The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)

in Film, Gender | November 18th, 2015

Yesterday we featured The Seashell and the Clergyman, the first surrealist film, directed by Germaine Dulac in 1928. Given Dulac’s gender, for those playing the cinema history home game, it also counts as the first surrealist film directed by a woman. That alone would make for a sufficiently pioneering achievement for any career in film, but Dulac had already accomplished another important act of cinematic trailblazing with La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet), a short silent that also happens to hold the title of the first feminist film.

Where Dulac worked from a story by Antonin Artaud in the The Seashell and the Clergyman, she works here from a story originally by Guy de Maupassant, one revolving around a wife, the titular Madame Beudet, pushed to the brink by years of life with her boorish husband.

Madame Beudet at first finds some sweetness in her unenviable lot in life in the form of the rich fantasies in her head, realized onscreen with a suite of visual techniques similar to those Dulac would use to bring her audience into the romantically fraught psyche of the clergyman six years later. Eventually, though, she engineers a more permanent solution to her problems, placing a live bullet into the chamber of the revolver Monsieur Beudet uses in his constant self-pitying pantomimes of Russian roulette.

And where scholars label The Seashell and the Clergyman as a work of surrealism, they label The Smiling Madame Beudet as a work of impressionism. “Throughout the picture,” writes critic Nathan Southern, “Dulac uses such devices as slow motion, distortions, and superimposed images to paint Beudet’s various emotional states onscreen,” an intersection of form and substance that resulted in a picture that “instantly established Dulac as a force in world cinema.” Now, alongside The Seashell and the Clergyman, The Smiling Madame Beudet lays strong claim to the title of her masterwork. Dulac clearly had far better luck than the pitiable Madame Beudet who, despite her best efforts ends the film deeper in despair than she began it. As advanced an artistic sensibility as she had, the filmmaker here expresses a dictum of age-old simplicity: you can’t win ’em all.

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

in Film | November 17th, 2015

When the subject of early surrealist film arises, most of us think of Salvador Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and not without good cause: even 86 years after its release, its nightmare images of piano-dragging and eyeball-slicing still lurk in our collective cinematic consciousness. But we can’t call it the very first surrealist film since, 87 years ago, French critic and filmmaker Germaine Dulac, in collaboration with no less an avant-garde luminary than Antonin Artaud, put out La Coquille et le clergyman, better know internationally as The Seashell and the Clergyman, which you can watch free above.

Un Chien Andalou met with a pleased reception, to Buñuel’s delight and Dalí’s disappointment. Dulac and Artaud’s project provoked a different reaction. “Advertised as ‘a dream on the screen,’ ” writes Senses of Cinema’s Maryann de Julio, “The Seashell and Clergyman’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on February 9, 1928 incited a small riot, and critical response to the film has ranged from the misinformed – some American prints spliced the reels in the wrong order – to the rapturous – acclaimed as the first example of a Surrealist film.”

The film takes place in the consciousness of the titular clergyman, a lusty priest who thinks all manner of impure thoughts about a general’s wife. In another Senses of Cinema article on Artaud’s film theory, Lee Jamieson writes that, in putting this troubled consciousness on film, it “penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted,” resulting in “a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically,’ truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.” It capitalizes, in other words, upon the now well-known principle that what is seen cannot be unseen.

But it also pushed cinema ahead in a way that Buñuel and Dali could run with the following year. De Julio’s article quotes Artaud’s own description of the challenge he saw the form as facing, and the one which The Seashell and the Clergyman attempts, in its way, to address: it could either become “pure or absolute cinema” or “this sort of hybrid visual art that persists in translating into images, more or less apt, psychological situations that would be perfectly at home on stage or in the pages of a book, but not on the screen.” He saw neither of these as “likely the true one,” and many filmmakers even today (David Lynch stands as a guiding light among those now living) continue the search for how best to tell stories on film in a manner suited to the advantages of film.

Even overshadowed by Un Chien Andalou, The Seashell and the Clergyman remains a popular silent film to re-score today, and you can watch the movie with a few different soundtracks online: from dark ambient artist Roto Visage, from musique concrète composer Delia Derbyshire (see right above), from large-scale experimental band Sons of Noel and Adrian, and many more besides.

The Seashell and the Clergyman has been added to our collection of Silent Films, a subset of our meta list 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Hear 2.5‑Hours of Great Jazz Songs Featured in Woody Allen Films: Sidney Bechet in Midnight in Paris, Louis Armstrong in Stardust Memories & More

in Film, Music | November 16th, 2015

It takes no great research pains to find out that Woody Allen loves jazz. He scores most of his movies with the music, never failing to include it at least under their signature simple black-and-white opening titles. He has worked jazz as a theme into some of the films themselves, most notably Sweet and Lowdown, the story of a dissolute 1930s jazz guitarist who heads for Hollywood. He plays the clarinet himself, touring with his jazz band as seen in the documentary Wild Man Blues. He makes no secret of his admiration for fellow clarinetist (and also saxophonist) Sidney Bechet, after whom he named one of his daughters.

