Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

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The first time I saw Roger Corman’s Teenage Doll (1957) was in 1979, on a J.D. triple bill with Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One at San Francisco’s late, lamented Strand Theatre. You know what a J.D. is, right? Do you have a J.D. card? (I ask only because, back in sixth or seventh grade, the little brother of one of the neighborhood greasers told me that this ominous certificate of identification — supposedly distributed by sourpuss truant officers — proved your moxie as a tough guy.) I don’t ever recall it playing on TV in the 1960s or 70s, so I savored Teenage Doll that day, especially as it unspooled from a crisp, clean 35mm print.
    This was near the height of the Corman mania that swept through so much of film culture in the 70s. Some critics likened him to Jean-Luc Godard, and his interview figured prominently in Kings of the Bs, one of the first mainstream books to recognize the B-movie as legit cinema. By the late 70s I’d seen most of Corman’s pictures; the then-fresh anecdotes of threadbare budgets and insane shooting schedules (three days for The Terror! two days for Little Shop of Horrors!) constantly whetted the appetite for more. But I felt that Teenage Doll stood apart from the rest, and, emerging from the Strand late that afternoon, I considered it to be Roger Corman’s best picture.
    I’m not so quick to make such blanket statements anymore, and, revisiting Teenage Doll thirty-two years later, I find not a diamond, but rather gaudy costume jewelry, the kind that entrances the eye with light and reflection, the ear with jingles and jangles. It’s no one’s ‘best’ film, but rather a relic that speaks from a time both foreign and obsolete. It opens with a promise to tackle pertinent social issues — disgruntled adolescents, clueless parenting, drunken neighbors — but seems to exist merely for a climactic showdown in which the actors playing the girl gang members display no aptitude for pugilism while their male counterparts mug uncontrollably, some engaged in that pinched, lemon-sucking facial expression only James Dean could pull off with any success.


The original trailer

    It stars June Kenney, making her big screen debut after a brief run of TV guest spots (Boston Blackie, The Loretta Young Show, The Public Defender). With her fidgety, goody-two-shoes demeanor, petite frame, blonde hair and pronounced eyebrows, she’s Dorothy McGuire-lite. Here she accidentally kills a member of the Black Widow gang (the corpse is supplied by full-lipped beauty Abby Dalton), and flees from punchy head Widow Fay Spain and her loyal minions (among them a young Ziva Rodann), knowing she’s due to be taught the proverbial ‘lesson’ via a knuckle sandwich from what the ads call “hellcats in tight pants.” Mama Mia!
    He made plenty of teen exploitation, westerns and gangster pictures, but Corman’s métier was horror and science fiction, so it’s interesting to see how he navigates through the squalid, low rent housing and bop-noir back alleys of Teenage Doll without the beneficial eye candy of paper-mâché monsters and space vampires. The screenplay was written by Charles Griffith, author of more than a dozen Corman pictures (including the funny, irreverent Bucket of Blood), who had a knack for creating full bodied characters with distinctive quirks, and well-rounded situations that generally remain compelling. In Teenage Doll he opens on the corpse and gradually reveals the cause of death in relation to the neighborhood teens, eventually zeroing in on the guilt, stifling family life and makeshift sentencing imposed upon Kenney’s jittery schoolgirl.
    It’s difficult to imagine today, but teenagers were virtually nonexistent in the cinema prior to the 1950s. There were, of course, sundry Mickey Rooney sitcoms in the ‘40s, where the plucky kid fumbles his way into manhood; and twenty years’ worth of Dead End (1937) derivatives starring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and the other members of the Dead End Kids as teen slum dwellers who evolved into overripe caricatures called The Bowery Boys. But teen angst as a theme didn’t jell until The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause (both in 1955), their sullen adolescent characters pained by mystery (self-pitying? crybaby?) agendas (“No one understands me!”), one set in the inner city, the other in suburbia.
    Distancing itself from America’s post-WWII economic recovery and the exodus of whites to those suburban bedroom communities, Griffith’s screenplay floats in seedy urban confinement, its characters weathering lifestyles more in tune with the Great Depression. We visit each of the Black Widows’ homes to be hit by squalor, ignorance, anger, frustration and poverty. Adults are portrayed as philanderers, alcoholics (we run into several old school winos), or tight-lipped cops (guided by the thousand-yard stare of actor Richard Devon doing his best Joe Friday). Slightly more upscale, Kenney’s character lives in a nicer house, albeit under the martial rule of an overzealous dad; and whose mother has been psychologically pounded into submission — her odd introduction in Teenage Doll is something out of a David Lynch movie.
    Despite the low budget, Corman brought together an interesting assortment of actors who excel during Griffith’s extended scenes of heated, wordy confrontation. Fay Spain is Cagney-intense: in a scene where her character chews out her father, it’s like watching Cody Jarrett Tommygun his way through the Actor’s Studio. Another vignette focusing on two sisters (one a Black Widow, the other a sell-out about to “date” her old, fat and bald employer for a plate of caviar), he juxtaposes the soft beauty of twenty-five-year-old Barboura Morris (a Corman regular) with Colette Jackson, whose hard, angular sultriness suggests a hybrid of Patricia Arquette with Fairuza Balk. I don’t know what happened to Jackson, other than she died in 1969 at the age of thirty-five. But she’s got a raw presence here that makes me want to see more.

