Dennis Hopper naked - Night Tide

Night Tide (1961) a Hollywood B movie so beautifully made, so quirky and so original it should be recognized as art. It stars Dennis Hopper , then only 24, as Johnny, a sailor who comes from land-locked Denver, Colorado. Fascinated by the sights and sounds of Venice Beach with its carnival attractions. Enticed by exotic music, he wanders into a jazz club. Pay attention to the  music. It weaves serpent-like throughout the film and is a way above average film score. Composer is David Raskin.The director was Curtis Harrington. 

Johnny sees an exotic woman, so elegant she seems to come from another  world.  She's terrified when a strange woman comes in and addresses her.  It's all Greek to  Johnny, but he follows her because she's so upset. She's called Mora, and she lives in a tower, looking out to sea, over a merry-go-round. "I'm a mermaid" she says, "Half woman and half fish". She sits in a tank of water and people pay 25 cents to look at her. "It's very relaxing". She came from the island of Mykonos, adopted by a sea captain, who is way too Oxbridge to have been a career seaman, but has washed up in Venice Beach ("nothing like the real Venice, of course")  At a night party on the beach, Mora dances to hypnotic bongo drums, faster and faster til she falls in a faint. Johnny spots the Greek woman in the distance.  A bizarre English fortune teller and a wholesome American girl warn Johnny that there's something dangerous about Mora.

A wonderfully-filmed sequence of angles and strange planes, where Johnny runs under freeway bridges and derelict buildings, following the Greek woman who disappears outside the sea captain's house. Captain Murdock tells Johnny about the Sirens, who lure men to their deaths.  Not legends. . "There are things in this world you'll never believe!"  At last, Mora acknowledges the mystery woman. "She's one of Them, she's coming to take me back" The fortune teller, like Captain Murdock, has a bizarre past,{ but is or the scriptwriter was)  transformation, vortices, danger. "Is that good or bad?" says down to earth Johnny.


Back in his rooming house, Johnny thinks he's embracing Mora but she disappears. He sees wet footprints running from the bathtub, down the stairs, and follows them to the beach. Another well filmed sequence , shot under the pier: Johnny rescuers Mora from the water.  Next we see her in bed, but where was Johnny all night? Mora tells him to go get a massage, which is a very strange thing to say if they'd spent the night together in the usual way.  The masseur is one of the jazz musicians. Captain Murdock's there, too.

This is no ordinary massage. "You all tied up in knots" says the masseur. "Girlfriend not treating you right?" Are there deeper meanings in the film? The conversation between the masseur and the sea captain is full of innuendo, so explicitly homosexual that the scene was cut from initial release. The camera has lingered lovingly on Dennis Hopper's body, in tight Navv pants and naked, so many times that it's pretty clear that there's another narrative behind the main plot. hence the jazz band and dangerous (for 1961) interracial and unmentioned other subcultures, but an overwhelming fear of women.   Unsurprisingly, the movie was released as downmarket schlock horror. Mainstream audiences wouldn't get the subtext. Needless to say, the film was produced by a small independent company, not a big studio.

Mora calls Johnny into the sea. He dives underwater and nearly drowns. Where's Moira?  He next sees her on the rocks, with a fishtail instead of legs.  In reality, or what passes for it, he reads a newspaper which has a story about Mora the Mermaid. She and the Captain have been doing their act for 20 years, but she still looks the same as she did then.

Yet another brilliantly filmed sequence as Johnny walks throughb the fairground, the carvings on the attractions lit up as if the were gargoyles come alive. Lightning flashes, waves crash. Then Johnny sees Mora, floating, apparently dead......  But how did she die, ad who killed her? Captain Murdock tells the police that he'd brought Mora up to think she was a Siren, so she couldn't have relations with men.  He says he killed her previous boyfriends, so they couldn't take her away, and committed suicide rather than have Johnny die, too. The police think Mora was the killer and that the Captain was trying to protect her. "But what about the mystery woman?" asks Johnny. " It was true. !It wasn't m imagination".  When Johnny leaves, the nice wholesome girl asks if he'll be back. "Merry-go-round", he says. Mora lived above the merry-go-round. in ever sense. As the shore patrol take Johnny back to base, it's pouring with rain outside. Not quite "Sunny California".

If you like this post, please read : George Antheil : Daughter of Horror 
and Zemlinsky Die Seejungfrau

Genuine the Vampire - Wiene download

Robert Wiene's Genuine the Vampire (1920) was  eclipsed by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, completed a few months earlier. But Genuine the Vampire is genuinely interesting, and not just for the hilarious name.  There's Genuine in all her glory wearing a dangerously revealing costume of belts and straps over what one hopes is a body suit but might be real flesh since she flashes naked thighs many times, and strikes poses that let the viewer linger. There's more nudity in this film than possibly any other of its period, and possibly long after. Note the coy "butterfly wings" and the stylized pose. One of the features of this film is the way Wiene freezes formal, stylized poses. In Dr Caligari and other films of the time, movements are theatrical, but not to this extent. In Genuine the Vampire, the poses are so stiff and held for so long that they clearly reference tableaux vivants, which were often used in pornography on the reasoning that, if the body resembled sculpture and wasn't natural, it could be deemed legit.

