Good advice

I mean, sometimes you do need to explicitly state this sort of thing, and after Labour got kind of thumped by the Greens at a by-election in Manchester the other day, I suspect it’s the sort of thing that Keir Starmer really needs to hear. Stop making mistakes like, you know, trying to convince people the Greens are as extreme as Reform, or not giving people a reason to vote for you rather than them, or just generally looking like a bit of a cunt.

Gugusse redivivus

I need a happy story, and the recent rediscovery of an 1897 film by George Melies will do just fine.

The 45-second film, made around 1897, was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot, which had endeared it to generations of science fiction fans, even if they knew it only by reputation. It had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century. The find, made last September but now being announced publicly, is a small but important addition to the legacy of world cinema and one of its founders. […]
The cache of Frisbee’s exhibition films also contained another well-known Méliès film from 1900, “The Fat and Lean Wrestling Match,” as well as fragments of an early Thomas Edison film, “The Burning Stable.” They survived due to McFarland and his family preserving them for a century, if often in haphazard circumstances.
After Frisbee died in 1937, two small trunks of his old projectors and films, along with some of his diaries and papers, went to his daughter (McFarland’s grandmother), who passed them along to her son (McFarland’s dad), who passed them along to him.
McFarland didn’t know what was on the reels – they could no longer be safely run through a projector – and after years of searching for a home for them, a lab technician in Michigan suggested he contact the Library.
“The moment we set our eyes on this box of film, we knew it was something special,” said George Willeman, the Library’s nitrate film vault leader.

I love a good film rediscovery story, especially when it involves a film THIS old. Said film is handily linked in the LOC article and proves to be a prime bit of delightful early Melies, though I do think the “robot” description is a bit tenuous. But whatever, it’s pleasing to have Gugusse back…

Speaking of Bresson…

I found this screen grab of cinema’s “patron saint” on Tumblr and have been a bit perplexed by it. It evidently comes from this French TV interview from 1960. As I noted in the previous post, I’ve now seen almost all of Bob’s filmography, and that’s why I find this statement so baffling… because frankly, if there’s one thing I’ve very rarely done with Bresson’s films, it’s feel anything from them. His approach to acting which involved kind of leeching all the “performance” out of his performers, of which Roger Ebert wrote in his obit of him:

Bresson was one of a handful of directors whose very frames identified their author. Like Fellini, Hitchcock and Ozu, he had such a distinctive way of seeing that his films resembled no others. What you noticed was the extreme restraint of his actors (he preferred to call them “models”), and the way the action centered on what his characters saw, rather than what they did. “The thing that matters,” he said, “is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”
His actors had no difficulty conveying that state, because Bresson never discussed characters, plot or motivation with them, only instructing them minutely on how to move and what to say. He shunned displays of emotions in his work, rehearsing and shooting a scene over and over, until the actors seemed to be going through the motions without thought. Oddly, this style created films of great passion: Because the actors didn’t act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them.

But I rarely if ever felt an emotion TO internalise from Bresson’s films. I never felt passion from them, except perhaps for Diary of a Country Priest. The proposition that his methods created some kind of greater realism just doesn’t hold for me, and I think his films tend instead to a kind of gross artifice. Not as grotesquely so as Greenaway’s, but certainly not naturalistic. The “acting” may be drained from Bresson’s films, but so is almost everything else. I know I’m in the minority here, but that’s how it is for me.

Diary is the only one of his films I ever particularly liked, and I haven’t seen it since 1995, at which age this was the sort of film I would have liked at that time and that age, when this kind of art cinema with some sort of heavy spiritual theme seemed particularly Important (with a capital I) to me. Over the years I gradually saw most of the rest of the Bresson filmography, none of which impressed me in the way that film did, and I don’t think I left any of them with more than a somewhat distant sense of mild appreciation and respect for the effort at best. At worst I actively disliked the films. If I ever catch up with those three I haven’t seen, I don’t suppose my overall opinion of Bresson will improve much.