Adventures in peplum

Hercules and the Captive Women (1961) is quite something. Bodybuilder Reg Park takes a slacker approach to Hercules; Fay Spain chews the scenery as the Queen of Atlantis. No matter how dire (check out the strings on the monster vulture!), so many of these Italian muscleman flicks of the 60s had opulent sets, long tracking shots showing hundreds of extras, fascinating script deviations into science fiction and fantasy. They’re also wildly homoerotic, forcing this straight guy to question his motives for watching them (ahem). This one examines the fall of Uranus as a ‘real’ god. And it’s pronounced “your anus,” as it should be. Hercules, trucking his barely clad butt into the village square, is informed by the local princess, “Today is the celebration of Uranus!” At which point all the oiled, beefy young half-naked men smile and applaud. There’s also a comedy relief dwarf — this appears to be a recurring character in these movies — who Hercules sits on his knee, ready to be spanked. I tell ya, I could watch a hundred of these things.

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Is this your brain on drugs?

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If ever you question Russ Meyer’s position as King of the 1960s and 70s softcore mammarydrama, simply check out his competition. Russ employed the best looking women, wrote the wittiest scripts and took the sharpest photography, to say nothing of his innate flair for caricature and satire. These are things you’ll not find in The Acid Eaters, a spacey (and, at 63 minutes, mercifully short) odyssey from 1968 produced and directed by B. Ron Elliot, a pseudonym for the Psychotronically recognized Byron Mabe.
    Shot mostly outdoors in and around the same SoCal canyons the Manson family called home shortly before the fateful nights of August ‘69, The Acid Eaters disposes of Meyer’s brand of structured narrative for a stream-of-consciousness rambling Mr. Mabe and screenwriter Carl Monson (aka Carlos Monsoya) imagine one would encounter while under the influence of LSD (codename: ‘acid’). What they’ve concocted, however, occasionally suggests a fractured homage to Kenneth Anger by way of Ed Wood. Indeed, some of the personnel involved had a hand in the Wood-scripted Orgy of the Dead (1966).
    Starring a group of seamy neanderthals who look as though they were fished out of a West Hollywood saloon at lunchtime, they cavort as aimless, topless crazies en route to a pyramid where hallucinogens are served by Lucifer, here played by a simian bodybuilder with short legs who resembles ‘Toody’ ("Ooh! Ooh!") on the old Car 54, Where Are You? TV show. Chewing on the drug (a prop brick of Styrofoam), they sink down a rabbit hole of incongruous fantasy subplots including a woefully un-arousing orgy held in Satan’s crib.
    Made near the height of LSD’s popularity, The Acid Eaters shows no awareness of the cultural precedents set forth by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters or Timothy Leary, while its music soundtrack, credited to Billy Allen, is ersatz jazz far removed from Sgt. Pepper or The Grateful Dead. One does wonder, though, where Mr. Mabe’s head was when he inserted those brief flashes of a bewildered granny (is that Louise Latham, who played Tippi’s mom in Marnie?) or the unrelated, Godardian vignette of literary characters conducting an obscure discourse in the middle of an isolated field.

