Danza macabra / Danse macabre / Castle of Blood (1963) (2022 restoration Société Cinématographique Lyre)

Anthony Dawson (Antonio Margheriti): Danza macabra / Danse macabre / Castle of Blood (IT/FR 1963) with Margrete Robsahm as Julia Alert.

Castle of Blood / Gäst i fasornas hus.
Anthony Dawson / Italie-France / 1963 / 89 min / DCP / VOSTF
Film réalisé par Antonio Margheriti sous le pseudonyme d'Anthony Dawson.
Produced in 15 days in 1963, released 27 Feb 1964 (Italy) and 14 April 1965 (France).
[D'après le roman Danse macabre d'Edgar Allan Poe {no such work exists}].
DP: Riccardo Pallottini (as Richard Kramer) noir et blanc. PD: Ottavio Scotti (as Warner Scott). Set dec: Ennio Michettoni (as Mike Thony). Makeup: Sonny Arden. Hair: Adalgisa Favella (Gisa Flowers). SFX and VFX: Ettore Catalucci. M and cond: Riz Ortolani. ED: Otello Colangeli (as Otel Langhel).
    Avec Barbara Steele, Georges Rivière, Margrete Robsahm, Montgomery Glenn.
    E-sous-titres français par Alessandra Cocchi.
    Séance présentée par Jean-François Rauger.
    Viewed at the Festival Toute la mémoire du monde 2023, la Cinémathèque française, Salle Georges Franju, jeudi 9 mars 2023, 18h30 20h00

Restauration 4K menée en 2022 par la Société Cinématographique Lyre en collaboration avec la Cinémathèque française et avec le soutien du CNC, de la Mairie de Paris 8, des contributeurs du crowdfunding ProArti et des sociétés Artus Films, Lobster Films et Severin Films. Travaux réalisés au laboratoire Éclair Classics et au studio L.E. Diapason à partir des négatifs originaux et de contretypes d'époque. La version restaurée intègre certaines séquences initialement censurées lors de la première sortie du film.

" Un jeune journaliste relève le pari de passer la nuit dans un château hanté. Il perd rapidement pied car, devant ses yeux horrifiés, se rejouent des meurtres passés, dont celui du précédent couple à avoir relevé le même défi. "

" Dans le sillage des productions anglaises de la Hammer, l'Italie connaît, au début des années 1960, un engouement pour l'horreur gothique, genre qui ne revêt pas encore les couleurs sanglantes du giallo et dans lequel Danse macabre tient une place prépondérante. Tournée en moins de deux semaines dans les décors encore frais du Religieux de Monza – que vient de réaliser Sergio Corbucci –, la série B d'Antonio Margheriti produit un véritable plaisir esthétique, à la faveur d'une photographie envoûtante, explicitement inspirée par l'atmosphère fantastique des contes d'Edgar Poe. Explorant les recoins du château de Lord Blackwood, éclairé d'une chandelle vacillante, Alan Foster regrette bientôt d'avoir accepté un pari aussi funèbre, dont l'unique prétexte sert à donner corps aux histoires extraordinaires qui imprègnent les lieux. Le long des corridors aux ombres flottantes, le danger peut surgir à chaque instant, dans le reflet d'un miroir ou derrière la porte d'une chambre chargée de secrets. Pris au vieux piège de la maison hantée, coincé entre la vie et la mort d'un espace-temps poétiquement indéterminé, voici que l'intrépide mortel tombe amoureux d'une revenante. Barbara Steele, diva du genre à l'étrange beauté – révélée dans Le Masque du démon de Mario Bava –, apporte à cette Danse macabre son lot de suggestions érotiques et saphiques, lors d'une ingénieuse représentation, qu'une horde de fantômes et de vampires se plaisent à rejouer indéfiniment. "

Delphine Simon-Marsaud

AA: A well done restoration of a horror film from the period of the greatest flourishing of Italian genre cinema. Antonio Margheriti's career spanned the genre range. Danza macabra might be his lasting achievement in horror.

Danza macabra reconfirms its place among the works of Freda, Bava, Argento and Ferroni during the heyday of Italian horror cinema, simultaneous with the great waves in Britain (Hammer Horror), United States (Roger Corman), Mexico and Japan.

Despite the claim in the opening credits (of being based on "Danse macabre" by Edgar Allan Poe, although no such work exists), the title of the film is probably inspired by Camille Saint-Saëns's tone poem "Danse macabre" (whose most durable cinematic connection is Jean Renoir's La Règle du jeu).

Of Edgar Allan Poe's works, Danza macabra is most directly linked with "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", the tale of Toby Dammit (modernized by Federico Fellini in Histoires extraordinaires, starring Terence Stamp as an alcoholic Shakespearean actor). The story is about a bet, and there is a similar punch ending at the gate.

Margheriti's film, Saint-Saëns's tone poem and Poe's story all take place in the All Souls' Day / Halloween period. In Finland, the day of commemorating the dead is called Pyhäinpäivä. In France it is known as Toussaint. Mexicans celebrate the Día de Muertos, cinematically memorable from ¡Que viva México! and Under the Volcano. (I was also thinking about Les Orgueilleux. Although it does not take place on the Day of the Dead, it is also a danse macabre film, powerfully linking Eros and Thanatos). In the cinema Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance is also relevant.

More than an adaptation of a specific story, Danza macabra is an Edgar Allan Poe tribute in the same way as Griffith's The Avenging Conscience, Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher – and Histoires extraordinaires, and why not, Corman's portmanteau film Tales of Terror. Poe himself is a key character, and the male protagonist is a journalist, Alan Foster (Georges Rivière), who wants to find out if the tales of Poe (Silvano Tranquilli) are based on imagination or reality.

The film deals with several of Poe's obsessions: death, being buried alive, the life of the spirit continuing after corporeal death, and the idea that "The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover." ("The Philosophy of Composition", 1846).

Freedom is of the essence in a successful film adaptation. In Danza macabra, shadows of the night, mist, fog, smoke, fire and candlelight are simple but eloquent elements. Clothes and veils hide something more than naked flesh: evanescence. Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas. Behind the door is the secret that we all finally meet. The image of dust flying from the coffin lingers in memory.

"For he knoweth our frame;
he remembereth that we are dust.

As for man, his days are as grass:
as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it,
and it is gone;
and the place thereof shall know it no more."

– Psalm 103: 14–16 (King James Bible)

Add to the mix the phantoms' lust for blood. Like vampires, they need blood for their undead existence.

An original feature is the focus on female desire. Elisabeth Blackwood (Barbara Steele), Julia Alert (Margrete Robsahm) and Elsi Perrente (Sylvia Sorrente) are active, pheromone-charged women. Elisabeth's life force is so strong that even from beyond death she attempts to rescue Alan Foster to the living while all other phantoms try to trap him into their domain.

As Delphine Simon-Marsaud comments in her program note, there is a Sapphic dimension. Julia Alert desires Elisabeth Blackwood and is jealous of her male lovers.

The focus on sexuality stems from exploitation needs but is successfully integrated. Glimpses of the bride's beauty as God intended are added into the restored version. They may be gratuitous but contribute agreeably to the Eros – Thanatos dynamics.

In Delphine Seyrig's Sois belle et tais-toi!, Barbara Steele is one of the interviewees. She distances herself unequivocally from her exploitation film career, films she did not want to make now adulated as cult films, while all she wants to say is: "That's not me". Yet in Danza macabra she creates the most unforgettable character as Elisabeth, both dead and full of life. Barbara Steele is worthy of better things, but there is nothing to be ashamed of in her presence here.

Jean-François Rauger in his introduction gave us the suggestion to pay attention to the documentary insert of a snake, a startling illustration of the mystery of life and death.

Danza macabra, produced simultaneously with Roger Corman's eight Poe cycle films, is as good as the best of them. Although quickly made, crazy and abrupt, it sustains a compelling dream mode and conveys the Poe spirit memorably.

Danza macabra inspires me to digressions. They may never end, since the day of the commemoration of the dead is a universal phenomenon, and the dance of death and the skeleton dance are ubiquitous in world art (Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal is a well-known example, drawing from classic medieval imagery which seems to have its origins in Paris, in the Cimetière des Innocents, long since demolished).

For me, a candidate for the best study of horror fiction is Stephen King's Danse Macabre (1981). Its title is, indeed, a perfect motto for the genre.

...

" Car il sait
de quoi nous sommes formés,
Il se souvient que nous sommes poussière.

L'homme! ses jours sont comme l'herbe,
Il fleurit comme la fleur des champs.

Lorsqu'un vent passe sur elle,
elle n'est plus,
Et le lieu qu'elle occupait ne la reconnaît plus. "

– Psaumes 103:14–16 (La Bible Louis Segond)

Sillä hän tietää,
minkäkaltaista tekoa me olemme:
hän muistaa meidät tomuksi.

Ihmisen elinpäivät ovat niinkuin ruoho,
hän kukoistaa niinkuin kukkanen kedolla.

Kun tuuli käy hänen ylitsensä,
ei häntä enää ole,
eikä hänen asuinsijansa häntä enää tunne.

– Psalmit 103:14–16 (Raamattu 1938)

Musée d'Orsay: to photograph or to see II

The Musée d'Orsay clock. A view over the Seine to Montmartre. Please click to enlarge the photo. L'Horloge du Musée d'Orsay from: Paris Tickets by Headout.

These jottings are a remake and a sequel to my remarks from 2014 titled "Le Louvre: to photograph or to see" I.

Before the pandemic, there was a global golden age of museum attendance: never had museums been so popular. Now, after a three year interruption, crowds are returning, not least from Asian countries. Hopefully the golden age continues.

