I have many things about which I feel thankful this year.  I’m thankful for the love of my wife, for the gift of my two children, for the continued health of my family through some trying times, for my circle of close friends, cohorts and cronies, for an interest in something that has sustained me (except financially) for most of my life, for running water, for gravy, for Honeycrisp apples, for white socks, for California sunshine, for Johnny Mercer, Johnny Ramone and Johnny Cash, for more things than I could ever list given all the time and all the bandwidth.  And last but not least,  I’m thankful for Boris Karloff… and I’d like to take this opportunity, as part of the ongoing “Boris Karloff Blog-a-thon” being hosted at Pierre Fournier’s Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog, to get down to specifics. READ MORE

If you are like millions of Americans, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade may be playing as video wallpaper in the background of tomorrow’s holiday hubbub in your household. In between stuffing that turkey and unsuccessfully averting your eyes from the crasser, materialistic moments of the television broadcast, it is still fun to catch sight of those unwieldy balloons straining while remaining afloat above the crowded street. Depending on luck, fashions in pop culture and our memories of balloons past (where is Underdog?) these gargantuan floating creatures seem as familiar as that stained recipe card you may be consulting. Yet, as the above image from a 1930s Macy’s Parade illustrates, they were not always quite as cuddly as they seem today. Just as these helium behemoths sometimes elude their handlers and occasionally deflate, the origin of these now familiar fixtures is not well known. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the originator of these unique inflated fantasies dipped a toe into the movie business just as it started to take off as an art form.

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The nasal whine of Jerry Lewis is slowly screeching it’s way back into the American consciousness. He won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award at the last Oscar ceremony, and he’s returning to Broadway as the director of a musical version of The Nutty Professor, set for the 2010-11 season. And over the past few weeks, Anthology Film Archives held a retrospective of his directorial work, from The Bellboy through Cracking Up (aka Smorgasbord). The series was timed with the release of Chris Fujiwara’s concise study of his style published by the University of Illinois Press. It’s been a crash course in Lewis’ comedy, as I only have a passing knowledge of his movies, specifically the ones with Frank Tashlin (Artists and Models first and foremost). What became immediately clear is his astonishing technical command.

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Last week, I showed William Friedkin’s The French Connection in my film history class to represent the era of the Film School Generation, which was that remarkable group of young directors who ruled Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s. Enormously popular when released in 1971, The French Connection not only holds up 38 years later, but it looks amazingly fresh and “modern” compared to most films produced today, even those by hip, up-and-coming indie filmmakers. I saw the film when I was a kid and then again a few years ago, when I showed it for the first time as part of my film history class. But last week, I watched it with fresh eyes, partly because of a coincidence that had occurred the day before. Director William Friedkin came up in a conversation at Facets Multi-Media, where I also work, in the context of his early career as a documentary filmmaker in Chicago. And, it occurred to me as I watched The French Connection that the influence of that early experience is what makes the film as powerful as it is.

Over the years, many historians and critics have noted the film’s use of documentary techniques—most notably hand-held camera, natural lighting, overlapping dialogue, and extended takes—and their impact on the narrative and on the viewer. However, working at Facets the past few years has helped me see something specific about Friedkin’s documentary style that I had not noticed previously. The film’s down-and-dirty style derives from a short-lived Chicago-based documentary movement from the 1960s—now long gone and unchronicled in most documentary history books. A version of cinema verite, the visual style of this loose-knit movement included the use of hand-held camera, long takes, and direct sound, just like their well-known verite counterparts from New York—Richard Leacock, the Maysles, and others who were part of Drew Associates. And, the Chicagoans also took advantage of the new lightweight 16mm cameras and cableless sync-sound recorders. But, there was something more direct, earnest, and even anxious about Chicago’s answer to verite; theirs was a no-nonsense street style fashioned from the use of documentary as social activism.

'AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2' IS DOCUMENTARY AS SOCIAL ACTIVISM.

