Film Noir

Short Film 09: House of Small Cubes (2008)

2009-06-03T15:23:00.003+03:00

The film is about an old man who lives in a submerged town. As the water rises, he’s forced to add additional levels on to his home with bricks (cubes) in order to stay dry. One day he drops his favorite pipe into the lower levels of his home. In the search for another pipe, he decides to purchase a wetsuit instead to use as he dives down to retrieve his original pipe. As he moves downwards through the different stories of his home, he relives scenes from his life.

download: link
imdb

Short Film 08: Le Building - Gobelins (2005)

2009-06-03T11:22:00.008+03:00

Le Building is an animated short film made by a team of 5 french students (Olivier Staphylas, Marco Nguyen, Pierre Perifel, Xavier Ramonede and Rémi Zaarour) from the animation school "the Gobelins" in Paris, France.

It was made as an opening short done for the Annecy 2005 international animation festival, so it had to be funny and/or punchy. After developing the story to find an idea all the team members liked and would be happy to work on, they came up with a simple one. A grandmother wants her neighbour to stop singing so loud -- and the main focus of the film ends up being the crazy chain reaction which follows. Its a pleasure to watch.

The movie was completed in 4 and a half months, including screenplay, storyboards and designs. The technique is a mix between traditional 2D, Flash, and 3D animation. With these differing techniques used, the challenge was to blend them so that the audience won't notice it too much. For example the pizza guy, his bike, the bus, and the crane are in 3D. The cat on the pizza guy's head is animated with Flash and the other characters are traditionally animated in 2D.

http://avaxhome.ws

download: link

Short Film 07: Hotel Chevalier (2007)

2009-06-03T10:46:00.006+03:00

Hotel Chevalier is a short film by director Wes Anderson, released in 2007. Starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, the film acts as a prologue to Anderson's 2007 feature The Darjeeling Limited. The 13-minute short takes place in the eponymous hotel some time before Schwartzman's character, Jack, meets his two older brothers in India. The film was screened out of competition alongside The Darjeeling Limited at the 64th Annual Venice Film Festival. It was shown in North American and British theaters attached to the beginning of (and credited as "Part One of") The Darjeeling Limited.

The film was shot at the Hotel Raphael in Paris, France. The song "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)" by Peter Sarstedt, from the 1969 album of the same name, is featured prominently in the short.

Hotel Chevalier attracted some attention for containing Natalie Portman's first nude scene, despite her previous insistence that she would never shoot one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Chevalier

imdb
download: part-1, part-2

The Short Films of David Lynch (2002)

2009-04-02T15:29:00.003+03:00

Collection of the early student and commissioned film work of American filmmaker David Lynch. As such, the collection does not include Lynch's later short work, which are listed in the filmography.

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The Punk Years (2002)

2009-04-02T15:02:00.007+03:00

(10 episodes - Music Documentary)

A definitive history of the music that shook the world, looking at the origins and development of the punk rock movement as a social, historical, political and musical force. Achieved a record audience for Play UK on Saturday July 13th 2002.

The Punk Years celebrates punk as a valid musical genre in its own right, like jazz or blues or soul. Not only Play UK’s most watched series ever, it is also widely acknowledged by long term fans of the genre as the best-ever series about the music. Appreciative comment focused on the great cross-section of interviewees and the programme’s honesty and integrity in dealing with a highly contentious, and for many people emotional and exciting, art form.

Programme 1: Wham Bam Thank You Glam:

A look at the nihilist rock n’ roll forefathers of punk - Warhol & The Velvets, Iggy & The Stooges, MC5, Glam rock - Roxy, Bolan and Bowie - and the British Pub rockers and discover why they had such an impact on the young punks-to-be.

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Programme 2: Year Zero:

New York’s punk scene developed from its roots in Warhol’s Factory and The Velvet Underground through to the New York Dolls and venues like Max’s Kansas City. We explore how the now legendary CBGB’s evolved into a seminal punk club, playing host to the likes of Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Talking Heads and The Ramones and how the New York scene informed the nascent London punks.

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Programme 3: 1977 Never Get To Heaven:

The British cultural revolution that defied authority and confronted the rock hegemony. This episode focuses on the rise of the Sex Pistols and other emerging British punk bands such as The Clash, The Damned and The Buzzcocks and the reaction their exhilarating music and confrontational behaviour received from the British public.

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Programme 4: Take Three Chords:

Here we look at the myriad of bands that emerged taking punk’s Do It Yourself ethic literally. This episode also covers the fashion, music and graphics - looking at designers who developed the punk graphic style; fashion designers such as Westwood and not forgetting the birth of the fanzine culture.

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Programme 5: A Riot Of Your Own:

An outraged cry against the rising right wing sentiment in the country and a counter to National Front marches, organisations like the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism formed. The band leading the way in energising punk in a political sense was The Clash, who played an integral role in the Rock Against Racism movement (as did many other punk groups), taking the stage alongside groups like Aswad and further cementing the links between punk and reggae. Anarcho-punk bands like Crass also began to emerge, taking on board anti-nuclear and vegetarian causes in opposition to the right wing politics of Oi! Bands. We discuss the political confusion caused by the mass of ideas thrown into the air by punk.

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Programme 6: Typical Girls:

Women were finally seen as equal in the punk movement. If you could pick up a guitar and play it - great. If you could sing and form your own band, even better. Women were finally getting a voice and not just as backing singers. We look at the women who rocked and discuss the great female punk performers - Siouxsie, The Slits, Pauline Murray, Poly Styrene, Debbie Harry and the seminal Patti Smith - and find out how true the idea that punk emancipated women from rock’s macho posturing really is.

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Programme 7: Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of :

The fashion of punk was more important than the music according to some. The episode looks at Sex and Acme Attractions, the two leading shops competing with each other on the Kings Road, and the effect they had influencing punk clones across the country. This episode also looks at the importance of the punk picture sleeve and how the diy graphic designs of the time are admired today.

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Programme 8: Punx Not Dead:

We look at some of the bands that were sniffed at by the punk elders for being cartoon-like; bands like Charlie Harper’s UK Subs, Sham 69, The Ruts, The Jam - but who dominated the late ’70s charts, as well as the different routes bands took as punk began to splinter.

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Programme 9: Independents Days:

The post-punk period of ‘79 - ‘82 was a time when the provinces really did rise up and challenge the metropolitan monopoly over music and attempt to complete punk’s apparently failed musical revolution. Labels like Manchester’s Factory, Glasgow’s Postcard and London’s Rough Trade and Mute evolved during this time and took the means of production back from the multinationals. We look at some of the key players from this period.

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Programme 10: California Uber Alles:

We look at how throughout the ’80s and ’90s, punk continued to influence music-making globally, but nowhere more so than America, through multi-million selling bands like Green Day and Offspring to the punk in contemporary acts from The Strokes to Limp Bizkit; The White Stripes to Blink 182.

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Lesbian Short Films (2005)

2009-04-01T20:52:00.002+03:00

A WOMAN REPORTED, directed by Chris J. Russo (5 mins., USA). Official Selection: Sundance Film Festival.
Moira Kelly (The West Wing, One Tree Hill) stars in this gripping thriller about a woman's determination to escape a hate crime and return to the loving arms of her girlfriend. (Inspired by the Ambrose Bierce short story An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge.)

DANI AND ALICE, directed by Roberta Marie Munroe (12 mins., USA/Canada).
Yolanda Ross (Stranger Inside, Shortbus) stars in this powerful, high-gloss indictment of lesbian domestic violence. WARNING: This film contains scenes of graphic violence.

FROZEN SMILE, directed by Silas Howard (7 mins., USA).
From By Hook or By Crook, Exactly Like You writer-director Silas Howard, this candy-colored comedy serves up a quirky portrait of a butch and her crazy family!

EVERYTHING GOOD, directed by Elizabeth McCarthy (17 mins., USA). Audience Award: Best Short, Fire Island Film Festival
A woman takes a risk and orders a call girl to fulfill her perfect lesbian sex fantasy in this crowd-pleasing bittersweet comedy.

SAINT HENRY, directed by Abigail Severance (19 mins., USA).
Ashleigh Ann Wood (Bloodknot) stars as a girl named Henry who enlists her gay best pal (Max Van Ville, The Standard) to help search for her father in this moody and gorgeously produced drama.

BLOW, directed by Marie Craven (7 mins., Australia).
This glossy Aussie short is the sweetest schoolgirl crush movie you've ever seen.

TRANSIT, directed by Kerry Weldon (4 mins., USA).
Enjoy the simple pleasures of lesbian cruising, subway style!

HALF LAUGHING, directed by Michelle Ehlen (12 mins., USA).
You'll laugh, you'll cry. It takes a lot of courage for a butch lesbian to face her mother's homophobia on a trip home for Grandpa's funeral.

TINA PAULINA: LIVING ON HOPE STREET, directed by Barbara Green and Michelle Boyaner (10 mins., USA).
A riveting and inspirational documentary portrait of a lesbian living on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

THE BLACK PLUM, directed by Meredyth Wilson (15 mins., USA).
A poignant, evocative fantasy about a young tomboy's journey away from her restrictive home. Stars Kip Pardue (Loggerheads, Thirteen, But I'm a Cheerleader).

http://rapidshare.com/files/181842877/LsbnShrtFlmFstvl.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/181852919/LsbnShrtFlmFstvl.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/181867391/LsbnShrtFlmFstvl.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/181908198/LsbnShrtFlmFstvl.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/181914860/LsbnShrtFlmFstvl.part5.rar

rar pass: tsou_li

http://cinelez.blogspot.com

Short Film 06: 10 minuta (aka: 10 minutes) (2002)

2009-04-01T16:20:00.003+03:00

How many different things can happen for only 10 Minutes. The film won the award for the best European short film in 2002.

This short film, as its title indicates lasts only 10 minutes, but it tells a much longer story which unravels only in our imagination upon seeing the end of the film. While 10 minutes in someone’s life mean nothing, they can be fatal in another: a boy and his loving family, tragedy in a war-torn city, death and destruction. All in just ten minutes. The film follows two simultaneous story lines: one set in Rome, and one in Sarajevo, in 1994, the worst time of the war in Bosnia. Although the Rome part was not filmed on the original location, that does not take away anything from the quality of the film, it was just a symbolic element anyway. Cast is great, story is very compact and well written, direction dynamic and precise. There is nothing out of place in the film: well structured, stripped of false pathos, realistic, it is very straight forward. In other words, this is a jewel of a film, and it was not by chance that it won the award for the best European short film in 2002. 10 minutes for me is definitely one of the most moving and powerful films about wartime Sarajevo. Behind the scene: I read that the director Ahmed Imamovic, in search of Japanese for the role of the tourist, had to go to the Japanese Embassy in Sarajevo and ask one of the staff to perform in the film. Luckily for the director, the Embassy allowed one of their employees to star in the film.

The story tells how SERBS have killed civils, old people and children!

download with english subtitle
imdb

Short Film 05: Ilha das Flores (1989)

2009-04-01T16:14:00.003+03:00

Best Short Film at the 17th Gramado Festival, 1989.
Silver Bear for a Short Film at the 40th Berlin Festival, 1990.
Air France award to the best Brazilian short film of the year, 1990.
Margarida de Prata (CNBB), best Brazilian short film of the year, 1990.
Special Jury Award and Best Popular Jury Film Clermont-Ferrand Festival, France, 1991.
"Blue Ribbon Award" at the American Film and Video festival, New York, 1991.
Best Film, No-budget Kurzfilmfestival, Hamburg, Germany, 1991.

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imdb

Short Film 04: Das Rad (Eng:Rocks) (2003)

2009-04-01T16:03:00.003+03:00

Das Rad (English title: Rocks) is a German animated film written and directed by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger. It was produced using a mixture of stop motion, puppetry, and CGI animation. The film tracks a hillside from ancient times through the present and into the future, usually moving through time at high speed (so that buildings appear and disappear in an instant) but occasionally switching to real time and showing the inhabitants and objects in motion in their day-to-day existence. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2003. And it won several other awards in respectable festivals like the Anima Mundi Animation Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Sweden Fantastic Film Festival, and the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival. It was produced by the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Germany.Das Rad (English title: Rocks) is a German animated film written and directed by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger. It was produced using a mixture of stop motion, puppetry, and CGI animation. The film tracks a hillside from ancient times through the present and into the future, usually moving through time at high speed (so that buildings appear and disappear in an instant) but occasionally switching to real time and showing the inhabitants and objects in motion in their day-to-day existence. The movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2003. And it won several other awards in respectable festivals like the Anima Mundi Animation Festival, Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Sweden Fantastic Film Festival, and the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival. It was produced by the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

download - Eng subtitle
imdb

Short Film 03: Peter and the Wolf (2006)

2009-04-01T15:52:00.004+03:00

Peter & the Wolf (Polish: Piotrus i wilk, also known as Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf) is a short Polish-British-Norwegian model animation film released in 2006. It was written and directed by Suzie Templeton, made in Se-ma-for Studios in Lï¿½dz, and has been shown both in cinemas and with live musical accompaniment.

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Short Film 02: Little Terrorist (2005)

2009-04-01T15:48:00.003+03:00

Jamal, a 10-year-old Pakistani Muslim, mistakenly crosses the border between India and Pakistan and finds an unusual ally in a Hindu Brahmin, Bhola. Indian soldiers descend on Bhola's village searching for the so-called terrorist who crossed over. Bhola's neice, Rani, insists they can't let a Muslim into their Hindu home. With Bhola and Rani grappling with the consequences of harboring a Pakistani and their deep-set prejudice against Muslims, Jamal's only hope is the humanity shared by a people separated by artificial boundaries a long time ago.

Since its world premiere in September 2004, the film has been invited to 103 film festivals and has won awards in fourteen of them. Chief among them was the nomination for Academy Awards, USA in the Best Live action short films category. It was also nominated for the best short film award in the European Film Awards.

It went on to win the audience award in the AlmerÐ½a International Short Film Festival, the UIP Ghent Award for European Short Films in the Flanders International Film Festival, the grand prize in the Manhattan Short Films festival and the first prize in the Short Films category in the MontrÐ¹al World Film Festival.

The movie was officially mentioned and selected in various other competitions. It also won an honourable mention by BAFTA LA. It is the first Indian short film to get a theatrical release in India.

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Short Film 01: Franz Kafka (1991)

2009-04-01T15:32:00.004+03:00

I will share lots of awarded short films with you. Begining with Piotr Dumala's film: Franz Kafka.

In Franz Kafka, Dumala shows us scenes from Kafka's life, from youth, through the ripening of his creative genius to his eventual isolation. Taking Kafka's diaries, letters and novels themselves as its source, the film includes documentary material - from photos taken by Kafka between 1883 and 1924 to images of Prague at the turn of the century.

Piotr Dumala was born in Poland and studied sculpture and animation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. His award-winning animated ?lms include Lagodna (Gentle Spirit, 1985), Nerwowe zycie kosmosu (Nervous Life of the Universe, 1986), Sciany (Walls, 1987), Wolnosc nogi (Freedom of the Leg, 1988), and Franz Kafka (1990).

Dumala's films have won multiple awards. Lagodna was winner of the Golden Ducat at the International Film Festival in Mannheim, Germany, in 1985, and received an award for the Best Animated Film at the International Short Film Festival in Toures, France. Dumala received a Mister Linea Award at the Treviso International Animation Festival for his 24 episodes of the series Nerwowe zycie, and, in 1998, Sciany received the Grand Prix at the International Short Film Festival in Krakow, Poland, and Special Jury Award at the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France. In 1992, Franz Kafka received the Grand Prix at the 10th International Animation Film Festival in Zagreb, Best Animated Film at the International Film Festival in Madrid, Grand Prix at the International Animated Film Festival in Espinho, and Best Cartoon Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Dumala's most recent piece is an adaptation of Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i kara) which premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in September 2000 and received the prize for Best Design at that festival. In 2001, Crime and Punishment was awarded the Public Prize at the Summer Film Festival in Kazimierz, Poland, and at the International Animation Film Festival in Espinho. In 2003 Dumala was awarded a Luna de Valencia at the Valencia Film Festival for his lifetime achievement in animation. He received the Albin Brunovski Prize in Uherske Hradiste for his artistic creativity in the art of animation, and a Grande FeFe Award at the FeFe Festival in Warsaw for his artistic independence in the field of animation. Dumala has created four MTV idents: Charlatan won the Broadcast Design Gold Award in Orlando, Florida, in 1994, and was a finalist in the New York festivals. Kafka Meets Dostoyevski received an International Broadcast Design Gold Award in 1996.

In addition, Dumala has made commercials and TV trailers; a short public service announcement for Amnesty International; and a ten-second sequence created for the Absolut Vodka website showcasing independent animation. He teaches animation at the Film, Television and Drama School in Lodz, Poland; is a guest professor at the Animation House at Konstfack in Eksj?, Sweden; and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University. He is involved in writing and journalistic activities, and published Razor Game (Male, 2000), a collection of short stories. He also creates graphics, paintings, illustrations and poster designs. He is currently working on his new film The Forest.

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David Fincher

2009-03-31T22:26:00.007+03:00

It is an understatement to claim that the films of director David Fincher are reminiscent of classical film noir. The canonical texts written on the subject, notably Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton's “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” (1955) and Paul Schrader's “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), read like 'how to' guides for understanding films like Alien 3, Seven, Fight Club, and to a lesser extent The Game and Panic Room. Schrader points out that “film noir's techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness.” (1) If this is true, Fincher has created a series of films that are anything but meaningless. His slick and glossy treatment of a dark world frequently garners accusations that his films are shallow experiments in style. It is more accurate to say that Fincher absorbs the fleeting styles and tastes of Hollywood, reflects them, and twists them. He pulls back the curtain, revealing a mechanical process at the core of the filmmaker's art, leaving us to wonder how we lost our humanity in something we love so much.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Fincher is his proven ability to buy artistry at $7000 a second. The idea that a film can cost $50 million-plus inspires nausea in most critics and it is tempting to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that all that cash doesn't really make a film any better. But, while many directors with fat studio wallets are falling over themselves to get the biggest bang for their bucks, Fincher is lacing his films with effects that are subdued, moody, and often transparent. He is mapping out impossible camera movements with CGI, commissioning intricate sets that would make Dario Argento drool, tweaking every last detail in postproduction, and re-shooting copious amounts of footage after the principal photography has wrapped. He appears to have the studios figured out and is able to make films the way he wants, with or without the final cut.

Fincher cultivated a healthy respect for big-budget filmmaking as a teenager when he landed a dream job at Industrial Light and Magic. He worked on special effects cinematography for films like Return of the Jedi (1983) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). As if this experience didn't already place him at the chewy centre of his generation's pop culture, he then went on to direct music videos for, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones. Fincher also found a place directing lavish commercials for corporations like Nike, Levi's, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola; this profession has since sheltered Fincher from the whims of the studios, giving him time to choose his projects and negotiate a decent amount of control over them. It has also provided those who disapprove of Fincher's films with a convenient justification. There are dissenters who simply object to all “films of quality” and Fincher's work with commercials and music videos leads him to produce films with extremely precise lighting, editing, and décor.

Fincher proudly stands behind all of his work (except Alien 3) and defends himself against his detractors. He says, “[t]here's this assumption that commercials are just close-ups of celebrities holding products up to their faces. But some of them are great art. It's not the art of the surrealistic painting or the poem, but it is art.” (2) Fincher's definition is refreshingly inclusive. At the same time, Fincher hints that the relative importance of a film is fleeting and indeterminate:
I think the movies I make are trifles. They're footnote movies. I'm not making big important movies, I'm not making Bridge on the River Kwai. I'm not dealing with big noble themes. But again, I couldn't imagine somebody wanting to remake Psycho, so maybe I'm wrong. (3)

Maybe that's why he continues to make thrillers, even though he believes that “[c]omedies are probably more important to the human psyche than movies that scare people.” (4) Or maybe he aspires to exorcise our demons by showing them in their entirety. The unique combination of despair, cynicism, and the occasional burst of calculated sadism that pervade Fincher's films has surfaced only on rare occasions in Hollywood cinema during the past 50 years and each time it leaves a scar.

Fincher's first feature film, Alien 3 (1992), was a critical and commercial failure. Wrought with agony under the iron fist of Twentieth Century Fox, Fincher's vision for the sequel was demolished by the studio. Fox was plainly unwilling to gamble on an even darker version of an already depressing film, especially when handing over an unprecedented budget to a first-time director. By the time the ordeal was over Fincher reportedly “swore he would rather have colon cancer than direct another picture.” (5) Fincher's later film career may not have been so successful, nor his fan base so large, if Alien 3 had been a benign success. After all, there is no better way to gain sympathy as a director than to have your dreams crushed by heartless studio executives. However, greatness, or even the possibility of greatness, does not typically descend from sympathy. Alien 3 taught Fincher a valuable lesson. Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. New Line Cinema and Fox Studios executives put their careers on the line to give Fincher extra time and money to tinker with the endings of Seven and Fight Club.

Alien 3 replays much of the content of Ridley Scott's original Alien (1979). The outgunned and unprepared humans, unable to flee because they are adrift in space, overcome the odds and destroy the creature that is hunting them. However, the originality of Alien—the shock of a living man giving birth to the creature as it bursts from his chest, the betrayal of the crew by its android companion, and the strength of the female protagonist that ultimately casts the creature into space—is intentionally absent. Imagine a stock horror film where the defenseless teenagers simply surrender to the serial killer at the outset. They do eventually destroy the creature, but only because they have nothing better to do.

The visual language of the film was carefully planned to nourish the paranoia and isolation of the film's plot. The camera is always looking up at the smooth lines of the neo-gothic interiors, but the angle only makes the film more claustrophobic because the camera never gets far enough away to make us feel comfortable with the surroundings. Even if we weren't always so close to everything, it's unlikely it would make any difference. As the film's cinematographer, Alex Thompson, pointed out, “Fincher was always saying 'Keep it dark, keep it dark!'” making it very difficult for him to maintain any sort of color in the image. (6) The end result is a gritty, chiaroscuro sepia that doesn't let up.

In the last few minutes of the film, a curious attempt is made to resurrect an SF atmosphere. Men in white suits (à la E.T.) arrive after the destruction of the alien to take Ripley and her 'child' away. They want to develop the alien life form into a weapon. Robin Wood's comments on the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) seem particularly relevant here, when he says that the Hollywood ideology “is shattered beyond convincing recuperation.” (7) This sudden influx of guns and enemy soldiers is too little too late. As Ripley jumps to her death, clutching the newborn alien to her chest, Alien 3 is unable to find resolution in this or any other context. Since that moment, fans have prayed nightly that a director's cut of Fincher's original concept will be released. Fincher, however, would just as soon see the film's original negatives destroyed.

Fincher proved his aptitude for moody set pieces with his next film, Seven (1995), a drama about two detectives who track a heaven-bent serial killer who chooses his victims and their deaths according to the seven deadly sins. The film is viscerally repellent due to the viciousness of the killer's crimes—for the first murder, he feeds a man for days until his stomach bursts—but it is more horrific than gory. It comes as a surprise, watching the film more closely in later viewings, that so much of what we thought we saw the first time is never shown.

