Cinema Rediscovered 2024 Wrap-Up

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We have nothing but praise for this year’s edition of Cinema Rediscovered. In the podcast, we discuss the pleasures of seeing Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) in beautiful prints on the opening night; the pleasure in seeing restorations with an audience where every time someone responds differently it raises a question one might not have thought of before; thus, a pleasure that begins in the realm of the aesthetic and moves on and combines with the the real of dreams and thoughts.

We talk about the two Edward Yang films screened,  A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996) and praise Ian Wang for doing such a terrific job of introducing the films: interesting, entertaining, succinct and opening up ways of entering the film, a challenge in the age of Wikipedia.

We discuss the Ninon Sevilla cabaretera films, possibly the hit of the festival. There was a fantastic programme of ‘New’ Hollywood films — Out of Their Depth: Corruption Scandal and Lies in the New Hollywood — and we discuss the only two films in the programme that we did manage to see:  Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). We hope to catch up with the rest when it tours. The festival offers a great balance tween the more esoteric strands and those appealing to a larger audience. It was wonderful to see The Wizard of Oz (1939) with an audience full of children, some of them dressed up as Dorothy. We also touch on the Jeff Barnaby and  Bill Douglas cycles as well as  the Sergei Parajanov restorations and other strands of the festival such as the J. Lee Thompson restorations. We will be doing a separate podcast on the Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc programme.

There were several revelations in this festival that we discuss in the podcast: The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman, 1970) the only woman to direct a film in Hollywood between Ida Lupino and Elaine May; Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999); Ehsahn Khoshbakht’s beautiful and very personal Cellulloid Underground; and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Il Mare (1962), which David Melville Wingrove in his introduction argued had been a formative influence on Jarman as well as Bill Douglas and, we later learned on Tony Richardson as well as Pedro Almodóvar. Quite a queer package.

Lastly, we praise how the festival makes use of the city, the different venues, It’s part of a concerted effort to bring the city into the festival and the festival into the city. The festival seems an incubator for curators, some programming a single film, some a strand. The community feel, the social engagement, the educational component of talks and workshops, a teaching people how to do things, all meshed together to form a very impressive and entertaining festival. Many congratulations to all. Some of the strands will be touring. Oh, and no one used their phones during the screenings. Big Gold Star.

The podcast may  also be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Our Preview of the  Festival may be heard here:

Strands of the programme we have previously podcast on written on include:

Le Samourai

The Long Goodbye

Bill Douglas Films: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, Comrades

Edward Yang Films: The Terrorizers, Taipei Story, That Day on the Beach,   Desire/ Expectations in IN OUR TIME,

Listeners may also be interested in Hal Young’s video essay on Yi Yi: ‘Yi Yi and the Power of long Fixed Shots’. 

A short note on THE PARALLAX VIEW

A conversation with Ehsan Khoshbakht

 

Lonesome (Craig Boreham, Australia, 2022)

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More catching up on films bought but unseen, this time Craig Boreham’s LONESOME, featuring some exceptional cinematography by Dean Francis. The story is as old as the hills: a young gay man (Josh Lavery) from the outback is violently forced out of his home by incomprehending parents and ends up in the big city – here Sidney – dealing with his traumas whilst trying to survive in the big city through petty theft and a stumbling into sex work before meeting someone with whom he forms a connection (Daniel Gabriel). There are clear references to MIDNIGHT COWBOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO. But the old story is like the overarching structure for something newer — a snapshot of contemporary queer culture – the sex apps and the different ways young gay men now meet, socialise and have sex – that feels authentic. Full frontal nudity is ever present and casually treated and a whole alphabet of sexual scenarios are depicted without judgment but equally without abdicating the responsibility of representing consequences. If the film feels authentic, it also seems glamourised. Everything and everyone looks beautiful, even in the most alarming situation, like in an old Hollywood movie. It also has a happy ending, which I see some find artificial, but which I loved and find in keeping with the tone and look of the film. LONESOME is a beautiful film. I also think it an important one — in what it says about contemporary queer culture – what’s changed, what hasn’t, and how –but would have to see it again and think about it some more to be sure.