Genuine the Vampire isn't a vampire story in the Bram Stoker mode but quite explicitly connects to psychology theories popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The film unfolds like a dream, where characters emerge and disappear without logic.  Genuine was an African goddess, kidnapped and sold as a slave to Lord Melo who keeps her prisoner in a geodesic dome in his mansion. Each day a barber comes to shave Lord M, who seems to like being shaved while he's sleeping. One day the barber can't come but Lord M's grandson Florian turns up. Like everyone else in this film, his costume is bizarre - exaggerated love locks and waxed curls and jodphurs. When Florian shaves his grandad, Genuine tells him to kill the old man, so he does. Go figure.

Other personages appear - a Black Slave (in real life possibly from Kamerun) , and Henry and Percy who seem relatively normal.  Genuine appears in different costumes, one made of ostrich feathers, with a Madam Pompadour head dress. Because the action is so slow, viewing the decor is very much part of the experience. The sets are Expressionist paintings, jagged angles and blocks, a collision of Franz Marc, the Cubists and Second Empire excess. Because the plot isn't rationale, the story ends when a mob waving scythes invade the mansion. Notice though that the mob aren't peasants. Their scythes are working tools but symbols of death.

Genuine is played by Fern Andra, in real life Verna Andrews from Watseka, Illinois (1893-1974) who married a Baron von und zu, though he was dead by the time she made this movie. Those strange set designs are by Walther Reimann, the painter and architect who did the sets for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.  For a download of Dr Caligari, please see HERE.
 

Abel Gance Napoléon RFH Saturday

Almost unique event this Saturday, 30th November - a screening of Abel Gance's epic Napoléon at the Royal Festival Hall, London.  This version, curated by Kevin Brownlow,  runs from 1330 to 2130 with two intervals and a 100 minute dinner break. A marathon! This screening will be accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing Carl Davis's score for the film.

Gance's Napoléon is legendary because it's a masterpiece of cinematic art, with sequences and shots way ahead of its time, and a dramatic intensity that makes spoken dialogue superfluous. This was film as the highest form of art. Albert Dieudonné played Napléon, Antonin Artaud played Marat and Gance and his wife played subsidiary parts. The original music was composed specially by Arhur Honneger and can still be heard - separately from the film - as his Napoléon Suite.

So why is a milestone in film and music history,  made nearly 90 years ago, still excluded from public life? I won't go into the legal ramifications here, but read the article in the NYTimes for background.  But what artistic integrity lies behind some things. How much of the profits actually accrue to those who made the film in the first place? It also raises questions about the stranglehold of the English language media,. The NYT article quotes a US review of an early version released in the US. "The film “doesn’t mean anything to the great horde of picture house goers over here......“Nap wasn’t good looking enough and they didn’t put in the right scenes for the flaps here.” Oh well. Maybe we're wiser and more mature nowadays.  Or not, as the case may be.

En avant la musique 1907

Another innovative film by Segundo de Chomon. More elsewhere on this site.

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens (The Light of Asia)  is unique. It's much more than a movie. Since the film was funded by the Maharajah of Jaipur the film makers were able to use authentic palace areas where outsiders weren't normally allowed to enter. Absolutely stunning - elaborate detail that no artificial set could ever deliver. This movie is so gorgeous that you need to watch over and over to appreciate how gorgeous it is, preserved forever in beautifully made film..

Yet this is the story of Prince Gautama who became the Lord Buddha. so the scenes shot in slums and markets are, if anything even more important. Real street people and beggars, in their thousands - watch the children, some of whom have hardly seen a camera before.

Gautama is born into untold wealth but from an early age seeks something unknown. His father wants to sheild him from all knowledge of sorrow and death. He marries a princess and is blissfully happy, but goes off to seek wisdom among the poor. That's why Buddhism is so hard for some to comprehend. The whole point is letting go, disposing of judgemental ego games and fixed outcomes. The narrative unfolds slowly. No rushing, no need to grab. We all know how Gautama will become the Buddha.  The drama is in the contemplation of each moment. Buddhism doesn't "solve", but offers alternative resolution. The Light of Asia is poetic, and spiritual  in the way most movies cannot be.