I have travelled to Paris in business since the 1970s, but my first tourist trip I made only in 2014, and it was then that I also visited Le Louvre for the first time.

In 2014 I was amazed to observe visitors photographing artworks at Le Louvre. These are legendary works of which there are high resolution images online without paywalls. Observing the fantastic online images one can get deeper into informative detail than viewing the paintings themselves.

Susan Sontag, among others, has praised the service done by high quality photographic reproductions for art historians, critics and artists. Before photography, it could be overwhelming to gain such a wide grasp of art history as anybody can have today.

Brilliant online reproductions are available around the clock, but when the rare moment arrives to actually see the legendary cultural object, what do we do? We don't view it. Instead, we take a photograph.

Nine years ago I thought that we have reached the nadir in this behaviour. The classic photograph of the phenomenon was taken by Guia Besana for The New York Times, 28 July 2014: Mona Lisa. (I quote the photo in my remarks on "The queer gaze of Leonardo"). The tiny lady is in her bulletproof glass cage, surrounded by safety rope. A crowd throngs around. Everybody takes photos, some turning their backs to the painting for a selfie.

I refused to visit the Mona Lisa room but became a victim of the photographing mania anyway. Wanting to examine the Code of Hammurabi Stele in peace I soon realized that I was disturbing photographers, who in turn kept interrupting me. Great images of the stele and complete accounts of its contents are available in sources, but the three-dimensional presence of the object is an unforgettable and haunting experience that a photograph cannot convey.

Now again in Paris, this time visiting the Orangerie and the Orsay museums, I realize that the nadir of the photographing mania has not yet been reached. Visiting the Matisse exhibition, it was not rare to observe a photographer in front of every painting. It was like a Godardian combo satire: running through a museum and bringing back only postcards.

There are still benches in exhibition rooms, but not in front of the most famous paintings. The classic habit of visiting exhibitions included the possibility to spend an hour meditating in front of a masterpiece. Today, museums are turning into conveyor belt platforms of photo opportunities.

Susan Sontag was puzzled by the phenomenon of photography as a substitute for seeing. Which is connected to major philosophical issues dating back to Socrates and Plato.

By incessant photographing we attempt to outsource seeing to a machine. It is a futile exercise. Seeing as documenting factual information is important. But particularly when we are dealing with a visual artwork, the substance is only revealed in a complex mental process that requires time and focus. Often it requires revisits. Even the physical reality of the visual artwork is multi-layered. There is the surface (line, shape, colour, texture, value, form, space). But that is often only the beginning. A painting is a physical, three-dimensional object. One of the magical mysteries of Mona Lisa is that she seems to have a different smile and a different look depending on the light and the direction of the viewer. A good painting can be many paintings depending on the changing circumstances of display.

Seeing in the highest sense of the word means insight. It means being illuminated. It means being enlightened.

These things cannot be externalized to a machine. Not even an AI machine.

Musée d'Orsay (art museum)

Camille Pissarro : Le Pont Boïeldieu à Rouen, en 1896, huile sur toile, H. 54,0 ; L. 65,0 cm., Dation, 1983, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski.

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) : Un atelier aux Batignolles (1870). Huile sur toile. 204 x 274 cm. Featuring: Édouard Manet (painting), Zacharie Astruc (sitting), standing from left to right: Otto Scholderer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (wearing a hat), Émile Zola (bearded, lorgnette in hand), Edmond Maître, Frédéric Bazille (in profile), Claude Monet. Musée d'Orsay. Photo: Google Art Project.

Musée d'Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Esplanade du Musée d'Orsay
62 rue de la Lille
Rue de la Légion d'Honneur
7 quai Anatole France
75007 Paris
Visited on 5 March 2023.

The catalogue:
Christophe Averty : Musée d'Orsay.
Paris : Könemann © 2020 koenemann.com GmbH, © Éditions Place des Victoires.
ISBN 978-2-8099-1770-3
Dépôt légal : 4ème trimestre 2020.
In French, with translations in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.
Printed in China by Shyft Publishing / Hunan Tianwen Xinhua Printing Co. Ltd.
480 pages. Dimensions: 32 x 29 x 3,8 cm. Poids: 3210 g.
    Chapters:
The Art of a Century
Academic Arts – Freedom born of constraints
Naturalism and Realism – The colors of the world
Symbolism – Journeys to the innermost
Impressionism – The Painter's time
Post- and Neo-Impressionism – A new beginning
On the Threshold of Expressionism – Disenchanted Realities
Lonely geniuses – Everyone goes his own way
Emerging abstractions – A never ending journey

" The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe. " (English Wikipedia)

AA: For the first time I visit the Musée d'Orsay. During my first visit to Paris in the 1970s it did not exist. It is a destination so daunting that a lot of mental energy is required. Most of the paintings I have never seen in an exhibition. Many are familiar from art books since childhood, including ones by the old friends immortalized by Henri Fantin-Latour in the group portrait above.

I focus on the fifth level (Niveau supérieur), the rooms 28–47.

De l'impressionnisme au néo-impressionnisme: Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Seurat, Signac.

Post-impressionnisme: Pont-Aven: Bernard, Gauguin, Sérusier. Cabinet d'arts graphiques et de photographies. Galerie Françoise Cachin: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon. Le Cabaret du Chat Noir. Cinéma 1895–1914 (this room I pass by as quickly as possible).

It is deeply moving to see some of the most famous paintings of all time in the flesh: Van Gogh's La Nuit étoilée, Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette and Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Most importantly, the well curated and mounted fifth level department has a cumulative impact. We get to see many paintings from many major artists in one go. There are felicitous pairings such as Renoir's Danse à la ville and Danse à la campagne. Further, the artworks collected here contribute to a larger experience of a golden age of painting before the First World War, the twilight zone, the transitional period between realism and abstraction.

Gauguin is displayed in dialogue with Van Gogh, and young Gauguin is seen along late Gauguin, including his large scale wood sculpture for La Maison du Jouir. I register the melancholy looks of his Tahitian subjects. We searched for the lost paradise in Tahiti, never learned to understand, and destroyed in the process an ancient, alien lifestyle with alcohol and venereal and other diseases.

A painter whom I today register fully for the first time is Gustave Caillebotte, a great intermediary between realism and impressionism. In his great realist paintings there is a touch of the uncanny. There are impressive paintings on display that have only recently been added to the museum's collections.

After a break I head to the second and ground levels. I have just read from Conversations with Susan Sontag the great writer's remark that she burst in tears (of disappointment) during her first visit to Musée d'Orsay, because of the exhibition on these very levels. The difference is still marked compared with the fifth level. Even proper lighting is sometimes missing. The volume is at its most overwhelming here both in the number of paintings and the size.

I don't try to see everything. I am impressed by the fantastic sculpture alley with a lot of Rodin. The rooms filled with academic paintings provide context to the general story. Realism is represented by some of the most legendary classics. I am in tears seeing for the first time "live" Millet's L'Angélus and Des glaneuses, revered by Van Gogh and Agnès Varda. I am awed to see for the first time Courbet's L'Atelier du peintre in its majestic 361 x 598 cm grandeur. Musée d'Orsay does justice to the hugitive paintings of the 19th century. There is a good survey on Symbolism.

Add to that a number of special pleasures such as a Douanier Rousseau selection including La Charmeuse des serpents, which impressed me as a child examining art books. Here she is again, a mysterious figure, now belonging to the collective dreamscape of mankind, preceding Surrealism.

Aftersun

Catherine Wells: Aftersun (GB 2022) with Frankie Corio (Sophie) and Paul Mescal (Calum), daughter and father on holiday in Turkey.

Aftersoon – päivämme auringossa / Swedish title: Aftersun.

Viewed at Le Grand Action, Salle Paul Vecchiali, 5 rue des Écoles, 3 mars 2023

My dictionary on aftersun: "Describing a cooling lotion applied to the skin after exposure to the sun."

Like Sofia Coppola's Somewhere (2010), Catherine Wells's Aftersun is a film about a 11-year-old daughter and her father's existential crisis, but the two films are completely different.

Aftersun is an experimental film. The fragile imagery of low tech home video footage conveys both raw immediacy and the transience of memory.

Aftersun is not story-driven. It captures a traumatic memory of the daughter's last holiday with her father. The destination: sunny Turkey.

11 years is an important age for such a rite of passage. Not too young, not too old to experience a voyage with father.

It is about the end of childhood.

It provides a memory of the greatest happiness and the greatest loss.

The performance of the young Frankie Corio is wonderful as the young teenager Sophie.

The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg: The Fabelmans (US 2022).

151 min

Viewed at Le Grand Action, Salle Kelly Reichardt, 5 rue des Écoles, 3 mars 2023

I like The Fabelmans, a film that is both a fresh opening for Steven Spielberg and a continuation to his long-term concerns.

The great revelation of The Fabelmans is of course that for the first time Spielberg is directly and frankly autobiographical, revealing intimate secrets and anxieties about childhood and young age.

The Fabelmans is a family saga. It is about a loving family, and it is about a broken family. It is about the conflict between work duty and family happiness, also between art and love. To sum up: between ambition and love. A great and universal theme is honestly and movingly discussed.

The screenplay is another collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, resulting to psychological nuance and complexity.

The Fabelmans is one of the films that display Spielberg's cinephilic passions. There are cinephilic references all over Spielberg's oeuvre, but only one film has been dedicated to them: the baroque and extravagant 1941. The Fabelmans is a Bildungsroman about the integration of cinephilia into life.

