On Reason: Magic, Religion, Decency & Kindness...

"He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason." -Sinclair Lewis ("Elmer Gantry", Novel: Chapter II-1, p. 34, 1927)."You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."

-Aldous Huxley(1894–1963,“Amor Fati,” Texts and Pretexts, 1932. Image: Burt Lancaster from the Oscar winning film"Elmer Gantry", directed by Richard Brooks, 1960).

Fritz Lang: Metropolis Rediscovered...

Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier traveled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, including scenes believed lost for almost 80 years. After examining the film the three experts are certain: The find from Buenos Aires is a real treasure, a worldwide sensation. Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been rediscovered.

Fritz Lang presented the original version of Metropolis in Berlin in January 1927. The film is set in the futuristic city of Metropolis, ruled by Joh Fredersen, whose workers live underground. His son falls in love with a young woman from the worker’s underworld – the conflict takes its course. At the time it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was intended to be a major offensive against Hollywood. However the film flopped with critics and audiences alike. Representatives of the American firm Paramount considerably shortened and re-edited the film. They oversimplified the plot, even cutting key scenes. The original version could only be seen in Berlin until May 1927 – from then on it was considered to have been lost forever.

Those recently viewing a restored version of the film first read the following insert: “More than a quarter of the film is believed to be lost forever.”

In 1928, Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund – clearly nobody had yet realized the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive – and discovered the missing scenes.

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of three experts, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic. In brief: “Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s most famous film, can be seen through new eyes. The material believed to be lost leads to a new understanding of the Fritz Lang masterpiece.

-ZEITmagazin (Zeit.de, 7.2.2008. Image: -Jósef Bottlik, "Metropolis," UFA poster, designed for film's release in Hungary, Berlin, 1927).

HISTORY: Celebrity Body Snatching: Charlie Chaplin's Stolen Body Found...

"The coffin containing the body of Charlie Chaplin - missing since his grave was robbed 11 weeks ago - has been found. It was dug up from a field about a mile away from the Chaplin home in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland. The legendary comedian died on Christmas Day last year, aged 88. He was buried two days later in the village of Corsier in the hills above Lake Geneva.

"Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."
-Lady Oona Chaplin

Swiss police have arrested two men - a Pole aged 24 and a Bulgarian aged 38 - and say they have confessed to stealing the coffin and reburying it. Names of the accused have not been released, but police say they are both motor mechanics. They were traced after police kept a watch on 200 phone kiosks and tapped the Chaplins' phone after the family received ransom demands of £400,000 for return of the body after it went missing in March. Sir Charles' 51-year-old widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay up saying: "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous." In further calls the kidnappers made threats to harm her two youngest children.

The family kept silent about the ransom demands and various rumours circulated about the missing coffin. One Hollywood report suggested it had been dug up because Sir Charles was a Jew buried in a gentile cemetery. Lady Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill inherited about £12m after the death of her husband. The couple and their eight children have been living in Lausanne since 1952. A spokesman for the Chaplins said: "The family is very happy and relieved that this ordeal is over." Superintendent Gabriel Cettou, the head of the Geneva police, said the two men would be charged with attempted extortion and disturbing the peace of the dead.

-BBC News (On This Day, 5.17.1978. Image: Charlie Chaplin's Exhumed Coffin, 1978).

Percy & Denham: "Why Does God Always Take Pity On The Wicked?"

"Louisa Creed: I hate the dark. It frightens me.

Sister Theresa: It shouldn't, my dear. Don't you believe we're watched over?

Louisa Creed: Oh yes. But I'm never quite sure who's watching us.

Ellen Creed: Hell is like the kingdom of Heaven. It's within."

- Edward Percy & Reginald Denham, (LADIES IN RETIREMENT,1941). "Based on a famous murder case which took place at the end of the last century, this play has become one of the most successful and most frequently performed in the modern repertoire. An eerie atmosphere of mystery is evoked in a dark, lonely house on the marshes of the Thames estuary. The characters, presented with great psychological realism and the strong vein of earthy comedy invest the play with a liveliness unusual for such a genuinely horrifying murder play.

