Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

Our shop has a reputation for carrying a lot of the “classics” of cinema that no other video store in Bellingham dare to carry, but the task of figuring out which one to take home can be daunting. You often hear a movie is a classic, but sometimes just looking at the box just doesn’t do it for you.

I have two documentary recommendations that are, in their own ways, portable courses on film appreciation that will help get you acquainted with some of the films you know you should see.

The first of these is My Voyage to Italy, a documentary film directed and hosted by Martin Scorsese. In it, Scorsese talks about the films he saw on an Italian-language TV station broadcast in New York for the Italian-American community while he was growing up. While Scorsese acknowledges that American films contributed equally to his passion for film, he made My Voyage to Italy to share some of these many Italian films that go overlooked in America. At just over four hours, this documentary is a long one, but as there’s really no narrative to speak of it’s easy to take in smaller bits. Clips from the many films he talks about comprise a healthy portion of the film’s run time, which are indispensible in helping you decide which ones you may want to see in their entirety.

The second film is called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a documentary produced for cable about a cable channel. The film’s narrative documents the rise and fall of a pay cable channel run by hardcore cineastes that came about in the right place at the right time: Southern California, before the advent of home video. For the first time, cable subscribers could see movies they never had the opportunity to see theatrically, or versions of films that had never even screened in the United States before, like the extended versions of 1900 and Das Boot. Moreover, many of the subscribers were or would become highly influential figures in Hollywood, many of whom are interviewed in this film. They talk about the influence of the films they saw on Z Channel, and this documentary also provides clips from a good many of them.

I recommend watching both of these documentaries with a notepad and a pencil handy. One word of warning: many of the films referenced in these documentaries have never been released on DVD or even home video in the United States. However, in large part thanks to the Criterion Collection, a majority of them are available to you at Film Is Truth. I will humbly admit that even among these, I have not seen most of them. But I’m working on it.

Below are partial lists of some of the films highlighted by these documentaries that can be rented at Film Is Truth. These lists are by no means exhaustive.

From My Voyage to Italy:

• Ossessione — 1943, Luchino Visconti.
• Open City (Città aperta) — 1945, Roberto Rossellini.
• Shoeshine (Sciuscià) — 1946, Vittorio De Sica.
• La terra trema — 1948, Luchino Visconti.
• Bicycle Thieves (The Bicycle Thief; Ladri di biciclette) — 1948, Vittorio De Sica.
• Stromboli — 1950, Roberto Rossellini. VHS only.
• The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di Dio) — 1950, Roberto Rossellini.
• Umberto D. — 1952, Vittorio De Sica.
• I Vitelloni — 1953, Federico Fellini.
• Senso — 1954, Luchino Visconti. VHS only.
• La dolce vita — 1960, Federico Fellini.
• L’avventura — 19, Michelangelo Antonioni.
• La notte — 1961, Michelangelo Antonioni.
• Divorce, Italian Style (Divorzio all’italiana) — 1961, Pietro Germi.
• L’eclisse — 1962, Michelangelo Antonioni.

From Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession:

• College — 1927, James W. Horne & Buster Keaton.
• Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) — 1929, Georg Wilhelm Pabst.
• Maedchen in Uniform (Mädchen in Uniform) — 1931, Leontine Sagan. VHS only.
• Children of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis) — 1945, Marcel Carné.
• Les dames du bois de Boulogne — 1945, Robert Bresson.
• My Darling Clementine — 1946, John Ford.
• In a Lonely Place — 1950, Nicholas Ray.
• Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) — 1959, Marcel Camus.
• Ride the High Country — 1962, Sam Peckinpah.
• The Leopard (Il gattopardo) — 1963, Luchino Visconti.
• Andrei Rublev — 1969, Andrei Tarkovsky.
• Images — 1972, Robert Altman.
• Attila ‘74: The Rape of Cyprus — 1975, Mihalis Kakogiannis.
• Overlord — 1975, Stuart Cooper.
• Fingers — 1978, James Toback.
• Bad Timing — 1980, Nicholas Roeg.
• Berlin Alexanderplatz — 1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
• Heaven’s Gate — 1980, Michael Cimino.
• The Decline of Western Civilization — 1981, Penelope Spheeris. VHS only.
• Fitzcarraldo — 1982, Werner Herzog.

That’s right, Charlie Kaufman is actually directing his next screenplay for Synecdoche, New York. It seems like it should be typical Kaufman fair, but I was suddenly really interested in seeing what he will do as a director, having most of his scripts handled by everyone from Spike Jonze to George Clooney in the past.

