First Impressions: Thinking Aloud About Film

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/09/18/thinking-aloud-about-film-stronger-than-love-mas-fuerte-que-el-amor-cuba-mexico-tulio-demicheli-1955/

Stronger Than Love/ Más fuerte que el amor (Cuba/ Mexico, Tulio Demicheli, 1955)

Another fascinating film showing on MUBI; part of the ‘Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Cinema’ program; a lurid and very entertaining melodrama; interesting to compare with its contemporary Hollywood variant but perhaps best seen as an example of Spanish speaking transnational cinema. The director Tulio Demicheli is from Argentina, Jorge Mistral is Spanish, Miroslava originates in Czechoslovakia, from a Jewish family displaced by WWII. The film itself is a Mexican/Cuban co-production, in which, as we can see from the poster, the location shooting is a major attraction: ‘The exteriors for this movie were filmed in Santiago de Cuba, the beautiful Capital of Oriente.’ It’s a movie that condenses, symbolises and allegorises class oppression under patriarchy, interspersing the drama with some melo in the guise of very suggestive musical/ dance sequences.’

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/09/14/thinking-aloud-about-film-her-man-tay-garnett-1930/

A ‘pre-Code’ film set in Havana, probably so lots of drinking could take place during Prohibition, and based on the Frankie and Johnny song about a prostitute who falls in love with a sailor and kills her pimp(see below). The roving camera in HER MAN challenges many of the pre-conceptions of cinema at the beginning of the sound period. Costs of on-location shooting split with W. S. Van Dyke’s CUBAN LOVE SONG, with Havana street-scenes of the period being a major attraction in. the film. In the podcast we discuss the mobile camera, the subject-matter in relation to the Code, how music is mainly restricted to the diegetic, the opening titles, the connection of the comic gags to Garnett’s training with Hal Roach, and the performances of Phillips Holmes, Helen Twelvetrees and Marjorie Rambeau. Many thanks to the Film Foundation for once more offering an opportunity to see such a great restoration.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/09/11/streetwalker-trotacalles-matilde-landeta-mexico-1951/

A female perspective on sex and marriage evoking a great mistrust of the social construction of romantic love. Truly radical for its time, in the way that it so clearly positions marriage as equivalent to prostitution, and makes husbands equivalents to pimps. The third film directed my Matilde Landeta, who had to fight the director's guild in order to be allowed to direct at all, and who would not direct another film after this one for another forty years. A film to see.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/08/25/thinking-aloud-about-film-the-eloquent-peasant-shadi-abdel-salam-egypt-1970/

We podcast on our second Shadi Abdel Salam film, the beautiful Film Foundation restoration of The Eloquent Peasant. The film is a parable, a moral lesson. A peasant is robbed of his cargo by a rich man. Is justice for the powerless possible or are the rich protected by too many vested interests. As relevant a question now as it was in Ancient Times.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/08/15/thinking-aloud-about-film-deep-crimson-profundo-carmesi-arturo-ripstein-mexico-1996/

This is our eighth podcast on Arturo Ripstein films. Increased exposure has only increased our appreciation; and Deep Crimson seems the best of the films we've seen. Based on a true story that was then made into a film by Leonard Kastle in 1970 -- The Honeymoon Killers -- Deep Crimson has a very particular tone, black and funny, encased in the structures of feelings of 1940s popular romances, and edging them towards the savage and brutal as the film unfurls. It's an extraordinary work.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/07/26/thinking-aloud-about-film-bushman-david-schickele-1971/

BUSHMAN (David Schickele, 1971) is a real discovery, already the subject of much excitement when shown at Ritrovato in Bologna, and now made available to us through Cinema Re-Discovered this coming weekend, where it is being screened Sunday 30th of July at 18.30. Set in 1968, in the context of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, with the Nigerian civil war in its second year, the film centres around the experiences of Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Opokam), a Nigerian graduate student also teaching at San Francisco State College, the cross-cultural experiences he’s afforded, and the different types of racism he encounters. In the accompanying podcast, we discuss the film’s beauty, its politics, how it fluidly seems to condense so many of the burning issues in black American cinema in the following four decades, and the important shifts in register near the film’s end. A really great film, so far little know, that’s bound to encourage much discussion, as indeed it did with us.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/07/22/thinking-aloud-about-film-cinema-rediscovered-2023/

Cinema Rediscovered, which takes place annually in Bristol, is one of the most exciting events in the cinema calendar year. In the accompanying podcast, Richard discusses the various strands of the program (Reframing Film; Restored and Re-discovered; Look Who's Back -- The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist; Dowb abd Dirty: American D.IY, Restored) and José offers tips on many of the various films that make up the program. There are many reasons to visit Bristol, and attending this festival is tops of the list.