The Light of Asia is also unique because it was made in India, by Indians, at the height of the Raj, in 1925.  Obligatory scenes of white tourists looking at exotic locals : they had to give context to the film if it were to be seen in the west. But as the credits roll, we're told that the actors are "members of the Indian Players Company, each of whom gave up his or her career as Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer and Professor to bring about a renaissance of the Dramatic Art of India". It's highly idealistic, in keeping with Buddhist values. The film was directed by Himasu Rai, who plays Gautama. Significantly, it was co-produced by a German, Franz Osten, which is perhaps another reason the film doesn't sentimentalize or play to colonial stereotypes. Of course the script follows a British epic poem, but the story itself is obviously Asian. So this film is important in itself as a document of Indian dignity at a time when colonial values prevailed. Since the world is becoming increasinbgly west centric, we need this film now even more than before, to remind us that there are other alternatives.

Read much more about this remarkable film HERE on Memsaab's blog,  Full of screengrab photos, scene by scene description, so even if you can't track down the full film (BFI restored) you can feel what it's like. As the blogger says, it's good karma, rewarding Rai and those involved in making the film for the love they put into it.

More Carl Th. Dreyer - Vredens Dag - music for film

Two evenings round St Joan of Arc this week at the Barbican. First, Arthur Honneger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher on Thursday and on Saturday, Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc with soundtrack by Einhorn. I was planning to write on Joan of Arc in music (specifically Walter Braunfel's opera ) and will, but got sidetracked by the role of film in music. But it's relevant because Dreyer's films use music in a very different way to the "Hollywood style", although Dreyer uses different composers in each of his movies.

Dreyer revisits the territory of Joan of Arc in Vredens Dag, (Day of Wrath, 1943) but with a very different perspective. Dreyer's Joan is unequivocally a saint, though she isn't the least bit romanticized. Her beauty is in her faith, shining past the suffering she receives on earth.  In Vredens Dag, and old woman known as Heklot's Marthe (Marthe with the owner Heklots) is burnt at the stake for being a witch, though she comes over as a frightened rather simple minded old lady. In Joan of Arc, Dreyer highlights Joan's tormentors as individuals, albeit in a stylized fashion, as in a medieval triptych. The "action" is in Joan's soul.  In Vredens Dag,  the tormenters are the good folk of a clean living, organized, peacable community. This film is a study of relationships on a group of different personalities. Yet again, Dreyer uses black and white for meaning. This community is austere and conformist. Everything is black and white for them, not only their costumes and spartan taste in decor.

Absalom is the elderly local preacher, who is probably a genuinely good man, within the confines of the system.  He has an extremely young wife, Anne, whom his mother hates with such ferocity that she's more likely to end up in hell than heaven. "This is the house of the old", says Absalom, while Anne withers into desiccation.  Then Absalom's son, Martin, returns. Like Anne, he's repelled by Marthe's murder but they can't object. Soon they fall in love. The "rising of the sap" in nature. Anne is reinvigorated and starts to stand up for herself.  One stormy night, Absalom returns from a storm, saying he's felt the chill of death. Since Anne had wished him dead, now she thinks maybe she has occult powers after all. In this communiuty, if you want anything other than the norm, you must therefore be primed by the devil.

Marthe must be a witch because she keeps denying it, so she's tortured until she proves her accusers right. Flawless logic. No evidence needed. "It's those eyes" says the mother-in-law from hell of poor Anne, whom Absalom married when she was barely a child. (who is the real villain here?) Eyes that Absalom sees as innocent, eyes that Martin sees as mysterious. Since Anne has been brought up in this community, she thinks that she too must be a witch. When Absalom drops dead, mother-in-law accuses Anne of witchcraft and murder. Knowing that she can't hold Martin, Anne has nothing to lose and declares, yes, she's at fault.

Vreden's Dag was made in 1943 whike Denmark was neutral, but surrounded by Nazis, so it's easy to read anti-Nazim protest into the film. But I think that's grossly delimiting. This situation can occur anywhere, any time. Indeed, in the age of the internet it's even easier to stir up mobthink and ignorance.  In Vredens Tag, the locals at least know each other and can doubt, though they don't act. The original story this movie is based on was an apparently true story that happened in Norway in 1623. Bigotry knows no borders. The scary thing is that even the victims are conned into losing faith in themselves.

Back to the music. Glorious "medieval" plainchant marks the opening, where Dreyer shoots an ancient manuscript that introduces the story. But then, silence for the most part. Only atmospheric sounds, like the ticking of clocks, or footsteps. You must be watchful, always alert, just as Anne is. Very occasionally, flourishes of music. When she falls in love, she starts to hum, and there's music when she and Martin have trysts. The compser is Puol Schiebeck (1888-1949), old enough to have studied with Carl Nielsen, yet this score is modernist enough to sound avant garde even today. Listen to the music in the sequence where Anne is thinking of Marthe at the stake. Turbulent cross currents, not obviously disssonant, but deeply disturbing.  Listening to Schiebeck's score, and indeed to Wolfgang Zeller's score for Vampyr (described here with download) I'm less convinced by Richard Einhorn's 1994 Voices of Light, used in the DVD rerelease of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. But maybe audiences today need film music with their films.

