The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.
Every so often I would like to make a full episode available to folks outside Manhattan who haven’t yet seen my style of movie-rant, and the kind of nowhere-else-on-TV clips I’m proud to present. Thus, I present last week’s show, which summed up the high and low points of the work done by the distributor New Yorker Films. For background on what I’m talking about, I refer you to my initial blog entry about New Yorker, which was the source of this episode. Also, last week’s entry about white-on-white subtitles.
Part one contains my opening comments about New Yorker:
Part two contains clips from The Mother and the Whore and my comments on Celine and Julie Go Boating:
Part three contains clips from Celine and Julie Go Boating and my closing comments:
As a country, we Americans are obsessed with the “miracles” of childhood, childbirth, and kids in general. I’d argue that the reason we are is because our adult lives are so filled with daily reality and let-downs that we begin to bestow an unrealistic magic on our early years, and thus the urge to revisit childhood, whether mentally, emotionally, or through having children (or as the wisemen Hicks and Carlin called it, “pumping one out”), is irresistible. What does this have to do with the current brouhaha over tiny cinema master Roman Polanski? (You can kinda figure where I’m gonna fall on this from the last phrase, can’t ya?) Well, unlike many other cultures that do indeed guard their children’s innocence and adhere to the notion that pedophilia is rightfully a crime, ’round these parts, we hoot and holler a lot more about the issue, because we’re “one nation under God,” dontcha know. We are the appointers and defenders of morality, and know best, so shut up, rest of the world, we’ll tell you what to think. Polanski has indeed been condemned in his adopted country of France, too, by both right and left-wing politicians — the latter because gents like Daniel Cohn-Bendit said pro-“loving kids” stuff earlier in his career and now has to publicly raise a hue and cry against the practice. But we in America *reallyreallyreally* want you to know where we stand.
First of all, let me state outright that Polanski did commit a crime many years back. He also indulged in wildly bad judgment. The severity of his debt to society is what the issue is here. Let's run through a few of the elements surrounding the case, many of which are covered in a New York Times (oh boy, that liberal Jewish New Yawk newspaper) group of op-eds. Here is another op-ed, this one written by Polanski’s latest screenwriter.
-The victim “got over it long ago.” The woman who was the 13-year-old in question back in the disco era wants the case dismissed. Here is a second piece stating her desire to shut the thing down. She is what might easily be called at this point “a sympathetic witness,” oddly enough. Ms. Geimer was indeed not at the age of consent when the event took place, so either she was a “sophisticated teen,” as Polanski first argued, or she was a young girl who was taken advantage of by Roman. But she is now a grown woman who wants the case thrown out. The “lynch the child rapist!” crowd argue that “the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of the victim, it works on behalf of justice.” (I take this from a fervent argument against Polanski on a Newsweek blog.) And, what pray tell, is justice? Well, it’s the same as obscenity — they’ll know it when they see it….
-Polanski’s flight. Despite the serious loud-mouthing about how we in America won’t put up with “foreign artist types raping our kids,” this case simply amounts to embarrassment over Polanski’s flight. In fact, it’s rather evident that, were he to be extradited back here, the actual crime he would be imprisoned or otherwise penalized for would be his flight. Anyway having any familiarity with Polanski’s biography is aware that the reason he survived the Holocaust was because of his successful ability to flee those who mean him harm. Given the circumstances, he followed his instinct and booked the hell outta the States, and for that I don’t blame him.
-The initial publicity-hungry judge. Details of the case are included in the rather uneven but useful documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. In short, the judge initially indicated he would honor a plea bargain that dictated Polanski would have to go through a 42-day session of “psychiatric evaluation.” Polanski did the session, and then the judge decided he would not honor the plea bargain, which had been worked out with the district attorney. He sought media stardom, and thus was going to put Roman away for a long time.
