Friz Freleng For All

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Welcome to the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon, in celebration of the late animation master's 100th (or is it 101st, or 102nd?) birthday. The picture to the right is a caricature of Friz from the 1952 Chuck Jones cartoon the Hasty Hare. Links to other sites participating in the occasion will be listed at the bottom of my long-winded post. Thanks to everyone for participating! I think it's wonderful to have such a collection of writings on Freleng in one place on the anniversary of his birth!

I'm not an animator or an animation scholar, but I love to watch classic cartoons, and sometimes try my hand writing about them. Knowing that writers far more practiced than I can sometimes get their extremities caught in painful, embarrassing traps when trying to reach for analysis of cinematic topics outside their realm of expertise (Mick LaSalle being a recent example) might make me hesitant to write on the form. But, though I'm still in the beginning steps of understanding the animator's craft (a term I use because it parallels the commonly-used "actor's craft", not to imply that animating or acting are unartistic endeavors), I hope I have something to contribute to a discussion of cartoons, if only an expression of my passionate belief that the best are as essential as the acknowledged great works of the cinema.

One of the film critics I most admire, Manny Farber, was among the first non-specialists to treat the Warner Studios' cartoons as an important topic of discussion, with a piece published September 20, 1943 in The New Republic called "Short and Happy." It's a brief, six paragraph article, but it does a good job describing the amoral appeal of the Warner house style in the early 1940s when compared to the growing tendency of Disney (the only cartoon studio to have received widespread critical attention at that time) toward virtuous uplift. In 1941 Preston Sturges had made a similar, if perhaps unintended, critique of Disney's transformation by using scenes of pure slapstick from 1934's Playful Pluto in his Sullivan's Travels as the catalyst for the film director's conversion from would-be educator to entertainer, reversing Disney's path during the period. Farber praised Merrie Melodies for being "out to make you laugh, bluntly, and as it turns out, cold-bloodedly." The problem with his praise in the original article, however, is that it now seems rather misdirected. Repeatedly Farber gives the credit for the cartoons to the producer Leon Schlesinger and not any of the directors to whom we now know he gave relatively free creative reign. This is probably why, by the time "Short and Happy" was placed in the 1971 Farber collection Negative Space, it had been edited to attribute the cartoons' singular qualities to Freleng, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Robert McKimson. But the re-edit causes more problems than it solves, as by bringing McKimson into the equation Farber awkwardly conflates two eras of Merrie Melodie-making: 1940-42, when Jones, Freleng and Avery were directing but McKimson was still an animator, and the period that stretched from 1950 until the early 1960s, when nearly all the studio's cartoons were directed by Jones, Freleng or McKimson. An added paragraph constrasting the directors' styles feels like it belongs in a different piece; it was that paragraph's reference to the 1958 cartoon Robin Hood Daffy that made me feel the need to look up old issues of The New Republic on microfilm.

Sad to say, Freleng probably emerges from Farber's 1971 (or earlier?) re-edit worse off than if he, like Robert Clampett or Frank Tashlin, hadn't been mentioned at all. In the new paragraph, Freleng is simply described as "the least contorting" while Avery gets to be called "a visual surrealist" and McKimson "a show-biz satirist", with Jones receiving several sentences of praise all to himself. At least Freleng cartoons like the Fighting 69 1/2 and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt get singled out for praise, but the latter is misidentified as a McKimson product in the re-edit. Perhaps the most enduring line Farber uses to describe the cartoons is: "The surprising facts about them are that the good ones are masterpieces and the bad ones aren't a total loss." In the original article three examples of "good ones" are identified as The Case of the Missing Hare, Inki and the Lion (both Jones) and Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt. But the lone counter-example is the "poor" Wabbit Who Came to Supper which is saved by a single gag (where Bugs tricks Elmer into celebrating New Year's Eve in July) from implied "total loss"-hood. I disagree; that's one excellent 'toon!

But here I am, already on the fifth paragraph of this post, and I still haven't gotten around to saying what it is about Freleng that made me want to initiate this Blog-a-Thon in the first place. The above stuff is important, I think, because Farber is a deservedly influential critic, and his damningly faint praise of Freleng's talents in the revised "Short and Happy" has probably held some sway over the many, many readers of Negative Space in the years since its publication. It, or other conventional wisdom like it, certainly held some sway over my own opinions of Warner cartoons when revisiting them as an auteurist-minded adult. I took the genius of Avery and Jones almost for granted, and it was Bob Clampett's extraordinarily distinctive (almost always MOST contorting) style that first caught my attention as something of a "new discovery" for me. But gradually I began to appreciate Freleng more as well, and now I think he among all the Termite Terrace directors most exemplified this original Farber quote, contrasting the studio's artistic method against "insipid realism":

It is a much simpler style of cartoon drawing, the animation is less profuse, the details fewer, and it allows for reaching the joke and accenting it much more quickly and directly: it also gets the form out of the impossible dilemma between realism and wacky humor.

