John Conomos - Paging Mr Hitchcock in The Cube at Mosman Art Gallery

Paging Mr Hitchcock is a poetic performative video installation work by the notable Australian artist John Conomos. This new artwork is essentially a homage to the artistry of the legendary Hollywood film-maker Alfred Hitchcock, known globally as the ‘master of suspense’. However the artwork also traces the artist’s own post-colonial narrative and autobiographical trajectory as an artist, cinephile and writer who has been impacted by migrancy, fragmentation, vulnerability and trauma.

Below is John Conomos's introduction to his exhibition which has its official opening on 19 February 2016.

Self-plagiarism is style. Alfred Hitchcock

Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of artist is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other. Charles Simic

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he‘ll tell you the truth. Oscar Wilde

Alfred Hitchcock, like Luis Bunuel and Fritz Lang, was a film director that spanned the best part of film’s history in the last century, from the silent era in the 1920s till the 1970s. All three directors had this much in common with each other, amongst many other things. And truth be told, Hitchcock himself had the highest admiration for Bunuel from an aesthetic and technical point-of-view: both these directors also had a surreal outlook on the world. Why ‘Hitch’? This is how he was colloquially known through the mass media – particularly the Fourth Estate and later in his life through his extraordinary commercial success with his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television shows of the late 1950s and early sixties. It was these television shows in particular with the filmmaker’s famous characteristic droll introductions to each episode “Good evening. Tonight’s little entertainment concerns…”.

It was with Hitchcock’s television shows besides, my earliest indelible cinematic memories of seeing his Rear Window, Vertigo and later, Psycho in our local cinema in Marrickville in the 1950s/60s, that I became familiar with his dazzling, suspenseful ‘Rubik Cube’ oeuvre of a cinema that at its core posed deep resonant existential and moral questions about our Manichean nature as human beings. And how life itself (especially in its everyday prosaic fabric) profoundly underscores the ambiguity and horror of the well-known saying “still waters run deep.” With Hitchcock this was always the case: things were not as they would appear at first glance. Hitchcock saw himself as a master artisan or craftsman rather than as an artist. He firmly believed that cinema was the 20th century’s most innovative art form, but he regarded himself as a commercial filmmaker of highly polished mass entertainments.

Craft before art was Hitchcock’s cardinal belief as a filmmaker. Despite the unbridled enthusiasm of the Cahiers du Cinema group of critics (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer) for Hitchcock - which was in radical contrast to the qualified respect Andre Bazin had for the director - Hitchcock found the comparison with artists flattering, but preferred to see himself as a craftsman of technical virtuosity. These ideas of his were mostly at the fore of the far-reaching interviews (six days) that Truffaut and his collaborator and interpreter Helen Scott conducted with the filmmaker in the mid 1960s. The result of this landmark encounter between these two filmmakers manifested in the 1966 book Cinema according to Hitchcock that clearly had such an impact on subsequent cinephiles and aspiring filmmakers. Truffaut regarded this book as his unique “film–book” because of its explicit storyboard look and meticulous details about how Hitchcock conceived and shaped his films. This is a subject which, incidentally, is explored by the American critic Kent Jones in his new film Hitchcock/Truffaut that he co-wrote with Serge Toubiana, who is presently the president of the Cinematheque in Paris today and premiered at the last Cannes Film Festival.

In any attempt to assess Hitchcock’s achievement as a filmmaker, the intricate relationship between both the artist and the meticulously self-staged persona (the droll, dead-pan English observer of human foibles), and his oeuvre and its legacy to contemporary visual arts, we need to contextualise Hitchcock’s art within the larger cultural, economic and political forces that shaped it. Hitchcock’s American films not only testify to the filmmaker’s own ironic encounter with American cultural life and its diverse public spaces, popular cultural and literary narratives, as well as its cultural and ideological tensions and textures, his films clearly suggest that the filmmaker had a supple and adroit understanding of cinema as a major modernist cultural form of visual representation, and of its key role in reconfiguring the cultural, social and emotional life in the American public sphere.

Hitchcock’s delightful cameos, in essence, are such self-mythologizing jokes and they perform a vital self-reflexive role in the aesthetic economy of his movies often acting, as the American film critic David Sterritt once put it, as “ironic punctuation marks.” But they are also important for their playful multilayered illusion – breaking characteristics . They also are the least discussed aspects of Hitchcock’s cinema. There has always been a tendency to see them as being not so significant in their aesthetic, dramaturgical and narrative implications. The question we need to ask of them what are they doing here in his movies; what is Hitchcock trying to achieve with this “Where’s Wally” humour of his? Are his cameos in anyway detracting from the aesthetic and technical aspects of the suspense in his movies? Remembering that Hitchcock once said, how he played his audiences, like an organ.

Hitchcock in Blackmail (1929)

According to Jason Holt (1), Hitchcock’s cameos that numbered over thirty five first appeared in The Lodger (1926) and despite their sporadic appearances afterwards they started to surface more consistently by the 1940s.  Apparently, one day Hitchcock did not have enough extras in one of his movies so he decided to step in as one of them. Soon audiences began to recognise his portly presence and they started to anticipate them in his subsequent works. Hitchcock, ever so pragmatic and an astute showman, realised that they in themselves were commonly regarded as a vital signature of his existential horror cinema so he obliged his audiences ever since throughout his oeuvre. Hitchcock did not originally plan to keep appearing in his movies, he simply seized the opportunity to do so because of his audiences ‘expectations. Some commentators have also speculated that one reason why Hitchcock continued his cameo appearances was that he regarded actors as ‘cattle’ and he wanted to perversely remind his actors that anyone can act and, at the end of the day, what he was doing for a living was not some sacred, transcendental and egotistical activity.