It begins and ends with cinephilic sequences. The little Sam visits the cinema for the first time and sees Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show On Earth. (In its first lines DeMille declares that it is for "children of all ages").

The film ends in a sequence in which young Sam is unexpectedly introduced to John Ford, played with gruff charisma by none other than David Lynch. Ford gives the young Fabelman a lesson in horizon that he will never forget. The Fabelmans has one of the greatest closing shots in the history of the cinema. In it, Steven Spielberg internalizes the John Ford lesson. *

But cinephilia is also integrated into the family romance. In one of his home movies, Sam unwittingly documents his mother's secret love life. And at high school, Sam, a victim of bullying, grows into a popular hero thanks to his beach party movie.

The Fabelmans is also one of Spielberg's movies relevant to feminism. Let's remember that his theatrical debut film was The Sugarland Express, featuring a strong female lead (Goldie Hawn). The Post is for me a personal favourite because its account of Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) evokes active women in my own family who were the only women in all male panels. And, as art sometimes does, this film helped me finally truly understand what they had always told.

The protagonists of The Fabelmans are Sam (played by Mateo Zoryan and Gabriel LaBelle) and his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams). Mitzi is a talented pianist who has given up her career for the family. There is an affinity with Doris Day's character in The Man Who Knew Too Much. She is also being estranged in her marriage with her IT wizard husband (Paul Dano). In The Rain People, Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by his own mother, discussed a similar quandary in the tale of Natalie (Shirley Knight). A family romance like this has been discussed in classic melodramas such as Back Street and All That Heaven Allows, but this is no melodrama. This is a heartfelt family drama seen from the children's viewpoint, the love and the empathy being slowly transferred to the mother who has become trapped in her own family, risking to become a stranger both to herself and all around her. Michelle Williams's touching performance is the heart of the movie.

Sam's own éducation sentimentale proceeds at the high school where he is the only Jew. The Fabelmans is one of Spielberg's most important works about the Jewish experience, following Schindler's List and Munich. It is an achingly personal account of antisemitism and bullying – as verbal abuse, as direct violence, and as a complicating factor in relationships and romance.

Sam's first romantic interest, Monica (Chloe East), is the active one in the relationship, an ardent Jesus lover, interested in Sam because Jesus, too, was a handsome young Jewish man. Her project is to convert Sam, but when Sam proposes to her, she turns him down. Having reached the nadir of his school experience, Sam screens his Ditch Day movie which becomes the zenith. In it, his worst enemy Logan appears as a glorified hero and another bully, Chad, as a miserable loser.

Logan breaks down after the film and cannot make sense of Sam. I was thinking about a favourite book and a favourite chapter of mine: "Confusing your enemy with style" in Quentin Crisp's Doing It With Style. If you have an enemy, be sure that he hears only good things from you. This may sound superficial but is actually a lesson from Jesus Christ, about turning the other cheek. In Logan's case, it works.

* William K. Everson wrote that in William S. Hart's earthbound films the skyline is always high in the frame. With John Ford, the skyline is low, and the action unfolds under a wide open sky.

Matisse. Cahiers d’art, the pivotal 1930's (Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, 1 March to 29 May, 2023)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Femme à la voilette, 1927. The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Succession H. Matisse © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence / DR.

Musée de l'Orangerie
Jardin des Tuileries, Place de la Concorde (côté Seine), 75001 Paris.
    This project enjoyed the crucial support of Cahiers d’Art and the Matisse Archives.
    This exhibition is organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Musée Matisse in Nice.
    Curatorship: Cécile Debray, President of the National Picasso Museum – Paris.
    Assisted for documentary research by Alice Marsal, Head of Conservation at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
    Visited on 1 March, 2023.

Musée de l'Orangerie: "There has been no lack of exhibitions on Matisse. Among those that have addressed the various periods that marked his career, very few have focused specifically on the 1930s. Matisse. Cahiers d’art – Le tournant des années 1930 (The Pivotal 1930s) is devoted exclusively to this period."

"In 1930, Matisse left France and traveled to Tahiti, so deliberately taking a break from creation, and reaching a turning point in his career. The “Matisse. Cahiers d’art, le tournant des années 1930” exhibition revisits this decisive decade. It is through the prism of Cahiers d’art, the great avant-garde magazine created by Christian Zervos in 1926, that the exhibition will be presenting Matisse’s work in the 1930s. The mouthpiece for international modernism and the aesthetic trends of its day, the magazine reported on the artist’s production throughout the interwar period."

"The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the decade with a view to understanding their major concerns. Largely excluded from the art scene during the 1920s, the painter’s work once again became a subject for the era’s debates on ideas and reflections, due to regular publications in Cahiers d’Art, highlighting his pre-1916 paintings – the most radical among them in particular – and reporting on his production underway. Articles and reproductions of Matisse’s works helped relaunch his competition with Picasso. In successive issues of the magazine, Matisse featured alongside the artists of his time: Georges Braque, Juan Miro, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Marcel Duchamp."

"A number of outstanding works rarely exhibited in France have been brought together for this exhibition, including Large Reclining Nude from Baltimore, The Song from Houston and the 1938 Romanian Blouses series conserved in various American museums. The density and complexity of the decade in question are suggested by sculptures, objects from Matisse’s and others’ collections, drawings, engravings and paintings, along with recent prints of photographs of states of progress, archives, excerpts from films and issues of Cahiers d’art."

AA: The Paris leg of the internationally circulating Henri Matisse exhibition opened today at the Orangerie. The exhibition is admirably compact and well curated. Selections of cycles are illuminating, rarities are highlighted, and the Matisse / Picasso comparison is a running concept. The paintings are covered by non-reflecting glass, and the hanging and the lighting are excellent.

The exhibition satisfies a curiosity about Matisse in the 1930s, a less well known period in the life of the artist who remained active for 65 years, better known for instance for his Fauvist breakthrough or his final giant cutout years.

Having turned 60, Matisse sensed a need for renewal and headed for Tahiti where he happened to meet F. M. Murnau filming Tabu. The Tahiti room is dominated by two big related oil paintings, both showcasing a ship in the port as seen from a hotel window. Invitations to a voyage, one in the light of the sunrise, the other in the evening dusk, on display here from different collections.

Matisse was a Northerner who loved the colours of the Southern sunlight. He was one of the greatest Colourists, and many of his greatest paintings are colour-driven.

Matisse was also inspired by African, Tasmanian and Papuan art, and there is a fascinating wall at the Orangerie of sacred sculptures and totem poles from Matisse's private collections. Collections such as these are a topic today for a new critical discourse on colonialism in art museums. These collections have powerfully influenced European art. A renewed urgency is attached to these endlessly mysterious and uncanny objects.

La Danse (1909) in its different versions may be Matisse's most famous work. In the Matisse of the 1930s exhibition, a whole room is dedicated to works related to La Danse de Merion / La Danse II (1932), the triptych mural for Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia. These are studies in the grandeur of simplicity.

A wall is dedicated to a comparison of Matisse and Picasso's etchings. Matisse and Picasso were each other's greatest friends and rivals. Matisse created illustrations for Mallarmé and Joyce, Picasso for Ovid. The themes of both were mythic. Before the exhibition I was not able to tell a Matisse etching from a Picasso effort, and having spent today a long while comparing them I am none the wiser. Matisse has a stronger urge to reduction and simplification while Picasso favours a more detailed composition and superimpositions.

Judging by the prominence of the odalisque motif, Matisse's libido remained as unrestrained as Picasso's. During the current Me Too discourse, John Berger's thesis in Ways of Seeing has been revived ("men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."). Certainly nothing would be more patriarchal than reducing a woman to a harem lady, already condemned by Mozart in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Let's also register a presence of sexual violence in The Afternoon of the Faun and the Ulysses series. But these are atavistic drives that are both transcended and sublimated in Matisse's art.

What remains is a response to the call of life (in Nu allongé, de dos, 20 mai 1935) and the joy of release (Nu au collier [Lydia], 1935). It is rare to find erotic art so frank and so refined. I wonder whether art like this is going to be censored in the current trends of cancel culture. But I remember examining a particularly uninhibited nude in a recent Auguste Rodin exhibition in the company of a distinguished female art executive. She did not seem to be in censorship mood, on the contrary.

Among the highlights in the last rooms is the rarely displayed Le Chant (1939, from The Lewis Collection). Grand nu couché (nu rose) (1935, from the Baltimore Museum of Art) is shown in the context of ten sketches. From the Blouse roumaine series is shown a stark and memorable 1940 version from Centre Pompidou (not illustrated in the catalogue in which other works of the cycle are displayed).

Thirty years earlier Matisse had already discarded depth and perspective. The trend was to even greater reduction, simplicity and flatness.

The style kept becoming simpler and the colour stronger.

Tom Luddy 1943–2023

Larisa Shepitko and Tom Luddy at Telluride Film Festival, 1977. Photo: Richard Leacock. Tom sent this photo to me for our 2016 Larisa Shepitko retrospective.

I did not know Tom Luddy well, but I kept meeting him irregularly since his 1987 visit to the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Lapland where I registered his silent dignity. In 1993 I visited the Telluride Film Festival for the first time, and witnessed his mercurial engagement as festival director.

Tom Luddy was a film programmer of the first order, but there was an even more profound dimension in his commitment, something that I have learned to increasingly appreciate during the pandemic years of enforced distancing.

Our calling is about films, but even more importantly, it's about people. Our calling is to connect the artists who created the films with the people who visit our screenings.

"It takes talent to appreciate talent", said Stanley Donen who visited Sodankylä in 1994, and that could serve as a motto for Tom Luddy.

