The Film Criticism Blog-A-Thon

Chabrol and Godard

“But to the critic to whom art is important, sacred, and, ultimately, coextensive with life itself, to produce bad art and to condone it—and thereby give rise to further bad art and finally drive out the good—are the two most heinously dangerous sins imaginable.”
—John Simon

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages! has instigated a Film Criticism Blog-A-Thon, a subject open to broad definition that could well take over the internet. While many will undoubtedly seize the opportunity to wax philosophical, cigars and brandy in hand, I’m currently preoccupied with other projects to contribute anything of substance. There are, however, a few notes I can add to the fray:

I don’t normally read film criticism or reviews. The only film critics who’ve succeeded in engaging my attention at any length are Pauline Kael, David Thomson, J. Hoberman…and, yes, John Simon. Plus, there's a dogeared copy of Leonard Maltin's 1998 Movie & Video Guide in my bathroom.

A film’s subject matter doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s all in the art of film, the craftsmanship and storytelling.

Andrew Sarris did not keep his pimp hand strong. Once in a Village Voice column, Mr. Sarris related the story of when he showed his university students The Asphalt Jungle sometime in the 1980s. It seemed that whenever a character in the film uttered the line, “Don’t bone me!” the students laughed. Professor Sarris didn’t get the joke, and had to ask them for an explanation. If Andrew Sarris can’t figure that one out, who knows how many other things have flown over his head through the decades? Such an admission voids a great deal of his written concepts and understandings. The moral? Clean-living and sheltered bourgeois academics should not always be trusted (if at all). Should Mr. Sarris wish to challenge this, all I have to say is, “Don’t bone me!”

Kael’s misgivings about the auteur theory… stemmed from a belief that male critics simply wanted to justify their penchant for action movies (Hawks, Ford, Joseph Lewis). Recent Blog-A-Thons gushing on about Brian De Palma and Abel Ferrara had me wishing Pauline were still alive to comment.

Reviews or critiques should never be read before seeing the film. No matter how objective we imagine ourselves, expectations and preconceptions will always color perception and alter the shape and value of a film. I never read about films before seeing them, and rarely read about them afterwards. To this day, my freshest viewing experience occurred when I went to a theatre and knew nothing, not even the title, of what I was about to see.

The need to know what a film is “about” before seeing it is an open admission of a closed mind.

The movie is over even before it started. In Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love, Orson Welles sums up the dilemma faced by the filmmaker, and inadvertently causes one to question the relevance of the critic: “We’re not filmmakers. We’re just a ragbag bunch of people doing something that is technologically already almost passé. It’s a great problem of movies is that they’re always old-fashioned. It takes too long to make a movie. By the time your idea’s on the screen, it’s already dead.”

Recommended reading:

Flickhead’s hometown revisited revisited

A while back I posted photos from my Long Island hometown that were taken in 1961. A thoughtful reader was kind enough to take snapshots of those same locations as they appear today. Now you can see the before and after on Flickhead!

Chabrol: Apprehended!

Via Images Patman

Paul Gégauff

Paul Gégauff getting wasted in Claude Chabrol’s eerily prophetic Une Partie de plaisir (1975). Click to enlarge.

Paul Gégauff career/bio by Peter Lev

Deconstructing Hitchcock: The Birds

The laconic stationary overhead shot, an exercise in deceptive objectivity. (Via Puppooska.)

…meanwhile:

Oja breaks “Wind” (via GreenCine Daily).

The Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon

Happy 90th Birthday, Mr. Ackerman

An author, magazine editor, movie memorabilia collector, part-time actor and notorious punster, Forrest J Ackerman enters the new millennium with a website (Forrest J Ackerman’s Wide Webbed World, presented in “DracsCape” 5.0), an entry on Wikipedia, and a museum’s worth of memories. His name may not Quasimodo any bells for those born after the great monster boom of the 1960s, but he was immensely influential to me and others of that time and place. We were young and impressionable and yet to be tainted by the hammering negativity and violence of television, the Vietnam war, and nuclear and terrorist threats. Even though we’d just emerged from the atomic ‘50s, we were taught that covering ourselves with wet newspapers would fend off any blast the Russkies could dish out. Life was so much simpler back then.

    Mr. Ackerman, or Forry, 4E, Mr. Monster, Mr. Science Fiction or The Ackermonster, take your pick, had been active in science fiction fandom in the 1940s and ‘50s, but it was his magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, that made him a star to baby boomers. When the first issue came out in 1958, the monster market was approaching fever pitch: Universal Pictures just sold their classic Frankenstein, Dracula and Mummy movies to television; American International’s horror and science fiction pictures were also being broadcast; and Britain’s Hammer Films was revving up a whole new cycle of monster movies in the theatres.