As he once famously said to Ingrid Bergman “Ingrid, it’s only a movie.” This utterance at its core is emblematic of how the director regarded filmmaking as a craft rather than an art form. In a tour de force fictional piece Fat Man My Love, by the prolific American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, we have an extremely vivid, rhythmic and memorable diagnostic stream-of-consciousness account from Tippi Hedren’s point-of-view (one of the director’s late Ice Blond beauty archetypes in Marnie and The Birds) of the director’s Jesuit shaped pathology as the ultimate fetishist, fantasist, obese, gluttonous, sadistic, smirking, mama’s virginboy joker, the witty “Zombie Buddha” with the aching hole in his belly. ² Who lived in his head full of dreams, obsessions and knew and lived his movies script perfect. Given the vast and ever-expanding literature on Hitchcock, the many different constructed Hitchcocks - Hitchcock, the moralist; Hitchcock, the modernist-formalist; Hitchcock, the aesthete; Hitchcock, the post-modernist, etc - how do we locate him in the context of the triadic formulation (realism–modernism–post modernism) of cinema history?

If cinema is the 20th century’s paradigmatic art form, is Hitchcock one of its greatest artists? For Slajov Zizek, Hitchcock paradoxically incarnates all three categories of the aesthetic-historical triad, and for Gilles Deleuze, Hitchcock, through framing, camera movement and montage, represents, in the tradition of English empiricism, ‘the filmmaker of relations’ par excellence, the last of the classic movement–image directors (paraphrasing Deleuze) and ‘the first of the moderns’. ³ John Conomos 30 December 2015

Notes.
¹ Jason Holt, “The Hitchcock Cameo: Aesthetic Considerations”, in David Bagett and William A. Drumin (eds), Hitchcock and Philosophy, Chicago and Las Salle , Illinois, Open Court, 2007, pp.220-238.
² Joyce Carol Oates, Fat Man My Love, in Bradford Morrow (ed), Cinema Lingua, Conjunctions : 42, 2004, pp.246-260.
³ Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), London: Verso, 1992, p.2 Gilles Deleuze, ‘On the movement - image’, in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p.55.

John Conomos works and lives in Sydney. He is currently an Associate Professor, Principal Fellow, The Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and the Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. Conomos is a New Media Fellow (2000) of the Australia Council for the Arts and has been exhibiting and writing since the late 1970s.

The Duvivier Dossier (43) - Barrie Pattison on Duvivier in the 30s - Pt Two - Allo Berlin Ici Paris & La Tete d'un Homme

Allo Berlin Ici Paris / Here's Berlin, 1932
This German co-production  is a departure from the Baur films and features a playful attempt to deal with its bi-lingual audience, setting the action in an international telephone exchange where minimal dialogue and misunderstanding drive the plot.

Josette Day

German International Telephone operator Wolfgang Klein has been chatting Josette Day (Cocteau’s Belle), his opposite number in  France, and they have arranged for him to meet her on her home ground in Paris at the weekend. However his supervisor disapproves and gives him overtime, meaning that Karel Stepanek, the next in line telephonist, takes his place when she calls back, bringing Hans Henninger and dismissing Klein’s photo as “un ascenseur - er - assassin.”  She takes them to a hotel - ingenious tilts upwards to Sacré Coeur establishes height (we’ll see this gain in  Le Golem) - and the pair go off , with Henninger taking the address but unable to locate the place and a frowzy meat market street woman getting the hotel idea and dumping him in a sordid room, where the staff man thinks he’s being called “Vache’ when he wants “Wasser.”

We get cross cutting from the atmospheric Bier Keller with Klein and the Lapin Agile Montmartre cafe where they do the Duvivier-Rathaus song and “Auprés de ma blonde” before Stepanek fails to get Day to let him in, past the security grill. Klein follows on the overnight (toy) train and Day’s side kick, Germaine Aussey, who has made off with his message, collects him and takes him home, making up a couch but manoeuvring him onto the bed, where he hesitates, with her suggesting “angst” but shoving him in the closet, when the middle aged admirer, whose photos are on her wall, shows. Day fends off Stepanek with the needle she’s using to repair his missing button.

Back at work, no one has had a good time. Day doesn’t want to speak to Klein, though they both get fired for private calls, only to be hired as translators for an International Federation Conference at the Berlin Adlon hotel - set up atmospherically by close-ups of rain soaking feet, as President George Boulanger’s carriage rolls past. Much comic business with Gustav Püttjer’s blackface band in fake Arab costume, commissioned to play the Trans Oceanic Anthem, and the camera racing along the banquet table, where the room fills with the smoke of the magnesium flash cameras they montage.

The leads meet afterwards, at the cafe, where the numbered tables have ‘phones, and she recognizes Klein from his photo, with the whole story coming out and him punching out Stepaneck, starting a riot. The door man and cops are too kind hearted to arrest the young couple.

Much of the action is played in silent style visuals - white clock hands superimposed on feet walking through the wasteland, the glance at the  table  followed by a close-up of Day dialling its number or Henninger’s memory of being lost in Paris as quick cuts of industrial chimneys. The lecherous employer’s ‘phone call plays silent behind the glass of the phone booth where Day waits and the description of the fight can’t be heard over the crowd talking to the lacquer hat Berlin Polizei. There’s even some Pinter-esque minimalist speech, with the representative moving on her and Day dismissive ”Oh, Nous!” or Redie querying “Non?”

An admired score by Karol Rathhaus, then the most innovative of film composers, provides elements of the track normally given to effects or dialogue. Possibly the most virtuoso accompaniment of it’s day it goes through an extraordinary range of styles and instrumentations, including the whistles and puffs at the train station. There is all manner of use of sound - the kisses off screen after the floozy has passed out of frame in the Cosmos Companie office, waking the snoring Hennenman with whistling, the repeat of the cafe song followed by music on black.