Above: A bucolic moment from Alex de Renzy’s Weed

The Acid Eaters is on a double feature DVD with Weed (1972), a surprisingly good documentary released when marijuana legalization was a hot-button topic in the U.S. I say ‘surprising’ because it was produced and directed by Alex de Renzy, a leading practitioner of porn in the 1970s who made scads of hardcore with Desiree Cousteau, the underage Traci Lords and others of the field’s l’age d’or. He continued working long after the market slid from celluloid to videotape, his career climaxing, if you will, with Anal Booty Burner 2 in 1997. Renzy passed away four years later from a stroke and diabetic attack at the age of sixty-five.
    Although clearly liberal in its views, Weed makes an honest effort to be objective, Renzy on camera (he’s a middling interviewer), traveling from the thousands of acres of marijuana growing freely throughout Missouri, to points far, far east, at a time when you could buy a pound of Cambodian Red directly at the source for less than two dollars. (In Nepal we pass a store with “Freedom for Angela Davis” posters in the window.) He talks with a handful of law enforcement figures, drug dealers and users, soldiers idling in Vietnam, who explain some of the smuggling and black market techniques, economics and philosophies surrounding pot. It’s not the definitive word on the subject, but it’s a lively attempt.

3 vues du 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup

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Jacques Rivette and Jane Birkin; oh, to be a fly on the wall…

“At times, nothing is everything,” says one of the performers meandering through 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (“Thirty-six views of Pic Saint Loup,” 2009). New on DVD under the anglicized Around a Small Mountain, it’s Jacques Rivette’s most recent picture, and, clocking in at 84 minutes, uncharacteristically trim. For me it plays like jazz, the director creating something from what appears to be nothing by combining abstract with conventional forms, the same way as he did in La bande des quatre (1989), Haut bas fragile (1995) and Va Savoir (2001). As one character ruminates, “Even if it’s a bad idea, it’s still an idea, which brings to another idea, which might be less bad or even better,” which could be the credo behind Rivette and company’s on-the-spot formation of the ‘script.’ It also reunites him with Jane Birkin (L'amour par terre, 1984; La belle noiseuse, 1991) and Sergio Castellitto (Va Savoir). I’ll savor it.


Jane with half-clown Sergio Castellitto


Jacques and Sergio

Weed respite: dude’s got a point

Bill Hicks on target.

Stone soul birthday

On this day in the year of our lawd nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, your humble narrator was born. For the occasion, I dug up the following blog entry which was first posted back when I hit the seemingly callow age of forty-eight. Enjoy. Oh, and, Sharon: you can still call me any time. — Flickhead

Sharon Stone and I slept together. Or at least I think we did. It was a very long time ago. Forty-eight years ago, to be precise, in the maternity ward of a hospital in Pennsylvania where the two of us had been born just hours apart…or a day or two. Some of Sharon’s bios offer contrary dates. Most say March 10, some place her at the 8th, others go as early as the 6th. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say she and I will be celebrating our birthdays sometime this week. But not in the same room. I’m sure Sharon would want that little fact quite clear.

    I would never have given Sharon a second thought had it not been for Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990). It was then when I recognized the familiar face, the manner, that seductive, calculated smile. Had she enchanted me when we were newborn bed buddies? Did those icy-yet-inviting blue eyes put the whammy on me while I lay there innocently sucking my thumb in the next crib?

    Imagine Sharon in a crib as Daddy’s Little Girl. Bad girl! You need to be spanked…!

Basic

    The eyes are flirtatious and hostile. The promise of a wild time in the sack shielded by an impenetrable wall built on that dysfunctional beast indigenous to the ‘90s, ‘attitude.’ And then there’s the mystery of the scar on her neck, which one day may yield too much information than I’d care to know.

    She had her fifteen minutes in the early ‘90s. Before Total Recall there were forgettable movies, TV shows, a lot of junk. After the Verhoeven picture, there was still the looming threat of a career in mediocrity: fifth billed in He Said, She Said (placing her a degree away from Kevin Bacon), John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun, the bizarre cable staple Scissors, the intriguing Diary of a Hitman — all in 1991! — and Where Sleeping Dogs Lie (1992).

    Then came Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992). Kismet. I was certain that I’d been hexed. How else to explain my fascination with this clanging monstrosity of a murder mystery action flick? Sharon smoking. Sharon crossing and uncrossing her long, tan legs. Sharon messing with Michael’s head. Sharon giving head. Sharon snorting coke. Sharon grinding with Roxy. Sharon’s aerobic intercourse workout. Michael going down on Sharon. Sharon for breakfast…for lunch…for dinner!