When Tom met people, they had a feeling of having been seen. Tom had an inner eye, and when he saw, it was not in an instrumental way, not as a means to an end. Seeing was the end. The immense pleasure of that happening was obvious.

The happiness in such encounters was infectious, and the expanding circles of such encounters created a warm and enthusiastic festival atmosphere.

Tom was a wizard of introductions. Between screenings he could simultaneously conduct multiple introductions between guests. Tom was a master matchmaker. He positively glowed in that role.

A special Telluride memory for me is when Tom introduced me to William K. Everson, a grand old man of film history and preservation. Two weeks later I visited Everson's class at the New York University, followed with an invitation to Everson's home for a private screening. The year after, we invited Everson to Helsinki for a series of Pre-Code treasures from his collections.

Tom Luddy had a distinguished official and credited career as a film producer and Francis Ford Coppola's right-hand man. But behind the scenes, his influence was greater, unfathomable.

I liked Kasi Lemmons's recent film I Wanna Dance: The Whitney Houston Movie, and one of the reasons was the affinity with Tom Luddy in Stanley Tucci's quietly compelling performance as Clive Davis, the visionary music industry executive of Arista Records.

I was in correspondence with Tom who sent Telluride programs and followed our Helsinki programming and shared memories inspired by our themes. How he helped Agnès Varda in California to meet Black Panthers and Uncle Yanco. How he guided Larisa Shepitko in Telluride through Brezhnev era surveillance (Tom wrote an excellent memoir about this. I wish I could find a link).

Tom's interest in culture and society was many-sided. He loved music. He was widely read, even in Finnish literature: he followed Sofi Oksanen's oeuvre in Lola Rogers's translations. In Finland, Tom's key connection was Peter von Bagh whom he knew since 1972. Midnight Sun Film Festival was inspired by Telluride Film Festival.

Born in New York City, Tom came to the University of Berkeley in Northern California to study physics in 1962. Stanford University was the other major university of the Bay Area, which kept flourishing into the world's most important center of information technology, including Silicon Valley. In the heart of counterculture and the Summer of Love, in an atmosphere of some of the greatest musical and literary exploration of the era, Tom groomed the Pacific Film Archive into one of the most exciting hubs of film culture.

I was humbled by the fact that Tom was a reader of my blog and sent dvd's and links to watch. When Jonathan Miller died, Tom advised me to view Miller's films. Tom had met the Renaissance man only once: "we were both close friends of Susan Sontag and met at a dinner on the eve of Susan’s burial at Montparnasse." The Sontag and Miller connections are illuminating.

"The company you keep". That, too, could serve as a motto for Tom.

In our calling as film programmers the memory of Tom Luddy lives on as a model in the spirit of inspiration and generosity.

...

P.S. 28 Feb 2023. Meanwhile, I have read many wonderful obituaries. I just finished reading a particularly outstanding tribute by Catherine Shoard for The Guardian, 21 Feb 2023.

P.S. 26 May 2023. The brilliant Pacific Film Archive tribute "Ambassador of the Cinema" in June-July 2023.

Sois belle et tais-toi ! (1981) / Be Pretty and Shut Up

Delphine Seyrig: Sois belle et tais-toi ! / Be Pretty and Shut Up (FR 1981). Photo: © Tournage de Sois belle et tais-toi ! / Familles Seyrig et Roussopoulos / Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir / Version restaurée par la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

FR 1981. Année de production : 1976. Sortie en France : 4 March 1981. Productrice déléguée : Delphine Seyrig
    Genre : Documentaire, long-métrage.
    Réalisé par Delphine Seyrig. Directrice de la photo+montage: Carole Roussopoulos – source format: video – camera: Sony AVC-3400 – couleur – 1981 release on 35 mm – 2023 re-release on DCP.
    Featuring:
– Jill Clayburgh
– Marie Dubois
– Delia Salvi
– Juliet Berto
– Patti D'Arbanville
– Mady Norman / Maidie Norman
– Louise Fletcher
– Jane Fonda
– Cindy Williams
– Rita Renoir
– Jenny Agutter
– Luce Guilbeault
– Shirley MacLaine (archive footage)
– Anne Wiazemsky
– Rose de Gregorio / Rose Gregorio
– Maria Schneider
– Viva
– Candy Clark
– Barbara Steele
– Millie Perkins
– Mallory Millett-Jones / Mallory Millett
– Susan Tyrrell
– Ellen Burstyn
...
– Simone de Beauvoir (voice, archive footage)
– Michel Drucker (archive footage)
    Production: in Hollywood in 1975, and in Paris in 1976.
    112 min
    Premiere in France: 4 March 1981.
    There were originally two versions: a French one and an English one. Each version was overdubbed (a narrator reading the simultaneous translation).
    Digital re-release in France: sortie nationale 15 Feb 2023
    Version restaurée par la Bibliothèque nationale de France.
    Exportation / Vente internationale / Distribution France : Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir
    Viewed at Luminor Hôtel de Ville Paris, 23 Feb 2023.

The title of the film is a riff on: Sois-belle et tais-toi (FR 1958), D: Marc Allégret, C: Mylène Demongeot (1935–2022), Finnish title: Ole kaunis ja – vaikene.

There was a debate after the screening about the double bill " Maria Schneider, 1983 " and " Sois-belle et tais-toi ! " with Elisabeth Subrin, Nicole Fernandez Ferrer and Jackie Raynal.

Le mot du cinéma (Luminor Hôtel de Ville Paris)

" La projection du film sera suivie par un débat avec Jackie Raynal, réalisatrice monteuse et comedienne et Nicole Fernandez Ferrer : déléguée générale du Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir de 2004 à 2022, elle donne des conférences sur le cinéma et la vidéo féministe, elle est membre du 7ème Genre, des Archives du féminisme, du Centre Hubertine Auclert, de PIAF Images Europe. Elle a travaillé aux deux expositions Delphine Seyrig et les vidéo collectifs vidéo féministes des années 1970 et 1980, concues par Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez et Giovanna Zapperi. "

Synopsis (Luminor Hôtel de Ville Paris)

" En 1976, Delphine Seyrig s'entretient avec 23 actrices sur leurs conditions de femmes dans l'industrie cinématographique, leurs rapports avec les producteurs et réalisateurs, les rôles qu'on leur proposent et les liens qu'elles entretiennent avec d'autres comédiennes. Un documentaire culte, qui permet de réaliser ce qui a changé (ou pas). Actrices interviewées : Jane Fonda, Louise Fletcher, Barbara Steele, Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky, Shirley MacLaine, Maria Schneider, Ellen Burstyn ... "

Synopsis (Unifrance)

" Delphine Seyrig interviewe vingt-quatre actrices françaises et américaines sur leur expérience professionnelle en tant que femme, leurs rôles et leurs rapports avec les metteurs en scène, les réalisateurs et les équipes techniques. Bilan collectif plutôt négatif en 1976 sur une profession qui ne permet que des rôles stéréotypés et aliénants. "

AA: There is a do-it-yourself quality in the movie. Shot on video, its opening credits unfold as a series of photographs manually changed in front of the camera, the names announced by the narrator. All original videotapes of the two versions of Sois belle et tais-toi have not survived, and approximately half of the movie is presented with overdubbing (we hear vaguely the original interview, overdubbed by voice translation). Much of the movie is hard to understand, and hopefully a subtitled version can be produced.

From challenging sources, Sois belle et tais-toi ! has been painstakingly reconstructed and restored, and it is a powerhouse of a movie. The low definition of the video footage fails to do justice to the beauty and charm of the actresses, which is, however, somehow also the point. Beauty in the context of the world discussed here has become a curse, even for the director Delphine Seyrig herself. The external beauty of a young woman is transient, and the more profound charms of a mature woman are not appreciated in the film business.

Jane Fonda is vocal about her ridiculous sex kitten roles in the 1960s. Barbara Steele speaks out about her humiliating exploitation film career, films she did not want to make now adulated as cult films, and all she wants to say is: "That's not me". Ellen Burstyn is sarcastic about her mistreatment: her suggestions were ignored and when they were accepted she had to pay her own flight tickets to make the film.

It gets deep. The producers and distributors have all the power, and because of their veto, they ultimately decide who is bankable and which stories get made. "They don't like women. They don't want someone who is equal." The actresses find women of all ages beautiful, especially the mature, fully experienced ones.

The buddy movie phenomenon is discussed. The actresses do not use that term, but they mean movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Ellen Burstyn and Jill Clayburgh discuss the almost open homosexual current in male love stories like this in which there is even less space for women. Men can remain stars regardless of age, but for women, it's hard to pass the 50 year mark.

Delphine Seyrig's film reminds me of the great wave of feminist film historians of the 1970s including Joan Mellen, Marjorie Rosen and Molly Haskell. They emphasized the tradition of the strong women and superstars of Hollywood's classical studio era from the early days until the early 1960s.

Paradoxically, during the New Hollywood and the women's liberation movement, the status of women stars took a deep dive. The careers of exceptional veterans such as Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis lasted until the 1980s. But the domination of male stars grew, "to the detriment of all", to quote Jean-Michel Frodon.

This is a saga of money, power and sex. The hidden mystery is the misogyny inherent in the film production system. As a result, the quality of the films has suffered. The great change that started five years ago is one of the most promising currents of our age.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: FROM THE PRODUCTION NOTES:

Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin's short film, 2022)

Elisabeth Subrin: Maria Schneider, 1983 (FR 2022) with Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga and Isabel Sandoval each playing Maria Schneider. Poster design: Caspar Newbolt. Smoke gets in your eyes.