This film is more atmospherically studio Germanic than Duvivier’s others of the time, with the Cafe Negre, moody corridors and stairwells, along with big sets that the camera gets to race through - the two ‘phone exchanges. Day passes a line of girls going “bonjour!” who will later join in a song or the “Rauchen verboten” opposite number.

Duvivier’s control of film making has advanced. Compare David Golder’s opening montage with this film’s switch board operator close-ups interspersed with the globe and vignettes spoken in the foreground while shadow action plays behind the speakers, leading to a succession of different language one liners. Less fortunately, the plot is thin and protracted and the German influence makes for a ponderousness which undermines the attempt at counterfeiting a René Clair trifle. The energy and inventive use of the medium don’t really compensate for the lack of  engaging characters or strong scripting, making this a curious antique.

La tête d'un homme 1933

The peak of the Baur-Duvivier collaboration is their Inspector Maigret movie. Despite an initially dragging pace, this asserts as one of the outstanding European films of its day, developing to an extraordinarily intense, complex drama as the mania of Valéry Inkijinof‘s doomed Slav assassin begins to assert, providing the best outing for that great actor. Inkjinof was then becoming a major French cinema character player, with subdued Maigret/Baur, in felt hat and mustache, his seeming foil. This is the only important film Inkijinof, star of Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia, would do without his trade mark shaven head.

Faced with the knowledge that he will shortly die of an incurable disease, Inkijinof‘s Carl Radek plots an extraordinary challenge for his last days - a perfect murder which will make him rich and bring him the object of his fantasy desires - sultry Gina Manés (Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidèle, Litvak’sMayerling & Josephine in the Gance Napoléon).

Gaston Jacquet, her desperate for money lover, hires an unseen assassin to kill a rich aunt in Versailles, making her fortune accessible to him. Manés lifts from Jaquet's pocket the note of agreement that the waiter has found on the Montmartre Eden bar floor and we get the scene that we will see again in Dieterle’s 1950 Dark City, with Manés looking round the room at the unfamiliar faces, one of whom she knows is the killer he has hired. Inkijinof, then hardly known, can be glimpsed at a table.

Leaving simpleton Alexander Rignault ’s bloody foot & hand prints in the apartment of the dead woman, Inkijinof throws the guilt onto that man in the most substantial of his Duvivier roles

Baur and his colleagues figure this out but can’t prove it and it looks like the insignificant Rignault will be guillotined without anyone being too concerned. Nice touches like Baur's profile intruding into Rignault's ratty third degree examination - compare this with André Luguet in the Litvak 1931 Coeur de lilas. Baur’s superior, Armand Numès, dismisses the affair as "une crime crapule" where the real guilty party is about to die anyway.  Maigret puts his job on the line. "Nous jouons la tete d'un homme, M. le directeur."

Baur/Maigret plans to prove Rignault's innocence by letting him escape on the way back from a re-enactment in Versailles. Sure enough the fugitive leads them to Inkijinof in the cafe where they witnesses "cette comedie" of  Valéry ordering three caviar sandwiches, vodka and cigars, and refusing to pay, with the cops marching him to the slammer (away from potentially implicating Rignault at the window) only to prove to have a wallet full of notes and settle the bill.

Valéry takes bar girl Line Noro home, not wanting to be alone and makes breakfast as Baur visits and they hear the neighbor singer on whom the killer has become fixated. "J'ai encore une visage pour ce voix." Now the film pulls away from the productions done around it as Baur manipulates the fantasy of associating the voice with the face of  object of amour fou Manés, to whom Valéry has now explained he owns her, ("C’est vous la fetiche, le gri gri, la porte bonheur") the  weak husband having offed himself.

Manés is terrific. She does an evil smile when Inkijinof gets his-soon-to-be-fatal tubercular cough and throws her champagne in his face, before he drags her into the room where the wiped out-party goers sit on the floor, listening to the raddled singer (cf. Pepe le Moko).

Baur has however trapped the guilty pair and they realize it in a vivid, violent finale. The pacing is slow, decelerated by the complicated camera movements and deliberate speaking but these and the sound are more polished than David Golder and Thirard’s visuals are frequently striking - Rignault next to the giant cart wheel, diagonal wiped to the bloody hand print, the police leg work, putting the foreground cop in dialogue with the succession of shoe sellers dissolving on wobbly back projection, the car-view scenics with conversation over them to cover the return from Versailles, Rignault stealing the tartine from the child, in the field of leafless trees with the sun in the sky, seen upper right, through the cloud, after the low angle "vos papiers" montage; Manés inverted reflection advancing on the glass table and the image with Inkijinof’s hand under the car wheel after his dash through the streets (with more weak process.)

Most distinctive is the bustle of the lived-in environments - the Eden Bar with its dice game and floozies, the busy squad room where a cleaner slops down the station floor as the cops talk. A delivery man brings Injinkinof ‘s morning milk. The Jazz Band plays under the Eden's "Don't shoot the pianist" mural. The track is imaginative, using only source music (no sound on the giveaway letter insert), street noise, bar crowd chat and particularly the street sounds below with screams, the distant singing and the final hammering on the steel shutter of the Pharmacie.

Sometimes described (wrongly) as the first film noir. As good as any European film of its day, La Tête d’un homme is the only film where Baur was accompanied by players whose skill matched his own. Not all modern copies do the film justice* The Paris Cinematheque held a pillar box format 35mm. four tinted print which was an event in itself.

Filmed again in 1950 by Burgess Meredith & (uncredited) Irving Allen, with Charles Laughton as Maigret  asThe Man on the Eiffel Tower. It derived as much from the Duvivier movie as Simenon’s book. Also filmed as Les enquêtes du commissaire Maigret : La tête d'un homme directed by René Lucot on 1967

The Baur films were not widely shown outside France or remarked by foreign critics. He would work with Duvivier in another three films but these would not include one of his dominating central performances. Duvivier's own career would draw more attention during another sustained collaboration - with Jean Gabin - including Pepe le Moko and continuing into the sixties.

