Some men dream #1

by Ryland Walker Knight

Unfaithfully Yours, Preston Sturges, 1948
shot by Victor Milner

Kill your clock.

by Ryland Walker Knight

—We deal in reversals here; we battle for the light.
You've probably heard of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule by now. Likewise, you've probably seen the "quiz" Dennis put together this summer. Some people asked me whether I was going to answer these questions. I thought I wasn't going to, as these quizzes always take far too long, even though they can be fun, for a nut like me. But this evening, prompted further, I went ahead and killed time (procrastinated) with this bit of silly. Hope you dig it.

1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film. Barry Lyndon behind 2001, though that can reverse depending on what I've seen last.

2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil. You can probably guess that I'll say the digital trending: for the image, for history, for preservation (perhaps this is misguided), for expression, for democracy, for hifalutin theory, for grainy purple skylines.

3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)? Newman.

4) Best Film of 1949. Hmn, lots of goodies, including Ozu and Reed and Ophuls and Ford. I'm tempted to say Late Spring but, well, my heart and soul belong to Tati: Jour de fête.

5) Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)? Guess I'll say Barrymore.

6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché? Far too often, duh.

7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw? Maybe Yojimbo.

8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)? Lorre all the way.

9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970). My favorite movie ever would qualify if you stretched that parenthetical to include 1998, but in that window, I'd wager Resnais's Hiroshima lament is pretty tough to beat.


10) Favorite animal movie star. If it isn't Balthazar or Babe or Baby, then it's got to be Mr. Smith.

11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema. The film critic's ego. Or, most film criticism at that. (Although, the flip of that is that we all take this niche world too seriously, too.) The movies? Hell, they're a damned irresponsible lot the whole of them, which is why I love'm. It's nice to indulge this life.

12) Best Film of 1969. Andrei Rublev of course.

13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray. Theatrically, Harry Potter 6; DVD, A Matter of Life and Death; "otherwise", Duelle.

14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film. Probably The Long Goodbye behind that Western with Julie Christie.

15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print? I'm biased, like anybody, with too many friends online to choose from, so I'll draw straws and, arbitrarily, pick Andy Rector.

16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!) ...

17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)? Tomei

18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence. I almost want to ape Sean and say Sunrise—though the Hitchcock and the Minelli sure are spectacular—but what if I just said Speed Racer? Could that work?

19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date. Tough to call, but my prejudices would point to Miami Vice of course.

20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre. Wait: isn't that every movie? Aren't the best ones just not even about that but, instead, synthesize the self-reflexive nature of the medium into their stories? Aren't you forced to ask that of every film? To get as Cavell as possible, I'll vote for The Awful Truth.

21) Best Film of 1979. Stalker over Alien though Manhattan still holds a special, sentimental spot.

22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies. I can't speak to any veracity, but I sure do love The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division). Alien, duh.

24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film. The Conversation behind The Godfather.

25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see. I'm feeling the Master and Commander love, but what if Dennis Hopper had played Ripley for a decade?

26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film. The end of The Fury, easy.

27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor. Pfffff. Um, Powell and Pressbuger.

28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!) ...

29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)? Crash.

30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film. Sweet and Lowdown.

31) Best Film of 1999. Beau Travail over Sicilia! by a finale.

32) Favorite movie tag line. "Family isn't a word, it's a sentence." [The Royal Tenenbaums]

33) Favorite B-movie western. Can't say I know many, to be honest, but if 40 Guns counts, count me in.

34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work. There are several ways to answer this question. Arthur Symons solely for Desplechin's Esther Kahn, which may be the best movie of the 2000s (or close to).

35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)? Oofda. Susan Vance.

36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie. When "Nighshift" comes on in 35 Rhums.

37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping? Abstain

38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!) (1) Terrence Malick // (2) Cary Grant // (3) Irene Dunne // (4) Mathieu Amalric // (5) Preston Sturges

—This lady, too, I guess.

Viewing Log #1: Settling OK [6/24/09 to 7/4/09]

by Ryland Walker Knight

[I hope to make this a weekly feature, for me as much as for you, since it seems I'm able to watch a lot more over here, and I'd like to track my thought a little better than simply within my moleskins since, in theory, among other things, the internet is forever. And I don't want to use Twitter for this for some reason. I must say: watching all these, that is being this indulgent, has been super fun.]

• Laura [Otto Preminger, 1944] Knotty and endlessly interpretable. One of those movies you can tell straight away is sure to be a classic. Also, the whodunit is hardly a hard puzzle, and that is hilariously on point.
• Christmas in July [Preston Sturges, 1940] # Kind of perfect, and surprisingly pictorial for Sturges. Really appreciate both how prol-trumpeting and how brisk the picture winds up: luck is swift, and stretches beyond class; in fact, it may even leaves class behind. Perfect for the 4th.

