Summer flix fix: Plein soleil

I first saw René Clément’s 1960 film, Plein soleil (‘full sun’), at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan during a 1996 reissue prompted by Martin Scorsese, who finagled a limited release through Miramax. I remember that the attendance was rather low that opening weekend evening, and the usher was outside assuring passersby that it was “a good movie.”

    Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the picture stars Alain Delon in his prime, along with Marie Laforêt (a pop singer making her screen debut), and one of France’s finest character actors, Maurice Ronet. Clément co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Gégauff, Claude Chabrol’s main scriptwriter throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. (Chabrol reportedly had little use for Clément, an adherent to the classic forms that the nouvelle vague were then in the process of eradicating.)

    It’s a curious tale of murder, a crime of passion committed by Delon’s disturbed Tom Ripley. Rather than take the convenient route of logic, Clément and Gégauff use Ripley’s madness as a point of reference and build from there. Shot outdoors in the blistering sun or in overlit, sweltering hotel rooms, the picture is tinged with a brusque lack of discipline, mirroring the instability of a man in search of character and acceptance. Delon’s systematic theft of Ronet’s identity enables the script to explore the humiliation and degradation that have dogged his rootless existence. One beautifully acted scene, in which Delon pretends to be Ronet in front of a mirror, was reworked by Gégauff eight years later in his screenplay for Chabrol’s Les Biches.

    (As a footnote worthy of Hollywood Babylon, Gégauff’s most fascinating work was the semi-autobiographical Une partie de plaisir [literally, ‘a piece of pleasure’], which he wrote and — most uncharacteristically — starred in for Chabrol in 1975. A prophetic tale of adultery, power struggles and lies destroying a marriage, it co-starred Gégauff’s actual wife, Danièle, and their daughter, Clemence. Eight years later, in real life, Danièle stabbed her sixty-one-year-old husband to death.)

    Clément spent most of his career riding on the reputation of his one acknowledged classic, Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952), and had something of a hit in 1966 with Paris brûle-t-il? (Is Paris Burning?). Plein soleil — titled Purple Noon in America, the color representing the hue of the Mediterranean where the action takes place — benefits from the invaluable contributions of cinematographer Henri Decaë (on the heels of his successful run of Bob le flambeur, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Les Quatre cents coups and Les Cousins) and editor Françoise Javet. They lend Plein soleil a flavor never to be duplicated in any of the director’s subsequent pictures.

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The Lina Wertmüller Collection

“She underlines the political machination of sex, of domination both in the bedroom and on the battlefield, and displays how the two arenas are intrinsically linked. In her world, titillation comes at the price of war and terrorism, tragedy and deep personal loss.” A review of The Lina Wertmüller Collection, new on Flickhead.

From this moment on

Carol Haney and Bob Fosse illustrate art in motion in Kiss Me Kate (1953).

You can’t hide love

Bulle Ogier & Jean-Pierre Kalfon, c.1967 (click to enlarge)

The Cowboy Angel Rides: Happy Birthday, Zimmy

Above: Everybody must get stoned. Flickhead (foreground) with Nelhydrea Paupér (eyeglasses) and Professor Jeff in 1974, at perhaps the peak of my Dylan worship.

If I could name any one Bob Dylan song as my favorite among the hundreds to choose from, I guess that “Gates of Eden” would be it. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I probably would have gone with “Like a Rolling Stone”. But “Gates of Eden” is the one that I’ve listened to the most…for over thirty-five years. As a teenager, it captured my imagination with its splendid imagery: the motorcycle black Madonna, ships with tattooed sails, utopian hermit monks side saddle on the golden calf. Today it is still very fresh for me, and with each passing year I can appreciate more and more of its labyrinthine center, the poetic address to gluttony, vanity, pride, and the futility of power. It’s a magnificent work, perfect for May 24, 2006, Bob Dylan’s 65th birthday.