Vampyr - Carl Th. Dreyer

Carl Th. Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is a masterpiece every serious film buff studies frame by frame. But Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) is equally remarkable. The two films are very different. Joan of Arc is shot with extremely harsh lighting, bleaching out unnecessary detail, so every line and pore in Joan's face is exposed, like she herself is exposed and alone in her torment.  Vampyr, on the other hand, is a study in ambiguities.  What is happening? Who is the vampire, the old man, the old woman or the protagonist himself?

Vampyr is also fascinating because it's a sound movie with a score written by Wolfgang Zeller (1898-1967), one of the most innovative composers of film music when it was still an experimental art. The music for Vampyr ia a lot like the film - tonally ambiguous, mysterious, spare. Single instruments (wonderful brooding cello), merging in and out of a mist (mainly strings). Low rumblings, sudden sharp chords. Listen to the music without watching and it works on you emotionally - very unsettling. Film noir music before film noir existed.

Zeller worked with Walter Ruttmann whose Dadaist abstract films can be seen HERE on this site, and were made to be  shown with live music. (Ruttmann is the creator of Berlin, Symphony of a great City, which you can see in full download with analysis HERE)  Ruttman's credentials as a moderrnist are impeccable, yet he went on to write music fotr the Nazi film The Jew Suss, which I can't bring myself to watch for more than a few moments. After the war, he wasn't blacklisted, so I don't know what his denazification file says. We can't aassume anything. 

In Vampyr, a young man with a butterfly net (important detail) stops at a country inn. Already we know something's not right. A peg legged old soldier sits on a bench, and his own shadow comes down to sit beside him. In the inn, shadows of dancers are seen, and their music can be heard, but they don't exist in the real world, whatever that is. Then there's the star himself played by "Julian West" who looks Indian or something exotically swarthy, quite alien to whatever country the story is set in (anywhere from Northern France to the Baltic). "Julian West" is in fact Nicolas de Günzburg, whose family were Russian Jews, bankers to the Tsar. Günzburg, who financed the film, was supposedly fabulously wealthy but when his father died in 1933, it turned out the family was broke.  So Günzburg goes to New York and ends up editor of fashion glossies.

Watch Vampyr and see how Dreyer uses odd angles, so you're seeing things from odd perspectives. He makes the most of the discipline of black and white, using darkness and light as a palette to paint ideas. Details, like the Grim Reaper on the inn sign, and the peasant with the scythe in the field.  Just as the film seems to develop a narrative, Dreyer throws all into confusion. Julian West sits on a bench in the park, but his shadow gets up. It's so subtle you might not notice until you see his figure is transparent. Then he finds a coffin, and looks in. As the coffin is carried out, you see the treetops, the tower, and hear the tread of dull footseps. Is West now looking out, upwards from within? Watch the final sequence frame by frame. It's the mill, where the doctor, who may or may not be the vampire's helper, gets trapped  Fantastic shots of the machinery, wheels and cogs like infernal mechanisms. The machine grinds flour which suffocates the doctor. Will the bread (the staff of life) be tainted? Meanwhile, West and Léonie, the young girl who is saved from the vampire (whom we never see) are in a boat in a fog. They call out, echoing the doctor's cries. But they cannot hear him, nor he them.
PLEASE see here for Marschner's opera Der Vampyr (nothing like the movie)

Surviving Hitler: a love story

Two remarkable films about living under the Nazis on BBC4 TV. First Surviving Hitler: a Love Story . This is big news, as it's making its first high profile appearance in Britain. So far it's only been screened in festivals and small houses. The DVD will be released in December. Second, My father was a Nazi Commandant. Watch them both for a week on this link and this one.

Surviving Hitler: a love story is so amazing, it's almost hard to believe. The people involved were camera fanatics and recorded every detail of their daily lives. It's an almost unequalled archive, a valuable resource for historians of all kinds. But most amazing of all is what the family went through. All of them arrested for being involved with Operation Valkyrie, to assassinate Hitler. And all miraculously survived.