-Polanski’s history as a “playboy.” He has indeed been involved with many, many women in his lifetime, but has not been a “serial offender” in terms of underaged girls. Gary Glitter, for instance, could easily be pegged as a person who had a predilection for “the young stuff” — the gent gets arrested, then moves to another country, gets arrested again for the same thing. In his heyday, Polanski was constantly seen in the company of beautiful women and was known as a gent “on the make,” no question. The interview clip below (Diane Sawyer ABC-TV interview) takes him to task for dating Nastassja Kinski when she was 16; this particular charge can only be answered with the words "consensual," romance, and ohmygodNastassjaKinski. He has, however, not be seen with an underaged woman since l'affaire Kinski ended quite a long, long time ago (Reagan wasn't even president, if you want how long ago it was).
As a fan of Polanski’s work, I’d imprison him for having made Pirates, but that’s another matter…. What I mean to say is that his recent status as a rehabilitated family man with an attractive younger wife (who is middle-aged — when you're 76, most everyone is younger) and two children was evidenced by his polished but uninvolving version of Oliver Twist. He made Bitter Moon for adults, and Oliver Twist for younger viewers; take a look at the former, and tell me if you want a fascinating filmmaker like that in prison (my biases leak out).
-“Taking a chance” on the artist. This harkens back to Norman Mailer’s comment on society needing to take a chance on artists — in the case of his comment, it was John Henry Abbott, who killed a man when he felt the man had insulted him (not so wise a chance, bad decision, Norman). Polanski has indeed enriched the world of film, and thus the world, with the work he’s done in the three decades since his crime. Should society not “take a chance” that he has rehabilitated himself, and will not fuck up again?
-The MSM, as it is called (“mainstream media”). The media needs a whipping boy, and Polanski is currently it. Interestingly, the Newsweek blogger cited above invoked the name of Bernie Madoff in her discussion of Polanski. We all have certain whipping boys that we loathe, and those that we sympathize with, but we can recognize them nonetheless as whipping boys, or whipping girls, as the case may be. For instance, I loathe Sarah Palin and think she is a complete ignoramus who shouldn’t be appointed dog-catcher (does anyone get appointed dog-catcher anymore?), but she is also a fave slam-target for the MSM (it would nicer if morons were ignored).
I get the feeling when reading/listening to the words of the anti-Roman brigade that they are as completely clueless as the Women Against Pornography leader Page Mellish, who used to stand on Manhattan street corners with large placards featuring horrid images of women being exploited; for some reason, she never understood that she herself was helping to perpetuate the exploitation by displaying these images in such a large and aggressive fashion (and turning off many whom she otherwise might’ve recruited). A percentage of the “Polanski is a child rapist!” crowd may really be motivated by their own feelings that any advance towards an underaged person is rape pure and simple, but a * lot * of the animosity towards Polanski is clearly a product of his being a “foreigner” who is loved by the French and those freak film-fans — and that “you ran away from us when we wuz talkin’ ta ya, boy! We don’t like that, come over here and get your beatin’…”
Then again, there are some folks viewing the case with a sober mind: here is a rather calmer assessment of the case, on a U.S. Military board (!) on the About.com site.
And since this blog is all 'bout the clips, here are some reasons to love Roman (I'm assuming most readers have seen his greatest films, from Knife in the Water to The Pianist). First, an early short, A Toothy Smile (1957). Hey, I never said the guy wasn’t a kinky perv. It’s just a question of whether that’s illegal or not….
Polanski acting (sans dialogue) in one of my faves, The Magic Christian:
Polanski ABC-TV interview from 1987 (“he was, by all accounts, a brilliant movie director…”):
On Chinatown, an AFI interview:
An absolutely brilliant and disturbing scene from The Tenant. (Hail Polanski and his wild screenwriter, the late Gerard Brach):
The trailer for Tess, the “kinder, gentler" Polanski:
The trailer for Bitter Moon is below. The whole film can be taken in here here:
A recent faux perfume commercial directed by Polanski, in which Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams catfight over a bottle of scent:
And the strangest Polanski-related artifact, and one of the most melodramatic: the ENTIRE German version of the stage musical Dance of the Vampires, with an amazingly over-the-top score by the ever-melo Jim Steinman!