Gates of Eden mp3


Gates of Eden

Of war and peace the truth just twists
Its curfew gull just glides
Upon four-legged forest clouds
The cowboy angel rides
With his candle lit into the sun
Though its glow is waxed in black
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden

The lamppost stands with folded arms
Its iron claws attached
To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail
Though it shadows metal badge
All and all can only fall
With a crashing but meaningless blow
No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattooed sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden

With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden

Relationships of ownership
They whisper in the wings
To those condemned to act accordingly
And wait for succeeding kings
And I try to harmonize with songs
The lonesome sparrow sings
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden

The motorcycle black Madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden

The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what's real and what is not
It doesn't matter inside the Gates of Eden

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die
And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what's true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden


Lyrics Copyright © 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music

Dominic Angerame’s Film Screening

Above: Program flyer, click to enlarge

As a filmmaker and cinephile, Dominic Angerame has been behind both the scenes and the lens. On Sunday, June 4, at 7:30pm, the San Francisco Cinematheque celebrates his twenty-five years at the helm of Canyon Cinema, their sister organization and the world-renowned distributor of experimental film, with an overview sampling of work from early urban sketches to his current project. Threads of eros, violence and melancholy weave through the cityscape in the following films: Demonstration (1968-1974), The Mystery of Life (as Discovered in Los Angeles) (1982), Freedom's Skyway (1980), A Ticket Home (1982), Premonition (1995), Anaconda Targets (2004), In the Course of Human Events (1997), Consume (2003), and Untitled (a work-in-progress). Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street (corner of Third), San Francisco. For ticket information: 415-978-ARTS.

Flickhead on Consume

The only sound that’s left, after the ambulances go

Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm & Bob Dylan, 1974

Basement Tapes Vol. 5 (zip file — 93815 KB)

Bob Dylan — guitar, piano, harmonica, vocals
Robbie Robertson — guitar, drums, vocals
Rick Danko — bass, fiddle, vocals
Richard Manuel — piano, drums, vocals
Garth Hudson — organ, piano
(Levon Helm also appears on some tracks)

Recorded in 1967

1. Four Strong Winds

2. The French Girl #1 & #2

3. Joshua Gone Barbados

4. I Forgot to Remember to Forget

5. You Win Again

6. Still in Town

7. Waltzing with Sin

8. Big River

9. Folsom Prison Blues

10. Bells of Rhymney

11. Nine Hundred Miles

12. No Shoes on My Feet

13. Spanish is the Loving Tongue

14. On a Rainy Afternoon

15. I Can't Come in with a Broken Heart

16. Under Control

17. Ol' Roison the Beau

18. I'm Guilty of Loving You

19. Johnny Todd

20. Cool Water

21. Banks of the Royal Canal

22. Po' Lazarus

Can you ID this scene?

Help! Several years ago, Janice Fried did the above illustration, based on a scene from a film. What film, you ask? Good question. We’ve been approached to see if anyone in the audience can make an identification. Janice says it could have been a French film made in the 1930’s or 40’s, but she’s not sure. If the scene looks familiar, please leave your answers in the comment box below, or e-mail them to Flickhead.

Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees

Above: Flickhead and Nelhydrea went before the flood

Basement Tapes Vol. 4 (zip file — 82086 KB)

Bob Dylan — guitar, piano, harmonica, vocals
Robbie Robertson — guitar, drums, vocals
Rick Danko — bass, fiddle, vocals
Richard Manuel — piano, drums, vocals
Garth Hudson — organ, piano
(Levon Helm also appears on some tracks)

Recorded in 1967

1. You Ain't Going Nowhere #1

2. Bourbon Street

3. All American Boy

4. Wild Wood Flower

5. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean

6. Comin' Round the Mountain

7. Flight of the Bumblebee

8. Confidential To Me

9. I'm a Fool for You

10. Next Time on the Highway

11. The Big Flood

12. Don't Know Why They Kick My Dog

13. See You Later, Allen Ginsberg

14. The Spanish Song #1 & #2

15. I Am a Teenage Prayer

16. I'm in the Mood

17. Belchezaar #1 & #2

18. Bring it on Home

19. The King of France

20. If I Lose, Let Me Lose

Found at Last: The Return of Irene Dobson

Following the publication of found scraps of Irene Dobson’s work on Flickhead in April, Eddie Biesel was approached by the lady herself, now living on the outskirts of London and flattered that her thoughts on film aesthetics should have seen the light of day years after they were written. Happily for us, enclosed with her letter were some more recent extracts from her writings.

