The future of art cinema’s past is unwritten

To keep you folks up on the strange and sad stories of how the rights to great arthouse pics of the past are slowly "disappearing," let me pass on this odd tale from The New York Times in which it is revealed that the owners of a movie theater in Aspen, Colorado now own the rights to the films made by Svensk Filmindustri. Yes, that’s the right, the back-catalogue of the late great Bergman, plus everything else the company made, including such famous titles as Elvira Madigan and My Life as a Dog.

You can read how this ridiculous situation came about in the article. It makes a nice add-on to the death of New Yorker films (which I wrote about below, on this same blog). The latest news on that front? There will be an auction for the rights to some of New Yorker’s holdings tomorrow. To wit:

On March 12, 2009, Technicolor, Inc. and certain of its affiliates will be conducting a secured party auction sale of certain of the assets of New Yorker Films. The winning bidder(s) at the auction will purchase some or all of the available assets but not assume any of New Yorker Films' liabilities. If you are interested in participating in the auction as a potential purchaser, please contact *** of Technicolor - New York at 110 Leroy Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10014, telephone number ****; email: ***

It is New Yorker Films' sincere hope that the purchaser of our assets will be a well qualified distributor with the intention and ability to manage and distribute the fine films we have had the privilege of distributing in a manner consistent with New Yorker Film's 43 year history in the independent film world.

So certain arthouse masterpieces of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies are now sitting in a legal limbo. Sure, the best-known Bergmans are out on DVD (with dozens more available only if you hunt through troves of old VHS). But this indicates what one viewer-friend had called “the telescoping” of American culture. We have a view of things that has gotten very, very limited over the past thirty years, and as far as most moviegoers these days are concerned, foreign movies are a rarified taste (best ingested only if the film in question is critically heralded, and preferably based on a famous novel), or in film class. Sad, sad, fucking world….

Bless me, Ingmar, for I have sinned

Couldn't shoehorn this into my Bergman Deceased Artiste tribute on the show this week, so I decided to place it online. A scene from the very strange and hypnotic (and kinky and disturbing) Bergman TV film The Rite (1969). The great filmmaker himself plays the priest.

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Close-ups and subtitles, or Liv Ullmann's mouth

I’ve been rewatching Bergman’s films for an upcoming tribute on the Funhouse. I had forgotten how visual intrusive subtitles are on his films. Of course you need ’em if you don’t speak Swedish but — with the possible exception of Cassavetes and Dreyer — few filmmakers depended so consistently on close-ups to tell his story.

When I used to see the Bergmans, they were being shown in horrible-looking, white-on-white subtitles, barely readable in the prints that were sent around to rep houses by Janus films and other distributors during the 1980s. The films still had the power to blow one’s mind (Persona is of the ’60s and yet it is timeless, as are The Silence, Hour of the Wolf and Shame). What’s odd is that now that we possess absolutely pristine prints of these films on DVDs with imminently readable subtitles, the subs are still extremely intrusive because they haven’t been MOVED DOWN on the image. Granted, Bergman did work for the most part in the 1:33 ratio (read: square, box-like, the TV ratio), but I just watched The Passion of Anna tonight, which appears to be 1:66 with small letterboxing, and the DVD company (in this case, MGM-UA, who did a phenomenal job otherwise on these ’60s classics) has kept the subs where they always where — namely, on Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow’s mouths.

I attended the “Tutto Fellini” traveling festival in NYC about a decade and a half ago, where perfect prints in Italian were screened, with English subtitles present on LED lettering. The effect was slightly odd, like the operas that do the same: you feel like you’re watching the absolutely most sublime print of the film in the world, and yet you’re reading the dialogue off of a robotic “crawl.” Nonetheless, it is a good deal more preferable than the placing of subtitles on the bottom portion of the screen, when the filmmaker in question is, like Bergman, obsessed with the landscape of the face. I’ve noticed that this method has never been used since in the NYC area for film; I in fact was even told by one major museum curator that “our viewers have complained about it, they hated it,” leading to the institution in question to show un-subtitled prints rather than copies with LED subs. (I would bet that these same complainers were the people who wander into the auditorium, not knowing what film they’re attending….)

I know my tiny voice carries no weight whatsoever, but as a film fan, I think it’s time to reconsider LED technology for these films. At least for the theaters that can afford it — and, I have to ask, how come the wonderful Anthology Film Archives could afford to do it some years back for a great print of Bunuel’s Cela S’Appelle L’Aurore (Sunrise), and the two main institutions in town that show absolutely brilliant rep and have major arts funding behind them have never done it?

And for the DVDs, when letterboxing is involved, could you guys PLEASE move the fucking English subs just a few centimeters/inches down so we can see the actor’s mouth when they’re speaking and not have words sittin’ right over their faces?

And the fact that white subs are still being used in digital-land when there are several other methods available (yellow subs, greying the letters, providing a dark band behind the words) is a subject for another rant sometime in the future. If you want to know how ridiculous it can get see the end of Assays's Les Destinees, where a character imparts the "secret" of his life and it is seen in the print available over here on white subs that can't be read over his bed clothing. C’mon it’s 2007, people!

Funhouse upload: Deceased Artiste Ingmar Bergman talks about... Deceased Artiste Michelangelo Antonioni

The fact that Bergman died within a day or so of Antonioni is certainly remarkable, as they were of course two of the remaining Old Masters of cinema (I still think of the French New Wavers — still rockin' in their 80s — as a bit younger than they). I couldn't resist putting up this bit of a 2002 TV interview in which Bergman brought up Antonioni's name while discussing the new films he would see in the cinema on Faro, the island where he lived out the latter part of his life.


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Ingmar Bergman sells soap

I haven't done many tributes on the Funhouse TV program to this Old Master, but I do love his work. It may have become fashionable to bash him, but Persona is still one of the great modernist mindfucks of all time (as much as it's been copied) and, curiously enough, you can see the seeds of that film in these soap commercials Bergman made from 1951-1953. One doesn't want to put the auteurist magnifying glass too close to these, but shorter, commercial enterprises have always served as "laboratories" of sorts for their makers, and so here we can see Bergman's love of old silent comedy (and I do mean OLD silent comedy, of the Melies and "trick film" variety), his habit of having performers appear in the foreground to grab the viewer's attention, and his devotion to the stylings of classical theater. The sense of humor found here does manifest itself in some of his movies, but is a bit overdone in his only full broad comedy All These Women(1964).

Here are the three best of the bunch:
His evocation of early cinema

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A wonderfully strange one in which the first half of the commercial is played back in the second half. Fragment it, Ingmar!

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And this wonderfully playful item, in which a 3D gal comes right out at the viewers to sell them, what else, "Bris"!

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All eight of the spots can be found
here.