Increased realism has been a constantly recurring ambition of animated and live-action filmmakers alike. The Warner cartoonists were not immune; most notably, Jones started his directing career attempting to draw simulations of the natural world in films like Joe Glow the Firefly. Avery would often take a scene to the technological limit of cartoon realism, then demolish that limit with a gag drawing attention to the cinema-unreality of any filmed image (the hair-in-projector gag in Aviation Vacation being a quintessential example.) Clampett, on the other hand, fought against tendencies toward cartoon realism, and usually ended up with an anything-goes cartoon universe of wackiness. What Freleng would do in his most effective cartoons was something else: he'd create a gag that, if not realistic, would at least be performed by his characters as it would be if they were vaudeville actors. Then he would repeat the gag to the point of ridiculousness, altering time and/or space to increase the impact of the humor, and creating a sense of inevitability that is funny in a completely different manner than the unpredictable hilarity of a Clampett cartoon. The Wabbit Who Came To Supper follows this pattern, as do many of the Sylvester-Tweety cartoons, but the most perfect distillation of the principle is probably the 1949 Yosemite Sam/Bugs Bunny face-off High Diving Hare.

As Greg Ford notes in his commentary on the Looney Tunes: Golden Collection disc on which this short appears, High Diving Hare has a long set-up. It's true that there is often some gag-light "dead space" in a Freleng cartoon, but at least in the case of this one, the set-up is necessary to build the gag premise that will so pay off in the second half of the cartoon. The premise, for those of you who may not have seen the film before but want to see me overexplain it (I really don't recommend that; please watch it right now or skip to the end of this post where the links to other bloggers are) is that Bugs is presenting a variety show at an Old West Opry House. Yosemite Sam's favorite daredevil Fearless Freep is on the bill, inspiring the diminutive gunslinger to lay down a pile of cash and plop down right in front of the stage. Carl Stalling's musical contribution increases the tension as the camera makes a vertical pan (Paul Julian's background using a perspective effect to simulate a live-action tilt) up the impossibly high ladder to the platform Freep is going to dive off of. But if Sam isn't impatient enough already, he really loses his temper when Bugs interrupts a lengthy introduction to accept a telegram from the weather-delayed diver. Of course, all this set-up isn't to make Sam's anger more believable; with Yosemite you believe his anger from the first cel. It's to create a situation in which Sam doesn't want to just kill Bugs in his usual way, but to motivate him to force Bugs up the ladder to the platform so he'll dive in Freep's place. Freleng and his crew don't have a pair of six-shooters that can make Yosemite climb that ladder himself; they have to construct and draw everything.

The first dive takes over a minute to unfold, but each second is perfectly used. First there's the climb, backed by Stalling's chromatically-rising violins, then acrophobic (or so he says) Bugs inching to the edge of the diving board, then clinging to Sam and to the board to avoid the fall. When Sam aims his guns and orders, "now, ya varmint! dive!" it seems like the moment of no return. But of course it's really the perfect moment for a Bugs switcharoo. He convinces Sam to turn around and close his eyes while he puts on his bathing suit (an absolutely absurd modesty since Bugs is naked to begin with!) With his adversary not looking, he's able to rotate the board around an imaginary center, then use sound effects he must have learned from Treg Brown to bamboozle Sam into thinking he'd actually jumped into the bucket of water at the bottom of the ladder, when he's actually just landed on the platform, only a few feet lower than where he started. What happens next is absolutely priceless: Sam expresses genuine respect for the "critter", and in his state of shocked admiration he steps off the board into a stagebound freefall.

I'm not going to detail each of the subsequent 8 times Yosemite tries to force Bugs off the diving board and ends up the fall guy himself, but in each iteration of the gag the climb-trick-fall cycle gets briefer than the previous, except for the third, and the ninth and last fall. Sam's third ascent takes a few seconds longer because it's the film's first real break with the rules previously established in the cartoon's exaggerated but thus far logical universe. When he steps out on the board, unable to figure out where Bugs went, the audience is privy to the knowledge that he's standing upside-down on the underside of the board. Or so we think; as soon as Bugs informs Sam that he's the one upside-down, he falls, illustrating the principle that Looney Tunes characters can do anything until they realize they've done something they can't. By falls number seven and eight Freleng leaves the camera trained on the middle of the ladder so that we see a sopping wet Sam climbing up, and soon enough falling down and making a splash, but we aren't shown what Bugs is doing up there to keep Sam's water wheel of torment turning. The moment when we expect to see him fall again, but instead the silence is broken by the sound of sawing, is a hilarious friction between anticipation and surprise. The resolution is perfect because it's simply too easy. When Michael Barrier in Hollywood Cartoons claims that "gags in Freleng's cartoons tend to be of equal weight, so that a cartoon simply stops when its time is up" he either isn't considering High Diving Hare or else he's thinking specifically of big, complicated, finishes like the ones Jones supplies in most of his Road Runner or Sam Sheepdog cartoons. High Diving Hare's "biggest" gag is the first dive, and the others are like ripples on the surface, keeping the laughter generated from the initial splash going and going.

This is all just how I see it. Please feel free to disagree with any or all of my train of thought by leaving a comment below!

Freleng appreciators in the Frisco Bay area will want to know that the Balboa Theatre will be holding a tribute to the director sometime this Fall, including a screening of Ford's 1994 documentary Freleng Frame-By-Frame. (I'll post the precise date when I learn it through the theatre's informative weekly newsletter, available on the theatre website and through e-mail.) In the meantime they're screening a (non-Freleng) cartoon before each showing of Little Miss Sunshine.