FR 2022. PC: 5à 7 Films. P: Martin Bertier, Helen Olive.
    D+SC: Elisabeth Subrin. Cin: Pascale Marin – 4:3 – colour. PD: Valérie Valéro. Cost: Corinne Bruand. S: Nassim El Mounabbih. ED: Jenn Ruff.
    C: Manal Issa (Maria Schneider), Aïssa Maïga (Maria Schneider) and Isabel Sandoval (Maria Schneider) with Amélie Prevot (Anne Andreu).
    Inspired by the Maria Schneider interview in the TV show Cinéma, Cinémas (1983), Antenne 2, P: Claude Ventura, Anne Andreu and Michel Boujut.
    24 min
    Festival premiere: 26 May 2022 Cannes Film Festival: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs.
    Viewed at Luminor Hôtel de Ville Paris, 23 Feb 2023.

There was a debate after the screening of the double bill " Maria Schneider, 1983 " and " Sois-belle et tais-toi ! " with Elisabeth Subrin, Nicole Fernandez Ferrer and Jackie Raynal.

Cannes Film Festival 2022: Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: " In 1983, French actress Maria Schneider gives an interview for the TV show Cinéma, Cinémas. The conversation takes an unexpected turn when she challenges film industry practices and is asked to talk about the controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972). "

AA: A powerful short film by Elisabet Subrin based on the "theme and variations" structure. Three actresses interpret a quietly devastating Maria Schneider interview from the year 1983. Manal Issa looks like Maria Schneider, Aïssa Maïga is Black, and Isabel Sandoval is a trans woman. The substance remains the same, but the narrative changes, and each actress brings a complex of personal reverberations to the tale about the power play involved in the making a movie.

The endless disappointment in the saga of the making of Last Tango in Paris is that artists like Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando behaved like this, treating a young woman like a sex object and not like an equal fellow artist, worthy of special and sensitive attention, particularly crucial because the subject was something as intimate as sex.

Maria Schneider evokes Romy Schneider (no relation), who had died the year before at the age of 43. "This is a very dangerous career. I would not recommend it to any young person". She does not prefer actors who are myths like Brando. For her an actor like Magnani is the greatest. The trouble in the film industry is that it is not the directors who have the final say in casting but producers and distributors who deem who is bankable.

Last Tango in Paris is the most dismal topic that Maria Schneider can imagine. How she was treated was beneath her, but she never lost dignity.

This movie makes me look forward to watching the original Maria Schneider interview and make more sense of the Last Tango saga.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: KATIE SMALL ON "MARIA SCHNEIDER 1983" AND INTERVIEWING ELISABETH SUBRIN IN CINEMA FEMME:

The Banshees of Inisherin

Martin McDonagh: The Banshees of Inisherin (GB/US/IE 2022) starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

The Banshees of Inisherin [title in Finland and Sweden] / Les Banshees d'Inisherin
    GB/US/IE 2022. Searchlight Pictures presents – In Association with Film4 and TSG Entertainment - A Blueprint Pictures Production – A Martin McDonagh Film. P: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Martin McDonagh. EX: Diarmuid McKeown, Ben Knight, Daniel Battsek, Ollie Madden.
    D+SC: Martin McDonagh. DP: Ben Davis. PD: Mark Tildesley. Cost: Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh. M: Carter Burwell. ED: Mikkel E. G. Nielsen. Casting: Louise Kiely.
    C: Colin Farrell (Pádraic Súilleabháin), Brendan Gleeson (Colm Doherty), Kerry Condon (Siobhán Súilleabháin), Barry Keoghan (Dominic Kearney), Pat Shortt (publican Jonjo Devine), Gary Lydon (Gary Lydon, the local Garda Síochána [the national police service of Ireland]), Sheila Flitton (Mrs. McCormick, the local elder).
    Loc: Inishmore and Achill Island on the west coast of Ireland.
    114 min
    Festival premiere: 5 Sep 2022 Venice Film Festival.
    UK premiere: 21 Oct 2022.
    French premiere: 28 Dec 2022.
    Finnish premiere: 3 Feb 2023.
    Viewed en VOST [version originale avec sous-titres français par Houria Belhadji] at Luminor Hôtel de Ville Paris, 23 Feb 2023.

The Banshees of Inisherin production notes: "Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN follows lifelong friends Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship. A stunned Pádraic, aided by his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and troubled young islander Dominic (Barry Keoghan), endeavours to repair the relationship, refusing to take no for an answer. But Pádraic’s repeated efforts only strengthen his former friend’s resolve and when Colm delivers a desperate ultimatum, events swiftly escalate, with shocking consequences."

"Searchlight Pictures presents, In Association with Film4 and TSG Entertainment, a Blueprint Pictures Production, a Martin McDonagh film, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN. The film stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who reunite with McDonagh from In Bruges, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan. The key crew include Director of Photography and regular McDonagh collaborator Ben Davis, BSC, costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, production designer Mark Tildesley, and editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, ACE. Carter Burwell is composing the score. McDonagh’s frequent collaborators Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin are producing for Searchlight Pictures and Film4." 

"The film was shot on location on Inishmore and Achill Island on the west coast of Ireland." (The Banshees of Inisherin production notes)

AA: The Banshees of Inisherin, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, is an excellent film in every department.

The performances by Colin and Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in the leading roles are terrific, as are Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan in the main supporting roles, and also Pat Shortt as the pubkeeper, Gary Lydon as the brutal local Garda policeman, and Sheila Flitton as the sinister local elder.

The movie was brilliantly shot on location by Ben Davis, capturing the magnificence of the seaside landscape and the majesty of the sky.

Maestro Carter Burwell has created a score which avoids Irish accents. It unfolds in a fairy-tale world with affinities with Tchaikovsky's "The Dance of the Sugar Plums" and John Williams's "Harry Potter Theme" ("Hedwig's Flight"), all connected with the other-worldly sound of the celesta, in The Banshees of Inisherin enhanced by gamelan. For me, the music seems to connect and give a sound to Pádraic, who, however, is himself tone-deaf, unlike his musically talented sister Siobhán and would-be friend Colm.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a tale of male marginalization, a theme currently prominent in public discourse internationally, also in my country. The men live solitary lives, but they meet in the jovial atmosphere of the pub. The policeman is the most brutal of them, and his main victim is his own poor maimed son Dominic.

Also Pádraic is handicapped in his way. He is a fundamentally nice guy, and he loves animals, but Colm, whom he would like to call his best friend, loses patience with Pádraic's limited range. They fail to communicate on levels and dimensions that are for Colm the most meaningful.

Out of all this, a very special and unique story evolves. A great film can be based on a slight narrative or even a token narrative, for example Iranian classics in the tradition of which Kiarostami is the best-known example. But then the viewer would expect an engrossing sense of the presence of life, or an experience of transcendence, in the world of the story.

Seeing The Banshees of Inisherin for the first time, I failed to be overwhelmed, and thought that it might be one of the victims of the pandemic phlegmatic syndrome. Too many obstacles and interruptions in the progress of a film project may dim some of the fire, the fury and the passion.

I can point to no direct connection, but recently I have been reading G. H. von Wright's memoirs and thinking about Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, a favourite book of his. Spengler predicted that the downfall of the Western culture and civilization would start around the year 2000 and last two hundred years.

The story of The Banshees of Inisherin is set in the year 1923, a hundred years ago, in the period after the First World War and during the Irish Civil War – which only remains in the background. But in a general way it has an ominous significance in this history of violence and friendship's death.

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: FROM THE PRODUCTION NOTES: AND SOUNDTRACK LISTING FROM THE IMDB:

The Kiss (1929)

Jacques Feyder: The Kiss (US 1929) with Greta Garbo (Irene Guarry) and Lew Ayres (Pierre Lassalle). This was the first major film role for Lew Ayres. He became world-famous in his next film: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

Le Baiser / Kohtalokas suudelma / Kyssen.
    US © 1929 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corp. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) presents, controlled by Loew's Incorporated. P: Albert Lewin (n.c.), Irving Thalberg (n.c.).
    D: Jacques Feyder. SC: Hanns Kräly – titles: Marian Ainslee – from the story by George M. Saville. Cin: William H. Daniels. AD: Cedric Gibbons. Gowns: Adrian. Movietone synchronization: Dr. William Axt – the soundtrack listing (including copious Tchaikovsky selections from the Romeo and Juliet overture and the pathetic symphony) has been published on IMDb. ED: Ben Lewis.
    C: Greta Garbo (Irene Guarry), Conrad Nagel (André Dubail), Anders Randolf (M. Charles Guarry), Holmes Herbert (M. Lassalle), Lew Ayres (Pierre Lassalle), George Davis (Detective Durant.
    Filming dates: 16 July – 26 August 1929.
    Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, 10202 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City.
    Released in two versions: a silent one and a sonorized one with a Movietone soundtrack and sound effects. The silent version was released in full frame, the sonorized one in the Movietone aspect ratio. 62 min
    Premiere: 15 Nov 1929 (New York City), 16 Nov 1929 (wide).
    Finnish premiere: 3 Nov 1930.
    Copie 35 mm, Cinematek de Bruxelles, original English version, sous-titres français dans la copie, full silent frame, duration announced: 1H01
    Présenté par Samantha Leroy.
    Grand piano: M. Camille El Bacha.
    Viewed at Salle Charles Pathé at the Fondation Jerôme Seydoux Pathé, 73 avenue des Gobelins (retrospective Greta Garbo, La Divine), 15 Feb 2023

"Irène est l'épouse malheureuse de Charles. Pierre, le fils d'un associé de Charles, la poursuite de ses attentions amoureuses. Un soir, alors qu'elle lui donne un innocent baiser, Charles les surprend. Fou de jalousie, il s'attaque à Pierre mais meurt dans la bagarre. Irène est accusée du meurtre." (Fondation Jerôme Seydoux Pathé program notes)

"Irene, victim of a loveless marriage to wealthy Guarry, carries on a clandestine affair with André, a young lawyer whom she loves but forces herself to forget; and in desperation, he leaves and goes to Paris. Pierre, the youthful son of a Lyon financier, is fascinated by Irene, and when she gives him an innocent goodby kiss, Guarry, thinking she has been unfaithful to him, attacks the boy. The ensuing struggle results in Guarry's death. Irene recounts the events of the fateful evening to the police, but her story is full of contradictions and she keeps the boy's name out of the affair. Brought to trial, she is acquitted with André's help, but later she confesses that she killed her husband to save the boy's life. At last she finds happiness with André." (AFI Catalog online)

AA: The Kiss was the last silent film of Greta Garbo and the MGM studio. It was released amidst the turbulence of the Wall Street crash, anticipated in the film: M. Charles Guarry, the husband of Irene (Garbo), facing bankruptcy, has a stroke. Against all odds, The Kiss became a huge hit, Garbo's second most successful film to date.

