Despite its sensationalist pulpy title and #ColdWar premise, Jack Arnold's adaptation of the #RichardMatheson novel is an existentialist treatise.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) plays with the understanding of what it means to be acknowledged as a human, and one's place in the world. The story is told through the eyes of the titular Shrinking Man – Scott Carey – who after being exposed to strange fog, finds himself increasingly lost in this world.
“[…] in the ballroom circuit, it is so obvious that if you have captured the great white way of living, or looking, or dressing, or speaking - you is a marvel.” –Pepper LaBeija
Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) is probably best known for its fabulous #ballroom and #vogue-ㅤing scenes but in its heart, it tells the story of #family, of people who found their new ménage where they can live and love without fear and prejudice. While you may expect a fierce #documentary about #TransRights, or maybe merely a glamorous parade, you will be confronted with the flagrant #racism that made the #BallroomScene so essential for the Black and #Latinx#LGBT+ (comm)unity who founded it. And the tragedy of its demise in the name of pop culture even more heartbreaking.
Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de #Salem (FR/GDR, 1957) – , with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early #film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.
Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.
For authenticity reasons, Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton's The General (1926) was – for the most part – filmed on location in Oregon. Set during the #AmericanCivilWar, it's a comedic retelling of a popular war memoir about the #GreatLocomotiveChase.
Sadly it was a box office #flop, resulting in Keaton losing his independence and The General entering the #PublicDomain as early as 1954. Luckily for us that means we too can enjoy the views of beautiful 1920s Oregon: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YWm587wKKVw (note: this version has the appropriate piano score but appears to be a missing few minutes).
“Madrid was filled with the stench of – pardon my language – food. It was indecent.”
Eating is taboo, and relieving oneself is performed on a toilet at a communal table in Luis Buñuel's Le fantôme de la liberté [The Phantom of Liberty] (FR/IT, 1974). Le fantôme strings together events from #Buñuel's life (he was 74 by the time he made this film), with dreams remembered by both Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière. The title references the opening sentence from Marx/Engels' Communist Manifesto. What follows is a wonderful, free-flowing pastiche performed by a sublime cast.
Re-released by Something Weird you're forgiven to think that She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1967) will be a schlockfest. Instead it's a versatile as Bob Clark's filmography. She-Man – and do please forgive the wording – is part #fetish fest, part #mondo movie, part #queer liberation. Real-world female impersonator Leslie Marlowe plays Lt. Albert Rose, a military man forced into wearing lingerie and said wig and eventually embracing it as “Rose Albert”. I loved this #film which reminded me of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda, another lovingly made #LowBudget crossdresser movie made by the people who lived it.
Frederick Wiseman is the fly-on-the-wall at Northeast High School, filming teenage angst and awkwardness. There's talk of #PromNight, and small dramas when it turns out that above-the-knee is not formal wear thankyouverymuchyounglady. The dance itself is never shown. This is High School (1968). I'm glad I never have to set foot in one ever again.
not the #film that won the first grand price at that first #Oscar night in 1929, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
Sunrise was bestowed the award for “Best Unique and Artistic Picture”. The first and last time that ever happened; in 1930, the price was scrapped and replaced by “Outstanding Picture” aka “Best Picture”. And that one went to the much more American-patriotic Wings.
Also rightfully awarded in '29 were Janet Gaynor (Best Actress in a Leading Role), Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Best #Cinematography), while Rochus Gliese was nominated for Best #ArtDirection.
Sunrise is a fantastic tour de force, and it winning that award should make you feel hopeful for the future of cinema. Instead, the current list of nominees and winners is, at least to me, a checklist of what to avoid for ever.
A slice of teenage bravura is just enough for a couple of kids to #dare each other to a drag race. Hours after the car of one of them plunges from a bridge into the murky waters below, Mary Henry resurfaces.
Carnival of Souls was Herk Harvey sole feature length #film. He's much better known – albeit mostly uncredited – for his short PSAs including Halloween Safety, ruining your kids' favourite holiday since 1977, and Shake Hands With Danger (1980). You don't have to tell Three Finger Joe about taking no risks.
A young woman jumps out of a window, leaving behind her husband, an antiques dealer. Sitting in their bedroom with the body lying in state, the widower remembers her. In his memory, she is nameless, abstract, a state not a life. This is Une femme douce [A Gentle Woman] (Robert Bresson, 1969), closely adapted from Fyodor #Dostoevsky's A Gentle Creature (1876).
Various characters lose their shoes in #Fellini's hedonistic La dolce vita (IT/FR, 1960), most famously Anita Ekberg after entering a freezing Fontana di #Trevi with #paparazzo Marcello #Mastroianni.
In ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER #JOKE AS CITED BY #SIGMUNDFREUD IN “WIT AND ITS RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS” OR CAN THE AVANT-GARDE ARTIST BE WHOLED?” (1977) Owen Land explores meaning, wit, and #WordPlay, and manages to unite the #marketing of #umeboshi#plums in a wide variety of vessels, the brokering of brides, and pandas discussing #Freud in all of the above contexts.
In a small train station's waiting room, people sleep. #Trains in the distance rumble along. #Snow covers footprints crossing nearby tracks and the wooden shed where travellers, strangers, huddle together in their shared fate. Pavel Kostomarov's cinematography and Sergey Loznitsa's direction capture the silence. This is Полустанок [Polustanok / The Halt)] (RU, 2000).
A man and a woman meet and fall in love. The woman – Anouk Aimée – still mourns the loss of her stuntman husband, while the man – Jean-Louis Trintignant – is alone since his partner took her life, incapable of dealing with his near-fatal crash at #LeMans. #Trintignant came from a family obsessed with race car driving and was an avid amateur driver himself. His uncle, the #GrandPrix racer Maurice Trintignant, can be seen driving a #Maserati Tipo 151/1 during the race scene.
A deceptively simple #film by Claude Lelouch, with an equally breezy soundtrack by Francis Lai. This is Un homme et une femme (1966).
Joseph #Losey's The Damned (1962) starts out as your conventional, lurid, early counterculture affair.
An American tourist visiting #Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by King, a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous avances. They elope to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control. These are the damned.
A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple - who superficially speak the same #language, #French - struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are. André Delvaux's Un soir, un train (1968) is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.
#Peace, little girl aka Daisy aka Daisy Girl was the #PoliticalAd campaign to end all ad campaigns. It opens innocently enough with a little blonde girl, picking the petals of an ox-eye #daisy while counting. When the final petal's gone, the tone changes completely*
This deceptively simple #propaganda#film was made in support of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign by ad agency #DBB and media consultant #TonySchwartz. It was so effective and bleak in is insinuations that the Johnson campaign was forced to pull it after only one screening.
What fascinates me is the similarity with one particular scene from James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). The Monster (#Karloff) meets a little girl who sits on the shore of a lake, picking daisies. He approaches her, and the girl, knowing the creature is a good man at heart, invites him to play a game with her involving them tossing the daisies into the lake. <spoiler>When they run out of daisies, the Monster picks up the girl who to him is as pretty and innocent as a flower, and throws her into the water.</spoiler>.
This scene was cut and considered lost until the 1980s. Could Tony Schwartz have been aware of that scene? He was at the right age to have seen the pre-code, pre-cut version.
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