Digitisations and Restorations (15) - Chaplin, GONE TO EARTH, KING OF JAZZ, Lubitsch and more

Associate Editor (Restorations and Revivals) Simon Taaffe has come across the following screenings and other information. Click on the links for times, more detail etc where indicated.

Chaplin, His New Job

Start with the great man Charles Chaplin and a screening at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The program is three of the shorts the master made the Essanay company in 1915. For the Chaplin version of his stay at the Chicago based company you can go here. That’s the official website. The Chaplin program is part of a day of silent restorations to make the mouth water. Click on the links to see what sort of a day you can have and have the great added extra of being in the fabulous Castro Theatre. More details below.

Among the films screening in a six week season of Powell and Pressburger films at UC Berkeley’s BAMPFA is the relatively little seen Gone to Earth in what is claimed to be a restored print . Simon writes “I wonder when this was restored, I remember seeing it at the Sydney Film Festival.”

At New York’s Film Forum a 4K restoration of the 70s Oscar winner The Lion in Winter, Details here

What will they think to celebrate next. Forty years of Steadicam is at the Lincoln Centre in New York. Click here for details.

King of Jazz was included in the Universal selection screened at Bologna earlier this year. The advance notice was wildly enthusiastic after it went on at MOMA in New York. The Bologna reception was shall we say a little more muted including by moi in this post. Anyway it’s having quite a number of screenings at ACMI over the holiday period, see Details here  Simon asks: “Will it make it to Sydney?”

At the Lincoln Centre a new restoration of Raul Ruiz’s ‘first French film” The Suspended Vocation, see Details here

As part of the same festival as the Chaplin program mentioned above is Ernst Lubitsch’s 1926 So This is Paris, The copy is a Restored 35mm print from the Library of Congress  Details here and one of the earliest feature films to examine gay life  Different from the Others,  Details here

Finally, in London the BFI presents Cinephilia down the ages: a Museum of the Everyday. Described as “An exhibition devoted to obsessive and quirky records of cinemagoing reveals how film fandom, and geekery, have transformed over the past century. Details here

On Blu-ray - David Hare dissects the Criterion edition of Bunuel's enigmatic THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL...and a plea for more

A Liebestod moment from Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel photographed by the titanic Gabriel Figueroa. 

Criterion's new Blu-ray is a redux of their earlier, very fine, extras packed DVD 2 discer which the Blu now delivers intact. The transfer is a very high quality remaster indeed and I am guessing they chose to use the same film elements for this scan and BD. For one thing it is literally INTACT, like their earlier DVD, not mutilated by an outrageously stupid act of cutting perpetrated on a subsequent video transfer which was made and used by Arrow in the UK and Madman in Oz, for which some idiot in post prod has removed two repeated shots early in the movie when the two female servants are readying to leave the house before the guests arrive. The second shot is a long wide of the guests arriving. Bunuel then cuts to more activity in the kitchen and then the two shots are repeated in toto. This was one of apparently four incongruities he consciously included in the movie for the puzzlement and delight of his fans, but I confess to not recalling the other three. The shots are as they always were in the new Blu. 

There is also a newer 2k remaster of the film which was released a year or two ago by Divisa Spain which from screens anyway looks more sharp, and perhaps more black level boosted. But I have always very much liked the reproduction of grain and the shadow detail as the great Figueroa filmed it here. 

Now, how about a boxed set, in HD format, of all the Mexican Bunuels? Avid collectors will all know where to look for extremely good quality DVDs from Spain and Mexico of most of them but Criterion would really be doing the world a favor if it could put its mind to BDs of Los Olvidados (already restored I understand), El, El Bruto the sublime Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride), Archibaldo de la Cruz, Illusion Travels by Streetcar, Ensayo di un Crimen, Susana and his mad insane, beautiful, melodramatic reading of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de Pasion. After the Trump, Brexit and god knows what horror is next, the world needs Don Luis more than ever to cleanse the palate and keep us sane. And make a perfect dry martini.

Defending Cinephilia 2016 (2) - Rod Bishop contemplates the cinephile meaning of the Trump Age

Chris Stafford on Facebook: I haven't been right about much lately but I did say weeks or maybe months ago that folks were gonna vote in this election who never voted before. And they did.

They got in their big ol' GMC pickup trucks and rusty Toyota Hi-Luxes with the gunracks and stars-and-stripes bumper stickers and they drove on down to the Union Hall and voted the fuck out of those blue-state pussies.

I hope Donald doesn't let them down. Otherwise, what good is a serial bankrupt sub-prime profiteering real-estate fraudster? Just fear the goblins gathering behind him. You can bet he has his own personal Rumsfeld lurking somewhere in the wings.

Is there a single character in Hell or High Water who would have voted for Clinton? Or a single character in Master of None who would have voted for Trump? How about the cast of Maggie’s Plan? Surely all for Hillary. Show Me A Hero? Most likely anyone but Trump. Making of a Murderer – all Trump?