Allen has publicly discussed a dream project called American Blues, a movie about the very beginning of jazz in New Orleans seen through the careers of Bechet and Louis Armstrong. He acknowledges that a story of that scale would require a far larger budget than the more modest films he makes just about every year, and so, in light of the unlikelihood of his commanding that budget, he has evidently contented himself with infusing the work that does come out with as much jazz as possible. You can hear almost two and a half hours of it in the Youtube playlist at the top of this post, which includes cuts from not just Bechet and Armstrong but from Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday, Django Reinhardt, Glenn Miller, Lester Young, Jelly Roll Morton, and many other respected players from prewar and wartime America. You can find a list of the songs featured in the jazz playlist, complete with timestamps, in the blurb beneath this YouTube clip.

Even apart from what film scholars would call the non-diegetic jazz in Allen’s pictures (i.e., the jazz we hear on the score, but the characters themselves presumably don’t) he also includes some diegetic jazz, as in the ending of Stardust Memories, when Allen’s character puts on a Louis Armstrong record. And isn’t now just the right time to revisit the sequence from Midnight in Paris just above, a montage celebrating life in the City of Lights set to Sidney Bechet’s “Si tu vois ma mère”? After that, have a look at the clip below, in which the man himself plays with the Woody Allen and Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band at New York’s Cafe Carlyle — where you can catch them every Monday night through December 14th.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

NASCAR Meets the Paranormal in Terry Gilliam’s Short Film, The Legend of Hallowdega

in Film, Sports | November 13th, 2015

I think we here at Open Culture can freely own up to a deficiency in our content: despite its outsized presence in American culture, we’ve really neglected to post much about NASCAR. Luckily, film director, animator, and Monty Python member Terry Gilliam has given us reason to change our ways by shooting a short film at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway, one of the best-known venues for NASCAR races. But The Legend of Hallowdega, made to promote something called AMP Energy Juice, tells not a straight (or rather, constantly left-turning) story about racing, but adds another layer of intrigue: the paranormal.

That might sound like a random conceptual mashup, but a little bit of research reveals Talladega as a regular Overlook Hotel, what with its history of mysterious compulsions, freak injuries and deaths, and unexplained acts of sabotage. (Some even chalk all this up to a curse placed on the Talladega’s valley by its original Native American inhabitants, driven out for their collaboration with Andrew Jackson.) Enter tattooed, Fu-Manchu’d, bead-festooned ghost hunter Kiyash Monsef, here to answer the question, “What is the truth? And what is truer that the truth?” — the words of the khaki-wrapped host of World of the Unexplained, the fictitious, highly sensationalistic, and not especially competent television show that frames The Legend of Hallowdega’s story.

Nothing in the first few minutes of the film gives it away as a Terry Gilliam project, but as soon as it enters Monsef’s elaborate yet makeshift, thoroughly analog lair — located underneath Talladega itself — the famously imaginative director starts making his touch apparent. We could easily dismiss David Arquette’s performance as Monsef as over-the-top, but to many of us, he surely comes off as no more unfamiliar than some of the locals providing their own testimony about the curse in the interview segments. Where has the oft-lamented “old, weird America” gone? In (the American-born but British-naturalized and thus sufficiently distanced) Terry Gilliam’s eyes, it lives on, especially in places like Talladega.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Peter Sellers Calls Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “Violent,” “The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen” (1972)

in Film | November 12th, 2015

In an age when The Walking Dead provides a weekly dose of head-exploding gore, it’s easy to forget how shocking the violence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) felt to viewers at the time. Anthony Burgess’ novel was about crime and punishment, the differences and/or similarities between street-level thugs and state-sanctioned violence, and the importance of violence in a free society. Kubrick, having blown up the world a decade earlier at the end of Dr. Strangelove, took on all these issues and made them into pure cinema. It elicits a response even now—I have friends who resolutely refuse to watch the film—despite its years spent on the compost pile of post-modern culture.

For an example of how strongly people felt, check this quote from Peter Sellers, being interviewed by Gene Siskel in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1972, five months after the film premiered in the States.

Peter Sellers: I hated A Clockwork Orange. I thought it was the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen for years. Amoral. I think because of the violence around today it’s lamentable that a director of Stanley Kubrick’s distinction and ability should lend himself to such a subject. I’m not saying that you can’t pick up that book [the Anthony Burgess novel upon which the film is based], read it, and put it down. But to make it as a film, with all the violence we have in the world today – to add to it, to put it on show – I just don’t understand where Stanley is at.

