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD’ (1972), ©HIGASHI PRODUCTIONS

‘In the Realm of the Senses’, 1975

One of the few truly hardcore art films came out of Japan, boldly signed by Nagisa Oshima. ‘My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it’, the director once said. In his mind, it was nothing more than a wasteland of samurai epics, bleak parlour dramas, and the occasional monster. His movies thus determined to be packed with all the vim, passion, and petty cruelties of a less mellow culture. They became cult icons of Asia and beyond. Oshima’s work gleefully coincided with the relaxation of censorship laws against pornography in the mid-Seventies, and he did not hesitate to take a chance and finally treat sex on screen with the unrestricted realism that it deserved.

Enter ‘In the Realm of the Senses’, an adaptation of the true story of a prostitute named Sada Abe, who was arrested in 1936 whilst wandering down the street with her lover’s severed genitals tucked in her kimono. Naturally, the end result was a hardcore allegory about obsession, sadomasochism, and the inherent splendour of death and bloodshed. But the film never aimed to just thrill its viewers. It was also one massive middle finger dedicated to the mainstream’s cultural taboos on certain aspects of eroticism.

‘IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES’ (1976), ©OSHIMA PRODUCTIONS

‘The Man Who Stole the Sun’, 1979

Kazuhiko Hasegawa is famous for two thoroughly underrated gems of Japanese cinema in the Seventies. One of them is ‘The Man Who Stole the Sun’. Masquerading as a dazzling and provocative action epic, this particular work manages to impress through its handling of nuclear fear. The anti-hero learns to quit worrying and embrace the bomb. It utilizes its action thriller template in a way I’ve not seen before, delivering a troubling combination of comedy and suspense slightly akin to John Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ (1962). However, that daring weirdness is precisely where the similarities end.

The story follows a high-school science teacher who manages to build an atomic bomb and demands… well, it turns out he’s not sure what he wants! A cat-and-mouse game with a police inspector ensues—played brilliantly by action icon Bunta Sugawara, quickly evolving into a counter-culture satire that whacks us with its merciless punchline. Our anti-hero is stumped and ends up asking for a cancelled Rolling Stones concert to take place. My favourite and, at the same time, deeply troubling part is watching the teacher as he knowingly cuddles up with his nuclear ball for a bit of shut-eye.

‘THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN’ (1979), ©TRISTONE ENTERTAINMENT INC.

‘Director Yasujiro Ozu’ by Shigehiko Hasumi Is Published, 1983

This was easily the book that singlehandedly influenced modern Japanese cinema, yet it is exceptionally rare for a critical study of a film director to have such an impact on not only how movies are discussed, but also how they are made. Mr Hasumi, a scholar of French literature at the University of Tokyo, accomplished just that.

His most notable achievement is countering conceptions of the legendary Yasujiro Ozu as either a minimalist or the ‘most Japanese’ of directors. To do that, Mr Hasumi dug deep into the director’s basis in cinema and argued plainly that anything Japanese was less a reflection of Japan than a product of film and Ozu’s unique manipulation of visual and narrative motifs. Ultimately, the book forever altered future filmmakers’ impression of Yasujiro Ozu. The likes of Masayuki Suo and Naoto Takenaka chose to emulate Hasumi’s version of Ozu, as opposed to the real one. Many post-Eighties directors who studied under Hasumi followed a similar path, and his influence can be easily spotted in their films.

LEOS CARAX AND SHIGEHIKO HASUMI, ©MICHIKO YOSHITAKE

But what I perceived as simply the greatest shift of all was the emergence of ‘Akira’ (1988). From that moment on, it became clear that Japan’s most valuable export would soon become the animation—the beloved anime, specifically, that went on to birth entire cultures online and across the globe. It started with a bang, quite literally, in ‘Akira’, and it hasn’t stopped since.

In the end, Japan has had nothing but good and wonderful things to give us, in its own definitive and impossible-to-confuse style. From its black-and-white minimalism to its thespian explosions of colour and its often incredibly ambitious themes, it’s plain to see how Japan made its indelible mark on the silver screen. Film is but a medium, and the Japanese proved that it is how you use it that makes it a triumph.

The post Cinematic History: Defining Moments in Japanese Cinema, 1958-1988 appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

Cinematic History: Defining Moments in Japanese Cinema, 1926-1953

Jules R. Simion — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 13:34:14 +0000

‘A Page of Madness’, 1926

I’m not the only one who thinks that the opening sequence from Teinosuke Kinguasa’s film deserves its spotlight as a defining moment in Japanese cinema. Sure, it shows us a car arriving under a heavy torrential rain and a figure getting out. Nothing exceptional here, at first sight, since we never learn who that person is. But it is the technique that is noteworthy, particularly for the silent film era. The rhythmic montage of rain, tires, stairs, a telephone pole, lightning, and windows are all combined through cuts and double exposure and upside-down imaging. Its partial motivation is that this is a mental hospital, as the film begins, and the next hundred shots serve to draw the viewer into the delusions of a dancing inmate.

It combines the wild body movements with extrasensory incantations of music into a climactic frenzy of shots of only one frame each. Its French impressionism influence is clear, but Japanese critics were quick to praise it as surpassing even the best of contemporary European cinema—though some did complain about other melodramatic elements of the film. Surprisingly, Kinugasa didn’t take the movie with him when he travelled to Europe in 1928. It was thought lost until the director found two print copies in rice cans, lost in his old house, much later in 1971. It was nothing short of a miracle that it survived.

‘A PAGE OF MADNESS’ (1926)

‘I Was Born, But…’, 1932

Filmmaker and author Mark Cousins once said that Yasujiro Ozu was ‘cinema’s great master of resignation’, which makes ‘I Was Born, But…’ such a surprise since it’s full of joy and playfulness. Then again, Ozu was only 29 when he made this silent film. It was his 23^rd, and he had yet to discover the artistic sadness that would become his signature style. Harold Lloyd’s American comedy influence can be observed here.

The movie show at the boss’s house is a particularly delightful scene, as the sons go from the shock of viewing their father as he debases himself in an amateur movie to understanding that there is a hierarchy to this world, and that not everybody gets to be at the top. The film’s overall subject is suburban Japan and the family of a salaryman—each superbly played by Tatsuo Saito, Hideo Sugawara, and Tomio Aoki. The freshness of its theme is the main appeal, along with the exquisite acting, making ‘I Was Born, But…’ the first of Ozu’s surviving films that goes on to define him as one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers.