Foster Hirsch has high praise for the setting of Seven, because it “may well be the most richly rendered symbolic space to date in the history of neo-noir.” (8) However, he concludes that “Seven is compelling if morally hollow.” (9) I would instead argue that Seven floods us with morality, not all of it palatable. The fragmentation of narrative voice is extensive and the only authoritative storyteller we can cling to (Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman) is the one who believes that the violent aspects of human nature are incomprehensible, yet unstoppable. Frighteningly enough, even the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), has a powerful and convincing voice in the film. He, at least, envisions an end to violence.

Seven conforms to the definition of the “progressive text” as one that challenges “the conventional means of representing reality in the cinema in such a way as to expose those means as a practice, as a product of ideology, and not as a manifest replication of reality.” (10) This label is easier to apply to Fight Club (1999), where the style of the film directly influences characters and the narrative structure, but the seeds of this visual progression are planted in Seven. The film's protagonists, detectives Somerset and Mills (Brad Pitt), are from two different worlds and the lens alternates between their two disparate perspectives. Somerset's world is smoky and dark; his crime scenes are littered with grime and decay and his precinct, cluttered and cramped, is a monument to unsolved cases. Mills' approaches police work as a profession, rather than a solemn duty. He has the hot cups of coffee, the beautiful home, and a beautiful wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). His first crime scene is bright and media saturated and his attitude is reflected in the words that echo from a nearby television: “[t]his will be the very definition of swift justice.”

Fincher and cinematographer Darius Khondji (Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen [1991] and City of Lost Children [1995]) worked to create a new aesthetic that would successfully convey the mood of the characters without falling into kitsch and cliché. Khondji comments that they moved toward “a roughness, a grittiness [and] didn't worry about making things beautiful.” (11) Towards this end, Khondji applied a new re-silvering process to the negatives, revealing more grain in the celluloid and making the black impervious to light.

The noir world and the clinical world of the police-procedural compete until, gradually, Somerset's historically proven pessimism wins out. It is unclear at which point the killer takes control of the film. Possibly, he has always had the upper hand and we have simply been following his directions. At any rate, we are certain that his final ghastly act—shipping the head of Mills' wife by courier to this final destination in the middle of nowhere—symbolizes nothing but victory for Doe's machinations. Mills executes Doe, shooting him several times. The fall of an innocent man is complete, but we can't forget Doe's venomous remarks that “only in a world this shitty, could [his victims] be considered innocent.” In most Hollywood serial-killer films, the death of the madman at the end seems to tie up all the loose ends. In Seven, Doe's execution fulfils his master plan (he claims that he is a victim of envy) and completes the story that he set out to tell. Somerset's voiceover as the film closes cannot regain the confidence of the spectator and is unable to mitigate the impact of the tragedy.

Following Seven, Fincher was selected to direct The Game (1997). In this clever thriller, Michael Douglas plays Nicholas van Orton, a man of inherited wealth and privilege, who is haunted by his father's suicide and is in the midst of more than a simple mid-life crisis as his 40th birthday approaches—the day when, in his own life, his father chose to jump to his death. So, when his brother (Sean Penn), the ne'er do well son, offers him the chance to sign up for a game that will change his life—to make it 'fun'—he is curious enough to accept. After visiting the offices of CRS, the administrators of the game, a conspiracy unfolds that threatens his status and his life. His home is vandalized, he discovers his briefcase in a hotel room filled with alarming Polaroids and cocaine, he is driven into the river by a taxi driver who is in on the action and, after being told that his most valuable bank accounts have been emptied, he is drugged and left for dead in Mexico. The rules of the game were never laid out, so we are in the same boat as Nicholas, wondering if this is real or just an elaborate hoax.

The Game is an apt title; the audience is playing its own game as Van Orton is playing his. We happily sign ourselves over to the events we see on screen and are drawn through the absurd sequence of events without a second thought, gaily eating up the illusions of the movement-image. Fincher exploits the game that is inherent in the noir mystery as we try to figure out the twist, the trick ending. All the while, he proudly displays the tools of his machination. Van Orton is being manipulated by costumes, sets, props, characters, and soap opera tragedies. This should highlight the fact that we are manipulated by these same elements. We should know better than to go along with it. But, just because we know that we are watching a film doesn't make us any less susceptible to the illusion. If anything, knowing the rules makes us even more gullible. Hirsch evaluates The Game as a dire prediction for the future of film noir:
It is, however, a perilous model that if pursued could lead only to the death of noir. Treating the form as only a game, as carnivalesque theatre of the absurd, a sequence of what in retrospect are vaudevillian turns, the film contains the seeds of the genre's destruction. (12)

When noir is simply something that we use to confirm the pleasantness of the reality that we live in, something in the language is certainly failing its potential. This is not to say that it will always fail. Certainly, Fincher's next film, Fight Club, confirms that there is still some revolutionary potential in the noir mode.

Fight Club is possibly the only film in which a happy ending is comprised of the literal self-destruction of the protagonist and the possible end of civilization. In this world, the American Dream is even further out of reach than it was in the noir world of the 1940s, but rather than fighting to obtain it, Fight Club's solution is to destroy it utterly.

As Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) stroll down the street at night, they hit obvious status automobiles with baseball bats. And the assaults do not stop there. Every form of consumption suffers mass casualties: the computers, coffee shops, and furniture that we trade in as frequently as we change our underwear are blown to pieces. Fight Club declares as ethos something that the classical noir protagonists discovered long ago: the quest for the Maltese Falcon or the Great Whatzit, even when it succeeds, is a failure. Rather than simply accept that there is no such thing as a fair fight, Fight Club reinvokes it as a revolutionary gesture. The fights are without glory or explicit reward, but all of the participants are willing, and in fact pleased, to be part of a physical conflict.

In Fight Club the American Dream that the narrator has followed all his life is an illusion; the remnants of it hang in the form of faded or bleached flags over the attendees at testicular cancer meetings or in the command center of “Project Mayhem”. Such a situation, some would argue, could lead to a loss of one's identity. The narrator's identity crisis and his insomnia lead him to narrate the entire film as a list of alternating tragedies and banalities. Two of the structuring principles of film noir, the flashback and the voiceover, reflect the narrator's confusion, cynicism, and narcissism. The narrator's reason for telling us this story is the same as his reason for attending the self-help groups. He tells Marla, the ostensible femme fatale, “When people think you're dying, they really, really listen to you instead of….” “Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak,” she says, finishing his sentence. The narrator finds in us a receptive audience.

This is not to say that we entirely trust the narrator. His words are filled with contradictions and a very subjective morality. The narrator's condemnation of Marla is immediately ridiculous. After all, his problem with Marla is that she is a “tourist” in the same self-help groups that he is frequenting under false pretences: “her lie reflected my lie,” he says bitterly. The narrator's obsession with Marla shadows, conveniently, his obsession with Tyler.

Because of the narrator's fascination with Tyler (and because our narrator knows what Tyler knows), Marla's role in the film is almost incidental. Tyler is very much the homme fatale whose charismatic demeanor manipulates the actions of the narrator. Male sexuality is now as dangerous as female sexuality and “attractive men are set up to inspire and to receive the gaze of the camera and of other characters—that sexually appraising gaze formerly reserved for the sexual woman only.” (13) After all, it is Brad Pitt's half-naked body that dominates the film. While Tyler and the narrator sit in the bathroom—Tyler in the bathtub and the narrator nursing his wounds—they discuss their failed relationships with their fathers and seriously question the need for a heterosexual relationship. Tyler says, “We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really what we need.”

Fight Club constantly exhibits the battle for the narrative voice, even if it is not apparent until after the narrator's revelation that he and Tyler are actually the same person. Karen Hollinger's observations on the impact of the voice-over in film noir are pertinent in this context. She writes:
Voice-over creates this fragmenting effect by establishing within the film a fight for narrative power as the narrator struggles to gain control of the narrative events recounted. This battle between the narrator and the film's flashback visuals leads to an extreme tension between word and image. (14)

Fight Club is told as a flashback, with occasional footnotes. The narrator reminisces while Tyler shoves a gun in his mouth. The unnamed narrator speaks, while Tyler periodically dips his hand in to dally with the visual images. Tyler's subjectivity adopts a reflexive edge. He controls the very medium of the story. Frames of Tyler are spliced into the film that we are watching (we later realize what these are when our narrator tells us of Tyler's penchant for splicing single frames of pornography into children's films) and, during his most impassioned speech, the film jumps the sprockets of the projector. Realizing the inherent contradiction between Hollywood film as an escapist medium and noir language as a subversive mode, Fincher calls on more radical techniques to get his point across.

According to Gavin Smith, “Fight Club belongs to a distinct moment of both dread and rupture in American mainstream cinema.” (15) His comments echo the words of those early critics who mapped out the territory of film noir. But times have changed. Fight Club is packaged to make us drool. After watching it, we want to buy the theatre, not burn it down. Maybe Tyler Durden's sermon to “just let go” is the ultimate solution, but it will take more than a vicarious journey of self-discovery to make it happen.

Fincher's most recent film, Panic Room (2002), is more conventional than any of his previous films. It is, in the words of the film's producer, Scott Rudin, “a cheesy popcorn movie produced within an inch of its life.” (16) It is a concept film, a 'woman-trapped-in-a-house film'. I won't say too much about it other than to applaud Fincher's attempt to make a 'perfect film' and to critique it for being too simple to convincingly fill 90 minutes. The plot revolves around a home invasion robbery, which finds Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) trapped in the safe room of their New York brownstone townhouse. The three intruders, of course, want to steal something that is in the panic room. The film presents the battle to control this home space. It hinges on knowing what the enemy is up to. Surveillance is key. The camera glides through walls and floors, down airshafts, and through keyholes, to create a clear geography of the home and its occupants. The suspense hangs on these effects and largely succeeds. But, with the exception of how well the cast holds the film together, there's nothing to it. There is no edge, no question, nothing left unsaid. Frankly, Panic Room has all of us Fincher fans a little concerned. We don't go to sleep any easier these nights knowing that Lords of Dogtown—a film about skateboarders in Venice, California, in the 1970s—is slated to be Fincher's next project. But I shouldn't speak too soon. Fincher is full of surprises.

by Sean Lindsay-http://archive.sensesofcinema.com

Michelangelo Antonioni

2009-03-31T22:05:00.010+03:00

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex - critically stimulating though elusive in meaning. They are ambiguous works that pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction. Displaced dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the spectator is compelled to respond imaginatively and independent of the film. The frustration of this experience reflects that felt in the lives of Antonioni's characters: unable to solve their own personal mysteries they often disappear, leave, submit or die. The idea of abandonment is central to Antonioni's formal structuring of people, objects, and ideas. He evades presences and emphasises related absences. His films are as enigmatic as life: they show that the systematic organisation of reality is a process of individual mediation disturbed by a profound inability to act with certainty.

Antonioni was raised in a middle-class environment that he accepts has influenced his creative perspective. His formative interests in art included puppetry and painting. From 1931-1935, he studied at the University of Bologna where he became involved in student theatre. After graduating in economics, he took a job as a bank teller and contributed stories and film criticism to the Ferrara newspaper Corriere Padano. Before he moved to Rome (sometime around 1940), (1) Antonioni attempted to make a documentary at a local insane asylum. When the set was lit, the patients suddenly responded with convulsions and the film was aborted. (2) (This experience prefigures the strong key lighting of Tentato suicidio [1953].)

In Rome he began writing for Cinema, a hotbed of political and social criticism. Since the (neorealist) direction of the journal was contrary to Antonioni's interests in alternative technical practices and filmmaking styles he stopped contributing after only a few months. (3) He spent a similar amount of time at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, making one, now lost, short film. A stint helping write Un Pilota ritorna (Roberto Rossellini, 1942) led to the signing of a contract with the production company Scalera. While drafted into the army, Antonioni still contrived to work under assignment on I Due Foscari (Enrico Fulchigoni, 1942) and Les Visiteurs du soir (Marcel Carné, 1942).

Antonioni's first documentary concerned the inhabitants of the Po valley region near Ferrara. Shot in 1943, Gente del Po was not released until after the war in 1947. In the interim, the bulk of the footage was lost through degradation, accident, and, possibly, deliberate tampering. Still, he displayed an early resilience and determination to complete the film, a trait that would resurface on numerous occasions in the future.

In the next few years, Antonioni continued to write criticism and screenplays, translated French literature, and made several more documentaries. N.U. - Nettezza urbana (1948) and L'Amorosa menzogna (1949), in particular, were well received: both won awards from the Italian Guild of Film Journalists and the latter competed at Cannes. On the strength of his documentaries, Antonioni secured financing from Vallani Film to make his first fictional feature in Milan.

The narrational structure of a search with competing urges of desire and death surfaces in Cronaca di un amore (1950). Antonioni will consistently return to this structure in his later works. The film's protagonists are doomed past lovers who find their romance renewing and repeating itself with the same tragic ends. Their wish for the destruction of an intervening third-party twice comes true but on each occasion something unidentifiable is also lost between them. All that remains is an individual, separated existence. (An immediate, violent, desire-quenching version of the wish-device occurs, imaginarily, at the end of Zabriskie Point [1970].) Cronaca is suggestive of film noir, (4) but Antonioni sidesteps traditional plot conventions to focus on the interior feelings of the lovers. He utilises a mobile camera, composes roomy frames, and follows the performers in deep-focus long takes. Key dialogue is highlighted by centrality, symbolism, frontality, unexpected movement, and cutting: a range of methods that define Antonioni's precise emphasis of narrative by particulars of style. This approach occupies Antonioni's formalism until more comprehensive analytical cutting techniques and less character-dependent camera movements arise first in Le Amiche (1955) and then more definitively in his first widescreen film, L'Avventura (1960).

Perhaps Antonioni's main concessions to the dominance of Italian neorealism are his configurations of class. As in Cronaca, the relatively poor female protagonist of La Signora senza camelie (1953) is thrust into a wealthy environment. From shop assistant to star B-grade actress, she is beset by the demands and advice of men. Her ultimate failure is an inability to control her own life. Antonioni has said that he considered the film to be a mistake because he concentrated on the 'wrong' character. (5) Who the preferable character might have been remains a mystery. The film's style is similar to Cronaca, with an odd, perhaps absurd, reflexive effect: the melodramatic filmmakers within the story, similar to Antonioni, seem to be utilising mobile camera, long take strategies!

I Vinti (1953), a trio of separate stories set in Paris, Rome, and London, was shot before Camelie but released at least seven months later. (6) Troubles that began in pre-production between Antonioni and the film's producers presumably continued until the film's premiere. (7) Additionally, the film was censored abroad which may have led to long delays. The reason for all the fuss was Antonioni's insistence on portraying three murders and investigations without providing any moral, social or other evidence to identify the killers' motivating reasons. Reconstructing the space evacuated by motive, Antonioni positions characters with respect to their environments, foregrounds landscape and experiments with independent camera movement. This destabilising of character and narrative by formal abstraction continues to be emphasised as Antonioni's style develops. His next work is a complex example. Tentato suicidio is staged amid artifice but presents a range of stories about attempted suicide that purport to truth. Cesare Zavattini, producer of L'Amore in città, intended its segments to record the daily life of "ordinary" people. Antonioni takes Zavattini's quotidian premise and, rather than concede to it, investigates its validity. Four of the stories are reconstructed and their non-fictional guises come under threat from the fictional probing of the cinematic stylistic system. Even in the presence of non-actors who tell their own stories, Antonioni is incredulous of a basic "real" dimension.

Another attempted suicide begins Le Amiche, linking two stories that are in medias res. (8) Both concern the immediate traumas of two women: Clelia (Eleanora Rossi Drago) is returning to a displaced past, while Rosetta (Madeleine Fischer) is unable to foresee a romantically successful future. Their lives are influenced - hindered more than assisted - by an ensemble of social friends. The interaction between all players is handled at a deliberate slow pace, with space carefully constructed to suggest what has previously happened and to convey internal group dynamics. The second story is perhaps the most interesting, unravelling in parts that effect change on the first. Clelia's stable linear progression through the story is counter-pointed by the emotional imbalance of Rosetta's highs and lows. How Antonioni dramatises the differences in the two stories is largely reinforced by a flux of inclusions and exclusions in his staging. The scene on the beach is an often cited example. (9) Only Rosetta is isolated for the length of a single shot. There are teasing set-ups which briefly single out someone else, but a track or pan finds others. A single insert shot in the scene depicts a drawing of Rosetta by Lorenzo (Gabriele Ferzetti), the object of her affections. Clelia, on the other hand, is always framed side-by-side with another. At the pivotal moment of the scene, a cut suddenly reveals the two of them standing together. Antonioni's arrangement of his cast functions to incorporate and separate ideas and conflicts as required at specific moments. Close observation of placement in the mise en scène is worthwhile because it helps explain the unknown properties of the story: its past, how its characters think and feel, even speculation as to what might happen next. (10)

The complexities of Antonioni's multi-actor staging style are not as apparent in Il Grido (1957), a bleak portrayal of one factory worker's journey away from home, through various liaisons, and back again. There is a return to the use of a mobile camera paired with analytical cutting (including some reverse shots) to serve the interests of dialogue. The constant state of Aldo's (Steve Cochran) agitation is emphasised by this more rapid technique of editing. Even the longer shots (at least three are just over a minute long) concern arguments between Aldo and women. What sets Il Grido apart from Antonioni's previous films is his stylistic response to a different milieu. Dank, gaslit interiors are tight spaces forced by the staging into a moderate depth. The result is an effect of oppression from which Aldo always tries to escape. But when he surges outside, the land is such a contrast that it too is threatening. Antonioni generally maintains a high horizon line, emphasising the flatness and desolation of the background. The high camera angle also accentuates the smallness of Aldo's daughter, Rosina (Mirna Girardi), whom Aldo is unwilling, or unable, to properly father. When he sends Rosina home on a bus, the element of pathos generates a strange and rare Antonioni moment. It is an interesting opposition to the awkward attention seeking of Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi) in Il Deserto rosso (1964).

Antonioni's next four films frame the period of his most intense and, it is generally accepted, productive work. Some consider L'Avventura, La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962) a trilogy (or, with Il Deserto rosso, a tetralogy) of sorts, largely because of a consistency of style, social setting, theme, plot and character (especially the roles played by the ubiquitous Monica Vitti). (11) The usefulness of such a categorisation is questionable. (12) However, at least in the first three, Antonioni demonstrates a formal stability between films that, considering his earlier fluctuations in method, is surprising. Part of what makes L'Avventura so impressive is that Antonioni developed a cohesion of narrative and stylistic devices that had only haphazardly surfaced in his earlier films. It might not be too ridiculous to suggest that analogous to some of his characters, Antonioni was searching for something, a method of communication, which he finally "found" with L'Avventura. That he wouldn't let go until he had explored the approach a couple of films further, is retrospectively understandable.

It is with these films that Antonioni became a famous, critically esteemed, and even popular filmmaker. Concurrent with a boom period in the Italian industry and a re-vitalisation of European cinema in general, Antonioni was suddenly reflective of a massive change in film culture that he had really been progressing towards for the last decade.

The critical discussion of these films is so extensive that I will forego summarising them here. But it is worth mentioning that a fundamental element of "the trilogy" is Antonioni's increasing interest in the abstraction of space: for instance, the shot of the church in the deserted village in L'Avventura; the opening shot of La Notte that tracks down the Pirelli building; and the final seven minute montage of L'Eclisse. These kinds of independent, wandering, investigative techniques are dominant traits in Il Deserto rosso, Blow-Up (1966), Zabriskie Point and The Passenger (1975). However, there is expansive conjecture regarding their purposes and effects.

For his first colour film, Il Deserto rosso, Antonioni further abstracted reality. Effects trick the eye: the flattening of space by telephoto lenses; the strange scale, placement, and colour of objects; out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds. He implements a faster, sometimes disorienting, cutting style and emphasises the aural qualities of industry. To use André Bazin's phrase perversely, the dramatic evolution of Antonioni's revised style is a dialectical step, but not in the direction of realism. (13)

Il Deserto rosso marked a turning point. Antonioni's shifting directions of interest compelled him to explore international markets, include male protagonists, and vigorously question the nature of photographic reality. In this transitive period, he made another short film, Il Provino (1965), a preface segment for Dino De Laurentiis' I Tre volti, starring Saroya, a past queen of Iran.

No small account can possibly sum up the ambiguous openness evident in Antonioni's next film. Aside from being his biggest commercial success, Blow-Up is a highly valued critical commodity that has drawn the interest of an astounding range of commentators. The reasons for such a deluge are somewhat unclear. Other films are, for instance, self-reflexive, conducive to subject theories, or consciously explore how reality and meaning are constructed. Nevertheless, Blow-Up continues to attract various emergent criticism. Rather than add to such a mass of interpretation, and again for reasons of space, I will instead vouch for the usefulness of Peter Brunette's "post-structuralist," feminist account. (14)

Compared to the troubled Zabriskie Point, the story surrounding the risky production and exhibition of Blow-Up is a relatively happy one. When Antonioni went to make a film in America, he decided to make a film about America. He said, "I see ten thousand people making love across the desert." (15) And the problems began.

Quite unlike the complex ambiguity of Blow-Up, the story of Zabriskie Point has a considerable vagueness located in its simplicity. It clearly constructs a negative image of authority and materialism, but its converse handling of revolutionary students is not especially exciting or engaging. That leaves the most compelling centres of the film as its two fantasy sequences. These in their most reduced forms amount to love (more accurately, mass sex in the desert) and death (expressed via the violent explosion of a houseful of commodities). (16) They're outright hallucinatory spectacles, practically Hollywood marketing devices, which makes the massive losses the film took at the box office even stranger. (17)

The Passenger is another open text, full of self-reflexive concerns such as perception, reality, identity and truth. Past narrative techniques are further explored: doubling, journeying, constructing an unseen death. While Blow-Up investigates the possible, but redundant, existence of an object, this is a search that turns inward and ultimately finds nothing.

Antonioni's style in these three films is far removed from that of the '50s' films. The earlier invocation of interior moods and feelings has been discarded in favour of a construction of exterior things in their own various contexts. His characters are now positioned as part of a complex network of objects and inter-subjective relationships. The camera no longer functions to serve the action; it becomes a tool for Antonioni to inscribe meaning. He asks questions that are best resolved by stepping outside the fiction and considering the film's structure of organisation and cognition. By incorporating the film viewing experience into the story, his formal choices are layered with a political subjectivity: he explains how ideology is working within the film.

The height of such artistry explains the relative disappointment, to most, of the rest of Antonioni's films. Il Mistero di Oberwald (1980) is an abrupt swing away from epistemological preoccupation. Made on video for television, it provided Antonioni relief from high budget production burdens. Excited by the potential of new filmmaking technologies, he experiments with post-production colour manipulation to produce unusual effects. In other respects the film is less daring, perhaps a signal of Antonioni's desire to move in a different direction but not quite knowing where.

