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LXXXII: Amadeus (swell consopio) (Tacita Dean, 2008)
I missed the very beginning, so I'm in the dark. Literally. There's an anamorpic image of night. A few lights here and there. The lights move up and down - no, the camera is going up and down becuase it's on a boat, a fishing boat - the Amadeus. The boat leave Bologne at night, and sails across the Channel to Folkestone. More lights are passed. Some of them are boats. There's a lighthouse. A lightship. A few gulls. A ferry ot two. A grey arrival at Folkestone.
Part of the Triennial, this is a fifty minute journey across the English Channel, supposedly in real time, although there are cuts - not necessarily matching reel changes, but presumably occasioned by them as this was 16mm not HD. Arrival from darkness into grey. There's a long tradition of this sort of documentary - Grierson and the GPO unit, with Auden on Night Mail - I think there was one on a fishing fleet - the Shell films, New Free Cinema (football fans, Covent Garden), but all of these had a point of view - music (Britten as composer, among others) and a narration (Auden, James Mason) - but here jsut pictures of darkness, and the projector grinding in the darkness. Tacita Dean wants the pictures speak for themselves. Time and space - that time, that space. But why? (Why not?)
It's an approach to the town, but I feel dulled, not transformed.
The Triennial publicity emphasises her recent work, but she focused on the sea in some of her 1990s work, with stuff inspired by Donald Crowhurst, the round the world race faker. That at least has a sense of drama to it - but this just work for me.
LXXXIII: The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957)
One of the Top 100, a noirish tale in contemporary New York, based on a novelette by Ernest Lehman - who went on to script, North by North West, Family Plot and, ahem, The Sound of Music. Here his cowriters were socialist playwright Clifford Odets and MacKendrick - who had directed those quintessential British films Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers but was in fact American.
Stanley Falco (Tony Curtis) is a press agent - trying to plant stories about his clients in gossip columns in New York newspapers. He feels cut out of the leading column, written by J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), and this is becuase he has yet to split up Hunsecker's sister, Susan (Susan Harrison), from her jazz guitar playing boyfriend Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Curtis plays the angles, manipulating all and sundry, but someone is bound to get hurt.
The plot reminds me of the way that Hammett's Continental Operative performs - playing the angles, telling one person one thing to get a reaction, telling them to do one thing anticipating they'd do another, and constantly reversing paths. (I wonder if the Coen brothers pick up on this, too? I kept hearing Hudsucker...) (Steve Dallas is a Bloom County character for that matter.)
This was presumably meant to be a Lancaster vehicle - produced by independents [Harold] Hecht-[James] Hill-Lancaster films - but it is stolen by pretty boy Curtis, as the dubious hero. Lancaster is an even darker figure, too close to his sister (the father of the cheerleader in Heroes looks not unlike him).
What is also very striking is the photography, the rich black and white, the night shoots, which looked to me as if it were on real New York streets. Cinematographer James Wong Howe had worked on Fire Over England and The Thin Man, and appears to have been striving for the look of a Weegee photograph. It's a beauty to behold.
Totals: 83 (Cinema: 31; DVD: 47; TV: 5)
I missed the very beginning, so I'm in the dark. Literally. There's an anamorpic image of night. A few lights here and there. The lights move up and down - no, the camera is going up and down becuase it's on a boat, a fishing boat - the Amadeus. The boat leave Bologne at night, and sails across the Channel to Folkestone. More lights are passed. Some of them are boats. There's a lighthouse. A lightship. A few gulls. A ferry ot two. A grey arrival at Folkestone.
Part of the Triennial, this is a fifty minute journey across the English Channel, supposedly in real time, although there are cuts - not necessarily matching reel changes, but presumably occasioned by them as this was 16mm not HD. Arrival from darkness into grey. There's a long tradition of this sort of documentary - Grierson and the GPO unit, with Auden on Night Mail - I think there was one on a fishing fleet - the Shell films, New Free Cinema (football fans, Covent Garden), but all of these had a point of view - music (Britten as composer, among others) and a narration (Auden, James Mason) - but here jsut pictures of darkness, and the projector grinding in the darkness. Tacita Dean wants the pictures speak for themselves. Time and space - that time, that space. But why? (Why not?)
It's an approach to the town, but I feel dulled, not transformed.
The Triennial publicity emphasises her recent work, but she focused on the sea in some of her 1990s work, with stuff inspired by Donald Crowhurst, the round the world race faker. That at least has a sense of drama to it - but this just work for me.
LXXXIII: The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957)
One of the Top 100, a noirish tale in contemporary New York, based on a novelette by Ernest Lehman - who went on to script, North by North West, Family Plot and, ahem, The Sound of Music. Here his cowriters were socialist playwright Clifford Odets and MacKendrick - who had directed those quintessential British films Whisky Galore!, The Man in the White Suit, and The Ladykillers but was in fact American.
Stanley Falco (Tony Curtis) is a press agent - trying to plant stories about his clients in gossip columns in New York newspapers. He feels cut out of the leading column, written by J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), and this is becuase he has yet to split up Hunsecker's sister, Susan (Susan Harrison), from her jazz guitar playing boyfriend Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). Curtis plays the angles, manipulating all and sundry, but someone is bound to get hurt.
The plot reminds me of the way that Hammett's Continental Operative performs - playing the angles, telling one person one thing to get a reaction, telling them to do one thing anticipating they'd do another, and constantly reversing paths. (I wonder if the Coen brothers pick up on this, too? I kept hearing Hudsucker...) (Steve Dallas is a Bloom County character for that matter.)
This was presumably meant to be a Lancaster vehicle - produced by independents [Harold] Hecht-[James] Hill-Lancaster films - but it is stolen by pretty boy Curtis, as the dubious hero. Lancaster is an even darker figure, too close to his sister (the father of the cheerleader in Heroes looks not unlike him).
What is also very striking is the photography, the rich black and white, the night shoots, which looked to me as if it were on real New York streets. Cinematographer James Wong Howe had worked on Fire Over England and The Thin Man, and appears to have been striving for the look of a Weegee photograph. It's a beauty to behold.
Totals: 83 (Cinema: 31; DVD: 47; TV: 5)
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