THE CYNEPHILE

Marilyn Monroe was known for two things above all: a dazzling smile and a tremor in her voice. On the screen, those features were shaped into a surprisingly varied cast of characters. The Marilyn who knocked everybody out cold in Some Like it Hot is different from the Marilyn who almost stole Monkey Business right out from under Ginger Rogers’ nose. And the show-stopping Marilyn who proved, once and for all, that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is yet another Marilyn, a four-alarm fire practically burning a hole through the screen in Niagara.

She had considerable dramatic range as an actress, and a well-honed sense of comedic timing. As Montgomery Clift’s character Perce Howland mulls in The Misfits, “She’s kinda hard to figure out, you know? One minute she looks kinda dumb and brand-new, like a kid… and the next minute…” Her character, as well as the actress herself, remains an enigma, to be showcased in BAMcinématek’s series, Marilyn!, from July 1 to 17.

But first, let us consider Marilyn’s mythic projection, or Monroe the icon. This Marilyn is indelibly written into our consciousness as the golden, open-faced beauty, epitomizing a healthy American sexuality and a vulnerable, childlike innocence. Here, all the nuance of her myriad characterizations is lost, and she becomes a series of frozen images. This is the Marilyn from The Seven Year Itch who felt the gust of air from the subway grate, immortalized with her dress blooming around her like a flower. This is Andy Warhol’s silkscreened Marilyn, her celebrity reduced to her mug in a rainbow of colors reproduced ad infinitum. This is Marilyn in the realm of high camp, draped in diamonds and surrounded by ostrich plumes, cooing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” There are abundant variations on this theme but the girl at the center remains the same: an erotic fantasy, an imaginary creature that can only exist in the cinema.

"Marilyn Vs Brigitte Bardot" by Alex Guofeng Cao

Monroe’s beginnings were far from auspicious. The woman who was to become a universally known and loved icon of the 20th century was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Hollywood. Her mother was a film cutter at RKO Studios who, widowed and mentally ill, abandoned her to a sequence of foster homes. Monroe’s childhood was marked by crippling poverty and abuse, and she married at 16. It was then that she started to achieve some success as a model and was scouted by Howard Hughes, then the head of RKO Studios. He offered her a screen test but she ended up signing with 20th Century Fox. Her first major break as an actor was in John Huston’s gritty LA film noir, The Asphalt Jungle, in which she played a memorable mistress that lit up each of her scenes. She won another small but significant role in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, in which she held her own among a formidable cast that included Bette Davis and Anne Baxter. Mankiewicz predicted her rise to fame, claiming that she had that certain indescribable something, that ineffable star quality. Watching All About Eve, it is evident that Marilyn knew she had it too.

But she wanted to play more than arm candy. In addition to roles for which Monroe is celebrated, the BAMcinématek series includes some underrated gems that never achieved box-office success but nevertheless remain crucial landmarks in her development as an actress. The first of these is Don’t Bother to Knock, her first serious role in which she plays a mentally unhinged babysitter. She’s unstable and creepy, and it’s thrilling to watch her face morph from hardened to sweet to insecure in an instant. Still another role in which she expands her repertoire is opposite Robert Mitchum in the thrilling action epic River of No Return, shot in lush CinemaScope. But if you see just one film from this series, let it be John Huston’s twilight Western, The Misfits, penned especially for her by her then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Film critic Pauline Kael wrote of Marilyn dismissively, proclaiming “When she was ‘sensitive’ she was drab,” but Monroe has never been more sensitive than in The Misfits, and has never looked more radiant. Miller wrote this role particularly with Monroe’s dramatic strengths and biography in mind, and it’s astounding to watch. It’s also the last film that she completed.

Shy, bright, sensitive, and unaffected, Monroe hated being a star. She was the woman most fantasized about by men (a fact that embarrassed her), yet fame became a painful thorn. It’s an old story, but still a sad one, and whatever factors contributed to her untimely death, one thing is certain: Marilyn was made for the medium of film.

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.)

Here are some Bollywood posters I came across. I love the way these are screenprinted (does anyone know anything about the particular method/technique?) and the unbleached brown paper. According to J.D. Salinger: “Brown paper, especially wrapping paper, is very pleasant, very cozy to paint on. Many an experienced artist has used it when he wasn’t up to anything grand or grandiose.”

A friend just pointed me to this fascinating exchange of emails published in the December issue of Harper’s surrounding an underground screening of Film Socialisme that never took place. Here’s the gist of it: the collective Red Channels organized the screening; the Film Society found out and they (along with Wild Bunch, the film’s distributor) threatened to sue if they went through with it. Not surprisingly, the screening was canceled. I remember being invited to the screening on facebook, so I included that text too, because I think it’s pretty telling.