Once again, thanks to all the participants in this Blog-A-Thon! If you've written something you'd like me to link, please e-mail me or leave a comment. Here are the links I've collected so far; they'll be updated several times throughout the day:

Adam Koford at Ape Lad.
Akylea at Robots cry too (en Español / in Spanish).
alie at blogalie (en Español / in Spanish).
ASIFA-Hollywood.
Brad Luen at East Bay View.
Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan.
Craig Phillips at Notes From Underdog.
Dave Mackey.
David Germain at david germain's blog.
Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.
Dennis Hyer at Atlantic County Cartoons.
Gir at Gir's room with a moose.
girish.
Harry McCracken at Harry-Go-Round.
J.E. Daniels at the Adventures of J.E. Daniels.
Joe Campana.
Josh at jazz::animated.
Kurtis Findlay Burnaby at animated toast!
Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.
Mondoxíbaro (en galego / in Galician).
Peter Nellhaus at coffee, coffee, and more coffee.
Richard Hildreth at Supernatural, Perhaps -- Baloney, Perhaps Not.
Sean Gaffney.
Stephen Rowley at Rumours and Ruminations.
Steven at The Horror Blog.
Ted at Love and Hate Cartoons.
Thad Komorowski at Animation ID.
Thom at Film of the Year.
Tom Sito at Tom's Blog.
Xocolot (en Español / in Spanish).

UPDATE 8/22/06: Just wanted to point out that Wade Sampson published a MousePlanet piece on Freleng last week in honor of the centennial as well.

Also, thanks to Cartoon Brew, Greencine Daily, La Vanguardia and other sites that spread the word about the Blog-a-Thon. With more than two dozen officially participating sites, I'd call the day an unqualified success!

Bruce Conner's Permian Strata

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I thought that these two posts would make up my entire reportage from last month's Silent Film Festival. I was wrong. As the preamble to my entry in Girish Shambu's Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon I want to revisit my too-brief mention of G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, a film I'd never seen before, saving it for just such an occasion as a new print at the Castro Theatre. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it: a carnival of unending depravity both gaudier and gloomier than I had expected, this atmosphere driven on by Clark Wilson's superb Wurlitzer score. Making Louise Brooks the face of the festival, her image appearing on posters, T-Shirts and the festival program cover, surely helped make the screening the biggest audience must-see of the weekend. I only hope the folks who were turned away from the sold-out show can take some solace in the fact that, according to the Louise Brooks Society, the Balboa and the Rafael will be screening Louise Brooks films on the weekend before her centennial birthday November 14.

The screening was introduced by several people, but most notably Bruce Conner, filmmaker, artist, and on-off Frisco inhabitant since 1957. But like Louise Brooks, Conner was born in Kansas, and he related what it was like growing up in the same town as a retired Hollywood star, where he almost took dance classes at her studio, and almost got up the nerve to ring her doorbell once. You can see the beginning of Conner's intro at filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's blog. Zahedi mentions Conner's evidently declined health, something I too wondered about, as he seemed quite a bit less lively and comfortable speaking than he did even nine months ago at an SFMOMA appearance. I imagine that it might be easier to relax and naturally let a mischievous energy flow while speaking about one's own films in front of a few hundred people who have come because of their interest in your work, as opposed to speaking in front of 1400 silent film and Louise Brooks fans, some of whom might not even know who you are. But then Conner doesn't seem like the sort to be fazed by stage fright; he got 5,500 Frisco voters to mark his name in a 1967 Board of Supervisors campaign (perhaps won over by his campaign speech: a list of sweets). According to this interview he was diagnosed with a fatal illness twenty years ago. Perhaps it's simply a matter of having good days and bad days. At any rate it's great to see him still involved in Frisco's film and cultural scene.

But what I really want to talk about is not Conner's health, but his filmmaking. In particular, a film he made in 1969 that rarely gets discussed, and is only barely mentioned even in the monograph 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. This excellent tome contains close analysis by Bruce Jenkins of film-school staples like A Movie and Looking For Mushrooms as well as of later works like Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland. The 1969 film is called Permian Strata, a title which works in conjunction with the images and the song that makes up the film's soundtrack to form a colossal pun. So often experimental film gets pigeonholed as overly serious, boring, stuffy, or requiring an expertise in filmmaking processes to fully appreciate. But a big part of my attraction to these films is that so many of them exhibit an accessible sense of humor more genuine than some so-called comedies stuffed with lines written by "professional" joke writers do. Few films have the belly laugh potential of Permian Strata. I'll try my best to talk about the film without giving away the all the humor for those who haven't seen it yet, and I won't reveal the song on the soundtrack by name (I won't be able to avoid leaving clues, though, so if you're really concerned about having the surprise spoiled read no further).

The humorous nature of Permian Strata may be why it hasn't been discussed much. Conner has called it a "bad joke movie", which sounds like a dismissal of a slight film. But is it? Conner has never avoided using humor as a part of his films, his sculptures, or his other art pieces. His first film, the 1958 A Movie, derived as inspiration for its clown-car-of-recycled-footage collage aesthetic the scene in Duck Soup where Rufus T. Firefly calls for forces to come to the aid of Fredonia, which is probably why it too feels like a comedy. Dada was another early influence on Conner, and somehow it seems natural to connect Permian Strata with a piece of "anti-art" like Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. Like Duchamp, Conner appropriates pre-existing artworks and alters them to create a new work satirizing the relationship we have to art and history.