But, as I said, I haven’t rewatched Diary in 30+ years, nor indeed have I rewatched any of them that I can remember, with the somewhat odd exception of Lancelot du Lac, which I remember seeing on SBS and then again some years later on a DVD I got from the library, and per the note I wrote about it on my old film blog back in 2009—the last time I can recall watching him at all—I apparently hated it less than I did first time round, and that by the time I was 50 I might even like Bresson. And, well, I’m past that landmark now, so maybe it’s time I found out. Maybe I just need to rewatch Bresson’s other films with these markedly older eyes and allgedly more mature perspective. Maybe I’ll watch something I’d rather watch first, though.

Some very mixed doubles

One thing I like about Bluesky is that there are accounts which look at what was showing on TV or at the cinema in that week during some other year, like what was on at Times Square or the Scala in London, etc. I don’t know anything about the Times cinema except what this tells me, but I did find on BS this ad for its February/March 1969 programming…

…which I find profoundly baffling on multiple levels. Of all of these, the only one where I’ve actually seen both titles is La kermesse heroique and Viridiana, neither of which… go together. And I’ve seen one film in each of the others and read about their respective partners to know that, well, none of them do either. I really can’t imagine what the logic of these couplings is, and maybe that was the point; having learned that Antony Balch was operating the place at that time certainly explains the discordance of the programming to some extent, if not the precise oddities going on here.

I mean, Hunger is apparently “a masterpiece of social realism“, whereas X is… frankly kind of the opposite of that, I don’t think Roger Corman ever had that in mind. Masque is one of his too, of course, although it’s him in his higher-minded Poe series, but again the other film is, per IMDB, “An avant-garde political satire” so not exactly an obvious pairing again. That film starred Zbigniew Cybulski who was also in The Saragossa Manuscript… I have no idea what Thoughts of Chairman Mao even is (maybe this?), but I’m sure it was also a wildly inappropriate companion to its big shaggy Polish brother, though admittedly I can’t think of many films that would pair well with. But the last one… OY. Mouchette is actually one of the few Bressons I haven’t seen at any point, I think Four Nights of a Dreamer and The Devil Probably are the only other ones I’ve never seen, but that means I have seen all his others, so I know EXACTLY how deranged it is to pair him off with a 1940s Val Lewton horror for RKO. Particularly that one. And did each of these bills actually play each day for a week as the ad suggests? OY again.

But Balch was also running the Jacey cinema at the time which apparently ran more in an exploitation/sex vein (including his own Secrets of Sex in 1970, where it was apparently a big hit and made back its entire cost just from that one cinema) so presumably that offset some of the losses I’m sure the Times must’ve been accruing with this sort of programming. I found the advert via this fellow who offers a lot of old cinema ads like this, but Bluesky is so damnably hard to plow through so I don’t know if he’s got any more of this particular place. I’d love to see more of what Balch was running there cos this batch is so perplexing. Maybe 1969 was just like that, of course…

Oh no! Anyway…

Yeah, Britain’s least sweaty man is finally being dealt with by The Law, who I can only assume timed this bust to fuck up his birthday royally (if you’ll pardon the expression). By the look of it, though, they don’t seem to be going after him for the putative sex stuff but some rather more prosaic stuff involving government business, when Randy Andy was working as a trade envoy and supposedly passing on confidential info to Epstein… And it should be said that his Dukedom’s association with Epstein was considered problematic even 15 years ago, along with a few other dubious friendships he’d been cultivating, and he wound up being forced to step down in 2011. I wonder if there were suspicions then that Andrew might be doing things he shouldn’t be doing in that capacity. I don’t know. At any rate, the story’s still only just breaking so we have very few details as such, but I have a feeling this could turn into something quite interesting; after all, you don’t often get stories about royalty (lapsed or not) getting arrested like this…