Brad Stevens, ‘La notte’: ‘Far from being concealed, everything to which (Antonioni) wishes to draw our attention is present on the surfaces’. Here are eleven stills from the film, in chronological order, on which to test that argument:
José Arroyo
A classic returns to cinemas for its 50th anniversary and we receive it in rather a muted fashion. José’s never seen it on the big screen and Mike’s never seen it at all, so it’s an interesting experience for both, but both come away with reservations.
Much of the discussion revolves around context. 2001: A Space Odyssey was first released in 1968 and our repeated use of the phrase “of its time” becomes a coded criticism as much as an honest descriptor – the film simply doesn’t work today as well, or in the same ways, as it did half a century ago. We discuss its editing, novelty value, depiction of the future and technology and more, perhaps unfortunately but probably unavoidably never being able to escape the historical lens. It’s true to say that we’re both very glad we took the opportunity to see it, but both left feeling that while its influence is even more tangible than one could imagine and its legacy is not in question, its greatness is today a touch overstated.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.
José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
A film about cinema itself, in all its variants; and, from the first, one is dazzled by the technique; the extraordinary compositions, the use of space, the inventiveness of the shots, the use of mirrors to bring off-screen space into the frame, the way off-screen dialogue is used as a kind of Greek chorus on the action; and then there’s Lucia Bosé as Clara Manni, the shopgirl who’s ‘discovered’ and becomes a big star. She’s dressed fifties-style, with bullet bras and a belt cinched as tight as possible to reveal what must be one of the smallest waists in the history of cinema. But it’s the beauty of her face that arrests – the ineffable sadness it evokes, the sense of mystery, the feeling she’s got longings that will never be sated; and her presence draws you in so as to share and understand those feelings without never quite knowing for sure which ones they are. The film ends on her gorgeous, sad and vanquished face attempting a smile.
The film starts with a young shop-girl, Clara Manni (Bosé), waiting outside the cinema during the preview of her first film. She’s anxious, wonders into the cinema and we see that she’s such a hit that the filmmakers want to enhance her part, make it bigger add a bit of romance and sex to it. One of them, Gianni (Andrea Checchi) falls in love with her and, before she knows it, he’s arranged a wedding her parents are delighted by, and a combination of gratitude and responsibility lead her to submit to the wishes of others. Gianni, however, is jealous, won’t let her film any more sex scenes with others, and he idealises her to an extent he sees her only in heroic and virtuous roles. In a clear nod to Rossellini and Bergman, he decides that his first picture as a director will be Joan of Arc, the role that will showcase all that he sees on her. The film is a terrible flop and comes close to bankrupting them. She takes on a role in a commercial film that succeeds and thus rescues her husband financially but seeks solace in the arms of another, Nardo (Ivan Desny). Whilst she’s ready to give up everything for him, he’s only after a fun adventure with a glamorous movie star. Her career is now back on track but she decides to learn how to act, to get serious about her art and only accept roles in film that aspire to more than just making money. The husband who formerly idealised her has just such a role to offer. But he doesn’t see her as an actress now. And neither does anyone else. The film ends as she accepts a role in an Arabian Nights movie with lots of harem scenes.
The film raises questions that cinema has incited since the beginning: cinema’s relationship to sex, realism, fantasy, noir, the business of it, the selling of it, the art of it. At the beginning of the film director Ercole (Gino Cervi) claims that sex, religion and politics are what’s needed for success. We get to see Venice during the film festival; and almost all areas of Cinecittà: it’s coffee shops, dressing rooms, the various sets, the ramparts of sets, behind backdrops, its entrance, its screening rooms. It’s a film buff’s delight.
In the biography she wrote with Begoña Aranguren, Lucia Bosé, Diva, Divina (Marid: Planeta, 2003), Bosé tells us:
‘To return to La signora senza camelie, it turned out to be a big hit. In my second film with Antonioni I could forget about the torment of the lights. He was the first director to begin shooting with ‘foto-flu’. It was a lighting system in which, at last, the whole set was lit at the same time, and this made possible that it wasn’t you that had to go blind in the darkness searching for the light. This is why Antonioni was able to make those extraordinary compositions. He lit the whole set and then the camera could move freely. The new system was very time consuming and the fuses kept blowing up frequently..But what impressive shots he made!’ (pp.58-59).
In an interview with Antonioni that accompanies The Masters of Cinema booklet to La notte, Antonioni says that ‘La signora senza camelie ….is a film that I consider to be a mistake, mainly because I started off on the wrong foot from the very beginning of the film by concentrating on a character who then turned out to be the wrong one.’ I wonder what the right one was? And I wish more filmmakers would make ‘mistakes’ of this order. La signora senza camelie is a cinephile’s dream of a movie. Antonioni’s comments only want to make me see it again.
