Find This Film a Home: Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's Hollywood

Getting the word out about films that have a spotty home video history

Directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Written by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Narrated by James Mason
Edited by Trevor Waite and Dan Carter
Music by Carl Davis

Common complaints lodged against contemporary culture are that we're too celebrity-obsessed, all media-drenched, searching for those fifteen minutes, and that our movies are silly, featherweight, and too focused on spectacle. Kevin Brown and David Gill's thirteen-part, television series, Hollywood, provides a longer view of history and reasserts how our current obsessions were just as rampant then (perhaps more so) as they are now. The evidence includes the enormous crowds that greeted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford everywhere they went in the world, Charlie Chaplin's tramp character becoming an universally-recognized symbol, and the unsafe, often deadly, working conditions that sprung up around the wild plots pursued by filmmakers. Modern Hollywood can hardly compare. 

The directing duo attack the American movie industry of the teens and twenties from all angles. Their first move is to bury the misconceptions that surrounded silent film at the time of the series' release. It's less a problem now with proper restorations and home video releases, but silent film has long been plagued by technical issues. Improper showings on television and repertory theaters built-up its association with super-fast speeds and dinky, public domain piano music. Hollywood shows the world of difference that proper display makes. Brownlow and Gill then go on to interview a succession of actors, directors, and cameramen who eloquently make the case for the films of the time as worthy of serious artistic consideration. The bits about the elaborate palaces where movies were shown and the full orchestras that often accompanied their screenings will make you weep over the sad state of multiplexes. A movie was an event in a way it rarely is today. 

The sheer amount of historical detail present is miraculous. The background work for the series was started just in time to catch the main players of the era, snapping up informative interviews with Colleen Moore, King Vidor, and Karl Brown. It's a sad fact, but if the leaders of the project had waited even a decade later to begin, many of the principal subjects would have passed away. The beginnings of the film industry are shown to be wild, weird, and full of contradictions. The earliest studios weren't even set-up in California, but in New York and New Jersey. Gangsters were hired to star in front of the camera and bribed by rival outlets to break those cameras with bullets and beatings. The independents eventually moved to the west coast to escape the stranglehold of the big studios. 

Hollywood depicts an odd time in world history. Around the globe, monarchies and democracies existed within short distances from each other. World War I destroyed the European film industry, allowing American film to start its foreign domination that continues today. The Russian Revolution sowed the seeds of the conflict that would take up the latter half of the twentieth century. Within the movie capitol, cars, trains, and horses were all still in use. The west was dying, but given one last chance at immortality. Women and immigrants were given brief opportunities to ascend to the highest levels of artistic achievement despite living in a land that was still hugely racist and sexist (women wouldn't gain the right to vote until twenty years after cinema's start). 

My one complaint is that the series doesn't dig far enough below the glitz and glamour. The perilous positions camera operators and stuntmen often found themselves in are mentioned, but not fully questioned. The exploitation of masses of people for use as extras gets the same treatment. At one point, a star being interviewed compares the discrimination against "movie people" in the early days of the industry's settlement in California to that faced by African Americans.

Still, discussion of those matters, new broadcasts of Hollywood, and conversion of the program and its supporting materials into HD would help immensely in restoring interest in silent film. Brownlow and Gill's work would be a valuable tool in any film studies course, whether in high school or university. It's a shame it's been left to languish on VHS.


P.S.
The entire series is up on Youtube, but as with all copyrighted material that makes it way to the service, its status there is tenuous. Episode twelve has already been removed. If my description has made you keen to learn more, I'd start watching now.

Something Else: Sleeping Beauty

Random thoughts of random lengths on random films

Directed by Clyde Geronimi

Written by Erdman Penner adapting Charles Perrault's/The Brothers' Grimm/Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty"

Voice acting by Mary Costa (Princess Aurora), Bill Shirley (Prince Phillip), and Eleanor Audley (Maleficent)

Edited by Roy M. Brewer Jr. and Donald Halliday

Production Design by Ken Peterson

*Note: I don't know what the equivalent of "cinematographer" is in animation, so I just put down Ken Peterson. If I wanted to be fully accurate, I'd need to list every animator/visual effects artist.

Sleeping Beauty can be difficult to analyze. The characters are one-dimensional, there's barely anything going on thematically, and the plot is a wisp. Princess Aurora's only defining traits are that she's pretty and can sing. Her only desire is to get married. Prince Phillip is a drip, with the features of a Ken doll and the personality to match. Likewise, his one want is betrothal.

The title gives the wrong impression. The Beauty of note only appears for 18 minutes, long enough only to sing to some animals and prick her finger. If she is labeled the protagonist, the pacing seems lumpy. The majority of the action is jammed into the beginning and end, with a long, barren section in the middle. However, if our sympathies are re-centered on the three fairies, the structure makes more sense and the emotional arc becomes satisfactory.