    There followed a run of magazine covers, fashion shoots, cocktail parties, social events, red carpets, the whole bag, all leading up to…Sliver (1993). This is a prime example of the comet burning itself out in a moment’s notice. The picture made one-third of its total U.S. gross on opening weekend alone. People went sweating from Basic Instinct but were sobered by a mess of a thriller, and word-of-mouth pulverized it from there. Part Robert Evans, part Ira Levin, part Joe Eszterhas, all of it crying out for the guidance of Roman Polanski but entrusted to Phillip Noyce, who failed to fathom the dark satire of media addiction and voyeurism. There’s still a great movie waiting to be made here, starring…Jessica Alba?

Still fairly real

    The fall was swift and assured: career suicide with Intersection (1994) — second-billed to Richard Gere in a Canadian production?!? Ouch!; guns and fast cars in The Specialist (1994), playing second-fiddle to Stallone (not even a steamy shower scene could bring in business); Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), an interesting satire on Westerns, Sharon quite fetching in buckskin, but likewise without an audience.

    A telling vindication of time taking its toll, when Verhoeven was casting Showgirls (1995), Sharon tested for the older dancer. She lost out to Gina Gershon and the sex kitten days drew to an end. I’m fascinated by an Elizabeth Berkley / Sharon Stone Showgirls: they could almost be sisters…or trailer park mother and daughter.

    The critics and Academy noticed her in Scorsese’s Casino (1995; no Oscar, but a Golden Globe), though she was better in Peter Chelsom’s The Mighty (1998), a quiet, overlooked gem. She was miscast in the Simone Signoret role in an unnecessary rehash of Diabolique (1996) — a picture that managed to make Isabelle Adjani appear dowdy; and she was semi vacant in Barry Levinson’s Sphere (1998). Two earnest attempts at social drama — Bruce Beresford’s Last Dance (1996) and Sidney Lumet’s remake of Cassavetes’s Gloria (1999) — played to empty seats.

    Which meant that Sharon had become a star who couldn’t sell tickets. And now that her ‘day’ is over and she’s inching up on fifty, the roles and opportunities seem strange, outmoded, even a little reaching. There’s a Basic Instinct 2 in the pipeline — Catherine Tramell in London directed by Michael Caton-Jones, a guaranteed train wreck — and we’ve been informed that she’s naked in several scenes. At this point in time, is that something we really want or need to see? Other than the rock-solid softball-size breast implants, she’s in fairly good shape from the neck down. But her face has seemingly frozen, the mouth and eyes apparently flattened (along with all that early, earthy rambunctious character) by Botox. The wrinkle-free, ironed skin was lampooned in Catwoman (2004), when her evil cosmetics magnate cultivated an epidermis as hard as a diamond. I’m among the few who appreciated the erotic stupidity of that goofy venture, to say nothing of Halle Berry looking fabulous in leather. (For the record, Halle played ‘Sharon Stone’ in the live action Flintstones movie.)

Reborn

    So happy birthday, my dear. You’re getting older. I’m getting older. You still look glamorous even though you no longer resemble yourself. Time, gravity, and a diminutive bank account has shaped me into a pale, doughy schlub with thinning, graying hair. You continue to attract handsome millionaires; I make Paul Giamatti look like Brad Pitt. Will your eyes ever search mine again, the way they did in that maternity ward, your deep, innocent gaze so longing and free? Whether we really were side by side never truly mattered. It’s the thought that counts.


All my love forever,

Flickhead

A Propos de deux

By Richard Armstrong

In a piece on French film education resources recently I included some comments on Jean Vigo’s delightful seaside documentary A Propos de Nice. So I watched the film again. It so happened that the evening before I had watched the Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Seeing both of these films in such proximity made me wonder if they had ever been paired in a double bill…

    In the August 2008 issue of Sight and Sound, David Thomson writes: “my favourite double bills are secret, thematic pairings, films where deep below the surface one picture is speaking to another.” Thomson’s suggestion of unexpected relations, an unforeseen conversation, seems a vital aspect of the double bill as practice and as institution. The bringing together of two disparate films can lead to a rethinking of each in ways that encourage fresh associations to be envisaged between hitherto disparate titles and traditions. This ‘collision,’ so to speak, could even be said to produce a third film, or idea of a film, perhaps even prompting us to think anew about genres. Coming into its own during the high days of repertory arthouse exhibition in the 1960s and 1970s, the double bill can be seen as a stage in the historical progression from the classical genre cycle, the Warner gangster programmers, the MGM Freed musicals, Gainsborough melodrama, for examples, through repertory cinema’s excavation of classicism, to the contemporary cinephile’s domestic DVD juxtaposition. In his piece in the 2005 essay collection Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory, Gerwin van der Pol sees the artful pairing as fundamental to the cinephile’s project: “So the ‘Holy Grail’ of knowledge for the cinephile is finding a novel connection.” Jane Giles was a former programmer at London’s Scala cinema. In the August, 2008 Sight and Sound, her testimony reinforces the perception that the inspired double was the special province of post-war cinephilia: “Despite the obvious emphases on director, genre or star, there were no hard and fast programming rules to what made a good double bill…(it was) in the hands of enthusiasts, fired up by audiences who crammed the suggestion box with their dream double bills.”