One crucial difference between Permian Strata and the Duchamp parody is that (understatement alert!) Conner's film is appropriating far less well-known specific images than the Mona Lisa. It took me a fair bit of research into the fascinating history of Christian films for me to determine Conner's source: a 1949 Cathedral Films release the Life of Paul: On the Road to Damascus. Having not seen this 13-minute film parable yet, I don't know whether it is the origin for every image in Permian Strata (I'm not sure how the opening shot of a robed figure flicking powder into a cauldron would fit into the story of St. Paul, for example) but according to Conner lore it's one of his few collage films (along with Marilyn Times Five) in which all the images come from a single source. Judd Chesler has been quoted on this:

The style of Strata marks a departure from Conner's earlier collage forms. Conner chooses the significant footage from the found film and simply sets it off against the music. There's no cutting between the scenes.

This last sentence suggests that Conner simply took an intact excerpt from On The Road to Damascus and synched it against the chosen music track, but that surely isn't true. In fact Conner has carefully re-edited the shots so that the visual content lines up with certain lyrics in the song. Thus the narrative of Acts 9:1-18 is subverted by the "sound effects by Robert Zimmerman". For example, while we hear the words "walking on the street" we see the actor who plays Ananias doing precisely that. It gets a laugh every time I've seen it, whether at a public screening with strangers or when watching the now out-of-print Facets videocassette at home with friends. We may be responding to a "bad joke" or taking gleeful pleasure at the secular trumping the sacred. But I think there's something else going on. Though On the Road to Damascus has been all but forgotten, it unmistakably bears the symbols of something quite familiar: the historical/Biblical film. The appropriated images stand in for an entire genre, and one surely doesn't have to be a non-Christian to recognize the absurdity of the artifice of a low-budget period piece. In the context of the original film, this absurdity might well be overcome by strong narrative and/or direction, but when recontextualized (redirected) by Conner every gesture feels like a peek behind the puppeteer's curtain.

The moment when Ananias lays his hands on the unidentified blind Paul (it occurs at the end of On the Road to Damascus and the middle of Permian Strata) is particularly hilarious in light of the double-entendre of the song, which you may have guessed by now. Cinematic depictions of the blind being "healed" are invariably ludicrous (at least, I can't think of any that aren't, can you? Don't say At First Sight or I'll assume you're a Coca-Cola operative), but due to the temporal re-editing in Conner's film the viewer doesn't even know exactly what the actor playing Paul is trying to portray. He arches his shoulders, sucks in his chest, flutters his eye lashes, and suddenly his eyes pop wide open like he's just gone under the influence of a strange drug.

Permian Strata's final shots, in which Paul is struck blind, seem particularly significant in light of Conner's life and career. Conner had utilized themes of blindness before, most notable in a pair of pieces relating to Ray Charles he made in 1961: the sculpture Ray Charles/Snakeskin and the film Cosmic Ray. Regarding the latter, according to a quote Jenkins highlights from the transcript of the 1968 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, Conner "felt that I was, in a way, presenting the eyes for Ray Charles, who is a blind musician." Furthermore, Joan Rothfuss in her biographical section of 2000 BC quotes Conner relating an experience he had at age eleven that he'd unlocked from his unconscious upon first trying peyote in 1958:

I was home in the late afternoon with the sunlight coming through the window in my room. I was lying on the rug working on my homework. I decided to rest and I laid my head on the floor. The light started to change and became very bright....Shapes and sizes were changing. It seemed like they weren't inanimate. They were living things. I was part of them, and I was moving into them. I moved into a space that was incomprehensible to me....I went through things, and places, and spaces, and creatures. I became them, and I came back to myself....I went through all these changes until I was so old. I was so wrinkly. My bones were creaking and likely to break....Then I began to realize that I was on the floor, I was back....I became myself again, after eons of time....It was the same room. Only fifteen minutes had passed

I'm not sure what to make of this mystical experience, except to think such a memory surely is something Conner has carried with him through his artistic life, and to note certain parallels to the transformation the Paul character undergoes in the final minute of Permian Strata. At the moment he becomes blinded by a "very bright" light (in On the Road to Damascus it's Heavenly light accompanied by the voice of Jesus Christ), the soundtrack provides a couplet: "it's the end" rhymed with "come back again". I could be reading way too much into what was intended as nothing more than another synchronization joke like the one made at the line "walking on the street". But if Conner in 1969 remembered coming back again from exposure to a beam of light, it could be one reason why he responded to this particular 16mm footage strongly enough to make a film out of it.

Though Conner apparently believes that "Avant-Garde is a historical term. It doesn't exist anymore", here are some other pages to consult in today's Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon:

Acquarello at Strictly Film School.

Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura.

Brendon Bouzard at My Five Year Plan.

Chris Cagle at Category D.

Zach Campbell at Elusive Lucidity.

Matthew Clayfield at Esoteric Rabbit.

Culture Snob.

Filmbrain at Like Anna Karina's Sweater.

Jim Flannery at A Placid Island of Ignorance.

Flickhead.

Richard Gibson.

girish.

Ed Gonzalez at Slant.

Michael Guillen at The Evening Class.

Tom Hall at The Back Row Manifesto.

Ian W. Hill at Collisionwork.