‘I WAS BORN, BUT…’ (1932), ©JANUS FILMS

‘Takadanobaba Duel’, 1937

A strong example of the virtuoso flourishes of pre-war Japanese cinema comes with Yasubei’s run towards the duel in Masahiro Makino and Hiroshi Inagaki’s splendid film. Yasubei is a masterless samurai who enjoys drinking and fighting perhaps a little too much. He’s beyond tipsy upon his return home when he finds a letter from his uncle Kayono, who has written in hopes of receiving his assistance in a duel against eighteen men.

Usually, a dash such as Yasubei’s would be delivered in a few simple shots or through parallel editing, at most. But the Japanese filmmakers chose to showcase their directorial skills through what David Bordwell calls ‘flourishes’, snippets of stylistic excess that can offer viewing pleasure on top of the narrative progress. This samurai’s run to the duel is one of the better examples, with a camera looking up at a raised road that shows him and his neighbours running in a string of pans. Thirty-five pans, all from the same camera position. It may seem that Yasubei is running over the same road but in slight differences, combined with the increased tempo in cutting to deliver the urgency of his sprint. Mr Inagaki, in particular, was clearly a master of montage.

‘TAKADANOBABA DUEL’ (1937), ©NIKKATSU

The Film Shortage of 1941

On 16^th August 1941, the Japanese Empire was already at war with China and almost totally reliant on foreign film stock. Ryuzo Kawamo, chief of Section Five within the Information Bureau, told the major studio heads that the government did not have a single foot of film left to give to the private industry. While it served more as a threat rather than a directive, the government did decide to take advantage of its authority mainly under the Film Law of 1939 in a bid to establish state control over raw materials. The move meant to force a reorganization of the film industry and to bring it under the government’s unflinching domination.

By September, the bureaucrats and the filmmakers hashed out an agreement to set limits on the number and length of films that could be made. It also reduced the number of fiction-film-oriented studios from ten to a mere three, and the number of other producers from hundreds to an even more dismal one. In the government’s opinion, the agreement served to make the Japanese film industry more efficient, at the time notorious for its inefficiencies and over-production habits. It ended up transforming the entire production process and ushering the golden age of Japanese cinema in the ‘50s.

‘A Hen in the Wind’, 1948

It’s one of the lesser known oeuvres of Yasujiro Ozu, but it is crucial to his overall body of work, which is more variegated than one might think. While it does hold a trove of slow and harmonious films, there are some remarkably livelier works of silent film in Ozu’s portfolio. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese master is generally and superficially associated with his later, refined style, despite his earlier works being full of unexpected moments of cinematic art.

While it’s obviously an ‘Occupation’ film, ‘A Hen in the Wind’ does not glorify the concept of patriotic reconstruction, choosing to focus on a human-scale compromise instead. In ‘A Hen in the Wind’, a wife resorts to prostitution to cover her son’s hospital bill while waiting for the husband to return from war. When he comes back and learns about her shameful methods, he cannot forgive the woman and pushes her down the stairs. After lying immobile and crooked for a while, she slowly manages to climb back up. Only then is he willing to consider reconciliation.

‘A HEN IN THE WIND’ (1948), ©SHOCHIKU

‘Life of Oharu’, 1952

Kenji Mizoguchi’s mid-century film art reaches a superior level of mastery. The elaborately detailed narrative voyage of an arresting heroine is lifted in a special moment that reveals the Japanese director’s long-take technique and the enormous amount of talent combined with practice required to deliver such a scene. In it, only a few steps superbly link past and present in muted sunlight.

Late in the story, Oharu, the film’s principal character, has been reduced to playing the samisen and begging after many difficult and otherwise twisting events in her life. We see her sitting in front of a gate, and she gets up. She’s reacting to something, moving left to right as she climbs a small slope. We’re then transported into her point of view and see what Oharu saw—her son. It’s only a glimpse of him before the camera returns to track with her back to her spot by the gate. The sequence lasts about five minutes, and it contains only nine shots, of which the last is decidedly beautiful with the quiet and unexpected materialization of her past within her present. It is almost magical and raised to perfection through Mizoguchi’s stellar command of camera movement and fixed composition.

‘LIFE OF OHARU’ (1952), ©KOI PRODUCTIONS

‘Ikiru’, 1952

After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and thus making history with ‘Rashomon’, Akira Kurosawa went on to deliver ‘Ikiru’ that same year—a film that provides the best evidence of the Japanese director’s ability to communicate challenging ideas through daring, large-scale structures of narrative and image.

While there are plenty of scenes that illustrate his brilliant vision and craftsmanship, what truly stands out is the audacity of their overall design. Much like ‘High and Low’, ‘Ikiru’ is divided into two parts of unequal length, at first focusing on a man who acts on previously suppressed humanist impulses before abruptly renouncing them as the story is taken over by a new and much larger set of characters. The first segment of ‘Ikiru’ follows Kanji Watanabe, a man who discovers that he will die of cancer. It ends with him choosing to fight alongside people who are demanding the realization of a socially useful act—transforming a patch of wasteland into a playground. This is what he hopes will give his life meaning. The second delivers the varied responses to his successful campaign after his death.

The final scenes suggest that his impact was minimal despite his good intentions. It is the culture that demands more radical changes. Its problems cannot be solved by liberal reforms and the virtues of a few decent individuals.

‘IKIRU’ (1952), ©TOHO COMPANY

‘Tokyo Story’, 1953

We’ve just passed the middle of the 20^th century. The Second World War has ended, and Japan has already been making an impressive comeback, from a cultural point of view. Its participation in the global conflict would take years to slither into the background, though it would never be forgotten. Alas, from that darkness came the golden era of Japanese cinema, and there are few films that better encompass its ingeniousness and grandeur than Yasujiro Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’.

Oddly enough, one scene stands out among the others. It is a small yet critical moment, superbly understated and yet emotionally startling. The mother has been sitting outdoors with her husband. She hesitates for barely a second as she rises to her feet. That is all—there is no camera movement, no cut to a close-up, no reaction shot whatsoever. Tomi, the mother, is perfectly fine, as is her husband. They’ve only been talking for a while, and they’ve just gotten up. Only, one of them did it slightly easier than the other.

‘TOKYO STORY’ (1953), ©SHOCHIKU

In life, a passing moment has the power to foretell major changes for a family. Still, with so much flowing around us, it is difficult to observe the fleeting details, to truly feel what it means. The art of Ozu’s cinema offers the extraordinary alertness and brilliance needed to see such things. He takes stuff out, rather than put stuff in. He helps us notice the precious elements by removing the distractions.

