Tomsutpen

Radio Racket

rooty toot toot

Jean-Luc Godard on Jerry Lewis

An excerpt from 'A Genius Like Us': A Portrait of Joe Orton

Neither eye-popping nor formally complex (relatively speaking, I hasten to add), Danses cosmopolites à transformation nevertheless has a charm that was very often hidden within the visual, hand-tinted tumult of Segundo de Chomón's later and more celebrated achievements. Employed initially by the brothers Pathe, Chomon was a filmmaker of extraordinary gift whose name just about always appears in the same paragraphs as Georges Méliès; and for marginally good reason. Both men were pioneers of the new medium; both had more than a hand in the development of its various techniques of optical hocus-pocus (multiple-exposures, time-lapse, dissolves, to name the most frequently cited); both gave their filmmaking over to extravagant, impossible visions that made America's rather staid pioneer class look utterly moribund by comparison. But Chomon's determination to embrace the illusory power of what was then a new medium . . . in its known totality . . . often gave his visions an incantatory force that would have rendered them, in retrospect, fairly insufferable were it not for an equivalent spirit of playfulness at their heart (a spirit laid bare in Danses). His films were never dolorous or solemn. They exulted in a joyous sense of potential made positively radiant by the new technology and its vast, still undiscovered galaxies of expression. In 1964, Jonas Mekas referred to Andy Warhol's films as, in a sense, "a cinema of happiness". I sometimes think he picked the wrong filmmaker.

Amid every rash, destructive, feral thing that happens in the mere four minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Across the Universe' (1998), the overall bearing of Fiona Apple throughout is perhaps the most mysteriously compelling of all. Within the slow-motion, monochromatic chaos that is its backdrop of epic Soda Shop vandalism, she carries herself with neither authority nor submission; neither blissful ignorance of what's happening around her nor knowing assent. She seems a world (or two) apart from the ceaseless shower of paper napkins. straws, flying glass shards, ice cream scoops, gumballs, venetian blinds, chairs and tables hurled in every conceivable direction, but she nevertheless appears to draw an odd, private strength from it in the same instant. Singing this hymn to an exalted state of being (in lyrics that were written by John Lennon three decades before) as if it were a lament, she shines brightly. If you have to give it a name . . . something you must always do in film criticism, whether the object under review deserves to be embalmed in words or not . . . you could say that you were seeing the one perfect expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has coughed up. 'Across the Universe' is a music video produced in connection with an immensely obvious and stupid movie called 'Pleasantville' (a film Anderson otherwise had nothing to do with); and if you have to give it a name . . . something you must always do in film criticism, whether the work under review deserves to be embalmed in words or not . . . you could say that you were seeing the one true expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has coughed up. You could say it; and I'd probably agree with you.

On November 23, 1903, while dalmations and palookas in firehouses across America smoldered with envy, American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. cameraman F.S. Armitage was present as Pawtucket, Rhode Island's crack Fire Department unveiled its new, state-of-the-art firefighting equipment.

The industrialization of Northern Italy after the Second World War, and all its hideous consequences, was only one of the subtexts that informed, to one degree or another, a huge amount of Post-war Italian Cinema; not just the Neorealist cycle. In one of his early documentaries, 'Sette Canne, un vestito' (Seven Reeds, One Suit), Michelangelo Antonioni took his camera to a Rayon factory near Trieste and, through his determined emphasis on soulless machinery (almost to the exclusion of the workers) created the first of his oppressive environments without sacrificing the essential documentary character of the enterprise. Almost a decade later, Alain Resnais and Raymond Queneau would take this a step (or two) further with their plastic molding epic, 'Chant du Styrene', but Antonioni's film, even with the sumptuousness of its imagery, remains the more everlasting triumph in this small corner of the documentary canon. Note: This film is presented in the original Italian, without English subtitles. Call it a poor guess or call it a shifty evasion, but it's my belief that the narration probably offers us little that the images can't handle on their own.

For a director who sought time and again to restate a past he could only have known from hearsay, 1984's 'Karin's ansikte', one of the director's few shorter works and one of his most moving, represents the one occasion when Bergman allowed that past to speak for itself.

Far less critical of gender roles than her other work (that which I've seen at any rate), Gunvor Nelson's My Name is Oona emerged as one of the loveliest works in American cinema of the late 1960s (a time when you could use such terms as 'poetic' and 'cinema' in the same sentence and still maintain a straight face), and remains so to this minute. In writing about this film Amos Vogel judged Nelson 'the true poetess of visual cinema'; and while that may or may not be true . . . Vogel's declaration is too sweeping even for me, much as I incline towards it . . . no film of hers is at once so dazzling in form or effortless in its lyricism. And like all such films, it could not have been made in a time other than its own.

On April 27, 1906, American Mutoscope and Biograph cameraman G.W. Bitzer was on had at New York's Ellis Island to record the goings and comings of newly arrived huddled masses.