Andy Horbal at No More Marriages!

David Hudson at Greencine Daily.

Darren Hughes at Long Pauses.

Jennifer Macmillan at Invisible Cinema.

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee and More Coffee.

David Pratt-Robson at Videoarcadia.

Seadot at An Astronomer in Hollywood.

Michael Sicinski at The Academic Hack.

Michael S. Smith at Culturespace.

Squish at The Film Vituperatum.

Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger.

That Little Round-Headed Boy.

Thom at Film Of The Year.

Chuck Tryon at The Chutry Experiment.

Harry Tuttle at Screenville.

Walter at Quiet Bubble.

Did you know ...

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(With sincere apologies to Jonas Mekas)

Did you know the Rafael Film Center has put out its latest calendar? That they're playing Roberto Rossellini's beautiful the Flowers of St. Francis for four days in early August? Did you know that Guy Maddin's latest short film, a tribute starring the neorealist's daughter Isabella called My Dad is 100 Years Old, will be paired with the 1950 classic at each screening?

Did you know the Rafael is showing American Graffiti for free this Saturday at 11AM? And that it's the Frisco Bay venue for both the indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems series and the Sundance Institute Art House Project? Did you know that the Sundance Institute is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and that they're bringing to the Rafael prints of films like Allison Anders's Gas Food Lodging this July 9, Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger July 23, and Rob Nilsson's Heat and Sunlight August 2nd?

Did you know the Rafael also hosts the Mill Valley Film Festival October 5-15? And that they're warming up with a series called Global Lens starting September 21? And that they're also one of the venues for the Jewish Film Festival? Did you know that Israeli director Amos Gitai is receiving an award from the SFJFF this year? Did you know that I've never seen a single one of this Cannes regular's films? Or that I'll have a chance to remedy that situation on July 23 when the Castro plays House, News From Home/News From House and Free Zone, with several other opportunities to see those films in Berkeley, San Rafael and Mountain View in the subsequent weeks?

Did you know that the Silent Film Festival will be hosting a free event called Amazing Tales From the Archives on July 16th at 11AM, just before the 12:30 Castro screening of three Laurel and Hardy films directed by the entirely underrated Leo McCarey? Did you know that film archivists are my personal heroes, and yours too if you like seeing beautiful (or even halfway decent) prints of our cinematic heritage? Did you know that children 12 and under are admitted to all SFF events this July 14-16 for free?

Did you know that the Stanford Theatre is almost as wonderful a place to see a silent film as the Castro is? And that they're playing four silent films on Friday evenings as part of their newly-announced Summer schedule packed with Hollywood classics? That one of them is G.W. Pabst's second film made with Louise Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl on August 4? And, of course, that this is the perfect compliment to the July 15 SFF screening of that pair's first collaboration, Pandora's Box, which will be preceded by rare trailers for lost Brooks film the American Venus?

Did you know that the Balboa Theatre is hanging onto the print of Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows for at least one more week? But that tomorrow is the last day to see Iron Island at the Roxie or the Death of Mr. Lazarescu or Lady Vengeance at the Lumiere? Did you know that I consider the latter film the most fascinating of Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, combining the emotional trial-by-fire of Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance with judicious flashes of Oldboy-style narrative and visual gimmickry, with a final reel or two both shocking and self-critical?

Did you know that Artists' Television Access has all sorts of interesting-looking programs coming up? That the makers of the extremely controversial 9/11 documentary Loose Change will be at the Four Star July 13 to show the film and, hopefully, answer audience questions? That the Lark Theatre will be broadcasting the World Cup Final between France and Italy this Sunday at 11 AM? Or that the Edinburgh Castle will be as well? Did you know that the latter will also be the venue for a screening of a set of road movies by Frisco filmmakers on Monday, July 24? That it's free?

Anxious Animation

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Though I'm a fan of his music, and its placement in films as diverse as Fata Morgana and Natural Born Killers, I wasn't planning to participate in last Sunday's Leonard Cohen Blog-a-Thon organized by New York filmmaker/programmer Jennifer MacMillan. But that evening I saw David Enos's animated short Leonard Cohen at Alberta at SF Cinematheque's season-ending collaboration with Jackie Moe and the filmmakers from the Edinburgh Castle Film Night at the Yerba Buena Center. David's a friend, and I adore his films, so I can't resist the opportunity for a belated shout-out. Leonard Cohen at Alberta is like three minutes of a lovingly hand-decorated mixtape that could make any Cohen fan who received it swoon. It's almost as good on a first viewing as the hilarious Jim Morrison entry in Enos's series of pop icon homages: Light My Fire, which played Sunday as well. You can watch another of his animations, a music video for the Casiotone For the Painfully Alone song "the Subway Home" here.

As you can see, David Enos makes films that fit into the subgenre of cut-out animation. I really feel an affinity for these films that tend to blend the beautifully ornate qualities of George Méliès and Lotte Reiniger fantasies with the collage aesthetic of Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner. They imagine the cinema as a dynamic diorama (sometimes complete with a shoebox quality). Most of my favorite examples of cut-out animation feel like they spring directly from a single mind, and as much as I appreciate the collaborative nature of filmmaking, I also appreciate the particularly personal iconography found in a cut-out piece by masters of the form from the 1960s like Larry Jordan or Harry Smith. An opportunity to discover works by current practitioners of the art comes by way of a brand new release from Frisco-based DVD label Other Cinema DVD called Anxious Animation. Available for rent at Le Video and other fine establishments, it features two films by Janie Geiser, three by her husband Lewis Klahr, three by the Frisco-based team of Eric Henry, Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher, and two by Jim Trainor, an animator who barely uses cut-out techniques but clearly feels an affinity for the style, having curated at least one program featuring Klahr, Martha Colburn, and others.