    Following the Penwicken incident in which she was veritably hounded from the town, Dobson moved to Warwick in 1991 where she read for a BA in Film Studies at the University. Her scholarship can be felt in the new amplitude of her writing voice. Couched in an assured grasp of prose language and film form, the following extracts also elaborate the characteristically Dobsonian theme of the woman alone and the plight of the outsider with her usual grave and singular honesty. These pieces were written between 1997 and 2000.
— Richard Armstrong


Dance with a Stranger
    In the early scene in which Ruth dances with David, she is wearing a satin band around her pale throat. Later on, she sits on a beach with Desmond Cussen. She is holding her head back to catch the sun and is wearing a scarf around her throat. These moments sound ominous knells of the hangman’s rope.
    Like the classical Woman’s Picture, Dance with a Stranger records the biography of a heroine not only scorned in love but scorned by society too. The scene in which Ruth stands in the road outside the house in which David and his upper crust friends enjoy themselves looks back to the climax of Stella Dallas in which Stella gazes through the window at her daughter marrying well. Finally, the rope severs Ruth from the world around her as surely as it will rip one vertebra from another.


Far from Heaven
    Todd Haynes reads the crippling mores of 1950s America as a series of symptoms seen through Kathy’s eyes. Her little girl is rejected at the dance class by the other girls and their mothers when it is rumored that Kathy consorts with a black man. After the little boy is chastised for going in the segregated pool in Miami the pool is seen empty as the white parents pull their children free of the ‘contaminated’ water. We are back in the disease zone of Safe.


The Age of Innocence
    The “country” in which concepts such as “friends” and “trust” don’t matter and to which Newland and Ellen wish to escape exists out of sight between the lines of the discourses of letter, telegram and even Scorsese’s credits, which bind them socially. And in this ‘hieroglyphic’ society the love between Newland and Ellen must also remain hieroglyphic. The log slips in the fire grate when he visits her. The hand he extends her is tacitly rejected. It recalls the moment when they first met and she boldly extended her hand which he didn’t know what to do with!
    Like the artist in Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie, Newland comes away from Ellen at the end unsure whether any of what he had with her was real or whether it was dreamt.


Alice
    The arbitrariness of the scene at Dorothy’s in which men ceaselessly pursue Alice shows how we women find it absurd and oppressive to be pursued by unwanted men. That it happens here because of something the men ate makes it even less to do with anything Alice has done!


Body Snatchers
    The scene in which the little boy has executed a finger painting which is radically different from the other children’s is definitely chilling. We’ve all at school been petrified of appearing to be different.


Taxi Driver
    Cybill is ethereal. Her disembodied head in the back of Travis Bickle’s cab has her seeming to float above the action.


Dance with a Spectre
    “Something separates me from other people,” says Mary in Carnival of Souls. It is the editing with its unconventional splitting of an action. When Mary dashes around the streets and the bus station, an action seems incomplete, say her walking towards a car seeking help or walking around the station. Only when Mary goes back to the disused fairground do the takes become more fluid, even if there is causal disjunction between her and the space she is in as gongs sound for no reason, a mattress glides down a slide.
    Carnival of Souls has a New Wavey look to it. It must be the improvised tone of the acting, the sudden shifts of perspective from high angle long shot to close-up in Mary’s first job, or those shots of places to which she feels she must go, zooms suggesting that the fairground pavilion and the mountains are landscapes of Mary’s unconscious perceived by her in innocuous places like the car wash. This would all seem to make sense as Carnival of Souls was released in 1962 when the French influence on low budget filmmaking must have been pronounced.
    Even more unusual is the debt Herk Harvey’s little film owed the experimental films of Maya Deren. Carnival of Souls is, like Deren’s At Land, exploring a woman’s odd odyssey like Mary’s from water to land. In At Land Deren’s beautiful amphibian makes her progress from sea to land and back again, exploring her soul in a topographical way as Captain Ahab does in Moby Dick. Like in Carnival of Souls, the woman is the only unifying principle in At Land. We never see the landscape in its entirety and never when Deren is not there. The film is in thrall to Deren’s looks, where she looks and how she looks, and her curiosity, her own compulsion to reveal the strange universe of the film. As in all of At Land, Mary’s odyssey is without sound, and she too determines how we negotiate the funfair, and how we feel desire and curiosity before the image. She makes me feel like her, for her. As in At Land, I always want to be somewhere where I am not. Both films invite me to travel into, as well as over, the landscape, rather like the free association I find in my sleep. Deren herself said that At Land deals with the “inability to achieve a stable, adjusted relationship to (the world’s) elements.” Carnival of Souls too is about a woman who isn’t really there. Yet while the slippage can be felt in Mary negotiating the dilapidated and decaying pavilion, there are also moments, shots smuggled in, when something looks at her. Finally, we see her dancing with her suitor at the carousel. Maya Deren’s girl chases a chess pawn from place to place. Mary is the pawn, found at last.

