“I didn’t know you could mix Santa Claus and horror movies,” my son Max told me this morning (y’all met him last week when he guest blogged on my behalf). He was referring specifically to his and my current obsession, a movie that has been inaugurated as a holiday viewing tradition in our home: Jalmari Helander’s looney cult flick Rare Exports.

Never heard of it? Well — as Max said, it is a (mildly gory) horror movie about Santa Claus.

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I love those comedies from the Swinging 1960s that are part farce, part caper movie in which a huge international cast sashays through Europe in an incomprehensible plot. The cinematic equivalent to a 1960s discotheque, with its trendy music, jet set movie stars, mod costumes, and fab hair styles, this subgenre not only includes breezy examples such as Casino Royale (1967) and What’s New Pussycat? but also atrocious bombs like The Happening and Skidoo! My favorite has always been After the Fox, which I recently saw again after many years. I was delighted to discover that After the Fox not only held up for me this time around but that there was more to the film than I realized.

After the Fox failed with the critics and at the box office in 1968 when it was first released, and few have warmed up to it in the interim. The odd assembly of creative personnel is frequently cited as one of the film’s weaknesses. Comic actor Peter Sellers and beefcake movie star Victor Mature appear alongside perennial starlet Britt Ekland in a film directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Neil Simon. While Simon, who is famous for his very American, middlebrow comedy, and De Sica, who was the acclaimed neorealist director of The Bicycle Thief, do not generally come up in the same conversation, I found nothing disastrous in their collaboration.

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I have something I need to say. It’s something I don’t say often enough, and for that I am sorry. You deserve to hear it. The words are few but powerful.

I love you. I love you, Muppet Movie.

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I really wanted to contribute something to this Halloween blogfest, so I offer a little nonsensical coda about a movie I’m sure a lot of us have seen many times and probably enjoy.  Funny + spooky has been a movie tradition forever, and nobody did it quite as well as the limber-limbed and rubber-faced actor/comedian Don Knotts in his 1966 feature film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. 

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It’s no great surprise that the two movie genres that gripped me so thoroughly when I was a little kid and which continue to dominate my love of cinema to this day (as I careen towards geezerdom) are horror and comedy.  They are much closer than they might superficially appear.  I’ve been to plenty of comedy films that induced in audiences gasps of awe and terror, and horror films that provoked in audiences nervous laughter.  Drawing a line between the two involves splitting hairs and other forms of killjoy pedantry.

And so, in honor of Halloween, I’d like to tip my hat to one of the most venerable tropes of classic gothic horror, which also happens to be a slapstick mainstay: the old dark house!

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One of the sad things about being a classic movie buff is the closed nature of so much of the experience.  Fritz Lang ain’t gonna make any more movies, Alfred Hitchcock is all done and gone, Charlie Chaplin has left the building.

Now, every once in a while, some old once-lost fragment gets dug out of the archives and brought back to public consciousness.  Fritz Lang may be dead but–almost ninety years after it was made–his METROPOLIS can be refurbished and given new dimensions.  Alfred Hitchcock can’t make movies any more but the discovery of bits of THE WHITE SHADOW can be uncovered in New Zealand.  Charlie Chaplin isn’t around to share it with us, but a previously unrecorded appearance by him in THE THIEF CATCHER can draw huge crowds of gawkers and journalists.

Still, there is no question that none of these experiences comes close to the thrill of the experiences that drew us in as fans in the first place.  METROPOLIS isn’t new, it’s just longer.  THE WHITE SHADOW will not slake a thirst created by REAR WINDOW.  THE THIEF CATCHER is mildly amusing at best.

What if I were to tell you that there is a cache of movies that you have never seen before and most likely never even heard of, that can stand alongside the best of Buster Keaton’s work?  A selection of short films and features that share none of that diminished expectations that dog his later work–we’re not talking PASSIONATE PLUMBER here, but entire treasure box full of movies to take their place with THE GENERAL and STEAMBOAT BILL JR.

I am not kidding.

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The following is in honor of the upcoming birthday of Buster Keaton, on October 4th.  It is the story of a custard pie, a movie camera, and the very origins of American slapstick.

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Let me start with an anecdote: when I was producing my DVD compilation of the restored films of Harry Langdon, I had gone to my bank to take out a loan to help finance the project.  I sat down with a banker and started to explain what my company did, and what this specific project entailed.  She listened, and nodded her head politely.  But she was puzzled.  “Silent comedies?  How does that work?  How do people hear the jokes?”

Every once in a while I find myself getting dragged into some arcane argument with other slapstick nuts like myself (the sometimes controversial stances I take in this space should clue you in to why that happens to me a lot).  And when the arguments get heated–over such trivia as the proper frame rate for silent comedies, or whether that’s really Mal St. Clair as “Deadshot Dan” in Buster Keaton’s The Goat—I like to remember that as passionate and fanatical as we can get, there are a great many Americans who don’t understand how a silent comedy could even exist.  How d’ya hear the jokes?

And they outnumber us.

And it is at times like that when I curse the nostalgia merchants.

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Two sixty-something masters of their domain have new work showing in the U.S. John Landis, a dean of the low farting arts, has his morbid comedy Burke and Hare playing cable-on-demand services and a limited theatrical run. Harun Farocki, of the high brow-furrowing arts, has a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Images of War: At a Distance. Landis has been tagged with artistic decline, something Hollywood directors have to deal with as soon as they sprout their first grey hair (Burke is his first narrative feature since 1998, was financed and made in the U.K., and released there in Oct. 2010). This kind of ageism doesn’t appear in the gallery world, where Farocki is now being embraced after decades as an experimental video artist. The MoMA exhibition is running his most recent work on a loop, Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010), but also providing nearby monitors that are showing nearly all of his previous videos (which they acquired for their library). As artists, they are similar mainly in their dissimilarity, but both have a deep and playful sense of film history.

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