Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

My introduction to Jack Johnson was Miles Davis' 1971 album, A Tribute To Jack Johnson, a collection of music which served as the soundtrack for Jim Jacob's documentary on the life of the great American heavy weight boxer. For Miles the project had a personal resonance. He loved boxing and was a regular at the fights and as he alludes to in his own liner notes for the album, had tremendous admiration for how Johnson lived his life, his taste for fine clothes, fast cars and faster women, and Johnson's refusal to tow the racial line set by the white establishment of 20th century America. All of which is explored in Ken Burns' superb 2004 film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson which traces the extraordinary life of Jack Johnson, the son of former slaves, who fled Galveston, Texas to seek his fortune and battled and bludgeoned his way to became the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

In telling the story of Johnson's life the film explores the emergence of professional boxing from its earliest days when matches were strictly unregulated underground affairs to the world-famous The Fight of the Century of 1910 when former undefeated heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement to fight Jack Johnson. The film is also a damning indictment of systematic suppression of blacks in the post-Reconstruction America. Ultimately Johnson's toughest opponent was Jim Crow, and he had as many battles outside the ring - his struggle against the racism within the boxing world which denied him for years a shot at the heavyweight title because of his color, the poisonous racial theorizing aimed at undermining his athletic achievements, and the contempt he earned for his relationships with white women. Johnson was fiercely intelligent, highly sophisticated and for a man of his time progressively-minded, opening up a speakeasy on the South-side of Chicago which catered for blacks and whites - "I have found no better way in avoiding race prejudice" Johnson once said, "than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist".

1909. Jack Johnson towers before a flattened Stanley Ketchel. Johnson hit Ketchel so hard it is said Ketchel's front teeth were found embedded in Johnson glove.

Unforgivable Blackness follows on the tradition of previous Burns films like The Civil War (1990) or Baseball (2004). Instead of the fragmented, frenetic pacing of contemporary TV documentaries (as well as the current vogue for applying three dimensional effect to photographs), Burns has a more classical meditative style, weaving together an incredible tapestry of archive photographs, personal correspondence, newspaper clippings and film footage (complete with subtle and sensitive sound effects to add additional life to the images). The film features insightful commentary from a wide range of personalities, including novelist and critic Stanley Crouch, essayist Gerald Early, Johnson biographer Randy Roberts, boxing writers Bert Sugar and W.C. Heinz, and James Earl Jones who played Jack Johnson on Broadway and film in The Great White Hope. Returning from previous Burns' films, Jazz (2001) and Mark Twain (2002) is the great Keith David who provides another fine narration, and among the excellent voice cast are Brian Cox, Ed Harris, Derek Jacobi, Amy Madigan, Joe Morton, Alan Rickman, Studs Terkel, Billy Bob Thornton, Eli Wallach, Jeffrey Wright and with great presence, Samuel L. Jackson as the voice of Jack Johnson. Wynton Marsalis provides the enjoyable ragtime score (with snatches of Blind Willie Johnson). Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson is available as a standalone 2-disc set or as part of an excellent value 10-disc American Lives boxset which rounds up a number of other Ken Burns films. Highly recommended.

Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive

This week I caught a screening of Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive, a film I hadn't seen in quite some time probably owing to Elite's no-frills DVD edition which suffered from excessive digital fog. In 2007 Dark Sky Films put out their DVD edition which added a second disc of extras but more importantly featured a much improved transfer. I picked up the Dark Sky disc soon after its release and quietly filed it away on the shelf and forgot about it - until now. Thankfully the intervening years haven't dampened my enthusiasm for Hooper's so called difficult second album (actually his third film, if you include his rarely seen 1971 debut Eggshells) and Eaten Alive remains as sleazy and violent as you imagined 70's drive-in films to be when you were too young to rent them at the video store.

Unlike George Romero who did an about-turn after Night of the Living Dead with the romantic comedy relic There's Always Vanilla, Tobe Hopper took a job directing a screenplay which was so slavish of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the comparisons between his breakthrough film and Eaten Alive seem unavoidable. The plot sees a disparate group of people wind up at the decrepit Starlight hotel in Louisiana to be picked off by a madman who's weapons of choice are a scythe and a ravenous alligator. As with Chainsaw, Eaten Alive was inspired by another American serial killer, this time, one Joe Ball, a WWI veteran who disposed of the bodies of over 20 women in a makeshift pool of alligators. Story wise both films may be cut from similar cloth, but Eaten Alive abandons the stark realism of its predecessor for something far more akin to a weird fairy tale, the stagnant bayous of Louisiana entirely recreated and reimagined at a soundstage in Los Angeles.