I can think of no better defining moment that truly encapsulates the artistry of mid-century Japanese cinema. Ozu’s beautiful minimalism stays with us as Tomi’s knees bend, and our hearts fall.

The post Cinematic History: Defining Moments in Japanese Cinema, 1926-1953 appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

Cinematic History and Its Defining Decades: 1994-2004

Jules R. Simion — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 07:00:28 +0000

1994: For the Love of Classics

In the early days of Joel and Ethan Coen, exploiting the ridiculous to depict the rise of America as we know it was a new technique for intelligent comedy. In ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ (1994), the Coens envisage Dwight Eisenhower’s United States as a gargantuan bureaucracy that is hungrily devoted to the pursuit of money, power, and fame. Using imagery and editing often reminding us of Soviet classics such as Eisenstein, the directors seem to have some crazy fun by poking the near-totalitarian conformism that more or less defined Post-War America. The film commands repeat viewings for its subtle and resonant use of circular motifs—the star of these being the hula hoop, of course.

‘THE HUDSUCKER PROXY’ (1994), ©POLYGRAM FILMED ENTERTAINMENT

The debut of Turner Classic Movies marked the beginning of cinephilia’s mainstreaming. It started out as a low-concept cable premise, the showcase channel of a gazillionaire’s back catalogue of film titles, and as a competitor for the then-dominant American Movie Classics. It basically turned Ted Turner, purveyor of hideously colorized home video, into a friend of movie lovers worldwide. Turner Classic Movies also brought forth the value of considering a film’s topic thanks to the intros and outros of Robert Osborne. TCM was not a hub of revolutionary film criticism, however.

To this day, its selections aim for an institutional, high quality approach, while Osborne’s commentary is peppered Hollywood gossip, at best. But the high standards of the networks and its demands of a 24-hour cycle have led to a broad selection of film titles, including silent and foreign language pictures.

©RICK MAIMAN

One of the best things to come out of 1994, however, was the exquisitely pulpy ‘Pulp Fiction’ by Quentin Tarantino. The watch monologue especially represents the uniquely talented director at his best. Here, Christopher Walken’s Captain Koons delivers a watch to Butch, the kid who will grow up to become the boxer Butch portrayed by Bruce Willis. He explains that the watch belonged to Butch’s father, passed down from his grandfather and great-grandfather.

In western cultures, particularly, the watch a son inherits from his father is an item of great significance, representing the phallus transferred from one patriarchal generation to another. The history of this specific timepiece is also the history of 20^th century America, from WWI to Vietnam, represented by its wearers. Then Tarantino has Koons expose the true nature of his symbolism by revealing that Butch’s father hid the watch ‘in the one place he knew he could hide something’. That place where the sun doesn’t shine.

‘PULP FICTION’ (1994), ©MIRAMAX

1996: The Birth of DVD

A very Nineties sort of thing was to use music not as a soundtrack or as a comment, but rather as a pure stimulant. Danny Boyle does an exquisite job of that with Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ in ‘Trainspotting’ (1996). The film itself was mostly about the squalors and fitful glories of heroin abuse, but the timing of its release and its grimy, buzzing energy, along with its use of the aforementioned song pushed ‘Trainspotting’ at the peak of an emerging culture—Generation Ecstasy.

But 1996 had something greater to give besides Danny Boyle’s oeuvre. On 1^st November, the first DVD players went on sale in Japan. This advent of digital video disks (or digital versatile disks) was a case study in the way simple marketplace competition can enrich an entire culture. At the time, studios were faced with the challenge of getting their sceptical home viewers to upgrade from their trusted VHS tapes to a whole new format. The solution came in two equally convincing forms.

The first signalled the beginning of the end for the likes of Blockbuster Video, claiming that the VHS format was garbage and the rental-store economy that supported it was insane. The second proposed that by increasing the value of home video, one could turn the DVD into a sell-through rather than a rental product. It led to an explosion of commentary tracks, outtakes, alternate versions, critical histories and so on. Read-only media like the DVD ultimately expanded the participatory element of entertainment, and this culture of engagement is one of the twentieth century’s final gifts to us.

1997: The Inestimable Value of Pam Grier

When looking at Quentin Tarantino’s career, one would have to admit that his greatest film is also the one with believably human characters. Each of his works proves why he’s the king of pop-culture pastiche, but only ‘Jackie Brown’ (1997) comes fitted with a heart of its own. Here, Tarantino manages to conceive two characters who resemble human beings with a believable emotional life.

‘Jackie Brown’ captures our attention through the love story between its titular stewardess and the bail bondsman, a love story that also serves as the meeting point between two styles of medium cool—‘70s blaxploitation, as represented by Pam Grier, and ‘60s thriller, offered by Robert Forster. It is a counterpoint, as well, to the ironic detachment that usually surrounds Tarantino’s classically meta-characters, though Samuel L. Jackson does a fine job of holding a banner for them as the eccentric, vampiric gangster.

There is something about ‘Jackie Brown’ that just stands out, even after all these years. My guess is that it comes from the uncommon respect with which Tarantino treats Ms Grier, as well as the remarkable shots with which she leads the entire movie—her mature beauty and her aura of self-respect both captured with admiring tenderness.

1998: Of Long and Complex Opening Shots

As with previous studies of cinematic history, it would be damn near impossible to dissect every movie moment that made its mark. Sacrifices must be made, along with painful cuts. But I wouldn’t be able to skip past this year without mentioning the tour de force that is the opening scene of Brian De Palma’s ‘Snake Eyes’ (1998).

It’s one of the longest and most difficult shots ever brought to the big screen—full of characters and anonymous moving crowds, rife with movements in so many directions that the viewer eventually forgets it’s a single continuous tracking, panning, and craning shot. Mr De Palma, author of ‘Dressed to Kill’ (1980), ‘Blow Out’ (1981), and ‘Body Double’ (1984), seems obsessed with telling his audience to look harder, look better, look twice.

As Miguel Marias once wrote, ‘you think you have understood more than you did, while you are unable to see much of what is shown to you, which you either underestimate or overlook or forget or, on the contrary, take for granted as the truth, jumping to conclusions or overinterpreting details’.

1999: A Most Extraordinary Year

Incredible things came at the end of the 20^th century. Wonderful things. Cinematic masterpieces and turning points in this ever-evolving medium. One scene worth mentioning as a mere hors d’oeuvre would be Dickie’s murder in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ (1999) by Anthony Minghella. Here, the director offers a superb portrait of class distinction and masculine violence—the latter fuelled by unrequited love. It builds slowly from a subtle disagreement through Dickie’s arrogant superiority clashing with Tom’s mortified self-negation, culminating with an instant of uncontrollable release. Tom doesn’t hate Dickie, he worships him. And his god has just declared him unfit. In a sense, the killing is less murder and more suicide, as Tom, the proficient imitator, will now take Dickie’s passport and transform himself.