I'd encountered Lewis Klahr's name but never before his films. The three selections on the disc are Lulu, a commission for a Danish production of Alban Berg's opera of the same name, Altair, the first entry in a series of seven pieces in dialogue with 1950s melodrama called Engram Sepals, and Pony Glass, a later entry in that series which was my favorite of the three. Altair beautifully marries the melancholy Lullaby from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite to magazine advertisement cut-outs, playing cards, astronomical charts, etc, and I think I'd better understand Lulu if I were familiar with Berg's opera, the original play, or at the very least the silent film it also inspired. But I had all the context I needed to appreciate the narrative of Pony Glass: using characters literally clipped from the pages of DC, the piece enacts Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen's bedroom escapades with Lois Lane's sister Lucy and, after a homosexual revelation made much more explicit than I remember from the comic books, various male figures. Klahr's figures cast slim shadows that constantly reinforce the physical two-dimensionality of comic books and of the motion picture image, as well as the literary two-dimensionality of superhero characters and their foils. But Pony Glass does its part to try and flesh Jimmy Olsen out a little (so to speak), like in a moment when Lucy Lane's paper hand tries to grope his naked ass during sex.

Geiser's films, which I'd seen before on a Cinematheque program, also highlight an interplay between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space. Immer Zu's hand-drawn characters resemble icons from film noir classics (e.g. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity) moving through spaces cloaked by patterned superimpositions and oddly-shaped gobos. This is a world of keyholes, clocks, test tubes and mysterious codes hinting at some kind of plot that the audience is never given the means to unravel. With a soundtrack constructed from snippets of noir themes like Hans Salter's Scarlet Street, the entire nine-minute film has the feel of a 1940s Hollywood dream sequence. Lost Motion constructs a similarly enigmatic mood, not from cut-outs but out of objects you might expect to find in a junk drawer: erector set pieces, miniature park benches, and paint-chipped figurines casting long, dark shadows. The film suggests a clandestine tryst in a foreign locale, but the details are never made clear. Only a few actual cut-outs are animated in Lost Motion, notably several birds (a nod to Joseph Cornell?) observing the action. But whether Geiser uses two-dimensional or three-dimensional objects as her puppets, more than any other filmmaker I know her work is like putting the eye to a deep, dark diorama.

By contrast, the work made by the team of Henry, Garon and Ascher uses a cut-out approach to computer animation (via After Effects), but doesn't involve any real cutting at all. These images exist only on the screen, in the eye and in the mind, not in any physical form. It's quite obvious, as there are no shadows, no light sources, no textures to speak of. Arguably it makes for an even-more self-contained visual universe. The intangibility of the image works well in a tripped-out hallucination like Sneak Attack, an excerpt from the feature-length Wave Twisters with music by Frisco superstar DJ Q-Bert. But in pieces that seem to be attempting visual dialogue with the real world, like in Spokes For the Wheel of Torment, which attempts to animate Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights to a Buckethead song, the approach feels somehow sterile to me. And though their adaptation of a Jack Chick tract, Somebody Goofed, is undeniably faithful to the original source, right down to the word balloon lettering, it's just not cinematically satisfying to have to read lengthy stretches of dialogue on screen. Especially when everything is delivered without a trace of irony, which ought to leave the Jack Chick uninitiated wondering if the filmmakers are trying not just to acknowledge a cult figure, but to actively preach at their audience.

Last but not least, there's Jim Trainor, whose Harmony is one of my favorite new films seen in the past few years. I'd never seen any of his earlier works, but the Anxious Animation DVD includes The Moschops and The Bats. They're along the same lines as Harmony in that they take to an absurd limit the anthropomorphism that lends such appeal to both nature documentaries and animated films. We like watching animals on screen because they're a blank slate for us to project human values onto, especially appealing in moments when our faith in our own species flags. But Trainor's animals describe their behaviors in human voiceovers that, delivered in the first person, are jarringly matter-of-fact. I'm not exactly sure why it's funny to hear a bat say something horrific like, "More and more our nursery smelled like rotten blood," but I definitely laughed. Oh, and his drawings are quite sophisicatedly animated for their crudeness on first glance: check out the way he illustrates the Moschops' breathing patterns, for example.

One final unrelated note: I'm sorry to see that A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Books really, truly is about to close. It's my favorite Frisco bookstore not named for a Charlie Chaplin movie (City Lights, Modern Times, Limelight), but more importantly it's the bookstore nearest where I work. The saving grace is that apparently Books, Inc. is planning to open their eleventh store on the site. A mini-chain is certainly better than no bookstore at all. But in the meantime, there's a liquidation sale going on, and there's still some decent selections in the film book section waiting to be carried out the door. I noticed my favorite Welles biography Despite the System and a book of Godard interviews still available this morning, for example. The store will be shut for the long weekend after closing tomorrow, but the sale resumes next Wednesday, July 5 at 11 AM.