 

 

 

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José Arroyo

Cinema Rediscovered 2024 – Preview

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Richard and I preview the 2024 Cinema Rediscovered Programme taking place in Bristol, July 24-28. We’ve already podcast on the Parajanov films and the Ninon Sevilla ‘cabaretera’ films so we here highlight some of the other strands such as the 70s cycle of ‘New” American films of the 70s titled OUT OF THEIR DEPTH: CORRUPTION, SCANDAL AND LIES IN THE NEW HOLLYWOOD and QUEER CINEMA FROM THE EASTERN BLOC. We also highlight restorations of films from Charles Burnett, Bela Tarr, Edward Yang and many others, as well as the rare opportunity to see films by the likes of Lynda Miles, Stephanie Rothman, not to mention beautiful restorations of classics such as GILDA and THE LONG

GOODBYE. Cinema Rediscovered offers not only a superb programme but a model of engagement, community based, inclusive, social, cinephile, generative. It includes films but also history walks, workshops on criticism and projection and much else. At the centre of it all are films, usually in beautiful prints with great attention to projection, all instigating a conversation on cinema.

The full programme may be seen  here.

The podcast may be listened to below:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Strands of the programme we have previously podcast on written on include:

Le Samourai

The Long Goodbye

Bill Douglas Films: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, Comrades

Edward Yang Films: The Terrorizers, Taipei Story, That Day on the Beach,   Desire/ Expectations in IN OUR TIME,

Listeners may also be interested in Hal Young’s video essay on Yi Yi: ‘Yi Yi and the Power of long Fixed Shots’. 

A short note on THE PARALLAX VIEW

A conversation with Ehsan Khoshbakht

José Arroyo

José Arroyo in Conversation with Sheldon Hall on ARMCHAIR CINEMA: FEATURE FILMS ON BRITISH TELEVISION, 1929-1981

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Sheldon Hall’s ARMCHAIR CINEMA: A HISTORY OF FEATURE FILMS ON BRITISH TELEVISION is a beautifully produced object, lavishly illustrated and lovely to hold. More importantly, it is a pleasure to read , full of new and fascinating information and is sure to become a landmark and reference point in the study of films on television for decades to come. In the podcast we discuss how the book came to be and how it developed, how the policy around films in television developed over the years, how research lead to a heretofore unaccounted for Hitchcock film, Leslie Halliwell’s influence as film buyer, the role of television programming in creating particular types of cinephilia, how the editing of films for television changed over the years, what Sheldon learned as a result of writing the book, what I learned as a result of reading it, and much more.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

José Arroyo in Conversation with Daniel Bird on Sergei Parajanov

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I was so bowled over and moved by the programme of Sergei Parajanov’s Ukranian films at Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna,  Parajanov 1954-1966: A Ukrainian Rhapsody, co-curated by Daniel Bird and Olena Honcharuk,  that I wanted to talk to Daniel Bird about the programme in general and the driving force behind it. Another reason to talk to Daniel was because Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol is showing Shadows of the Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), and I wanted to hear what one of the foremost experts on the famous director had to say about Parajanov’s most celebrated films.

The Cinema Rediscovered Screenings will be introduced by Professor Ian Christie.

