Let’s get down to brass tacks: there are few things I love more than hardboiled film noir dialogue—that outrageous, rapid-fire back-and-forth smothered in pulp and peppered with slang. It’s a major source of the genre’s appeal, cloaking the film in the seedy, coded vernacular of the underworld. The tough talk in The Sweet Smell of Success represents a particular apogee of the form, and the neurotically articulate screenplay is chock-full of colorful metaphors, New York argot, and punchy one-liners. Some of the most memorable: “You’re a cookie full of arsenic,” “Just don’t leave me in a minor key,” ‘Your dead son, get yourself buried,” and “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”
Which brings us to Christpher Wool. This fine example of Wool’s language-based painting is now on view at MoMA as part of their current refresh of the Contemporary Galleries, and its visual impact is akin to that of a New York Post headline: graphic, sensational, and not overly predisposed to sublety. Wool appropriates this evocative line from the film, shortens it like a text message, and then stencils it imperfectly in pump-em-full-of-lead-black on a stark white background. “CATS INBAG BAGS IN RIVER suddenly morphs into a puckish haiku, a expression of hardnosed lyricism. Sidney Falco, the character who utters this juicy bit of repartee in the film, is someone that we come to admire for his gumption in doing away with the competition, and his cockiness has a comic edge. This painting too, manifests a certain biting humor, a humor that mocks the seriousness of painting and pays tribute to all of the sinister smart guys in the room—of which Christopher Wool is one.
Here’s Mr. Falco himself, aka Tony Curtis, delivering the line full of piss, vinegar and snarling ambition. Don’t be a two-time loser: see this classic if you haven’t already, and then check out this painting in person.
Though reports of the death of 35mm have been rumored for some time now, the death knell has officially sounded in the form of a report from the IHS Screen Digest Cinema Intelligence Service, which marks 2012 as the year that digital technology will overtake 35mm projection.
What does this mean? For the first time in cinema’s 120 years, analogue film will no longer be the norm, but the exception. 35mm projectors will likely disappear from theaters by 2015. The technology and equipment required for 35mm filmmaking will be accessible only to a privileged few. And a treasure trove of 35mm prints will be left to rot in a vault somewhere, save for a few deemed worthy of preservation by a handful of film archives. Repertory houses who are devoted to the format will continue to the screen 35mm until distribution ceases. Most moviegoers will never notice the difference.
But there is a difference. Film is an index and retains a physical impression from its exposure to light, while digital movies are composed from a finite number of pixels. The fact that digital imitates film is purely superficial, and in fact, they undergo drastically different mechanical processes. Digital cameras record a series of 0s and 1s to create an approximation of a photograph, whereas the film camera catalyzes a chemical reaction between light and film stock.
There is also detectable difference in the look and feel of the two mediums. Digital is often noticeably digital: spotless, precise, or at worst, grotesquely pixelated. Whereas film has a certain texture that closer to the smoothness of a painting. The blacks are richer and have more depth, and actors’ faces are warmer and suffused with light. Digital is glacial, flat, and sterile-looking, and 35mm is full-bodied and radiant.
The shift to digital also disproportionately affects the distribution of older films, which were shot on 35mm with the intention of projecting that way. Many studios have said that they will stop producing 35mm prints of older films for use in repertory cinemas, and instead present those films only in digital formats. For serious film lovers, this is unthinkable.
The British artist Tacita Dean has mounted an incredibly eloquent protest in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. Simply called Film, her installation is an elegaical plea for the continuation and the preservation of the medium. A short film in which she captures the legendary green ray (yes, that same rayon vert at the end of the eponymous Rohmer film) is perhaps the most poetic raison d’être for film—real film—that I’ve encountered.
I’m not dead
I’m merely changing places
I am still with you
In dreams you’ll see my traces
—Michelangelo
If you routinely draw your fashion inspiration from films (as I do), you’ll notice that one classic item of clothing keeps appearing over and over: the sailor-striped shirt. Known alternately as the marinière, the Breton shirt, and the telnyashka in Russia, the simple white and navy blue pullover is an iconic fashion piece with international appeal. Originally created for the French navy—the stripes helped spot seamen who had gone overboard—the style was co-opted by Coco Chanel, and the rest is fashion history. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the shirt has been equally prominent onscreen: its graphic horizontal stripes read well on film, and both the masculin and the féminine look good in it. Below are some of my favorite striped-shirt in cinema moments:
Zouzou [Allégret, 1934]. Jean Gabin sports the classic French naval uniform while Josephine Baker dons the pom-pom hat.