José Arroyo
backlots
An interesting article by Erik Piepenburg in The New York Times that hyperlinks to a short clip on Franklin Pangborn from this blog. Other articles on pansies, Pangborn, sissies and Easy Living here can be accessed by double-clicking on the highlighted term.
José Arroyo
Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin cropped up in one of Gregory Woods‘s threads and it’s enthralled me for the last three nights. Otto and Anna Quangle – an elderly working class couple – are driven by grief and conscience to small acts of rebellion. Each Sunday, they write out a postcard and put it in a public space where someone will pick it up. That act, small and impotent as it is, is treason, and punishable by death, which is where the whole novel inexorably leads to. I love the milieu. it’s so rare to see working class people, neighbourhoods and ways of life depicted in novels still. But here the working class rub shoulders with the underworld, farmers, the criminal justice system. The careless cruelty, the greed, the pompous injustice of it all, the quotidian nastiness: all depicted from the inside. The period is from the Fall of Paris to the Fall of Berlin and the author wrote it in a burst of 24 days just before he died in ’47. The corruption of the system, the acceptance of different degrees of hideousness everywhere, the dehumanisation of those showing any kind of difference or dissidence…and in the meantime Otto and Anna put out their postcards, assert a humanity with small acts. There are lots of people alone in this Berlin engaging in small, almost invisible acts of dissidence they only hear about when the land in jail. It’s a great novel because it depicts a whole world peopled by varied and vivid characters but it’s the narrative unfolding that rivets. It reads like a great detective novel even though one knows exactly where everything will end up. one is riveted by character and process, indeed the process is in itself a kind of hope, even as you know that Anna and Otto’s actions doom not only them but also many who they merely happened to be in contact with. No Hollywood movie depicted Nazis with the kind of ordinary, everyday, casual and almost funny brutality that we read of in this book.
José Arroyo
I hem, haw and get all the actors’ names wrong. Mike is there to pick up the pieces and make lucid comments. We find much to mull over in Solo, which José finds the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back and Mike finds overlong and depressingly dull. Our discussions take in the merits and flaws of the film’s visual design, its relationship to the saga’s history and fans, Ron Howard’s earnestness, the way the film builds a lawless world to develop and reconfigure Han Solo, and more. Is it a textured film with interesting rounded characters played by good actors or is is dull and unstructured? Two very different points of view on the film.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.
José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
Though never very good at acquiring or exercising it myself, I’ve always been very interested in power: how to acquire it (Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son), how it’s exercised (Machievelli’s The Prince) how it works (Foucault). My favourite of all these works, which is not directly on the issue but brings it to life better than no other, is the Duc de Saint Simon’s memoirs. It’s in three enormous volumes and one can sink into them for a whole winter. There is no greater chronicler of the last years of Louis XIV, the war of the Spanish succession, and the Regency which followed. Saint Simon is prissy, proud, always venting about order, and precedence and how those lousy bastards are destroying proper seating arrangements in Versailles. He writes with a cool, clear eye of the realities he sees – everyone on the make, fixed on appearances, orbiting around the centres of power, trying to de-center them slightly so as to find a place for themselves — and is lively fun to read. It’s the best chronicle of its time and place; a detailed and precise chronicles of politics at work; a dramatic and personalised rendering of the workings of power in relation to the failings of personality, all beautifully written: Two random expamples :
‘There were many marriages this winter, and amongst them one very strange – a marriage for love, between a brother of Feuquière’s, who had never done much, and the daughter of the celebrated Mignard, first painter of his time. The daughter was still so beautiful that Bloin, chief valet of the King, had kept her for some time, with the knowledge of everyone, and used his influence to make the King sign the marriage-contract.’
And on great Mme de Sévigné, the other great chronicler of the time: ‘so amiable and of such excellent company, died some time after at Grignan, at the house of her daughter, her idol, but who merited little to be so. I was very intimate with the young Marquis de Grignan, her grandson. This woman, by her natural grace, the sweetness of her wit, communicates these qualities to those who had them not; she was beside extremely good, and knew thoroughly many things without ever wishing to appear as though she knew anything.
They’re not really books to dip in, though one can, the work becomes cumulatively greater as it unfolds. I recommend.