·         La Tete d’un Homme has just been released by Criterion on its Eclipse label as part of a four film package Julien Duvivier in the Thirties

The Duvivier Dossier (42) - Barrie Pattison on Duvivier in the 30s - Pt One - David Golder, Les Cinq Gentlemen Maudits & Poil de Carrotte

Julien Duvivier

Film makers, who were unfortunate enough to peak around the 1930 mark, missed out their place in movie histories, with work which looked crude next to that made either side of it, where the level of competence had climbed, to show up camera movements which the focus pullers couldn't master, direct sound in noisy locations, dissolves in the still shaky process backgrounds. In Hollywood, Wesley Ruggles, Robert Z. Leonard and even Henry King fell victim to this phenomenon but the greatest casualty was Frenchman Julien Duvivier who could reasonably claim to be the most accomplished European film maker of the day.

Harry Baur

Duvivier, who had been a supplier of European up-market Boulevard cinema in the late twenties abruptly became one of (if not the) leading film maker on the planet when two elements were added to his work - sound and the star presence of Harry Baur. La Comedie Française had forbidden it’s company to participate in the new sound movies, either to curb competition or to prevent damage to their brand by this upstart medium. This decision changed the nature of French and possibly word cinema by clearing the path for one time Folies Bergères comedian Harry Baur and song and dance man Jean Gabin.  The careers of both careers would be thrust ahead by their association with Julien Duvivier.

Duvivier’s sustained collaboration with the great Harry Baur must be regarded as the most substantial element of both men's careers and only Scorsese and De Niro would put together a body of work that could be compared. Baur, re-entering the cinema at the age of  fifty one, demonstrates an authority which we remain unused to seeing and a technique unparalleled in his day. He would jam Maigret, Herod, Emperor Rudolph and Jean Valjean into the years that remained to him before his death in 1943, under suspicious circumstances, after surviving a stint in a WW2 French Occupation prison.

Many of the later Duvivier films were mediocre production line efforts, often sketch
films. This contributed to the attribution of his place in French film to Jean Renoir who better fitted the high culture model. Even among the later Duvivier though, there's no problem in finding entertaining work - notable a nicely cynical line in fifties films like Gabin in Voici les Temps d'Assassins (1954), the Fernandel starrer L’Homme a l’Imperméable (1957) and Le Diable et les Dix Commandements (1963).

As casual readers are unlikely to get to see these, (they appear to not exist in official translated copies) I’ve included give away plot details on the early sound films.

David Golder 1931

Not as complex as the later Baur-Duvivier films but still pushing the limits of early sound technique - particularly early European sound technique -  leaving us in no doubt abut its quality with an opening  trains, planes and stock exchange montage under the titles. Then Jewish business Czar Baur/Golder arrives at his office where the old associate who cheated him a year back, sits facing ruin. Flashing light reflected off his cigarette case in the man’s face, Baur tells him he's out of luck but later that night as he dines with the friend who tells him "Vous croyez qu'un juif a besoin de toute ca pour vivre." The ruined man shoots himself (undercranked foggy street inset) and Harry has shortage of breath, rushing to the window, cf. the Edward Arnold plot in You Can’t Take It With You (Frank Capra, USA, 1938).

Opting for ten days break at his Villa in Biarritz (travel shots with noisy Tobis effects
tracks) with his wife Paule Andral (Tarakanova) and daughter Jackie Monier ("Tu ne vivre que pour elle" the wife objects) he gets back to find dinner (CUs at table in progress and a fat man towelling off in his room, with provision made for Harry in the linen area. The daughter has a New Rolls (“tired of the Hispano”) but wants another car and he has to go off to the baccarat table where he loses a million and wins two, while she dozes. Dismissal of his health problems ("They bury every one") but he has a heart attack and on his sick bed the wife empties his wallet and shakes him, demanding what provision he's made for her - while she's bedecked with millions worth of jewelry. She tells him the daughter isn't his. The girl flashes in with her lap dog before taking a holiday by running streams with her current boyfriend.

On recovering, his shuffling steps play over the close up of the cocktail shaker in the wife's lover's hands. Telling close two shots of the two menacing faces without speech. Harry arranges to flog the villa, outraging the wife, allows his stocks to crash and (OK tracking shot with dialogue by the Seine) he plans a new life. In his empty apt. he meets his seventy year old associate in the Russian oil deal and tells him "A mon age on n'a besoin de grand chose - sauve vivre" not having to worry about his family anymore. The daughter however shows up having been dumped ("Love, money - in life one chooses"), and tells him he's ruined her life making her non eligible, ignoring the parentage details. "I was quiet. I had begun to forget" Baur explains that she's going to be richer than her mum even if he dies.

So he sets off again, for studio Russia (wooden oil wells outside the window) marching out of negotiations to be brought back with the Lenin character demanding a ninety year limit which he, philosophical, allows. On the way back in the (model) ship in the fog he collapses, accompanied by a track of fog horns, pistons and Leon Nigazli's choir, and is helped by a Yiddish speaking young man from Poland who he entrusts to take the papers back to Paris, on his way to New York. 

Baur is terrific, giving an authoritative reading and constantly creating bits of business that add to the effect. The film’s last image is a sustained close shot of his dying face opening and then closing his eyes - a formidable effect. No one else makes any impression.
 
Interesting depiction of Jewish business and the illegitimate daughter place the film's period. The use of sound, trackings, adventurous angles and uncluttered settings is state of the art. The sound mix is sometimes disturbing - the scraping feet of the dancers in tune with music and dialogue, camera movements which defeat the operators.

 
Les cinq gentlemen maudits/ The Five Accursed Gentlemen/  Moon Over Morocco 1931
The director was also a North Africa specialist - this film, Maman Colibri,  La Bandera, Pepe Le Moko, The Impostor etc.