Garbo was once again brilliantly showcased by the greatest studio of glamour. Adrian created gowns, Cedric Gibbons designed Art Deco milieux, William H. Daniels made magic with the camera, and Ben Lewis stunned with montages, superimpositions and visual effects.

Like in Jean Renoir's films, the dramatis personae form a quadrangle. Irene is faithful to her suffering husband, but she is surrounded by a suitor, the lawyer André Dubail (Conrad Nagel) and a teenage admirer, Pierre Lassalle (Lew Ayres).

The most fatal sequence of events is related to Pierre. Irene displays tact and a sweet sense of humour as Pierre timidly reveals her affections. Irene avoids hurting Pierre's feelings, in no way playing with them.

But love is a play with fire. An innocent kiss can lead to tragedy. Pierre does not accept a "no" as a "no", and Charles witnesses Irene in the grip of the youngster's passionate advances.

Irene is not like Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft / The Graduate) or Mrs. Reynolds (Deborah Kerr / Tea and Sympathy), but she does incarnate sympathy. To Irene's sympathy both men react destructively.

As usual, the literary quality of the storytelling is beside the point. In a silent Garbo vehicle, it is like a manuscript for a ballet whose substance lies in wordless body language. And in the case of Garbo, increasingly eloquent facial expression.

Again, Garbo overcomes the limitations of the narrative and the obsolete conditions of life in which the storyline plays out. Her screenplays would not have survived the Bechdel test. But it cannot be claimed that Garbo's characters are defined by her relationships with men, because they observe everything from the viewpoint of transcendence.

I was also thinking that the death of Mauritz Stiller the year before marks her performances in 1929 in a poignant way. Garbo is timeless, never more than here. In our age of revaluation / transvaluation of gender, Garbo is beyond conventional roles and identities. Also a legacy from Mauritz. When Abraham met Greta at Mauritz's grave, he recognized his brother in the figure emerging from the distance of the graveyard corridor. They conversed in Swedish.

– I want to be buried with Mauritz.
– That is not possible.
– Why?
– Because you are not Jewish.
– I would like to convert.
– That would be too complicated, and besides, you are too young to think about such things.

Jacques Feyder was one of the greatest directors of the silent period in masterpieces including Crainquebille, Visages d'enfants and Gribiche. His Thérèse Raquin (1928) was for many the greatest lost silent treasure. I was puzzled to register how great The Single Standard felt, directed by John S. Robertson. Now I'm puzzled to discover Jacques Feyder not quite at his best in The Kiss, perhaps hampered by the studio system in his first Hollywood assignment.

The Brussels print is complete and in full frame but, duped and bumpy as a result of unevenly shrunken source image and intertitle footage, fails to convey the MGM glamour. Yet it is a luminous pleasure to behold.

The Single Standard

John S. Robertson: The Single Standard (US 1929) with Dorothy Sebastian (Mercedes) and Greta Garbo (Ada). In 1929 Dorothy Sebastian was also Buster Keaton's costar in Spite Marriage, his best female lead and a long-term romantic partner.

Le Droit d'aimer / Gleiche Moral / Elämän valhe / En kvinnas moral.
    US © 1929 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Distributing Corp. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) presents, controlled by Loew's Incorporated. .
    P+D: John S. Robertson. SC: Josephine Lovett (adaptation) – Marian Ainslee (titles) – based on the novel (1928) by Adela Rogers St. Johns. Cin: Oliver T. Marsh. M for the sonorized version: William Axt (compilation soundtrack listing detailed in IMDb). AD: Cedric Gibbons. Cost: Adrian. ED: Blanche Sewell.
    C: Greta Garbo (Arden [Ada] Stuart), Nils Asther (Packy Cannon), Johnny Mack Brown (Tommy Hewlett), Dorothy Sebastian (Mercedes), Lane Chandler (Ding Stuart), Mahlon Hamilton (Mr. Glendenning), Kathlyn Williams (Mrs. Glendenning), Zeffie Tilbury (Mrs. Handley).
    Filming dates: 15 April – 3 June 1929. Production Dates: 19 April – June 1929,
    Filming location: San Pedro, California, USA (scenes on the boat off-shore).
    Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios – 10202 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City
    Released in two versions: a silent version and a sonorized one with a music soundtrack and sound effects. Silent length: 6474 ft. Sonorized length 6574 ft / 24 fps/ 73 min
    The silent version was released in full frame and the sonorized one in the cropped Movietone ratio. Only cropped prints survive.
    Premiere: 27 July 1929 (New York City), 29 July 1929 (general).
    Finnish premiere: 25 Aug 1930.
Copie 35 mm, Bundesarchiv, Deutsche Fassung (deutscher Vorspann und Zwischentitel), Movietone aspect ratio. Duration announced: 1H10.
Présenté par Marion Polirsztok
Grand piano: Satsuki Hoshino
Electronic subtitles in French
Viewed at Salle Charles Pathé at the Fondation Jerôme Seydoux Pathé, 73 avenue des Gobelins (retrospective Greta Garbo, La Divine), 14 Feb 2023

"Arden Stuart, une oisive de la riche société de San Francisco, rencontre Packy Cannon, un marin combattant devenu artiste, dans une galerie d'art. Elle tombe amoureux de lui et part avec lui sur un yacht pour une liaison prolongée. Lorsqu'il la quitte pour aller à Paris pour affaires, elle retourne à San Francisco et épouse un ancien prétendant, Tommy Hewlett." (Fondation Jerôme Seydoux Pathé program notes)

"Arden Stuart maintains that the set of moral principles applying differently to the sexes should be altered in favor of a single standard of conduct applying equally to men and women. She refuses to take seriously the marriage proposal of Tommy Hewlett, of her own social set, and steps out with Kendall, the handsome family chauffeur; but Kendall commits suicide in despair. Then she meets Packy Cannon, an ex-prizefighter turned artist, and takes him on her yacht to the South Seas, where their romance develops over a period of months; but when Packy fears she is interfering with his creativity, she returns home and marries Hewlett. After the birth of their child, Packy returns, realizing that his love for her is stronger than his devotion to his art. Arden plans to leave with him, but her love for the child persuades her to remain with her husband." (AFI Catalog synopsis)

"For a number of generations men have done as they pleased--and women have done as men pleased... " (motto of The Single Standard)

AA: I saw for the first time The Single Standard, Greta Garbo's penultimate silent film. Charles Chaplin and Greta Garbo were the last Hollywood superstars still popular in silent films when sound film became dominant. Silent cinema reached its greatest heights when it ended.

For me, The Single Standard is a Greta Garbo vehicle, beyond genre, beyond subject matter, and beyond the literary source. Adela Rogers St. Johns was an exciting talent and worthy of attention, but it is not for her literary merit that the film adaptation of The Single Standard remains relevant.

Greta Garbo is at her best here, conveying much in subtle looks and gestures. She kept getting better in the mastery of pantomime, in the unique art of the silent cinema enhanced by luminous, superhuman close-ups.

The story is relevant to the post-WWI experience. Ada's first lover is an ex ace pilot suffering from the post-traumatic stress disorder, a member of the "lost generation" immortalized in Ernest Hemingway's novels such as The Sun Also Rises. Having lost his social standing and unable to readjust, he commits suicide by car crash.

The shock is transferred to Ada who finds a new lover in an art gallery, seeking shelter from the rain and unwanted attentions of a man on the street. Packy is a sailor and a boxer who has turned into a painter. They embark on a cruise in the South Seas on Packy's yacht. But art is what matters most to Packy, and he abandons Ada in San Francisco.

I know too little of John S. Robertson to assess how much the film's success can be attributed to the director-producer and how much to the genius of the system. Brilliant cinematography by Oliver T. Marsh and elegant gowns by Adrian contribute unforgettably to this Hollywood dream.

It is a dream of fulfillment for men and women equally, against the double standard, told visually, one of the cinema's counterparts to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, frankly and proudly sensual, a pre-code film: finding the greatest beauty in an uninhibited expression of sensuality. There is no sin in Ada's paradises.

It is a satire about manners and mores, casting a sharp eye on hypocrisy. Recently I wrote about Leo Tolstoy and the cinema and remarked on the distinction of Greta Garbo's Anna Karenina interpretations. Her originality is in bringing a dimension of cosmic solitude to Tolstoy's tragedy. The same is valid here. To each frame, she brings transcendence.