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I just read the six-page article in the November 16th, 2009, New Yorker by Arthur Krystal titled Slow Fade: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. Reading about the famous American author who took the literary world by storm with The Great Gatsby and other stories, only to find himself at the bottom of the food chain in Hollywood brought to my mind images of Barton Fink (which touched on Faulkner’s Hollywood experience). It’s recommended reading for TCM fans and I’ll further whet their appetite by providing the following quiz based on what I’ve learned from reading Krystal’s piece. Answers will appear at bottom. READ MORE

It seems surprising that Sir Author Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, and London’s most famous serial killer who stalked the Whitechapel neighborhood in 1888, were never brought together for one of Doyle’s novels. But the two were pitted against each other on screen for the first time in A STUDY IN TERROR (1966) and it’s one of the most underrated but entertaining entries among the Holmes-on-film mysteries created since the days of the Universal Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce series.       READ MORE

In the spring of 1993, I spent ten very happy days in Rome.  It was my first trip abroad and I was the guest of a friend of a friend, an architect who owned a sprawling apartment in the heart of Old Rome.  Walking out of the door of his place on the Piazza Aracoeli, you had only to turn a corner in any direction and find yourself in a setting you’d seen a thousand times in travelogues, in books and of course at the movies.  READ MORE

I suppose to the eyes of the world, we were a motley looking crew as the capacity crowd flowed eagerly into George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York last month. Unlike the first Hollywood premiere of Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (1923) at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on October 18, 1922, there were no limos, no gowns, no red carpets, no klieg lights searching the sky, and certainly no hint of a “Day of the Locust” style mob scene. However, there were about five hundred not very glam but expectantly eager people gathered on an October evening for the “World Premiere” of this restored version of the tale in the 21st century starring Douglas Fairbanks in one of his classic roles.

So, who were these people who came out to see this 87 year old film version of the English bandit’s adventures?  Among the crowd at this movie were a few who might have been just old enough to have seen a later Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. film in a movie theater, a generous sprinkling of younger cinephiles, middle aged academics, and a delightful gaggle of children of about nine years of age in the audience that Saturday.  Once thought lost until it was rediscovered in the 1960s, this film’s “premiere” was a highlight of the seventh biennial conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies at the University of Rochester, where the historical and literary permutations of the appealing errant figure of lore were analyzed and, frankly, reveled in by the participants. Accredited scholars and hard core Robin buffs from around the world spent three days discussing the evergreen legend of this “Robin Hood: Media Creature”, trying to discern if the 700 year old hero of Sherwood Forest even existed, while enjoying an extravaganza of multi-media exhibits (including Douglas Fairbanks boots, seen below), early manuscripts, songs, and presentations discussing all aspects of the tale.

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Abbas Kiarostami has retreated from the international scene for most of this past decade, working on a variety of museum installations and digital video experiments that received little to no distribution in the U.S. These pursuits, which include the installation Looking at Taziyeh, the long-take landscape film Five Dedicated to Ozu, and his latest, Shirin,  extend his interest in off-screen space and ways of seeing. Taziyeh is a mixed-multimedia work, with Kiarostami directing a live stage performance of a Shiite passion play (Ta’ziyeh is a folk theater form that re-enacts the murder of Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad), while giant monitors near the stage depict Iranian audience members reacting to a previous version of the play.

Kiarostami told The Guardian that “Ta’ziyeh is strictly linked to its audience – the event is actually created by the rapport between actors and spectators.”  Five Dedicated to Ozu, available on DVD from Kino (full disclosure: a company I work for), is a series of fixed-camera long takes of a beach on the Caspian Sea that capture ducks, dogs, shorelines, and reflections of the moon. It is an academic exercise imbued with Kiarostami’s wry humor and keen compositional eye. It asks for a patient, involved viewer, as it unveils split-second narratives and fugitive plastic beauties. While watching it, one can be emotionally involved in a duck’s fate, then pull back to enjoy the framing of driftwood on the horizon, or simply leave it on as an impossibly hip screen-saver.

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