Silverlake Blvd.

Happy 69, George & Mike!

 

 

Last night Echo Park Film Center hosted an impromptu birthday party for unclassifiable twin brother indie filmmakers George & Mike Kuchar, whose birthday is August 31^st.

Besides Tempest in a Teapot and Mecca of the Frigid, I managed to catch The Smutty Professor, documenting George’s Spring 2000 filmmaking class at San Francisco Art Institute. This film, which started as a somebody else's project, organized the chaos that went into the group creation Planet of the Vamps.

This was nicely echoed by an immaculate 16mm print of George’s 1966 epic of cinematic and romantic frustration, Hold Me While I’m Naked. After watching DVDs projected on a screen, it was a jolt to experience the warm, clear colors of actual film. A treat.

 

Cinema Treasures

The NY Times has an article on Ross Melnick's movie palace database. One of the best classroom experiences of my life was Ross's seminar on movie exhibition since the Seventies. Go to CinemaTreasures and look up theaters near your zip code.

[Images: the Coronado in Rockford, the Royal Cinema in St. Ives]

Love's Labour's Lost @ Griffith Park

 

By midpoint in last night’s performance, I was wondering if Shakespeare’s silly, arid sequence of skits, doggerel and dated wordplay was going to defeat the ISC.

 

The cast’s antics during the intermission were funnier than anything on stage during the first half. I.e. Andre Martin (Don Armado) running around the hillside in a towel showing his ass. And, best of all, Richard Azurdia (Constable Dull), rigid and humorless, stomping through the audience, tooting his whistle and passing out citations to anyone showing affection.

 

But the second half came alive. The pedant Holofernes is a very familiar monster, and Bernadette Sullivan had a ball playing him.

 

And Shakespeare wakes up in Act 4, when the men confess that they are in love, and Biron has his speech about the wisdom, the charity, the religion of affection. In the 1870s Walter Pater wrote a love-letter to Biron, seeing in his extravagant language and constant criticism of his companions Shakespeare’s portrait of himself. Sean Pritchett was funny and appealing as always, but did not steal the show. Erwin Tuazon (Dumaine) sang his “On a day—alack the day” to a tune very like “Like a Virgin” while accompanying himself on the ukulele.

 

And then at the very end, Shakespeare does something like Ibsen in the Doll House, where he has the Princess, hearing that her father has died, abruptly call the play to a halt.

 

When the King asks her—naturally, tenderly—if she’s OK, she doesn’t even respond, but gives orders for their immediate departure. The game is over. She does manage to say that she and her ladies didn’t take the men seriously, but “met your loves / In their own fashion, like a merriment.” It ends with promises of reconciliation, reuniting in a year, but the spell has been broken.

 

“Is this considered one of the comedies?” Good question. 

 

Reel Thing, Day 3

 

We got to see Annike Kross from the Eye Institute's new restoration of Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916). A young woman who supports her family is driven to prostitution by poverty--specifically selling herself to replace her tattered shoes.

Like Pharaoh, it's melodrama, and didactic as all get out, but quietly devastating, rather than an occasion for an exhibition of historonic poses. The heroine's exasperation with her lazy father is poignant. Instead of looking for work, “He spent his last thirty cents on a novel.” A reminder how until just recently novel-reading was viewed as a vice.

 

 

 

The high point of the whole conference was getting to see a reconstruction of a tinted version of Voyage to the Moon by Méliès (1902).

The source material was, in the words of Tom Burton of Technicolor, a heap of shards, shattered bits of fragile film, with hardly a frame intact. After 8 months and half a million euros, the results were overwhelming: seething tones of a Helen Frankenthaler painting. Truly a trip to another place.

Unfortunately there had been a curatorial decision to commission a new soundtrack from the electronica band Air. I respect the desire to rescue the film from quaintness, but the result was insipid and annoying. If nationalistic concerns of the sponsors required a French band, why not Daft Punk? Just close your ears and watch.