Tall, "Aryan" Jutta discovers that her maternal grandparents were converted Jews, and is sent to Switzerland for safety. But she returns to Berlin where she can't work, study or marry. Luckily she's rich and moves in influential circles. She meets Helmuth Cordes, a man who seems permanently attached to a camera, whether he's taking stills or moving film. The family is close friends with Werner von Haeften, adjutant to Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted the bomb that should have killed Hitler. They attend "tea party" groups  that denounce Hitler (Moltke?) and sheltered one of the plotters in their mansion.  Come July 20th 1944, the assassination fails and von Stauffenberg and von Haeften are murdered. Jutta's father is imprisoned and her mother sent to Ravensbruck, Helmut, who had a very junior position in Haeften's staff, is arrested too. Officially around 5000 people were executed in the bloodbath that followed. Others just disappeared. Jutta hides for a while then walks into Gestapo HQ and is promptly arrested. Eventually, the Russians roll into Berlin and Jutta, freed, goes home. In walks her mother, who's also been freed, and then father and Helmut as well. So they take out their cameras and record their wedding, the first in liberated Berlin.

Surviving Hitler: a love story is an extremely well crafted documentary. There must be thousands of photographs, for the story can be told through real pictures, carefully matched to fit the narrative, even thoughn the pictures may have been taken at different times.  Only one talking head, Jutta herself, who is eloquent and has such force of personality that she'd be worth watching even without the amazing story and archive. The family shots are augmented by contemporary film clips, including rare film of Hitler in colour. Where there's no original material, the film makers resort to re-enactments and footage from old movies, but these are incorporated so well that they blend in perfectly. This film has none of the tacky cut and paste feel many other documentaries suffer from. And the film makers are so self effacing, you can't find them on their website ! Truly a remarkable movie, beautifully made. This should be screened everywhere, including film making classes.

As film, My Father was a  Nazi Commandant (2006) isn't nearly as well made, but it's about Monika, the daughter of Amon Goeth, commander of the work camp at Plaszow near Krakow, and her quest to make amends by contacting Helen, who was a slave in Goeth's luxurious dwelling.  Monika was brought up in ignorance, not understanding why her mother was a cold hearted bitch.  Helen tells her everything, and how the father was an evil killer who took pleasure in destroying thousands of lives. Helen's husband killed himself in 1980, haunted by memories. For Helen, making this film was a kind of closure because now her testimony is in the public domain. Monika is traumatized. It wasn't her fault, but she's devastated, practically hysterical throughout. "Your suffering is just beginning" says Helen. As documentary, this film feels very edited, so you wonder what really went on behind the scenes, and how the participants were treated. But Monika and Helen's feelings are so raw that it's a disturbing, emotionally draining experience. Monika, too, is a victim of the sadist who engendered her, and she's worthy of respect. She's a courageous woman, so I hope the trauma of making this film hasn't wrecked her.

Making documentaries like these isn't easy. Sometimes you wonder at what human cost is "good TV" created. But they need to be watched, to remind us that totalitarianism is never harmless or acceptable.

1929 kitsch colour extravaganza

This is a clip  from a 1929 extravaganza shot mainly in Technicolor, packed with elaborate dance sequences. It wasn't called "The Show of Shows" for nothing. Sound was new and colour even more shocking, so this film really announced a new era in entertainment. Trouble was it cost millions and was released just before the Wall Street Crash that started the First Great Depression. The Lehman Brothers of film?

This segment A Chinese Fantasy has almost nothing to do with China. Chinese opera costumes used without context, mixed with peasant hats, Japanese kimonos and "Arabian" objects like Aladdin lamps. This is high camp fun. No offence was intended at the time, though, apart from the basic fact non-whites were considered fair game and not just in entertainment. The film's not racist so much as totally off the wall. The idea was to get something exotic and colourful to make maximum impact.

Look out for the gigantic black legs that descend from the roof. It's a massive black genie, bearing the actress in his palms. The star is Myrna Loy, one of the big names of the 1920's. They are packing in every big name of the time, including the dog, the famous Rin Tin Tin. Loy's role is unashamedly yellowface, because everyone knew it was a vehicle for her and had nothing to do with authenticity. Had the part gone to a real Chinese  that would have been offensive as a real ethnic camping up like this would be selling out to stereotype.

Besides, at that time, any real Chinese actress dancing in her underwear would never have been able to live it down. No doubt the film was shown in China, but the audiences would have been tittering with embarrassment. Eighty years later, it's still hard for real Chinese to watch the sequence of dancers in Chinese hats and tops but NO pants, especially when they squat. OOPs!

The male lead is Nick Lucas, king of kitsch crooning, who created the original Tiptoe thru the Tulips. The song is Lipoli which is gibberish but sounds cute (and Italian to a Chinese.)

Of Gods and Men - Cannes

A film about a terrorist massacre of Catholic monks in Muslim Algeria may turn out to be a more genuinely "Christmassy"  experience than the usual fare. Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et des Dieux) (dir. Xavier Beauvois) won the Grand Prix at the  2010 Cannes Film Festival. This film will make you think about the values that really matter.

The  monks of Tibhirine were captured by extremists in 1996 and held hostage for months before being beheaded. It's still not clear who actually killed them, small-time brigands or State-endorsed terrorists. The real mystery is what led these men to remain in Algeria when society was collapsing around them.