Fear of the Dark

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The horror movie is one of the few remaining film genres that can fairly reliably pack audiences into theatres, according to articles like this one. I wonder if a big part of the reason for this is the dependence the genre has on darkness. As nyctophobia is so common among children because of their active imaginations, it may be an instinct to confront (and conquer) buried childhood fears that keeps fans hooked on the imaginings of horror movie directors. And, at least in my experience, only an extremely carefully calibrated home video set-up in a room free of distractions of light and sound can approximate the cinematic void of blackness found in any decent movie theatre. All but the most absolutely absorbing films in the genre lose a great deal of their power to startle, shock, and disturb when viewed within the familiarity of home.

This summer is a good time for discovering or rediscovering alternatives to the re-makes and "family friendly" chillers Hollywood is bringing to multiplexes in Frisco and across the country. You can even build a "history of horror" curriculum, as films from every decade since the development of the talkie are represented. The Yerba Buena Center is holding a 35mm horror series Thursdays in July, including Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet July 6 and Donald Cammell's White of the Eye July 27. The Parkway hosts a Thrillville screening of the Incredible Two-Headed Transplant July 13th. The Red Vic shows Night Watch tonight, and 1950's 3-D horror films in late July. Even the Frameline film festival that just began the other night will be presenting some horror in the form of Frameline Award recipient François Ozon's Criminal Lovers at the Roxie June 22nd. And Peaches Christ's 2006 Midnight Mass season at the Bridge begins with the film I've been most wanting for her to program, Night of the Living Dead. It's showing as part of something called "Spooktacular" which appears to be the same program that launched the Castro's first annual Shock It To Me! horror extravaganza last October at the head-scratching hour of 1PM. Much more appropriate is 11:59 PM, June 30, and the next night is one of my favorite midnight movies of all time, Brian DePalma's blood-transfused horror melodrama Carrie. A good night to get some Hawaiian Punch at the concession stand. After this horror blow-out weekend (featuring an appearance by Elvira both nights), the Midnight Mass schedule brings less-scary (or is it just a different kind of scary?) films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls July 7-8, Showgirls July 21-22, and Death Race 2000 August 5th. Peaches also refrains from screening from video, as has become an increasingly noted practice for midnight movies, except during her annual Underground Short Film Festival (August 20th this year). Video is also how the SF Neighborhood Theatre Foundation's Film Night in the Park will present Hitchcock's post-Kennedy horror template the Birds for free at Union Square September 9th, and classic horror spoof Young Frankenstein at Dolores Park October 7, officially closing out Frisco's extended Summer.

And of course we just completed Another Hole in the Head week at the Roxie, which happily coincided with the week-long break in the Balboa's gargantuan Karloff festival. It wasn't precisely a break, since Karloff's ghost appears in the Spirit of the Beehive, Víctor Erice's stunning, every-frame-like-a-painting meditation on childhood fear and the irresistibility of film images that concluded a run Thursday night. But Erice's masterpiece is certainly something of a stretch as merely a Karloff-related film, like last night's Gods and Monsters which was made twenty years after the star's death. A welcome stretch, as the films add even more diversity to a lineup that's already impressively ranged considering Karloff's image as a horror actor: the theatre's also showing him in comedies the Secret Life of Walter Mitty and the Boogie Man Will Get You (both this Sunday, June 18), gangster films Night World (June 21) and the Guilty Generation, and the tough but nuanced Howard Hawks prison drama the Criminal Code. The latter two will show June 20, accompanied by an appearance from Karloff's Frisco-raised daughter Sara, who last week talked about her father's role in forming the Screen Actors Guild (his union card was #9), debunked his feud with Bela Lugosi, showed home movies (including the only known color footage of his get-up as the Monster in Son of Frankenstein), and answered audience questions between the Mask of Fu Manchu and the Lost Patrol. But indeed the majority of the program is made up of Karloff's horror classics, including all the original Frankenstein pictures that included him in the cast (his first two turns as the Monster play on today's double-bill, while his last, the aforementioned Son of Frankenstein, closes the series June 22 alongside House of Frankenstein, where Glenn Strange donned the monster's costume and Karloff got the mad doctor role), the original the Mummy paired with a lesser-known Egypt-themed film the Ghoul (June 19), and best of all, Edgar G. Ulmer's 1934 teaming of Karloff with Lugosi, the Black Cat (June 21).

On Tuesday, June 6 I caught a triple-bill which showcased the diversity found even within Karloff's horror filmography. First up was the 1936 Frankenstein variant the Walking Dead, in which he gets to play an ordinary, sympathetic ex-con for a while before the character gets unjustly sent to the electric chair only to survive and become a zombified killing machine with a white streak added to his hairdo. As usual, director Michael Curtiz does very well with inherently cinematic setpieces like a shadow-laden jail cell or a piano recital in which Karloff gets to give the evil eye to the men who framed him, but the direction is less inspired when he's filming transitional scenes just trying to move the plot along. And unfortunately, the 16mm print the theatre had secured was judged to be unusable, so the screening was sourced from a 1979 LaserDisc release instead, which softened the deep blacks that undoubtedly should have been present in this German Expressionist-influenced film.