In the podcast Daniel and I discuss who is Parajanov and why Parajanov? We touch on the centrality of his work to the national and cultural identities of so many countries: Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Russia; its aesthetic beauty and its continuing power. Certain filmmakers continuously crop up in relation to Parajanov’s work — Eisenstein, Jarman, Greenaway, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Powell and Pressburger. The conversation is bounded by the war in Ukraine; post-colonial relations; the excitement of cinema poetry; the need to archive, preserve, restore and circulate cinema; questions of anarchy in totalitarian contexts; and a fluid line of different degrees of queerness that runs across Parajanov’s oeuvre.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The conversation began with an unintended provocation – the consequences of the term ‘East European Cinema,’  what it highlights and what it obscures so we began again. Daniel explains the problems with the term and connects it to questions of post-coloniality in relation to the film heritage of nations formerly in the Soviet Union: ‘Film plays a part in the process of reforging national and ethnic identities in the post-Soviet borderlands: Central Asia, Transcaucasia, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine….Yet there is a tendency amongst film writers, programmers and distributors to treat the cinemas of the former Soviet Union as if they still belonged to a singular, amorphous bloc….whilst Russia has relinquished the ownership rights to films from the post-Soviet borderlands, they have kept hold of the original camera negatives. In this digital age, this presents difficulties for film agencies from these regions to restore, screen and distribute their own films. It is time we started thinking about heritage cinema from former Soviet countries for what it is: a post-colonial problem.’ Daniel elaborates further here: animusmagazine.substack.com-The Animus Substack.

 

In the podcast we touch on the background to the Parajanov films screened at Ritrovato, Parajanov 1954-1966: A Ukrainian Rhapsody. The full program can be seen below:

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Daniel edited a collection of articles on The Colour of Pomegranates with contributions from Martin Scorsese, James Steffen and others, which may be accessed hereThe Colour of Pomegranates – PRESS-3-7.

As well as being a scholar, filmmaker and programmer, Daniel Bird is also the Project Director of the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, a collaboration between the National Cinema Centre of Armenia and Fixafilm. In that capacity he created an installation for The Film Festival in Rotterdam composed of outtakes from The Colour of Pomegranates. According to MUBI, ‘“Temple of Cinema #1: Sayat Nova Outtakes ‘is an exhibition showcasing all the additional footage made for a production, in this case unused footage from Sergei Parajanov’s sublime masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates (1969). These pieces have been digitally restored and a selection of them were presented in an Armenian church in the city (sic, the Arminius Church is named after a Dutch theologian but is not Armenian), with multiple screens placed flat as if the audience were browsing illuminated manuscripts on tables. The footage looked fabulous and, due to Parajanov’s style favoring insert shots and tableaux, was nearly as enthralling in its fragmented form as in the organized narrative of the finished picture’.

For Film Comment, ‘Restored from the original camera negatives by the heroic restorationist Daniel Bird, these outtakes peel back the top layer from Parajanov’s practically unsurpassed compositions to reveal not only that, yes, these otherworldly images were obtained in this very world that we ourselves live in (signaled by a jeans-clad technician on a ladder in the background fixing a light amid an otherwise transporting tableau), the final product to which they amounted was deeply informed by the decisions of the Soviet censors. Bird’s ongoing exploration of the “behind the scenes” machinations surrounding the work of one of cinema’s all-time great visual stylists promises to enhance Parajanov’s work, and this labor is already paying off: Bird also presented a program of newly restored short films by Parajanov—Hakob Hovantanyan (1967), Kiev Frescoes (1966), and Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme (1985)—and the results were revelatory, helping to fill in the gaps of our understanding of his artistic development between Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and Pomegranates.

 

Some examples of these outtakes may be seen below:

 

José Arroyo

 

José Arroyo in conversation with Lorena Pino on Ninón Sevilla Films at Cinema Rediscovered, Watershed, Bristol, 24-28th of July

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José Arroyo talks to Lorena Pino about the programme of Ninón Sevilla films playing at the Watershed in Bristol as part of the Cinema Rediscovered Programme, and which includes two UK Premieres — Carita de Cielo (José Diáz Morales, Mexico, 1947) and Aventurera (Alberto Gout, Mexico, 1950) — as well as the 4K restoration of an acknowledged if still too little-seen masterpiece, Victimas del Pecado (Emilio Fernández, Mexico, 1951). Gabriel Figueroa, the great cinematographer who worked with Buñuel and John Ford, is responsible for the great film’s astonishing look.