Ada returns to her own social world and the patient Tommy, but I don't find this movie conformist. It is about a woman's equal freedom to love and pursue happiness. What happens is not because of social norms but an inner urge.

Ada is proud of the blood flowing in her veins. She is also proud of her motherhood, giving birth to new life and the supreme joy of witnessing her child grow. In her pursuit of the single standard, she transcends her social circle. In motherhood, she transcends herself.

The Bundesarchiv print has a duped look. The glamour is missing, but the print conveys the mastery of the cinematography in extreme close-ups and underwater passages and the irresistible flow of Blanche Sewell's editing.

Sisu / Immortal

Jalmari Helander: Sisu / Immortal (FI 2023) starring Jorma Tommila as Aatami Korpi.

From Wikipedia: "Immortal (Finnish: Sisu) is a 2022 Finnish historical action film written and directed by Jalmari Helander. The film takes place in Finnish Lapland during World War II, where a gold digger, played by Jorma Tommila, goes to take the gold he finds to town and has to escape from the Nazi patrol led by a brutal SS officer."

"Deep in the wilderness of Lapland, Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is looking for gold during the Lapland War. From time to time the overflight of bombers and the distant sounds of war can be heard on clear autumn nights. Finally, the hard work is rewarded and the gold dust in pan grows into gold nuggets. Aatami leaves to take his gold treasure to the nearest town. When a thirty-strong Nazi extermination squad led by SS Obersturmführer Bruno Helldorf (Aksel Hennie) turns against Aatami, a breathtaking and gold-hungry chase begins through the destroyed and mined wilderness of Lapland, with Aatami having to wage his one-man war against this superior enemy."

AA: Finnish action rampage films tend to take place in Lapland. In Renny Harlin's Born American, three young Americans cross the Soviet border just for the adventure's sake, and all hell breaks loose. In Mika Kaurismäki's The Last Border, Lapland is an ideal landscape for a Mad Max style violent dystopia.

Our Lapland war against Hitler's Germany took place from September 1944 until May 1945. When we switched to the Allies, there were 213.000 troops in Die Armee Lappland / 20. Gebirgs-Armee. A significant part of the soldiers belonged to various SS formations. The prominence of the Totenkopf cap badge is accurate.

The historical background of Helander's story is the Wehrmacht's scorched earth strategy in Lapland. It is conveyed in vivid images, of which two are particularly memorable. One is factual: the fire of Rovaniemi, burned to the ground by the Nazis. Another is imagined: a shock image of a ruined Helsinki, with half of the dome of the Helsinki Cathedral bombed away (in reality Helsinki was devastated by the great raids of the Red Air Force but not like this).

Sisu is a tall tale with little regard for realism. It belongs to the Rambo* school of lone psychotic fighters.

Having abandoned plausibility, Helander goes all the way. The ordeals of the unstoppable guerrilla warrior Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) get increasingly outlandish. I was thinking about Tex Avery cartoons and Weird Al Yankovich's parody trailer Gandhi II from UHF (in Finland: Kaapelit irti!), mixing Shaft and Rambo slogans such as "This is one bad mother you don't wanna mess with" and "He's a one man wrecking crew". In this Tarantinoesque recycling exercise Nazis speak genre-movie American English.

Leaping from history to Neverland, Sisu enters myth, legend and fairytale. Aatami Korpi can survive fire, water and the sky. I was thinking about what my friend Kai Vase told at the time about Rambo in India: he was seen as an incarnation of Shiva.

Jorma Tommila is career-best as Aatami Korpi, a role name with Biblical resonances: Aatami = Adam, Korpi = Wilderness (as in John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the wilderness). Tommila was groomed into the cinema by Jari Halonen in several fierce roles, joining Jalmari Helander since his early days as a director, also repeatedly working with Olli Saarela. He has lost none of his furor, equally at home in fairy-tales and gangster roles, as recently seen in Laitapuolen hyökkääjä / On Thin Ice.

The DP Kjell Lagerroos excels in epic scope-frame panoramas of Lapland, often gloriously evoking classic Westerns. Actually Sisu can be seen belonging to the trend of the Northern, established in the 1910s by William S. Hart, Nell Shipman (the James Oliver Curwood aficionado) and Tom Mix, followed by Sjöström, Stiller and Molander in Sweden.

Tuomas Wäinölä creates a powerful and ominous score, during the end credits paying open hommage to Morricone.

* Rambo happens to be the name of one of the oldest Swedish-Finnish settler families in North America, dating back to the settler Peter Gunnarsson, in America known as Rambo (1611–1698), in the 1640s in the New Sweden colony in then-Delaware, now-Pennsylvania. Peter Gunnarsson was all Swedish, and his wife Brita Matsdotter, whom he married in America, was Finnish, from the city of Vasa. David Morrell picked the name of his antihero from the Rambo apple brand originating with that family. According to Nils William Olsson, the name Rambo means "raven's nest" = ramn + bo and was chosen for Ramberget ("Raven's Mountain").

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Laura Poitras: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (US 2022), featuring Nan Goldin.

US 2022. Neon Presents – a Participant and HBO Documentary Films presentation – a film by Laura Poitras – photography & slideshows by Nan Goldin.
    P: Nan Goldin, Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras. P: Howard Gertler, John Lyons. EX: Clare Carter, Alex Kwartler, Hayley Theisen. EX: Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann.
    D: Laura Poitras. Colour, 16:9 HD. M: Soundwalk Collective. Music Supervisor: Dawn Sutter Madell. Archival P: Shanti Avirgan. Archival Co-P: Olivia Streisand. ED: Amy Foote, Joe Bini, Brian A. Kates.
    A non-fiction film featuring the photographer Nan Goldin.
    Also featuring: her sister Barbara Goldin (archival). The Goldin family.
    Featuring: the Sackler family.
    Featuring: David Armstrong (archival), Marina Berio, Noemi Bonazzi, Harry Cullen, Alfonso D'amato (archival), Jesse Helms (archival), Jim Jarmusch (archival), Megan Kapler, Patrick Radden Keefe, Ed Koch (archival), John Mearsheimer, Annatina Miescher, Cookie Mueller (archival), Sharon Niesp (archival), Darryl Pinckney, Alexis Pleus, Mike Quinn, Anwar Sadat (archival), Vittorio Scarpati (archival), Maggie Smith, Robert Suarez, David Velasco, John Waters (archival), David Wojnarowicz (archival).
    Loc: Metropolitan Art Museum (New York City). Marian Goodman Gallery (Paris). Harvard Art Museum (Cambridge, Massachusetts). Louvre Museum (Paris). Tate Galleries (London).
    Soundtrack selections include [from my screening notes]: – Vincenzo Bellini: "Casta diva" perf. Montserrat Caballé. – The Velvet Underground & Nico: "Sunday Morning" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" – Screamin' Jay Hawkins: "I Put A Spell On You" – Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht: "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("Mack the Knife") and "Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit" ("Ballad of Sexual Dependency") from Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) * – Lucinda Williams: "Unsuffer Me".
    117 min [IMDb: 122 min]
    Festival premiere: 3 Sep 2022 Venice Film Festival.
    US festival premiere: 5 Sep 2022 Telluride Film Festival (TBA hors catalogue).
    New York premiere: 23 Nov 2022.
    Finnish festival premiere: 5 Feb 2023 DocPoint.
    Finnish premiere: 10 Feb 2023 – distributed by Cinema Mondo – Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Anitra Paukkula / Sophia Beckman.
    Viewed at a press screening at Kino Engel 2, Helsinki, 18 Jan 2023.

Chapters: – I Merciless Logic – II Coin of the Realm – III Ballad of Sexual Dependency – IV Against Our Vanishing – V Escape Hatch – VI Sisters.

“Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
– Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (the motto of Barbara Goldin, Nan Goldin's beloved sister) **

Press notes:

Logline
"An epic story about artist and activist Nan Goldin, told through her groundbreaking photography and rare footage of her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."

Short Synopsis
"Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."
 
Long Synopsis
"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis."

"Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the film interweaves Goldin’s past and present, the deeply personal and urgently political, from P.A.I.N.’s (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) actions at renowned art institutions to Goldin’s photography of her friends and peers through her epic “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” and her legendary 1989, NEA-censored AIDS exhibition, “Witness: Against Our Vanishing.”"
 
"The story begins with P.A.I.N., a group Goldin founded to shame museums into rejecting Sackler money, destigmatize addiction and promote harm reduction. Inspired by Act Up, they orchestrated protests to call attention to the toxic philanthropy of the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, ignited the opioid epidemic with its blockbuster drug, OxyContin."
 
"At the core of the film are Goldin’s art works “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”; “The Other Side”; “Sisters, Saints and Sibyls”; and “Memory Lost.” In these works, Goldin captures her friendships with beauty and raw tenderness. These friendships, and the legacy of her sister Barbara, anchor all of Goldin’s art." (Press notes)

AA: Before All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I had seen from Laura Poitras only Citizenfour, the disturbing Edward Snowden documentary that was shot in real time as one of the greatest news timebombs of our age was detonated. It was not about sensation. It was about revelation. It was about the end of privacy, the ubiquity of NSA's Big Brother surveillance in the internet age that makes Gestapo and Stasi practices as revealed in The Life of Others look tame. Later we have learned even worse about Pegasus.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is also a big league social documentary, about the North American opioid crisis which has claimed the lives of a half a million of Americans. The target is Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, and its drug OxyContin. The movie covers the international campaign of artists to boycott the influential Sackler philanthrophy in the world's major art museums. The leader of the campaign is Nan Goldin, herself an OxyContin survivor.

