Alan Splet

Listening to Robert Hampson's experimental soundscape project Main… The album I'm currently listening to, Hz, a compilation of limited edition singles comes with a dedication to film sound designer Alan Splet (pictured below with David Lynch and Jack Nance). Splet is perhaps best known for creating with David Lynch, the audio surrealism of Eraserhead. Splet first worked with Lynch on The Grandmother which led to a run of tremendous collaborations – Splet was responsible for the sound of the hissing, clanking machinery in The Elephant Man and Dune, and the extraordinary detailed soundworld of Blue Velvet (whose story begins with the shot of an ear!). Elsewhere Splet's brilliant work can be heard in Days of Heaven, The Black Stallion (which won him a special Academy Award for sound editing), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Dead Poets Society, and The Mosquito Coast, which incidentally includes another piece of sinister machinery...

Mr. Arkadin

I've just completed (well, almost completed), Criterion's fabulous Mr. Arkadin box, having now watched all three cuts of Welles' brilliant 1955 film(s)... I had pondered on which order to watch the three films in and finally took the pedantic decision to watch them as placed within the Criterion set - Confidential Report first, followed by Mr. Arkadin (Corinth version) and the so-called Comprehensive Version. Of the three cuts, I think the Comprehensive Version is the best - the revisions are sensitive and well-considered, and the re-sequencing of certain scenes is handled with dutiful deference to Welles' own plan for the film. The Comprehensive Version also rescues a few exclusive snippets here and there from Confidential Report - I say "rescue" like Confidential Report was an unforgivable corruption of Welles' vision - far from it, I think producer Louis Dolivet's dispensing of the flashback structure lends the film a bold narrative thrust which makes few concessions to the audience's comprehension of the film. By the way, I fell head over heels in love with Patricia Medina in the film, her drunken scene with Welles on board a perilously swaying yacht is one of my favourite things in the picture. I very much liked Robert Arden as well, and have scribbled a mental note to look out for him in what I suspect are bit parts in Chaplin's A King In New York, and Omen III. All that's left now is to finish off the set by reading Maurice Bessy's novelization, and Video Watchdog's own forensic investigation of the film and its variants (which I might add appeared in issue 10 from 1992, predating the Criterion set by 14 years).

Revisiting Sunset Boulevard

Just watched Sunset Boulevard, a film that looks more astonishing with each passing year... There are moments in the film when Gloria Swanson, not hamming it up as Salome, retains some of that beauty of her younger self seen in the clip of von Stroheim's Queen Kelly - after all, William Holden takes her to bed at one point, and perhaps it's my age, but I think the film generates a palpable frisson of dark eroticism. I love the sequence where Swanson makes her triumphant return to that Paramount lot and there's a lovely moment where C.B. DeMille gently kisses Swanson goodbye on the forehead and Swanson momentarily closes her eyes like a loving daughter. Wonderful stuff. It's a shame the film's original, more macabre opening of Holden beginning his story from a mortuary slab was rejected after unfavorable test screenings, but fortunately the brilliant notion of a dead man narrating the film was kept: in fact, for Holden's last bit of voice-over I half-expected him to sign-off with "Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had finally enfolded her...in the Twilight Zone." (I was perhaps thinking of the 1959 TZ episode. "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" which leans heavily on Sunset Boulevard).

Kosmos - Soundtracks Of Eastern Germany's Adventures In Space

First album of the day... Kosmos - Soundtracks Of Eastern Germany's Adventures In Space, a 2002 compilation which collects together various themes (and dialogue) from a clutch of sci-fi films made at the East German DEFA studio - Der Schweigende Stern (First Spaceship on Venus, 1960), Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure, 1970), Im Staub der Sterne (In the Dust of the Stars, 1976), and Eolomea (1972). There's less weird electronics on this than I expected, the music swings in the style of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, with occasional jazz licks, celestial choruses, and the odd burst of prog rock (one track in particular sounds like a cast-off from Tangerine Dream's Cyclone album). Still, it's an enjoyable listen, and it's given me the urge to investigate these Eastern Bloc space operas...