Watching the film again I was struck by the odd moments of strangeness - actor William Finley barking like a dog, for no apparent reason, or the surreal cutaways to a caged and starved monkey, balanced by scenes of pure menace, like the sequence where 8 year old Kyle Richards is terrorized by the scythe-wielding Neville Brand (a scene which probably caused the film's brief detention as a Video Nasty in the UK). Hooper had reigned in the bloodshed for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in an attempt to secure a PG rating from the MPAA but producer Mardi Rustam had no such concerns and the film doesn't shy away from bloody carnage. More problematic are the scenes of nudity which feel tacked on and probably were - Hooper left the film before completion and there are stories of additional scenes filmed following his departure.

Hooper's direction isn't as fluid as his other films, there's little of the show off camerawork that you might expect from the director, perhaps as a consequence of the limited scope of the sets, but the film conjures up a thick sinister atmosphere with its baroque lighting and the eccentric musique concrète soundtrack of tweeting electronics and music box chimes, meshing with the sounds of a radio spewing forth dreary country ditties. And there's the splendidly repellent art direction - the hotel, all mouldering wallpaper and strewn with discarded bric-a-brac, magazines, spectacles and a half-dressed mannequins. Of the cast Marilyn Burns spends most of her time gagged and tied to a bed while a young Robert Englund playing an obnoxious cowboy with a penchant for sodomy bags the film's famous first line. Stuart Whitman equips himself well as the helpful sheriff, Carolyn Jones acting underneath some old-age make plays the wizened brothel madam trying to unload some useless real estate, while a shell-shocked Mel Ferrer looks like he's wandered into the wrong the film. Effortlessly stealing the show however is Neville Brand who seems genuinely beyond the pale and clearly channelling a wellspring of alcoholic rage into his performance. Brand's hard-drinking had just about finished off a distinguished career and despite later appearances in The Ninth Configuration and Without Warning, Eaten Alive is effectively Brand's acting swansong.

No word about Eaten Alive is complete without mention of the film's numerous retitles. Years of choppy distribution has left the film with at least five official titles, 3 of which have been used elsewhere. Eaten Alive! was chosen as the export title for Umberto Lenzi's 1980 cannibal film (starring Mel Ferrer!); the film's UK title Death Trap is also the name of a 1982 Sidney Lumet film, and Horror Hotel was previously used as the US title for John Moxey's 1960 film City of the Dead. Apparently, the film might have been issued at one point as Brutes and Savages, also the title of a dreadful mondo from 1977 but I've yet to see anything that proves this. Personally, I like the eerily evocative Starlight Slaughter best. And finally no one it seems can agree on whether the creature in the film is in fact an alligator or a crocodile, least of all the person who compiled the closing credits, assigning effects artist Bob Mattey a credit for Mechanical Alligator and Crocodile...

Mindwebs: Short Stories from the Worlds of Speculative Fiction

Last night I finished Penguin's The Call of Cthulhu the anthology of H.P. Lovecraft stories I mentioned a few posts back, and for one final bit of cosmic weirdness before I break from Lovecraft I took a listen to Mindweb's radio production of his 1919 story Beyond the Wall of Sleep a tale of extra-terrestrial possession from another dimension... Running from 1975-1984, and broadcast weekly out of WHA Radio in Wisconsin, Mindwebs was a sort of halfway house between sci-fi radio dramatizations like Dimension X and X-Minus One and "a book at bedtime" program.

Each 30min episode of Mindwebs features the relaxed easy-going voice of Michael Hanson reading from the short stories of science fiction and fantasy heavyweights like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick among others. Accompanying Hanson's voice is an eclectic selection of music - from Samuel Barber to Tangerine Dream - and a battery of sound effects (or technical operations as Hanson credits them in each episode's sign-off). Of the 169 episodes, 135 are available to stream or download at the Internet Archive. The sound quality of these recordings is generally very good, but shouldn't be judged against official audio books - there are some occasional sound drop outs, tape hiss and other anomalies but given the rarity of these shows, this is a minor complaint. Sadly, given the amount of copyrighted music there's little chance that the Mindwebs archive will be remastered for an official release, so grab this extraordinary collection while its available. (The Dimension X and X Minus One collections are highly recommended also)