 

I have so far only seen the great Victimas del Pecado. If you haven’t yet seen this great transgressive clip, one of the great delirious moments of melodrama in the history of world cinema, simultaneously masochistic and subversive, do. I’ve conveniently provided it for you here, with sub-titles. It was a pleasure to talk to Lorena and find out about the other two films, both UK premieres.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

Lorena Pino

‘Cabaretera Subtexts,’ the  great videa essay by Dolores Tierney and Catherine Grant, made as part of the “Classical Mexican Cinema: Directors, Stars and Films” lecture given by Dr. Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex) to launch the Salón México season at the British Film Institute on July 4, 2019, may be seen below:

The Victimas del Pecado 4k Restoration Trailer may be seen below:

 

The programme of films is playing at Watershed Bristol July 25th as part of the Cinema Rediscovered Programme.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Ritrovato Round-up 2024

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Richard and I return to the podcast with our Ritrovato Round-up. Last year I couldn’t go due to health reasons and I interviewed him; this year, the tables were turned and he interviews me. Ritrovato is so vast and generous in its programming that everyone who attended would have had a different experience of the festival. This is an account of mine. We criticise the booking system and people’s piggish habit of taking out their phones during screenings. Cinephiles do know better, which makes it all the worse. The rest is mainly hossanas. We praise Daniel Bird’s programming of the Parajanov Strand. We note how even seeing familiar films can be the basis of a rediscovery and discuss how the programme of Dietrich films at the festival should re-write the narrative of the Von Sternberg/ Dietrich collaborations from one of a Svengali act of moulding to a feminist act of self-creation. We touch on Delphine Seyrig, the Dark Heimat Strand, Gustaf Molander, Anatole Litvak and highlight Carlos Sauras’ Los golfos and Montxo Armendáriz Tasio from the Cinema Libero strand. We also discuss seeing films at the stunning Cinema Modernissimo, watching Les parapluies de Cherbourg at the Piazza Maggiore and many other bits and bobs.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

José Arroyo

Les lèvres rouges/ Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, Belgium, 1971).

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There was a whole Delphine Seyrig strand at Ritrovato. I’d already seen most of them. But this was a marvellous discovery. Lesbianism is almost a feature of horror films of a certain vintage but rarely as elegantly combined as here: a classic. Seyrig plays a Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Báthory, made up to recall Dietrich, who arrives to a hotel ,in Ostend, out of season and mostly empty, with her maid Ilona(Andrea Rau), styled to resemble Louise Brooks. The porter tells the Countess  they met forty years earlier but she looks still the same. She tells him it was probably her mother, though the audience is quickly made aware that there’s a legend about her namesake drinking the blood of virgins to keep young, one dating from the middle ages, and that police are currently carrying a whole bunch of dead bodies to the morgue. At the hotel they find a pair of newly-weds – Stefan (John Chirlton) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) who can’t keep their hands off each other. He’s from an aristocratic family and is delaying introducing his bride to mother, probably because mother is shown to be a man eating orchids. The Countess is set on seducing Valerie, and part of the seduction is showing her what a violent, brutish, sexist pig her husband is. How will it end? A sexy, stylish film, beautifully shot, dark but with vibrant accents, Seyrig often dressed in Nazi colours, with elements of Surrealism and Expressionism and a focus on transgressive desire that is mostly conveyed through Syrig’s soft, low voice and precise diction. It was so striking that the young woman next to me kept taking her phone out to film particular scenes. When I got annoyed and finally said, ‘really’? She said, ‘yes, really’. I like to think it’s the film that drove her to it but she might just have been a pig.