Adapted for the screen in 1941, directed by Charles Vidor (King's brother) and starring Ida Lupino, the New York Times described the film as “an exercise in slowly accumulating terror,” This comes mainly from George Barnes’s moody camerawork and the solid acting of the principal cast. Top honors go to Ida Lupino, a bold and strong-minded actress who became a prolific film and TV director in her own right starting in the late 1940s. Although in the stage version Ellen was sixty years old, Vidor gambled that 23-year old Lupino could look 40 with the right makeup and strong lighting to wash the softness from her face. It worked. Lupino seems almost ageless in the part, playing Ellen as a tightly coiled bundle of nerves, seething with determination beneath her generally calm appearance."-by Mikita Brottman and David Sterritt (Turner Classic Movies Review). Image: Ida Lupino, Publicity Shot, 1940s.

Gods & Masters: If Greatness Existed...Again

"Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

The further, more troubling question is, what is greatness? The climate of excess is also a climate of uncertainty and tribal dispute. When Ingmar Bergman died, many said he was just a solemn old bore — a startling, almost unbelievable dismissal of one of cinema’s greatest artists. As with leaders of the Lib Dems, in the arts, when you’re out, you’re out. And artists are being pushed in and out all the time by a cultural hype industry that has increasingly infected the ranks of what should be the independent-minded. The carefully cultivated “buzz” about some artists can be so effective that I — like, I am sure, you — actually find myself questioning my own intuitions or, in extreme cases, sanity. And the “buzz” feeds on change, novelty. The very idea of an old master, an artist who endures and grows, is rapidly becoming incomprehensible."

-Bryan Appleyard (EXCERPT:"Twilight of the Greats", The Times UK, 12.30.07, Image: Pablo Picasso)

Hitchcock: We All Go A Little Mad Sometimes...

"Norman Bates: She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

Marion Crane: Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough.

Norman Bates: You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.

Marion Crane: Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps.

Norman Bates: I was born into mine. I don't mind it anymore.

Marion Crane: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.

Norman Bates: Oh, I do

Norman Bates: but I say I don't."

********************************************************

"Norman Bates: Mother! Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!"

-Joseph Stefano (PSYCHO, 1960)

"Of all his movies, Hitchcock took the most pride in Psycho, because with this one he was able to create a blockbuster through what he called,"pure film". Made for a cheap-even-at-the-time 800K, Psycho somehow keeps the audience tagging along despite its dearth of likable characters, its homely and oddly shaped story, and its lack of A-list sheen that typified the films Hitchcock had make with Grace Kelly, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. For once the star of the show was Hitchcock himself. "I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion." It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance...They were aroused by pure film...It's the kind of picture where the camera takes over. Like Edgar Allan Poe, whom he revered as a young man, Hitchcock gave ordered shape to the thick mental glop of his own neurosis and obsessions."

-Jim Windolf (EXCERPT: Vanity Fair, March 2008)

Stanley Kubrick: On Doubling...Some Shine & Some Don't

"Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who "shine" can see. Just like they can see things that haven't happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of 'em was good."

One aspect of Stephen King's novel, "The Shining" which impressed Kubrick was the way the reader was misdirected:

"It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: 'Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy.' This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing...It's not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural."

In preparation for writing the script, Kubrick and co-screenwriter, novelist Diane Johnson, read Freud's essay "The Uncanny":

"The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is found of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death."
-Sigmund Freud (EXERPT: "The Uncanny,"1919)

Of working in this genre, Kubrick said:

"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly."

Screenwriter Diane Johnson spoke of archetypes:

"A father threatening his child is compelling. It's an archetypal enactment of unconscious rages...the material of this novel is the rage and fear within families."

Dick Hallorann: "Some places are like people: some shine and some don't."

-Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson (THE SHINING, 1980. Novel: Stephen King-"The Shining" was the first widely read novel to confront alcoholism and child abuse in baby-boomer families, especially the way alcoholism, a will toward failure in one's work, and abusing one's children are passed down from generation to generation. The heart of the book is not an evil hotel but a pair of father-son relationships: Jack and his father, Jack and his son. This was both daring and insightful for its time, long before "dysfunctional family" was a cliché).

THEY Live, THEY Really Do...

"Street Preacher: Outside the limit of our sight, feeding off us, perched on top of us, from birth to death, are our owners! Our owners! They have us. They control us! They are our masters! Wake up! They're all about you! All around you!

Gilbert: The world needs a wake up call gentlemen...we're gonna phone it in.

Bearded Man: We could be pets, we could be food, but all we really are is livestock."