Films and Filming magazine

During the second half of 2012, I obsessively collected issues of British film magazine Films and Filming which ran in its original incarnation from 1954-1980. The bulk of my collection is composed of a near unbroken run of Films and Filming from the 70's, a dozen or so issues from the 60's and a prized copy of Films and Filming #1 from October 1954 (pictured left). The magazine was pitched somewhere between the Hollywood glamour of Picturegoer (1913-1960) and the more scholarly Sight and Sound (1934-) and contained an eclectic mix of reviews, articles and interviews (Ken Russell was a favorite it seems),with excellent coverage on World Cinema (Eastern European Cinema especially), film festival screenings and a regular column about films playing on the London club circuit (did you know that Fando & Lis played in London as Tar Babies?). Interestingly the magazine had something of a gay bent (no pun intended) - in the early years the magazine's classifieds section functioned as a meeting point for the closeted gay community. It also ran gay-interest adverts, gave coverage to Gay Cinema (more about that later) and featured plentiful male nudity among its pages and occasionally on the cover. The following is my own humble tribute to this very unique magazine which I hope will give a flavor of what the magazine was like to read - right away I must add a disclaimer about the screenshots below, taken quick and dirty with my camera so any distortions, warping and skewed angles are down to my amateur fumblings...

One of Films and Filming's primary features was the preview section of forthcoming or new releases, usually a double-page spread of stills from a particular film. Given the magazine's penchant for nudity, quite a lot of cult and exploitation films were given exposure, like Jacopetti and Prosperi's slave trade mondo Farewell Uncle Tom from the September 1970 issue

Films and Filming had an official star-rated film review section in addition to capsule reviews found in the Documentary and Club columns. What's most valuable about the reviews is their lack of cultural baggage that comes with reviewing vintage films today. The Exorcist was famously panned, The Devils received a shrug of the shoulders while lavish praise was bestowed upon Performance. A good example of this is the December 1970 review of Night of the Living Dead which imparts some of the experience of seeing Romero's film with virgin eyes back in the day.

One of the pleasures of browsing through the magazine are the vintage film advertisements. From the July 1971 issue a rare ABC Cinema ad for The Baby Maker, a late sixties time capsule starring Barbara Hershey as a free spirited surrogate mother, coupled however unlikely with Dario Argento's early masterpiece The Cat O'Nine Tails. I could be wrong but I haven't seen this unusual ad reproduced in the various Argento books.

Among the more well known contributors to Films and Filming were the great film historian Kevin Brownlow (who wrote articles on the silent Ben Hur, and the films of Abel Gance), as well as regular staffers like House of Whipcord and Frightmare writer David McGillivray, and Michael Armstrong, director of David Bowie short The Image and more famously Mark of the Devil. Among Armstrong's best work for the magazine was a three part series which ran from March/April/May 1971 entitled Some Like It Chilled which examined some of the major motifs in Horror films.



Films and Filming's Letters page makes for especially insightful reading. Anyone with an interest in the film-going habits and attitudes of the British public during the 70's would find the views and opinions of readers quite fascinating. The tide of increasingly violent films that swept through cinemas during the tenure of British censor Stephen Murphy saw much debate in the Letters page. Films such as The Devils, Straw Dogs, Clockwork Orange, Soldier Blue generated a considerable amount of commentary which raged on and off for two years. The two letters below from the May 1972 issue are typical of the passions these films aroused.

From its inception Films and Filming catered to a gay readership in the absence of any dedicated gay magazines. The magazine was a champion of the Basil Dearden and Dirk Bogarde film Victim and as the 60's gave way to the 70's the magazine became increasingly brazen in its choice of covers - the September 1968 cover featured a male interracial kiss (from the film Two Gentlemen Sharing), and covers showing men in various states of undress would be a regular fixtures throughout the 70's. Inside the magazine there was coverage of Underground Gay Cinema, with retrospectives on Warhol and the magazine gave exposure to obscure gay films like Pink Narcissus and the films of Derek Jarman who scored covers with Sebastiane (November 1976 issue) and Jubilee (March 1978) 

Other marginal film makers who appeared in the magazine included David Cronenberg, interviewed in the October 1982 issue whilst promoting Scanners, the June 1974 issue featured a Norman McLaren career overview, and below, from the August 1971 issue, a report on American Underground film makers Curtis Harrington, director of the avant-garde Horror film Night Tide, and Conrad Rooks who made the psychedelic experimental film Chappaqua.

Further Reading

Memories of Films and Filming
A decade by decade gallery of Films and Filming covers
Films and Filming for sale at eBay

Cronenberg on Videodrome

Continuing a series recalling little nuggets heard on film maker commentaries. In this instalment David Cronenberg recalls a moment of protest by his leading man resulted in an impromptu director's cameo...