The 35mm black-and-white print for the second film, Robert Wise's 1945 the Body Snatcher, was just about perfect, however. And what a great film, seamlessly stitched together without the dull stretches found in the Walking Dead. It's the tenth I've seen made by producer Val Lewton's RKO unit (the eleventh and last on my checklist is Isle of the Dead, another one starring Karloff that I'd hoped might appear in this series when I first heard about it) during the early-to-mid 1940s. Like I Walked With a Zombie, the Seventh Victim and other Lewtons, it's a thoughtful, classy horror film with an exploitation-style title. In the Body Snatcher Karloff is, if not the source of, than the leech-like enabler of evil in a corner of Old Edinburgh. The third film in the program was a very pleasant surprise: I was expecting to see The Wurdalak, Mario Bava's 41-minute Tolstoy adaptation with Karloff as a vampire hunter bringing his very dangerous work home with him. But I'd come for the last show of the night, and the theatre treated us to the full Black Sabbath (yes, the origin of the heavy metal band's name) triptych it's a part of. Black Sabbath was shown in the Americanized version put together by AIP for a 1964 release, and while the Italian-dubbed version is reportedly superior, this version is surely more appropriate for a Karloff tribute as it features his own voice, not only in the Wurdalak, but in his introductions for all three segments. And it still shows off Bava's highly saturated colors and his visual trademarks: shots framed by lattice works, camera zooms, faces eerily peering through windows, etc. Black Sabbath also was shown in a virtually pristine 35mm print.

Somewhat sadly, 35mm is increasingly becoming a cost-prohibitive option for making and distributing edgy, innovative new horror films these days. I wasn't able to make it to the Roxie for more than three films in the aforementioned Another Hole in the Head festival this year, but two of the three were shot digitally. And, like the problem with viewing horror at home or through a LaserDisc-sourced projection, the digital I've seen still does not reproduce dark enough blacks for my taste. The Blair Witch Project worked in 1999 (I haven't revisited it since) because the digital video footage was convincingly combined with 16mm and carefully blown up to 35mm for its theatrical release, and more importantly because so much of its terror relied on the power of suggestion. But the digital look is a real problem for the Hamiltons, which embraces a 'reality TV' aesthetic seemingly appropriate to its subject matter: a family trying to cope with its special problems (the less you know about the specific horror elements before seeing the film, the better.) Unfortunately, it's just too bright a film to be scary, even when it's really trying to be. Shinya Tsuakamoto's Haze fares better in its use of digital video. Like Blair Witch, much of the horror I experienced stemmed from my imagination, as I concocted all sorts of scenarios to explain the protagonist/victim's claustrophobic predicament. And the extremely closed-in feel Tsukamoto chose to utilize would probably not have been possible to shoot with cameras large enough to hold a reel of celluloid film. I bet the film would be scarier still if screened from a more powerful digital projector than the one at the Roxie, which is perfectly fine for the documentaries its usually used for, but maybe not ideal for a more visceral film like Haze.

I was glad that at least one of the Another Hole in the Head films was shot and presented on 35mm film (in a print that the festival spokesman apologized for as "dark" but I didn't find objectionable). And it was a good film too, combining scares, cultural commentary, and even a few laughs: the Ghost of Mae Nak, the latest riff on a bedtime story known to every adult and child in Thailand. The tale of Mae Naak Phra Khanong, who died in labor while her husband was away at war, but who manifested as a ghost upon his return, has been made into a hit film by the Thai movie industry every few years or so, and since it was as long ago as 1999 that Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang Nak surpassed Titanic as that country's all-time box-office champion (only to be beaten in turn by Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol's epic Suriyothai in 2001), it's about time for another one. And it makes some sense that a foreigner (British cinematographer-turned-writer-director Mark Duffield) would tackle the next high-production value version; what Thai director would so blatantly ask to be compared to an industry powerhouse like Nonzee?

This was my first time watching a film made in the Thai language by a Westerner, and the outsider perspective definitely leads to certain divergences from what I'd normally expect from a Thai film. In bringing the story into a present-day setting (in which everybody seems just a bit out of date, which matches my experience with certain sections of Bangkok) the film centers on a young couple, Mak and Nak, who find themselves entwined into the legacy of the original Mae Nak when they move into a traditional teak house haunted by an angry ghost. But Mak and Nak do not seem to be aware of the legend, as it gets explained to them (and re-enacted for the benefit of the audience) midway through the film. A universe in which a Thai couple have never heard of Mae Nak Phra Kanong could only be one imagined by a storyteller, but that's okay, as Duffield is a pretty good one and his universe has its own rules. For example, the laws of physics do not necessarily apply to the human body when the opportunity for a cool-looking death scene special effect (and a nod to Yojimbo) presents itself. But, and perhaps it's because I too have experienced Bangkok through outsider eyes, I thought Duffield captured the visual idiosyncrasies of the City of Angels (as the traditional Thai name of the city, Krung Thep, translates to) very well. I got the feeling that he shot scenes at some of the same ferry stops and pedestrian bridges that I passed through myself once or twice, though I know Bangkok is big enough that it's probably not true. I also thought it was interesting that the office of the shady, supernaturally-connected real estate agent was placed in Chinatown, which felt like a rebuttal, intentional or not, to the dozens of Hong Kong films (the Golden Buddha and the Eye being two) in which Thailand is portrayed as a source of crime and/or ghostly activity.