The monks lived among the local Muslims as equals, not as colonial masters, sharing the humble lives of the community. Then the civil war came and the country slipped into anarchy. Brigands threaten the monks at gunpoint. "Come to our clinic and we'll treat your men" says the leader of the monks coolly, "but don't take medicines from the villagers". The monk quotes the Koran. The brigand keeps the monastery under his protection til he himself is brutally murdered.  The monks know they are in grave danger. But their commitment to living with the villagers is so deep that they can't abandon them to save themselves. There are many themes in this powerful but gentle movie. so catch it while you can. This just might be a gift to give yourself, whatever your beliefs or what you think of the monks. Here are the words of the monks' leader:

"If it should happen one day -- and it could be today -- that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country. I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life was not a stranger to this brutal departure."

"I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity. My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value...... should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down."

A Dog's Heart - the movie

Brand-new opera A Dog's Heart starts at the ENO on 20th. Please see my preview HERE. The opera is based on a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written only 8 years after the Russian Revolution. It was a time of surprising liberality because the new order didn't, as yet, clamp down on new ideas in society, literature, film, etc. Nonetheless Bulgakov's The Heart of A Dog was so seditious it went underground until officially unbanned in 1987. Perhaps it says something about the Soviet Union that the novel was filmed the very next year for Lenfilms, Moscow, directed by Vladimir Bortko.

Atmospherically shot in sepia, like an antique print, it grounds the drama in 1925, discreetly bypassing the universal relevance. It's a good starting point though, because so much of the film depends on understanding the background. A snow-covered street, shot from ground level. Gradually voice emerges - the thoughts of the dog, which is why the shots are dog-level. Everyone's scavenging in these desperate times, "dog eat dog" you could quip.

Professor Preobrazhensky is an eminent surgeon, who lives in an old Tsarist mansion, now gradually being taken over by squatters authorized  by the new authorities. They pull up the parquet for firewood, the electricity's unreliable, everything's slowly falling apart. The Professor dines in elegant surroundings and still has the clout to ward off Shvonder and his Management Committee who represent the new order. The Professor adopts the dog and feeds him kielbasa. The Professor's speciality is interspecies transplant which was actually popular pseudoscience in the 1920's - monkey glands as viagra for example. Rejuvenation by extreme measures - a metaphor for the grand Soviet Experiment. 

But you can't take the dog out of the man. Post-surgery Sharik gets poshed up as Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov. The name means "polygraph" a nonsense name chosen by a dog asserting his identity. He wrecks the house, tries to rape the maid, generally runs amok till he takes up with Shvonder and his gang of bullies. Then he gets a job in pest control. "You're so good at rounding up stray cats", say his mates. "It's in my heart", says Sharikov. Now that Sharokov has power and is armed with a gun, he's dangerous.  Not because he is pals with Shvonder. "The real horror is that he now has a man's heart, not a dog's,", says the Professor, "the rottenest heart in all creation".

Bortko's Heart of a Dog is full of quirky period details that will have Russians howling with delight. But it's a wonderful film anyone with wit can enjoy if you like subversive satire. The actor who plays the dog even looks jowly, like a mutt. At the ENO, A Dog's Heart is an entirely new work, scored by Alexander Raskatov and dramatized by Simon McBurney, both of them new to opera, though McBurney's work with Complicite, the innovative theatre ensemble, is legendary. The film is excellent background, but go to the Coliseum expecting something completely different to the film. Who knows what this latest transformation  might be?

Fritz Lang Metropolis (1927) restored

Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece Metropolis has been restored with 25 minutes of new footage and extra intertitles, and original soundtrack (once played live by an orchestra in the cinema). This is big news because it reveals a tighter, tougher vision behind the film than the neutered version currently available.  Lang's Metropolis is not science fiction, it's a parable on modern society.How amazing those opening shots are! They're painted, sophisticated mega-cartoon, at a time when Disney was producing  primitive stuff. It's Futurist, high art like so much else at the time. Bauhaus in the movies.

The Metropolis exists as a multi dimensional, self contained world where vehicles travel in the space between art deco towers that rise endlessly upwards. The Tower of Babel, as the movie makes explicit. This glory comes at a cost. The workers who make the whole thing function are dehumanized, reduced to regimented automatons. Look for the amazing scene where naked bodies are thrown into a fiery abyss in the mouth of a gigantic Moloch. And the immortal scene where the worker has to keep turning the hands of a clock, so the whole edifice doesn't blow up.