Jimmy Woods would not put on this helmet. He was worried he would be electrocuted. I thought he was kidding but he was serious. So that’s me in the helmet right now, those are my hands you are seeing, held up in front of the lens and it’s me in this shot because even though Carol Spier my production designer who designed the helmet put the helmet on for him, stood in a pool of water on the Videodrome set and fired up the helmet to show him he wouldn’t be electrocuted, he wouldn’t put on the helmet...

David Cronenberg, Videodrome (Criterion DVD/Blu-Ray, commentary index point 52:01)

Listening In Depth - Keith Fullerton Whitman's "Greatest Hits"

I'm currently listening to a very interesting project over at Soundcloud by experimental musician Keith Fullerton Whitman. Over the last 10 years or so Keith has been taking fragments of pop songs and applying all sorts of effects to them, chiefly slowing them down to half-speed and accentuating previously hidden elements of the music to reveal entirely new sound maps, best described by Whitman himself as “shining a flashlight into the dark corners of each selection, revealing the ghosts lurking within”.

Keith is streaming 100 of these “transformations” in a massive 10-part 12-hour block simply known as “Greatest Hits”. Additionally Whitman is offering listeners to chance to win a handmade, 10-disc set of “Greatest Hits” to the first 10 people to supply a complete list of the original songs used for the project. So far I’ve only been able to identify just a handful of songs - John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane, Edie Brickell's What I Am, Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield, and Duran Duran’s Save A Prayer. Remarkably much of the music sounds very shoegazey and this collection is required listening for those of you who enjoy the warm dreamy textures of The Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and Belong’s 2011 long-player Common Era

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Greatest Hits (Soundcloud) - sadly no longer available

H.P. Lovecraft - Rejuvenator

I must apologize for the dreadful punning title of this post but it goes some way in describing the profound effect the stories of Howard Phillips Lovecraft have on me. Whenever I feel my love of Horror is flagging I turn to one of Lovecraft's anthologies to recharge the batteries. I'm currently re-reading Penguin's excellent Lovecraft collection The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and it's always a case of one-more-story before I'm forced to put the book away and attend to other things. The majority of Lovecraft's work is now almost a century old but he continues to exert a huge influence over writers, film makers, artists, musicians and game designers. Films as disparate as Horror Express, Dead & Buried, The Thing, Pan's Labyrinth and The Prestige all feature unmistakable echoes of Lovecraft's work. Stephen King who famously described Lovecraft as the "dark and baroque prince" of 20th century Horror paid homage to him with The Mist and The Tommyknockers. And should one desire a musical companion on their journey to the mountains of madness, seek out Lustmord's 1994 album The Place Where Black Stars Hang, a collection of brooding isolationist pieces which perfectly capture the mood of the far flung desolate and alien landscapes found in Lovecraft's stories.

Artist Michael Whelan's Lovecraft's Nightmare, from 1982, partly used for the cover of H.P. Lovecraft anthology The Tomb and Other Tales. The artwork is now more well known as the cover of Obituary's 1990 death metal classic Cause of Death.

Penguin's three Lovecraft books (which also include The Thing on the Doorstep and The Dreams in the Witch House) are highly recommended for Lovecraft beginners, the collections are curated by Lovecraft's finest biographer S. T. Joshi and include near-definitive texts, and excellent, insightful introductions and explanatory notes.

Black God White Devil

Just a quick post... I was surfing earlier and came across to my extreme delight Black God White Devil, smartly jacketed in a Criterion sleeve. I was momentarily stunned that this had been announced under my nose until I realised I was looking at an imposter from the very fine website Fake Criterions... A key film of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha's 1964 film Black God White Devil follows the fortunes of a poor farmer who kills a cattle owner and goes on the run to hook up with a religious maniac and later a revolutionary bandit, all the while followed by hired gunman Antonio das Mortes... A ragged, feverish film Black God White Devil is a heady brew of mysticism, religion and politics played out against some of the driest scorched looking landscapes in Cinema, the story propelled along by a Greek chorus of fantastic Brazilian folk songs. The violence is often surprisingly sadistic - a baby stabbed to death on a sacrificial altar, a bride raped on her wedding day - and the film is outlandish enough to include a startling tip of the hat to Eisenstein's Odessa Steps. Rocha's film sits somewhere between Gospel According to Matthew, A Bullet For the General and El Topo, and if all that sounds intriguing, this is the film for you (and hopefully for Criterion too!)