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999), lacked critical and commercial support to a level that proved just how low the cineplex had sunk in that era. Its mere existence was an insult to the audience, who’d expected to see something flashier and easier to digest from the likes of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, whom they’d drooled over during ‘Days of Thunder’ (1990). Kubrick’s fluid camera work lulled viewers. The modulated performances felt wasteful to them. The portrayal of New York at Christmas as a lonely city of sexual conspirators seemed fake. In a sense, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was the death of the auteur film made to look like a marketing accident—an insult to the director who passed away four months before its theatrical release.

George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace’ (1999) may have lacked in many other aspects when compared to the first three films of his Star Wars saga, but its one redeeming quality rests in the lightsabre duel. It was sorely needed after the anaemic confrontation between Sir Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and David Prowse’s Darth Vader. The final Jedi showdown of ‘The Phantom Menace’ is poetry in motion, put together by the combined synergy of stunt coordinator Nick Gillard, assistant Andreas Petrides, and actor/stuntman/martial arts champion Ray Park. Not only did they give the lightsabre duel the treatment it deserved, they delivered the most invigorating example of swordsmanship in Western cinema since the age of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, further enhanced by John Williams’s nervous score.

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez created ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999), propelled to worldwide fame thanks to cinema’s newly discovered cousin, an adjunct and a marketing tool rolled up into one: the Internet. Much like James Hogg’s publicity stunt of 1823 regarding ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, ‘The Blair Witch Project’ came to us claiming to be the lost footage of three filmmakers who mysteriously disappeared after an encounter with something nebulous and supernatural in the woods. The film’s website and the tie-in pseudo-documentary ‘Curse of the Blair Witch’ further added value to the story with historical background that just made it feel so real. It represented the birth of the ‘found footage’ style that still works for the supernatural horror genre.

After the first computer-generated imagery made its debut with ‘Westworld’ (1973), and the virtual forms entered the public consciousness through ‘Tron’ (1982), the Wachowski Brothers took the art of special effects and computer graphics to a whole new level with ‘The Matrix’ (1999). Visual effects designer John Gaeta went to great lengths for this film’s ‘Bullet time’ money shot by attaching hundreds of still cameras to a snaky metal rig. Each of these units generated a single frame when fired in sequence, in a Muybridge-motion-study style, around a flailing or jumping actor. When the images were later stacked like a flipbook in computerized form, the result gave us Keanu Reeves’s Neo dodging bullets in slow motion while the viewers swirled around him like the eye of God. This moment changed the way cinema worked, making the unrealized potential of digital effects into a most wonderful reality.

2000: The Most Visually Stylish Films Arise

No one will ever forget the bamboo forest fight in Ang Lee’s ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ (2000). Each fight scene reveals a different emotion in this movie, and the bamboo grove moment between Chow Yun-fat’s Li Mu Bai and Zhang Ziyi’s Jen is truly exquisite. A number of elements—the rhythmic cutting, the music, the affective close-ups, the coming together in one move and drawing away, his enormous tenderness measured against her rebelliousness—they all turn this encounter of fighting skills into a love scene of sorts.

Equally enthralling, ‘In the Mood for Love’ (1999) by Wong Kar-Wai made movie magic with its subtle eroticism and artful visuals. Following two neighbours who discover their spouses’ extramarital affairs and get closer to one another, the Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker accomplishes something extraordinary by showing us how ‘it’s already happened’ before our eyes. But the summit of this masterpiece comes with the scenography and the prevailing colours which intensify the emotions, shamelessly yet elegantly suggestive of an erotic and passionate atmosphere. In the beginning, Mrs Chan’s dresses are mild in their design and palette, but once she and Mr Chow start seeing each other, warmer colours, of which red is predominant, begin to dominate the screen.

2002: The Mexican Cinema Revival

There have been great Mexican directors since the ‘30s, surely. Emilio Fernández, Fernando de Fuentes and Luis Buñuel are but three of the Latin-American filmmakers that have gifted us with great movie moments. However, Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ (2002) signifies a new era for Mexico’s film culture. Gael Garcia Bernal’s Julio and Diego Luna’s Tenoch kiss scene takes a dig at Mexican machismo and homophobia without any fear—in the film, it leads to the destruction of the male characters’ friendship.

In a country so completely divided by class most of all, where social mobility is extremely limited, the fallout from that kiss seems powered by class anxiety, as well. The young men’s friendship bridges an economic abyss in Mexican society. Therefore, it cannot survive. Far from being an Americanisation, ‘Y Tu Mamá También’ is one of the most revealing Mexican films ever made.

2004: 21st Century Cinema

After 2001, the world wasn’t the same again. Something happened after 9/11, something that weaved itself through the way stories were told. But none of the films inspired by those terrible events had a greater impact than Michael Moore’s documentary ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ (2004). And while moviegoers may have strong positive and negative opinions about the director, his filmmaking savvy should be appreciated once it’s considered alongside the overall thrust of his politics. His weakness for tendentious argument and first-person showboating should also be noted.

We all remember his rendition of George W. Bush in the schoolroom, however. It shows us a president who’s just been told the second plane has hit the Twin Towers, and he chooses to go ahead with his photo-op at a Florida school. Noting that Bush’s failure to do anything (even leave the room for information) lasted for almost seven minutes, Moore wonders if the vacation-loving president were wishing he’d gone to work more often. By the time this part of the monologue ends with a mention of the cuts that Bush applied to the FBI’s terrorism funding, the image of his paralysis has become indelible. I doubt it will ever lose its ghastly strength even now upon another viewing, long after the Bush administration has become history.

But let us not end this series on a sombre note. Instead, I invite you to remember Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunset’ (2004), starring the inimitable Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in two of their most memorable roles. Much like its predecessor, ‘Before Sunrise’ (1995), the film is focused on the fleeting hours, minutes, and seconds before Jesse and Celine must end their brief encounter. If the two were in a foreign place (Vienna) in the previous story, Jesse now finds himself on Celine’s territory in Paris, on a publicity tour that fictionalizes their previous experience.

It is the end that stands out. The cab is waiting, and a plane will soon be boarding, ready to take Jesse away, but he shows no sign of getting off Celine’s couch. Instead, he chooses to enjoy her mimicking of a performance by Nina Simone—a show in which the singer took ‘all the time in the world’. Suddenly, in this tension of a looming deadline, Jesse and Celine seem to have all kinds of time. The future is, once more, free and open to them.