Here’s a PDF of the email exchange here (quick read, I promise).

And here is the original invite promoting the “ non-screening”

Godard’s Final Struggle: Socialism(e) from Below
We are not hosting, organizing, or sponsoring a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme. Our event is not the World, North American, United States, festival, or theatrical premiere of Film Socialisme. Our event is in no way a violation of agreements between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Wild Bunch, Wild Bunch and Vega Film, Vega Film and Jean-Luc Godard. Our event is not in opposition to the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s premiere of Film Socialisme. We wish no one any alarm. Our event is a group reflection and response to the future and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard, filmmaker, in anticipation of his newest feature film, Film Socialisme, screening officially at the New York Film Festival. We welcome discussion on the future of socialism, internationally, with filmmakers and socialists, artists and revolutionaries. It’s a party. Please join us at this private social night.

Even without the Americans, the Kazimir Malevich show at Gagosian Gallery would be an event. The show features an impressive six paintings, four of which are superb examples of the Suprematism, the movement Malevich founded and that would become a linchpin of abstraction in the twentieth century. In all likelihood, audiences will never have a chance to see these pieces together again, because they reside with the heirs of the Malevich estate and in museum collections. They are emphatic and self-sufficient, claiming the wall allotted to them in the gallery despite their diminutive size and declaring themselves irrefutably present. They do not need external validation nor a litmus test of their influence, because their influence is everywhere.

The Gagosian show has the salutary effect of placing examples of American minimalism in apposition to Malevich’s truly formidable vision. It’s up to the Americans to prove themselves worthy of the Russian master, and most do, though sometimes that lineage is muddled. Though Malevich flipped the switch on painting as early as 1915 with the revolutionary Black Square, the gravitas of his formal composition was not felt in America until 1973 when the Guggenheim mounted a retrospective. The Americans were late to feel the full impact of Suprematism from Malevich’s mouth, but received it as hearsay from numerous European sources, most notably Mondrian.

Donald Judd, art-reviewer, recognized Malevich as ground zero for abstraction, writing “It’s obvious now that the forms and colors in the paintings that Malevich began painting in 1915 are the first instances of form and color.” For Malevich, art was about two things: the square and the void. Every other form derived from the square, which was an absolute construction that was for him, commensurate to “pure feeling”. I saw it yesterday and I’m still very far from being able to think intelligently about it — the show is very difficult, and despite its relatively small size, there’s still far too much there. I like to think of myself as a little bit capable of looking at art, but an exhibit like this could probably retrain anyone’s eye.

Malevich wrote several articles on film and briefly worked with Hans Richter on a non-objectivist piece for the cinema. He spoke of the “missed encounter” between film and art, and saw infinite potential in the medium.

Within a decade after he settled in Berlin, in 1918, Josef Fenneker designed more than 300 movie posters. He primarily worked for two movie houses, the Mamorhaus and the Mozartsaal, but he also designed images for the large German movie producer UFA. From the beginning of his career, Fenneker developed his own personal style, which drew largely on German Expressionism combined with a flair for decadence.

He primarily depicted elongated and distorted figures emerging from dark backgrounds, and punctuated them with unusual, hand-drawn typography. This poster is for the silent film The Tragedy of a Great Man, the story of Rembrandt van Rijn. The atmospheric image, with its murky background offset by the wide, adoring eyes of Saskia (Rembrandt’s wife) is a fascinating confluence of Old Master and German Expressionism.

I would give anything to be in Paris right now to catch Raymond Depardon’s La France at the BNF, in order to see his miraculous and ordinary (yes, those two words can go together) photographs up close. Raymond Depardon is a photographer and a filmmaker, the French equivalent to a modern-day Paul Strand, and film work has often been compared to Frederick Wiseman. Depardon’s overarching sensibility is that of reverence for small and intimate improvised experience. The result is that each ordinary moment he photographs is enshrined and somehow emblematic of both a dense sweet past, and a thinned out, scattershot present.

Jean-Michel Frodon’s review of the exhibition in Slate.fr is a beautiful piece of writing in its own right. Here is a translated passage that encapsulates the essence of Depardon’s style:

“There is no secret in these photos, no revelation. Depardon’s art was never that of the knockdown, it was often noted for his documentaries about the quality of listening. With his enormous camera, he listened to everyday landscapes. And everyone hears. Everybody hears something, but never the same thing. Everyone takes ownership of these images, they live in our own memories, as reflections as done over time, and most often kept to oneself.”