— Irene Dobson

You Can’t Find Peace

(Click above to order from Amazon)


The Princess and the Warrior
(2002 — Written & Directed by Tom Tykwer)

Music:

The Letter mp3

You Can’t Find Peace mp3
(Performed by Pale 3 featuring Skin)


With Franka Potente and Benno Fürmann
Click images to enlarge:

Kiss the hand of your master

“The class conflict between the north, the south and Sicily is Wertmüller’s battleground, where the roots, values and snobbery of an inherently proud culture have slipped.” Digitally restored and remastered on DVD from Koch Lorber, Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) “continues to command the senses.” A new review on Flickhead.

Talking World War III Blues

Take what you need you think will last

Richard Manuel & Bob Dylan

Basement Tapes Vol. 2 (zip file — 87852 KB)

Bob Dylan — guitar, piano, harmonica, vocals
Robbie Robertson — guitar, drums, vocals
Rick Danko — bass, fiddle, vocals
Richard Manuel — piano, drums, vocals
Garth Hudson — organ, piano
(Levon Helm also appears on some tracks)

Recorded in 1967

1. Odds and Ends #1

2. Nothing Was Delivered #1

3. Odds and Ends #2

4. Get Your Rocks Off

5. Clothesline Saga

6. Apple Suckling Tree #1

7. Apple Suckling Tree #2

8. Going To Acapulco

9. Gonna Get You Now

10. Tears of Rage #1

11. Tears of Rage #2

12. Tears of Rage #3

13. Quinn the Eskimo #1

14. Quinn the Eskimo #2

15. Open the Door Homer #1

16. Open the Door Homer #2

17. Open the Door Homer #3

18. Nothing Was Delivered #2

19. Nothing Was Delivered #3

20. I'm Not There (1956)

21. Don'tcha Tell Henry

22. Too Much of Nothing #2

Revenge of Oogie!

Via MadCat Joey!

Tiny Montgomery says hello

Click image to enlarge

In honor of Bob Dylan’s 65th birthday coming up on May 24, this is an opportunity to download the rare five-volume Basement Tapes set. We’ll be posting zip files from now until the third week of the month. Here’s volume one. It’s a bootleg of odds and ends, so don’t you tell Henry.

Basement Tapes Vol. 1 (zip file — 90428 KB)

Bob Dylan — guitar, piano, harmonica, vocals
Robbie Robertson — guitar, drums, vocals
Rick Danko — bass, fiddle, vocals
Richard Manuel — piano, drums, vocals
Garth Hudson — organ, piano
(Levon Helm also appears on some tracks)

Recorded in 1967

1. All You Have To Do Is Dream

2. I Can't Make It Alone

3. Down On Me

4. Bonnie Ship the Diamond

5. One Man's Loss

6. Baby Ain't That Fine

7. Rock Salt and Nails

8. A Fool Such As I

9. Stones That You Throw

10. Hills of Mexico

11. I'm Alright

12. One Single River

13. Try Me

14. One For the Road

15. I Don't Hurt Anymore

16. People Get Ready

17. Won't You Be My Baby

18. Don't You Try Me Now

19. All You Have To Do Is Dream

20. You Say You Love Me

21. Long Time A-Growin'

Related link: rosswords on David Blue.

Bagdaddy-O

Calling You
by Jevetta Steele, from Bagdad Café

It’s that day again…

It’s that day again. I’d like to give a shout out to JanJan, to whom this song meant so much. If there is a heaven, maybe there she can remember the way that we smiled on the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.