A Letter to Elia by Martin Scorsese

I can safely say the last time I watched the annual Academy Awards ceremony was in 1999. It was the year the Academy awarded the lifetime achievement Oscar to writer, producer, director Elia Kazan. As Kazan made his way centre stage to be presented with the award by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, the response from the attending film community was decidedly mixed. Warren Beaty clearly emotional stood and clapped, Steven Spielberg offered polite applause but remained seated, while Ed Harris and Nick Nolte sat stone-faced and arms folded, in no uncertain terms at odds with the Academy honouring a man who appeared as a "friendly" witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. For such a carefully stage-managed event, the Academy Awards has had a number of memorable gaffes and slips over the years, but Kazan's snub was one of show's most sour moments. At the time I was only vaguely aware of the Hollywood Blacklist controversy, but I still feel (as I did in 1999) that Kazan's treatment was shabby and he fully deserved the Oscar for his contribution to American Cinema.

A Letter to Elia, Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' 2010 documentary about Kazan, only briefly mentions the Blacklist by way of an excerpt taken from Kazan's 1988 autobiography A Life (read by Elias Koteas) but position it as a defining moment not only in Kazan's personal life but in his film making life also. It was after 1952, the year Kazan appeared before HUAC, that the director made his most important films - among them On The Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face In The Crowd, Wild River and America America. A Letter to Elia continues in the vein of previous Scorsese documentaries, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy; rather than a definitive career overview of Kazan, Scorsese discusses the director's films in the context of his own life - he saw in On The Waterfront the same streetwise toughs of his Little Italy neighborhood, and considered his difficult relationship with his brother in the light of East of Eden, a film Scorsese "stalked", obsessively following it around theatres in New York in the mid-50's. It's surprisingly frank stuff with Scorsese evidently reliving some awkward memories and emotions. That Scorsese was chosen to present Kazan with the Lifetime Achievement award was no coincidence, in the documentary Scorsese remembers first meeting Kazan in the 60's when he was in film school. Much later when Scorsese was a famous director he and Kazan become good friends, but Scorsese admits that he could never reveal to Kazan how he felt about his films. Instead he put it in a letter.

A Letter to Elia is a fascinating film, Scorsese's passion for Kazan's films is infectious and has awakened my own interest in Kazan. I've begun reading A Life (and I'll be first to admit that Kazan was a sonofabitch) and in the next few weeks I hope to catch screenings of A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden and A Face In The Crowd, and pick up the Blu-Rays of Panic In the Streets and On the Waterfront. A Letter to Elia can be currently seen by US readers on the PBS website while readers in the UK and Ireland can catch the film on Film4.

In A Silent Way - Jesús Franco 1930-2013

When the news reached me yesterday that Jesús Franco had passed away, it came as a gentle surprise. I knew Franco’s health had been perilous in the last few years – recent interviews with Franco filmed for various DVD supplements were sometimes painful to watch, but despite all this I always had this notion that Franco was immortal, that he would continue to grind out zero-budget quickies long after all the rest of us had bit the dust. I won’t mourn Franco’s death but instead celebrate the career of an extraordinary artist. In the grand scheme of things few people in this world will get to leave behind such a rich and dense body of work like Franco has and I have no doubt that his filmography now finally complete will be studied, discussed, argued and obsessed over as long as people watch movies. How's that for immortality.

I’m listening to a lot of jazz at the moment and I mention this because in a strange way I've always associated Franco with Jazz. One of the first things I discovered about Franco was that he was passionate about Jazz. He often signed his films with the director-pseudonym Clifford Brown, the name of an influential American trumpeter who recorded in the '50's before his untimely death at 25 in a car accident. I would even suggest that Franco's body of work perfectly embodies the spirit of Jazz. One of Cinema's most prolific auteurs, Franco's filmography is a vast ocean of shifting styles and moods, and like Jazz is complex, formidable, it resists any easy definition of what it is exactly. His films include plenty of bum notes and fluffed solos, but he also made films that were blazingly progressive, full of emotion and liberation.

Black Angel's Death Song... Jess Franco on trombone in Venus In Furs (1969)

Franco was legendary for his rapid-fire work rate, stories about the director juggling three of four films simultaneously may well be true (Franco has always denied this), his sprawling filmography reads less like a director's CV and more like a list of sessions by a jobbing horn player. Jimmy Cobb who played drums on Kind of Blue, once described Miles Davis' great masterpiece as "just another date" and one wonders if Franco thought a masterpiece like Succubus, or Eugenie de Sade was "just another production". Probably. Franco had little regard for his own films and would always say he was happy just making movies. The final word goes to the man himself. When asked in 2009 why he made films, Franco replied, "Because I love Cinema. It is the most important thing to me. Life is Cinema"