The post Cinematic History and Its Defining Decades: 1994-2004 appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

Cinematic History and Its Defining Moments: 1983-1993

Jules R. Simion — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 11:00:47 +0000

1983: The Year of Satire and Cocaine

One of the most memorable films to come out of the Eighties was Martin Scorsese’s ‘The King of Comedy’ (1983), a dark satire that culminates with a truly epic moment between Martin Scorsese’s fame-hungry Rupert Pupkin and Jerry Lewis’s comic legend Jerry Langford, as the ardent desire for celebrity becomes a blatant invasion of privacy. This scene features Rupert uninvited in Jerry’s home and accompanied by Diahnne Abbott’s Rita, with an awkward conversation that escalates into something… extraordinary.

The modern sculptures it takes place around sort of lend it an air of Greek drama and grandiosity, with Jerry in his shorts and sneakers looking stoic and regal going against Rupert, with his little moustache and two-toned shoes—a jester prancing and foretelling a dawn of shamelessness as a personality cult soon to engulf the world. ‘I’m gonna be 50 times more famous than you!’ Rupert ends up yelling at Jerry, ultimately confusing talent with fame.

With ‘Scarface’ (1983), Brian De Palma offers a melodramatic, if not even opera-like extreme approach to the classic theme of the gangster. It centres on Tony Montana’s (Al Pacino) obsession with territorial control, mercilessly followed by the loss of this power. He’s a Cuban refugee who is intent on living his version of the American Dream by gaining absolute control over everyone and everything.

However, at the end of this extravagant rise and fall, shortly after snorting a literal mountain of cocaine, Tony Montana gives us an outrageously hyperbolic finale that ends in blood and bullets. It was considered vulgar and politically insensitive shortly after its release, yet it has withstood the test of time as a masterpiece of modern cinema that gives us the subversive thrill of watching a social microcosm explode.

1985: A Dystopian Dream

Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985) gave a whole new meaning to the term ‘dark comedy’. A burning science-fiction fantasy about a future gone many kinds of wrong, the film got off on a tremorous start when Universal Pictures, its American distributor, declared it a failure and refused to release it. Mr Gilliam, ever the stubborn and enterprising spirit, arranged press screenings anyway. Once the Los Angeles film critics declared it the best movie of the year, Universal relented.

In hindsight, it’s not difficult to understand why the studio had trouble seeing its potential. ‘Brazil’ steers clear of the regular commercial categories. The hero of this story, Sam, exquisitely portrayed by Jonathan Pryce, is a bureaucrat in a future society that might be considered totalitarian, if not for its endless stream of blunders and almost-cartoonish errors. He’s branded a terrorist, eventually, and goes through a series of harrowing experiences before he is saved—only to find out that his breathless escape was nothing more than a hallucination. Sam has surrendered unto the worst torture of all—the foolishness of hope.

1986: The Cinema of Strange

‘Blue Velvet’ (1986) is one of David Lynch’s best films, its ‘In Dreams’ scene best representing the director’s mastery of bizarre juxtaposition. Dean Stockwell’s Ben, hailed by Dennis Hopper’s Frank as ‘one suave f***er’, takes down a mobile mechanic’s light and uses it as a lounge singer’s microphone, lip-syncing to Roy Orbison’s classic ‘In Dreams’. It’s a signature of Lynch’s—taking easy listening melodies and presenting them in a manner that unmasks the fetishism, the obsession, and the dreamlike delirium that lingers behind their charming golden-oldie familiarity.

Ben is effeminate but lethal, his face covered in white kabuki makeup as he assaults Orbison’s song, projecting the entirety of his putrid soul into its soft, elusive, and twisted lyrics. The song is later replayed when Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey is savagely beaten by Frank’s goons.

It was also the year of John Woo. ‘A Better Tomorrow’ (1986) is the legendary director’s breakthrough film, in which he coins an elegant cinematic language that redesigns the Hong Kong gangster genre, propelling Chow Yun-Fat to international fame. In its most famous scene, Chow’s dashing gangster Mark lights his cigarette with a fake hundred-dollar bill before he enters a restaurant and delivers an almost musical performance in fighting the traitorous gangsters, his figure as feathery as Fred Astaire’s.

1987: Of Chinese Superstars and American Soldiers

Zhang Yimou’s first film, ‘Red Sorghum’ (1987) recorded an incredible international success and created one of the most well-regarded professional couplings in cinema altogether—for there are few as wonderful as Zhang Yimou and the arresting Gong Li. Of course, there was also a personal layer to this pair, as the two developed a long-lasting relationship despite Mr Zhang’s marriage, his wife refusing to grant him a divorce.

It was in ‘Red Sorghum’ that the world became familiar with 22-year-old Gong Li as the bride with a lustful smile in a crimson palanquin, forever transforming Chinese cinema. She was reunited with Zhang for two other great films, ‘Ju Dou’ (1990) and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ (1991), contributing to the director’s global fame and helping to usher in a new ‘star system à la chinoise’ that was easily exported to the West.

An iconic film of the Eighties—one that haunts its first viewers to this day, is Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987). It’s a powerful work of silver screen art, and this power is incredibly condensed into the closeup of the dying Vietcong woman. Kubrick has no military or wartime experience whatsoever, yet he delivers a gut-wrenching scene with the wounded sniper who begs for Matthew Modine’s Joker to finish her off. The hatred in her eyes is absolute, making this particular scene impossible to forget, especially once we see ‘Gomer Pile’ grinning insanely just before he shoots Sergeant Hartman.

In Brian De Palma’s ‘The Untouchables’ (1987), the showdown at the train station is a veritable work of art. It’s also a splendidly crafted update of a legendary silent-film sequence that ultimately demonstrates the perennial life force of pure visual storytelling. Ennio Morricone’s score gives it a final dash of authenticity. Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness and his partner, played by Andy Garcia, are determined to capture Al Capone’s bookkeeper. In David Mamet’s original screenplay, this was supposed to happen as the accountant’s train was pulling out of Chicago’s Union Station. Paramount stuttered at the cost of production, asking De Palma to shoot the whole scene inside.

Regarding himself as a visual stylist who cares not for where his plots come from, De Palma thus shows us why he’s one of cinema’s greatest borrowers by taking a cue from Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’ (1925) and refurbishing the ‘Odessa Steps’ scene for Eliot Ness through montage and alternating shots that inflate tension.