With Identificazione di una donna (1982), he returns to older concerns. A specific filmmaking problem (the processing of choices available to a director) is merged with devices of searching, uncertainty and sudden abandonment. It is tantalising to put Antonioni in the shoes of the director in the text, opening up a reading that suggests a confusion about what kinds of films he ought to make. But it seems just as sensible to consider Identificazione as a re-focusing on the hesitant, anxious individual, now framed by apparent self-reflexivity. Its formal system is a balance of autonomy and traditional continuity: a complex arrangement, both distancing and engaging. The problem may reside in the mix. At this late stage in his career, Antonioni and the film's producers may have felt it necessary to appeal to a large, international market. He expected to continue making pictures, but the lack of success here probably assisted in the halting of his progress. In the historical context of a worldwide resurgence in mainstream cinema, the inability to construct a narrational or stylistic pigeon-hole for Identificazione was troublesome.

Thirteen years later, after a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Antonioni was able to make Al di là delle nuvole (1995), with Wim Wenders providing insurance should the production come into difficulty. For most critics, the return was welcomed even though few admired the film. This time, it may be impossible to reject the alter-ego hypothesis: a lot of the wandering Director's (John Malkovich) dialogue is culled from Antonioni's interviews and writings. However, the Director's presence within the film is largely observational. Even his affair, in the second of four segments, occurs because of a voyeuristic curiosity. His presence bares witness to a nexus of love stories, a collection of events he has been told, or possibly invented. They are lost stories, in the sense of being momentary, transitory, and disconnected in space and time. In an authorial context they are stories Antonioni has told elsewhere, not directly on film. They existed outside of cinema, beyond the clouds of the imaginary. Without the benefit of the cinematic apparatus, without the human capacity, continually stressed in the cinema of Antonioni, to observe and perceive, most of us would never hear or read them.

No one would have seen them.

by James Brown-http://sensesofcinema.com

Interview with Kenneth Anger

2009-03-30T17:14:00.006+03:00

Unlike most filmmakers identified as avant-garde or experimental,Kenneth

Anger never seems to have assumed that his filmmaking would be a marginal

enterprise. Growing up in Hollywood, Anger was surrounded by the

film industry during one of its most halcyon decades and from time to time

was part of the excitement: at the age of four, he played the Changeling

Prince in the Max Reinhardt–William Dieterle adaptation of A Midsummer

Night’s Dream (1935). He was making his own films by the age of seven,

and ten years later, when it had become clear to Anger that the films he

wanted to make would be seen only by American film society audiences, he

moved to Europe, where his work seemed more fully appreciated: he was

introduced to the French film scene by Henri Langlois and worked as Langlois’s

assistant at the Cinémathèque Française for years. Even in Europe,

funding for his projects was di‹cult to find. Anger worked when he could

and supported himself by writing a legendary history of Hollywood scandal,

Hollywood Babylon (published first in a French edition in 1959 and subsequently

in English editions, in 1975 and 1981),which was followed in 1984

by Hollywood Babylon 2.
Anger’s first seven films appear to be lost, but Fireworks (1947), his earliest

extant film, is a landmark in at least two senses. Along with Maya Deren

and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Sidney Peterson’s

The Lead Shoes (1949), it helped to define what has come to be known

as the psychodrama: a film that uses symbolic action and detail to dramatize

a disturbed state of mind, usually the filmmaker’s own. The particular

disturbance dramatized in Fireworks is Anger’s recognition of his powerful

sexual desire for other men within a thoroughly heterosexist American society.

Indeed, one of the film’s most memorable images—of Anger lighting a

firecracker phallus sticking out of his pants and achieving an orgasm of

sparks—is easily read as Anger’s declaration of independence from America’s

repression of homosexuality and of film history’s, and especially Hollywood’s,

complicity in this repression. Fireworks is not just a landmark in

what has come to be called Queer cinema; it is, so far as I am aware, the first

openly gay American movie. In retrospect what seems especially poignant

about the film is its good humor: for Anger, being gay—even “coming out”

in Fireworks—is less a trauma than a psychosexual inevitability that must

be faced with the same high spirits, the same whistling-in-the-dark humor,

as other aspects of maturation.

During the nearly sixty years since Fireworks was finished, Anger’s career

has been frustrated by frequent financial setbacks—the projects he

envisions are remarkably inexpensive by commercial standards but more

expensive than most avant-garde films—but the films he has found ways to

complete are distinctive and memorable, often gorgeous and thrilling. And

they are consistently evocative of Anger’s spiritual quest to use cinema as

a means of acknowledging, honoring, and participating in those many spiritual

traditions that have been suppressed by the evolution of modern so-

Kenneth Anger in Fireworks (1947). Courtesy David E. James.

ciety. In the exquisite Eaux d’artifice (1953) Anger depicts the gardens of

the Villa d’Este, in the Alban Hills east of Rome, particularly the elaborate

system of fountains designed by Pirro Ligorio. He not only brings the mythological

sculptures spouting water to life but also creates an incarnation of

the spirit of the garden: a tiny woman (Carmilla Salvatorelli), who appears

from a fountain, inhabits the enchanted space and finally dissolves back into

a fountain. In Rabbit’s Moon (1950), Harlequin uses a magic lantern to create

the spirit of Columbine,who as usual frustrates Pierrot, in Anger’s homage

to the commedia dell’arte.

In Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), still his longest and in some

ways most elaborate film, Anger introduces a protagonist, Lord Shiva

(Samson De Brier), who reveals within himself a multitude of spiritual entities

from various religious traditions—Osiris, Isis, Pan, Astarte, Lilith, the

Great Beast, the Scarlet Woman—and even one of the crucial spirits of early

film history: Cesare, the Somnabulist, from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of

Doctor Caligari (1919). For Anger cinema is, and always has been, a form

of ritualized experience that oªers the opportunity for entering imaginative

worlds and for creating new worlds where entities from diverse geographies

and histories can commingle and celebrate their spiritual power.

Like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Lucifer Rising (1980) evokes spirits

from several mythological traditions—Egyptian, Celtic, biblical—who

communicate with each other across time and space, reminding us that underneath

the conventional surface of our lives lie forces that inform our experience,

even though we may be unaware of them, and that these forces,

like the volcano we see in Lucifer Rising, can at any moment burst forth and

alter whatever world we thought we were living in. Aleister Crowley and his

teachings seem to have been crucial for Anger during much of his career.

Crowley is invoked literally by means of a superimposed photograph in Inauguration

of the Pleasure Dome and implicitly in Inauguration and Lucifer

Rising, both of which were at least partially inspired by Crowley’s famous

rituals in which people assumed the identities of gods and goddesses.

Anger’s best-known and most widely influential film, Scorpio Rising

(1963), is a depiction/interpretation of a motorcycle gang, foregrounding the

spiritual dimensions of young men’s fascination with their bikes and the biker

life, as these are revealed in their preparations for a raucous Halloween party

and for the final motorcycle race of the year. Anger’s inventive use of pop

music in conjunction with, and as an ironic comment on, the activities revealed

in his visuals have caused Scorpio Rising to be understood as one of

the progenitors of the music video (along with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray

[1962], which was completed the year before Scorpio Rising). While Anger

has never finished a film with dialogue, he has always taken his sound tracks

very seriously, working inventively and precisely with a wide range of music:

Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons in Eaux d’artifice, Janácek’s Glagolithic Mass in

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, American pop songs in Scorpio Rising

and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Mick Jagger’s Moog synthesizer track

in Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and, in the case of Lucifer Rising,

a sound track composed in prison by Anger’s friend (and for a brief, unfortunate

moment, Charles Manson groupie), Bobby Beausoleil.

Although his work since 1980 has received little attention, Anger remains

active, presenting earlier films and working on new projects, including the

recent The Man We Want to Hang (2002), a documentation of a show of

Aleister Crowley’s artwork in London in 1995; and Mouse Heaven (2004),

a brilliant, high-spirited rumination on the early Mickey Mouse, using a collection

of pre-Fantasia (1940) Mickey Mouse toys and memorabilia. Mouse

Heaven must be numbered among Anger’s finest films.

I spoke with Anger in his apartment in Echo Park, Los Angeles, in March

2004 and subsequently by phone.

MacDonald: What do you remember about the LA independent film

scene in the forties, and how did you get involved?

Anger: I got involved after I had made some films that I wanted to show

in public. I think the first film I showed publicly was Escape Episode in 1946,

the year before I made Fireworks, and then I showed Fireworks at the Coronet

Film Society at the Coronet Theater—it was a new theater at the time—

on La Cienega here in LA. Later I took Escape Episode to San Francisco,

where there was already a small group of filmmakers—Frank Stauªacher,

James Broughton, Jordan Belson—beginning to show independent work at

the Art in Cinema Film Society at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

MacDonald: I understand that at some point you and Curtis Harrington

had a small distribution eªort.

Anger: Yes, it was called Creative Film Associates. It was basically just

Curtis and me, though we involved a few other people, like the Whitney brothers

and Jordan Belson, who donated prints. We made these prints available

for rental and sent out brochures. Creative Film Associates lasted about a

year and a half. The prints were rented by colleges and film societies.

MacDonald: Was there a demand? Did it work as a small business?

Anger: On a very small scale, yes. I gave it up when I moved to Europe

in 1950, and Curtis didn’t express any interest in continuing it on his own.

MacDonald: I’ve heard that there was even a phantom secretary.

Anger: Yes. Curtis and I thought her up. Her name was Violet Parks.We

didn’t do any telephone orders, so she didn’t need to speak.We bought some

violet ink and Curtis signed for her. She was our phantom lady.

MacDonald: You were making films very young, and by the time of Es-

cape Episode you had a body of work. It’s surprising to me that you got so

much work done so young.

Anger: Well, they were all short films. The longest, Escape Episode, was

a half hour, but most of them were five or ten minutes. Fireworks was fifteen.

MacDonald: You told Robert Haller that it was no great loss that most

of those early films no longer exist.

Anger: I don’t remember saying that!

MacDonald: How did those films get lost?

Anger: I lived like a gypsy. I’ve been moving constantly most of my life,

and when you’re moving constantly, it’s very hard to hold on to a lot of things.

Sometimes you store things with friends and come back a year later, and they

don’t know what happened to the stuª. This place [Anger’s apartment in the

Echo Park area of LA] is basically just where I store my paper archives.

Some things seem to have disappeared even rather recently. I left a box

of my material with Anthology Film Archives in New York, including some

of my early films, and when I went back, the box had disappeared. They

think it may turn up, but the box wasn’t kept under lock and key, and I think

someone may have appropriated it.

MacDonald: Are your films being preserved?

Anger: At the moment UCLA is graciously allowing me to keep my masters

in their cold vault, in the former Technicolor Building.

MacDonald: Fireworks is the earliest of your films still available. I teach

it almost every year, and my students are always astonished, as am I, not

just at the continuing power of the film, but that, in 1947, as a seventeenyear-

old, you had the courage to make it.

Anger:Well, everything just fell into place. I didn’t think it was particularly

courageous; it was just something I wanted to do, and so I did it.

Of course, later, when I tried to get Fireworks printed, it almost got

confiscated at Consolidated Film Lab here in Hollywood. At that time there

were very few big labs that did negative-positive printing in 16mm. In fact,

there are fewer and fewer now; it’s almost like 16mm is on the way out. But

at that time I went to Consolidated, and it turned out that the head of the

lab was a navy veteran, and he looked at the negative and found it had some

people in naval uniforms in it. He was considering calling the FBI, as if Fireworks

were some subversive thing. One of the lab technicians there told me

later that he had saved it by telling the head of the lab, “Oh, it’s just some

little film; it’s of no importance—don’t bother with it!”

MacDonald: I think what strikes those of us who see it as courageous is

that it’s the first film, at least the first I’m aware of, where a man openly,

clearly expresses a desire for other men. I grew up in that postwar period—

I’m a little younger than you are, but I remember the era—and there was

so much repression . . .

Anger: As I said, it’s just something I wanted to do, and I did it. I suppose

in retrospect you can put a badge of courage on it, but I don’t necessarily

choose to think of it that way—though I suppose it was reckless.

MacDonald: It has a great sense of humor, a whistling-in-the-dark kind

of humor, which still works wonderfully.

Anger: Yes. Thank you. If you don’t catch the humor of the film, you really

miss the point.

MacDonald: A general question: You’re regularly cited, along with Jack

Smith and Jean Genet, as one of the fathers of what’s now called Queer Cinema.

I wonder how you feel about being thought of that way.

Anger: I consider myself an individual artist, and I don’t like being put

in a cubbyhole. There’s nothing I’ve ever hidden; I’ve always been very upfront

about myself. I can respect what other filmmakers are doing, but I don’t

think we need to be put into a category.

I knew Jack Smith and in fact spent a day in Oakland with him, looking

for a prop for one of his movies—I think it was called Normal Love [1963].

He wanted a little morning-glory gramophone, the kind with the big tin

horn, and we finally found a bent-up one in a junk shop, but it was more

than he could aªord. Jack always liked to get everything for nothing. So

finally, just so it wouldn’t be a wasted day, I bought him a rusty Buck Rogers

ray gun for a dollar. Later I saw the unfinished footage of Normal Love, and

the ray gun was in it. Jack left a lot of unedited material; he didn’t seem to

like to finish things.

But I’ve never identified either with him—I mean in a group way—or

with John Waters or anyone else.

MacDonald: Sitney describes an auditory prologue that was on early versions

of Fireworks. At what point did you remove the introduction?

Anger: I still have a print with it on. It was my voice over a black screen,

rather than an introductory main title. It was very short: it says something

like, “In Fireworks are released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. The

inflammable desires ignited at night . . .” and so forth—rather purple language.

The last sentence is, “These imaginary displays provide a temporary

release.” I took the introduction oª when my films were being released by

Canyon; it seemed more practical to have a copyright title at the beginning.

MacDonald: You made Fireworks on a single weekend?

Anger: In seventy-two hours. I had a “window of opportunity,” as they

say nowadays, to turn my house into a movie studio because my parents

were absent, which was rare. They had gone back to Pittsburgh to attend

the funeral of an uncle.

MacDonald: What did your parents do? I know very little about your

background.

Anger: I was the third child, and there was a lapse of about eight years

Kenneth Anger 21

between me and my older brother and sister. I was the tail end of the family.

The member of the family I was closest to was my maternal grandmother,

who had worked in costumes in the silent era. She told me a lot of stories

about Valentino and Clara Bow and sparked my interest in the silent period.

She bought me my first 16mm camera, as a birthday present. It was a

used Bell & Howell. It had seen some war service; those handheld Bell &

Howells were used by cameramen during the war.

MacDonald: Was your family supportive of your filmmaking?

Anger: They didn’t know too much about it. My grandmother did see

Fireworks—it was made with the camera she gave me—and she had one

word to say: “Terrific!” Considering that she was a lady approaching her

eighties, I think that was quite remarkable. But my family wasn’t particularly

supportive of what I was doing. I had to make my own way.

My father was an engineer at Douglas Aircraft. My older brother went

into aviation, and I was expected to. I could have gone to Cal Tech, if I had

been so inclined; they would have paid for it, but I declined. I wanted to be

an artist, and only my grandmother supported me in this. She had made

her money in real estate, back in the twenties, and had retired by the time

she was part of my life. She was a landscape painter and the president of

Women Painters of the West, a plein air school of landscape painting. I used

to go with her to various places that she liked to paint, like when the wildflowers

were in bloom in the spring. There used to be magnificent stretches

of California that were covered with wildflowers for a brief period, and I

would go with her and carry her easel; it was very pleasant.

MacDonald: What do you remember about the early screenings of

Fireworks?

Anger: That first screening at the Coronet Film Society was at midnight,

after the regular screenings. To my surprise, there was an audience, including

some rather remarkable celebrities who just happened to show up: James

Whale, for example, the director of Frankenstein [1931] and other wonderful

films. Later, we became friends. And Robert Florey, another very interesting

maverick Hollywood director,was there. And Dr. Alfred Kinsey came.

He was on the West Coast doing interviews. Dr. Kinsey came up and spoke

to me afterward and said he’d like to interview me; he oªered to buy a print

of Fireworks for the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in

Bloomington. Now it’s called the Kinsey Institute.

MacDonald: How did these guys know to be at this screening?

Anger: Kinsey apparently heard on the grapevine,which he was very good

at listening into, that this screening was going to happen and that Fireworks

was an unusual film that he should see. There had been some publicity for

the event. I was very pleased to meet Dr. Kinsey, and later I went downtown

to the Biltmore Hotel, where he was staying, to do the famous Kin-

22 A Critical Cinema 5

sey interview. My statistics are part of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,

which came out in 1948.

MacDonald: Did Fireworks have censorship trouble?

Anger: No, because it was shown in so few places, and in a very discreet

way. And when it was made available for rental, I had no particular problem:

I assumed that the fact that it came back in one piece meant that the

showing had gone well, wherever it was shown.

MacDonald: Sitney talks about Fireworks as one of the early psychodramas.

At what point were you seeing films by other people who were also

moving into the mind as an environment to explore?

Anger: Well, Curtis Harrington made a short called Fragment of Seeking

[1946] at about the same time; it’s a kind of psychodrama. Curtis was

coming to terms with the homosexual issue in his own way, which was more

oblique than mine. And at the same time, Gregory Markopoulos was beginning

to make films.

Back in the forties, when there were very few of us working, I was certainly

encouraged by the example of Maya Deren: she made her films with

very limited means on 16mm, and they were very consciously works of art.

I thought it was very daring of her to have her films silent; she wanted them

silent. Meshes of the Afternoon was conceived as a silent film. Of course, she

had a very good collaborator, her husband, Alexander Hammid, who was

an excellent photographer, so her films always had a professional polish to

them. We never met; we did exchange a couple of letters.

In 1949 I heard there was going to be a festival in Biarritz, called Le Festival

du Films Maudit (the Festival of Damned Films)—films that had had

trouble with censorship or used subject matter that some people might want

to condemn. So I wrapped up a print of Fireworks and mailed it airmail to

the address I had in Biarritz, not knowing if they’d show it or even if I’d

ever get the print back. Fireworks was awarded the prize for poetic film. The

head of the jury was Cocteau, and he sent me a letter, a handwritten letter,

with his signature and a hand-drawn pentagram—his way of saying how

much he liked it. I decided at that point that I should go to Europe, where

I seemed to be appreciated more than I was in the States, and meet Cocteau.

And in 1950 I moved to Paris. Fortunately, I was oªered a job by Henri Langlois,

the head of the Cinémathèque Française.

MacDonald: How did the job come about?

Anger: Henri had a reception for me in Paris and showed Fireworks. He

had invited Jean Genet and Cocteau. And he decided to hire me to be his

assistant at the Cinémathèque Française. “Hire me” should be in quotes,

because I wasn’t paid but was housed and fed (of course, Langlois loved

eating in the best restaurants, so I ate very well—the beginning of a lifetime

of aªection for French cuisine). I moved in with Mary Meerson (Lazare

Kenneth Anger 23

Meerson, her late husband, had been René Clair’s set designer in his early

films) and Henri; they had a guest room in an apartment overlooking the

Parc Monsouris. The apartment had been designed by Lazare Meerson; it

was a wonderful Moderne design. I guess you’d call it art deco today. I had

a wonderful relationship with Mary Meerson and Henri Langlois that lasted

for about twelve years while I was working there. Then I started to travel

again.

MacDonald: You mentioned that Genet was at the Parisian screening of

Fireworks. What was his response?

Anger:Well, I believe I understood him to say that he found it “fascinante.”

I arrived in France speaking French, and I couldn’t have gotten along as

well otherwise. I went to Beverly Hills High School and took French. I was

motivated and got As. I’m sure I had an American accent, but I knew my

basic grammar, and I could speak French and I certainly could hear it. At

the time, we had a theater here in LA, called the Esquire, which specialized

in foreign films with subtitles. There was always an audience for European

film in Hollywood, especially French films. I would go to these French films,

which included Cocteau—as I remember, they had Blood of a Poet [1930]

and films made in France during the occupation and afterward, like The

Eternal Return [1943, directed by Jean Delannoy] and Un Carnet de bal

[1937], a beautiful film by Julien Duvuvier, which was very popular.

I would go more than once to these films, or I would stay and see them

again and again (in those days you would pay your admission, and you could

stay and see a movie twice or three times if you wanted to). The first time,

I would watch a film the usual way; the second time, I would just listen to

it: so I had some very famous French actors, like Arletty and Jean-Louis

Barrault, teaching me French pronunciation. By the time I arrived in France

in 1950, I’d already seen things like Children of Paradise [1946, directed by

Marcel Carné] and all those films, felt familiar with them, and could talk

about them.

MacDonald: What kinds of projects did you do at the Cinémathèque?

Anger: Langlois was having a festival in the town of Antibes on the Riviera,

and he invited me to take the various films that had been made from

Eisenstein’s aborted Mexican project, Que Viva Mexico!, and recut them

more in the order specified in Eisenstein’s script. So I reassembled the material

in Thunder over Mexico, Death Day in Mexico, plus a couple of travelogues

that had been made from Que Viva Mexico! after Eisenstein was removed

from the project by the producer, Upton Sinclair. It was fascinating

to work with Eisenstein’s material and to see how certain ideas that were in

the script were not reflected in any of the films. For example, he had a sequence

that began on Death Day starting before dawn; dawn slowly comes,

and the scenes get brighter and brighter, and then when it’s full light you

have this fiesta on the graves, which is a Mexican tradition; they eat candy

skulls and things like that. That was a fascinating project.

MacDonald: What filmmaking were you doing?

Anger: It was through the Cinémathèque that I was able to make Rabbit’s

Moon—in French, La lune des lapins.

MacDonald: I’ve never understood the title.

Anger: It refers to a Japanese legend. The Japanese see in the full moon

the silhouette of a rabbit. See, the odd thing about the moon is that when

you’re in the latitude of the Orient, you’re seeing the moon at a diªerent

angle.We see a kind of face, two vague eyes and a smile—the “Man in the

Moon.” But the Japanese don’t see that; they see the body of a rabbit with

two ears sticking up. If you use your imagination, you can see the rabbit

by tipping your head to the side. The Japanese have developed a whole

mythology about this benign lunar spirit, and every full moon they leave

out rice cakes and sake for the Rabbit in the Moon. The next morning the

children note that the sake cup is empty and the rice cakes have disappeared,

and they think that the spirit came down and helped itself, and is happy

with them.

I combined that Japanese mythology of the Rabbit in the Moon with the

European commedia dell’arte tradition of mime theater,which involved basically

three characters. There’s Pierrot, the white clown—a lunar spirit who

dates back to the Middle Ages—who is unhappy, but it’s OK to make fun

of him. He’s quite a poetic figure, and he has two passions: he has a longing

for the moon—the phrase “reaching for the moon” refers to something

you want but can never have—and he’s infatuated with Columbine, who’s

a tease. His rival is Harlequin, who is a devil figure—the devil in his form

of the prankster. Just with variations on this simple combination of three

characters the Commedia dell’Arte made any number of little plays that were

popular across Europe. It started in Italy, then went to France, and was very

popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The best representation

of Pierrot in commercial film is in The Children of Paradise, where he’s

played by Jean-Louis Barrault.