José Arroyo
I love cookbooks. I love reading them, looking at them, following up on ingredients, doing a kind of cultural geography through cooking. I don’t need to cook their recipes but I sometimes do. I learned to cook with The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. And I still have my tattered, split and dirty paperback I bought in the early 80s —- ‘First time in paperback!’ says the cover. I don’t think I’d even made myself a cup of coffee until I left home, so learning to cook was an imperative as I had no money. And Fannie Farmer taught me. I remember working at La Ronde and thinking all day about making the Rich Devil Food Cake recipe when I got home, and then cycling through the Jacques Cartier Bridge and realising I didn’t’t have cocoa, and stopping by every dépanneur from Hochelaga-Maisonneuve to Park Extension that looked open in search of cocoa, finally finding it, arriving to the Avenue du Parc apartment I shared with Michael Bailey, making that cake half asleep, staying up for the baking time and then having some of that hot cake with cold milk and feeling completely blissed out. In the morning I awoke to loud banging on the fire escape leading from the kitchen. It was the landlord, coming to collect his rent, which I’d forgotten about, and looking aghast at my kitchen: full of dust from flour, cocoa, and bits of chocolate icing that were smeared on the table, the floor, and seemed to be everywhere. That’s the kind of obsessions cookbooks can lead to.
José Arroyo
I’m a great reader of biographies, which I think of as a very English-language genre (think how poor Spanish literature is in this regard). Biography is also a broad category that could encompass anything from a book of joined-up press-clippings of a star to the works of scholarship that take decades to complete. My favourite writer of biography has been Michael Holroyd and I’ve loved reading his doorstoppers on Shaw, Strachey and Augusts John. My favourite of his books has been this remarkable telling of the extraordinary life of Ellen Terry that encompasses the various historical and social contexts in which she moved, and that is also a telling of at least one history of the developments in the English theatre from the 19th Century onwards, with an accent on prevalent performance styles; to, through her children, the director Edith Craig, and particularly through the extraordinary designs of her son, Edward Gordon Craig, the modern theatre. The research is extraordinary, the narration of it clear and exciting, the approach gentle and inclusive. How do these books affect your life? Well you look on, learn, compare; and in the best of these works, such as this one, through the life, you learn of the varied complexities of an art, a politics and a culture. Also, maybe, a little bit about yourself.
José Arroyo
Charlize Theron stars in Tully, Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s fourth collaboration as director and screenwriter, as a mother of two with a third on the way, heavily put upon and struggling financially and personally, who hires a nanny to help her out at night. We find room for both praise and criticism, José in particular singling out Reitman’s direction for his ire and Mike disappointed in the film’s ultimate treatment of its central female friendship, but keen to discuss its portrayal of stress and mental illness.
The podcast can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes.
José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
I’ve excluded books of history or theory from this list that have to do with work even though some (Marx, Benedict Anderson, Harold Innis, Barthes, Sontag) had an influence on my thinking that exceeded the boundaries of my job – always and at best uncertain, elastic, permeable — and seeped into shaping an understanding of life and the ways the world works. But I can’t refrain from including Pauline Kael here: she was my introduction to films and film criticism. In the mid-late 70s there were very few film books in the second-hand bookshops I trawled through and worked at in Montreal but Going Steady, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and I Lost it at the Movies could usually be found there along with Bazin, V.F. Perkins, Paul Rotha, John Grierson, maybe a collection of Agee.
The problem with those and with other film books then available was that one was usually reading on films that were not available to see; one was reading …but in the dark. This changed for me when Reeling was published and was available at every corner bookshop in paperback: I bought my copy at Classics. In Reeling she was writing about some films I’d already seen or would soon see on television, and one could have a conversation with her views, and as one grew up and social circles expanded, one could also have a conversation about her work with others. It was almost de rigueur at a certain period. I saved my money and bought The New Yorkeronly to read her: I could barely understand the rest of the magazine. The weeks she wasn’t in it, I didn’t buy.
Anyway this is turning into a thesis, suffice to say that I’ve read her all my life and continue to dip into it occasionally, that no one’s writing on film entertains me more, that she’s endlessly interesting as a figure and despite her unarguable historical importance has still not received the attention that is her due (why do David Thomson, James Wolcot and all the other major figures she helped have such a tortuous relationship with her legacy – each expression of gratitude is a sting; what does it say that the person who did most damage to her reputation was a fellow female critic, Renata Adler?). I miss her irreverence, that thirties unsentimental funniness, those marvellous jazzy sentences, her fearlessness (she was banned from screenings several times). No one now exercises a similar centrality in the current culture, and that’s probably a good thing. But it does seems to me that no established popular critic now dares call out and poke fun at those in power like she did with Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, calling him ‘Feather in Brains’, one of many of her jokes that still make me chuckle over thirty years later , and largely because it hits its target so accurately. See the film. That’s what Kael always made you feel like doing.