Isis mp3


Isis
By Bob Dylan

I married Isis on the fifth day of May
But I could not hold on to her very long
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

I came to a high place of darkness and light
The dividing line ran through the center of town
I hitched up my pony to a post on the right
Went in to a laundry to wash my clothes down.

A man in the corner approached me for a match
I knew right away he was not ordinary
He said "Are you looking for something easy to catch?"
I said "I got no money." He said "That ain't necessary."

We set out that night for the cold in the North
I gave him my blanket he gave me his word
I said "Where are we going?" He said "We'd be back by the fourth"
I said "That's the best new that I've ever heard."

I was thinking about turquoise I was thinking about gold
I was thinking about diamonds and the world's biggest necklace
As we rode through the canyons through the devilish cold
I was thinking about Isis how she thought I was so reckless.

How she told me that one day we meet up again
And things would be different the next time we wed
If I only could hang on and just be her friend
I still can't remember all the best things she said.

We came to the pyramids all embedded in ice
He said "There's a body I'm trying to find
If I carry it out it'll bring a good prize."
It was then that I knew what he had on his mind.

The wind it was howling and the snow was outrageous
We chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn
When he died I was hoping that it wasn't contagious
But I made up my mind that I had to go on.

I broke into the tomb but the casket was empty
There was no jewels no nothing I felt I'd been had
When I saw that my partner was just being friendly
When I took up his offer I must-a been mad.

I picked up his body and I dragged him inside
Threw him down in the hole and I put back the cover
I said a quick prayer and I felt satisfied
Then I rode back to find Isis just to tell her I love her.

She was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise
Blinded by sleep and in need of a bed
I came in from the East with the sun in my eyes
I cursed her one time then I rode on ahead.

She said "Where ya been?" I said "No place special."
She said "You look different," I said "Well I guess."
She said "You been gone." I said "That's only natural."
She said "You gonna stay?" I said "If you want me to, Yeah."

Isis oh Isis you mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
I still can remember the way that you smiled
On the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.

Images of beauty lie there stagnant

JC and Boy Toy (click to enlarge)

Thanks to the lovely Pita, our attention is diverted to Martin Streisand’s photostream, which runs the gamut from an uncommonly leggy Anna Magnani to Greer Garson pouring coffee with those tantalizing fingers that have been mesmerizing Flickhead for eons.

Vibrations bounce in no direction…


Michelle Phillips, stoned and stunning

MadCat Joey has posted some mp3s of the Mamas & the Papas, and if you want to hear what Flickhead was grooving on Back In The Day, listen to “Twelve Thirty (Young Girls Are Coming to the Canyon),” which spun on my turntable countless times in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I used to play it and stare out my bedroom window into the forest across the road, imagining the lyrics coming to life, a parade of California blondes in frayed blue jeans, sandals and sweatshirts hiking into the canyons of my mind. And they all looked like Michelle Phillips.

John Phillips wrote the music and these slightly lysergic lyrics:

I used to live in New York City
Everything there was dark and dirty
Outside my window was a steeple
With a clock that always said twelve-thirty

Young girls are coming to the canyon
And in the mornings I can see them walkin'
I can no longer keep my blinds drawn
And I can't keep myself from talkin'

At first so strange to feel so friendly
To say "Good mornin'" and really mean it
To feel these changes happenin' in me
But not to notice till I feel it

Young girls are coming to the canyon
And in the mornings I can see them walkin'
I can no longer keep my blinds drawn
And I can't keep myself from talkin'

Cloudy waters cast no reflection
Images of beauty lie there stagnant
Vibrations bounce in no direction
But lie there shattered into fragments

Young girls are coming to the canyon
And in the mornings I can see them walkin'
I can no longer keep my blinds drawn
And I can't keep myself from talkin'

Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring

Ray Milland sees God in X — The Man With the X-Ray Eyes

“Extending auteur theories to Corman can be a dicey, subjective proposition. It takes an innate draw to the subject matter — perhaps an obsession — to thoroughly appreciate such alleged intentions.” A review of a new book, now on Flickhead.