The first issue of Famous Monsters
(click to enlarge)

    The magazine was published out of Philadelphia by Jim Warren (that’s him under the Frankenstein mask above), who built a small empire with his Captain Company, a publishing and novelty outlet that sold everything from back date issues to Aurora’s plastic monster model kits, 8mm and 16mm horror movies, record albums, and Don Post masks. But Mr. Ackerman’s was the voice of Famous Monsters, a forum for his vast knowledge and an incomparable collection of movie stills.

    This is where and when I received my elementary education in the cinema. Between its gaudy covers, Mr. Ackerman held a deep, resounding admiration for Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Ray Harryhausen, Bela Lugosi, makeup artist Jack Pierce, Lon Chaney, Vincent Price…and worked these names and the dates and titles of their accomplishments into my mind forever. In fact, other than Alfred Hitchcock, who made an industry of promoting himself in the ‘60s, Lang was the first director I became consciously aware of thanks to Forry’s love for Metropolis.

    Mom and dad, however, weren’t the least bit impressed that their seven-year-old son knew who Fritz Lang was. It was a time when horror movies were sneered at, when a kid’s rabid interest in monsters spelt trouble to parents who only knew life by the rules dictated by corporate America. How, they asked, could these weird obsessions ever lead to a decent job? Even though I was so young, their concerns weren’t entirely unfounded: as far as business and finance are concerned, I’ve come up woefully short, the dreamer they warned me I’d become.

Above: Issue #30 (1964) is the first I remember buying
Below: #46 (1966) was delivered under protest by concerned parents
(click to enlarge)

    By 1964, my weekly allowance of fifty cents went straight to the local sweet shop where I’d scour the magazine rack for the latest issue and any or all of the other publications that followed its lead. The gallery of covers posted on Monster Mags is a trip down Memory Lane: the earliest Famous Monsters I remember buying was #30 with its terrific Bela Lugosi cover painting by Russ Jones; issues 31 and 34 summon up heady recollections of snug, cozy afternoons; shivering at the sight of #40, I can only assume it arrived at some personally vulnerable time, though I can’t remember what; around issue #92 I was involved with my first girlfriend; and #46 was delivered — under protest — by my parents when I was in hospital recuperating from surgery.

    They winced when they handed it to me, asking if it was too graphic, too horrible for my young eyes. By that time, though, I was jaded and ravenous. Mr. Ackerman’s quick way with words complimented the large, clear photo reproduction. It was a magic gateway to Never Never Land, beyond a mundane reality where I never fit in or was not ‘good enough’ at school, in sports, or in thinking seriously about my future. To those first girlfriends, monster movies were about as appealing as spiders and snakes. But Mr. Ackerman showed me that it was alright to dream and imagine, that my artistic aspirations were worth something.

    For nights on end I sat in the basement at a small drafting table my uncle had given me, scissor happy with the magazine, cutting out photos and rearranging them on sheets of paper and writing my own captions. Soon the captions grew into reviews and articles. By the age of eleven, I taught myself how to type on an old manual, using Mr. Ackerman’s simple style of prose as a guide. I’d gather up these sheets of photos, captions and reviews and asked my father to copy them in the machine at his office. The pages were then collated and stapled and thus began a publishing empire: The Creature Journal, my first fanzine, lasted from 1969 to 1973.

    Mr. Ackerman was an inspiration to me forty years ago, and continues to be a constructive influence. For someone so immersed in monsters and horror, he always kept things light, accessible and friendly. As he hits ninety today, I wish Mr. Monster a happy birthday and a debt of thanks.

Forrest Ackerman, Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury sign autographs at the 2005 Comic-Con

The Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon continues…

George ‘E-gor’ Chastain’s FMeral appreciation

Dennis Cozzalio @ SLIFR

Dennis Cozzalio visits the Ackermuseum!

Ian Hill @ CollisionWorks

C. Jerry Kutner @ Bright Lights After Dark

Joplin John

Peter Nellhaus @ Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee

Tim Lucas @ Video WatchBlog

Interview @ MJSimpson

Forrest J Ackerman at Amazon:

Doing Time

“The prison life depicted on screen here is far removed from what we’re accustomed to…Strangely enough, if there’s any one film Doing Time resembles it would be Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast.” Yoichi Sai’s film of Kazuichi Hanawa’s manga, now on DVD — read the review on Flickhead.