In 1939, Joseph Losey became a walking emblem of what is still a relentlessly paradoxical and fitful accomodation between the imperatives of art and progressive ideas. He was at that time a stage director who could cite as accomplishments a tour of duty with the Federal Theater Project's Living Newspaper series; awards from the National Child Labor Committee and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union . . . both bestowed for his 1938 staging of Francis Faragoh's child labor melodrama Sunup to Sundown (which, despite this honorable amen corner, ran seven performances); a stillborn attempt to produce Ernest Hemingway's hideous Spanish Civil War play, The Fifth Column; and little else. Attendant to this, he had been occupied since 1937 as Production Supervisor for the Progressive Education Association's Experimental Film Project (his sole involvement in motion pictures to that point). To call him a committed man of the Left, in short, would be to understate the matter. It is terribly odd, then, that the first film to bear the name of this future Blacklistee, Pete Roleum and His Cousins, was a deliberate work of propaganda produced for and financed by America's Petroleum industry for exhibition at the legendary New York World's Fair of 1939. Like all such works, its primary message is simple (if immodest): We . . . you, me, and everyone not reading this . . . would be nothing without Oil companies. Oil molds life as we know it; it makes the wheels of civilization turn with deceptive ease; it is as necessary to human existence as sunshine, or oxygen. With a panoply of animated oil drops (created by one of the early masters of stop-motion animation, Charles Bowers) preaching an industrial evangel that makes the average George Pal Puppetoon, by comparison, look like a Santiago Alvarez newsreel, Losey evinces a shift in values so drastic as to invite dark retrospective speculation about blackmail, extortion, moral compromise, all kinds of horror. Why else would this man, who would go on to direct such films as The Boy With Green Hair and The Assassination of Trotsky, leap head first into the hip pocket of Oil interests? As usual, the answer is no less prosaic (and no less sinister) than a substantial payday. He was paid $10,000 out of the film's rather lavish $115,000 budget for this 15-minute Technicolor shill job and, personally, I find it hard to begrudge him a nickel of it. By his own account, none of the early work he had done in theater or film (with the exception of this, and his work on behalf of the Progressive Education Association . . . an organization which received its funding from the John D. Rockefeller Foundation) brought him more than a pittance. The life of a hardcore Progressive, staging dramas about social blight that won prizes given by Labor Unions, may have been . . . great. On paper. And it was certainly noble. But unless your name was Orson Welles, and you had enough of an instinct on how to turn a WPA poverty gig into something that eventually paid off (if only for a time), then the weight of that Great (and still ongoing) Depression was no less heavy on your shoulders than it was on any out of work mill-hand or any ex-banker reduced to pawning old suits and selling apples on 79th street. I wish I could say that Pete Roleum and His Cousins is a slyly subversive film; a feast of subtle, undermining touches that reflect Losey's own anti-capitalist bent. It's not (according to Losey's biographer, David Caute, there is some evidence that the filmmaker in fact excised potentially ambiguous lines from the script). This is as straightforward an encomium for a multinational industry as one could ever dread. But it is an engaging piece, nonetheless. Tom Sutpen

The beauty of this affable domestic morality play by Max Linder rests entirely with the actor/director's seemingly inexhaustible ability to balance his ineffably graceful screen presence against the character of a less than competent husband, consigned to his own dysfunctional devices after the wife runs home to Mother. Linder's comedies were always like this; forever two steps less unhinged, even in their slapstick elements, than the lovely knockabout grotesquerie of Keystone; and with a shade more emphasis on character. Though never as wildly successful in the States as the pantheon comics (Chaplin, Arbuckle, Keaton, Lloyd, etc), they nevertheless all took away something from Linder, whithout which their work, indeed the soul of American screen comedy itself, would have been a very different, possibly less charming, species. Tom Sutpen

What transpires when a world-class film artist is consigned to his or her own devices indefinitely? If your name is Orson Welles you do guest shots on Variety shows, wax nostalgic on a once glorious past on chat shows, lend your weight as an actor (physical as well as spiritual) to whatever godforsaken film project your agent can peel off the bottom of a very slimy barrel and, hopefully, pick up a camera when you find time and the money in whatever meager quantities fortune sees fit to provide. Maybe the shortest Shaggy Dog story ever committed to film, Vienna finds Orson Welles' filmmaking at its most delighted, its most giddy. But for the panoply of locations where it was shot (from the eponymous Old World capitol to a stage in Hollywood), one would almost think it a home movie; not too different from those odd bagatelles Charles Chaplin used to whip up in his First National days when distinguished visitors stopped by. Though nowhere near as formally elaborate or rigorous, the gleeful tone of Welles' Vienna directly anticipates that screwball comedy in montage, the bewildering final half-hour of F for Fake. And like all of Welles' home-grown product (only errant moments of which saw the light of day in his lifetime), it has an unbeatable juvenile spirit, but with none of the cring-inducing amateurishness that condition implies. Tom Sutpen