MacDonald: I see Rabbit’s Moon as a film about you as a filmmaker.

You’re a combination of both Pierrot and Harlequin: you’re always reaching

for the moon, longing for the light; and at the same time you’re playing

tricks on the audience who are also longing for something they hope you

can give them.

Anger: The magic lantern I used in the film was a real one, from the eighteenth

century. It was part of the Cinémathèque’s collection of magic lanterns.

They loaned it to me. In the film I show that Columbine is a projection

of the magic lantern,which is controlled by Harlequin,who is a Lucifer

figure.

I had to work very fast on Rabbit’s Moon; I had to make the costumes,

build the set, and do the filming within four weeks. Pierre Braunberger had

lent me his little studio, the Cinema Panthéon, just a single soundstage near

the Panthéon on the Left Bank. The idea was that I’d be out of there, and

the place would be restored to the way it was, when he came back from vacation.

Everyone in France goes on vacation in August.

MacDonald: Rabbit’s Moon was shot in 35mm. Where did the money

come from?

Anger: It wasn’t a matter of the money. The 35mm raw stock came from

Russian friends of the Cinémathèque who had come to Paris to do a film

on UNESCO—the children’s division of the United Nations. They had a

couple of thousand feet of 35mm, something like six cans of unexposed raw

stock, left over. It was the same emulsion, they told me, that Eisenstein used

to make Ivan the Terrible [part 1, 1943; part 2, 1946]: a very fine-grain, beautiful

stock. It wasn’t fast; you needed quite a lot of light, compared to modern

emulsions. I figured those six cans were just enough, if I just shot one

take of everything, to make this little fantasy on the theme of the commedia

dell’arte and end up with a short film.

I was also lucky enough to have a professional cameraman working on

the film: Tourjansky, the son of the famous Russian émigré silent director

in Russia and France.

MacDonald: There have been multiple versions of Rabbit’s Moon. I don’t

know if I’ve seen the longer version.

Anger: The longer version is printed in blue and has cut-ins in rose or

pink: shots of woodcuts of the moon. That version is twenty minutes long.

MacDonald: It still exists?

Anger: Yes, it’ll be on my DVD, which is due to come out later this year.

Rabbit’s Moon uses a lot of repeats and deliberately unmatched shots. Pierrot

will make a gesture like reaching up to the moon, and then he’ll make the

same gesture in another shot, but it isn’t like the usual tight cutting on movement

you see in most commercial films. I knew all those conventional techniques.

I had been absorbing movie techniques since I was a little boy growing

up in Hollywood around people who were working in the industry—so

I knew when I could break the rules. I wasn’t just fooling around. From the

beginning I had a film language to work from.

At any rate, I had this unique opportunity to have a professional studio

with professional lights. My set was an artificial forest scene. I repainted some

cut-down tree branches in black and silver, and they were built in perspective,

so they got smaller as they went away from the camera—I didn’t have

much depth to work with in what was a fairly small room. Doing Rabbit’s

Moon, I was inspired by Méliès, and by his flat depth of field. And I was

fortunate to have actors from the Parisian mime school (later it became the

Marcel Marceau School), who were trained in pantomime and were happy

to work with me.

MacDonald: You mentioned that you only had stock for a limited number

of takes. But the film looks very carefully choreographed. Did you spend

a lot of time rehearsing?

Anger: They were professionals, thoroughly schooled in what they were

doing. I explained that I wanted an imaginary tightrope walk, imaginary

juggling; they had done things like that, so they knew what to do. And, of

course, they were familiar with the characters of Pierrot, Harlequin, and

Columbine. I was working with people who were in a sense already rehearsed.

They were a very nice small cast to work with.

MacDonald: It’s easy to think of Rabbit’s Moon as an expression of your

happiness at being in Europe.

Anger: It was. That can also be said of Eaux d’artifice.

MacDonald: In my book The Garden in the Machine, I conjectured about

the relationship between Eaux d’artifice and Fireworks. Fireworks is about

the repression of your gay desire in America and how that desire finds ways

to express itself, even to explode, when it’s repressed.When you got to Europe,

you were able to express this desire without the resistance you had experienced

here, and, as a result, Eaux d’artifice suggests an explosion of pleasure

and freedom, and of freedom of expression. Is that a fair reading?

Anger:Well, I wouldn’t characterize my American period as repression,

because it really wasn’t. I was able to make films, short as they were.

I’ve always had parallel projects going on at any one time, for a very simple

reason: I was never able to make anything approaching feature-length

because that always involved more money than I could round up. At the time

that I was doing the early films, there just wasn’t a network of foundations

backing films. I had to come up with my own ways of financing things.

I went to Italy and lived in Rome to make Eaux d’artifice, which was

filmed in Tivoli, a town about thirty miles from Rome, in the Alban Hills.

The gardens in the film are part of the estate of the d’Este family. In those

days, the eldest son of a wealthy family would go into the military, and the

next son would go into the church, whether he was suited for it or not. And

that’s what happened to the fellow who became the cardinal d’Este when he

was only sixteen. He supervised the design of that garden on that hill; it was

his place to have a good time. The garden is an amazing use of water as an

element of architecture; hydraulics, just natural gravity, makes all the fountains

work.

The most surprising thing was that I was given permission by the Department

of Antiquities in Italy to make my film. Those gardens are a tourist

attraction, and I couldn’t just go in there with a camera and start filming. I

had to block oª certain sections of the garden so that I wouldn’t have tour

Kenneth Anger 27

Water from fountains in the gardens of the Villa d’Este in Kenneth Anger’s

Eaux d’artifice (1953). Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.

guides and groups of tourists coming into my picture. I don’t know if a

young American would be given that privilege today. They told me with good

humor, “Don’t break any old statuary,” which I didn’t; I was respectful of

everything. Sometimes an American Express guide behind my barrier would

be shouting, “Hurry up! We have to get in because we have to go on to see

Hadrian’s Villa!” But I was able to get the film shot.

MacDonald: How did Carmello Salvatorelli get into the project?

Anger: Ah, yes, she was a little midget I had met socially through Fellini

in Rome, and of course . . .

MacDonald: You said “she”; it’s a “he,” right?

Anger: No, it’s a lady.

MacDonald: It’s not a man in drag?

Anger: Absolutely no. No, no, no. Why would you think that?

MacDonald: It’s spelled “Carmello” in the program note P. Adams Sitney

reproduces in Visionary Film [New York: Oxford University Press, 1974,

2002], and in the filmography of Moonchild, edited by Jack Hunter [New

York: Creation Books, 2002]. I saw the spelling and assumed it was a man.

Anger:No, it’s Carmilla, as in J. Sheridan LeFanu’s short story “Carmilla.”

MacDonald: I need to rethink my interpretation of the film! [In The Garden

in the Machine (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press, 2002), I use my misreading of Salvatorelli’s gender in arguing that in

Europe Anger was able to release his feminine side.]

Anger: Carmilla was a wonderful little lady who was patiently willing to

work with me through a whole summer. The di‹cult thing about that project

was that not only was I working in a place where I couldn’t simply do whatever

I wanted, but also I had to work in certain areas of the garden at certain

times of day. I was filming on 16mm reversal Ferrania film using a deep

red filter for the night eªect, which means I was using natural light as if it

were artificial light. Because there were a lot of tall cypresses in the garden,

the light would sometimes be right in a certain area only for ten or fifteen

minutes. The light would come through, and then it’d be gone for the rest

of the day. So I needed to figure out in advance when the light that I needed,

the backlighting particularly, would be coming through the trees, and get

specific areas blocked oª at just the right moment. Once I figured out where

the light would be in a certain place, I had my actor get into position and

my two cameramen, Charles and Thad Lovett, go to work.

Charles and Thad were Americans living in Rome—as a matter of fact,

I was living with them in Rome. They had a camera that I wished I could

have owned: a 16mm Éclair with a mirrored viewfinder, so you could look

through the lens and see what you were shooting. Charles and Thad were

very enthusiastic about working with me, so as with La lune des lapins, I had

skilled cameramen helping me. I was very grateful for that.

Carmilla is a mysterious figure in an eighteenth-century costume, wearing

a mask, who you never see in close-up; she’s always seen at a distance.

I knew I wanted a small person, because when I was first studying the gardens,

I compared them to Piranesi’s etchings of the same gardens in the eighteenth

century. Piranesi also did etchings of the ruins of Rome and other

famous old buildings, and when he wanted to give the viewer a sense of scale,

he would use very small people, to make the ruins or the fountains or the

monuments seem bigger. I decided I would use that same technique. And it

worked.When you see the figure in Eaux d’artifice come down the winding,

curved balustrade, the balustrade is above her head—she has to reach up

to it—whereas a normal-sized human would reach down or over to hold

onto the balustrade.

MacDonald: Was Vivaldi part of the original conception?

Anger: Yes. I love The Four Seasons, and I figured that I would just use

one movement, the winter movement, Yes, I always had Vivaldi in mind.

MacDonald: Early on,when you were writing letters to Amos Vogel, looking

for financial help to get that film made [see Anger’s letters in Cinema 16:

Documents toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2002)], you refer to the film as “Waterworks.”

Anger: That was my working title. But then I realized that “waterworks”

often means sewers, so I decided not to use it. “Eaux d’artifice” is a pun I

invented. The French have an expression, feux d’artifice, their name for “fireworks.”

So I use e-a-u-x, rather than f-e-u-x: waters of artifice. I wanted to

refer back to Fireworks and forward to this new project. The French aren’t

oªended by my pun; I’ve asked various people in France, and they’ve all

said it’s okay. I’ve never seen anyone else use my little pun. I also had an

Italian title for the film, “Aqua Barroque,” which I thought I would use if

there were a chance to open the film in Italy, but that didn’t happen.

After Eaux d’artifice I did conceive of a couple of other baroque garden

films. For example, I visited a garden called Bomarzo; it’s located between

Florence and Rome. It’s quite famous, though it’s oª the beaten tourist path.

It has huge boulders that were carved into monster faces by slaves in the sixteenth

century, and you can walk through the mouths into little rooms. It

was a folly commissioned by a nobleman. I never got around to filming that

garden; if I had, I would have used another movement from The Four Seasons.

At that time, Bomarzo was an overgrown, wild ruin; I loved it because

it was so romantic.

My idea at one point was to do four films about four gardens, one for

each of the four seasons, but I wasn’t able to find the financing, so I moved

on and eventually moved back to the States.

MacDonald: Your career has a lot of beginnings that don’t get financed

into complete films. I’m thinking particularly of Puce Moment [1949],

which was originally going to be Puce Women, and Kustom Kar Kommandos.

What was the original plan for Puce Women?

Anger: I did have a written script for it; it’s filed with Anthology Film

Archives, and I also made preproduction drawings for the whole film. Because

of my Hollywood background, I picked up on the idea of doing drawings

for every shot, and I’ve done that for several of my projects.

MacDonald: Do the drawings still exist?

Anger: They do for Puce Women. But to answer your question: Puce

Womenwas to be about forty minutes long. It was to begin early in the morning

and go through the day, ending in twilight. Each section would be appropriate

to a particular time of day—morning, noon, afternoon, and twilight—

and would be represented by a diªerent woman. Each of the women would

be based on a Hollywood star of the twenties: the morning woman would

evoke Clara Bow, and the noon woman would be like Barbara La Marr, and

so forth. They would be dressed in authentic costumes that my grandmother

had given me; she had kept costumes, and they were still in excellent condition.

I found locations—the houses in Hollywood—I would use, and I’d

chosen and blocked in the women I was going to work with, but I was never

able to find the money. The only thing I ended up with was basically a test

for one woman, who was played by Yvonne Marquis; she had a vivacious

quality like Clara Bow.

Puce Moment was one of those projects that I wanted to make so badly

that I even tried getting sponsorship from some Hollywood people. I went

to see Albert Lewin, who had made The Picture of Dorian Gray [1945]. I

knew that he had a collection of voodoo art and primitive paintings. I

thought he might be interested. I showed Puce Moment to him, hoping he

might be convinced to provide some sponsorship, and I also showed it to

Arthur Freed, while he was a producer of musicals—this was before he did

Singin’ in the Rain [1952]. They politely looked at Puce Moment, but then,

you know, I never got a check [laughter]. Later, it seemed to me that I saw

some glimpses of the fashion parade I had used in Puce Moment in Singin’

in the Rain—maybe not; maybe it’s just coincidence, but it seemed like some

moments in Singin’ in the Rain paralleled my idea pretty closely.

Some grants were becoming available at that time. I applied to the

Guggenheim Foundation and was turned down, which was rather annoying

because to apply you had to get twelve people to say that you weren’t a

criminal. I found that very oªensive.

MacDonald: I always think of the Guggenheim, especially in those days,

as interested in abstract art.

Anger: Probably. I don’t know. Later, people told me that you’ve got to

be willing to be turned down about twelve times before they’ll give you a

grant. That seemed like too much of a waste of time, so I just moved on.

MacDonald: The music on some of your films changes over time, and

I’m wondering whether that’s because you have a love-hate relationship with

pop music; pop music can come to seem out-of-date more quickly than some

other forms of music. Is that why the sound tracks change?

Anger: Absolutely not. I consider myself an experimental artist, and even

once a film is “done,” if I want to try something else, and make a new version

of a film, I will. This may annoy critics who are trying to keep track of

everything, but this tendency of mine dates back to my earliest films, which

were like three-minute or five-minute shorts that had to be run at silent speed

because the only camera I had at that time ran at sixteen frames a second.

I would just play a record along with a film and see if I liked it, and then

I’d try another record.When I’d look at Who Has Been Rocking My Dream

Boat?, I played the Mills Brothers song “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat”

on my phonograph.

My first sound track for Puce Moment was Puccini, the interlude for his

first opera, Le Villi [“The Willies”]. It has the same plot as Les Silphides, the

ballet about the phantoms. I liked that piece very much and used it for a while,

and then I thought I’d try something else. In the sixties I met the musician

who composed what became the second sound track for Puce Moment.

MacDonald: What was The Love That Whirls [1949]?

Yvonne Marquis in Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949). Courtesy David E. James.

Anger: That was my first film in color, in Kodachrome. I had met a remarkable-

looking young man, named Ernest Lacy; he had an Irish mother

and a Mexican father, so he was an interesting mixture. He had extraordinary

eyes. I wanted to make a film with him. The idea for it came from

Fraser’s The Golden Bough. The film was to present a ritual of sacrifice.Many

diªerent cultures have had ritual sacrifices, but I was thinking specifically

of Aztec rituals. The film involved Lacy climbing to the top of a mountain

and sacrificing himself to the sun. During the film he was nude. He had a

beautiful body, and I was just using him as a nude figure, which has a long

tradition in art, and has nothing to do with pornography.

I filmed The Love That Whirls on Kodachrome, and at that time, to get

16mm Kodachrome developed, you had to send it to Rochester, New York.

When I sent the film to Kodak, they confiscated it because of the nudity,

and I never got it back. They had a flat rule about nudity; it didn’t matter

whether it was a woman or a man or a child. No nudity. Parents couldn’t

even make home movies of their children in the bathtub or playing in a

sprinkler. Looking back, I probably could have gotten a lawyer and at least

tried to convince them to send it back. But I didn’t do that. So I was shot

down by Eastman Kodak. Their monopoly broke up in the sixties, and then

there were independent labs that could develop Kodachrome and were willing

to print nude imagery.

MacDonald: I think for me Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is your

most remarkable film. P. Adams Sitney talks about an early three-screen version

of that film. Does that version still exist?

Anger: That version was shown at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 and

at a couple of film festivals. That world’s fair in Brussels is where I met Marie

Menken; she was there, too, as was Brakhage; they both saw the three-screen

Inauguration. At that point, the first part of the film used a single screen,

but for the last twenty minutes—the party sequence, which begins when the

characters start putting on masks—the film split into three images The two

side images were mirror images of each other. I varied that a bit, but quite

a lot of it had a kind of mirror eªect, so that one person might be looking

toward the center image from one side and another person from the opposite

side.

I knew about Abel Gance and his Napoléon [1927], which used a triptych

format. I met Abel Gance, and Nellie Kaplan, who was his assistant; they

showed some of their films at the Brussels World’s Fair too. Gance was fascinated

with my film and not at all upset; he was pleased that I had picked

up on his three-screen idea and used it.

Of course, the trick with a three-projector piece is that all three projectors

have to be in sync, and at that time I had help from the Siemans

Company in Germany; they were one of the sponsors of the showings and

provided the projectors for the Brussels Exposition. They agreed to supply

a coaxial cable linking up the three projectors, which I guess for them was

very easy, but would have been impossible for me. I had worked out the threescreen

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome only in theory.

And so that version was shown in Brussels and also at the Palais de Challiot

in Paris. But a time came when I decided I just couldn’t do this version

anymore; the logistics were much too complicated. I decided that the threescreen

version had been an experiment, that I had completed the experiment;

and I made a final, single-screen version. In my final recut of Inauguration

I use a lot of superimpositions, and to make those, I cannibalized the two

twenty-minute reels on the two sides and incorporated them. That’s the version

that’s in distribution now.

MacDonald: When I read about the three-screen version and that it began

with one screen and then expanded to three screens, it seemed to work

perfectly with the character development in the film.You start with this one

character, Lord Shiva, who seems, first, to split into, or to see within himself,

two characters—Kali and the Great Beast—and then to keep opening

out into more and more figures. I don’t think of Inauguration as a narrative

but as a ritual that allows the complex multiplicity of the central figure’s

psyche—and, in a sense, everyone’s psyche—to be revealed.

Anger: And that’s all quite deliberate.

The film is based on a musical form—theme and variation.

MacDonald: Did the three-screen version have the Janácek sound track?

When I was first seeing Inauguration, it had an Electric Light Orchestra

sound track . . .

Anger: For a short while, yes—another experiment.

MacDonald: The diªerent sound tracks tend to create diªerent experiences

of the film, with diªerent emphases. Juxtaposed with the ELO sound track,

the elegance and extravagance of your imagery moved to the foreground; but

with the Janácek, the humor of the visuals becomes the foreground—at least

for me.

Anger: All along, I was experimenting with various tracks, some of which

I never recorded. I had always known about Leo Janácek’s Slavonic Mass,

and I had that in mind even when I was filming the imagery. I found a recording

of The Slavonic Mass by Raphael Kubelik that I liked, and I used that.

MacDonald: In my book on Cinema 16 I reprinted a number of letters

between you and Vogel, written at a time when it looked like the film was

going to have a Harry Partch sound track. Does a print with that sound

track still exist?

Anger:Well, Harry is not alive anymore, so you can’t talk to him, but I’ll

give you my version. In the early fifties I heard an LP of some of his music

performed using his own instruments. He had invented things called “cloud

chambers,”big glass bells that he had cut the bottoms oª and used like gongs,

and several stringed instruments. He was quite a unique artist. Looking

back, I wish I’d done a documentary on him and his instruments. I liked the

music on this LP and told him so, and I asked if it would be okay if I used

it on an experimental film I was completing. He said yes. So I went ahead

and used his music with my imagery—but his piece was five minutes too

long for the picture. I saw a little section that I thought could be trimmed

out of the music, so that it would fit exactly with my imagery, and I went

ahead and trimmed that section.

When I showed the test print to Harry, he was furious. He said, “You

can’t cut my music! If you want to use the whole thing, that’s okay, but you

can’t cut my music!” And he asked me to destroy the print, which I did.

Looking at that version of my imagery with Partch’s music made for a

very diªerent experience. In that early version there were no optical eªects

at all, no dissolves or superimpositions, so every cut was like an abrupt slap;

the film had more of a cubist eªect, very diªerent from later versions. I’m

sorry that what I did oªended Harry; I suppose I should have asked him

first, but it was a slow little section of the music, and there was no way I

could have put additional visuals in to make the imagery fit the sound. After

that, I realized that I should commission my own music, so I wouldn’t

have problems with permissions.

MacDonald: You’ve obviously spent a lot of time studying world mythologies.

When you were making Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, how fully

did you assume the audience would make particular identifications? I ask

the question on two diªerent levels. Anaïs Nin plays Astarte. I’ve always assumed

that you assumed a substantial portion of the audience would recognize

not just the mythological role Nin plays but that it’s her playing this role.

Nin herself was/is something of a mythical figure. To what extent did you

think about the audience’s awareness, or lack of awareness, about the history

of mythologies when you were making the film?

Anger: I’ve always made my films for myself, and how much of what I

put into them is picked up by other people is not my concern. Otherwise I’d

have program notes. I do sometimes have program notes that identify the

cast and the names of the figures they play. But that’s about as far as I’ll go.

My films are enigmas to be figured out. My films are based on my lifelong

research, and they add something to that research. If you can pick up on

the results, fine; it’s all there if you want to explore it—but you may have to

do some research of your own.

MacDonald: Samson de Brier played a number of roles in Inauguration

of the Pleasure Dome. Was there a particular reason for that?

Anger: The whole film evolved from a Halloween party at which various

friends came dressed as gods and goddesses. Samson had a number of diªer-

ent costumes; he would appear in one costume, then disappear and reappear

in another. So I based the film on his personality; he’s the main character,

sort of the master of ceremonies of this event (which, by the way, was

filmed in his house).

MacDonald: In his filmography Haller lists The Story of O [1961].What

can you tell me about that project?

Anger:When I was living in France,my publisher was Jean-Jacques Pauvert.

He brought out the original edition of Hollywood Babylon, which I

wrote in French, before it came out in English. At that time Jean-Jacques

was the publisher of a rather notorious novel, Histoire d’O, by Pauline Reage.

It was an erotic novel; I guess you could call it a sadomasochistic fairytale

because it’s absolutely a fantasy, nothing that could actually happen in real

life. I met the author, whose real name is Dominique Aury, and she gave me

permission to film the book, and I began work on a black-and-white, silent

film. My model for the project was Bresson. I shot about twenty minutes,

and then the production came to a halt: it turned out that the father of the

young lady who was playing the lead was the French minister of finance.

The girl was in her late teens, old enough to make up her own mind about

Anaïs Nin as Astarte in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954).

Courtesy David E. James.

what she wanted to do, but at any rate, the filming had to stop when it became

known that she was playing a part in an erotic film. It wasn’t pornographic,

but did involve some nudity and some simulated S&M; most everything

takes place oª camera. The film was basically an exercise in style. I

had a work print of what I had shot, which I left at the Cinémathèque

Française. Another unfinished project.

MacDonald:When I think about Scorpio Rising, it reminds me a little of

All That Jazz [1979, directed by Bob Fosse], in the sense that the beginning

sequences are the most powerful, and the film seems gradually to fall away

from the energy we sense early on. For me, and I’m guessing to some extent

for you, the process of getting ready for the big social moment is the most

exciting part; and the moment itself can never quite live up . . .

Anger: . . . to the anticipation—yes. Paradoxically, I’ve always felt that

getting dressed up, putting on a costume, is more exciting, more fascinating

to watch, than striptease.What people choose to put on—their clothes, their

adornments—is more interesting than the undressing part.

