Kalamazoo

After college I was in a production called "1940s Radio Hour" which began with this song and was sung in this style. Fun stuff:

I got a new Flip Video Camcorder...

...to give me greater flexibility with videos for my other blog. Here's the first video I made:

The Awful Truth

As you can tell from prior posts, I've been pretty into classic films and screwball comedies from the 1930s. A new discovery for me are the handful of films Cary Grant made with Irene Dunne. Dunne is phenomenal in both comedic and dramatic roles, but for some reason is not well remembered. In "The Awful Truth" Dunne and Grant play a couple who decide to divorce after Grant suspects his wife of spending the night with her music instructor. In the 60 day period in which they wait to finalize their divorce, they work on sabotaging each other's new conquests.

The first clips shows a short conversation between Dunne and Grant just before their divorce becomes final. During the conversation, Grant's new girlfriend calls and Dunne answers. To cover up the awkwardness of a woman answering his phone in his apartment, he tells his girlfriend that it was his sister.

In the second clip, Cary is trying to impress his new girlfriend's aristocratic family when Dunne walks in pretending to be Grant's non-existent tawdry, heavy drinking, chorus girl of a sister. The timing and chemistry between Grant and Dunne in this second scene is amazing. She's working on two levels, first to destroy his chances with his new girlfriend, and second to win him back. The jokes in this scene are both subtle (mostly class-related remarks that Dunne makes) and slapstick (the more physical comedy).

Watch just enough of the first clip to get an idea of the character Dunne is playing, then watch the second to see her versatility as she takes on this new role to embarrass Grant:

A Classic Freak-out

Those of you who know me well understand that I have an eclectic (read nerdy) taste in films. I have a fairly high tolerance for slower moving films, films with little or no plot, and humor that is often more charming than clever. Classic films of the thirties hold a special place in my heart - I love the dialogues, the overacting, the poignancy and cinematography of many films from this era. One really popular film from the thirties was "Dinner at Eight." I have to admit, it unfolds slowly, and you may only recognize a few characters in it (Lionel Barrymore - Mr. Potter of "It's a Wonderful Life," Jean Harlow - Hollywood sexpot of the thirties, and my favorite Billie Burke - you'll remember her as Glinda the Good from "The Wizard of Oz"). The scene here is the one that makes me laugh the most in the film. Billie Burke is planning this lavish dinner to court some influential British couple visiting New York amidst family and financial crises happening all around. As the dinner slowly falls apart, poor Billie reaches her breaking point and freaks out on her daughter and husband. Every little gesture, twitch and eye movement is genius:

Curiouser and Curiouser

This post is a companion post to my friend Aiichiro's post on the same subject. I would link to it, but my Mac browser doesn't let me do it easily, so you will just have to trust me when I say that he wrote about this first. Anyway, as someone who enjoyed art and wanted to be an artist at a very early age, I was naturally attracted to kids books with superior illustrations. I liked Maurice Sendak, Edward Gorey, etc. But my favorite illustrations were the ones Sir John Tenniel had done for Lewis Carroll's Alice books. After I admired the pictures and tried copying them in my own notebooks, I actually read "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" and was so happy to find out the stories were (unlike the Disney film) brilliantly complex, humorous, and completely sarcastic. Carroll, through these books, is able to show how ridiculous the adult world must seem to children, and poke fun at imperialism at its worst to boot.

I've seen several versions of Alice in Wonderland and have never been satisfied because they have all seemed too cutesy, and Alice isn't cute - she's strong, and whiny, sometimes a brat, and very often full of common sense. I like Alice, because she is not passive - she explores the worlds she's dropped into and discovers new things. Most versions of Alice focused on the putting famous actors in caterpillar or turtle costumes and having them dance around like theme-park mascots.

Enter Jan Svenkmajer, Eastern European stop-action animator. I'd heard he'd made a version of "Alice" in the 80s but after my sister and her friend had seen another of his films, "Little Otek" (about a child made out of a stump of wood - a child that grows and devours neighbors), I kept putting it off. I didn't want to be disturbed. When I saw YouTube had some clips of "Alice", I watched them and then ordered myself a copy of the film. It IS a bit disturbing, but not in a bad way, and it completely captures the feeling of the original books without resorting to sentimentality. In fact, it's completely unsentimental. At times, Svenkmajer's wonderland is nightmarish and his Alice, who is correctly played much younger than in most adaptations, is run through the wringer (is it wringer? or ringer? I think it must be wringer because you are wringing out water as from recently warshed (I actually spelled that incorrectly on accident, so I'll leave it) clothes).

After watching the film, I had to bring it to Aiichiro because he quotes Alice at least once a week and has a special love, bordering on obsession, for this book (which to me is very cool).

So for your viewing pleasure (Liz, you will love the teeth!), I am including Svenkmajer's version of Alice and the caterpillar (it's four minutes long, but you can spare four minutes for bizarre, can't you? I thought so.):

ROPE

This Sunday's film is "Rope." It's Hitchcock's first color film, his first time working with actor James Stewart (Stewart would go on to do three more Hitchcock films - "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Rear Window," and "Vertigo"), and first and only attempt at shooting a film in real-time. This film is composed of a series of ten-minute continuous takes (at that time, ten-minutes was the maximum length one could get out of a reel of film. "Rope" is based on the stage play by the same name which is in turn based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case.