• Ishtar [Elaine May, 1987] Really doesn't deserve the bad rap. Elaine May is smarter than most movie people, especially the brand of comedy coming out of Ho'wood now. All her pictures are about the world, not just bedrooms.
• Ma Vie Sexuelle... [Arnaud Desplechin, 1996] # (scattered twenty minutes) For fun, but chiefly for an image.
• Daisy Kenyon [Otto Preminger, 1947] This made me sad. Dana Andrews is good, and Joan is something else, but Henry Fonda is spectacular. Also, I hate phones, too.

• Public Enemies [Michael Mann, 2009] # Second time was better. More soon elsewhere.

• Esther Kahn [Arnaud Desplechin, 2000] # (twenty more minutes) For an ongoing project.

• Holiday [George Cukor, 1938] # Oh, I want that life. Cary Grant, man, is undoubtedly the best.

• Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen [Michael Bay, 2009] I said plenty, if not too much over here.
• Marnie [Alfred Hitchcock, 1964] # (scattered hour or so) Was interrupted a lot. Its formal rigor still amazes me.
• Rebecca [Alfred Hitchcock, 1940] # Too long, too talky. Still, some great stuff, as ever, but Selznick's fingers are felt too much.
• Bonjour Tristesse [Otto Preminger, 1958] Simply fabulous. So wobbly and ironic. Nivens is too, too good for his own (the movie's) good. And Seberg... why hello.

• The Passionate Friends [David Lean, 1949] Better than Brief Encounter. Yup, I said it. I mean, come on, this one has Claude Rains. Perfect for early AM grogginess and transitional sadness.

• Esther Kahn [Arnaud Desplechin, 2000] # (maybe twenty minutes) For an ongoing project.

• A New Leaf [Elaine May, 1971] # One of the great films, I'm fairly certain. Why can't there be more black as hell comedies? I'd like to write more about this one, and about comedy in general, and why the best ones organize money in complicated ways.

Stand up and crowd. Happy 4th of July!

by Ryland Walker Knight

IN THE STREET


ON YOUR FACES


AT NIGHT LIGHTS





WE LOOK LUCK

IN THE EYE

The Coens as passionate witnesses.

by Ryland Walker Knight

After seeing No Country For Old Men I did some thinking. I talked to friends. I read reviews. I was reminded of an almost tossed off reference to their work by Stanley Cavell in his book, Cities of Words. It comes in the 16th chapter, which focuses on Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, in the first three paragraphs. I decided I would quote the passage here as a kind of placeholder while my thoughts continue to develop in regards to the Coens' work, and how we may best evaluate it beyond "Is it good? Is it bad?" Also, I want to interrogate my previous stance on their films that I remember dismissing as "bad." I've already been proven wise to rethink their rather astounding The Man Who Wasn't There, which I now am thinking of as a possible flip side companion to The Hudsucker Proxy: fate literally fights for Tim Robbins' Norville Barnes; nobody, not even Tony Shaloub, really, fights for Billy Bob Thornton's Ed Crane.

A summary of a film comedy written and directed by Preston Sturges suffers most in missing the continuous, virtuosic precision and intelligence of his dialogue, in no case more than in that of The Lady Eve. Sturges is one of the most remarkable mids to have found expression in Hollywood. Not until after the end of the Second World War, with the reception in America of the outburst of filmmaking in Europe -- including films of Truffaut, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman -- did an American audience become accustomed to finding a film written and directed by the same person. And Sturges' tight corpus of comparatively small-scale films occupies a treasure place in the hearts of those who care about the world and art of film; for example, beyond The Lady Eve, there are Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story and Hail the Conquering Hero. An instance of this esteem is recorded in the title of the Coen brothers' recent film, O Brother Where Art Thou? (with George Clooney and John Turturro), one of the most notable films of the past few years. It is worth taking a minute to say how that title inscribes a Sturges film.

The hero of Sullivan's Travels (played by Joel McRea, who is also the male lead in the remarriage comedy The Palm Beach Story, an interesting actor of considerable range, but less well known than the male stars, his natural competitors, of the remarriage comedies of the period discussed in this book) is a filmmaker whose great success is based on making thrillers with little intellectual or political content, and who wishes to make a film about something true and important, about suffering. The travels of the film's title are those taken by this director, who escapes the world of Hollywood escape in order to experiece the suffering of, after all, most people in the world, in preparation for making his important film of witness. The narrative takes him to the bottom of the world, in the form of being falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to a southern chain gang, where he discovers that the laughter provided by a Hollywood cartoon may provide the only rare moments of respite in a stretch of fully desperate existence. He contrives to be recognized in this place of anonymity, and returns to Hollywood to apply his hard-won insight, which means leaving unrealized his film of suffering.