 

José Arroyo

 

 

Tasio (Montxo Armendáriz, 1984)

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A thrill to see this newly restored classic, which permits one to fully appreciate José Luis Alcaine’s gorgeous cinematography. Director Montxo Armendáriz moves slowly into close-ups in a way that makes you feel you’re seeing into the very souls of the characters. Very beautiful and moving. Most Spaniards of a certain generation will recognise the way of life and the structures of feeling depicted here. Part of the Cinema Libero strand. The image above is its 25th anniversary release. The gorgeous 4K restoration is for its fortieth. It’s a film that continues to live. There’s something sadly still rare — and because of that impossibly moving to me–  about poor people being depicted with so much dignity, beauty, intelligence and humour. That Tasio and the people of his village also represent a whole generation of rural Spaniards makes it even more potent.

 

I was privileged to be at the Bologna screening when Montxo Armendárix introduced the film and include what I caught of the introduction below. I missed some bits but will include the gist in italics in the English translation below the film:

Montxo Armendáriaz: ‘A thousand thanks to all for your help with the projection. That’s the only thing I’ll say in Italian. I’ll try to speak slowly in Castilian so I may be understood and translated. Apologies for the voice, which between my asthma and the temperature in Bologna is a bit destroyed. I first of all give thanks to the festival for selecting our film in this magnificent strand and also for the Filmoteca for undertaking the restoration on the film’s 40th anniversary. The film you are about to see is based on a real person . Tasio was a person who lived in a tiny village in Navarra. He was a simple, honest,  and generous man who all his live lived from making carbon from vegetation in the hills and also from furtively hunting and fishing. Tasio was very proud and said his family had never done without food or any of the essentials and that he had always refused to work for others.   He lived by two principles. The first was that if you only took what you needed from nature and left everything else as is, nature would always give you back what you needed to live. The other principle, Tasio was a very peaceful man,  and he believed that though there were a bunch of people with whom he disagreed about their ideas or their way of life, he totally respected them; including, as you will see in the film,  he respected the views and the lifestyles of the forest guards who are the ones who persecuted and fined him for furtively hunting and fishing. I first knew him forty years ago, and the truth is that I was much younger and much more innocent then and thought that these two principles — respect for nature and respect for others — so normal, plain,  and simple could or would be the base on which could be sustained our development and progress towards the future.  Sadly, forty years later, we can now attest that the environment is completely destroyed because of all we’ve done to nature, our cohabitation is sadly increasingly violent and we are left with  confrontations, wars and genocides. There were a couple more sentences which ended with happy viewing but which I sadly missed.

 

Tasio a film I will return to and more carefully consider in further posts.

 

José Arroyo

Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, 1974)

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It’s a film I’ve tried to see and given up on at home five or six times previously. This time on a big screen, the first two shots are simply dazzling, I watched them with my mouth open, whereas at home on tv I simple missed them. They simply didn’t register. The last shot of the film, the fishing on the river at dusk with the golden light is extraordinary work from Vilmos Zsigmond….and yet, to me the film still doesn’t work. The cast, particularly Hawn is wonderful, but her Lou Jean is so intent on getting what she wants that she thinks little of getting her husband (William Atherton) killed. Surely a problem. And this reinforces my prejudices about Spielberg, an almost genius level understanding of technique, a not very complex understanding of politics or society or even, with the exception of children, people. Genius technique at the service of limited understanding.

 

José Arroyo

L’equipage (Anatole Litvak, 1935, France)

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The shots are always interestingly composed, the focus careless, one thinks some of it has no expressive intent behind it and is jut bad luck filming. Annabella is very beautiful, and Jean Pierre Aumont is very charming. Neither of them, however, are good enough. Charles Vanel is better than that as Anabella’s husband, subtly coded as a jew. . A combination of boys’ own WW1 adventure and melodrama, handsomely mounted, enjoyable to see but it does not entirely resolve the questions I have regarding Litvak.

 

José Arroyo

Tovarisch (Anatole Litvack, 1937)

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Litvak fails to convince. Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert couldn’t be more charming, the playing has rhythm and wit, some great lines too. But the Banker’s family couldn’t be more irritating, their playing uneven, and the politics are muddled at best. There were problems with the sound at the Ritrovato screening. The opening shot of the band playing the 14th of July does the show the resources of a big studio at its peak.