While the film is not completely seamless - it's quite obvious when Hitchcock is changing reels - it does have some snappy dialogue, great moments of suspense, and some humorous moments (thrill killing an old college classmate is humorous, isn't it?).



Anyway, it should be a lot of fun.

This Sunday's Hitchcock Film Forum (Cinetastic!)

This weekend's Hitchcock film is the 1940 classic "Rebecca" - we'll be going to the 4:00pm showing. This is Hitchcock's first American film and marks the point in the Hitchcock Sunday series where the director's style really kicks in. This one won the 1940 Oscar for best picture, and is a lot of fun - it's very atmospheric and has some amazing shots. This is one of my favorite images from the movie:


I hope people can make it.

Calling all Film Geeks

Yesterday was the first meeting of the Hitchcock Film Forum (Insert nerd snort here). Actually, I just wanted to tell everyone that this summer Oak Street Cinema is showing early Hitchcock films every Sunday afternoon. I plan on going to as many as possible; anyone who wants to join in, let me know and we can go as a group and then discuss the film over coffee/tea. Yesterday Liz, Chad, and Erin

were my companions. We saw Hitchcock's first film, "The Pleasure Garden."


We had a great time laughing at both the humor of the conventions of silent film acting and that of Hitchcock. There were some great moments in this film which can be seen over and over again in subsequent films of his. What was the main idea of the film?: You can always trust a dog named Cuddles to pick the right man for a chorus girl.

We arrived 40-45 minutes early due to a misprint in the paper regarding show times so we walked down to the Weisman Art Gallery:




This last pic is of a really cool/wall-drippingly-creepy installation piece. It's an apartment hallway - when you put your ear to the doors of this corridor, you get to hear what's going on in each apartment (I'd avoid apt. #7).

After the art and the film, we decided to head down to Uptown and take in the lakes (at least Calhoun and Lake of the Isles). We relaxed:



Practiced Tai Chi:



We also found a purple ball that we kicked around for a bit. I have two great pics from this part of the evening, but both Ofoto and Photobucket are being rather ineffective at the moment. I'll try and get them up soon complete with commentary.

Next week's film forum film: "The 39 Steps"

Unknowability

I feel like I should post something, but I don't really have a subject or topic of interest to discuss here. So I'll just ramble a bit and see what of value - if anything - comes out of it. Maybe I'll talk about the title of this entry: Unknowability. It's a term I threw around liberally when I was writing my thesis. I used it to describe the poem's multiplicity of possible meanings, but resistance to definition. My third reader had a problem with the term; she believed it was a slippery slope sort of word that allowed one to stay on the surface and not dig deeper for meaning. I didn't care because I was quite happy with the word, and felt that it allowed me to go deeper without being stuck in a rigid template. But I like the term in general as well; it it is, I think, something that drives me. The possibility of figuring something out - whether it is a crossword puzzle, a mystery, the location of a lost letter, the identity of Jack the Ripper, or a reason for someone's behavior - fascinates me. The solution is never as satisfying to me as the possibility of a solution and the attempt to figure it out. Not having answers stimulates my imagination. Definitive answers are comforting to some degree, but are cold, set-in-stone truths - I can't do anything with them. In literature and film unknowability plays out quite nicely because, I assume, the author or director wants to stimulate that creative part of the brain, wants to tease the reader or viewer with the promise of an answer and then never offer it.

I remember suggesting once to a theater group that I belonged to that we should re-adapt an Agatha Christie play, "And Then There Were None" (a.k.a. "Ten Little Indians," a.k.a. "Ten Little Niggers"), to more closely resemble the novel on which the play was based. Only my idea was to remove the solution from the play altogether: After eight of ten guests at a weekend party on a secluded island are killed over the course of a few days (in various gruesome ways), the two survivors (each supposing the other to be the killer) confront one another on the beach. The young woman has a gun; the young man doesn't. She shoots him, returns to the house, finds a noose hanging from a hook in an upstairs room. Knowing that the only survivor on an island with nine corpses will most likely be hanged anyway, she kills herself. After this, Christie offers a pretty complex solution. I suggested to my friends that we should end it after the woman kills herself and never offer an explanation. My thinking was that the audience reaction would be much more interesting. One of the group immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous, stating that it would make the audience feel unsatisfied and possibly angry. This was the reaction I would want. That way people would leave the play discussing possibilities.

Here are some books and films that I like to read because of their unknowability on different levels:

1. A Passage to India (book and film)
2. Picnic at Hanging Rock (book and film)
3. The Turn of the Screw (and the film, The Innocents, which is based on the novella)
4. The Mystery of Edwin Drood
5. Julia (Memoir and film)
6. When We Were Orphans
7. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
8. Bach's Art of the Fugue is great because It's incomplete - the final piece in the collection peters out wonderfully

If anyone else has good suggestions of books or films that deal with this kind of ambiguity, I'd love to hear from you.

How's everyone's summer going?