 
One "new" scene shows the paradise the young men enjoy - quite deliberately Venusberg, where men paint black lipstick on pretty women. In this restoration, we get more of the male-female power politics that meant so much to Thea von Harbou. Now at last I understand why Peter Gay denounced the film in his seminal Weimar Culture (1968). Gay was disturbed about the feminization of the hero, who throws himself on the bosom of the Eternal Feminine, named Maria, (wehat else?), instead of being a "man".  It says more about him than was apparent to us 40 years ago. For that was von Harbou's whole point. Fredersen's son rejects his father's ways because they aren't right.  The dialectic of this film contrasts "male" power which has created militaristic, mechanized systems with "Female" power which replaced the machine with something more nurturing and positive. The theme "Between the Hand and Brain there must be the Heart" recurs throughout the film.

It's clear: uncontrolled capitalism and industrialization is not good unless it's tempered by something softer and more humane. Much has been made of Maria's depiction as a prophet in the catacombs, preaching goodness to the workers. She's not a Virgin Mary, rather a throwback to the holy mystics of the ancient European past. Lang reinforces this with images of medieval sculpture, Death surrounded by the Seven Deadly Sins.  This isn't a Christian parable by any means, it's much more complex. It's international, too. The red light district in the Metropolis is called Yoshiwara. In the mindset of the time, oriental meant dangerous and exotic. Similarly there are references to Eygptian slaves building pyramids. Metropolis is all places at all times.

One of the new scenes shows the paradise garden where the Sons (of the rich) cavort. It's Venusberg or should I say, Venusburg, another kind of factory where the women are dehumanized like the workers below, though they're more decorative.  Later the Robot Woman cavorts in the nightclub, taunting the Elegant Gentlemen.  Venusberg again, the men automatons though they wear monocles and tuxedos.  Wonderful new shots of the Robot Woman, and her disintegration.

The actresss who plays Maria is Brigitte Helm, a girl who was approached in a street in Berlin, who didn't set out bto be a starlet. In fact, after Metropolis she became typecast as a dangerous, unemotional temptress, which was far dfrom herv reeal personality. At the height of her career she suddenly quit and became a Hausfrau in Switzerland and refused ever to speak of the movies again. In her life, Helm was re-enacting an image of Womanhood from Metropolis. Spooky.

The mad scientist, Rotwang, lives in a primitive hut surrounded by Fredersen's Metropolis, another connect to a medieval past. The hut has no windows but opens onto the ancient catacombs beneath the city.  Rotwang is a strange interface between Head, Hands and Heart, an amazing character to interpret. Luckily this restoration gives us more to go on. The actor, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, was immortalized  as The Gambler and the Testament of Dr Mabuse, one of my top movies of all time. Dr Mabuse uses mind control, shaping others to his will.  The film  was made in 1933. Go figure.
Metropolis explores ideas of mass manipulation,  unquestioning obedience and mob behaviour  Though Fredersen controls the Metropolis, the workers are complicit because they mindlessly follow. Individual workers are depicted, like G11811 but they're like cogs in a machine.  Maria is a charismatic leader with pseudo-religious powers to hypnotise the workers. Thus Fredersen and Rotwang try to harness her image to control the masses. Metropolis shows how appearances can be twisted, and people easily fooled.

Freudians might find something in the fact that Fredersen's son is called Freder, a rather effeminate wimp, whose Goth makeup is extreme. The other male actors didn't need it and  by 1927 film techniques had improved so it wasn't strictly necessary any more. These hints of bi-sexuality may have bothered Peter Gay. Nowadays that's no longer an issue, so Metropolis is prophetic on one issue at least.
The deeper you go into Metropolis the weirder it gets.  Thea von Harbou was married to Klein Rogge but divorced him for Fritz Lang yet they happily worked together. Von Harbou was a feminist and ultra modernist, yet became a Nazi as soon as Hitler came to power. The film represented everything the Nazis hated, because it was so avant garde. Yet some of its themes fitted their values.The Brown Shirts were "national socialist" after all, resentful of anyone more cultivated and upper class than themselves. The triumph of the will, the power of the mob. Totalitarianism, both Left and Right. Order versus disorder. Oddly, the film with its Tower of Babel imagery, was made in Babelsburg studios  The vision isn't coherent but still powerfully evocative, asking questions, noit giving answers.  Metropolis could be interpreted in many different ways, both as commentary on its time and on ours. That's what makes it so intriguing. We still haven't sorted the dilemmas of modern society.
PLEASE see my piece on Fritz Lang and von Harbou's Die Nibelungen There is a LOT on this site about Fritz Lang, Weimar, early movies, social issues, etc and many FULL DOWNLOADS
This is also one of the few sites about early Chinese film in English. Full downloads, too.