 

Reel Thing, Day 2

 

 

Thomas Bakels and his amazing team at Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH re-assembled from scraps and tatters Ernst Lubitsch’s The Loves of Pharaoh (1922), and screened it for us this afternoon. It’s not another Ninotchka, but it was a trip to another place and time. Another reminder how silent movies and opera are the only places we can experience real 19^th century melodramatic acting, characters and plots. It’s another language, and it takes a while to remember how it goes (all the principals die in the end). People are making movies of 19^th century novels all the time, but when was the last time there was a movie of a 19^th century play? And it was the era of theater as popular entertainment. I loved the comic touch of Lyda Salmonova playing the Princess of Ethiopia as a Flapper-era Paris Hilton.

 

 

This evening’s hush-hush mystery screening turned out to be nothing less than a new edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I’m fairly confident I could recite most of the dialog from memory, but I sat through it and laughed at the same jokes I’ve been laughing at since 1975 to the point that I am sore. Whatever spark of sanity I might have is largely due to discovering Monty Python at a moment when nothing less could save me. I’m hardly an unbiased observer, but I was impressed this time by how smoothly it flows, given it’s a sequence of skits. A lovely gift.

 

Reel Thing 2011, Day 1

At Reel Thing tonight the premiere of the new edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Such an overwhelming and baffling concoction of art, kitsch, strangeness and camp that afterwards I needed a cocktail. Forget Jules Verne, it’s De Sade’s Justine translated into an immaculately G-rated wholesome family entertainment, with James Mason sinking ships, lecturing his prisoners and crew of slaves about the mercilessness of the outside world, and feverishly playing his organ in his red and black boudoir.

Also translated into queer. It’s probably the gayest movie Disney ever perpetrated. Other than two prostitutes and a giant squid (non-speaking parts), there are no females at all in this movie except for a seal named Esmeralda who honks, and kisses Kirk Douglas.

And it ends with a giant mushroom cloud explosion while Mason breathlessly sighs about how someday, God willing, mankind will be wise enough to understand. We don't, but it's OK. 

 

The Memoirs of Augustus Hare: The voice of the bard

 

Two days ago I went to Lady Airlie’s, where a large party was collected to hear Mr. Browning read. I never heard any one, even a child of ten, read so atrociously. It was two of his own poems—‘Good News to Ghent’ and ‘Ivan Ivanowitch,’ the latter always most horrible and unsuitable for reading aloud, but in this case rendered utterly unintelligible by the melodramatic vocal contortions of the reader.

 

[Image: Roger Fenton, Cobham Hall, 1857]

 

The Memoirs of Augustus Hare: Ham House, circa 1880

 

All the family have their peculiarities. The late Lord Huntingtower was at one time separated from his wife, and when he was persuaded that he ought in common justice allow her to return to Ham, he assented, but he draped the gates and portico with black cloth for her reception, and he put a band of black cloth on the left leg of every animal on the estate, the cows in the field, the horses in the stable, even the dogs and the cats.

 

[Image: Unknown photographer, Probably the Queen of Naples with a dog, 1863-8]

 

The Memoirs of Augustus Hare: Rome, 1879

 

On Thursday the Duchess Sermoneta gives another party for him, to which she has taken the fancy to ask all the ‘learned’ people in Rome. My poor Prince will not make much of them, but will be amused with many, especially with Donna Ursilia Lovatelli, who likes to converse in Sanscrit, and who had to be told that she must not bring with her more aides-de-camp than the Prince (four); as her ‘court,’ as she calls it, which likes to follow her, sometimes number sixty persons. Madame Minghetti will also bring her court, which is far more Bohemian, amusing and agreeable.

 

 

[Image: Mang, Michele & C., On Horse, circa 1850-1880]

 

The Memoirs of Augustus Hare: American aid

 

Mr. Portal has a scheme for educating the unfortunate Americans of gentle birth who have fallen from wealth to poverty owing to the changes on the cessation of the slave trade in South Carolina, and he has been eminently successful.

 

[Image: Julia Margaret Cameron, The Passing of Arthur, 1874]