Robert Altman 1925 - 2006

Image ©2003-2006 +cweeks (click to enlarge)

Adventures with Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini with journalist, novelist and screenwriter Alberto Moravia in 1960. (Click to enlarge.)

LSD and Alan Hale

In the midst of writing and researching this Friday’s Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon, in honor of the man’s achievements and to celebrate his 90th birthday, yours truly had been dipping around the horrific fringes of the internet when a friend sent the trailer for Giant Spider Invasion (1975). Far be it for me to pontificate on its kitschy schlock value — I’ll leave such things to the experts and aficionados. Nor is there the need to offer any specifics: that title tells all, and the trailer magnificently condenses its eighty-four cheesy minutes down to a frantic 250 seconds. No, the lesson to be learned from The Giant Spider Invasion has less to do with aesthetics than environment, and that the quality of a film, or one’s perception of its greatness, may rest squarely on subjectivity, mood and a forgiving nature.

    I went to see it at a drive-in in Buffalo, New York. Enlisted at a medieval fortress called Niagara University and experimenting with the disruption of my nerve cells and the neurotransmitter serotonin, the newspaper ad jumped off the page. How often is one hit with a title like that? To boot, the co-feature was Night of the Cobra Woman (1972), featuring a cast of Joy (Maidstone) Bang, Marlene (Ganja & Hess) Clark, Vic (Vampire Hookers) Diaz, and someone claiming to be called Slash Marks. I had read about Cobra Woman in the pages of Castle of Frankenstein magazine, but Giant Spider Invasion was brand new and unknown.

    By the late 1970s, the drive-in was a deteriorating wing of movie exhibition, feeling the pinch of encroaching multiplexes and the public’s growing disenchantment with sitting in their cars for three hours, looking a screen hundreds of yards away, and the tinny sound emanating from a single speaker hooked onto the driver side window. While they served their purpose, be it as a haven for the last vestiges of the nuclear family or as mating grounds for horny adolescents, the drive-in was a relic, and I seized any chance to experience it’s sleazy sundry charms, sitting through scores of fetid kung-fu and exploitation flicks and the lower depths of horror and science fiction, knowing that all of it was due to fall off the face of the earth.

    Considering the era and mindset, the inside of my vehicle sported the accoutrements of a Cheech & Chong movie, and I sat there with my cohort for the evening (later a ‘respected’ doctor) and our stock of beer, chili dogs, popcorn and several joints. Under these circumstances, a Giant Spider Invasion can reach levels its makers never imagined, and my friend and I sat there very stoned and quite mesmerized. It co-starred Alan Hale, Jr., the Skipper on Gilligan's Island fighting off a bunch of Volkswagen Beetles dressed up like giant spiders.

    Shortly after, I gave my review of both of the films as well as the enchanted evening to Nelhydrea Paupér, who offered this, rather coldly, in return: “No way did you see anything called Giant Spider Invasion! You’ve had too much acid! It simply doesn’t exist!” It was jealousy, of course, pure and simple. I had wallowed in eighty-four minutes of hallucinogenic bliss that he’d never experience…because, after Giant Spider Invasion plays out its week, you can rest assured it’ll never be seen again. (Little did we imagine the future and home video.) But here’s the trailer, Nelhydrea. Enjoy it. And remember: I saw it and you didn’t!

Andy Warhol Screen Tests

Andy Warhol Screen Tests:The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One
By Callie Angell Published in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art
780 photographs, 15 in full-color, 320 pages, 9x11" Hardcover with jacket

In the mid-1960s, at the height of his creative powers, Andy Warhol produced hundreds of three-minute cinematic portraits, called "Screen Tests." Although rarely screened now, these short films captured a virtual who's who of the avant-garde, including such cultural icons as Edie Sedgwick, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali, and Susan Sontag. At last, in the initial volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of Warhol's films, Warhol authority Callie Angell examines each of the 189 people captured by Warhol's lens. Stills from many of the films appear here for the first time. Drawing on 13 years of original research into the Screen Test subjects and their relationships to Warhol, Angell provides an unprecedented look at the pop art master's working method, and a unique record of his colorful social and professional life.

Order from Amazon

Women’s Prison

Women's Prison (2002)
First Run Features

    Banned in Iran, this taboo-breaking film is based on director Manijeh Hekmat's extensive fieldwork among women prisoners in Iran. She depicts the lives of Iran's lost generation in the two decades since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, using the claustrophobic life of women behind bars as a metaphor for Iranian society.