-John Carpenter (THEY LIVE, 1988. Image: Jenny Holzer, New York City Billboard,1982)

Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler: I Want What I Don't Want

You can't assume people will tell you the truth about their desires even if they know them. What you are more likely to get are answers that will protect them in their steadfast endeavor to appear to the world as sensible, intelligent, rational beings.

-VioletPlanet

Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He'll be in then.

Walter Neff: Who?
Phyllis: My husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren't you?

Walter Neff: Yeah, I was, but I'm sort of getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.

Phyllis: There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

Walter Neff: How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I'd say around ninety.

Walter Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Walter Neff: Suppose it doesn't take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Walter Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.
Walter Neff: That tears it.
*************************************
Phyllis: We're both rotten.
Walter Neff: Only you're a little more rotten.

-Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler (DOUBLE INDEMNITY,1944 Novel: James M. Cain)

Clifford Odets: On Booze, Love & Longing

"Sid Jeffers: I envy people who drink. At least they know what to blame everything on.

Helen Wright: If it's so simple, why don't you drink?

Sid Jeffers: Me? I have no character.

Helen Wright: I love you so much, I don't care what I think of you."

**********************

"Paul Boray: All my life I wanted to do the right thing but it never worked out. I'm outside always looking in. Feeling all the time I'm far away from home and where home is I don't know. I can't get back to the simple happy kid I used to be."

-Clifford Odets & Zachary Gold (HUMORESQUE, 1946)

Hollywood: When Is Film Art? When Genius Meets Insanity

"As chronicled in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the lunatics were running the Hollywood asylum of the '60s and early '70s. The noun "auteur" was actually bestowed on American filmmakers like Robert Downey Sr. (the father of Junior), Hal Ashby, Arthur Penn, Jerry Schatzberg, Paul Mazursky, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and the great Kubrick. For my taste, the finest film of the era was 1969's Midnight Cowboy, directed by John Schlesinger, a Brit working in the U.S. The buddy story of male hustler Joe Buck and street grifter Ratso Rizzo was the ultimate example of anti-heroicism and we were all anti-heroes. We recognized that life is not a Hollywood movie in which the leading man gets the dame and all is wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. We saw that "decent" men gave us Vietnam and war crimes and that those in the lower rungs of the class system often embodied real decency, potentially more so than the clean stereotypes Hollywood had previously foisted on the marks.

These epiphanies were not the result of mere agit-prop by the filmmakers. They experimented, engaged in flashbacks and dreams, broke the fourth wall. THEY DID NOT FOLLOW THE RULES. All great art is created by artists who break the rules and allow their imagination free reign.

Then one day we woke up: Reagan was president and films were movies again. There are exceptions (the fab Coen Brothers), but even most of the exceptions lack the ferocity and vision of a Roeg. Spielberg and Lucas spewed out childish and manipulative crap for a dumbed-down and subdued nation. What had been a B-movie in terms of story was now the blockbuster. It was morning in America again and we were in mourning. As for Hollywood, there are many reasons for this descent into mediocrity. Beyond the country turning hard-right, accountants and agents had replaced eccentric, dope-addled businessmen who, while not exactly Abbie Hoffmans, were nonetheless willing to take risks.

Again, all great artists take risks. Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The politics of a film is the budget of a film." Where the lunatics once ran the asylum, the bureaucrats were now back in control.

To paraphrase something Coppola noted years ago, the great hope of film-as-art remains with a fourteen-year old girl holding a cheap digital video camera. She won't have to answer to accountants and her personal vision will be available for download on the Internet. The artist will prevail.

When is film art? When artists -- not compromised and spineless yuppies -- make films. They're out there, but chances are you won't find them if you're sitting through twenty-three coming attractions and eleven commercials."

-Michael Simmons (EXCERPT: Huffington Post: "When Is Film Art?" 3.12.08)

Milius & Coppola: Primordial Instincts

"Kurtz: It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.

And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.

If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."

-John Milius & Francis Ford Coppola (APOCALYPSE NOW, 1979)

Paddy Chayefsky: Madness, Virulent Madness

"Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I'm your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.

Diana Christensen: Then, don't leave me.

Max Schumacher: It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays.

You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.

[Kisses her]

Max Schumacher: And it's a happy ending: Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife, with whom he has established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell; final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week's show."

-Paddy Chayefsky, Screenwriter- NETWORK (1976)