MacDonald: A related thought: as a filmmaker you’ve had many experiences

where you have conceptions, and sometimes far more than conceptions,

about what you want to do in a film; and then in the process of trying

to get the film produced, you come into contact with a world that really

doesn’t care about your plans. Once in a while you are able to get a film

done—and usually it’s a remarkable film—but there are so many cases where

the actual contact with the realities of money keeps the film from getting

made; your professional experience as a filmmaker is often more about the

excitement of anticipation than about what results.

Anger: Yes, and some of this has to do with the way I am. I think it took

Oliver Stone twenty years to find a producer for his first script, Platoon

[1986]. But once he’d broken that barrier, he was able to make commercial

films; he became “bankable,” and large amounts of money were available

to him. I can’t stick with one project for twenty years. I’ve had some very

good projects, but when the money didn’t turn up—if I didn’t know how

to get it, or if I was turned down—I would just move on. I learned not to

get tragic about these things, and I’d just move on to something else. I’d think

to myself, “Well, okay, that’s going to remain a dream project.”

MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising, you examine, among other things, a very

common kind of doublethink, where men get together to enjoy each other

sensually, but pretend that the homoerotic element of the experience is not

there. Could you talk about the young men you worked with in Scorpio

Rising?

Anger: All my actors in Scorpio Risingwere straight. They were workingclass

guys, Italian Americans mostly,who would have been upset by the way

I portray them. Scorpio Rising was me putting that inference on their soci-

Kenneth Anger 37

ety, seeing their society as an outsider, which can be a limitation but also an

advantage. In fact, the men had girlfriends, but at the Halloween party they

said, “We don’t want our girlfriends in the picture; we want to be in the picture!”

They were showing oª a little bit, or maybe a lot, for the camera. This

was a case where the camera changed things, but it changed them in a direction

that I wanted. So Scorpio Rising is my take on their lifestyle, not

their lifestyle untouched.

In fact, some of the men that you see getting dressed for the party in the

film weren’t even at the party. The blonde who puts on a leather jacket when

you hear the song “Blue Velvet”wasn’t even in New York.When I got back

to Los Angeles after filming most of what became Scorpio in Brooklyn and

was cutting the film, I met this young man, who was a model with the Athletic

Model Guild, which was run by a friend of mine named Bob Mizer.

Before explicit or hard-core magazines were available, there were these physique

magazines, and Mizer had one called Physique Pictorial that published

some of the early drawings of Tom of Finland, and camp photographs

Mizer did of drifters that he’d find around LA, posed either in a leather

jacket or blue jeans or a posing strap. I used to go over there to the AMG

near MacArthur Park quite often. On one of my visits I met this fellow, and

I put him in the film.

Another thing: while I was cutting the film, living in Silverlake, a package

was left on my doorstep. Since it was a 16mm film package, I assumed

it was for me, and I opened it: it was a Sunday school film rented from the

Lutheran Church. I looked at the package more carefully and realized that

it was addressed to the same street address, but to a diªerent street. I decided

to run the film, and when I saw it, I thought, “Well, I’m just going to

keep this and cut it into my film.” And that’s how I got Last Journey to

Jerusalem [1948]. I thought of it as the gods acting up, doing a little prank,

doing me a favor. The film was perfect for my purposes.

I immediately saw the parallel between the disciples following Jesus and

the “disciples” in the motorcycle gang following some idea. And I saw that

in both cases, this kind of following could lead into dangerous territory,

as it did for the Hell’s Angels, who started out just as guys who had been

vets in World War II, a little wild, but not dangerous; but later morphed

into something else, drifted into drug dealing, and gained quite a negative

reputation.

MacDonald: Over the years there’s been some debate about the ending

of Scorpio Rising, whether it’s the Scorpio character we’re seeing dead in

the flashing light.

Anger: No, it’s not Scorpio. After the Halloween party, the motorcycle

gang went to a place called Walden Pond, in upstate New York. They rode

up there on their bikes after staying up all night and on November 1 were

38 A Critical Cinema 5

part of the last outdoor dirt bike race of the year. Some of them actually

rode in the race; the others just went up there to hang out. I rode on the

back of one of the riders’ bikes with my camera. During the race, there was

that accident; one of the bikes flipped over and crashed right in front of my

camera. I incorporated that, as the final image. But it’s not Scorpio. The

man you see in the flashing red light—Jim Powers—was a biker who was

killed later, but not in front of my camera, though that is the implication

I’m making. As a hobby, motorcycle racing is quite dangerous, and I think

that’s the appeal: the bikers all think they’re immortal.

Scorpio is the sign of the Zodiac that rules machines and death and sex.

That’s the tie-in.

MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising the men you’re depicting, at least early on

in the film, are quite beautiful about getting themselves ready, getting their

machines ready; and then as the film moves on, as they gather into a group,

at first it’s a party but then it turns more toward something creepy. I’m wondering

whether one of the things you’re suggesting is that very often when

you do follow your dreams and find other people who are sharing this dream,

there can be great pleasure, but also great danger. I’m trying to understand

the Nazi imagery in the film—in your mind is it the number of people that

makes dreams turn dangerous, or . . .

Anger:Well, Scorpio Rising isn’t a cautionary tale. I’m not trying to say,

“Don’t do this because you’ll end up a Nazi,” but I did find an element of

swagger and bullying in this culture. Actually the particular guys I knew

weren’t threatening, at least to me, and I became quite good friends with

some of them—they accepted me as some sort of camera nut, and they saw

me accepting them as bike nuts—but there often is a rebellious dimension

in biker groups that makes some bikers defiantly enjoy doing things that

might scare other people—like sporting swastikas.

I first asked this bunch if I could photograph their bikes when I met them

under the Cyclone [a roller coaster] at Coney Island, where they used to

meet on Saturdays. Mostly they were from Brooklyn. I was living in Brooklyn

myself at the time, with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in Brooklyn

Heights.

MacDonald: What was that like?

Anger: You may be aware that Marie Menken and Willard Maas, who

she was living with, were the couple that inspired Edward Albee to write

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—and if you know the play, you can imagine

that the experience was unusual.Willard and Marie had a strange symbiotic

relationship.Willard was gay, and Marie was not; and there was a son

who would show up occasionally. I was with them for about three months

in their penthouse in Brooklyn Heights. Marie invited me to live there; I was

more Marie’s friend than Willard’s.Willard was teaching at a college out on

Kenneth Anger 39

Staten Island; he was a professor of literature. Marie worked at Time magazine

in the cable room.

They would begin drinking on Friday and would continue to drink all

weekend, and then on Monday morning, they’d both go back to work and

be on time for their jobs. Each weekend was like a lost weekend—well, a

found weekend for them, because this was how they could be themselves.

Sometimes I was a kind of referee, usually defending Marie—though I never

actually had to intervene.Watching their arguments was a little like watching

Punch and Judy. If I had been able to film their fights, I would have had

quite a film because they did the most extraordinary things. Sometimes when

they were both quite drunk, they would get up on this parapet overlooking

the skyline of lower Manhattan and the river. It was a fifteen-story drop

down to the sidewalk, and they’d be up on the parapet pushing each other;

they both knew how to step back and not fall oª, but a slight miscalculation

and one or both would have gone over that ledge. It was scary, but also

entertaining. On those alcoholic weekends I would have a couple of drinks,

but I certainly wasn’t drinking along with them.

Edward Albee was familiar with them from an earlier period. I remember

going to the premiere of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? with Willard

and Marie. They were laughing at it and everything, but they never said,

“Oh, that’s us!”Afterward,Willard was quite critical. He said, “It’s too long;

Edward should cut out half an hour.” He was acting like a professor. They

must have recognized themselves, but they stayed friends with Edward. The

play was a hit, but so far as I know there was never anything like “Give us

a cut because you based it on our lives!” They only saw it once.

I was very close with Marie.We traveled in Europe together after the Brussels

World’s Fair. We went to Paris and then to Spain, and that’s where she

made her little short called Arabesque for Kenneth Anger [1961], in the Alhambra

in Granada. I helped her with that film; she was working with this little

16mm camera that used expensive little fifty-foot-load magazines. If she

had used a hundred-foot-load, she could have filmed for half price. But she

didn’t want the bigger, heavier camera. She liked this little thing that she

could hold in one hand; so while she was dancing around the columns and

the fountains, I would occasionally be behind the camera, guiding her, so

that she wouldn’t bump into something.

I miss Marie a lot.

MacDonald: In Scorpio Rising did you get the rights to use all the music?

Anger: I used about twelve selections, including Elvis Presley’s “Devil in

Disguise.” Since I intended to submit Scorpio Rising to film festivals and to

show it around, I decided I needed to get the rights. I hired a rights clearance

lawyer in New York and turned the whole thing over to him, and he

got the clearances, not for a feature film, but for a short. If it had been a

40 A Critical Cinema 5

feature film it probably would have been more expensive, but the clearance

for all the music came to eight thousand dollars. That about doubled my

budget.

It was pop music that was playing the summer of 1963, when I was filming;

it was just prior to the Kennedy assassination, and just before the Beatles,

who came in and messed up American music as far as I’m concerned.

They became such a fad and were in the top five for so long that a lot of

good American musicians and songwriters got pushed out.

MacDonald:Was the idea of using the individual songs as modules part

of the original conception of the film?

Anger: The music was an integral part of what I wanted. I am a pioneer

in using music this way, along with Bruce Conner,who began using pop music

in a similar way around the same time.

MacDonald: The only film I know of that may be earlier in its use of previously

recorded pop music, though it doesn’t use rock and doesn’t use the

music ironically the way you and Bruce do, is Weegee’s New York [ca. 1952].

Anger: What is Weegee’s New York?

MacDonald: It’s a short city symphony of New York, and especially of

Coney Island beach on a crowded summer day, shot by the photographer

Weegee.

Anger: Of course, I’m very familiar with Weegee’s still photographs, but

I’ve not seen that film.

MacDonald:When Amos Vogel found out that Weegee, who was a member

of Cinema 16, made films, he said, “We’ve got to show this material.”

According to Vogel,Weegee had no idea how to edit a film and no interest

in learning, so Vogel did the editing. The finished film uses pop music of the

early fifties, before rock and roll, almost the entire songs, so the structure

of the Coney Island section of Weegee’s New York is somewhat similar to

Scorpio Rising. Nobody seems to remember who put the sound on the film.

Anger: Weegee had such an eye for the grotesque, like Diane Arbus. I

loved his still photography. He was the first one to photograph car accidents

and things like that and show that they could be a brutal kind of art.

In Scorpio Rising, the songs are an ironic commentary on what’s going

on in the picture. They’re a kind of narration.When I have the fellow from

the Athletic Model Guild put on his leather jacket, the music is “Blue Velvet,”

which specifically says, “She wore blue velvet.” It’s a deliberate gender

switch that suggests that he’s as vain as any girl would be. Of course, men

have a right to be vain about their appearance, to take pains to decorate

themselves; that’s a human trait, from primitive man or woman on.

MacDonald: In the little monograph by Robert Haller that accompanies

The Magic Lantern Cycle videos, Scorpio Rising is dedicated to “Jack

Parsons, Victor Childe, Jim Powers, James Dean, T. E. Lawrence, Hart

Crane,Kurt Mann, The Society of Spartans, The Hell’s Angels, and all the

overgrown boys who will follow the whistle of Love’s brother.” Some of

these names are familiar to me; others are not.Who, for example, was Jack

Parsons?

Anger: He was a famous rocket scientist who invented the fuel that took

the Apollo to the moon. He was married to Cameron, who plays the Scarlet

Woman in Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Jack was killed in 1952 in

an explosion at his home in Pasadena.Apparently he had explosives at home.

He and Cameron were supposed to leave for Mexico that morning, and

Cameron had gone to a shop close by to get some supplies, and when she

got back, the workshop had blown up and her husband was dead.

MacDonald: Who was/is Victor Childe?

Anger: Victor Childe was a friend of mine, a skilled painter in the surrealist

tradition. He was working on a large, elaborate painting called The

Bone Garden for about ten years. He was also a script writer and at one point

wrote a script about a mermaid. At that time there were no films about mermaids,

and Constance Bennett took an option on Victor’s script, and it looked

like the film was set for production. Then in England somebody else made a

movie about a mermaid, and when Constance heard about this other movie,

she said, “Well, I can’t do it now because the novelty has been ruined,” and

decided not to take up the option. Victor was counting on this sale to solve

all his financial problems—he had gotten himself in a big hole financially—

and he committed suicide by turning on the gas in his apartment, which was

above a restaurant in Hollywood. One of the waitresses smelled gas from

down below and came up to see what was wrong and knocked on his door;

Victor was still conscious and switched oª the light, which created a spark

that was enough to set oª an explosion, and he was killed. The Bone Garden

was completely burned, covered with blisters—it was a photo-realist painting,

an amazing structure of skeletons and bones, totally original. I just

wanted to remember him a little bit; that’s why I mentioned his name in that

dedication.

MacDonald: Jim Powers?

Anger: He was the one who was “killed” at the end of Scorpio Rising.

It’s his head you see in the red flashing police light, and I have a shot of his

arm with his tattoo, “Blessed, blessed oblivion.” It wasn’t long after the filming

that he drove his car as fast as he could into a wall in San Francisco and

killed himself.

MacDonald: And Kurt Mann?

Anger: Kurt Mann was the son of Thomas Mann. He committed suicide

by jumping oª a boat to Cuba.

As I wrote in the preface to my friend’s book on celebrity suicide

[David K. Frasier, Suicide in the Entertainment Industry: An Encyclopedia

42 A Critical Cinema 5

of 840 Twentieth Century Cases (Jeªerson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002)], there

have been quite a few suicides among people I’ve known. It is odd that I’ve

known so many.

I’ve recently finished a film tribute—Elliott’s Suicide—to another friend

of mine who committed suicide not long ago. He was a songwriter and singer

named Elliott Smith. He’s on the Dreamworks label. He killed himself last

October. He was thirty-four and had had a fight with his girlfriend and

stabbed himself in the chest with a steak knife in his girlfriend’s kitchen,

which was so stupid—but people do stupid things. On the other hand, his

lyrics are quite dark; the word “suicide” occurs frequently. He had his own

destiny to work out, but I was really upset over his death and the waste of

this life, and I did Elliott’s Suicide as a little tribute to him. I photographed

the steak knife and it’s in the film. And I use several of his songs, including,

“Follow Me to the Rose Parade”; apparently he liked to get stoned on the

last night of the year and in the morning go with friends to the Rose Parade

in Pasadena. This past January, after he died, I shot part of the Rose Parade,

and I’ve incorporated some of the passing floats in my film. The Rose

Parade floats move so slowly that even though they’re filmed in actual time,

they suggest slow motion, and I use that in an elegiac sense in the film.

MacDonald: Is the film available?

From Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963). Courtesy David E. James.

Anger: I haven’t printed it up yet; but it’s basically assembled. It’s eighteen

minutes long.

MacDonald: Did you know Spalding Gray’s work?

Anger: Yes. He jumped oª a ferry—like Kurt Mann. But I understand he

had been in a bad car accident in Ireland and was apparently in a lot of pain—

he just couldn’t deal with it anymore. He was so talented. I’d seen people do

monologues before, but he certainly perfected the form. How he could just

be there sitting at his table with a glass of water, and maybe a couple of notes,

and yet be absolutely riveting—it was remarkable.

MacDonald: I saw him a number of times at the Performing Garage in

New York and loved Demme’s film of Swimming to Cambodia [1987]. Losing

him was a blow.

Like Puce Moment, Kustom Kar Kommandos is a kind of monument to

a project that never got financed.

Anger: Yes. Luckily I have at least as much from those projects as I do—

two short films. Kustom Kar Kommandos is about three minutes long; it was

supposed to be forty-five minutes.

I found a whole series of young men who were willing to work with me,

by going to the shows where they brought their custom cars. I met them

there, and they were very proud of what they call their “babies.”What they

did was a kind of folk art; they were skilled artisans turning a standard Ford

and Chevy into something quite unique. It was to be a study of the whole

culture of the remarkable custom car world; it still exists. At that time it was

quite new; I discovered it about the same time Tom Wolfe did. The film

was to end with a car meet or a race. The project paralleled Scorpio Rising

to some extent, but wasn’t going to end in a death.

MacDonald: The first letters of the title words make up KKK; were you

going to do something with the Ku Klux Klan in that film?

Anger: The title has nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan. In the custom

car culture, they use Ks instead of Cs.

I had gotten some assistance from the Ford Foundation; they gave a modest

amount of money to a dozen filmmakers—only twelve thousand dollars,

not enough to make a longer film. I filmed what is now Kustom Kar Kommandos

with that Ford Foundation money. I filmed in the garage of the

young man who’s in the film—it was his car, and he did all the work on it—

in San Bernadino. The garage was cluttered and full of stuª, and I knew I

had to simplify the set, so I brought in a twelve-foot-wide roll of no-seam

paper, the sort of thing that’s used for fashion model shooting, where you

want just a plain background behind the model, and I used that to isolate

the car as an art object.

MacDonald: Lucifer Rising went through a number of stages, partly because

much of the original material was stolen, though some of it ended up

in Invocation of My Demon Brother.

Anger:Yes, that was when I had a falling-out with Bobby Beausoleil,who

I originally cast as Lucifer. I don’t really want to go into that whole story

again, but when I wasn’t home, he came in and took several cans of the

unedited footage I had shot of him. All I had left of that material was what

I had in my cutting bin, just loose rolled-up bits, but I was determined to

do something with that material, after all the eªort that had gone into filming

it. And so those scraps were used in Invocation of My Demon Brother

and added to that film’s rough, disjunctive texture.

MacDonald: Is everything that’s not your performance of the ritual in

Invocation from the earlier film?

Anger: Most of it, yes. For Invocation I performed a Crowley ceremony,

“The Equinox of the Gods,” to commemorate the autumn equinox, at the

Straight Theater in the Haight-Ashbury, in 1967. I had someone film it for

me, since I was involved in the ritual. I can’t remember who it was.

MacDonald: It was Ben Van Meter, I believe.

Anger: It was the only time I worked with him. In the end, Invocation of

My Demon Brotherwas something like a first rough sketch for Lucifer. Then

when I moved to London, I showed that eleven-minute piece to Mick Jagger,

and he volunteered to do an improvisation on his Moog synthesizer for

the track, which is rhythmic but very disjunctive and dissonant—which is

what I wanted. And I recast and re-formed the Lucifer project.

MacDonald:When you made Invocation of My Demon Brother, was part

of the motivation a desire to express your anger at Beausoleil? Were you

sending in your “spiritual marines” out of frustration with what had happened

to the Lucifer Rising project?

Anger: I did have a lot of frustration and rage from working with Bobby.

I cut images of soldiers jumping out of a helicopter,which were from a newsreel

of Vietnam, into the salvaged footage and my performance of the ritual.

I’ve always considered Invocationmy War Film; it reflects the feelings of

the war—not the actual events but the kind of things that it had unleashed.

MacDonald: Who was the albino boy?

Anger: I met him in the Haight-Ashbury; I met several of the characters

who would have been in the first version of Lucifer Rising in the Haight-

Ashbury, including Bobby: he was the guitarist of an acid rock group called

Love, and then he founded his own group called the Magic Powerhouse of

Oz; the name is typical of that period—purple prose.

MacDonald:Was there more to choosing to use this albino boy than just

his amazing looks?

Anger:Well, it was his looks and the fact that he was a light-sensitive person.

Albinos have very sensitive eyes. Usually when they’re outdoors they

wear dark glasses. If you put a bright light on them, it doesn’t actually harm

them, but their eyes will go into a reflexive spasm, a jerking motion, and I

was fascinated by this. I asked him if I could photograph him and if he’d

Kenneth Anger 45

do some gestures with the glass wand, and he said, “Sure.” Usually when I

meet people, I don’t take up much of their time. I don’t disrupt their lives.

To me this young man was sort of a supernatural entity, and that’s why I

used him.

MacDonald: I need some help with Lucifer Rising. There are dimensions

of the film that seem clear to me. The volcano spewing up lava from underground

at the beginning of the film is a basic metaphor for thinking

about your work: underneath the conventional social surface of things,

there are all these other worlds, and art is a means of bringing these worlds

to the surface, at least for a limited time. But a number of the mythological

figures in the film and even some of the places in the film are mysterious

to me. For example, while the Egyptian spaces are very recognizable,

there’s also the sequence with the two giant natural stone pillars with the

bridge across . . .

Anger: Those sandstone pillars are a freak of nature standing in the forest

near Externsteine, Germany. It’s a beautiful place. The nearest big city

is Hannover, an hour or so train ride away. The pillars are considered to be

as old as Stonehenge, and of that same Celtic culture. And like Stonehenge

they were basically used as a solar temple. The steps leading up to the small

temple on top of the one pillar were carved, and the temple itself was carved

out of the rock on top. The bridge between the pillars was restored by the

Nazis. During their very peculiar pagan revival the Nazis used the site as

part of their ceremonies for the Hitler Jugend. That’s where the Hitler Youth

were presented with their daggers when they were twelve years old.

But it was a solar temple, which is why I used it. In the temple room on

the top of the one stone pillar there’s a round window that’s cut into the

wall; and on the summer solstice, the longest day and shortest night of the

year—and only on that day—the sun comes through that window and illuminates

the altar. All we know about that Celtic culture, since they didn’t

leave any writings, is that they knew about astronomy and they worshiped

the sun and natural cycles.

MacDonald: And so, the Celtic gods are communicating with the Egyptian

gods.

Anger: Yes, all of them are tied together. I took the main figures in my

cast to Luxor, where the opening scene and some other scenes were filmed.

Miriam Gibril played Isis, the Egyptian goddess of nature who rises from

a fallen granite monolith at the beginning of the film. Donald Cammell—

the director of Performance [1970] and a friend of mine—played Osiris, the

lord of death. In Egyptian mythology Isis and Osiris are a couple, which

creates a symmetry: life and death.

Lucifer Rising was sort of a psychodrama because most of the people I

cast had something in their personal makeup that was reflected in the roles

they were playing. Donald Cammell was always half in love with death, and

he eventually shot himself. You can see this tendency in Performance (the

bullet going into the brain is the last image of Performance), and you can

see it in his other films, too. I chose Marianne Faithfull to be Lilith. In my

mind, Lilith is a complement to Lucifer: she’s a female demon, the spirit of

discontent—and Lucifer is the original rebel. But I’m the one who put them

together; you can’t find this combination in any mythology. I dressed Lilith

all in gray, and Marianne used gray makeup, all of which fits with traditional

interpretations of Lilith.

MacDonald: How close was the shape of the final Lucifer Rising to the

conception that you were working with originally?

Anger: The final version covers the main bases that I’d established. It was

always conceived as dreamlike, episodic, and without a narrative line that

you could follow in a conventional way.

Originally I did think I would include fragments of dialogue, and as a

matter of fact, several people do speak in the film; you see them talking.

