On Blu-ray - David Hare's best doco ever SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

"I never dreamt that, with my own two hands. I could touch the sky."

So says Seymour Bernstein in Ethan Hawke's sublime and profoundly affectionate tribute to his guru and music teacher, the great, modest and humble man, now 86 still living in a one room apartment on the upper west side, so crammed with his piano and music and books it would take centuries to read and rediscover all his secrets after he dies.

Seymour: An Introduction was the best film I saw in 2014, and in my limited knowledge of the documentary form, it's the greatest documentary I could ever hope to see in my lifetime. It always comes down to the subject and here, the subject is an untouchably rare human being, the master, the guru, the saint. For Ethan Hawke, and many others who are interspersed through this sublime film is the shocking recognition that although you've never met this man, you know him immediately, and the fact you know him now changes your life.

Ethan's movie ran from Sundance through the Festival circuits in 2014 and since then has had a too sheltered life on VOD and direct order video. These screens are from a commercial DVD finally available from the States on the IFC Films label. I consider it one of the most treasured discs in my library.

Hawke's empathy and skill as a filmmaker is not only to acquaint us with Seymour Bernstein, but to transport us into the precious and secret realm of the artist whose skill or genius is, as others might put it, to communicate god through his ego. I can't bring myself to use that word meaningfully but it comes close to the rapture he allows me to feel.

Jean Gabin - A memory triggered by some modern technology

This note is extracted from a longer piece mixing reportage and nostalgia which I wrote after a short stay in Paris way back in 2004. If you want to read the full story you can still find it posted here . I'm minded to post it after watching Adrian Martin and Cristina Alvarez Lopez's newest visual essay on French noir which has been posted on the BFI website and, inter alia, brings Jean Gabin back into focus big time.  Enjoy.

Gabin
When I first became interested in the cinema, in the 1970s, Jean Gabin represented everything I hated – the antithesis of the modern ‘intellectual’ cinema of the time. I was baffled by the popularity of this ageing actor and of his films, which I despised. When I discovered the French cinema of the 1930s, and then of the 1940s and 1950s, I began to understand his extraordinary importance. I became a fan. If, like many people I prefer Le jour se leve and Touchez-pas au grisbi to Le Tatoue and L’Annee sainte, I eventually came to appreciate all Gabin’s performances. Even though I have to concede that he starred in a few bad films – not a bad record for someone who made ninety-five – I would maintain there are no bad Gabin performances” (Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema)

The Reflet Medicis gave over its splendid Salle Louis Jouvet to the Gabin retrospective Gabin worked with major directors, especially Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne from the 30s through to the 50s. He also worked with Jacques Becker in Grisbi but he had no truck, indeed was dismissive of, the Nouvelle Vague directors of the late 50s and 60s. Until the end, and he made his last film in 1974 only two years before his death, he resolutely continued to work. David Thomson’s characterizes the later Gabin work as being with “with dull directors and with decreasing zest”. Not entirely.

Certainly, in his last two decades, he chose to work with largely unimaginative commercial directors with whom he felt most comfortable. Jean Delannoy, Gilles Grangier and Henri Verneuil directed his films on several occasions each from the mid 50s to the late 60s. But the decreasing zest Thomson thinks he identifies was something else. If Gabin were going through the motions then it seems he would hardly have sought to make the effort to, in Vincendeau’s words “achieve authorship of his films in an industrial sense, creating tight and long-lasting partnerships, cutting deals with producers, founding his own production company, discussing would be roles with scriptwriters and directors and retaining a select group of key personnel. Vincendeau concedes that Gabin “goes through his thrillers of the 1950s and 1960s hardly moving a finger except to deliver magisterial slaps across the face of his opponents, his preferred form of ‘violence’.”

Gabin’s (ninety-five) films traveled only infrequently to English speaking territories. From the time he re-established himself as a star in post-war France with Jacques Becker’s superb Touchez-Pas au Grisbi (1954) until his death, he made 47 films. (I think) no more than a handful reached Australia. Those were perhaps French Can Can (Jean Renoir, 1955), En Cas de Malheur (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958), Archimede the Tramp (Gilles Grangier, 1959), Un Singe en Hiver (Henri Verneuil, 1962), Melodie en Sous-Sol (Verneuil, 1963) and Le Clan des Siciliens (again Verneuil, 1969). 
Among the many missing were his three appearances as Maigret and a brilliant Simenon adaptation in which he co-starred with Simone Signoret, Le Chat (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1971). It is perhaps the best of the ten adaptations he made from Simenon stories, a chamber piece about a couple whose wrecked lives are symbolized, rather obviously, by the terrain vague that surrounds their home. Gabin communicates with his wife only by curt handwritten notes that he flicks at her. Many of them simply remind her that she killed his beloved pet cat, the event that erected the wall between them. Still they go on sharing the same house, sinking ever deeper into loathing and despair until the wife, played with absolute lack of varnish by Simone Signoret, suddenly dies. During its course, the film ventures down the street to a sleazy hotel into which the husband moves for awhile. But he is drawn back. It is a fascinating study of two people who once loved each other and the ties and knots that bind them into a hell on earth.

The retrospective inevitably weighted itself towards Gabin’s more readily available post-World War II films. The exigencies of distribution and print availability made that so. The opportunity thus presented to study Gabin in film after film as he moved from late middle to old age was irresistible. First there was the Gabin walk. Vincendeau characterizes it as a “rolling gait” but can there be any other actor who seems to move with so little motion. His body seems to remain near to completely still and simply float close to the ground. 