 

JA

 

Bona (Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1980)

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Extraordinary opening shots of a sea of heads, all more or less the same height, bobbing. An abstraction of individual people and also of a people. Amidst the  bobbing mass, a rope appears, attached to a brightly dressed icon of a suffering virgin, frenzied faithful abandoning themselves to worship.

The film is  about a young woman (Nora Aunor) who falls in love with an actor (Philip Salvador), who ends up being no more than an extra. She leaves her middle-class family for him, cleans, bathes, feeds him – he’s got a thing about having his baths a particular way, the way his mother used to do it for him. She even sleeps with him. He brings other women and she puts up with it. She’s his willing slave. Until the end of the film, where he’s decided to immigrate with a rich widow. She can’t go with him; she can no longer return to the family, she boils the water for his bath and scalds him alive with it. Enough is enough. A terrific film in a beautiful new restoration.

 

Seen at Ritrovato

 

José Arroyo

Lady for a Night (Leigh Jason, 1942)

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The audience at Ritrovato applauded this at the end and the applause depressed me. The film is banal, clichéd, derivative. There are bits of Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Jezebel. It’s a hodge-podge of genres — Gothic, Western, Romance, Gangster, Melodrama — brutishly blended  ‘Maybe they’re applauding themselves’, a friend asked? I hope so because it’s one of those films that whilst siding with people of colour in the terms of the time now comes across as racist as well as incompetent.

The stars are the only reason to see the film. John Wayne is at his most handsome, and he’s able to get all the laughs. She is always great and this is a good example of how she could be absolutely great in absolute dreck. Blondell grew up in vaudeville and is one of those genius performers who is always aware of the audience, always performing FOR them, whilst also always being true to the character she’s playing, able to convey that truth as layered and with depth, whilst not missing a laugh if there’s one to be had. She had a rare warmth as well. She’s not well served by the production, which was tailored for her, a contradiction but one that tells us much about Republic Studios. I hope whoever dreamed up her spider-legs-eyelashes was fired.

This was Blondell’s last starring part, tellingly for Republic studios. She would be third billed in Cry-Havoc in 43 and then would return in ’45, in one of her greatest performances as Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but now firmly ensconced as a supporting actress, a category through which she would grace us for the rest of her lifewith her unmatched warmth and talent.

A terrible film; entertaining but discomforting, and a good examples of what Joan Blondell can do and of what stars can bring to a picture,

 

José Arroyo

CAFÉ ELEKTRIC (Gustav Ucicky, Austria, 1927)

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Marlene Dietrich, almost fully ‘Dietrich’ and much more electric than the film, is the daughter of a rich louche industrialist who falls for a pickpocket (Willi Forst as Fredl). The film has one great shot of Fredl coming out of prison, huge expressionist doors, Fredl becoming larger and larger as he approaches the camera, and then his shadow becoming visible, foreshadowing the trouble he will cause. We unfortunately will not get to see it because the last reel of the film is missing. The screening was memorable for a superb musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. The film is memorable because Dietrich before ‘Dietrich’ is already desirous, wanton, the camera already drawing attention to the legs, willing to do all for love, yet already slightly ironic and about to be bored with it. She dances the Black Bottom but actually her sharp graceful movements in merely walking already generate more electricity the film.

 

Seen as part of Ritrovato 2024

José Arroyo in Conversation with Ross Higgins on the Archives Gaies du Québec

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An inspiring talk with Ross Higgins on the foundation of the Archives Gaies du Québec.