And if anyone finds this sucker on discount anywhere, please notify me right away:
Two clips are now up from my interview with French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch, who was in town a few weeks back to promote the NYC opening of his film Paris. Here, we talk about his scripting films with large ensembles and separate plot threads:
And now for the fun part of the discussion. We talk about his eclectic and very catholic (with a lowercase “c”) use of music in his films:
With two great examples I used on the show. First, a kinetic moment that mixes four different genres, from When the Cat’s Away (1996):
And a very adorable moment when two middle-aged characters rock out to Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” in the family drama/comedy Un Air de Famille (1996).
To complement this week’s episode of the Funhouse, on which I discuss the death of the arthouse distributor New Yorker films (which I wrote about on this blog), I offer the following scene from one of the many, many masterpieces that New Yorker acquired but never released on either VHS or DVD. Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou (1969) is an absorbing film about a marriage in crisis, that finds the lead couple warring as both a theatrical production and a documentary are taking shape.
The sequence I uploaded here is one of the most notable moments in the film, as the lovely Bulle Ogier and the intenser-than-most Jean-Pierre Kalfon reach an impasse. It is noted in the very fine documentary on Rivette by Claire Denis and Serge Daney that Kalfon did indeed cut his chest when he did this scene (method!). The film is one of eleven superb Rivette films that is not available on DVD in the U.S. (including the overwhelming and quietly, insidiously brilliant Out 1). Out of those eleven, only two were ever out on VHS; one can only hope that Rivette gets some representation over here while he is still with us and still making films (his latest, Around a Small Mountain, is currently on the film festival circuit).
But the fact that L’Amour Fou was acquired and then hidden away by New Yorker is NOT the only reason I’ve uploaded this clip. The other is the fact that it contains some dreadful white-on-white subtitling. As all but one of the American DVD labels specializing in arthouse releases still use the white-on-white method, I’d just like to note that it is often really very fucking hard to distinguish white-on-white titles (why dance around the topic — I’m not getting paid to write this….). I know that the answer to this dilemma, yellow subs, is loathed by certain video/DVD labels, as it presumably “distracts” from the beauty of the visual (and this can well be the case with gorgeous black and white films or specially stylized color features), but some filmmakers are as brilliant at screenwriting as they are at directing. Thus, you have a dilemma: would you rather see a pristine print of a Bergman film with white-on-white subs where you may well miss a portion of the dialogue, or would you rather have yellow subtitles that may “distract” for a short while (the eye becomes used to them very quickly) and understand all that is being said by the characters? (And why can't modern computer-titling advancements that "enhance" titles with a slight gray backing be used?) This debate is virtually moot, as only Koch Lorber seems to still use the yellow-subtitling method that renders every line readable.
So, if you watch the following clip from L’Amour Fou and comprend le francais, you will be entranced (although the picture quality does suck too, but Kalfon and Ogier’s performances can make one forget that for a bit). If you don’t understand French, you will lose the dialogue that leads up to Kalfon’s intense act of self-destruction. I think the one and only lesson that comes from watching this kind of godawful print of an arthouse feature is indeed how devoted fans can be to great filmmaking: to fall in love with a film that looks THIS BAD means that truly you’re watching a great work of cinema.
After I posted this, I discovered that another fan had put the clip up in a clearer copy; he has taken it from Denis and Daney's documentary (also unavailable over here), so it's much shorter and is missing the lead-in to the violent act. It can be found here.
Jim Carroll was one of those NYC artist types that I have absolutely admired and respected, and have walked past in several circumstances, and yet I never told the guy how much his work has meant to me. Perhaps it was because he was physically imposing: a tall mutha, he sported bright red/orange hair (seemingly inspired by Bowie in the early Seventies) and, like any New Yorker worth his/her salt, walked as if he knew where the hell he was going to (no aimless rambling for New Yorkers, even if they’re headed to the local deli). Perhaps it was because I had nothing witty, interesting, or wise to say to him about my admiration for his work. Or perhaps it was because the Catholic Boy LP was so important to me at the time it came out, I played the thing so many fucking times, that it was almost redundant to stop the guy in the street and just say “hey man, I really loved that album so much….” When these folks die, you think about these things, as if your having imparted these positive feelings might’ve affected the artist in some way (the idea that we, the fans, can in some way touch the artist, is a mighty, mighty egocentric conceit). In any case, I loved Carroll’s music and, yes, his poetry (the latter being the bulk of his work over the years) and his memoirs.