In French Can Can Gabin plays an entrepreneur who builds a Pigalle night club to cater for the Parisian smart set. His floor show is the “French Can Can” a blazingly energetic dance led by the glorious Francoise Arnoul whom Gabin coldly seduces away from her somewhat earnest boyfriend and then, in the end, dumps. She is heartbroken and refuses to go on until she learns that her art is more important than mere love and the final triumphant spectacle can take place. There can hardly be a better film so redolent with romantic love, so infused with the sheer joy of living, with exuberant physical expression and containing so many characters dedicated to hedonist fun and pleasure. And that says nothing about its colour, its light its dancing. Every character, from the street pickpockets to Gabin’s determined business is set to seek personal satisfaction from the satisfaction of the senses. 
Yet French Can Can is almost the last film in which Gabin plays the romantic. Age catches up with him and he settles into roles where his age starts to show. The Simenon adaptations provided him with a steady diet of meat, whether as Maigret, the fake gentleman in Le Baron d’Ecluse (Jean Delannoy, 1959), the lawyer seduced into running off the rails by Brigitte Bardot in En cas de Malheur (Claude Autant Lara, 1958) or, his last great performance the aforementioned Le Chat. 

Except, that is, for one of his finest films Voici le temps des assassins (Julien Duvivier, 1956). Gabin plays Andre Chatelin, a restaurateur and cook with a thriving business in the old Les Halles. His ordered life, welcoming everyone from a film producer with a different starlet on his arm at each visit, to the French President, is turned ever more askew when Catherine, the daughter of his former wife Gabrielle, turns up and ingratiates herself into his company, his business and his bed. They marry and only then do we know, for sure at least, that she is a scheming gold digger who has hatched a plan with her drunken wreck of a mother to fleece Andre of his wealth. The spiral downwards into despair amidst a meticulously drawn background of daily life and routine in a successful restaurant is brilliantly drawn. The program booklet, Jean Gabin plus qu’un acteur…un mythe, a splendid publication describes the film exactly as “C’est le plus naturaliste, le plus noir, le plus pessimiste de Duvivier. Ici nous sommes plonges dans un monde infernale ou Catherine et Gabrielle sont les deux faces d’une meme nature humaine gangrenee.” One wonders whether all those like (David) Thomson (q.v.) who passed easy judgement on Gabin’s later career have even seen what seems to be an astonishingly neglected masterwork.

On Blu-ray - David Hare finds much enjoyment in William Cameron Menzies CHANDU THE MAGICIAN (USA, 1932)

Finally I have the VLC screencap software working again!

A gorgeous screen from William Cameron Menzies' opening montage for Chandu the Magician. 

From the new Kino Lorber Blu, using the same high contrast, albeit scratched source as Fox' older DVD. Some people are complaining about the "poor" quality of this current swathe of material from Fox's deep archive vaults to come out on Kino BD. Well, while they're not spanking new 2k full restorations done with the finesse of Shawn Belston's team, many of them, like this gem, look for the world like real 35mm film. 

Chandu's lunacies and nonsensical narrative, all derived from the post Universal "Mummy" craze by all the majors back in the early 30s simply play second fiddle to the visuals. All that counts here is Menzies' sumptuous, fluid, eye popping production design and costumes. Ably filmed with great mobility by co-director Marcel Vanel. Apart from Bela, one of the movies' most enduring actors, the heady spectacle of sets, costumes choreography and lighting (James Wong Howe) ultimately counts for everything.

I will remain a formalist to the day I die! Thus Chandu is infinitely more important and beautiful to me than a dozen Lewis Milestone message pictures.

HACKSAW RIDGE - Mel Gibson back to repeat his trope...

The violence in Hacksaw Ridge befuddles you. It shouldn’t really. Only a quick moment’s reflection reminds you that, putting aside all those Lethal Weapon movies in which Mel Gibson played the clown, all of the films Gibson has directed have been loaded up with the most primitive depictions of violent and war-like behaviour. The relish with which it's shown is Gibson's way of drawing attention to himself.

Hacksaw Ridge excels largely because the technology of putting war on screen continues to advance and the special effects work involving heads and bodies mashed up by bullets, mortars, hand to hand fighting, exploding vehicles and so on is so graphic. Whether this will be seen by audiences as a nice night’s entertainment I have my doubts.

 That graphic violence aside what struck me most about the film is the old-fashioned look and the old-fashioned way of telling the story. I started thinking that Gibson might be trying to emulate Samuel Fuller or even Robert Aldrich  from way back when but more and more the film kept slipping  backwards into the ‘look’ of some mid-50s Fox widescreen epic, ponderously directed, scripted by literalists afraid to let an obvious moment go by. The work of Henry King,  Nunally Johnson and others springs to mind, all going hell for leather for overblown ‘realism’ at the behest of Darryl F Zanuck.

You know of course that, in the manner of 50s Hollywood war pictures the suffering US GI is going to triumph in some way or other and then, the modern movie kicks in, we’ll round it out with photos of the actual cast members. The predictability level is well, high.

For this, an American film made out here for tax-minimisation reasons but with sufficient Australian input as to qualify as an ‘Australian film’ in the manner of The Great Gatsby, Knowing, Moulin Rouge, Charlotte Gray and others, the next certainty is that the film will be voted Best Picture by whomever it is that decides the AACTA Awards. This occurs almost as a piece of mechanical engineering – the ‘biggest’ picture of the year, wins that gong. Good luck to them I guess.

But there is one final mystery to be solved. We are told that at the end of the screening in Venice, the audience gave the film a ten-minute standing ovation. Incredible. …but I guess you had to be there and check for yourself that the crowd didn’t do what it mostly does, start to file out when all those credits got rolling. Nope, we are told it is at least implied and reported on the record. I cant see it happening at the Ritz Randwick in a week or two but further reports welcome.