This remake of a 1920 colonial pot boiler, with André Luget, is full of surprises. Baur is virtually a bit player, even doing his freaky bits of business - arguing with the fat
housekeeper, diving onto the couch, singing, reading the book on magic in Morocco - "cet fiction des bonnes femmes".

The European friends arrive in North Africa by steamer, playing deck tennis with the
winning Rosine Deréan. They offend a sorcerer by one laying a hand on his white veiled escort and he curses them to die in order before the full moon. One tumbles drunk from the night club into the lagoon, where his body can't be found the next day. They get news of the aviator's death in a Berlin air show - freeze the actors and playback plane crash and scream noise. Plausible hero Le Robert Vignan gets a note summoning him alone to a meeting at the ruins (delivered by the mysterious, slippered figure that creeps into his room at night) and when he goes and starts frolicking with Mlle Deréan, he finds the third associate with un poignard Berber in his back. Peering through the key hole Le Vignan is able to stop his fellow survivor from shooting himself and offers him money but spotting the sorcerer in the streets he follows him to find the man being kicked and sent on his way by the survivor who, with the other cursed gents has plotted the venture. Le Vigan gets the cheque back from the veiled Mlle Berry, as she tries to scarper with it and chases the villain through the streets with a riding crop to the delight of Baur & Deréan.

There's plenty of style - the intruder in Le Vignan's room introduced by the close up of the ceramic monkey, distant shots of white robe riders on the cross roads, scene montages, the aviator's death, which doesn't really work any more than the scene of Lefebvre leering at naked bathing girls. The casting is surprisingly effective and the suspense effective but it is playing this material in the great Tangiers locations, some of the best filmed ever, that makes this one work - the black turbaned rhythmic workers with the veiled woman in white, feeding ostriches, whirling dervishes and galloping men firing off single shot rifles, a belly dancer with python, tethered horses threshing, the ruins of Voluhiles, where the body is found with the dagger in its back, the Arab funeral and the chase after the sorcier through the shadowed cross branch roofed alleys, all coloured by the reference to "fanaticism religieuse," with the turbaned sniper riding off across the distant road and Baur's house guarded by a (sleeping) armed sentry. Great pacing. Effective score.

There’s a parallel German version Die Fünf verfluchten Gentlemen directed & written by Duvivier with Anton Walbrook, Camilla Horn & Jack Trevor 

Poil de Carotte/The Red Head 1932
Of the films Baur & Duvivier made together, Poil de Carotte is best known outside France still occasionally surfacing in traditional film history screenings, revealingly as a result of the accident of a sub titled negative continuing accessible to make sixteen millimetre prints down the years. Renard's 1894 plot covers the indignities piled upon young boy Robert Lynen from Niévre (the novels original setting replacing Haute Savoie in the earlier version) which make him face suicide until his dour father is driven to intervene.

The characterisation is stronger than we are used to seeing, the neighbours describing how the boy "came too late - he wasn't wanted, if you understand" to the new maid replacement Lydia Zaréna, her predecessor having held the record of two months under the harridan mother, who defends and caresses the kid when another mother calls him a voyou and slaps him when they are out of view, making him say he prefers her to dad Bauer sawing within ear shot in the nearby shed.

Robert Lynen in Poil de Carrotte

One of the most interesting aspects is that,  when events awaken Baur to the problem, the intrigue continues. Maid Zaréna tells him about the wife forbidding Lynen to accompany him hunting and looking at the mantle where there are pictures of the thieving, Meccano building, older son and his conniving sister demands "Oú est Poil de Carotte" or the uncle tells him "You should not make kids when one cannot love them" and he sends the older son off to get the flour his wife demands instead reconciling with the boy.

However Baur winning the mayoral election, complete with a wedding waiting for him, directs his attention away from Lynen who remains an outsider in his ill-fitting short trousers. The voices that drove the kid to experiment with drowning himself in the bucket are replaced with bursts of already used music from the track (big step forward from the David Golder opening montage)  as he has the noose round his neck and he fights vigorously with Baur's attempts to remove it.

The scene when they sit drinking wine and considering whether the mother's life is also  miserable, "Her only pleasure is slapping you", does end the film with a plausible rosy glow, a suggestion of a better life to come.

The countryside is sun through trees lyrical but it is also a place where the kid imagines the circle of gauze shrouded phantoms when sent into the night to take care of the chooks. This bit of Victorian imagery is matched by the scrubbed up little girl who prattles about marrying him after he has told her he's going to kill himself.

Poil de Carotte is an advance on the earlier films, where Duvivier had pushed the skills of his technicians to and beyond their limits, Here they were catching up with him - effective imagery like the head ringed by the reflection of the sun on the water, the elaborate multiple exposures, two see-through Lynens talking to each other with
impeccable timing and eye line, superimposed on the bed where he is sleeping and, better, the double exposed alter ego running with Lynen impeccably keeping time with the boy rushing through the woods. Photography, editing, settings are as polished as we'll see in the thirties. Full of effective staging like the ticket collector coming into mid shot just before the locomotive steams past behind him.

The frantic buggy ride scene with the cart carrying the boy and the maid past groupings of family happiness - child on dad's shoulders, picnic etc., backed by the striking Alexander Tansman score, is a formidable set piece.

For a film which trades so heavily in sentiment - the dog is the one that welcomes Lynen back from school after the train shots -  this is remarkably hard edged. It can be seen as an answer to the mother love scenes of Visages d’Enfants.

Here Baur has comparatively little screen time for his central role - much less than the boy - but still registers as a dominant, shaded character.

Poil de Carotte would be officially re-made twice more with a 1952 Raymond Souplex version apparently lost and an intriguing 1972 Philipe Noiret movie, shot by Nestor Almendros. Not only did the collaboration with Baur continue but young Robert Lynen appeared in Duvivier's other films - Un Carnet de bal and La belle equipe.