As some folks “write the book” on a specific topic, Carroll “wrote the song” on death (on the up-tempo side; downbeat being “My Death” by Brel). His “People Who Died” never was a Top 40 hit, but it’s never forgotten by anyone who hears it: a laundry list of his friends who died young, in colorful and supremely fatal ways. To honor Carroll’s passing, I want to point to my favorite songs of his, but perhaps I’d best start out with the words, spotlighting some clips of him reading poetry.
Before the poetry, however, a little access. Jim on an Ohio public access show in 1991, being interviewed about his basketball playing as a younger man:
And the most amazing Carroll interview ever, him on the Today Show in 1999 discussing the fact that various “school shooters” had been inspired by the movie version of The Basketball Diaries. I loved the book, and have never taken the time to see the movie, thanks to the unfortunate casting by director Scott Kalvert of the leads (I guess he, like Scorsese, saw something in Leonardo that I just do not see, namely breadth of ability as a performer). I was very glad to watch this interview last night and find out Carroll himself was no fan of the movie. It’s an incredibly eloquent and intelligent interview:
Carroll can also be seen/heard reading his poetry here and here. A wonderful full-length reading that took place at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in 1998 can be seen here:
A clip from a “video diary” project that never came to be:
And now, the musical side. The two most interesting revelations in Jim’s obits were the fact that Keith Richards arranged for his record deal with Atlantic (Patti Smith already having encouraged him to make the leap from poet to rocker), and that when his record deal died he wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult and Boz Scaggs (???). Here he is performing the lead song from Catholic Boy, “Wicked Gravity” live:
The one major network TV appearance by Carroll that I remember fondly was on the uneven but sometimes very amusing Fridays (2/6/81). He performed a lesser tune and this awesome piece that has the great opening salvo “It’s too late/to fall in love with Sharon Tate/but it’s too soon/to ask for the words I want carved on my tomb”:
I like the second and third albums Carroll recorded, and his “comeback” to rock, Pools of Mercury, but none of them had quite the force of the first LP. One song that did gather attention was his cover of “Sweet Jane,” which was represented by an actual music video (a student of Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, and Wm. Burroughs does a music vid!), which had the benediction of having a guest appearance by one of Jim’s other obvious influences, Lou Reed:
Sweet Jane
I loved and played to death several songs on the Catholic Boy, including “Three Sisters,” but the title tune had the most resonance for someone trapped in the rigors and dogma of a Catholic education. And it don’t age, either (’cause I’m sure those fuckers ain’t changed one bit):
The most poignant public moment involving Carroll in the years following his “retirement” from rockin’ was the publication of his moving poem “8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain,” which I first saw in The New York Times magazine section, and which he later performed live on MTV’s “Unplugged” (when poetry was the rage for a minute, thanks to “slams”). It’s a beautiful, heartfelt piece by a fellow sufferer, and can be found here.
And since “People Who Died” HAS to be heavily celebrated in any forum where Deceased Artistes are the order of the day on a regular basis, I present two versions of the song. First, a very up-tempo live rendition (from Fridays, I believe) for those who already know the lyrics:
And for those who haven’t heard it yet, I guess the lyrics are clearer on this “official” music-video version released in conjunction with the Basketball Diaries movie, with interspersed images of the Baby-Faced One:
Every so often I would like to make a full episode available to folks outside Manhattan who haven’t yet seen my style of movie-rant, and the kind of nowhere-else-on-TV clips I’m proud to present. Thus, I present last week’s show, which summed up the high and low points of the work done by the distributor New Yorker Films. For background on what I’m talking about, I refer you to my initial blog entry about New Yorker, which was the source of this episode. Also, last week’s entry about white-on-white subtitles.