I also wonder if his brother Donald will be involved, I really enjoy his work as well…

Look for it October 24th, assuming it plays anywhere in the continental U.S. Pickford, I sure hope you are reading…

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star in In Bruges, the feature film debut from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Academy Award in 2005 for his short film Six Shooter.
If you missed it’s run at The Pickford, this is your chance to check out one of the funniest and darkest buddy comedies to come along in recent memory.

Colin Farrell plays Ray, a rookie hitman whose botched first job finds he and his older, more experienced partner, Ken, (Brendan Gleeson) cooling their heels in Belgium’s most picturesque tourist destination, the city of Bruges. While Ken enjoys himself taking in the sights of the town and kicking back, Ray feels trapped by the city and is haunted by the mistake that got he and Ken sent into exile. But when it turns out the job might not be over after all, Ken and Ray end up having a much more exciting time in the laid back town than they expected to.

Though he comes from a stage directing background, McDonagh is a natural behind the camera, and his directorial sense translates beautifully to the more expansive, full city setting of the film. Through long panning shots and an obvious love of the city’s medieval architecture, McDonagh makes viewers feel like gawking tourists in a strange place. And as we watch another film being shot in the town’s ancient square as a plot piece, the sensation of being bystanders to this sordid, violent and immensely entertaining debacle is unmistakable. While his eye for direction has adapted to the fit the screen, McDonagh’s sharp screenwriting carries over directly from his award winning stage pieces such as The Pillowman, which played at Bellingham’s own Idiom Theater earlier this year.

Owing much to acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which also features a pair of hitmen bickering in exile following a job gone sour, In Bruges is replete with sudden violence, dark humor, deadly misunderstandings and slapstick comedy, along with a heaping helping of midget humor thrown in for good measure. By turns unflinchingly stark and comically surreal, it also features a phenomenal chase scene through the city’s canals, the most civil and considerate shootout ever put to film and a great third act performance by Ralph Fiennes as the two killers distinctly unhappy employer.

Click here to listen to an interview with McDonagh, and be sure to watch the official trailer here. Or just come on down this week and pick up a copy for yourself!

I spent a good chunk of my weekend watching commercials, and realizing that it is completely unfair to the rest of us just how much talent Errol Morris has. Seriously, the guy is ridiculous.

To make a painfully long story exceedingly short, after having a discussion with some co-workers on Friday about whether there was any shame in directing TV commercials, I sat down at a barbecue with some friends and rewatched a selection of Morris’ commercials for Miller High Life. My fellow football fans will remember these exceedingly strange little slices of commercialism, as they are some of the strangest ads ever to grace a Sunday afternoon television screen.

The poet Robert Creeley once described the work of his contemporary Richard Brautigan as “weirdly delicious bullets of ineffable wisdom.” It’s an odd description, but it fits these bizarre and charming TV spots. Each features very simple footage of doing “manly” things - fixing a refrigerator with duct tape, baiting a fish hook, making deer sausage, or deciding whether or not to eat the last devilled egg. The accompanying voice over extolls the virtues of living ‘The High Life’ as the High Life Logo fades in to dominate the screen. The spots range from hilarious to subversive to slightly offensive to downright bizarre, but remain consistently entertaining and slightly askew throughout. Their take on masculinity is just shy of satiric, and works wonderfully within the football fan beer commercial context.

To have the best time you’ll ever have being sold something, check out these and other ads for Hewlett Packard, Nike, Quaker Oats and other companies Morris has done work for at his website, here. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a taste of what’s in store, so submitted for your approval is the Franco-phobic gem that garnered Friday night’s unanimous ‘Best in Show’ from a group of guys who know a thing or two about beer commercials. Dear reader, I give you - Mayo.

Enjoy.

If you’re like me, and you enjoy animation for grown ups, you owe it to yourself to check out the breathtaking, surreal and groundbreaking work of Bay Area underground animation giant Larry Jordan, the greatest cartoonist you’ve probably never heard of.

I didn’t know a thing about Jordan’s work until seeing a smattering of reels a few years back, including Sophie’s Place, which you can check out a fairly low quality print of on YouTube here. ( A caution here - though animated, Jordan’s works are not for kids. Consider yourself duly warned.) I was hooked. Jordan’s stop motion collage animation, culled in large part frm paintings, etchings and engravings, was mesmerizing, a kaleidoscopic array of colors, shapes and themes that collide, fade, vanish and transform, only to return later as something entirely new. It was bizarre, yes, and calling it inscrutable is probably being a bit generous, but Jordan’s work transcends a need to entirely understand it. Comparable to Cocteau in his imagery and symbolism and Rauschenberg in his sense of color design, the films of Lawrence Jordan defy simple explanation. They are by turns challenging and carefree, mystical and lurid and always supremely rewarding.