The title of his projected work was to be O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coen film, which opens in a southern chain gang, realizes this unrealized work by, as it announces, adapting (or more accurately, silently remembering names, and imaging sequences to realize them, from) episodes of the Odyssey (the Sirens, the Cyclops), taking as the overall adventure the return of an extraordinarily resourceful, or resilient, man to his native town to reclaim his sought-after wife (and children). The challenge the Coens take up, or depart from, in Sturges' fantasy of witnessing suffering, and which they seem to declare as part of their film (indeed of their corpus of fascinating films), is neither to record nor to distract from suffering. It is rather to witness, on the part of people who recognize, despite all, that life may still hold adventure, say hold out a perfectionist aspiration, but that to sustain a desire to meet the fantastic, unpredictable episodes of everyday modern existence, one must, and one can, rationally and practically, imagine that one will, at need, discover in oneself, in the register of passion, the resourceful persistence of Odysseus, and the mixed, but preponderant, favor of the Gods, call it fortune.

Perhaps we can use this as a kind of springboard into the Coens' pictures to investigate their particular expression of the American experience. I will return to this, along with my fellows here at VINYL, at a later date, perhaps as soon as December 1st, perhaps as late as December 25th. The point is: December will see some Coens writing from at least a few of us here, taking in, as best as time and space and ability will allow, the scope of their work through this notion of witnessing.

"America is a place, fictional no doubt, in which that happiness can be found."

by Ryland Walker Knight

September 11th is huge. So huge it compels people to place purple fliers in the shape of over-sized "9/11" on a deliciously green hill on the aptly named Memorial Glade outside Doe on campus here at UC Berkeley. I wanted to vomit. I said to my friend, "This is a real day, right? They don't do that kind of shit on December 7th, do they?" He replied that "they" do not and that today is, in fact, a real day. It felt good to be affirmed. But you know what? That misses the point, as funny as it may have been to me. The point is not that such displays are naive and silly. The point is that such displays are perfectly American. This place breeds that kind of ostentation, and entitlement. "These are my feelings, writ as large as possible, and you will have to deal with them. I will force them on you." Funny, I find the sentiment adorable, even rousing, in films like 25th Hour (a personal touchstone). But stapled purple fliers on a green hill? Please: there's no magic there. America is a magical place. It only exists as a myth, as a fiction, continually rewritten by its people through its events small and big, domestic and abroad: everything everywhere.

The words of the title of this post come from that Stanley Cavell essay on North by Northwest I mentioned in my brief missive about my Honors Thesis. It's a phrase that continues to astound me, and reverberate in my headspace, when I think about the kinds of American films I cherish. The New World is not a comedy, nor is it really a melodrama (who thinks they have a genre to slot it into?), but its core is in that Cavell aphorism. There is hope in the new world: possibilities abound for life to work. Even in death, America's afterlife thrives in the present. The waters run, the trees sway, the leaves fall. Things continue, and they are beautiful. John Rolfe returns home, anew, and America will embrace him, prepared to propel him forward. 25th Hour's fantasy finale is the same thing. It's also a spirit found in Preston Sturges films. With my fall disbursement I treated myself, finally, to that box set that came out last year. It's fantastic. But it is missing two crucial films: 1944's The Miracle of Morgan Creek and 1948's Unfaithfully Yours. The former stars Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken and cannot be capsulated. The latter is available from Criterion Collection and it is phenomenal, hilarious, and dark. Both are as much about America and its arms-open plenum as the other films I cite. So, on a day like today, I say we salute that which we only continue to lose sight of: the foundational perfectionism, the gumption, and the hilarious hubris of America.


[Trailer 1: Unfaithfully Yours / Trailer 2: The Great McGinty]

[Pic: The Main Salmon River in Idaho, Salmon Falls. As I always say, "I believe in America, and rivers."]

UPDATE, 9/12/07, 5pm: Kevin Lee's most recent Shot-Down picture is Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours. You can read his take here or watch his video essay here. Kevin's project is nothing if not ambitious and extensive but I fear there's a tendency to foreground psychobiography, at least here, comparing Rex Harrison's conductor character to Sturges himself. This can only illuminate so much of the film. I much preferred reading the excerpts from the other sources, and figuring out what made those links between quotes significant for Kevin's argument. Perhaps I can offer more thoughts later after I re-watch the film. Still, do read Kevin's work: he is a fine writer, and committed.