Gene Siskel: Are you saying that it will influence people to commit violence that they would otherwise not commit?

Peter Sellers: I think it adds to it.

Sellers had worked with Kubrick on both Dr. Strangelove and Lolita, so for a star to talk so ill of a former director was quite shocking. He continues in the interview to also denounce the violence in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, which had just been released. When Siskel presses him on the portrayal of violence and its necessity in a world that wanted more truth and realism in its films, Sellers falls back on his recent involvement in yoga:

I must tell you first of all that I’m a yogi. I am against violence completely. Hare ommm. So you now know why. So there’s really no point in asking any more questions about it.

During the original promotion for the film, Kubrick considered criticisms of its violence absurd:

No one is corrupted watching A Clockwork Orange any more than they are by watching Richard III… The film has been accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm, though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have sought to protect society against works of art which they regarded as dangerous.

Yet as copycat crimes—or crimes that the UK’s press like to suggest were so—increased in the months after its release, Kubrick removed his film from circulation in Britain. Despite Kubrick being behind the decision, it was generally thought that the UK had “banned” the film. It remained so until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Britain finally got to see an uncut version of the film in…you guessed it…2001.

via Dangerous Minds/ Stanley Kubrick Tumblr

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respected Filmmaker of All Time

in Film | November 12th, 2015

If you enjoy film in an even slightly serious way, you’ve surely heard the name Andrei Tarkovsky brought up dozens and dozens of times, sometimes — or, if you run in cinephilic circles, invariably — in the context of vertiginously high praise. Film-lovers worship Tarkovsky, as do many other filmmakers: no less an auteur than Ingmar Bergman called him “the best of them all” (after dismissing Godard as “affected” and Hitchcock as “infantile”), “the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

Other artists, too, have paid Tarkovsky tribute: Geoff Dyer devoted an entire book not to the director’s career, but to just one of his movies, Stalker (see its original trailer above). As we told you five years ago, and it deserves repeating again, you can watch Stalker (here) free online, along with other major Tarkovsky films. Stalker alone can give you a powerful sense of just why the seven feature films Tarkovsky left behind when he died in 1986 have only drawn more accolades over time. And it will perhaps whet your appetite to start watching four other Tarkovsky films free online on this page, including his 15th-century Russian icon-painter biopic (to only partially describe it) Andrei Rublev and his Stanislaw Lem adaptation (and “answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey”) Solaris.

You can also watch 1975’s Mirror, which some Tarkovsky enthusiasts consider his greatest work. If you do watch it, bear in mind the Bergman quote above: if the best of all filmmakers won that title by rendering life as a dream, then it only stands to reason that Mirror, the most dreamlike of all his work, would rise to the top of his filmography. It will make you understand why, despite the hundreds and thousands of pages on Tarkovsky’s work written by critics, academics, and pure fans, you can only appreciate these films through direct experience. As with the difficulty of describing a dream compellingly in words, text can’t do justice to Tarkovsky, but when you watch one of his cinematic dreams, you dream it along with him — and like the most vivid dreams, fragments of them will stick with you forever.

Note: The Tarkovsky films listed above were put online by the official Youtube channel of Mosfilm, the studio for which Tarkovsky made the films.

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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Horror Legend Christopher Lee Reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Literature | November 6th, 2015

Did Bram Stoker’s world-famous Dracula character—perhaps the most culturally unkillable of all horror monsters—derive from Irish folklore? Search the Gaelic “Droch-Fhoula” (pronounced droc’ola) and, in addition to the requisite metal bands, you’ll find references to the “Castle of the Blood Visage,” to a blood-drinking chieftain named Abhartach, and to other possible native sources of Irish writer Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. These Celtic legends, the BBC writes, “may have shaped the story as much as European myths and Gothic literature.”

Despite all this intriguing speculation about Dracula’s Irish origins, the actors playing him have come from a variety of places. One recent incarnation, TV series Dracula, did cast an Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in the role.

Hungarian Bela Lugosi comes closest to the fictional character’s nationality, as well as that of another, perhaps dubious source, Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler. Protean Brit Gary Oldman played up the character as Slavic aristocrat in Francis Ford Coppola’s somewhat more faithful take. But one too-oft-overlooked portrayal by another English actor, Christopher Lee, deserves much more attention than it receives.

In ten low-budget films made by British exploitation studio Hammer, Lee portrayed the monstrous-yet-seductive blood-sucking nobleman as a very proper Englishman with “a certain lascivious sex appeal”—beginning with 1958’s Horror of Dracula (see a trailer above) and ending with 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula. I find Lee’s Dracula so memorable that I was delighted to hear the audio above of him reading an adaptation of the novel, in ten parts. The video begins with titles and an establishing shot from the Hammer films, then segues to images from a 1966 Dracula graphic novel, the source of the “pretty faithful” adaptation by Otto Binder and Craig Tennis, for which Lee wrote an introduction.