The dialogue was short and simple. There’s a scene where Marianne Faithfull

as Lilith repeats, over and over, the word “memory,” and anyone who

can read lips can see that that’s what she’s saying. And I had Sir Francis

Rose, who played Chaos, saying, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

Again, you can read his lips. But when I was finally putting the film together,

since Bobby Beausoleil had volunteered to do the music, I decided to use

just music and drop the dialogue—but to leave the visuals of the dialogue

as a kind of sketchy and mysterious dimension of the film.

Sir Francis is no longer with us. He was a famous character: “mad, bad,

and dangerous to know.” A friend of Gertrude Stein’s. She wrote “A rose is

a rose is a rose” for him. He did the illustrations for her books of poems.

He was a sketch artist and an oil painter, but also completely mad; and as

he got older, he became crazier and crazier. I’m afraid that appearing in my

film got him oª on a tangent, and he decided he was the devil—soon after

the filming he did a shocking crime in Wales: he threw bricks through the

stained-glass windows of a church. He was arrested, but because he was a

sir, he was let oª. I hate to think that I had any indirect responsibility for

triggering his madness.

The Lucifer jacket with the letters on the back was made for me by Jann

Haworth, the wife of Peter Blake, who was an artist working in cloth. She

was with the Fraser Gallery in London. She had made several large dolls of

mythological figures, one of which was Lucifer. I saw the Lucifer doll on

exhibit, which is the reason I approached her.

MacDonald: It’s a great eªect near the end with the cone of light revealing

the magic circle. As a film person, it’s hard for me not to see it as an evocation

of the projector beam.

Anger: It’s actually a triangle. Lucifer is constructed using simple geometric

shapes: the circle and the triangle. The triangle is reflected in the Pyramids

and in that beam; and there are many circles in the film.

MacDonald: Did you make contact with Bobby Beausoleil, once he was

in prison? How did you bring him back into the project?

Anger: Once he was in prison, we exchanged letters. His being in prison

was his karma. He had stolen my van, and as he was driving from San Francisco

toward LA, it broke down in front of the ranch where the Manson

group was living, and the girls came out and asked him to move in with them,

and that’s how he got mixed up with Charlie—a kind of devilish plotting

goes into all this. I’m sorry about how it worked out, but he made his own

decisions. He was a smart kid, too. But he was taking a lot of acid and just

got oª on a tangent.

Once he was in prison,we exchanged letters, and then I went to visit him—

just a couple of times because I don’t like hearing those metal doors slam

behind me. Actually, it was easier to be friends with Bobby once he was inside.

Through Bobby I became friends with the chief psychiatrist at the California

prison system—Dr. Minerva Bertholt—and Minerva had taken a liking

to Bobby, who had expressed an interest in continuing with his music.

She arranged for him to do that. He made his own guitar in prison; he knew

how to carve it and how to string it—he had made several musical instruments.

When he heard I was finishing Lucifer, he volunteered to do the music.

Through Minerva we were able to record the track in prison. I furnished

Bobby with timing sheets, and a workprint that he was able to see on the

projector they had there, and I donated a tape recorder, quite a good one,

a Nagra, to the prison—because you can’t take things in and out. I guess

they still have it. The other musicians you hear on the track were in mostly

for drug oªenses. Several of them had been involved in well-known music

groups in San Francisco; they were professional musicians who had made

a mistake and ended up behind bars. Bobby, of course, had a murder conviction,

so he’s still in, but I think some of the others are out now.

MacDonald: I know you have several projects under way. You sent me

a video of a very rough version of a film about the Hitler Youth, called Ich

Will.

Anger: Ich Will is a work in progress. It’s already quite changed from what

you saw. I’ve dropped a lot of the marching. I’m trying to get access to the

original prints of the Hitler Youth films, some of which are with the Imperial

War Museum in London. They’re on 35mm. The museum has said that

it would be okay for me to do something with that material, but it’s the cost

that’s stopping me.

I’m interested in the kind of bonding that was going on in the Hitler Jugend,

and the way the Nazis exploited that bonding by creating rituals out

of the boys being presented with their daggers and similar ceremonies. This

kind of thing also exists in the Boy Scouts and in many groupings in many

diªerent cultures—but Hitler and the Nazis gave it its most sinister twist.

The propaganda films that were made about the Nazi Youth are fascinating

source material to work from.

MacDonald: The most recent finished film of yours that I’ve seen is The

Man We Want to Hang [2002], the film about the show of Aleister Crowley’s

drawings and paintings. It’s not your first film about Crowley.

Anger: That’s true: Thelema Abbey [1955] was about his villa in Cefalù,

Sicily, which he called his “abbey.” He had painted murals on the walls of

his bedroom and called it Le chambre de cauchmars, the Room of Nightmares.

I went there and restored the murals, which had been whitewashed

after he was kicked out of Sicily by Mussolini’s police in the early twenties.

The murals were considered obscene, and they were deliberately obscene in

some cases, like the one he called The Scarlet Woman Being Mounted by a

Goat. And there were an images of Pan with an erect phallus. It was typical

of Crowley to do things like that. I made a documentary on the abbey,

which I didn’t own because it was paid for by this magazine called Picture

Post. In the fifties in England, Picture Post had a television program, and

they paid me to make the film. It was a documentary, a straightforward explanation

of what I was doing there.While I was in Cefalù, Dr. Kinsey came

to visit me. He knew about Crowley and had already collected his books,

and he wanted to see what these erotic murals were.

It was quite an interesting documentary, but by the time I got to England,

it had disappeared; the company had gone out of existence. I said,

“Well, what did you do with all the television films that were shown on this

series?” They said, “We don’t know; they were probably thrown out.” Nobody

thought to save anything.

The Man We Want to Hang is a documentation of an exhibit of Crowley’s

drawings and paintings, shown at the October Gallery in 1995 in London.

I own some of the drawings you see; a large collection of Crowley’s

work was bought by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and other paintings and

drawings came from Crowley collectors, some as far away as Australia. It

was a unique chance to have a good selection of Crowley’s work all together

because this kind of show had never been done before. I had permission to

film it, and I filmed in the gallery. I was showing the work as if you were

wandering through the gallery.

MacDonald: How did you decide on the title?

Anger: The title of the show, and of the film, is taken from a headline in

the notorious British tabloid Sunday Express, which was published in the

1920s by Lord Beaverbrook. Beaverbrook was an enemy of Crowley, and

whenever he needed a sensational story, he’d do one about Crowley being

a cannibal or something equally absurd.When Crowley was in Cefalù and

a student from Oxford died there, from typhoid, the Sunday Express story

had it that the student was sacrificed. The headline of the editorial in the

Sunday Express, denouncing Crowley as the wickedest man in the world,

was “The Man We Want to Hang.” Crowley was amused by it.

My title is an obvious pun: “The Man We Want to Hang” is about hanging

pictures: everything in the film is a picture. My film is a “Pictures at an

Exhibition.”

MacDonald: I assume what drew you to Crowley was that his religion

allowed for a spirituality that was nonexclusionary in terms of gods and

spirits.

Anger: Basically Crowley created a pagan revival. He blew the dust oª

figures like Osiris and Isis and Horus, in the Egyptian pantheon. Horus is

the solar god with the hawk head that Crowley identified as his personal

god. He called the age that we’re in right now “The Age of Horus,” which

replaces “The Age of Osiris,” which represented the Christian age. He believed

that we go through diªerent cycles, two thousand years each.

I want to tell you about my newest project, about a diªerent sort of art

collection. The film will be called Mouse Heaven. Last year I applied for a

grant from Media Arts, one of the Rockefeller cultural activities, to do a

film about an extraordinary collection of Disney toys owned by Eunice and

Mel Birnkrant. Their home is like a private museum. In fact, they don’t want

me to tell exactly where they live because they’re afraid the place will be broken

into. A few days ago I learned that I got the grant, thirty-five thousand

dollars.

Mouse Heaven will have the theme of the iconic Mickey Mouse. It’ll be

a twenty-minute film. I have to decide whether I’m going to do it on film—

and, if so, in 35mm or 16mm—or in digital. Everything seems to be pointing

toward digital. You’ve got to pick up all of the detail of these toys, so I

want a medium that will give me absolute razor-sharp clarity.

I want to show Mouse Heaven at film festivals, and I’ve noticed that festivals

usually have a hard time with 16mm.When I had a show in Argentina

at the Mar del Plata Film Festival last year, they seemed to have only one

old classroom 16mm Bell & Howell projector—in all of Argentina! I said,

“Is this all you’ve got?!” And they only had a five-hundred-watt bulb. I told

them, “It should be twice as bright.” But I just had to put up with it; they

still seemed to like my films, even dimly projected.

It’s too bad about 16mm, but most amateurs who used to have 16mm

projectors and cameras to film the baby and so forth have moved on to video.

They don’t realize that twenty years from now, when they want to look at

what they’ve shot, all they’ll have is snow. The magnetic image is fugitive,

and it will disappear more quickly than film.

MacDonald: Why Mickey Mouse?

Anger:Well, I’m very fond of Mickey Mouse. He meant a lot to me as a

child. I had a Mickey Mouse stuªed doll, and wind-up toys, and got my

parents to take me to the movies whenever a Disney Silly Symphony came

out. I think Mickey Mouse is one of the most important icons of American

pop culture, though the real Mickey has been lost. He was sentimentalized

from Fantasia [1940] on. The early Mickey Mouse had pie eyes; and

they changed the eyes. Basically the Disney people have lost him as a character.

He’s become the chairman of the board.

MacDonald: He was pretty outrageous at the beginning.

Anger: He was a mischievous little demon—that’s why I liked him.

I’ve talked to a lawyer, and since I’m filming a collection of antique toys,

I can call it Mouse Heaven and have the real Mickey Mouse as my star and

main character without a problem. The collection includes everything from

six-inch bisque figures to wind-up toys made of tin, made in the thirties in

Germany, before Hitler banned Mickey Mouse as a decadent rat. From 1928

to 1933, the Germans were making wonderful tin toys that you could wind

up: Mickey plays drums or he marches around. Mel Birnkrant has these toys,

and they still work. Of course, he doesn’t let anybody touch them, because

they’re very fragile. He’ll wind them up, and I’ll film them. I have some tin

toys in Scorpio Rising, if you remember; this has been an ongoing interest.

MacDonald: The video of The Mighty Civic [1992], Peter Wells and Stewart

Main’s documentary about the Civic Theater in Aukland, New Zealand,

has a “Kenneth Anger Presents”on it.What’s your connection to that project.

It’s a very sweet film.

Anger: Isn’t it?

I met Peter and Stewart when I was invited to a film festival in Sidney;

they showed me the film, and I liked it and asked if I could buy the video

rights for America. They agreed, and I paid them a thousand dollars. It’s

the only time I’ve ever done that.

MacDonald: The style of their film is reminiscent of your work.

Anger: I felt an a‹nity for it, and they had apparently seen something

of mine—I don’t know what. They’ve since made a feature, a costume drama

[Desperate Remedies, 1993].

I still have a few copies of The Mighty Civic, and I’m willing to sell those

that I have left, but I don’t really want to pursue it further. [Canyon Cinema—

see filmography—distributes The Mighty Civic in VHS.] I sold copies of the

film to members of the Theater Historical Society, an American organization

interested in preserving old theaters. Old theaters are one of my hobbies.

I’m a member of the Theater Historical Society.We go on what we call

“a conclave” each summer in some region and look at surviving old theaters

and, when we can, try to figure out ways to save them.

It’s hard to believe that at one point in the seventies there was actually

a plan afoot to close Radio City Music Hall and convert it into o‹ces. And

we had a petition-signing campaign to save it. In LA some of those grand

movie palaces are left, like the Pantages, which was the first art deco theater

in LA; it opened in 1930. The Million Dollar is still there on Broadway,

and the Los Angeles can be rented to filmmakers; it’s been used in

quite a few films. And the United Artists has been turned into an Evangelical

church, but they didn’t paint out the murals, so on one side, instead

of the Virgin Mary, they have Mary Pickford. It’s nice that they kept the

original decor.

At one time I contemplated doing a poetic documentary about old theaters;

I had my title: “Temples of Babylon.” And I found some great ones.

It still could be done, but it’s exceedingly di‹cult to light and photograph

those huge spaces. Of course, now with the much faster emulsions and with

video and digital you can practically film in the dark.

MacDonald: I might be the last generation to have that big-theater experience,

with the organ and sometimes an orchestra, and thousands of people

in the theater with you.

Wind-up toy motorcyclists in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963).

Courtesy David. E. James.

Anger: I loved it. I had some great big-theater experiences when I was a

kid and appreciated them for what they were. It was like going to a cathedral.

MacDonald: How much experimental film do you see these days?

Anger: Not very much. I don’t have much access to it. I do like the fact

that living in LA oªers the happy option of going to revivals; they’ve just

done a series at the Egyptian on all of the Orson Welles material, including

his own unfinished projects and an early film that was incorporated into a

stage production. Those retrospectives are valuable, and there are very few

places in America where you can see them.

MacDonald: Did you know Brakhage?

Anger: Yes. Stan was quite a good friend of mine. And I admired him

for what he accomplished. We knew each other over a twenty-five-year

period. He had a collection of prints of my films, including some earlier

versions of things, and after he died, his wife wondered what to do with them,

and I said, “I’ll take them back if you don’t know what to do with them.”

So she sent me a package of prints. I miss Stan.

MacDonald: Every once in a while I hear a rumor that volume 3 of Hollywood

Babylon is under way . . .

Anger: It’s been roughed in, but the recent crop of Hollywood people are

kind of a blank to me. I mean I have to like the people I write about, even

though I can also hate them; I have to be emotionally involved at least on

some level. The current “stars” just draw a blank, and frankly a lot of them

are a blank. Anyway, I don’t know whether I’ll do another book or not.

MacDonald: Have those books been a substantial source of income for

you?

Anger: For quite a while. They’ve been translated into Japanese, German,

Italian, and French, and so I still get royalties from those translations. I did

the books so I would have an income, and they turned out to provide more

of an income than my films ever have. Even though my films are rented quite

consistently, I still don’t get enough money from them to live on or to make

new films.

I’ve been lucky to have had a sponsor in my life,my friend Sir Paul Getty,

who is recently deceased. I was going to do a film on his private cricket

ground. The film was to be called Arrangement in White on Green, a title

taken from Whistler. Sir Paul had approved the project. His cricket ground

is the most beautiful in England; it’s on the estate of his country house near

Oxford. The film would have been forty-five minutes long, and the music

was to be Symphony no. 3 by Sir Edward Elgar. I had the great good fortune

of having Jack Cardiª agree to be my cameraman (he was the cameraman

for Michael Powell’s masterpieces, The Red Shoes [1948] and Black

Narcissis [1947], and a director in his own right). Jack is in his late eighties,

but still very spry and perfectly lucid, and he agreed to work with me. The

whole project was planned very carefully, but Sir Paul died, and since I was

doing it for him—he was a great cricket fan and had introduced the game

to me. I’ve put the project on hold.

I’m fascinated with cricket because of its Celtic roots and the little mysterious

things in the game that go back to pagan rituals. The “white” in the

title is the white uniforms, and the green is the grass. Sir Paul had his own

cricket team, “Getty’s XI,” and I recently got an invitation for this season.

I have to go to London in September for a show of frame enlargements from

Invocation of My Demon Brother—at the Modern Art Gallery in London—

and I may talk to Sir Paul’s widow, Victoria Getty, and see what she feels

about my filming some of the matches. Channel 4 has also expressed some

interest in the project.

Arrangement in White on Green will probably become another addition

to what I call my “graveyard” of films I wish I could have made. I’m not a

good hustler; I’m not talented at rounding up financing. If I had more of

the ruthless fighter in my nature, I suppose I would have gone after these

things a little harder—but that’s not my character. As I’ve said, I’m not obsessed

with these unrealized projects; if I were, I’d be adding my name to

David Frazier’s suicide book! Some things work out; some don’t. On several

occasions I had hopes of making a feature-length film, but I don’t have

a name that is “bankable”: I’m known as an avant-garde artist, which is

something quite diªerent—something I’m content to be.

By; Scott MacDonald

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Cinema-Interviews-Independent-Filmmakers/dp/0520245946

Quality Erosion In The Short Film Making

2009-03-30T16:31:00.003+03:00

Introduction

When we look at the long history of the short film, we see hat it dates back to the technical invention of the cinema because the cinema started with the short film. Appearing as a type of movie as a result of short news and document films' being shown before the film on the performance in 1940s, started to change and became more mature in 1960s. All over the world, particularly in European continent, cinema affected by the impacts of free thinking and societal changes which had a great impact in the era, started to be reshaped as a means of expressing ideas, resistance and controversial opinions. A new cinema generation who were opposing, anarchist and radical and attempting to express what they could not write, draw and say through the outstanding power of the cinema emerged. Experimental cinema, underground cinema were come into being in this era as a type of cinema.

What made the people who were involved in cinema business look for this new understanding of cinema was big changes seen in political and cultural fields and restrictions imposed on the production of the movie makers by the technical restrictions of the era. 16 mm 8mm formats emerged as alternative to 35 mm format causing big costs during the production and after the production of the film alleviated demanding technical conditions and decreased the high costs. Nevertheless, these formats required a particular pre-budget for the purchase of the raw film. Moreover, It imposed restrictions on the short film maker with regards to the time of the project, repetition of the plan, and the number of the places to be used. This brought about the care and attention together with the demanding technical conditions. The short film maker had to pay special attention to details such as a conducting a serious project, work planning, and pre-search.

Short film genre developed under these conditions generated several very important creative director in 1980s. In addition, directors such as pioneer of the pop-art, experimental film maker Andy Warhol, German short film maker Werner Nekes, who never give up making short films have sustained their existence.

In the not very bright past of the Turkish short film making, there were very few short film makers who did great jobs and caused lasting impact, and very few short-film related activities. The short film-related activities that can be remembered from the past include Hisar short film competition held by Boğaziçi University in 60s, short film category involvrd in Antalya cinema festival until 1983, İfsak short film activities, Adana Altın Koza, Arıburun awards and competitions organized in Ankara film festival in 80s. Ali Özgentürk, Yavuz Özkan, Muammer Özer, Ersin Pertan, who started to make long films later, started their careers with short films.

Everybody is making short films..

Having been existent until 90s, 16mm and 8 mm formats were replaced by magnetic band and completely became obsolete for the short film maker. A new era began first with betamax and Hi8 and its derivatives and more recently with DV and its derivatives. Being cheap, easily available and not needing developing, DV format has become an indispensable part of this era. Making a short film is not expensive any more. The prices of film cameras are easily affordable. If it is not possible to buy them, they can be rented or borrowed. Another advantage of DV format is its rendering fast and easy assembly and editing possible. A computer with required software and hardware, and an interface to catch the view will make assembly and editing quite easy. Assembly and editing in a computer can be done through Apple Mac and PC based applications. Assembly and editing software programs such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Edius result in time saved and quality in assembling and editing process with their rich transitions, Real Time, correction features and visual effects. All the expenses needed for all these things are not something which can not be borne by a cinema student having cinema education and expected to produce project films or by a short film maker. When the tradition of working in cooperation in short film sector is combined with these technical opportunities ....

Although DV format is considerably new, its superior version, High Definition, is a new candidate for the leading position in showing images. HD and its derivatives are about the give the sense of realness which was converged in standart films. Distribution, being on performance in cinemas, finding saloons, taxing, and legal procedures are concepts outside the universe of the short film maker. The main target is to participate in festivals, mass display, competitions and make their voices heard.

WHAT ABOUT CREATIVITY

This is the real problem... how is the state of expression, creativity and having lasting effect in an environment where a lot of short films are made, the number of festivals and competitions has increased ? In 60s, while the short film makers (including ours) grounded their films on a perspective of cinema, today, short films seem to be made with concerning haste and carelessness. A few examples should be given about this boom of short film production:

When we review the sources and past films produced since 1981, the production by year is as follows: in 1981, only one film was made. From 1981 to 1990 112 short films were recorded. Most of them are 16 mm and 8 mm standart film format. From 1991 0n, the dominance of video format was felt. Most of the short films produced since 1991 are videos. And most of the 187 short films made between 1991 and 1993 are videos. The general increase in the number of the short films and their having video format can easily be recognised between 1994-2004. When we add those which are not registered in these lists, we get a huge sum of short films.

There are quality films among these produced with haste and carelessness. However, when compared to the total, the number of these quality products is very small. Those who are trying hard to make short films are usually young students who have cinema education and planning to have a place in the sector. The starting point of these students in their endeavour to make a short film is its being a reference in the future rather than their preferring short film as a type of cinema. The main target and desire here is to be transferred into long film or advertisement sectors.

Other short film makers also share the same perspective as students. their main purpose is somehow to be a professional and make a cinema film. For them short film is also a springboard a preparation period. Some well-known examples can be given here. Mustafa Altıoklar, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, , whose name we heard of by means of short film festivals in 90s, series director Taner Akvardar, Serdar Akar, Kudret Sabancı, who finished their cinema education in 90s are first to remember.

Most of the short films made are devoid of the basic technical rules, aesthetic, expression opportunities of the cinema, they are produced without much creativity and care. The shortcomings in thematic plot, story, depicting, characterisation, directing actors or actresses, and putting on performance are clearly seen. The short film maker attempts to express something with a short film, but he finds himself in the trap of not telling anything. The real purpose of the film, taking part in a festival or organisation and having one more reference for future career, can clearly be seen in the short film.

All these judgements can be seen a bit merciless and tough. Of course there are quality films in the sector. But they are not enough. However, praising every short film can make the short film makers very proud of themselves, and this may pose a threat to the development of short films. The opinion like the more short films are made, the better it will be for the short film sector may undermine the short film.

RESULT

In the light of all these, we can say that the short film is viewed as an area of freedom for some and stepping stone for others. In any case it is an important cinema attempt. There are differences between its mission and state thirty years ago and now. The most important determinant of this differentiation is outstanding improvements in the image technology. There is a quantity boom in the short films. However, the quality of content and aesthetic has not increased parallel to the number. Now, the organisers of festival, competition and similar organisations encouraging short film production has important role. They should have certain requirements considering depiction, aesthetic, and cinemagrofic values so hat quality products are encouraged. Over time, elimination system treating each product equally, organisations with high budgets, encouraging prizes, and serious organisations will improve the total quality.

As long as the gap between quantitative boom and qualitative deterioration does not close, the future seems to be not bright for the short film. Technology used carelessly, as in every field, will continue to improve by harming the field of art

Dr.Serdar Karakaya-Mugla University / TURKEY

www.kisafilm.org

http://film.ilef.net

http://www.kameraarkasi.org

François Richet and Vincent Cassel

2009-03-28T13:43:00.002+02:00

Let’s face it – no one does Real McCoy, well-’ard gangster flicks like we Europeans. Of course, Stateside, you can cite Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) or Casino (1995) and, at a pinch, Coppolla’s The Godfather (1972) but sorry, when it comes to what violence, fear of violence and callous characterizations are really all about, we have (among many others) Get Carter (1971). We’ve got The Long Good Friday (1980).

Frankly, you’ve never really had a glass smashed into your face unless you’ve had it this side of the Atlantic, and there is a gritty, seamy, downright dirty side to the 70s gangster look and feel that only European pubs, bars, clubs and strip-joints can effectively convey.