Despite the aforementioned issues, Sleeping Beauty is an absolute pleasure for one simple reason: its animation and design are unique and astounding to behold. As a biochemist impersonating a cinephile with a limited vocabulary, the overuse of stunning, striking, amazing, and all their permutations in film writing is hugely frustrating. All of those words are accurate descriptors, but their "dead to language" nature doesn't properly communicate the experience of watching Sleeping Beauty, so I'll try to be more specific.

Next time you're perusing the film, stop on one of the scenes of Princess Aurora or Prince Phillip gallivanting about the woods. Notice that there is a clear distinction between the foreground (where the characters usually reside), the middle ground, and the background. The three look flat and separated from each other. This is different from the style developed in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, where fluid animation gives the impression of depth to the humans and the scenery is highly detailed.

The effect is like watching a stained glass window wrung through the Technicolor process or an illustrated medieval scroll that has gained autonomy. I began watching while eating dinner, and once the film opened with hordes of multicolored knights and villagers lined up at a castle, I had to stop just so I could gawk at what was onscreen. It's a cliché to say so, but nothing else looks like it, certainly nothing in the past or future of the Disney canon. If you venture outside of Walt's domain, Samurai Jack and The Secret of Kells come close, but they take the deliberately dimensionless aesthetic to further extremes. The style extends to the people. When in profile, they look cut-out and have multiple, discrete lines demarcating different parts of their bodies and clothing. When they move, this effect is slightly dampened and they appear fuller. Taken together, they twirl from 2-d to 3-d and back again in a mind-boggling manner.

Perhaps Sleeping Beauty's greatest asset is the malevolent Maleficent. She is a successful villain based not so much on what she does, but how she looks while doing it. Her scant few actions boil down to placing the famous curse and turning into a dragon after ineffectually detaining Phillip. And yet, she is awesome. Her garb of a black robe with purple lining and a horned headdress hides whatever human form might exist underneath, turning her into a shade or a wraith.

Walk? Ha! Walking is for mere mortals. Maleficent glides. Normal entrances are below her. A Maleficent entrance requires nothing less than transforming into an ominous green orb of energy and laughing maniacally. If you're inclined to approach Disney through its history of poor female representation, you could find your way to seeing her as the hero. She relishes the chance to disrupt a safe, hetero-normative relationship and attempts to bring down a monarchy by slowly torturing its boring heir. She even gets the film's most affecting scene, when she cries out in distress upon seeing her pet crow turned to stone. She is an ancient vamp and a middle ages femme fatale to Aurora’s straight-laced peasant/princess. How could you not love her?

Review: The Babadook

Directed by Jennifer Kent
Written by Jennifer Kent
Starring Essie Davis (Amelia) and Noah Wiseman (Samuel)
Cinematography by Radek Ladczuk
Edited by Simon Njoo
Released in 2014

I'm happy to report that Jennifer Kent's debut avoids all of the problems that tend to befall modern, low-budget horror. The cinematography dodges the trend of desaturation and shakiness, the supernatural conceit is used to explore a real fear, the ambiguity of the eponymous monster is still present at the end, the sound design is oppressive, and the film is focused on two magnificent performances by Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman. 

Befitting a story centered on a cursed kid's book, there's an appealing exaggeration to the costuming, sets, and sound. The most common colors are black, blue, and white. This leads to a light/dark contrast that I'm not sure has a set purpose or scheme behind it (someone more observant will have to figure that out). If nothing else, it's visually stimulating. Red shows up as well, but less frequently and with more impact. Near the beginning, the hue only appears on the cover of the main book. As the plot progresses, red pops into pillows and furniture. After a key development, Amelia prominently dons a scarlet dress. The pattern is clearer here. 

Common noises like a finger massaging a temple or a hand gripping a bar are amplified for maximum discomfort. Even if you close your eyes, The Babadook can still get you. The heightened approach extends to the casting. The secondary characters all look slightly animated, as if they were chosen based on an immediately-noticeable physical trait as much as their acting ability. 

Special credit needs to be given to the team of artists that created the Babadook. If little seeds of German Expressionism can be found elsewhere, then that style achieves full bloom through the creature. Like the robotic workers in Metropolis or the muddy marsh in Sunrise, the monster is the externalization of an emotion. In this case, Amelia's grief over the death of her husband, her frustration with her son, and the worries over her lagging career (you can all of these play out perfectly on Davis’s face as well). The Babadook is a triumph of design and execution. Armed with elaborate claws and a Cheshire Cat-wide grin and draped in shabby formal wear, he (it?) resembles a being out of a foggy daydream induced by a 30's Disney short or an old silent film. Such a comparison is explicitly courted in a sequence where Amelia pictures the Babadook skulking around a Méliès-like flick playing on T.V.

Amelia and Samuel’s bogeyman is the rarest of rare in current cinema, an effective and understated use of CGI. I am unsure how exactly the Babadook was created. It looks like some combination of stop-motion, traditional animation, and computer generation. However, I doubt it could exist without modern aid, and, since the technology allows anything to be depicted, Kent could have easily put all of her money on the screen. Instead, she employs the Jaws method of showing only pieces of the antagonist. Thankfully, the full beast is never revealed, only hinted at, leaving its final form to the audience’s imagination.