    The film opens in 1984 as a new warden, Sister Tahereh Yousefi, is brought into a Tehran prison to suppress an impending riot. She makes some immediate demands for change and reform, but the prisoners refuse to give way. Mitra, in prison for killing her violent stepfather, is particularly uninterested in Tahereh’s promised improvements and continues to speak out about the prison’s horrible conditions.

    The story picks up in the spring of 1992. Mitra’s relationship with Tahereh remains volatile and is characterized by recurring arguments and repeated visits to solitary confinement. In contrast, Mitra has strengthened her bond with her fellow inmates, who have grown to respect and appreciate her nurturing presence and steadfast leadership.

    The final segment of the film takes place in the winter of 2001. Mitra appears tired and reserved after years of battling authority, while Tahereh seems to have relaxed in her treatment of the prisoners. In the end Tahereh procures Mitra’s release, and as Mitra walks into the light of day the doors close ominously behind her, leaving Tahereh alone in the darkness of the prison, now more like a prisoner herself.

    Although Manijeh Hekmat has been in the film business for over 20 years (as producer, assistant director and production manager), she faced a number of problems in making Women’s Prison. "As a first-time director, I had to get a particular permit from the Iranian Society of Film Directors and they denied granting such a permit, although I was qualified for the Society's conditions." Eventually, she obtained the permit in the name of her husband Jamshid Ahangarani (the film's art director).

    Ironically, Hekmat nearly found herself on the wrong side of the prison bars after finishing her controversial film. When it was excluded from Tehran's 2002 Fajr Film Festival, many foreign guests clamored to see the film, and Hekmat was threatened with arrest if she dared to arrange a private screening. Ultimately, tapes of the film made their way to selectors from various international film festivals and the director's cut of Women’s Prison made its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival in September 2002.

    The film has since screened at more than 50 international film festivals, receiving critical acclaim for its thoughtful look at the lives of women prisoners within the social, political, and historical context of Iran. With pressure from reformists in the Iranian government and support from many members of the Majlis as well as President Khatami himself, a censored version of Women’s Prison finally opened in Tehran on August 7, 2002. In spite of not being allowed to have television teasers, the film set new box office records for an opening in the post-Revolutionary era.

BBC News: Iran bans film about women's prisons

Alissa Simon: Manijeh Hekmat and Women’s Prison

On DVD from Amazon

Random Notes, or: it’s neither pig nor pork

I’d like to thank Tom Sutpen and Dennis Cozzalio for their recent (and excellent) article contributions to Flickhead, Tom on Godard’s Hail, Mary and Dennis on Go for Zucker. Together with existing contributors Richard Armstrong and Nelhydrea Paupér, my dream of one day turning this into something more akin to an online magazine may happen. Thanks guys!

Are there any writers who are Theo Angelopoulos aficionados out there? If you’re willing to work for DVDs instead of money, please drop me a line at flickhead @ comcast dot net.

The Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon is set for Friday, November 24, in honor of his 90th birthday. If you participate, let me know and I’ll add your site to the blogroll that day. If you’d like to post banners for the event, here are two images:
Vertical: 118x269
Horizontal: 756x83

Thanks to John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows for alerting me to the new, restored March of the Wooden Soldiers, which sounds terrific; but also for pointing out the book, Castle Films: A Hobbyist's Guide, which somehow slipped below my radar when it came out two years ago. The generation born in the age of home video have no clue as to the immense value ‘home movies’ were at one point, and Castle Films was the crème de la crème!

DVDs new and upcoming:

One of my all-time favorites, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) finally arrives in February via Warners. While viewing the film will be a joy (hopefully in a somewhat complete version — several edits do exist), it looks like Warners blew it on the bonus features. There’s no audio commentary listed so far (a round robin between Roeg, Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg would’ve been amazing), and we’d hoped that they would have included Kevin MacDonald and Chris Rodley’s excellent documentary, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1998), but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. To read my notes on Performance, click here.

Due to a pile of other commitments, I’m unable to write anything extensive on Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (2004), but, after catching up with it recently, I was captivated by its sharp view of America’s contemporary obsession with Christianity, its unending preoccupation with its children, and the mistreatment of youth in the hands of those who profess “family values.” Plus, it’s got a great performance by Ellen Barkin.

The long-awaited arrival of Kenneth Anger on DVD happens in January, when Fantoma releases Films of Kenneth Anger 1. Since they’ve denied our requests for review screeners in the past, there’s no reason to think Fantoma will send us a copy of this. (Stingy, stingy…) But the disc is authorized by Mr. Anger himself, so the sound and images should be nice and sharp.