And that’s why we should all be on our knees, to give thanks for Mesrine: L’instinct de mort and the follow-up Mesrine: L’ennemi public n° 1 (released across Europe on 19 November) – both have this dirt in spades. Order has been restored.

Jean-François Richet, whose previous film was the somewhat uninspiring remake Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), from John Carpenter’s 1976 original, has simply outdone himself with this balanced, and, in spite of the grim violence at its core, non-hysterical account of what drives a man to devote his entire existence to the crooked path, and the price that must be paid for taking on the system single-handed.

Although Cassel’s previous form might indicate he could play a hot-blooded, moody but intelligently motivate gangster in his sleep, his turn as Mesrine offers a whole lot more than murder and mayhem by the numbers. Helped enormously by the ensemble cast (Gérard Depardieu makes a welcome return to the classic brutish role that first made him famous, Olivier Gourmet is simply wonderful as Commissaire Broussard, Mesrine’s reluctant nemesis on the ‘right’ side of the law), plus a splendidly tight, acerbic screenplay from Abdel Raouf Dafri, which was in turn adapted from Mesrine’s own ‘novel’, written while in jail, Cassel simply IS Mesrine.

A peerless master of disguise, Mesrine, whose sworn enemies were the banks, became France’s public enemy numero un during the 1970s, but his road into crime began shortly after his return from France’s war against Algeria in 1959 – aged 23, our man comes back with a clean service record, but quickly finds, despite the best efforts of his loving mother and father (Myriam Boyer and Michel Duchaussoy) the straight and narrow of civvy street too restrictive. Gifted with a quick mind and first-class improvisational skills, Mesrine is also a man of his word, no matter what the cost to himself, as he proves when, upon breaking out of the inhumane Saint-Vincent-de-Paul penitentiary (to which he had been sentenced to 15 years) in 1972, he returns two weeks later to break his jail mates free.

The story of the two films charts his nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats (including multiple bank robberies and numerous, increasingly spectacular, prison breaks), finishing on 2 November, 1979, when his story ends, as outlaws’ stories usually do, at the point of a gun. Several guns, in fact…

There are those who may say that the story is romanticized, as much in love with the man at its centre as Mesrine so clearly was with himself. Pooh-pooh to them – what Richet and Cassel achieve is a near-peerless account of a man who became a myth in his won lifetime, let alone nearly 30 years after his death. Make no mistake – in this film, people die and people bleed. In some ways, none more so than Mesrine himself, who was tortured by his notions of neither being a good son, husband, or father. Put it this way – I know who you will be rooting for from start to finish, and it isn’t any of the representatives of the system that the ‘gangster’s gangster’ swore to bring down.

And, to boot, the films are truly thrilling, with Richet proving he is just as adept at the big action scenes as he is with the expository dialogue. Vive Mesrine!

http://efareviews.cineuropa.org

Alejandro Jodorowsky: King Shot

2009-03-28T03:08:00.002+02:00

I was fairly convinced that King Shot was going to wind up another one of Jodorowski’s pie-in-the-sky ideas that never come to fruition, like his Dune adaptation, but this film actually seems to be rolling along. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a single frame of film shot yet but the wheels are actually in motion, it would seem. I’ve been hungry for more Jodorowsky for years so I have my fingers crossed. If anyone needs to jump back into the circuit, it’s that guy.

Ain’t It Cool News posted a video interview with Jodorowsky sourced from some Youtube channel. In it, he rambles on about his usual skewed point of view about filmmaking, which is awesome, all the while you get a look at storyboards, which show off some very elaborate sets. If this movie goes according to Jodorowsky’s vision, it’s going to be his most visually appealing movie ever.

On a final note, Harry Knowles needs to stop peppering his articles with sex references. If there’s one person on earth I would die before envisioning “post-coital”, it’s that guy. Here’s the video, yo.

The Hollywood Reporter website has reported David Lynch's company, Absurda, will be producing Jodorowsky's movie King Shot, which Marilyn Manson is set to appear in.

quote:In a separate development, Lynch's Absurda production company hasattached Asia Argento and Udo Kier to star with Nick Nolte inAlejandro Jodorowsky's metaphysical gangster movie 'King Shot.'

Marilyn Manson is touted to appear as a prophet in the 'SinCity'-style film, which producer Eric Bassett said has enough sexand violence to guarantee an NC-17 rating.

Lynch is executive producing both projects, and Absurda is reppingtheir sales rights in the Cannes market

- The Holywood Reporter

Below is more Information on King Shot and Marilyn Manson from Cinemafrenzy.com

Buried in an article on The Hollywood Reporter about Herzog and Lynch teaming up for My Son, My Son, which is huge news in itself (Lynch makes feature length films less and less often these days and Herzog was exceptionally brilliant in his heyday), they failed to point out the importance of Lynch’s company, Absurda, producing Alejandro Joworowsky’s metaphysical gangster movie, King Shot.

It’s been almost 20 years since his last film, The Rainbow Thief, but finally, Jodorowsky is returning to the director’s chair. As of now, Nick Nolte has the lead in the film, with Asia Argento, Udo Kier and Marilyn Manson also cast. Manson will play a prophet, in what is being touted as a “Sin City” styled film, destined for a NC-17 rating, based on the copious amount of sex and violence.

Manson’s involvement doesn’t come as much of a surprise, since he’s been a very outspoken fan of Jodorowsky for years. Neither does Argento and Kier’s involvement with the project, since they seem to be in every other genre project lately. Nick Nolte is the real curiosity here, since he hasn’t done anything of real merit in quite a while.

According to Anarchy and Alchemy by Ben Cobb, the film centers around “a casino in the middle of the desert, where gangsters play in a contest with fake shots [blanks]. There comes one other, who is not honest. That is one part of the story. Not all. There also comes a young gangster who is on the run [having] stolen diamonds. Back in the desert, scientists have found an enormous [prehistoric] bone. Then they discover bones everywhere in the desert. A big enormous hand. It is like King Kong. Then they close the desert because they know what it is. And the young person in the casino will dominate all the others and torture them. Everything is a story told by a beetle. There is a prophet, he came from [below the Earth] and eat the beetle.”

Apparently, Marilyn Manson’s role as the prophet will also set him as “a beautiful woman.” According to the book, King Shot is also suppose to be Jodorowsky’s last film.

Once again big thanks are due to cult legend Alejandro Jodorowsky for sharing more story boards from his upcoming "metaphysical spaghetti gangster film" King Shot, which will hopefully be moving into production soon with Nick Nolte and Marilyn Manson slated to star. Once again all of these storyboards are by conceptual artist Sylvain Despretz, whose resume includes work on Jeunet et Caro's City of Lost Children, Aronofsky's The Fountain, and a host of others.

While much of the financing for the three million dollar picture is in place - Nolte and Manson reportedly both believe so strongly in the film that they're putting up some of their own coin - they're still looking for the last few pieces to fall in place before shooting in Mexico. Potential investors or distribution partners - and investors only, he will check - can contact David Daniloff for a look at the script.

Anyway ... art. If you missed the first four storyboards you can find those here. The new images are linked below.

A while back word began to circulate that cult legend Alejandro Jodorowsky - he of El Topo fame - was moving ahead on his long rumored "metaphysical spaghetti gangster film", King Shot. Very happy to say that this is correct ...

Thanks to my Toronto After Dark compatriot David Daniloff - who brought Jodorowsky to Toronto for an event a few years back and maintains contact with him - we have confirmed that the script is 100 % complete, Marilyn Manson and Nick Nolte will star with both apparently chipping in some of their own funds, and they're looking to shoot the film on a budget of three million dollars in Mexico.

But it gets better. Jodorowsky himself has shared with us a trio of storyboards by artist Sylvain Despretz - his previous credits include The Fountain and The City of Lost Children - for the film to share with you and these look fantastic. And really, if you expected them to look anything other than fantastic you need to slap yourself hard right now. The man is a living legend for very good reason.

Provided that all goes smoothly with King Shot 2007 could prove to be a very exciting one for Jodorowsky fans, what with ABKCO Films recently announcing that newly remastered versions of Jodorowsky's El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando & Lis will finally be making their appearance on DVD. New Jodorowsky plus the old classics finally getting a high quality release? It's better than a kick in the teeth, that's for damn sure.

King Shot Storyboard One
King Shot Storyboard Two
King Shot Storyboard Three

http://www.cinemafrenzy.com/

http://www.cinema-suicide.com/

http://twitchfilm.net/

Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll

2009-03-28T03:04:00.003+02:00

From Twitch Film (via Film Rot) comes news that the first images have appeared online for Marilyn Manson’s upcoming film Phantasmagoria: The Visions Of Lewis Carroll. Wait a minute — hold the phone. Marilyn Manson is directing a movie? I vaguely recall hearing something about this, but I guess I missed the official announcement a couple months ago. Isn’t it bad enough that we already have Rob Zombie unleashing his “uncompromising artistic vision” on the film world? Okay I know some people actually like Zombie’s films, and to be honest, I do think Marilyn Manson is a talented and interesting guy beneath all that make-up. Plus this movie sounds like a perfect fit. Phantasmagoria is not based on the 1995 Roberta Williams video game, but rather it is a biopic of sorts about Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where his disturbing and strange imagination overlaps with his real life. I guess it’s kind of like a twisted version of Finding Neverland. Manson had said before that he would do a series of short films to be released on his website, followed by the feature film, although it is unclear whether or not the short films are still happening. RooTV has a video of a press conference from the Berlin Film Festival where Manson discusses his motives for making the movie. Check out images from the movie at the link below.

Manson's pet project Phantasmagoria, which is based on Lewis Carroll living by himself in a castle terrified of each night and his visions of Alice, is budgeted at $4.2M and backed by none other then Wild Bunch. Shooting was reportedly supposed to start recently after a tour to promote his 7th album. This will be Manson's directorial debut with him also starring as Lewis Carroll, and reportedly he's using a "new camera" he's very excited about and the film won't contain any cgi, instead relying on a "magician" he hired to create special effects. To boot, he's going back to do the days of Roman Polanski and Hitchock horror where the desire is to allow the viewer to "do their own damage". Damn, it sounds good already and knowing Manson it'll be really twisted. Unfortunately there's not much more right now, but you can check out three promo stills after the break.

http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2008/07/11/Marilyn-Mansons-Phantasmagoria-The-Visions-of-Lewis-Carroll

http://www.filmjunk.com/2006/03/29/marilyn-manson-directing-phantasmagoria-the-visions-of-lewis-carroll/

Film, Censorship and Historic Research

2009-03-28T02:54:00.001+02:00

The relations between film and culture, or film and ideology, have been found in various ways. One of these is to view film as mirrors of the dominant culture in which they are made. In this aspect movies are attributed documentary qualities, and a reflectionary relationship is created between movies and society. Applying this theory a problem occurs; i.e. both optimistic musicals and film noirs were made in America in the forties. Which of these are the accurate reflection of American society? The conclusion must be that the use of this mirror term or reflection metaphor is just not good enough. It is unsatisfactory because it overlooks the many variables that movie making consists of. To make a movie one has to deal with a system of selection and combination, both different and competing cultural aspects, and industrial and institutional factors have influence on a movie production. A feature film does not reflect the truth; it shows a constructed and narrated world. In order to create this world, it has to regard the conventions, rules, myths and ideologies of the society from which it was born. In addition the medium itself has restrictions.

There are more satisfactory methods to use in the analysis of film and culture. The use of methods from other fields of research have added valuable tools to the field of film research. In general there are two ways of approaching the relation between film and culture; textual and contextual. The textual approach to the film medium concentrates on the film text to read the cultural function of film. This method tends to focus on similarities and typical texts rather then the opposite, and this gives the method structuralist tendencies. It also tends to work by tracing the mythologies and ideologies in the film back to sources within the culture; it is based on the assumption that the film text consists of certain determined rules, and that the culture author this text. An example of this approach is the work of Paul Schrader on film noir, and the way the subject of women in noir has been treated. A contextual approach on the other hand is more interested in the analysis of outside determinants in the film industry, such as cultural, political, institutional and industrial factors. All of these factors are elements that have influence on the production of a movie, and a movie text. In the study of film and culture the best result would perhaps come from combining these two techniques since both deal with themes relevant to these studies.

Film institutions have political interests that determine which films are made, and which films are seen by an audience. One of the reasons for this is found in peoples identification with the nation. Nationalism functions as a tool to value the nation over the individual, so that if one accepts this nationalism one subordinates oneself to the nation. The idea of the nation sets a set of rules of ethics and moral, and thus defines what is American (in this case). If one possesses this identification one can gain political power. In this aspect it becomes important to control the arts, (because art are representations of the nation), so that it have coherence with this idea. Art--in this case movies--can represent different viewpoints on the desirable homogeneous image of the nation state. This multiplicity is of course not wanted, and thus there are tried methods of controlling this.

In America in the forties and fifties, measures taken to prevent un-national activities. Within movie production there was the Production Code and a bit later, HUAC. The Production Code was a set of censorship regulations governing the Hollywood productions. It laid down rules for what the movies were permitted to show. It labeled issues like nudity, the use of drugs, homo sexuality and so on taboo. Still film noir deals with several of these subjects, its messages are hidden within the movies. Sometimes this prohibited material is showed off screen, cast in another form with the message barely concealed, or in other ways disguised. In this manner there existed a Hollywood self censorship. In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee started their investigation of the film industry. This committee won political influence, and the questioning of the status quo was labeled un-American. This was a subject dealt with by the film noirs.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir09.htm

Film noir and contemporary America

2009-03-28T02:53:00.000+02:00

The national identity of a country is based on different myths and ideologies. In the nineteenth century pre-industrialized America, democratic equality was based on the universal ownership of property. At this time America was an agrarian society, and this ideology led-- among other things--to the westward expansion. During the early twentieth century America changed from an agrarian to an industrialized society. In the 1920s, for the first time, more people lived in cities than in the country. Even if the way of living changed and people formerly owned property now received pay-checks, the myths stayed the same. It was only after the Depression that these myths disappeared. Film noir shows a transitional stage in American ideology, when the American identity changes from being pre-industrial to a mass consumer society with an industrialized corporate state. At this point in American history there were no new myths available, and the national identity was in crises. During the war America saw a massive mobilization, and one of the driving powers behind this was the common goal of the nation. The national unity was one of the powers behind this mobilization, the country work as a group instead of as individuals. This prospect of unity disappeared in peacetime, and led to disillusionment in postwar America.

Film noir can be seen as both a screen style, and a perspective on human existence and society. Its narrative structures incorporate a dark world view that is the result of a confrontation with nihilism. The cause of nihilism, in short, appears when peoples ideals are shattered. In the twentieth century tradition could not cope with the social development, and this causes a moral problem (which is easy spotted in film noir).
This is what happened to the American population in the 1940s. Earlier the Americans had been free individuals and masters of their own destiny, but in postwar America people became tied up by an economic and political system out of their control. Fortune seemed to control the field. Nietzsche said that, if a world view one has put down effort to preserve and that one has believed in, is falsified, it will give man the suspicion that all perceptions of the world are false. From this it is not short step to take in order to say that the basis of human existence is irrational and order is an illusion, a thought, or truth, most people are not strong enough to handle. A way to fight the anxiety these thoughts, or knowledge, create is to hide oneself in the quest for material wealth or power.
At this point my thoughts go to the affluent mass consuming society of the United States. Another thought is that maybe the country as a whole, not just its bourgeoisie, tried to fight nihilism with materialism, for the willingness to annihilate the world before giving up its political system must be called nihilism. I think it can be safe to say that film noir is an American attempt to engage this phenomenon.

The themes of film noir touch many aspects of life, but they all revolves around the destined being. The protagonists are hostages of fate and seem partly unfree and powerless. Fate runs the shop, and the heroes of film noir are willing to buy. They act as if they are masters of their own lives, but still let it show that they know they are not. The male hero is disillusioned and alienated from his surroundings.
I think that this is something the audience could relate to in the forties and fifties. The new society of gigantic cooperation's created a feeling of powerlessness among the workers. He who had been his own boss earlier in this own small scale business , now had become one of many pay-check collectors. This alienated mood in film noir can be seen as a reaction to the large, impersonal, dehumanizing cooperation's of the new consumer society. I view the hard-boiled heroes disillusionment as a reaction to contemporary Americas loss of old myths and identity.

The way women are presented in film noir I find rooted in the fact that in America during World War II women had won access to the economic sphere, which field had formerly been exclusively for men. This creates a problem, not only in the noir world, but also in the real one. The females patriotic duty in the work force, led to a redefinition of their place within culture. A consequence of this was a confusion in regard to the traditional conception of sexual roles and sexual identity, an identity that had been non-practicing during the war because of the separation of the sexes. The female entry to the male dominated world made the American male lose track of his position within a society he formerly controlled. The war dislocated men from their former sense of being the prime movers of culture.

The family, or absence of it, in film noir is valuated with negativity. It is possible to view the family as a metaphor for the larger society, and its negative value as social discontent. In film noirs the rebellion against a traditional valued institution like the family often ends with destruction.

Movements within the medium of film--like the German expressionism--occur as an answer to a national crises. If the noir phenomenon is seen as a movement--and it partly is--so did film noir. In postwar America there are threats like the Red scare, the resent emerged from global war, extended borders, widespread crime and violence, and the possibility of annihilation.
Personally, I would call this a crisis. Film noir tries to deal with this crisis in its own way. It shows the dark and desperate mood of this era, even though some people threw themselves into the materialistic race to forget.
I think the audience of the time were distressed watching noirs, because they could identify with these movies. Still, I do not think that the noirs are not so much rebelling against contemporary America, as trying to get it back together. I do not think that noirs offer alternatives, but that they show what happens if one defies the traditions (i.e. the view of women and family). America at the time was confused and film noirs were merely searching for answers.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir08.htm

The male protagonist

2009-03-28T02:52:00.001+02:00

In film noir the male protagonist is often a detective or an otherwise social alienated individual. Sometimes the male heroes are featured as amnesiacs, a situation that absolutely creates a feeling of social estrangement and disillusionment. These hard-boiled heroes are anti-social loners that are subject to existential angst. The environments they live and work in are dark and scary metropolises, often red-light districts, or otherwise dehumanizing environments, like large desolate office buildings. They are experiencing anonymity through their large scale surroundings. The tough guy is often marked by an excellent gift of verbal wit, even if they are not always given the strongest intellect; this is a heritage from the hard-boiled novels. Their worlds are dominated by crime, corruption and cruelty. The protagonist often gets tangled up in some of these activities himself, in addition to his interest in the erotic. Thus, he lives in a distorting world.

The men are, as well as the women, portrayed as stereotypes. As a result of this they are not allowed to live their lives in alternative ways anymore than women. The patriarchal order that is surrounding them, and that they in addition to women are trying to upheave, represents a certain set of rules they have to follow and live up to. As it seems, the patriarchy is asking for quite a bit. The struggle to keeping women in their place also keeps the men in their places. The men can not show much emotion in order to upheaval their masculinity, (to be emotional is regarded a female virtue), and they have to work alone and be successful in what they do (something Oedipal). They have to seek meaning in activity, not in contemplation which also is regarded a female virtue. Their position within the patriarchal system provides them with purpose in life; to work, provide, protect and serve and protect the patriarchy. The first three virtues must be seen in the context of the family and the masculine.

The existence led by men in film noir is one of toil and loneliness. The actual choices men have in life are either to become a family man, which is the accepted thing to do, or not. Because of the way women are defined in these films, life as a married man would doom him to a domestic life, with a dull domestic woman. There would never be excitement or individual thought. So, the male must do all the thinking, and becomes surrounded by a deading conformity. For the film noir men and women are all the same: they are nobody. This must produce a non-interesting heterosexual relationship. So the reason is clear why the male protagonists becomes obsessed and fascinated with the femme fatale. A life outside this patriarchal determined role is a life of destruction in a closed and claustrophobic world. He is victimized by society, and perhaps also by a woman, and expresses the awareness of the loss of the fixed ties that bind a man to a community. The similarities between different male protagonists in different films are underlined by the mere fact that most noir heroes/actors were cast against type.

The sexuality of the hard-boiled hero is a question often brought up in film noir research. A consequence of the noir females masculine characteristics is that feminine characteristics are attributed to the male. This is why the noir male is humiliated and reduced. Because of an underlying misogynous attitude, females are not suitable objects, except for the women that make the noir male dull, and who offers an existence without emotional and sexual commitment. At the same time as women do not represent a tempting alternative, patriarchy has made homo sexuality taboo. What remains for the male hero is male friendship. (In America male bonding intensified during the war). It's a tough world.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir07.htm

Women in film noir

2009-03-28T02:51:00.000+02:00

Generally in art there are two archetypal female characters; the whore and the Madonna. In film noir we are introduced to both of these women: the dark, sexual and active spider woman and the maternal virgin. To give a meaningful presentation of the women's role in film noir I will first give you a short reminder of how the traditional family was viewed, and which values it represented in the world of movies in the forties and fifties.

The institution of the family reveals significant social values and beliefs. It functions as an ideological cornerstone of our society with its embodiment of traditional values. It represents the framework for reproduction, because marriage is the only institution that legitimates reproduction. Marriage at the same time both legitimates and conceals sexuality. Married couples are the only ones that are allowed to enjoy the erotic, but they are rarely presented as sexual partners or in any other ways erotisized. With breeding follows the upbringing of children which responsibility traditionally is lain on women. From a feminist point of view these practices of oppressing women are seen to be legitimated by this representation of the family institution. This image of the family, where the man is the family's head and ruler, is also a legitimizing model of a hierarchical and authoritarian society. Here the family can be seen as a metaphor of society on a larger scale. Thus the representation of the family institution in movies contributes to legitimize different social values, among other things the value of the family institution as a social unit, the ruler role of the man, the domestic role of women, and the total dependence of children.

In film noir the family relations are not normal. In some ways the noirs are based on the absence of the family. If a family, or more likely family relations are represented they are often broken up, filled with mutual hatred or in other ways perverted. The movies often concern themselves with what the loss of these family values and satisfactions can lead to. Marriages in film noir are often described as boring and sterile or non sexual. Because of this twisted family life, both men and women seek satisfaction outside marriage in film noir. This satisfaction is not only sexual, but also an attempt to reassure and find themselves in this confused and threatening society, an escape from the frustrating routine in an alienated existence. The violation of the marriages and traditional family values often results in destruction for the violators. In this manner both pleasure and death await outside the family institution. The family represents an antithesis to the femme fatale. I think that instead of showing and offering women an alternative to the traditional family life, film noir shows what happens if one chooses to stand outside the traditional values of the patriarchal system.

The dark, strong femme fatale of noir is the main female character in these movies. These women are given not only sexual powers, but also ambitions. They are longing or looking for independence, often economic, and freedom, often from relationships with men. These women that are masters and possessors of their own sexuality represent a danger to the males. She is--because of her ambitions and independence--a threat to the patriarchal system. On account of this she gives the males a feeling of alienation from his environment, and she must be punished for this to restore the patriarchal balance. The femme fatale is promiscuous, exiting, intelligent and narcissist while her opposite is the boring, but stable wife and mother. The virgin is capable of total devotion to the male, something that the sexual woman is not. The former is thus described as the ideal role for women, and it fits in well with patriarchy.