Intermezzo [Ratoff / Selznick, with cinematography by Gregg Toland, 1939]. Leslie Howard is a virtuoso violinist in a sailor shirt? Of course Ingrid Bergman would swoon.
Breathless [Godard, 1960]. A bit of graphic wit from Godard: Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s stripes go up, down, and across.
Jules and Jim [Truffaut, 1962] Jeanne Moreau looks blissful in this perfect-for-cycling sweater.
Death in Venice [Visconti, 1971] Björn Andrésen as the beautiful Tadzio wears the shoulder-buttoned version.
Coco Before Chanel [Fontaine, 2009] This one’s easy, but I do like the way the film immortalizes Coco’s borrowed-from-the-boys style.
This photo is not from a film, but is so awesome that I had to include it. Who wouldn’t want to be Gloria Vanderbilt surrounded by um, stripes in this photo? [From the 1954 “April in Paris” ball at the Waldorf-Astoria]
Of course, seeing all of this striated loveliness begs the question: where can one obtain the perfect sailor shirt, and the waves of cool that come with it? My secret source, which is not-so-secret anymore since this piece in the New York Times, is Kaufman’s Army Navy. Shopping at this chaotic, one-of-a-kind New York institution is an experience altogether unequalled.
Wearing my Russian naval shirt from Kaufman’s—perhaps the easiest piece of clothing I own.
If you don’t live in New York, I’m sad for you, but you can order the high-end French original from St. James, or the easier-on-the-wallet Russian version from I Sea Stripes. Both are authentic (because really, do you need another striped shirt from the Gap?) and evoke the effortless charm that only stripes can.
I found it – the utterly asinine and sexist beer commercial that Scorsese referred to this 1993 letter to the New York Times.The ad is obviously satirizing a Fellini film, and was part of a larger campaign with the tagline, “Why ask why? Try Bud Dry.”
Fostering willful idiocy as a sales tactic? Yup, sounds like America.
I love it when people send me things. Here is something a reader sent me yesterday, in response to my post about the novel and the subsequent film adaptation of Contempt.
No words we can write will ever change the age-old power of the vulgar interests that collaborate to distinguish the film from literature, creating two aesthetic systems and two moralities. We are content with the illusion that one day they will say: “from the very beginning, perhaps twenty individuals understood that the right wasn’t Hollywood’s, that the spectacle which began on the boulevards with the Lumière brothers was the beginning of the sickness.” The first theaters were called nickelodeons: a nickel was the price. And it was urgent to master the medium with a cost so low it could be within the reach of many individuals, like paper and ink, paints; film and lenses should have been brought into the home like sewing machines (then there would have been no producers, the apex of a bourgeois system, “applied” cinema, now defended, like a certain kind of publishing, by a wall of iron, the cliche about work being given to thousands of citizens). A return to man, to the creature who in himself is “all spectacle”; this would liberate us.
Set up the camera in a street, in a room, see with insatiable patience, train ourselves in the contemplation of our fellowman in his elementary actions. We will abandon trick photography, process shots, the infinite subterfuges so dear to Méliès. The wonder must be in us, expressing itself without wonder: the best dreams are those outside the mist, which can be seen like the veins of leaves.
Recently I came across this letter to the Times penned by none other than Martin Scorsese, a week after Fellini’s death. It elucidates, in no uncertain terms, why the “Cultural Vegetables” argument is so dangerous, because it so often leads to (or stems from) intolerance and ignorance. Scorsese rightly focuses not on individual films but a generalized allergy to work perceived as too dull, difficult, or foreign. (It’s sad that the “new” cultural intolerance feels very old hat by now). For all intents and purposes, this letter could be a manifesto for World Cinema Foundation, Scorsese’s incredibly important initiative to preserve films from all over the world.