Depardon’s New York, NY is a film that epitomizes the act of listening. A mobile portrait of the 59th Street Bridge — shot most likely from the Roosevelt Island tram — the film is both intimate and spare. There are some iconic shots of Wall Street, and then we traverse the bridge again with our eyes, this time at night:

Depardon describes his process as that of a flâneur losing himself in the crowd. This passage is from his essay entitled “The Picture Thief”:

I would seek cover amidst the throngs of people in the busy streets of these big metropolises. For a few hours, a few days, I was an inhabitant, a special kind of local. I remained a foreigner, but I was adopted and protected by the crowd. I have always liked being invisible, disappearing as soon as I’m noticed and slipping unobserved from one street to the next without trying to hide. I remained a tourist a little off the beaten track, full of curiosity, but always an amateur.

I think Depardon is overdue for a New York retrospective, similar to the one MoMA mounted for Wiseman. His filmography is vast and varied, and includes documentary, narrative, and short-form work. Unfortunately, not much is available on DVD.

More:
An interview with Depardon in Cinemascope [Engilsh]

So here’s my offering of films that knocked me out this year — not a complete list, nor something that follows any sort of rigid selection rules. I’ve omitted repertory screenings so that the list is roughly contemporary (though some may have been theatrically released in Europe in 2009). But we will not split hairs here, shall we? Years come and go, but great movies are hard to find. Onward!

1. DOGTOOTH. An authoritarian father virtually isolates his children from the rest of the world and puts a chokehold on the media. Sound like any totalitarian regimes today? Through this surreal and sickly comic film, Yorgos Lanthimoss produces possibly one of the greatest, most fucked-up allegories about control versus freedom ever.

2. EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP. If this street art “documentary” is a Banksy prank, it’s a pretty damn good one. Plus, I am still humming this. Carry on Mr. Brainwash, whoever you may be.

3. VINCERE. An epic and wholly original masterpiece from one of Italy’s most underappreciated filmmakers. Bellocchio presents a winning take on Mussolini (the man turned icon) through uncovering the family we never knew he had. Giovanna Mezzogiorno doesn’t hurt either.

4. I AM LOVE. Could Tilda Swinton be any more captivating in this movie? Could the mise-en-scène be any more gorgeous? Could the score be any more majestic? And where can I order some of those prawns? Though I wrestled with some of its over-the-top moments, sequences from this film stayed with me for days, as did the music. I gave in.

5. ALAMAR. An exquisite, almost wordless portrait of the bond between a father and son while they cling to methods of the old world. Truly unique and unlike any film I’ve seen before in its approach to many nuanced subjects, this film “speaks” in gestures and is the closest thing to a child’s handprint in clay.

6. RUHR. James Benning makes an avant-garde film about trains, and it feels like the fulfillment of the apocalypse. Only he could make something that feels so simultaneously gritty and mystical.

7. THE GHOST WRITER. An taut thriller that needed nothing more than old-fashioned political intrigue and a more-than-competent cast to summon up some excellent suspense. I wish more mainstream films were as good as this one.

8. LAST TRAIN HOME. This documentary is about more than the annual Chinese New Year migration; it’s about a daughter breaking away from her parents. Both experiences feel harrowing and very real in this film.

9. PLEASE GIVE. This very New York, very funny movie reminded me of early Woody Allen.
The humor is wry, but the film has its touching moments too, not to mention a super ensemble cast. I wish more “quirky mainstream” or “mainstream indie” (mindie?) films were like this.

10. BLUEBEARD. It’s fascinating to see Breillat explore the twinned axes of the fairy tales and childhood to explore the formation of the gender roles and processes of sexualization that have always fascinated her. (That’s my girl’s school education showing, sorry.) She also wins for best final film shot of the year.

Runners-up: Film Socialisme, White Material, A Prophet, The Father of My Children, Mother,
Around a Small Mountain, 12th and Delaware, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, Erie, The Silent Holy Stones.
Notably Absent: The Social Network, Inception

In January 1914, when Chaplin had been at Keystone for a few months, Mack Sennett asked him to come with some new ideas for gags. It was at this time that Chaplin invented the character of the tramp.

Kid Auto Races At Venice [1914], in which Chaplin’s “Tramp” character makes his debut.

I was in my street clothes and had nothing to do, so I stood where Sennett could see me. He was standing with Mabel, looking into a hotel lobby set, biting the end of a cigar. “We need some gags here,” he said, then turned to me. “Put on comedy make-up. Anything will do.”

The secret of Mark Sennett’s success was his enthusiasm. He stood and giggled until his body began to shake. This encouraged me and I began to explain the character: “You know this fellow is many-sided, a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he’s a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, he is not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy. And of course, if the occasion warrants it, he will kick a lady in the rear — but only in extreme anger!”

– Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography [1964]

A little bit of cheesecake from a smut catalog to brighten up your Monday, courtesy of Jim Winkel of Vintage Sleaze. Don’t we all want to watch movies that are clear, sharp, and “brilliantly lighted?” Bonus points if they star Lilly “Lady Bountiful” Lamont.