The sexual women's power and strength are visually expressed in the films, both through the iconography of the image, and through the visual style. It is often the woman that dominates and controls the camera, both because of her own strength and because of the male heroes attraction to her. Thus other participants become static within the image. But in the end when she is destroyed, she also loses her physical motion in the picture.
The dress code is also applied as her appearance defines her moral transformation. In Mildred Pierce for instance, she is dressed up in more manly clothes during the film and her own development. These women also use for example cigarettes and guns for phallic symbols, something I view as an extension of their bid for masculine powers. Filmaticly, the woman that represents an alternative to the dark world of film noir is often placed outside this world.

The spider woman uses her sexual powers in the quest for reaching her own ambitions. The mere possession of such ambitions is unheard of for a woman, and represents a danger to the male. She is a dangerous woman and the males own sexuality along with the patriarchal system are threatened. The only way to control her is to destroy her, something that happens in most noirs. Even though she is destroyed, it is her vital, deadly strength we remember.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir06.htm

The Noir Aesthetics

2009-03-28T02:50:00.000+02:00

Even though the "noir style" did not represent something completely new within Hollywood film making I find it necessary to give an introduction to the noir aesthetics, because this is something that the noirs have in common. Even if the stylistics had been used in earlier movies, the combinations of these expressions and techniques was to some extent new in american movies and to the american audience.

One of the techniques used was the low-key lighting which causes the effect of obscuring the action, and deglamourizing the star so that the composition becomes more important than the actor. Earlier American movies had focused on the star. The use of night and shadows emphasizes the cold and the darkness in the noirs. The change of focus from the actors and movement in the image to the compository excitement underline a fatalistic and hopeless mood. This mood is also fortified through a complex narration, often disjuncted and fragmented. To do this flashbacks are often used, which emphasizes the feeling of lost time and despair. According to Paul Schrader time is manipulated because the form stands above the content. In the narration voice-over is also often used , and in connection we sometimes get to see the end of the film in its beginning. This is also an unconventional use of the time notion that call forth a feeling of predestination and irrevocable past.

The wide-angle cinematography participated in making the space distorted and the audience disoriented. In film noir we also find a repeated use of an image composition where the lines no longer are horizontal, but vertical and sloping. This gives an unsettling impression. In the noirs the world often seems like a prison, something that these images along with the use of image metaphors like sun blinds help to underline. We also find an extended use of extreme low and high-angle perspectives.

All of these stylistic elements served to disorient the spectators and create a mood of uneasiness, alienation and loneliness in the movies. Thus, the dark and uneasy visual expression of the film noirs emphasize the themes.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir05.htm

The origins of film noir

2009-03-28T02:49:00.001+02:00

The noir films occurred in America during the war, and continued to be made during the forties and fifties, but it did not come out of nothing. The noirs were inspired both by literature and previous film history along with the sociohistory of the period it grew out of. In America in the thirties there was a literary tradition called hard-boiled novels. These were crime novels and so called pulp fiction, and very popular. The American hard-boiled fictions represented a completely different world and a different kind of detective than those found in english and earlier detective stories; both content and style were differentiated. This kind of fiction added a new tradition of realism to the detective fiction. The hero was as much an anti-hero, the action was taken down on the streets, it was violent, and the language was cut short and it was often marked by verbal wit. Instead of upper-class "detectives", we are now introduced to the proletarian tough guy detective that are walking the mean streets, and often he finds himself on the edge of law and crime. Contemporary America is described as an urban and industrialized area where people are in the hands of naturalistic drives. Many of these works were adapted to the screen, such as the works of Hammet, Chandler, Cain and McCoy to mention some, and many of the authors were hired by Hollywood as screenwriters. Obviously this hard-boiled fiction had a considerable influence on the film noirs.

Another thing that influenced the noir was the film traditions of German expressionism of the twenties and French poetic realism of the thirties. The German expressionism was a expressionistic and conventionalized film style, where the aesthetics were marked by distortions and exaggerations. It had a world wide influence and the filmmakers of America sought to integrate this popular stylistic style in their own movies.
The French poetic realism was a film style where poetic conventionalization were combined with realistic topics and milieus. Also the american gangster movies were an inspiration for the film noir. All of these movie styles have in common the description of a dark and fatalistic image of the world. This is something we find in the film noir as well. From these movements the film noir could gather inspiration, and alongside this, Hollywood received quite a lot of �migr�s with roots in these movie milieus in Europe during the prewar years. The �migr�s took jobs in different parts of the american movie industry, both as technicians and as directors. Thus they also made a contribution to the society and heritage that film noir emerged from.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir04.htm

The problem of film noir

2009-03-28T02:45:00.001+02:00

"Film Noir" is a french label on an american film phenomenon. In postwar France they got the opportunity to watch a large amount of american movies made in the forties, at the same time, and thus it became easier for them to discover similarities among these pictures. The french noticed the divergence between this film load and prewar american movies and the connection between these films and the literature called roman noir. This was dark literature, and film noir means black film. The knowledge of this term did not get to be used in the production or among the contemporary american spectators, in fact only french critics used the term in their work until the era of noir was over. Film noir is now a more familiar term and its use is widespread, but still there are ongoing debates concerning its status. Both film critics and historians participate in the discussion on the definition of this film category, and I will give a presentation of various views on the subject.

There are some critics that view film noir as a genre; thus it will rely upon a system of well defined conventions and expectations like other genre defined movies; for instance the Western or the musical. If film noir is referred to as a genre, like Higham and Greeenberg and Paul Kerr do, there is a number of problems that arises. First, genres tend to cross periods instead of being bounded by them and the film noir is generally very closely connected with the 1940s Hollywood. This particular criticism of noir as a genre relies upon whether one regards the more recent films as a continuation of the noir tradition or not. Obviously I do not. Furthermore film noir tends to cross traditional genre boundaries; there are both noir westerns, gangster films and comedies to mention some. The fact that the term film noir was not familiar to the film industry and audience of the 40s and 50s does not necessarily work as an argument against the genre definition of noir, because it is possible to argue that the defining characters of the noir constituted a set of conventions and expectations. Still, apparently the makers of noir did not deliberately set out to actually make noirs. A critique against regarding film noir as a genre is that it will not include all the films that have been seen as noirs. But this may also be a reflection of problems within the methodology of film criticism.

Other critics, like Durgnat and Schrader, avoid these problems by viewing film noir not as a genre, but by emphasizing the stylistic elements. Here, tone and mood are given considerable weight. With this focus on visual style one also runs into problems. This `noir style� is actually not what it seems. Instead of being subversive of the traditional or classical norms of Hollywood style film making, as many critics values it to be, the noir style was a part of the systemization of Hollywood's narrational regulation during the 1940s.

Film noir has also been regarded as a series. In this case the noir is seen as a cycle, and viewed as an aesthetic movement. Here the cycle has been seen as lying within the boundaries of the crime film, but this creates a problem since these borders themselves are difficult to determine.

All of these different views on film noir try to define and capture the essence of noir, and still I find that none of these are sufficient. But at the same time every one of them touches something important or essential about this film term. Maybe it would be best to simply state that all of the above describe some aspects of what one can call the film noir phenomenon. A film phenomenon with both generic, stylistic and cyclic parts.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir03.htm

Historical main currents

2009-03-28T02:43:00.001+02:00

In the 30s America was struggling with Depression. This era of depression led to a widespread unemployment, and was in general a difficult time for the American people. Roosevelt had his New Deal, but the problems would not go away. Furthermore the country led an isolationist politic, had beliefs of lasting world peace and pledged neutrality. Thus they had among other things a very small standing army. Their entrance to the battlefields of World War 2 was about to change the United States forever.

The U.S.A emerged from the war as the one great victor. The war actions had left behind a devastated Europe and a shattered Asia which had led major economic an military losses. America on the other hand had not had warfare on its own territory, and during the war it had managed to leap out of the depression and reach almost full employment for its inhabitants. It was also in possession of the worlds largest military force and the worlds most threatening weapon. In addition the country now had interests and responsibilities all around the world, but especially in democratic Europe. Thus, as the americans emerged from war they were elated and proud, happy with their victory and proud of their military and industrial might. The postwar era presented an unprecedented prosperity to the american people, at a time where the last fifteen years had been filled with deprivation and sacrifice.

The 40s and 50s were an era of economic boom, mainly upheld by military demands during and after WW2, and partly by the American peoples new consumer demands. The earlier fifteen years of saving and sacrifice naturally gave way for increasing consumer demands when the population now lived in increasing prosperity. Most people now wanted new and better things, which they also could afford. The federal government participated in this development by sustaining the military demands to some level, and by the creation of the G.I.Bill of Rights. The government also had campaigns directed to increase and sustain the consume of the people. Among other things advertising was a phenomenon that came to show its full potential during the postwar years. The government was interested in making the public believe that the affluent times were there to stay, and all of the things earlier mentioned along with the successful remains of the New Deals social program helped supporting this belief.

The G.I.Bill was a veteran funding system that led to an increase in both college education and the founding of the suburban homes of the 50s. This was kind of a social revolution with consequences like democratization of the education system and the mere fact that more people got higher educated. The veterans also returned to create a baby boom. After the war there were a high increase in marriages and new house owners, and alongside this the new baby boom came. These new babies contributed to the expanding society and consumers culture with their massive demands for things such as diapers, baby food and schools.

Another new phenomenon in postwar America was the explosion of suburban communities. All in all there was a metropolitan increase and a population decrease in the agrarian areas. For one thing the new affluent populations cry for their own homes created a need for building new houses. The easy answer for the place to build and the way to do it was lying in the suburbs. Alongside this came a demand for cars and highways which went trough an increase. People had a number of reasons for wanting to live in suburbs. They were longing for more spacious homes, greater security, and better education for their children. Some also moved to suburbs because of racial issues. (The suburbs were mainly segregated) All of this could these minor societies provide. The suburban lives encouraged uniformity; all the surroundings were similar, there was a need of a sense of belonging. There were created a conforming culture where social life had a homogenized character. The conformity of suburban lives gave way to a drastic increase in memberships in social institutions, the religious participation was especially renewed. Religion was set in bloom partly because of the Cold War where Communists were seen as anti God. Hence became religion an expression for patriotism. This was underlined by president Eisenhower among others. The American people wished that their own comfortable way of life could be reassured through religion, and so came an upbeat and soothing religious tone to be for sale; the gospel.

In corporate life big business grew bigger, and this had an effect on the working man. He went from being a hard-working individual, advancing by means of his own creativity and ability, to becoming a person within a collective cooperation and achievement.These things had consequences at home. The women were led back to the roles they played before the war. Campaigns were led to lead the women back to the kitchen. They were considered obliged to leave their jobs in the workforce so that the veterans could get "their jobs" back. The most honorable thing women could do were considered to be fostering a family at home.

As shown there existed a conforming culture consisting of affluent, consuming and content american people. These people were satisfied with what the new America had to offer, and at ease with their lives such as they were.
But at the same time there were people questioning this contentment. These were americans that expressed a growing sense of unease. They felt that maybe the american society was becoming too conformist and too materialistic. The battle between idealism and materialism had begun.

The same events that had created the earlier mentioned cultural expression, had also created a reaction upon it self. The new situation in which America was placed did not always give people a feeling of ease. The fact that The States now had global influence and responsibilities was reason enough to give some of the american people a scare. Also in postwar America a paranoid feeling developed. As mentioned earlier, the americans view of communists was not very pleasant.Presumably they felt their new interests threatened and as a guardian of democracy there developed what Churchill called "the iron curtain" between east and west. I do not intend to discuss the outbreak of the Cold War, but merely point out that it existed. With McCarthy this Red Scare developed to a countrywide plague. This of course could as easily result in a feeling of suspicion and anxiety as in neglect (as in the cultural expression above). In addition the mere fact that much of the american might and welfare were build on military power contributed to an uneasy feeling amongst a people known to be isolationistic in a country which in prewar times did not go for a big military force, but for lasting peace. Only a short time after World War II America got involved in the Korean war. But the two biggest consequences of The War were that the american people were given insight in the cruel capabilities of humans (i.e. concentration camps) and were given the knowledge of the annihilation powers of their new weapon--the nuclear war heads--at the same time.
All of the above contributed to giving some of the americans a feeling of unease. This is mostly expressed in art works of the time, often as a feeling of alienation and disillusionment. A result of these feelings could easily end with nihilism.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir02.htm

NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN : THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR

2009-03-28T02:39:00.001+02:00

In a disturbing scene from Dark Passage (1947), a back alley plastic surgeon tells Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), "There's no such thing as courage. There's only fear, the fear of getting hurt and the fear of dying. That's why human beings live so long." He is looking straight at Parry and — through the use of the subjective camera — straight at the audience. His statement is especially striking because it dismisses courage as a myth soon after World War II, rejecting a basic cultural belief that all of America and all of Hollywood had just spent four years trying to build up. Such an attack on society's (and Hollywood's) most cherished values is characteristic of film noir, and perhaps its favorite target is the most fundamental value of all — the family.

A short description of film noir

In classical Hollywood cinema, as in American culture generally, the family and home life are celebrated as a safe haven from the world outside and a common aspiration of each generation. When we say that a film has a "happy ending," we often mean that the male hero and his female love interest are united in marriage — or seem to be headed in that direction — before the closing credits. Indeed, many of the most popular films of the 1930s and '40s depict the family almost as a cure-all that will save the hero from any trouble, if he or she can only learn to appreciate it. Thus, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939) runs away from home, but discovers in the end that "There's no place like home"; George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life (1946) nearly attempts suicide, only to find that friends and family make any crisis worth living through; and even Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) comes to value Tara, the family home, above all other things.

World War II only intensified American culture's endorsement of society's dominant ideology and the importance of shared values — values that may be said to begin with the "traditional" nuclear family. The urge to affirm marriage and the family, already a popular and therefore profitable formula for filmmakers before the War, became an absolute political and cultural imperative during the War years. As the War came to an end, however, films began to

Humphrey Bogart established the archetypal film noir detective-hero. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

experiment with alternative formulas and introduced a radically different visual and narrative style. This body of films, which is generally thought to begin with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and end with Touch of Evil (1958), became known as film noir for its dark, disturbing visual style and thematic content.

Of course, film noir confronts a range of status quo values and institutions and does not focus exclusively on the family. In many of these films, the criminal justice system is incompetent,1 the white-collar office is dull and dehumanizing,2 the police force is corrupt,3 and even the federal government is threatening and oppressive.4 Yet, like classical Hollywood cinema, film noir often expresses its view of American society through the image of the family generally and specifically woman's place in the family. Dana Polan suggests that in mainstream Hollywood films, "realizing one's place can only mean realizing one's place in the family. . . . Family and public ideology are indeed one."5 Sylvia Harvey elaborates on this viewpoint, tracing the complex connections between the depiction of women, family, and society in film:

All movies express social values, or the erosion of these values, through the ways in which they depict both institutions and relations between people. Certain institutions are more revealing of social values and beliefs than others, and the family is perhaps one of the most significant of these institutions. For it is through the particular representations of the family in various movies that we are able to study the process whereby existing social relations are rendered acceptable and valid.6

Harvey emphasizes the special function that women perform in communicating American culture's view of the family: "[T]he representation of women has always been linked to this value-generating nexus of the family. . . . Woman's place in the home determines her position in society, but also serves as a reflection of oppressive social relationships generally."7

In film noir, women serve to express these films' skepticism toward the family and the values that it supports. With few variations, noir films divide women into three categories: the femme fatale, an independent, ambitious woman who feels confined within a marriage or a close male-female relationship and attempts to break free, usually with violent results; the nurturing woman, who is often depicted as dull, featureless, and, in the end, unattainable — a chance at conventional marriage that is denied to the hero; and the "marrying type," a woman who threatens the hero by insisting that he marry her and accept his conventional role as husband and father. Each type of film noir woman functions in a way that undermines society's image of the traditional family.

Still, noir films usually stop short of rejecting the family altogether. While criticizing the family and marriage in a fairly overt way, film noir cannot resist the urge to restore or reinforce the family, even if it is only at the last minute. This restoration involves punishing or destroying women (and men) who transgress the boundaries of "normal" family relations or providing a tacked-on "happy ending" in which the hero marries the nurturing woman or even a converted femme fatale who has learned to accept her proper role. In either case, the ending contradicts the content and style of the film itself.

Thus, film noir inverts the classical Hollywood formula of wish fulfillment through the family and marriage — where marriage is the "happy ending" that resolves all conflicts — by denying such an ending or by providing a conventional happy ending that draws attention to itself as unrealistic or inappropriate in the context of a particular film. Indeed, either type of noir ending — the denial of marriage or the unrealistic happy ending — can be seen as a critique of classical Hollywood cinema and the traditional values that it reinforces.

http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/no_place.asp

"High Heels on Web Pavement: Film Noir"

2009-03-28T02:36:00.002+02:00

Femme fatale—is defined as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger or disaster”. To me the most engaging semblance of a “femme fatale” is the stunning image of Lana Turner, as the camera pans from her ankles upward in that breathtaking shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946.

Extremes

The most consistent aspect of film noir, apart from its visual style, is its protagonists. If a usable definition of the noir protagonist is to be formulated, it must encompass its most intrinsic character motif—alienation. The undercurrent that flows through most high noir films is the failure on the part of the male leads to recognize the dishonesty inherent in many of noir’s principal women. This tragic flaw destroys the central male characters in films as diverse as Scarlet Street 1945, The Locket 1947, and Angle Face 1953. It's embodied in the John Dall character in Gun Crazy 1949, whose youthful fascination with fire arms eventually leads him into a relationship with a woman who not only shares his gun craziness but who also introduces him to the parallel worlds of eroticism and violence. A more extreme example of this confusion is exemplified with Dana Andrews in Laura 1944, and Edward G. Robinson in Women in the Window 1944. Robinson and Andrews are fascinated initially not by the flesh and blood women, but merely by paintings—images of them.

The overtly Freudian aspects of such relationships function as a foundation on which to construct a sequence of narrative events that typify the noir vision. Many of these male “victims” are not trapped exclusively by sexual obsessions. Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 1944, initially considers whether he is capable of committing murder for a woman. Then he thinks about effecting the perfect crime (his entanglement with Phyllis’ phony insurance claim), “It’s beating the house”, he thinks “sort of like the croupier that bets on the turn of the roulette wheel, when he knows the numbers to play”.

Detour

Edgar Ulmer’s Poverty Row cult-classic, Detour, 1945, is fraught with outrageous coincidences that in most accounts would be far too absurd to confront, but in Ulmer’s skilled hands are accepted as legitimate premises. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a disgruntled piano player in a New York night club. When his fiancée walks out on him for stardom in Hollywood, he decides to fellow her, and sets out to hitch hike west to join her. He gets picked up by a oddball character played by Edmond MacDonald who is carrying a large sum of money and happens to be driving all the way to California. MacDonald relates a story to Robert’s about a female hitch hiker he picked up earlier. In a blundering attempt to ravish her, she viciously attacked him, her finger nail marks clearly discernible on his face. As Roberts takes a turn driving, the MacDonald character mysteriously dies. Roberts thinking that the police will not believe his innocence in MacDonald’s bizarre death, hides the body and drives on alone. The next day Roberts picks up Vera, played with absolute aplomb by the very underrated Ann Savage.

Ultimate Femme Fatale

Out of the Past, 1947, while not a perfect example of the best of the noir cycle, contains many of the elements of the genre. It is best remembered as the film that introduced the erotic and lethal Jane Greer. The beautiful dark-haired Bettejane Greer came to Hollywood in 1945, a B player, she appeared in such obscure notables as Dick Tracy 1945, and The Falcon’s Alibi 1946. Out of the Past was one of only three noir films in which she appeared, the others being, They Won’t Believe Me 1947, and again opposite Robert Mitchum in the Big Steal 1949. Greer appeared in nine additional films through 1957. She took a brief hiatus until the mid-1960s, and has appeared off and on since.

Jane Greer was the “real deal”, unlike many of the frivolous noir semi-goddesses (Lauren Becall, Martha Vickers, Jane Russell, or Laraine Day), her sexiness was derived from sheer cunning. She did not rely on the parodistic flirtations so common to the counterfeits of the genre—while entertaining actresses, they lacked the appeal and darkness of the authentic femme fatale. A fine actress, I’ve always wondered why Greer did not become an icon of the genre in the mold of Gloria Grahame or Lizabeth Scott. She possessed the perfect on-screen persona of a post-war desolation angle. When Robert Mitchum firsts encounters her in the Mexican café, in an early scene from Out of the Past, she describes the complete night spot where he might feel more at home, and as she turns to walk away she tells him, “I sometimes go there”. At that moment we sense the hero’s ultimate calamity. Later we witness her brutally kill two men, and as Mitchum watches in terror, we cannot be confident that in the end he will not wind with her, such is the power of her sexuality.

Later Femme Fatales

Robert Siodmak’s, The Killer’s 1946 and Criss Cross 1949 are fine examples of Universal’s contribution to the noir cycle. In both films it’s the deadly female who topples the hero. Another Siodmak offering is the much downplayed, The File on Thelma Jordon 1950. Barbara Stanwyck portrays a different type of femme fatale than her Phyllis Dietrichson character in Double Indemnity, whom Thelma resembles in method and motivation. This time she ensnares Wendell Cory, playing assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall. Marshall is much more innocent that Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, who admits trying to beat the house, well before he meets Phyllis. From the beginning Thelma loves her victim, whereas Phyllis was not smitten until the very end in Double Indemnity. Where Phyllis and Walter are chillingly logical in their scheme, Thelma and Cleve are guilt-ridden, and clumsily romantic. In the end Cleve is not completely ostracized, or dead as was his counterpart Walter Neff. He is however, scarred immeasurably—an emotional Sisyphus, he must now forever bear the weight of his misdeeds.

What Happened

The archetypal model of film noir had run its course by the mid-1950s. The requisite entry of that period, at least among most film critics of the day, was Robert Aldrich’s take on Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly 1955, by then though Spillane had moved from the hard boiled pulp hero of the post-war years to the new antagonists of cold-war America, the new great fear of the moment—the “Commies”. Kiss Me Deadly was a greater influence on the French “New Wave” movement, than a further definition of film noir.

By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, strong, tough, independent women were being replaced by coadjutors and consorts. “Leading Ladies” who, though portrayed as capable and self-reliant had, however, moved well into the background. A prime example is Doris Day in Pillow Talk 1959. And so to the male protagonists, who were now being portrayed as gallant Don Juan’s or attentive Casanova’s, a fashion that was to reach it zenith with the James Bond films.

To me, the “classic noir period”, spanned the interval just after World War II, until the early 1950s. The central figures portrayed in these films, were too often caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness. They were drowning outside of the social mainstream. They came to represent America’s stylized vision of itself, a cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition. And often these characters were women, the femme fatales of a film style distinctly original, and wholly American.

¹Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, “Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style”

http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/film_noir/index.html