AFTRS Future - Nine Questions for Mitch Fifield

As a result of various posts about what’s happening at AFTRS, much private conversation  and some emailing  has ensued. If you want to pick up the threads you need to start way back here. Then there is forensic  piece which asks the question as to whether AFTRS has turned itself into a TAFE. Then there is a scoop , so far thought un-newsworthy by any of the major news gathering agencies or institutions, or indeed any of the minor ones, about the yet to be announced  short term (one year) reappointment of the current Chair. 

All of which leads inexorably to the Man at the Top and these Nine Questions for Senator Mitch Fifield, Minister for Communications and the Arts and Minister responsible for the administration of the Australian Film Television & Radio School (AFTRS)

Re-Appointment of Professor Julianne Schultz

1.       Has any previous Chair of the School Council accepted a second term for less than a three year appointment

2.       What were the reasons why the current Chair was not offered a  three year term in a manner similar to her predecessors over the 45 years of AFTRS existence

3.       Does he propose to make appointments to the other current  vacancies on the School Council for similar twelve month terms

Future of AFTRS as a stand alone Federally funded institution

4.      Has the Federal  Government made a final decision regarding the recommendation of the National Commission of Audit (2014): “The Australian Film, Television and Radio School could be transferred to a university or vocational education institution with an option for the Arts Council to fund scholarships. This is consistent with the principle that the Commonwealth should withdraw from activities that are outside its areas of core responsibility and could be more efficiently and effectively undertaken by the private sector or another jurisdiction.”

5.       Has the Minister, his advisory staff or any Federal Government officials engaged in any discussions with the NSW State Government regarding the possible transfer of AFTRSor any of its activities to the NSW tertiary education sector

6.       Has any member of AFTRS Council or staff engaged in any discussions with the NSW State Government regarding the possible transfer of AFTRS to the NSW tertiary education sector

7.       Has the Minister received any request from the AFTRS Council with a view to initiating or responding to proposed discussions regarding its future as a Federal Government  institution

8.       Has the Minister requested any proposal or submission from AFTRS Council or management regarding  proposed activities over the next three to five years or longer.

Volunteers

9.       Does AFTRS have any current guidelines or protocols which set out how volunteers may be involved with student productions

I cant say, especially given the way these questions are being asked, that  I expect any answers to be offered but the questions are now, as they say in many a noir drama, on the record.

Peter von Bagh and Neil McGlone - Emails from a film friendship (1)

Neil McGlone

In 2011, Neil McGlone, avid collector, cinephile, scholar, festival adviser and production consultant became friends with one of the world’s cinema treasures, the Finnish film-maker, archivist, festival programmer, author and animateur, Peter von Bagh. Peter died in September 2014 but left behind an unrivalled and enduring legacy of recordings, films, program notes and other scholarship rarely equalled. Neil is now curator of The Peter von Bagh Archives for all his audio and video interviews and undertakes this role in conjunction with The Criterion Collection in New York.He is thus in significant part responsible for ensuring that Peter’s legacy remains available to cinephiles around the world.

Peter von Bagh

Neil has begun publishing selections of the email correspondence he had with Peter between 2011-2014 and with his permission I plan to do a little bit of editing, add in some stills and pictures and re-publish the exchanges on the filmalert101 blog. 

Here’s Neil:

I am planning over the coming months to post on my Facebook page a selection of email exchanges between myself and the late film historian, director, writer and festival guru, Peter von Bagh. The emails cover a four year period and I shall not be posting any content that was personal or private between Peter and I, or material which discusses other individuals or business matters that I dealt with on Peter's behalf. The purpose of posting these is to share with you Peter's great love of film and his vast knowledge of the subject.

I first came to know Peter in 2010 via the director of the Cinematheque Suisse, Hervé Dumont. As some of you know I have quite a large archive of rare films and I would share these films with various archives and folk in the film world. Peter was an incredible collector of films himself and so our connection was sealed!

I would just like to thank both Peter's daughter, Anna, and son, Juhana, for their kind permission in allowing me to post the content of our email exchanges.

I hope you enjoy reading them and I'm happy to answer any queries that may crop up from them.

From: Peter von Bagh 
Date: Sunday, 23 January 2011 08:05
To: Neil McGlone 
Subject: Re: wish list (preliminary)

Dear Neil                                                             
Something I must report to you. I was in Bologna, and we are feverishly trying to put together a Conrad Veidt series. My original obvious thought is to have Tony Kaes as the chief man in this - and then I went to one of his old messages and found out that he had mailed all of your archive list, with warmest recommendations... and I the fool had not had time to concentrate to it. So I have become a fan only retardedly.
Anyway, as you have probably been connected with Tony about this theme, this wish list comes as a repeat - anyway I send it to you...

Conrad Veidt in 1918/1920 (did you know that he made 16 films in 1920 alone? Caligari was only one of them!)
Es werde Licht (1918)
Prostitution (1st and 2nd part)
/1919)
Wahnsinn (1919)
Wenn Tote sprechen (1917)
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1918)
Prinz Kuckuck (1919)
Graf on Cagliostro (1920)
Nachtgestalten (1920)
Patience (1920)
Kurfürstendamm (1920)
Moriturus (1920) 
Menschen im Rausch (1921)
Weltbrand Abend--Nacht--Morgen (1920)

Cordially
Peter

Neil *A Conrad Veidt strand did appear at the 2011 Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. I can report that I managed to track down a few of the films from the list, but sadly not many!