After my brush with Jordan’s work, I found myself trying to hunt down copies of his other films with at best marginal success, occasionally lucking into a third generation copy or sub-par internet clip. Luckily, the fine folks at San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema have released a new boxed set representing the entirety of Jordan’s 40 year filmmaking career. Whether they know it yet or not, animation fans everywhere are in their debt.

Culled from archives across the nation, many of these works are seeing the public eye for the first time in years, bringing new and deserved attention to animated classics like the Orson Welles narrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the magical documentary The Sacred Art of Tibet. Also included is Jordan’s live action work, including the only existing footage of reclusive surrealist assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell, for whom Jordan worked as an assistant for a brief period. If you’re interested in surrealist art, avant garde cinema, the history of animation, or just having your mind blown, I cannot reccomend this collection highly enough. And of course, you can find The Films of Larry Jordan in our New Arrivals section this week here at Film is Truth.

Here is an online petition which asks modern-day-Ed-Wood Uwe Boll to please stop making movies.

Uwe Boll himself responds, in this FearNet interview, that if the petition reaches one million signatures, he will be convinced to quit.

Come on, gang!  We can do it!

The Believer has a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris.  Read it here.

Former Film Is Truth employee Andrew (along with Ian Morgan) has made a documentary film about a shameful incident from Bellingham’s past. The film will have two showings locally in the next week; please read the press release below and consider attending the film: 

First Showing:
Location: Whatcom Museum and History and Art
Date: Sunday, January 13
Time: 2:00pm
cost: FREE

Second Showing:
As part of the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Jr.
Human Rights Conference*
Location: Whatcom Community College - Syre Auditorium
Date: Saturday, January 19
Time: 1:15pm
cost: Free
*Please come participate in the whole exciting and
educational conference.  For more info, see the
Whatcom Human Rights Task Force website.

Here is a short description of the video:

Community to Community Development and Whatcom Human Rights Task Force present…

“Present in All That We Do”

In 1907, more than two-hundred South Asian migrant
workers in Bellingham were attacked by a mob of white
workers. In the course of one night, an entire
community was driven from the town – in the approving
words of a local paper, “wiped off the map.” One
hundred years later in 2007, hostility towards
immigrants of color in Bellingham continues. Raids and
detentions by government immigration agents are
ongoing; so are surveillance and harassment from both
government agents and groups like the Minutemen. How
have the events of 1907 shaped Bellingham as we know
it in 2007? What has changed and what remains the
same?  These issues and questions are examined in the
independently produced documentary, “Present in All
That We Do.”

Written and Edited by: Andrew Hedden and Ian Morgan

Length: 52 minutes

The Whatcom Museum and the MLK Conference committee
have been kind enough to give us these venues to show
our video.  If you can, please come to watch our
documentary and ask some questions.

So it recently came to my attention that George Miller, the director of the Mad Max trilogy (!) is also responsible for…Happy Feet? WHAT?!? That really freaks me out for some strange and truly harrowing reason. That’s like as if the director of 28 Days Later and Trainspotting went ahead and made a cute movie about a kid finding money…waitaminute…that happened too?!? Aww man….

I love the formal reduction or expansion of a “finished” work of art, in this case film, by someone other than the work’s original author - be it Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho“, this analysis of movie poster color combinations, or this recent collection I found (courtesy Blog Flume) of Alfred Hitchcock films abridged to 1000 key frames each. I don’t suppose there’s any profoundly meaningful purpose behind these sorts of experiments, but they’re fascinating nonetheless and, at the very least, make you reconsider how to see a film, and what the film means. No substitute for the actual films as they were intended to be seen, of course… but with a director as meticulous as Hitchcock, it’s certainly worth looking at his work in this novel way as it really highlights his thorough sense of design.

My favorites of the examples posted at the site are as follows:

Marnie — One of Hitchcock’s more underrated and strange films. Seeing the stills lined up, punctuated by nearly solid frames of pure hues, really emphasizes the striking, psychological use of color he employed here.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) — A merely “average” Hitch production, but one with many exotic, almost surreal touches. The overall look of the color and light reminds me of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, though the same could be said of a lot of stuff from the 1950s.

Notorious — This has some really gorgeous, velvety B&W photography.

Frenzy — One of Hitchcock’s last films, and another one often overlooked. Pretty vicious, but not without his usual droll humor.