To the Editor:
“Excuse Me; I Must Have Missed Part of the Movie” (The Week in Review, 7 November) cites Federico Fellini as an example of a filmmaker whose style gets in the way of his storytelling and whose films, as a result, are not easily accessible to audiences. Broadening that argument, it includes other artists: Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Cage, Alain Resnais and Andy Warhol.
It’s not the opinion I find distressing, but the underlying attitude toward artistic expression that is different, difficult or demanding. Was it necessary to publish this article only a few days after Fellini’s death? I feel it’s a dangerous attitude, limiting, intolerant. If this is the attitude toward Fellini, one of the old masters, and the most accessible at that, imagine what chance new foreign films and filmmakers have in this country.
It reminds me of a beer commercial that ran a while back. The commercial opened with a black and white parody of a foreign film—obviously a combination of Fellini and Bergman. Two young men are watching it, puzzled, in a video store, while a female companion seems more interested. A title comes up: “Why do foreign films have to be so foreign?” The solution is to ignore the foreign film and rent an action-adventure tape, filled with explosions, much to the chagrin of the woman.
It seems the commercial equates “negative” associations between women and foreign films: weakness, complexity, tedium. I like action-adventure films too. I also like movies that tell a story, but is the American way the only way of telling stories?
The issue here is not “film theory,” but cultural diversity and openness. Diversity guarantees our cultural survival. When the world is fragmenting into groups of intolerance, ignorance and hatred, film is a powerful tool to knowledge and understanding. To our shame, your article was cited at length by the European press.
The attitude that I’ve been describing celebrates ignorance. It also unfortunately confirms the worst fears of European filmmakers.
Is this closedmindedness something we want to pass along to future generations?
If you accept the answer in the commercial, why not take it to its natural progression:
Why don’t they make movies like ours?
Why don’t they tell stories as we do?
Why don’t they dress as we do?
Why don’t they eat as we do?
Why don’t they talk as we do?
Why don’t they think as we do?
Why don’t they worship as we do?
Why don’t they look like us?
Ultimately, who will decide who “we” are?
I have been thinking a lot about color, and about artists and their relationships to their materials. I myself am a color junkie, and dramatic color is like a shot of adrenaline to me. The directors/cinematographers who share my chromophilia — Vincente Minnelli, Antonioni, Almodóvar, and Zach Cardiff’s cinematography in The Red Shoes immediately come to mind — understand the emotional essence of each shade in the spectrum. Red excites and stimulates. Green is a sedative. Yellow vacillates between sunny and sickening. Orange is talkative. Blue is always one of two moods: Yves Klein Electric or Plaintive Picasso.
From Picasso's Blue Period: Portrait d’Angel Fernandez de Soto
Lately I have been struck by the fact that the intensity of a certain hue is umbilically tied to its medium. Technicolor is indisputably the most significant development for color filmmaking in the 20th century, and one could argue that it precipitated a completely new approach to directing — new lighting, new make-up, even a new kind of acting. This is in stark contrast to digital filmmaking in which the majority of color correction happens in the post-production phase. Since the advent of digital, there has been a definite trend towards over-saturated colors that I would like to see go away, or at least toned down to avoid actors looking like Oompa-Loompas (then again, maybe they tan too much).
Becky Sharp, the first three-strip Technicolor film
But where does color come from? A filmmaker would think about color in terms of light or projection, but a painter would instantly think about paint and pigment. This understanding of color is first and foremost practical — pigments are not abstract, but material substances with chemical attributes. Paint has a particular consistency and texture. If you run out, you can’t complete your painting.
Derek Jarman’s book Chroma explores both the material and the spiritual implications of color, from the perspective on an artist who has worked in both painting and film. Written while Jarman was losing his eyesight due to complications from AIDS, it is an elegiac meditation on what colors signify, and how they exist in the real world. There are 19 vignettes in total, some named after different colors, along with essays on perspective, shadow and light, translucence, and iridescence.
I find it fascinating to read Chroma against the backdrop of Jarman’s films, which run the gamut from grainy 8mm shorts to 35mm Technicolor features. Here are some excerpts juxtaposed against film stills that showcase Jarman’s innate feel for color, both as light and pigment.
Caravaggio, 1986
May my black Waterman ink spill out the truth.