From: Peter von Bagh

Date: Tuesday, 22 February 2011 11:02
To: Neil McGlone 
Subject: Re: Maman Colibri (1929)

Dear Neil
Back from New York - 3-4 days only. And the great surprise waiting: MAMAN COLIBRI... I'll try to see it right today.
Then a shock... THERESE RAQUIN - isn't it one of the greats believed to be lost entirely...? But - as the international saying goes - "nothing is impossible for Neil..."
Cordially
Peter

Julien Duvivier

Neil: *Peter's emails often amused me with his little comments. We both shared a great love of Julien Duvivier and both believed his work deserved much greater recognition, so he was always excited when I was able to track one down that he'd not seen for a while. As for THERESE RAQUIN, well no, this was a film from 1928 by Jacques Feyder that is considered lost and proved impossible to find as you might expect!

From: Peter von Bagh 
Date: Friday, 25 February 2011 06:18
To: Neil McGlone 
Subject: Re: Silent Movies

Cordial thanks - I'm of course interested of all three, two of which I can also follow entirely (Danish, German). Great! And as said, Rentschler is one of the best film writers I know.
--- Warmest regards, Peter

----- Original Message -----
From: Neil McGlone
To: Peter von Bagh
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 1:31 AM
Subject: Silent Movies

Dear Peter,

Thanks for your email and I hope you had a good time in New York.

I received a number of films from Eric Rentschler last week. He sent me a few silent movies and I wondered if you might be interested in any of them:

Der Absturz (Ludwig Wolf, 1922, Danish intertitles)
Die grüne Manuela, Die (E. A. Dupont, 1923, Dutch intertitles)
Opfer das Hasses (Hans Marschall, 1923, German Intertitles)

If any of them are of interest then please let me know and I will send them on to you. I can confirm that I have a friend who is now preparing english subtitles for the Dupont and another friend working on english subtitles for Der Absturz.

Kind regards,

Neil: 
*Some of you may not know this, but Peter spoke and could read many foreign languages. To my knowledge he could speak all Scandinavian languages, Italian, English, Russian, German and French. Eric "Rick" Rentschler is Professor of German Languages and Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on German cinema.

From: Peter von Bagh 

Date: Wednesday, 30 March 2011 03:25
To: Neil McGlone 
Subject: Re: Silent Film Trade

Dear Neil
First,.great that you will be back in action. Your activity is one of the internationally poignant ones left in this pigsty situation developing everywhere.
Second of course, sincere thanks of the forthcoming discs.
Third, I must come back to details in the evening when I return from work. Yet, of course you will have the pass. And as to your coming in due time to Helsinki (you seem like to travel, and that is a great thing), you are free to have either my working room (my old home) which is not perhaps on a hotel level but is full of books, on film for instance, so my film friends use to like it a lot. That would economize a lot of your stay.
As to the travel details, I might forward that part of your letter to the office - they'd know better.
Cordially
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: Neil McGlone
To: Peter von Bagh
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:01 AM
Subject: Re: Silent Film Trade

Dear Peter,

Hope you are well and apologies for bothering you at what I am sure must be a very busy time for you.

Im pleased to report that the films listed in the email below will be with me later this week and I am also planning on sending you an updated list next week which will have well over 100 new titles including some quite exciting new titles I have acquired via several trades with other collectors.

I am in the process of also hoping to book my trip to Finland and wondered if it was ok to ask you a couple of questions regarding my trip and the logistics.

My plan is to arrive in Helsinki on Saturday 11th June and stay in the city for about 3-4 days then take a flight to Rovaniemi on the 14th June (my birthday, haha!). Looking at the Midnight Sun Film Festival website I can see a few places are recommended to stay and these seem to be in a place called Luosto or would you recommend staying in Sodankylä itself?. Am I right in thinking its relatively easy for me to get a bus or train from Rovaniemi to Luosto and am I right in reading that there is then a regular bus service from Luosto to Sodankylä where the Festival is held?

I know you have very kindly offered to give me a pass for the Festival but are you sure you would not like me to contribute something towards the cost of the pass as I would be more than happy to do so?

My plan was then to travel back to Helsinki from Luosto via Rovaniemi by train on the morning of Monday 20th June. I realise this is more expensive than a flight and its also a 10 hour train journey, but I do love travelling by train and it would be a great way for me to see Finland. I took a train journey round Denmark, Sweden and Norway last year in May and loved it. I am then intending on leaving Finland on the 21st June and taking the ferry over to Tallinn and spending a few days in Estonia before flying back home to England.

I would appreciate any helpful comments you may have about how realistic my travelling expectations may be whilst I am in Finland and any tips about accommodation whilst I am at the Festival as Im happy to book somewhere either in Luosto or Sodankylä, whichever you think would be more sensible.

Thanks as always and look forward to hearing from you again soon,

Neil

*This was to be my first visit to Finland and the Midnight Sun Film Festival. Peter was so kind in not only giving me a pass for the festival but also in allowing me to stay in what was actually his office in Helsinki. The room was like an Aladdin's Cave of filmic treasures. It was literally wall-to-wall film books. Gabe Klinger can vouch for this as I know he stayed at Peter's apartment the following year. The man's generosity was without bounds.

Vale Ettore Scola

Barely a few days have passed since Franco Citti's death and now we hear that another great name of the postwar Italian cinema Ettore Scola has also passed on, at the age of 84.

Scola directed all or part of 38 feature films and wrote or partially wrote a lot more, maybe 60 or so. He was working in the film industry from the age of 21 or so and stayed there until his death a day or two ago on 19 January 2016. The world has focussed on Bowie and Rickman and now Glen Frey of the Eagles has passed on. It’s the old story of where you need subtitles your audience drops off immediately. Wikipedia is up to date.

I cant confess to having seen all of or anywhere near all of his films. Many were made for and played to domestic audiences only, though I assume that in the days of Tony Zeccola’s Metropolitan Cinema in Brunswick (ex-Hoyts Padua) and when Charlie Palombo of World Films was operating many of Scola's movies would have come here, almost certainly un-subtitled, and found a niche with the local Italian diaspora. 