Police Raid Truxx in 1977

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may  also be listened to on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

How did the Archives come into being? Why did it come to be? What social and historical contexts shaped it? What particular problems did an archive from a marginalised community face on its inception? How did the Archives develop from materials stored and used in his flat to an archive of national and international importance soon to start its fifth decade? Ross, who along with Jacques Prince, founded the archive, offers various histories and contexts, from changes in the law to changing concepts of sexual and social identities that informed how the archive developed and how it came to be what it now is, taking into account particularities of place but always conscious of larger forces and the interplay between them.

with Ross (l), and Jacques Bourque (c) protesting the police raid on Chez Bud’s the night before, in 1984. 188 people were arrested.

Ross calls up dimly remembered political groups (Groupe Homosexuelle d’Action Politique, Comité Homosexuelle Anti-repression, Front de Libération Homosexuelle), early community magazines (Le Tier, L’Arcadie), the various police raids (Sauna Aquarius, Neptune Sauna, Truxx, Sex Garage, KOX) that along with the AIDS crisis shaped community organising in Montreal. We talk of the importance of community involvement (illustrated talks by Ross and Tom Waugh were an early and significant source of funding),  important donations (from Ken Morrison and many others), significant holdings (the work of Alan B. Stone and Peter Flinsch, the original logbook of the Front de Libération Homosexuelle). Ross reminds us that it took five attempts to start a gay community centre in Montreal before the current one succeeded in the 1980s, and that such institutions are still fragile and shouldn’t be taken for granted. He also reminds us that there is a very helpful pamphlet titled How to Start an Archive, now in the archive, and available to anyone keen on getting started on one. A talk anyone interested in histories of sexualities, communities and the place of the archive in all of that will find fascinating.

José Arroyo

GREAT FREEDOM/Grosse Freiheit (Sebastian Meise, 2021)

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I wasn’t aware of GREAT FREEDOM (Sebastian Meise, 2021), surprising because it’s the kind of film I look out for: the subject matter, the stars, the Jury Prize at Cannes… After the end of the war, Hans, a gay man who’d been sent to a concentration camp under Paragraph 175, gets shifted onto a normal prison. No Liberation for him. Viktor, a convicted killer is his roommate. The film is really about the unfolding of their relationship as Hans gets continually returned to prison for  being caught being gay; a ‘crime’ that shouldn’t be and which he can’t help. Hans loses and finds different form of love inside and find the Great Freedom offered on the outside its own prison, sexually commodified and devoid of the feelings prison’s nurtured. There are very few films that explore the relationship, love really, between a gay and straight man, not without a sexual component but not driven by it, the way this one does. Babenco’s THE KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN is the only other that currently comes to mind; and I found it moving, though the ending was perhaps a bit binary and cliché-ish, a pity because before it Hans’s freedom, his gallantry and choice of love in the harshest of circumstances, is like that of a Genet character . GREAT FREEDOM is intimate, sensual, complex on the price of being and its many hierarchies, shifting with context; who can endure and for how long? Who can transform and overcome and how? Franz Rogowski and Georg Friedrich are both great in it. It’s on MUBI.

José Arroyo

 

Il Cittadino si rebella/ Street Law (Enzo. G. Castellari, 1974).

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Italian Poliziotteschi films of the 70s are a protest against existing conditions of existence. The literal translation of Il cittradino si rebella is A CITIZEN REBELS. The government is corrupt, the police is corrupt, the judges are corrupt; the bourgeois benefit from the system and are mostly inured from its worst effects. The average person makes do, bends the law, tries to scratch a living from left-over scraps. The top rung of professional criminals are ruthless, the lower ranks gleefully violent: causing suffering is their joy. It’s very different from what we see in American cinema of this period, even in the paranoid conspiracy thrillers. STREET LAW, the English title, is something that might well describe an American or even British crime film of this period. In America, the street does have its own laws, a separate, parallel world, but institutions are to be protected; the system might be tainted in this or that part but recoverable as a system. In the French policier of this period the institutions are upheld or left out of the narratives altogether and the criminals are excellent professionals who are too bored or too greedy to do anything else with their lives (The Melville films, the Verneuil films, Alain Delon’s policiers from this period). In Spain, the crime film won’t really begin to unfurl until Franco was dead and buried, even though some of these Italian ones are Spanish co-productions. In Italy, street crime is a given…..but a citizen rebels! The Poliziotteschi really are special.