P.S.

I’ve seen grumblings that The Babadook isn’t scary enough, and that the movie is a failure for this reason. Setting aside how subjective that opinion is, the other elements work far too well for it to be true. I will warn you that if you go in expecting a 90 minute frightfest or showers of gore, you’re going to be disappointed. It would be better to approach The Babadook as a psychologically and emotionally intense drama with tinges of the paranormal.  

P.P.S.

How fun is it to say Babadook? Baah-Baah DOOK DOOK DOOK! 

Image Association: Seven Samurai's Circles, Triangles, Lines, and Squares

Word-free critiques 

P.S.
A tip of the hat to Jonathan Rosenbaum is necessary. His article, Lines and Circles, about 2001: A Space Odyssey and Playtime partly inspired this collection of screen captures.

New Horizons: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Unearthing the outré 

Directed by Thom Andersen

Written by Thom Andersen

Narrated by Encke King

Cinematography by Deborah Stratman 

Edited by Seung-Hyun Yoo

Released in 2003 (limited) and 2014 (wide)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo had its premiere in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art. Present at that screening was The Elgin theater owner, Ben Barenholtz. Unafraid of the somewhat icy reception, he programmed it constantly in his own cinema. El Topo ran for around half a year, always late at night at The Elgin. Eventually, fans of the film John Lennon and Allen Klein helped distribute it across the United States, to (marginally) wider acclaim. The success of David Lynch’s Eraserhead followed a similar path. Once its years-long gestation was finished in 1977, it was shown at the Filmex film festival in Los Angeles, where the same Barenholtz recognized its peculiarly fascinating qualities and convinced a local theater to show it in the same way as El Topo. Eraserhead expanded from there.

As shown by the two aforementioned titles, a few of the key aspects to the development of a cult are backing by an influential individual, a period of limited availability that allows word-of-mouth to build, and, finally, a wider roll-out that builds off that hype. Due to the increasingly fractured, niche, and immediate way media is consumed, it has become far harder for cults to evolve in this fashion. Non-mainstream titles can show up for a single week in theaters, or not at all if you don’t live in a big city, and quickly move to home video/digital distribution from there, only to slip away into the vast ether of the internet. Since there are a multitude of voices online, all battling for attention, the people who champion these films can get lost as well.

At first impression, a three hour cine-essay about the history of L.A.’s representation in film may not sound like the stuff cult objects are made of. However, the hazy legality of the footage used created the exact right environment for Los Angeles Plays Itself to forge its reputation as El Topo and Eraserhead did before it. In order to avoid possible lawsuits, Andersen limited screenings to repertory houses and university theaters for a decade. Advanced praise came from critics and hardcore cinephiles determined enough to seek it out, or lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. In the past few years, LAPI showed up on Pirate Bay and Youtube, was recently released on Blu-ray, and is currently streaming on Netflix. Its inch-by-inch rise is one of few such events to occur post-millennium.

Summarizing Andersen’s points outside of the full context of the work makes him sound cranky and irrational. If located in a regular written review, his critiques would be roundly dismissed. The original Gone in 60 Seconds is posited as a successor to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Sylvester Stallone’s trashy Cobra is picked on, among other things, for its misrepresentation of the city’s geography. Consensus classics Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and L.A. Confidential draw Andersen’s ire for both their cynicism and their attempts to posit well-known historical events as secret conspiracies. Many more are attacked for associating specific architectural styles with villainy and decay.

It doesn’t always do so, but criticism, like movies in general, offers a chance to step outside ourselves and poke around someone else’s mind. Viewed this way, Andersen’s thoughts are fascinating and highly specific. His general perspective is one I would never come up with on my own and have never encountered while reading other critics. Encke King’s monotone narration diffuses some of the anger and bitterness directed at Los Angeles’ abuse at the hands of Hollywood. The voiceover adds flavors of irony, ambiguity, and humor that help make the contrarianism easier to swallow.

Lose Angeles Plays Itself is equally successful as an act of history. The real affairs that served as jumping-off-points for Chinatown and its descendants are revealed to have been publically voted-on. Mini-movements contained within the film show everyday places like grocery and gas stations morph and degrade through the decades. The arc of Bunker Hill and its short tramway is relayed leading to praise for its depiction in the noir Kiss Me Deadly and the neo-realist The Exiles. The racially driven Zoot Suit and Watts riots are given prominence, with Andersen then going on to chide popular cinema’s failure to tackle these subjects.

If the movie could be distilled down to one point it’s this: Hollywood’s obsession with glamour and spectacle has led to a gross misunderstanding of the city where it (only partially) resides. The most moving portions of LAPI include segments from movies that came out of the UCLA film school, such as Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. In act of resistance to Tinseltown's dominance, Andersen states that these paeans to L.A.’s working class minorities should be help as the true depictions of the city of angels.