Dr Caligari - full movie download

Full movie download here of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), cult film from 1919. This version has sound and English subtitles, but you can always silence it. What did the cinema orchestras or pianists originally play ? The film reflects ideas in modern (90 years ago) painting and sculpture - odd angles and askew perspectives, "primitivism", the discovery of the subconscious. New ways of thinking about the world, no more surface literalism. Modern music (90 years after) reflects that sense of new possibilities. Those who'd shift back the clock in music might as well shift back the clock in painting, film, poetry, psychology, sculpture......

Please see the other Weimar movies on this site, many full download. Many big ones like Der blaue Engel, Nosferatu, Berlin Sinfonie eines Grosstadt, and many others Follow the links on the post below "Vienna to Weimar". Or key in on search or use label on right. Also this is the only site with Chinese movies of the same period which are in so many ways imbued with the same idealistic vision.

Berlin, Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt - download

This is "Berlin, Symphony of a Great City", Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt, a film made in 1927 directed by Walther Ruttmann. A symphony, but a silent movie? Partly they didn't have the technology then but this film actually works better with silence, for many reasons.

First, you concentrate on the images and the way they flow together to create a "symphony" in the original sense of the word, a weaving together of images. And what images - trains moving into the heart of the city, the lines so carefully choreographed that they move almost into one another, telephone cables crisscrossing in the sky, the innards of a telephone exchange dissected to show how thousands of lines cross and don't cross. The S Bahn and U Bahn and recognizable stations. This is abstract art, using real images, incredibly beautiful. Even now it looks modern, but in 1927 this was truly avant garde, for it celebrates state of the art technology.

Second, there's no need for narrative as this film depicts the life of a big city, teeming with people, each with individual narratives of their own. Each has his or her own life beyond what's caught on film, They've come from somewhere and will be going off to somewhere else, but for a few frames they're immortal, caught on screen. Most of them probably never knew they were being filmed. All of them are now dead, even probably the laughing babies in their prams and the kids scampering in the gutter (an image that any modern parent would howl at).

Third, the film doesn't judge. It's not some simplistic Marxist dialectic. All people and objects were filmed as they existed. The monk watching the demo, the beggar seeking alms, the old woman painfully climbing up the stairs to a church, rich and poor, old and young. A black man smiles in one shot, and in the background of another, two Indonesians in sarongs walk past - no explanation. A pretty girl in pale silk, her scarf blowing in the breeze, caught forever in motion. Animals and humans, lions and street dogs, beggars and government big brass. A little girl tries to pull her dolly pram up some steps, but fails. Two slightly older girls walk past, with looks that say "What a baby". A tram speeds past an elaborate 19th century hearse, pulled by horses.

Horses and streetcars, trains and tiny propeller airplanes that take us up for an aerial view of the city - almost unprecedented back then. The plane is Lufthansa but not the Lufthansa we know today. Everything seems excitingly modern - the bride and her family look as if it's the first time they've been in a car. Yet so much they take for granted is unknown to us now : elaborate puppets in shops, and in the streets musicians playing strange hurdy-gurdys we cannot hear. There's a procession of men dressed in weird costumes - they're advertising salt, of all things. And the footmen around the official building wear 18th century costumes - no one bats an eyelid, it must have been normal uniform. Footmen? yes, coaches with horses, straight out of Frederick The Great.

The film is like a symphony too in that it works in "movements" or Aktes - transport, food, night. And like a symphony it flows together theme by theme, images juxtaposed impressionistically to create the feel of a great city, alive and thriving. These aren't actors, but real people, There's hardly any mis-en-scène except perhaps the sequence with the dangerous ride in the funfair spliced with the desperately unhappy woman and the horrified crowd waving at something fallen from a bridge. I'm not sure whether Brecht and Eisler's On Suicide was written before or after this film, but it's a climactic moment. "In diesem Lande, und in diesem Zeit... there should be no melancholy evenings, or high bridges, over the water...... for these are dangerous...." But the image, now, is poignant because we know the film was made on the precipice of German history, even though the filmmakers didn't know it then.

Everyone in this film is dead now, even the babies in their prams. We know what was going to happen in Berlin barely five years later, and the apocalypse to come. The thing about history is that it's happening around us all the time. We don't know it as it happens, because it "becomes" history only in hindsight, when things seem to fall into analyzable place. The film makers are presenting us with an almost - not quite - objective source material which we can interpret in ways they probably could not foresee. History is no more than an ordering of documentary materials according to principles that might not be evident at the time they happen. That's why history is an art, and much more dangerous than the way it's taught in schools. It should be a search for truth, but often it's a way of rearranging reality to serve a purpose.

I tried to think of music to go with this but it's impossible, It would deface the dignity of these images, which bear silent testimony to a world long gone, which sometimes we can still catch echos of today. Better to switch off the world around you, and sit suspended in time, alone, for an hour, and watch this amazing film as it unfolds. This movie can be watched fullscreen and freeze framed if you want to check details.
Please see my other posts about Berlin, Furtwangler, The Wall, and German history