https://notesonfilm1.com/2023/07/14/thinking-aloud-about-film-the-killers-1946-1964/

In the podcast we compare the two films, a noir and a neo-noir, the 46 version made stars of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We then compare both to the Tarkovski 1956 student version of the film, what they use of Hemingway, and what needed to be invented as background.  We discuss why the 1946 continues to fascinate through its Citizen Kane style investigatory structure, its use of music, Woody Bredell's textured, expressive cinematography, and its depiction of a man driven to death by his love of a woman who constantly lies and who the film shows as unknowable.

I was unable to attend this year's Ritrovato; a pity as the programming is often a preview of films that subsequently screen elsewhere and inevitably become highlights of the year. Luckily, Richard was there to report on what he saw he saw. 

In the podcast, we discuss the following sections of the festival:The Time Machine: 1923, where films from a century ago get highlighted; The Space Machine section, particularly the Cinema Libero selections, of which Richard was able to see every feature film. We discuss the New Film Foundation Restorations, of which Richard highlights BUSHMAN ( David Schickele, 1981) and TIME OF THE HEATHEN(Peter Kass, 1961) . BUSHMAN will be shown at Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered this year. Richard also highlights two Iranian films by Bharam Beyzaie, director of DOWNPOUR Like with  CHESS IN THE WIND, programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht describes THE STRANGER AND THE FOG and THE BALLAD OF TARA as a holy grail of Iranian Cinema, pre-revolutionary films thought lost and now  restored.

Richard touches on some of the restorations he saw: MAN'S CASTLE (Frank Borzage),  CROSS OF IRON, CRY THE BELOVED COUNTRY (Zoltan Korda); MARRIAGE CIRCLE  and  LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN,  the latter with a score by Timothy Brock and shown with a  full orchestra; Stella Dallas, with Stephen Horne’s orchestral score and an equally  wonderful orchestra.

We discuss the Anna Magnani section; the Rouben Mamoulian section, which Richard views as an opportunity to see the films at their best rather than any revelations; The Michael Powell section, mostly Powell without Pressburger. Powell himself said he didn’t think his reputation would survive many more discoveries of his quota quickies. Has it?

We also discuss  being at the festival this year: The pros and cons of seeing films on the Square; the system of advance bookings; the faults and virtues of the introductions; and whether Ritrovato should continue the digital programming it began during COVID. 

The overall assessment is that it was a wonderful festival and I look forward to once more be present at it next year,

José Arroyo

Comrades (Bill Douglas, UK, 1986)

In the accompanying podcase, we discuss Bill Douglas’ fourth and final film, very different from his earlier trilogy: A three-hour-long epic of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, a group of early 19th-century agricultural workers who band together to unite against the lowering of their wages, form The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, an early form of trade union, campaign against rich landowners, end up on trial on a spurious charge ‘ swearing an illegal oath’ and get shipped to serve their sentence in Australia.

References to early forms of cinema structure the film’s narrative; the story is told through an account of the pre-history of motion pictures: shadow play, magic lanterns, camera obscura, heliotypes, dioramas,

The story is fascinating because it is a pre-history of the union movement and also pre-Marx.

We discuss how the film becomes less interesting in the second half where the narrative moves to Australia partly because we lose sight of what happens in Britain: the rallying, the support, the organising. In Australia, the Tolpuddle martyrs and indigenous people are seen to share an experience of oppression. But we also see the limits of this, how some of the white oppressed themselves become oppressors as soon as they get a little power.

We discuss how the might might be both an unwieldly mess and a very great film. What is beautiful about this movie is the way Douglas films working class people and landscape. There’s a real tension between the narrative and the poetic. The storytelling is tortured. Interesting to compare with My Way Home, in which the Scottish bits seemed stronger than the section where he goes into the army and abroad. At it’s best, the film brings to mind Chahine’s The Land. At its worst it feels uncompromising and a little bit self-indulgent.

The film has a very great cast with famous actors playing the upper classes (Robert Stephens, James Fox, Vanessa Redgrave) and then unknown actors playing the workers (Imelda Staunton, Keith Allen, Phil Davies).Barbara Windsor, falls somewhere in between and offers a wonderful turn.

England is shown as inhospitable, unfair, unjust. It’s a real condemnation.

The film is available on BFI blu ray and is also showing on Amazon Prime in a very good print.