The audio here was also recorded in 1966 by the book’s editor Russ Jones. Comics blogger Steven Thompson remarks that “since Dracula is made up of a series of letters, journal and diary entries, the writers here logically take a more straightforward route of telling the tale while maintaining the episodic feel quite well.” Rather than the voice of Count Dracula, Lee reads as the novel’s epistolary narrator Jonathan Harker, and the Dracula in the artwork, drawn by artist Al McWilliams, “bears more than a passing resemblance here to actor John Carradine,” a notable American actor who played the character in Universal’s House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. Nonetheless, Lee’s voice is enough to conjure his many exceptional performances as the prototypical vampire, a character and concept that will likely never die.

Scholar and writer Bob Curran, a proponent of the Irish origins of Dracula, argues in his book Vampires that legends of undead, blood-drinking ghouls are found all over the world, which goes a long way toward explaining the enduring popularity of Dracula in particular and vampires in general. We’ll probably see another actor inherit the role of Stoker’s seductively creepy count in the near future. Whoever it is will have to measure himself against not only the performances of Lugosi, Carradine, Oldman, and Meyers, but also against the debonair Christopher Lee. He would do well, wherever he comes from, to study Lee’s Dracula films closely, and listen to him read the story in the adaptation above.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Spellbinding Supercut of the First & Final Frames of 70 Iconic Films, Played Side by Side

in Creativity, Film, Video - Arts & Culture | November 2nd, 2015

Filmmaker Jacob T. Swinney’s First and Final Frames, Part II, above, is a rare sequel that upholds the quality of the original.

As he did in its predecessor, Swinney screens the opening and closing shots of dozens of recent and iconic films side by side, providing viewers with a crash course in the editorial eye.

What is being communicated when the closing shot replicates—or inverts—the opening shot?

Will the opening shot become freighted with portent on a second viewing, after one has seen how the film will end?

(Shakespeare would say yes.)

Swinney is deeply conversant in the nonverbal language of film, as evidenced by his numerous compilations and video essays for Slate on such topics as the Kubrick Stare and the facial expressions of emotionally revelatory moments.

Most of the films he chooses for simultaneous cradle-and-grave-shot replay qualify as art, or serious attempts thereat. You’d never know from the formalism of its opening and closing shots that Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train at the 1:00 mark is a comedy.

To be fair, Clint Mansell’s universally applied score could cloak even Animal House in a veil of wistful, cinematic yearning.

Given the comic sensibility Swinney’s brought to such supercuts as a Concise Video History of Teens Climbing Through Each Others’ Windows and a Tiny History of Shrinking Humans in Movies, I’m hoping there will be a third installment wherein he considers the first and final moments of comedies.

Any you might recommend for inclusion? (Hold the Pink Flamingos, por favor…)

Films featured in First and Final Frames, Part II in order of appearance:

Sunshine

Snowpiercer

Biutiful

21 Grams

The Prestige

All is Lost

Take Shelter

The Impossible

United 93

Vanilla Sky

Ex Machina

Inside Llewyn Davis

Dead Man

Mystery Train

Melvin and Howard

Fury

Full Metal Jacket

A Clockwork Orange

Eyes Wide Shut

Eraserhead

The Elephant Man

The Fall

The Thin Red Line

The New World

Road to Perdition

Snow Falling on Cedars

The Bourne Ultimatum

The Imitation Game

Flight

Hard Eight

Inherent Vice

World War Z

Wild

The Double

The Machinist

Born on the Fourth of July

Brideshead Revisited

Maps to the Stars

The Skeleton Twins

Mommy

A Scanner Darkly

10 Years

Milk

Lost Highway

Boxcar Bertha

Badlands

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Ratcatcher

Ida

Raise the Red Lantern

Gattaca

Kundun

Bringing Out the Dead

A Most Wanted Man

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The Social Network

Jack Goes Boating

Submarine

Half Nelson

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Babel

Django Unchained

True Grit

Vertigo

Oldboy

Apocalypto

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Gladiator

Mad Max: Fury Road

World’s Greatest Dad

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing at The Brick Theater in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)

The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

Hear 2.5‑Hours of Great Jazz Songs Featured in Woody Allen Films: Sidney Bechet in Midnight in Paris, Louis Armstrong in Stardust Memories & More

NASCAR Meets the Paranormal in Terry Gilliam’s Short Film, The Legend of Hallowdega

Peter Sellers Calls Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “Violent,” “The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen” (1972)

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respected Filmmaker of All Time

Horror Legend Christopher Lee Reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula

A Spellbinding Supercut of the First & Final Frames of 70 Iconic Films, Played Side by Side

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