    Such cinephilia is not limited to the rep aficionado. Artfully pairing films also enjoys currency among industry professionals brought up in the repertory decades. Creative pairing permeates the Hollywood story conference. In The Player (1992), a Hollywood satire balanced stealthily between fiction and verisimilitude, new projects are routinely pitched on the order of Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate, Sunset Boulevard meets Remember My Name. Quality journalism, many of its contemporary practitioners themselves habitués of the post-war arthouse, also colludes with this mentality, proffering a kind of shorthand which simultaneously appeals to the cinephile and to that amorphous consensual film knowledge which exists in the wider culture. The release of Savage Grace (2008) saw Vogue gushing: “Like Death in Venice meets The Great Gatsby on the Psycho lot” (Sight and Sound, August 2008). Formulated within the white heat of film commerce to entice the cinemagoer into the cinema, these examples graphically acknowledge the unexpected and allusive qualities of individual films. But what happens when we root through the back catalogues?

Paramount’s creative pairing of The Odd Couple with Rosemary’s Baby: does its ‘third identity’ speak of obsessive -compulsive lifestyles?

    The double bill has resulted from a plethora of logics and instincts, and the ‘collision,’ so to speak, of two films seen at random, could be said to produce something akin to a third identity. To the degree that a double bill highlights similarities which are not apparent when watching individual films, it may usefully inform a new typological conceptualization both as a method and as a tradition. After decades in which film industries have initiated and reproduced generic rubrics and expectations for consumption in the commercial and critical marketplace, it may be possible to conceive of a ‘bottom up’ model of typological identification and debate whereby a rubric is discerned at the level of spectatorship and then disseminated in critical writings. The DVD era seems ripe for this formulation. More than ever before, domestic delivery systems enable a potpourri of international cinema to be sampled according to personal whim, however well-informed, affording new kinds of association and classification arising from the contingencies of home spectatorship, and prompting a wealth of fresh and fruitful juxtapositions. Meanwhile, the Internet provides a rich set of venues for criticism and analysis far from the constraints and limitations of commercial film comment. My PhD research, for example, arose accidentally out of random viewings of Millions Like Us (1942), Under the Skin (1997) and Secrets and Lies (1995); British films drawn from different contexts and of very differing aesthetic provenance, yet coming together over the issue of grief and mourning, a perception which I initially rehearsed at Bright Light Film Journal (click here).

    Watching Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930) shortly after having seen Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), I was drawn by these films’ portrayal of the Côte d’Azur and their preoccupation with the leisure of the moneyed classes at a particular historical moment. Each in its way, both films deploy the iconography of the interwar Riviera and its social set. In A Propos de Nice Vigo juxtaposes a sequence of scenes on the Promenade des Anglais in which we see be-whiskered financiers in their bath chairs, ageing society matrons and haughty ‘elegants’ taking tea outside the hotels. I fancy these people, caught on film while ‘wintering’ in Nice, hail from all over Europe, a few perhaps from New York, Boston and Philadelphia: Wilhelmine ‘grafs’ eeking out the revenue from their Prussian estates, veteran French generals drinking their pensions away, ‘arriviste’ entrepreneurs watching the markets, a man asleep with his trouser legs rolled up (English?), another napping with his mouth open, an old man in a pedal wagon sells the Daily Telegraph, ancient politicians with white beards… And the women: the lady promenading with the little dogs, the voluble Russian Countess, she in the cloche hat straightening her stocking seam, the lady in the fur coat progressively stripped bare by the camera, a lady objects to being photographed and hides her face beneath the brim of her hat — heiress to a ball-bearing empire perhaps, maybe in the process of eloping from a jealous husband — the lady in silver fox, another in animated conversation with her friend — about the poor room service, the unfortunate weather….the spoilt, the bored, the jaded, the careful, the conscious, the avaricious, the fantastically rich and the desperately lonely….