1988: The Rise of Anime and the Impact of Film on Real Life

Before Katsuhiro Otomo’s ‘Akira’ (1988), most Westerners considered Japanese animation to be cartoons like ‘Speed Racer’, kids’ stuff with technical shortcuts and annoying overdubs. But the Japanese director gifted his dystopian epic animation feature with a convoluted plot, plenty of graphic violence and hallucinatory visuals, a dollop of black humour, an incredible attention to detail and a minutely synched dialogue sprinkled with meditations on evolution, enlightenment, and mass destruction. In ‘Akira’, Tokyo exploded on 16^th June 1988, and the world was never the same again. ‘Akira’ was theatrically released on 16^th June 1988, and the real world was never the same again, either, as the Japanese animated feature paved the way for illustrious works such as Studio Ghibli’s ‘Spirited Away’ (2001) and ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995).

Meanwhile, in the United States, Errol Morris’s ‘The Thin Blue Line’ (1988), presented as a non-fiction film noir, was universally applauded as a masterpiece of unconventional documentary that ultimately got an innocent man out of prison. The filmmaker and private detective began his journey with ‘The Thin Blue Line’ by making inquiries about James Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist known as a star witness in major capital murder cases. After interviewing him and some of the felons he’d put on death row, Morris became fixated on Randall Adams, in particular, who resolutely swore he was innocent.

By combining talking-head interviews, re-enactments, photographic evidence, and Philip Glass’s hypnotic score, Morris created a visual poem of slowly surfacing evil that climaxes with David Harris, the teenager whose confession put Adams in prison in the first place, as he finally reveals the truth. Because of the evidence presented in this film, Randall Adams was released from jail in 1989.

1989: Of Avid and Blockbusters

The last year of the Eighties was a fruitful one. In April, Avid introduced the film industry to digital nonlinear editing with its Avid/1 Media Composer system, which revolutionized the postproduction process by ‘providing editors with a faster, more intuitive, and more creative way to work than was possible with traditional analogue linear methods’. It didn’t just change the filmmakers’ view on the editing process, it also changed the way films looked. Digital editing confirms the status of image and sound as data, freeing them from their material support, as they’re no longer dependent on strips of film and tape. This was the true birth of digital cinema.

Though cynically conceived, Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ (1989) was an absolute smash, generating five sequels, a new animated series, an animated movie, and billions of dollars’ worth of branded merchandise. It made George Lucas’s success with ‘Star Wars’ seem almost quaint by comparison. In the end, ‘Batman’ perfected the blockbuster as a product, a concept that was still new to the suits in Hollywood at the time. What Lucas’s film was to the Seventies, Burton’s was to the Eighties—an iconic distillation of its era, further named ‘the film of the decade’ by Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine.

The one moment that everyone remembers from James Cameron’s ‘The Abyss’ (1989) is the water tentacle. This set piece, organic rather than mechanic, was as revolutionary as the first sound in the moving pictures. Within months from its premiere, other ambitious movies moved to development, including Cameron’s ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991) and Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993), and they were built entirely around CGI creations. Back then, when the scene was shot, no one knew if the effect would work, so these CGI-dependent sequences were written in a way that made it easy to cut them out if the computer programmers failed to deliver the proper effect. The tentacle of ‘The Abyss’ basically kickstarted computer-generated graphics in cinema.

Spike Lee made history with ‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989), a defining moment for New Black Cinema. The director wrote, directed, and led the cast onscreen, conforming to the era’s do-it-yourself model of African American cinema—previously adopted by the likes of Oscar Micheaux in the Twenties and Melvin Van Peebles in the Seventies. But no other Black American filmmaker had ever won such a public platform as Spike Lee even before he released ‘Do the Right Thing’, a simmering drama about racial tensions in America, as experienced right then in those days in Brooklyn. The film further propelled him as a master of the silver screen. It also earned a couple of Oscar nods for Best Screenplay and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Danny Aiello).

1991: Driving Off a Cliff

The unexpected conclusion of Ridley Scott’s road drama ‘Thelma and Louise’ (1991) sparked a wave of consternation and controversy from viewers and critics alike. It was a conversation piece in the early Nineties, especially since its lead characters were women—there already were ample discussions about the representation of female characters in pop culture at the time, along with Hollywood’s blatant appropriation of feminist motifs.

In ‘Thelma and Louise’, two working class women from Arkansas hit the road after they confront and kill a brutal would-be rapist. Their decision to drive off the cliff at the end of their fiery journey annoyed academic and feminist commentators, too, though the film did earn an equal amount of praise for its screenplay and manner of dealing with hot button topics such as rape and spousal abuse from a woman’s perspective.

‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991) by Jonathan Demme made for an equally compelling start to the decade. Hailing from Roger Corman’s B-movie generation, Demme was a natural with the chilling and sensationalist source material of Thomas Harris’s second Lecter novel after ‘Red Dragon’. Few, however, expected a film of such deliberate rigour, so neatly matched to Ted Tally’s screenplay, almost word by word. The first meeting between Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter is proof, as the young FBI recruit is ‘wide-eyed with terror yet stubbornly determined not to wilt in the heat of pure evil’, as David Stratton once wrote. This sinister sequence is complex and beautifully crafted, coming across as an example of Demme’s thinking-man’s-thriller style.

1993: Postmodernist Cinema à la Kusturica

‘Arizona Dream’ (1993) wasn’t Emir Kusturica’s greatest film—my eternal favourite will forever be ‘Black Cat, White Cat’ (1998). But it is a superb example of cinematic postmodernism, with wonderful performances from Johnny Depp, Vincent Gallo, and Faye Dunaway. The sequence where Paul (Vincent Gallo) ‘performs’ Cary Grant’s crop-duster attack from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ (1959) is magnificent. Shot by shot, albeit with only four stalks of corn as props behind him, Paul does an exact reconstruction, leaving us to imagine each buzz of aircraft flying overhead.

This moment requires us to see two movies at once and overlapped, offering laughter as we notice the titanic differences between Paul’s performance against Cary Grant’s. That was the point of it, in the final analysis, to take advantage of this little pocket in time to feast on a slice of absurdity.

The post Cinematic History and Its Defining Moments: 1983-1993 appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

Cinematic History and Its Defining Moments: 1972-1982

Jules R. Simion — Fri, 22 May 2020 12:00:45 +0000

1972: Tangoes, Mobsters, and the Madness of Man

Bernardo Bertolucci gave us a Marlon Brando at the height of his career and a wide-eyed Maria Schneider in ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (1972). When the two strangers meet, physical intimacy almost immediately becomes an ‘elemental force… the medium of exchange’ between the emotionally broken Paul and the sensually curious Jeanne, as once noted by Roger Ebert.

