Texas Film Sites 3: Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders’s 1984 film Paris, Texas (which I have written about before), never reaches the town referenced in the title, but it is filmed in large part on location in various Texas towns from El Paso to Galveston. The final sequences take place in my home town of Houston.

Houston was a big city even in the early 1980s, riding one of the crests of an oil boom that was about to come crashing down later in the decade. But it has exploded in both population and sprawl since that time, now boasting one of the nation’s largest and most diverse populations. Houston is also infamous for tearing down and replacing old architecture, but a number of the iconic locations, so memorably captured by Robby Müller’s cinematography, can still be experienced in person.

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Blind Spot 2017: The Passion of Joan of Arc

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A martyr’s crown.

Fragmentary impressions of a silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), directed by Carl Th. Dreyer, and starring Reneé Falconetti as Joan:

  • The film is unique in my experience in the way that it refracts the point of view we experience through the constantly shifting angles deployed on the screen for brief moments before another equally striking image replaces it.
  • The kaleidoscopic effect, rather than abstracting and distancing me, drew me into the heart of the emotion, and the spiritual nature of the simple narrative.
  • Director Carl Th. Dreyer employs a rapid pace of editing that at times anticipates the style of a latter day music video.
  • The pace is combined with the bewildering variety of camera angles, in almost exclusively medium to extreme close-up shots. The few instances of zooms or tracking shots are used with memorable specificity to emphasize the mood of the judges.

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Happy Birthday to Me Part II

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I’m sure everyone is as excited as Tippi.

Well, I just missed noting the 2 year anniversary of the blog on June 9. It’s been a fun experience sharing discussions of new and classic films with you all this past year.

Here’s some of my favorite things I’ve written since the last birthday celebration, in case you missed them:

Thanks to everyone who has read and commented this year. I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to read my blog.

Stay in touch on Facebook or on Twitter!

Josh

Blind Spot 2017: Day for Night

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A crane shot, perhaps, of a crane shot.

It is probably not best to view a parody before you see the original work that is its subject. But in this case, I think no harm was done. I laughed out loud the moment I recognized the music that underscored the crane shot in the opening sequence of François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), having first heard it in this silly gem of an American Express commercial by Wes Anderson. Anderson, noted for his admiration of Truffaut along with other filmmakers, has no shame in pilfering shots, music, or other elements from films he admires. You can also hear the same music cue in the trailer for Day for Night (pardon the unfortunate English dub). Anderson even riffs on the scene where Truffaut’s character has to choose from a tray of guns needed for a later scene, as he gives us his tongue-in-cheek homage to Truffaut’s behind the scenes look at filmmaking.

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Blind Spot 2017: M. Hulot’s Holiday

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One for the deceased gentleman, and one for his hearse.

Jacques Tati’s second major film as a director, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (M. Hulot’s Holiday), was released in 1953. This was the first to feature the character of Monsuier Hulot, a quirky everyman, who jauntily bumbles his way through a series of humorous episodes. Usually, the humor comes from Hulot’s unselfconscious way of disrupting the order of his environment, merely by being himself.

The obvious comparison for Tati, from my experience, is Chaplin. Just as in the films of the famous silent comic, Jacques Tati is the total filmmaker: a writer-director-actor who controls all the elements of his production. He has also created a comic persona in Monsieur Hulot, that—like Chaplin’s little tramp—is one of the great and iconic contributions to cinema. I have heard so much about the work of Tati, and now that I have finally seen the first of his films featuring M. Hulot, I know that the consensus is right—Tati is among the greatest filmmakers in world cinema history, and I am very excitedly looking forward to experiencing his other films. Continue reading →

Grave of the Fireflies

Ghosts and Fireflies

What lingers in the mind is the color. A reddish-pinkish hue, the hue of dying embers. And the glow of the fireflies who rise up with a dreamy slowness like sparks floating upwards. The fireflies die quickly—their lifespan may be a season—and they are easily crushed even by a small child, which is a giant to them. Children, like the fireflies, are also the victims of forces much larger than them—war, hunger, the banality of bureaucracy, the general indifference of the adult world.

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Blind Spot 2017: Drums Along the Mohawk

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“Watch the road, dear!”

In Frank Nugent’s original 1939 New York Times review of John Ford’s Drums along the Mohawk, he observed, “The Revolutionary period, oddly enough, has been one of the least exploited epochs in our national history—by the screen, that is…” If we are discussing war movies, I would add World War I to the list under-served by the cinema. While we seem to get a new movie about World War II almost every year, these pivotal eras are rarely charted by filmmakers. So it is with great interest that I took a look at Ford’s film, which stars Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert as a pair of newlyweds trying to make a life in the frontier when war against the British breaks out around them.

It’s not really a war movie properly speaking, but like most of Ford’s best loved pictures, a story of a family and a community. There are some battles, but most of them are off screen, or only spoken about. Ford is more concerned with the aftermath of the battles, and even the preparation for them, than on rousing footage of the actual skirmishes. The focus remains on the ways that the encroaching realities of war shapes and transforms a community. As one of the few wars fought on our own soil, this sort of story is very different than the ones where soldiers bleed and die across the ocean. Homes are burned by Indians allied with the British. The women and children of the frontier are forced to retreat to the relative safety of the nearby fort, abandoning their homes and lands. The militia is formed from the able bodied of the area, and drilled in preparation to defend the territory.

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THX 1138 – Great Villains Blogathon

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Are you now? Or have you ever been?

Dystopias never really go out of style. Since at least the early 20th century, every generation produces its fair share of dystopian literature and films. It seems that regardless of the political climate we live in, it is possible to detect the seeds of what might grow into a future where society is a frightening place. Artists seem to feel the need to express their discontent with contemporary trends through these futuristic nightmares, and readers and audiences continue to show an appetite to experience these brave new worlds. One of the earliest epic science fiction dramas was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a dystopic silent film that has influenced countless films since. Two of the best known novels in this mode, Orwell’s 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World, have served as models and inspirations for many of the dystopias which followed, up to the recent Hunger Games series.

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A Shot in the Dark – Flixwise Favorites

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Tribute to the opening credits of A Shot in the Dark by Flixwise artiste Emma Guerard

Greetings, loyal reader. You now have the singular opportunity to hear me talk about a film I have loved for a long time, A Shot in the Dark. Host Lady P. and her co-producer Martin Kessler graciously allowed me to pitch the film for inclusion into the Flixwise Favorites list. Flixwise is a podcast which in regular episodes makes its way through the Sight and Sound top 250 films list. On the Favorites episodes, they set aside that venerable and canonical list and turn to other, perhaps more neglected or less critically praised films, and discuss whether they should be honored as Favorites by the podcast. Take a listen to my pitch on A Shot in the Dark  to see if Lady P. and Martin find one of my favorites a Favorite of the podcast.

What follows is an expanded and revised version of what I pitched on the podcast, summarizing my feelings about the film.

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Blind Spot 2017: The Quiet Duel

 

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The most unkindest cut of all Doc Mifune’s life.

Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film, The Quiet Duel, is one of his least seen works, partly due to some obscure rights issues that has kept it from being released by Criterion or any other major home video label. The lack of visibility can’t really be blamed for the lack of acclaim the film has generated: it is a relatively minor achievement for Kurosawa. But is still worth seeking out for any fans of the Japanese master filmmaker.

 

One might assume that the “duel” referred to in the title was between the two major stars of the film, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, who had squared off the previous year in Drunken Angel, and would later famously be paired in such films as Seven Samurai. However, the title actually refers to an internal moral battle and struggle against a disease contracted by Mifune’s character in the course of his work as a doctor.

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