The ingenious structure of the documentary proceeds on several levels and dimensions. The main story is about the artists' fearless campaign at the most prestigious addresses of the international art world. Simultaneously the movie grows into a candid portrait documentary about Nan Goldin, starting from her tormented childhood and the suicide of her beloved sister Barbara.

It is also an art documentary about Nan Goldin, the pioneering photographer of milieux and lifestyles "on the wild side". Nan Goldin's major slideshows “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”; “The Other Side”; “Sisters, Saints and Sibyls”; and “Memory Lost” provide the artistic substance. The sound of the slide projector becomes a percussion element. ***

It is also a survey of the East Coast cultural underground and gay and trans communities since the 1970s. Nan Goldin was a member, not a voyeur observer. In this epic about these milieux she registers the evolution across decades from repression to acknowledging androgynous elegance, the AIDS death toll, and steps towards liberation.

Photography became a vehicle of emancipation for the young and inhibited Nan Goldin. It also becomes a weapon in the battle of life against death in successive health catastrophes: the AIDS period, the opiod crisis – and the Covid pandemic during which this movie was made.

* "Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit" ("Ballad of Sexual Dependency") was written for the character of Mrs. Peachum in Die Dreigroschenoper but withdrawn from the libretto before premiere.

** This thought, like most of the narration in Heart in Darkness, is expressed by the sailor Charles Marlow, inside quotation marks. The remark is heard soon after the declaration "Mistah Kurtz – he dead" and "And then they very nearly buried me".

*** English Wikipedia: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (slide show exhibition and artist's book): "It is an autobiographical document of a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin's personal family and love life. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said it "remains a benchmark for all other work in a similar confessional vein." Lucy Davies, writing in The Telegraph in 2014, said it "would come to influence a generation of fledgling photographers, who fell into her truth-telling wake. She was credited by Bill Clinton with inventing heroin chic"."

BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: MORE FROM THE PRESS NOTES:

Heojil kyolshim / Decision to Leave

Park Chan-Wook: 헤어질 결심 / Heojil kyolshim / Decision to Leave (KO 2022) starring Park Hae-il (detective Hae-joon) and Tang Wei (the murder suspect Seo-rae). Location: Geumjeongsan Mountain, Busan, South Korea. Do click on the image to enlarge it.

Päätös erota [Finnish title in telecast, Yle Areena 19 March 2026] / Decision to Leave [Finnish and Swedish title in theatrical release, 27 Jan 2023].

AA: In the film's promotion information Decision to Leave is characterized as a detective story turning into romance, and I can understand the usefulness of these words as handles.

But I find this film a metaphysical quest. The female protagonist Seo-rae is elusive, but the film is elusive, too. We soon realize that we are following a narrative in which perception is unreliable. In the middle of a take the conditional mood may appear: a doubled mood of the same situation.

Decision to Leave seems to take place in the detective's mind, not in the objective world. Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is an obsessive detective suffering from insomnia. The strange disruptions and dislocations in the flow seem signs of exhaustion.

For me, Decision to Leave is a film about the short attention span typical of the internet age, the lack of concentration in the mobile age, the scope of awareness getting increasingly reduced into the instant.

Decision to Leave belongs to the films inspired by Vertigo, but not in a superficial or obvious way. Falling from heights, the presence of the death drive, the centrality of a woman who is not who she seems, and the power of the sea are among the affinities. There are also set-ups in the chase sequences that seem to have a Vertigo hommage aspect.

The female protagonist Seo-rae (Tang Wei) is complex and original, and yet so mysterious that she almost feels like a figment of the imagination. Or the detective's projection is so dominating that we fail to fully empathize with the Chinese refugee herself.

Park Chan-Wook's previous films belong to the most highly regarded of the last 23 years. They have also been prominent in brutality, but brutality in art is a double-edged weapon. It is effective at first but may date badly.

Might the title Decision to Leave be also about Park Chan-Wook's statement of a new direction in his cinema?

On ne sait jamais / You Never Know

Victoria Schultz: On ne sait jamais / You Never Know (US/FR 2022) with Hande Kodja (Iris). Loc: Maison Louis Carré. Black and white in scope. Please click on the image to enlarge it.

Ei sitä koskaan tiedä.
    US/FR © 2022 VivaVision / Kafard films. Filmantiq. Producteur excecutif: Paul-Anthony Mille.
    Un film de Victoria Schultz, réalisatrice, productrice. Scénario: Victoria Schultz avec Pierre Mille. Directeur de la photographie: Paul-Anthony Mille – 35 mm – noir et blanc – scope. Assistants caméra: Nicolas Fouques, Juliana Vélez. Chef electro: Erwan Robert-Thomasson. Chef machino: Joseph Geremia. Ingenieur son, mixage, bruitage: Juste Bruyat. Chef maquilleuse: Natalia Vélez. Maquilleuse: Eva Goarin. Effets: Natasha Lopez. Couturière: Pinrawan Pimpimarn. Régie: Félix Louf, Stéphane Colle. Montage: Lisa-Lou Villemain. Assistant production, comptable: Ilhem Sadji. Étalonnage: Erwan Robert-Thomasson.
    Loc: Maison Louis Carré (architecte: Alvar Aalto). 2 Chemin du Saint-Sacrement ; 78490 Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, Île-de-France.
    Distribution:
Iris / Hande Kodja           
Alex / Milan Marsauche
Olavi / Jonathan Pineau Bonetti
Aino / Ronia Ava
Vera / Chantal Hecaen  
Leo / Nick Mancuso  
Roger / Olivier Che
Mauricette / Mauricette Gourdon
Ilona / Li Krook
soldats / Stéphane Colle, Olivier Le Montagner
animaux / Ronia Ava, Li Krook, Natasha Lopez, Felix Louf
barman / Jean Peyrelade
    Bande sonore:
"Kevätyö" de Selim Palmgren / Henri Sigfridsson, piano.
"Saharan uni II" ; "Sähkösoittimen ääni #1" ; "On-Off" ; "Virsi" ; "Inventio" ; "Antropoidien tanssi" ; "Preludi II" / Erkki Kurenniemi, compositeur.
"Lapsuuden toverille" ; "Karjalan kunnailla" / Iiris Tarnanen, interprete
Appels aux vaches en Carélie / Vilma Jää
"Säkkijärven polkka" / Aurélien Lehmann, accordéon
"Valse lente Op. 3" de Oskar Merikanto / Ossi Tanner, piano
    Fiche technique:   
Kodak Vision 3 ; Kodak Double X .
Arrican LT ; Arrican ST ; Arriflex 2C.
    70 min
    Versions: French version and English version. Subtitle options: English, Finnish, French.
    Private Vimeo link of the French version with English subtitles viewed at home in Lappeenranta, 29 July 2022.

AA: Victoria Schultz was born in Finland but has worked all her life in the United States and France and established independent production companies in both countries (Viva Vision and Kafard Films). After a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent, documentary filmmaker and photographer Schultz has worked extended periods with the Finnish Broadcasting Company and the United Nations.

Recently Schultz has embarked on a new path of expression with intimate poetic quests, returning at a mature age to painful encounters of youth in the 30 minute Memories of Desire (2019), photographed mostly in stark black and white, channeling personal confessions in an Expressionist mode.

Like its short predecessor, the feature length You Never Know is a dream play, a time play and a memory play, also a case of Traumarbeit and Trauerarbeit, but the visual frame of reference is the opposite to Memories of Desire. Instead of its striking contrasts, You Never Know is painted with gentle, tender light and has affinities with 1960s European Modernism, urban studies of alienation such as the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. Instead of the Academy aspect ratio of the previous film, You Never Know unfolds in scope.

The main location is Maison Louis Carré designed by Alvar Aalto, the architect who was more than a rigorous modernist, enchanted by nature and feminine curves, favouring wave-like forms and welcoming the presence of light.

The film is anchored in the early 1960s in the life of a young woman born during WWII. We are learning to understand better that post-traumatic stress disorder does not concern only soldiers but also women conducting medical service and children exposed to war. I know that from my mother who told that her childhood ended on 30 November 1939 when she stared in the eye a Soviet Red Air Force bomber pilot in her home town Lahti.

Memory montages evoke the city of Viipuri lost to Russia and the epic masses of refugees from Karelia. Red Army soldiers rape (but don't kill) a woman who later gives the baby born from the act to an orphanage. Traces of war are everywhere. Landmines and explosíves keep getting detonated for years after the war ends. Reminding of the horrible human loss are the war invalids. Memories are alive also on the soundtrack in tunes referring to the lost Karelia as "Säkkijärven polkka" and "Karjalan kunnailla" and ancient Karelian cattle calls interpreted by Vilma Jää.

Paranoia is a recurrent theme. The caretaker Alex hallucinates about Soviets everywhere. We are anchored in the 1960s, the decade of political assassinations, most prominently that of JFK, still unsolved in the sense of what it was all about. Like in The Irishman, the news of the assassination hits us obliquely but unforgettably.

Young sexuality awakens in circumstances of a ménage à trois where mother and daughter share an interest in the caretaker, the young hunk Alex. He desires Iris but belongs to the mother. The father's clothes are still hanging in the closet (he left his wife and daughter for another woman). A convention is reversed in the sauna sequence where the male is nude and the female is clothed. The young woman's éducation sentimentale evolves in twisted circumstances of shifting affinities and loyalties.

Adding to the ostranenie is the presence of animal-headed characters, reminders of the dream space in which we find ourselves. Perhaps this is a grown-up fairy-tale.

Memories of Desire was an Expressionistic dream. The shimmering You Never Know is a lucid dream.