Their chance encounter gives birth to a mysterious and restless mood that goes on to define their tempestuous relationship. The coupling was basically a rape scene, and Mr Bertolucci later confirmed that Ms Schneider was not aware of the details prior to shooting, which made her emotions all the rawer and more shocking. In the end, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ was the first feature to equate physical intimacy with human communication, despite the contrast between its high-art aspiration and its controversies.

Once considered by critics as the Soviet reply to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ (1972) is eerily earthbound and drawn to the past, especially since it’s a sci-fi film set mostly on another planet in a distant future. The Russian director did not share Kubrick’s fascination with technology, nor his misanthropy. He also stepped away from the source material’s author, Stanislaw Lem, and his concern with Man confronting the Cosmos. Tarkovski was more about the humanity that Man brought with him into the depth of Cosmos, instead. He spent his entire career proving that cinema was an art form as important as any other medium, and he certainly proved it with the weightlessness scene between Kelvin and his dead wife’s ghost.

The most memorable scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ (1972) is likely the horse’s head in the bed of Hollywood studio chief Jack Woltz. The circumstances that lead to this moment—specifically, Woltz’s decision to deprive mobbed-up singer Johnny Fontane of a key part in an upcoming war flick—were clearly inspired from Columbia boss Harry Cohn’s choice to cast Frank Sinatra in ‘From Here to Eternity’ (1954), though the dead horse trigger itself was something that writer Mario Puzo probably picked up from ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931). It haunts me, to this day.

In ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ (1972), his finest film with his archetypal star, Werner Herzog delivered a perfect example of his desire to depict the world as it had never been seen or even imagined before. The movie can easily be interpreted as an allegory of authoritarianism, its deranged hero representing the Hitlers of absolutely every stage of humanity. But viewing this story solely through an intellectual lens would diminish its sensory appeal, which ultimately carries its true meaning. As the camera swirls around Aguirre on his raft, stricken with delusional madness, Herzog presents us with history as nightmare, making his viewers breathe a sigh of relief when the film ends, and we’re returned to reality.

1973: Political Statements, Merchandizing, and Demons

On 27^th March 1973, Marlon Brando won an Oscar for his role in ‘The Godfather’. The actor sent Sacheen Littlefeather, a 26-year-old Apache, to refuse the Academy Award on his behalf, and to use the 45 seconds initially allocated to his speech to read out a 15-page statement instead. The brave young woman made her points about the portrayal of Native Americans in film and TV with courtesy and eloquence, drawing audience gasps and cheers. It wasn’t the first political upset at the Oscars, but it was certainly the most memorable. Charlton Heston called it ‘childish’, while Jane Fonda said that what Brando did ‘was wonderful’.

On 20^th August, George Lucas was still reaping the success of ‘American Graffiti’ (1973) and renegotiating his deal at Twentieth Century Fox for a science-fiction film. He didn’t ask for more money upfront but insisted on retaining all the merchandising rights of the film (this included income from any soundtrack album, tie-in book, or range of toys). At the time, few people understood how far-sighted the decision really was.

Merchandising rights were considered the ‘garbage’ of any contract, so no one thought much of it, until ‘Star Wars’ (1977) became the highest-grossing film of all time, and absolutely everything bearing its logo sold like hot and crispy powdered sugar beignets. His success with Star Wars merchandising went on to change the way movies were made, sold, promoted, then profited from.

This year also gave us William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), starring Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, and Max von Sydow. The director’s insanely popular follow-up to ‘The French Connection’ (1971) is a textbook adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel, who also penned the screenplay. It is a wonderfully crafted example of how to balance the temporal and spiritual aspects of such a troubling story. But without the legitimate scepticism from Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil when a radical course of treatment is recommended for Blair’s Regan, her daughter, I doubt the climactic showdown between Miller’s young Damien Karras and the demon Pazuzu would’ve had such a striking effect.

1975: The Year of Pacino, Nicholson, and O’Neal

In ‘The Passenger’ (1975), Michelangelo Antonioni uses an incredible seven-minute single take as his pinnacle, claiming that he made this decision purely because he didn’t wish to create a run-of-the-mill death scene for Jack Nicholson’s Locke. The influence of Michael Snow’s ‘Wavelength’ (1967), an underground gem of cinema, is downright palpable as the long-held static shot from inside the hotel room takes Nicholson out of shot, and the camera slowly moves towards and through the barred windows into the piazza. Cars arrive, along with key characters and cops… they all come and go in the space between the hotel and a bullring, and even the extras are given significance until the camera executes a 360-degree turn and returns to a now unidentifiable dead man on the hotel bed.

Three years earlier, on 22^nd August 1972, as Richard Nixon was nominated for a second term in office, John Wojtowicz walked into a Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank with a gun and declared a hold-up, desperate to get the money he needed for his gay lover’s sex-change operation. It was a seminal moment in America’s social landscape, and Warner Bros. were quick to make the most of it. They hired Sidney Lumet and gave the lead role to a young Al Pacino (then fresh off ‘Godfather II’), giving us ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975), one of the most emotionally stirring films to come out of the Seventies altogether.

Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975), starring Ryan O’Neal and Leon Vitali, has the ideal melange of style, story, and feeling that a viewer might demand of a suspenseful movie. The story is about history as loss, and the camera barely moves. Its frames resemble paintings of times gone by with powerfully baroque vibes, and its chief stylistic signature is the reverse zoom, where the scene begins with a close-up as the camera moves back to give us the fuller, greater picture. The final duel doesn’t have any reverse zooms, though, yet it stands out as a profoundly touching moment, enriched with medium-distance shots or moodier long shots that connect the characters to their environment, while O’Neal’s self-seeking hero proves that he does have the makings of a gentleman, after all.

While George Lucas’s ‘Star Wars’ (1977) made history as the highest-grossing film one time, the blockbuster was born a couple of years earlier with ‘Jaws’ (1975), Steven Spielberg’s frightful oeuvre. By then, Mr Spielberg was already regarded as a wunderkind of cinema, but his shark tale turned him into a cultural force not only through the way in which he adapted Peter Benchley’s novel but also through the way in which ‘Jaws’ was marketed and promoted worldwide. Thanks to superb word-of-mouth and repeat viewers, the film racked up about $260 million, which was more than ‘Gone with the Wind’, then box-office-champion, had made. The jackpot mentality took hold after Spielberg’s horror flick, as studios spent millions to will megahits into creation.