Chemistry and romantic names — manganese violet, cerulean, ultramarine and distant places, Naples yellow. The geography of colour, Antwerp blue, raw Sienna. Colour stretching to the distant planets — mars violet; named after old masters — Van dyke brown. Contradictory — Lamp black.
1919. The world is in mourning. Kasimir Malevich paints White on White. A funeral rite for painting.
When yellow wishes to ingratiate it becomes gold.
The Tempest, 1979
Red is a moment in time. Blue constant. Red is quickly spent. An explosion of intensity. It burns itself. Disappears like fiery sparks into the gathering shadow.
Wasn’t Dorian Grey’s brain speckled with the scarlet stain of insanity?
Painters use red like spice.
Wittgenstein, 1993
Pink is always shocking. Naked. All those acres of flesh that cover the ceilings of the Renaissance. Pontormo is the pinkest painter.
Jubilee, 1977
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. This song could only be sung in Southern California around a swimming pool.
Sloan Square, 1976
Leni’s full moon falling through a crystal grotto in the High Dolomites
Blue movies
Blue language
Bluebeard
The most stable of greens is the Terre Vert. The most elusive, the copper greens that turned all the Venetian paintings brown. Fugitive colour flies in time, and leaves us in a perpetual autumn.
The Last of England, 1987
How Now Brown Cow
There is nostalgia in brown. The touch of my mother’s soft beaver lamb coat in which we buried our tears. Brown simplified life.
Who has not gazed in wonder at the snaky shimmer of petrol patterns on a puddle, thrown a stone into them and watched the colors emerge out of the ripples…
Where did glass appear in my films? Faces distorted, pressed into the window.
And then there is Jarman’s Blue. Filmed in Technicolor, this cine-poem is both plaintive and electric, and is perhaps the saddest movie I have ever seen. It speaks for itself:
I’ve been seeing films since I was five, first, covered-wagon Westerns, and then, from the age of seven, I saw everything. I actually went to the movies every day, and later, two or three times a day, if possible.
Band of Angels, White Heat…the relationship between James Cagney and his mother, is I think like that between all my heroes and their mothers. Then Huston’s Asphalt Jungle was very important, and Howard Hawks, the gay stories…
What Sternberg does with light. The ability to tell stories in a roundabout way. It’s this extreme artificiality which is still, in my opinion, something very much alive.
Any film that is narrated conventionally all the way through would turn out like Chabrol and without the crime plot and simply using alienation technique, it might have turned out like a Godard film.
I don’t know, to me all stories are crime stories. To me the everyday oppression people experience is criminal. I could almost go as far as to say that you can’t really make anything but crime films. Everything should be declared criminal.
[Film stills from World on a Wire, opening this Friday at the IFC Center. Quotations from The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, and Notes by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.]
This is the secret recipe that Giulietta Masina said was the “love potion” she fed her husband of 50 years, filmmaker Federico Fellini. He told Charlotte Chandler for her ghost autobiography, I, Fellini (1995), it was the one secret Giulietta never shared with him.
Add the chopped onions and garlic to the oil when the oil is not boiling. It’s best to use extra virgin olive oil.
Use fresh tomatoes, if possible, or peeled canned tomatoes. Do not use tomato purée. Plunge fresh tomatoes into boiling water until the skins loosen, then peel, drain, chop, and crush.
Prepare the spaghetti pasta (for 4) by plunging it into boiling water until it’s al dente.
Pour the chopped garlic and onions into a larger pan, and add the chopped and crushed tomatoes.
With the tomato, the secret is to add:
1 teaspoon of sugar
1/2 a lemon’s juice
Sugar is the essential ingredient, and the lemon adds a subtle sweet and sour effect. According to Giulietta, it brings out the flavor of the tomatoes.
Add:
A dash of paprika
Fresh, aged Parmesan cheese
Giulietta always put on an apron because the sauce can “jump up” on your blouse. She was so happy to be cooking spaghetti after having been in hotel rooms. She said he (Fellini) could never leave her because he could never leave her spaghetti.
A video from Ryoji Ikeda’s installation at the Park Avenue Armory, which is a minimalist data panorama with some Imax oomph. (Don’t mind the background chatter about Ai Weiwei.)