 

In IL CITTADINO SI REBELLA, Franco Nero goes to put his hard-earned money in the bank, gets caught in a hold-up, and is so frustrated by institutional responses that he takes the law into his own hand, aping the American vigilante film (DEATH WISH) but doing something special with it. A characteristic of these films is that they are shot in location, in this case the port-town of Genoa, which not only brings grit but a historical context that exceeds the needs of the narrative proper. Reality intrudes, whether the film chases it or not. There are lots of shoot-ups, often in slow-motion, people getting run-over by cars, some car chases, very little characterisation, and lots of visual invention. The influence of Peckinpah is everywhere. Barbara Bach doesn’t have much to do but look beautiful, which she does.

José Arroyo

High Crime/ La polizia incrimina la legge assolve (Enzo G. Castellari, 1973)

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A stylish, pulpy crime film; clearly influenced by BULLIT (Peter Yates, 1968) and THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971) one of the several enticing collaborations between Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero (Keoma) , then one of the most popular stars and Europe, here handsome as always but with one of the worst dye jobs in the history of cinema.

The film co-stars Fernando Rey as a former drug kingpin, underlining the connection to FRENCH CONNECTION, now living out a retirement in luxury, devoting his attention to his hot-house, and the beautiful flowers that surround him adding to the colour and heat, evoking luxury and a certain corruption or degradation that recalls THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946).

The film has brilliantly playful compositions that are always a pleasure to look at:

There’s a brilliant word-less opening, a tour de force of speed, chase, operatic use of zooms, brilliantly edited to convey excitement in motion:

The chase scenes, which might seem slow  and clunky in the age of super-fast editing and CGI, seems to me more exciting than practically anything currently on-screen:

The images are elegantly composed to serve speed but usually also in a social context, here the crowd, a strike, as a place for the criminal to hide. Social context is interestingly deployed but  both visible in the films and transformed into something else, real social problems here a background to action/spectacle:

The mise-en-scène is dazzling. Note here the frames within frames of every composition; then the way the reflection on water is itself used as a framed plane of action; and lastly, the use of colour to the focus the eye once the body falls into the water. I find it brilliant.

Another trans in Poliziotteschi:

Typical Castellari

A great popular success credited with popularising the poliziotteschi genre. Perhaps not a great work of art but certainly the work of an extraordinarily skilled director.

 

José Arroyo

GANG WAR IN MILAN / MILANO ROVENTE (Umbeto Lenzi, 1973)

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Umberto Lenzi’s GANG WAR IN MILAN / MILANO ROVENTE is neither as visually exciting as the Enzo G. Castellari Poliziotteschis; nor as socially conscious and emotionally affecting as the Damiano Damianis. It is, however, exciting pulp; beautifully plotted, crudely characterised, efficient, accessible, with lots of sex and gore. It’s about a Sicilian immigrant, Salvatore Cangemi (Antonio Sabàto) who’s taken over the sex industry in Milan. A French gangster intrudes to try to sell heroin through Cangemi’s prostitution ring. A gang war ensues and an American gangster is brought in to help.

I enjoyed it all thoroughly until a moment where Cangemi and his thugs catch the French men in bed with a woman who turns out to be a man which makes clear the characters’ (and the film’s?) hierarchies of disgust: Murderers, pimps, drug dealers can all look down on women, who all look down on gays, and a trans is abouts as low as you can get. It’s a scene that made me wonder about the extent of my own internalised misogyny. Why was it only at that point that the film became a problem for me? Are we only troubled by those things that touch close to home? Can a film with these levels of misogyny and homophobia be enjoyable – can one separate them from other elements of the film? –…and which ones and to whom?

José Arroyo