If they were forcibly led to a polling station, the black football students in Last Chance U are likely to all be Democrat. But what about the teaching staff and that white boy who could throw the football like a homing torpedo? No doubt about the entire cast of Preacher. all Trumpers, through and through.

The border guards in the doco Cartel Land are no brainers. As are the white supremacists in the doco Welcome to Leith. Ironically, even the good townsfolk who tackled the bad guys in depressed rural Leith would most likely have voted for The Donald as well.

The Night Of? Hard to see any of that crowd voting for Trump, but things break down with Mr. Robot (series two). Loaded up with fsociety anarchism, can you imagine any of them in a voting booth, let alone discussing party politics? Bad for the image.

Rest of the World

Television series

·       the vicious politics in the French series Baron Noir seemed designed to out-punch House of Cards

·       the Neapolitan mafia of Gomorra provided a nice back story to the boys of Elena Ferrante’s novels

·       in Follow The Money the Danes showed their corrupt corporate world ranks with the best

·       the British cops finally routed out their bad apple in Line of Duty

·       the Brit Charlie Brooker has gone from strength to paranoiac strength in the third series of Black Mirror

Documentaries

·       remarkable was Patricio Guzman’s politically poetic The Pearl Button (Chile)
 ·      equally poetic and political was Fire at Sea, set on Lampedusa off the coast of Italy

·       razor-sharp was the analysis of nation state cyber espionage in Zero Days (USA)

·       brilliant is almost inadequate a description of the cinema verite in Winter on Fire (Ukraine)

·       pathological denialism was abundantly evident in My Nazi Legacy (UK)

·       the ravages of ALS were grueling in Gleason (USA).

Features

·       Mustang (France/Turkey) gave us the fight against forced marriage

·       Gueros showed a vibrant 1960s-style student radicalism still alive in Mexico

·       there was a unique take on family dysfunction in Krisha (USA)

·       the beguilingly immersive Aferim! (Romania) produced a cross between a Western and a voyage along an imaginary 19^th Century Silk Road

·       energetic lunacy laced the comedy of The Hunt For The Wilderpeople (New Zealand)

·       a hapless, aging Mumbai folksinger was charged by police with abetting a suicide through his lyrics in Court (India).

But more memorable feature films were hard to find.

Maybe I need to get out more.

Rod Bishop is a writer, critic, educator, commentator and producer. 

Vale Peter Corrigan - A brief appreciation of a serious life

I haven’t seen Peter Corrigan for quite a few years but news of his death still comes as a shock. Who would think him as other than of the immortal. Not much point in rewriting a way through the long life of achievement either. You can find that on a quite good Wikipedia page here. I will put in my own two cents worth and say how much I love that RMIT Building in Swanston Street. Beautiful in my view though I know many think otherwise.

But he was a larrikin, a challenger of authority and someone who constantly provoked others into their best. I visited his workplace a couple of times decades ago, the first time because I had an invite to look over his library. He kept it under lock and key and it was unique…. But the atmosphere of the place, lots of dedicated young people burrowing away was special in the extreme. 

A memory …..One night we walked into the Society Café at the top of Bourke St and Corrigan immediately said to the waiter “We’ll have a bottle of the house red”. “Would you like to see the wine list, sir.” Then, voice becoming very firm. “I SAID WE’LL HAVE A BOTTLE OF THE HOUSE RED!” “Yes sir.” Scuttle, scuttle.

He acted the grumpy bugger with consummate skill. He used to enjoy it I’m sure. 

His production designs go all the way back to student days in the old Union and Architecture Theatres at Melbourne Uni. Always striking even when done on near to non-existent budgets. As the shows got bigger he managed the transition. Directors like Barrie Kosky turned to him all the time. There will be lists of what he worked on all over the place I’m sure.

But one little period does warrant some additional memoir. Back in 1982 and on into 1983 Peter had a real bee in his bonnet about national arts institutions being located in Sydney. All this Federal money was tipped into slush funds that were pumped out most particularly in the direction of NIDA. He wanted it stopped. With his mate Dinny O’Hearn he wrote letters and organised meetings designed to really irritate the Federal Minister. Around this time, Bob Hawke got elected and I went to work as a staffer. Corrigan found ways to come up to Canberra and use the resources of a Minister’s office to send out what he called samizdats to every member of Parliament. No doubt the recipients all forwarded them to Barry Cohen the Minister for the Arts and some poor bugger had the job of writing a couple of hundred replies.

He dropped into Parliament House and came into John Dawkins office with so much regularity he was a part of the family for awhile. Dawkins took a liking to him even to the extent of taking him over to Fremantle to show him a parcel of land on the shore that Brian Burke wanted to give to some developer mate to build houses on and no doubt make a fortune. There was a thought that Corrigan might do the drawings for something special that would shame Burke into treating the precious spot with some respect. But this was Western Australia in the Burke era. Thuggery prevailed.

Corrigan’s arts location campaign eventually petered out but I think he made the point. The Labor Government didn’t hurl money at its mates in NSW and that was something. The location of and support for places like the ANG, the NFSA and the Museum all probably owe just a small something to the mindset that Corrigan pursued.

A serious contributor.