My particular favourite was his Passione d’Amore (Italy, 1981) with Bernard Giraudeau, the gorgeous Laura Antonelli and Valeria D'Obici.  It played the 1982 MFF and has had a long life afterwards as the source material for Sondheim’s wonderful opera Passion.

Rewards  and honours were many and you got the impression that Scola lived a good, happy life in an industry which recognised his talents with much opportunity.

On DVD and Blu-ray- David Hare looks at new Blu-ray releases by Visconti, Wenders and Richard Quine

Rocco and His Brothers

Some advance grabs from the gorgeous L'Immagine Ritrovato 2015 4k restoration of Rocco e Suoi Fratelli of 1960. These are from the first official Blu-ray release on Spanish Divisa label. with only Spanish audio and subs for linguistic options. Masters of Cinema in the UK will be releasing a transfer from the same 4k master in March with copious extras including an extremely rare French audio dub, and English subs. Rocco is my own favorite Visconti marriage of cinematic verismo and stylized operatic action with male sexuality driving the soup. Between them Renato Salvatore and Alain Delon represent the height of Luchino hunkdom, after the glorious episode with then Luchino BF Massimo Girotti and the Communist "lo Spagnolo" (Elio Marcuzzo) who is in love with him in L' Ossessione way back in 1943 and the birth of so called "neo-realism". Boxing promoter Roger Hanin adds a more directly gay hunk intermediary to all this barely suppressed horniness. The sequence of Hanin wrestling Salvatore to the floor to "overpower" him with the camera cutting away from the impending male to male sexual action to flickering tv images of nude male "classical" art is always worth the price of admission. Visconti's best film.

The American Friend

Criterion's new American Friend from a new 4K restoration. Wender's best film, and for the scenes with Nick Ray a reminder of a time back when lofts in Soho were cheap and nasty spaces only acceptable to starving artists in then edgy downtown Manhattan. Another world ago..... It's awful how much downtown Manhattan has changed. And I haven't been back since the late 1990s. Back in Sydney last month the entire NorthWest dockside of the central city (the old Walsh Bay) has turned into a hideous mini Dubai with vile green and black skyscrapers looking like giant anal warts but with a lovely but pitifully small token parkland as a concession to public amenity. This was the last living breathing part of the original working harbor. The early 20th century docks and sheds have long gone. I think when every old Harbor city loses its maritime heritage it spells the end and and the fouling flood of gentrification. Ditto London docklands and all those vile waterside apartments for Etonian spiv drug dealers and Tory merchant bankers..

Bell, Book and Candle.

A fine transfer, as to be expected from Twilight Time and Grover Crisp's team at Sony for the meticulous mastering. The resolution of detail and the perfect color timing is so fine you can see subtle changes in makeup, wig hairlines and almost every pencil line in Novak's "Witch" eyebrows. There's no doubting Will Krupp's point about the gay text. (“A good portion of the flamboyantly outre feeling of BB & C can also be traced to the original play, which author John Van Druten always acknowledged as a comic allegory for gay life in mid century Manhattan”). Even Jack Lemmon's supporting part as Nicky the brother/drummer/warlock is not gender specific when it refers to his love life. In fact his hookup with the bogus witchcraft author, played with wonderful pure New York method line reading of Van Druten's text by "Sidney"/Ernie Kovaks implies they have hooked up in more ways than one.

At one point Sidney says to Nicky/Lemmon "you're irresistible"! Another trait of this great disc is the clarity of Jimmy Wong Howe's luscious camera movements into and back from Novak and the cat, a clear evidence of Quine's nurturing and adoration of Novak through the supple graceful mise en scene.

Which leads me to my first cinephile heresy of the day. I frankly think the partnership of Novak and Stewart in this is superior to Vertigo and I frankly prefer the Quine as a movie to the Hitchcock. I won't delve too far into this but to say Quine's direction of Novak gives us a wildly superior performance to her half phony, half sluttish double part in the Hitch. I actively dislike her in the Hitch and agree with him about Vera MIles. I also have other issues with the picture, including the self consciousness of the narrative conceit. But Novak is so fine in all her Quine pictures, like another actress at another level altogether. And the parallels with Vertigo go further here, than you might expect as though Van Druten or at least screenwriter Daniel Taradash had consciously kept the conceits of Vertigo in mind while writing this very moving (beneath all the whimsy) subject of acknowledging genuine affection. In Quine's wonderful Pushover (USA, 1954) which debuts Novak as a star, Quine embeds the very subject and the impossibilities of a love affair within the context of a Noir world with Fred MacMurray as the chump. Quine badly needs resurrection and re-appraisal. Peter Kemp, if he needed the booze to make films this good, I raise a glass!

My coolness on Vertigo goes back a long way. The one thing I think works best in it is Hermann's score. As for Novak's performance surely a lot of the blame has to rest with Hitchcock's screenplay and his own direction of her. She's simply guided to Dutchess as Madeleine, as she had a year earlier for George Sidney in Jeanne Eagels but at least that movie is bedded down in Sidney's general let's have a party atmosphere even at the melodrama's shrillest moments. And she basically just slums it as Judy. Not to mention the sheer nerve edging ultra middlebrow annual S&S etc etc Canonification of titles via received fucking wisdom. (You and I need to walk quietly wearing a sign saying "unclean" Peter Kemp). And surely it would be churlish to deny fans and Quine himself a happily hetero reading of the text and performances which all work for me perfectly in tandem with the gay levels. And surely Miss Novak's own sexuality itself has always been at the forefront of the giant question mark thought bubble in the sky?

.....The absolute low point in the Hitch is that fucking nun ringing the fucking bells. At this point it's beyond camp. And yes the Boileau-Narcejac shoulders a lot of the blame. When a great artist takes his own hero worship too seriously he makes art films. Not movies.