1976: Scorsese, the Steadicam, and Stephen King

In Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976), camera work, along with Robert De Niro’s exquisite acting and hairstyle come together in one of the most jolting revelations of unleashed evil ever portrayed in American film. However, it’s not that easy to figure out the certainty of Travis Bickle’s terrifying psychosis. Even when he reads his diary entries about New York’s nastiest streets, or when he devises his quick-draw contraption to strap on his arm, or during his ‘You talkin’ to me?’ monologue, we’re still unsure. It could simply be the sharpness of puritanism. It’s at the rally for Senator Palatine that our doubts dissolve, when the camera lifts to Travis’s mohawk as he pops his pills. There, the ugly truth becomes impossible to reject.

In the early Seventies, cameraman Garrett Brown and Cinema Products, Inc. engineers developed the Steadicam system, which mounts the camera on a mobile, spring-leaded arm attached to a weight-bearing harness, thus giving hand-held camerawork the smoothness of a classical dolly. It was first used by Brown in 1976, in three major films: ‘Rocky’, ‘Bound for Glory’, and ‘Marathon Man’. Two years later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which often forgets that last bit of its remit) awarded Brown with a special technical Oscar to honour his invention. However, the Steadicam’s greatest first showcase happened later, with Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ (1980), where the pioneering cameraman rushed around the corridors of the Overlook Hotel set, following the kid on his tricycle.

We all remember ‘Carrie’ (1976) as Brian de Palma’s adaptation of Stephen King’s first novel and the beginning of supernatural horror’s true form. We remember the pig’s blood scene at the prom and the mean girls flicking tampons at poor Carrie when she gets her first period after gym class. But what the film is also memorable for is its most blatant use of gratuitous shock when Carrie’s hand erupts from the ground to grab Sue—only it’s a bad dream, and Sue wakes up, and the terror that Carrie caused as revenge for how she was bullied is over. Other directors have shamelessly reused this gimmick, including John Cassavetes’s detonation at the end of ‘The Fury’ (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham in ‘Friday the 13^th’ (1980). It always seems to make us jump, though.

1977: Family-Friendly Aliens and Bloody Ballet

In Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977), the magic moment when the spaceships form the Big Dipper in the sky marks the beginning of the director’s artful authorship. After hostile examples set by the likes of ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1953) and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1956), one might wonder why Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary is so keen to meet aliens, especially after his own encounter left him sunburned only on the right side of his face. But he pursues this obsession throughout the film and all the way to Wyoming, on a secret platform on Devil’s Tower where scientists confirm what he already knows: aliens are here, and they’re ready to meet us.

‘Suspiria’ (1977) was Dario Argento’s first horror film. In it, he remembered the lesson learned during his time shooting gialli: murder scenes must be original set pieces that leave the viewer breathless. Therefore, the main character’s introduction is swiftly followed by the brutal murder of two girls at the hands of an almost invisible force. It’s a complicated double murder sequence, rife with unrestrained gruesomeness and symptomatic of the Seventies’ genre yet transcended by Argento’s calculated and daring aesthetic choices. Its theatricality is purveyed by the vast and empty Art Deco scenery, but also by Goblin’s saturated music theme.

1979: Jazz and Killer Aliens

Bob Fosse was a choreographer before becoming a critically acclaimed director. ‘All That Jazz’ (1979), featuring Roy Scheider and Jessica Lange, is basically an autobiographical testament, as well as one of the most personal and original films to ever come out of Hollywood. Fosse’s strikingly bold approach deals with death in a romantic fashion as the movie is structured in the form of a dialogue between Scheider’s Gideon and his ‘angel of death’. It also adds a clinical angle through the open-heart surgery scenes and an ironic stab through the climactic song-and-dance sequences. A dazzling masterpiece of the silver screen, ‘All That Jazz’ deserved the Oscar for Best Film that ultimately went to ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ that year.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ (1979) set a standard for gruesome and horrifying sci-fi effects—the first, in fact, to step away from the otherwise humanoid depictions of aliens offered by cinema up to that point. The emergence of the beast when it explodes from John Hurt’s chest is a stellar early example of the now-holy union between horror film and advanced body make-up.

1980: Acting and Politics

There were two noteworthy events that best describe humanity’s first step into the Eighties. One came in the form of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ (1980), another Stephen King adaptation that secured its slot in the annals of cinematic history. The second came on 4^th November, when Ronald Reagan was elected as President of the United States—the one-time B-list actor and TV personality landed the greatest role of his life as the leader of the so-called ‘free world’. He understood the power of media spectacle and mass entertainment.

His presidency ultimately promoted a sentimental optimism and a certain detachment from reality. It was a triumph of stage management and a performance that recognized the value of that key big moment with its well-timed line. In the end, it also redefined the relationship between entertainment and politics.

1982: Crossing the T’s

We conclude this cinematic period with three monumental works of feature-length film. Steven Lisberger’s ‘Tron’ (1982) is the first substantially computer-animated movie. The innovations it put forth irrevocably changed the special effects industry. Technically speaking, there are only 15 minutes of computer-generated imagery, but it’s a miracle that the digital imaging crew were able to produce any footage at all! It took four monolithic computers two hours to render a mere half-second of film. For that era, ‘Tron’ was extraordinary, and it shifted our view of SFX forever.

Sydney Pollack’s ‘Tootsie’ (1982), starring Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray, gives us a hilariously sentimental romp with an out-of-work but savagely uppity actor who ends up dressing like a woman and nailing the role of a female doctor on ‘Southwest General’. Murray’s Jeff is a key counterpart to Hoffman’s Dorsey. The failed playwright has few lines, but they anchor the film. In fact, his downbeat one-liners were never more effective than in ‘Tootsie’.

And last, but certainly not least, John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ (1982) provides us with the single greatest technical and artistic use of the bubbling-flesh effect. The late Seventies and early Eighties are basically the domain of Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Chris Walas, and an assortment of other special makeup effects pioneers who created and serviced a boom market for transforming bodies of all kinds, particularly in the horror and sci-fi genres.

Requiring the hard work of 34 SFX makeup staffers (Rob Bottin and Stan Winston among them), ‘The Thing’ is a superficial remake of Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing from Another World’ (1951) and a towering presence above every other entry in the field of bubbling flesh.

Carpenter’s film isn’t astonishing purely from a visual effects angle, either. The film comes with literary entertainment attached, an original text of science-fiction paranoia and assimilation terror which the director mines greedily.

The post Cinematic History and Its Defining Moments: 1972-1982 appeared first on The Cinematic Journal.

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