José Arroyo
David Foster Wallace is the great essayist of my generation. If I were smarter and could write better, his is the way I’d like to write. Sontag is sparer, clearer, better — a greater influence on my thinking. But he’s the one who brings me most joy. The vocabulary is so dazzling, anything from Derridean terminology to 1920s slang; the sentences so beautifully structured; the mind so sharp; the sensibility so earnest, well-meaning. There’s a sad kinetic kindness to his point of view that I love. Choosing this over Consider the Lobster means forfeiting the great essay on ‘Authority and American Usage’ and of course ‘Consider the Lobster’ itself. However, this does have the great essay on Lynch originally written for Premiere, the hilarious essay on cruises, and the superb one on the connection between TV and US fiction, so that tipped the balance. Luckily there’s no either/or in life when it comes to reading David Foster Wallace, though critics in love with binaries often make a case of how his non-fiction is vastly superior to his fiction. I have read the first 300 pages of Infinite Jest — I mean to get to the rest before I die — and the scenes of one of the protagonists waiting for his drug dealer are as funny, desperate, accurate, as I’ve ever read. I suppose this exercise is a bit deceptive in that I don’t think one inhabits particular books as much as particular writers: David Foster Wallace is one of mine.
José Arroyo
João Moreira Salles in The Intense Now calls this the best film of the events of May 1968 in Paris. Certainly it’s the most beautiful: all those Super 8 images of handsome young men in love with cinema, horsing around, pretending to be nuns, looking for sex with pretty young women they promise to include in their films, poking fun at the earnestness of those selling L’Humanité on Sunday, being screamed at by the neighbours. The Super 8 images these kids shot for fun are enlarged and end up looking slightly grainy, or slightly our of focus, slightly spectral. The results of the processing of the film stock is soft, all slightly blurred edges, beautiful – a tonic from all the high definition sharpness of current cinema; as are the composition of the images themselves, which are very deliberate, often geometric. This is someone who’s been around cinema and in love with it from a very young age.
If the film begins with young men in love with cinema, it also charts their engagement with social change: on a trip to Spain as teenagers, they refuse to eat so that the Fascist tourist industry there won’t get any of their money. They return skinny, handsome, ready for adventures in radicalism. Soon, they get involved in the politics of their high school and of the communist party; they become student activists and ready to play a role in the events of 68 which will soon unfold. If cinema and social change are two of the film’s major interests what overhangs all is death.
The film is dedicated to, amongst others, Anne Sylvie, and the voice-over at the very beginning, that famous beginning cited at such length in In the Intense Now tells us:
‘Anne Sylvie, to die at thirty, the film is a little bit her story. She was tall, pretty, brunette, student, activist; she handled the high schools. I met her early on, in ‘66; she was in charge of our theoretical and practical training. I was secretly in love with her, and I can’t imagine I was the only one. She was tall, pretty, brunette. She is dead now. She committed suicide.
Dominic: To Die at 30/ ‘Half a Life’ . This film is a little bit his story. I had become an activist and he was the first student I recruited at Condorçet hight school. We became inseparable. We prepared all our actions together. One day, on the way back from a congress, he died in an accident.
Pierre Louis: Later I was working in film. I noticed Pierre-Louis did the rounds as a courier. He was a former militant. I did everything I could to get him a gig. We succeeded, he became an assistant editor. Then one night he killed himself.
March 23, 1978, Michel Recanati. Michel’s parent told me Michel had disappeared leaving his ID and cash behind. I shuddered. Michel is my entire political history, my only friend, the one most by my side. Years and years of projects, dreams, illusions. Hundreds of meetings, scores of protests. We were thick as thieves. Which is why I explained to his family that he must have taken off in search of another adventure. I deeply understood his desire to vanish. Since I , too that 23rd of March wanted to be gone. A few days before I had met Francine, a magnificent young lady, blonde and everything. I immediately loved her like mad so stayed. It’s when I heard about his death in 81 that I wanted to tell his story, our story.’
That beginning is an incantation that casts a spell. The film is composed of images and and a language that vividly evokes an era. The film is a great autobiographical video essay on the intersection of; cinephilia, social justice, biography, social history, the student movement in France, the events of 68 and their aftermath; structured as a quest to investigate the suicide of a friend that is also a metaphor for a generation of people who lived so intensely they committed suicide: by thirty, a half life, they’d lived so intensely they couldn’t figure out how to deal with the aftermath. Everyone looks young and beautiful in these dreamlike Super 8 black and white images. It’s extraordinary to see what they did so young. The film is textured through with a nostalgia that is slightly disconcerting in those so young. Images, sounds, voice-over all paint a romance of what it was like to live in the ‘Intense Now’ that led up to May 68 and the let-down of its aftermath.
José Arroyo