Vigo deconstructs vanity in A Propos de Nice; image taken from colettesaintyves.

    If in A Propos de Nice we are introduced to the habitués of the Côte d’Azur, in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, released eight years later, it is as though we become privy to the pecuniary and sexual intrigues which lay behind Vigo’s Riviera façade. As in Vigo’s film, we begin with an aerial establishing shot of Nice…busy beach …canoes…peddle boats…bathers…rows of ritzy hotels along the palm-lined Promenade, perhaps a glimpse of the famous Hotel Negresco…, before we segue into Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder’s tight little confection in which an American millionaire, Michael Brandon (Gary Cooper), spars on a bathing table in the marina with a lady from a fading old French dynasty (Claudette Colbert). In this most risqué of ‘30s romantic comedies, the woman will contemplate marrying the man on condition that he will furnish her with FF100,000 if the marriage ends in divorce. At their initial marriage ceremony, we meet Tante Hedwige (Elizabeth Patterson), the matriarch of the de Loiselle family, a scornful haughty matron in a wheelchair from a long lineage going vaguely back to the Bourbons, whom we fancy we may already have met, in slightly better days, taking the sun in A Propos de Nice.

    If the fashionable lady is disrobed by Vigo from her fur coat to her bare skin, during the course of Lubitsch’s film Nicole de Loiselle (Colbert) will go from bathing costume to mink stole in her odyssey up the ladder of worldly riches. In a sophisticated sex game hewn in suggestive and succinct prose, there is little of the bawdy and ludic play of Vigo’s vision of Nice. Yet perhaps the ‘meet-cute’ of Michael and Nicole’s first encounter in the department store, he buying pyjama tops, she pyjama bottoms, retains something of the ‘seaside humor’ which permeates Vigo’s film, Michael provocatively waving the pyjama top at Nicole, she ostensibly without ‘her’ top, or so he thinks.

    Whilst it may be too ambitious to suggest that the similarities I am proposing between A Propos de Nice and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife constitute another genre in the making, place them side-by-side and the thematic, aesthetic and humoristic resonances become increasingly obvious as you watch. For Thomson, the “secret, thematic pairing” seems key to one film’s propensity to ‘speak’ to another. Perhaps the question then becomes: can movies which ‘speak’ the same language be said to be of the same genre? This involves a rethinking of genre. Changing conditions of reception, like differing exhibition practices, encourage another attitude to film classification. In 1998 I worked a stint at the London Film Archive, fielding enquiries from clients seeking footage of 1950s cars, European royalty, Londoners at the seaside or whatever. After a few months, it became evident to me that, aside from the traditional markers of generic kinship existing, say, between Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and All that Heaven Allows (1955), films can relate to each other purely on the level of footage, literally, of what they show, feature, reveal or contain. For film theorist Tom Ryall, commonality of subject matter, theme and iconography already satisfy three stipulations of generic kinship out of his five (Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 1998). As a part-time reviewer in the late-90s, I was watching new films by day and rep cinema by night. Combined with the archive work, this routine made me increasingly sensitive to ‘new’ films, whether actually new or old, singular films which the collision of others ‘bring’ like generic apparitions to the cinephiliac mind.

    Restricted as the movie consumer is by the rubrics — Thriller, Romantic Comedy, Western — of the television schedule or neighborhood rental store, themselves descendants of the lapidary remits of the old studio system and the double feature exhibition protocol, we may overlook just how heterogeneous relationships between movies can be. For example, in a recent article at Flickhead, Irene Dobson has suggested a provocative link between the French arthouse title Cléo de 5 à 7 and the left-field American independent horror film Carnival of Souls (click here). But to venture further than her claims for timely and coincident thematic and aesthetic kinship, we may indulge in an even more adventurous cinematic flâneurisme which one evening brings together A Propos de Nice with Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland (1953), for their common interest in seaside leisure, or even their mutual dismay over the class tensions of modern Europe, or perhaps juxtapose Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife with Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) for their shared images of a morally bankrupt French bourgeoisie, for the tension they share over the specter of class miscegenation, or even, given the role Czechoslovakia plays in Lubitsch’s 1938 film, speculate that both films ‘know’ more than we realize of the looming war, and that deep down both are speaking to one another of histories and reputations yet to be envisaged. At the end of the day confronted with the Criterion box sets and Artificial Eyes of her movie collection, how many secret unholy alliances does the modern cinephile contemplate…

Available from Amazon

Available from Amazon


Text copyright © 2011 by Richard Armstrong