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon

Earlier this afternoon, I read Stanley Kubrick's screenplay for Napoleon... This particular draft is dated September 29, 1969, and comes with fascinating production notes concerning the film's budget, actors, filming locations, sets, costumes and research material. I'm not sure how advanced this particular draft of the screenplay was but it makes for interesting reading on what might have been, had Kubrick made the film. The screenplay spans Napoleon's entire life, opening with a scene where a 4-year old Napoleon is read a bedtime story, to his rise to power, his triumphant campaigns and battles, his coronation as Emperor of France, through to his fall after a disastrous war with Russia, and his exile and death on the remote Atlantic island St. Helena. And all of it within 3 hours. The screenplay includes copious amounts of narration (which I read with the voice of Michael Hordern in mind) providing expository information and filling in gaps in the narrative. The battle sequences make for the most exciting parts of the screenplay, with shots planned to include men by the thousands, but Kubrick deftly adds some small touches which delight - when the film briefly relocates to Egypt, there's a shot of French soldiers inspecting a tomb, and a young drummer boy scrawling "Long Live the Republic" over some hieroglyphic writing. Elsewhere, a key moment like the French naval defeat at Trafalgar is summed up in one single striking shot of a wrecked French ship at the bottom of the ocean, the body of its drowned captain drifting around the cabin along with his books and papers. But there are problems too. Kubrick's writing is less skillful when the film indulges in court intrigue, Napoleon's womanizing, and tempestuous relationship with Josephine are dull. A scene where Napoleon breaks away from a dinner to conquer the wife of a guest feels clumsily staged. One thing I did struggle with reading the screenplay was whom to visualize in the part of Napoleon. Jack Nicholson has long been associated with the role, but the Napoleon, as Kubrick writes him, seems a little to austere for Nicholson. I was thinking... Dustin Hoffman perhaps ? A copy of the screenplay is available here...

Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera

Following my last post on Philip Glass, I was reaching for my copy of Einstein on the Beach but instead I watched Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, an excellent 1985 documentary about Robert Wilson and Philip Glass' magnum opus. What's terrific about this 58min film is that it gives a window into the visual aspect of an opera that comparatively few people will experience, with footage of the rehearsals of The Brooklyn Academy of Music production of the opera for the Next Wave Festival in 1984. Good contributions too from Wilson and Glass. The film is available on youtube, and for streaming and download at the Ubu Archive

A Glass Book

Just reading a warm review of Philip Glass' new memoir Words Without Music (Faber, pp416) in The Sunday Times' Culture supplement. "Reading this memoir will not make converts one way or another, but it should at least put paid to the idea that Glass is facile or vacuous, for he explains the aesthetic behind his music interestingly and clearly. And whichever side you sit, there is no denying the intrinsic interest of his story and what it has to say about the cultural politics of our times - and especially those ever shifting categories of avant-garde and mainstream". I remember one time I was on a bus touring around Chicago, and passing the University of Chicago, the tour guide listed some famous former students which included Philip Glass. Asked for a show of hands for those who knew of Philip Glass, I was the sole contributor which was slightly disappointing. My fellow travelers were far more enthusiastic when the conversation turned to the fortunes of the Cubs as we passed Wrigley Field...

Coming Soon from Arrow...

I'm very pleased to see Arrow plans to put out Tobe Hooper's 1977 film Eaten Alive on Blu-Ray. This title has been on DVD for as long as I've been collecting - I've seen numerous editions of the film, good, bad and ugly released on both sides of the Atlantic, from fly-by-night cheapskates like Diamond and VIPCO, to more respectful editions by Elite and later Dark Sky. So, it's very gratifying to see Arrow's enthusiasm for this great, underrated film. I last visited with the film in 2013 and was impressed as ever (see link below). It will be really interesting to see what Arrow's production team will do transfer-wise, the film's visual scheme, all murky browns and thick, soupy reds will prove a formidable challenge for HD. If Arrow follows their tradition of offering alternative cover art, there will a bounty of material to choose from - the film at various points was distributed as Eaten Alive, Death Trap, Horror Hotel, Starlight Slaughter (my favourite!), Legend of the Bayou, and apparently Brutes and Savages, although I've never seen any admats or posters for the film under this title... Arrow's Eaten Alive is due for release in the UK and US in July

Visions of Clair

Just watched the 1977 art-porno Visions of Clair. My thanks yet again to Brad Stevens for introducing me to this utterly bewitching film. I feel one initial screening disqualifies me from saying anything meaningful about the film - Annette Haven's titular heroine, a beautiful model who conjures obsession, lust and jealously in the characters who orbit around her - explores ideas about identity, gender and dualism. I'm not entirely sure if Claire was actually a real person, or simply a projection of the other characters' own preoccupations (even the title of the film misspells her film - surely no accident?). I suspect a second or third screening is required for the film to give up its secrets. Still there was much to enjoy on this first pass of the film - director Zachary Youngblood lends the visuals a striking experimental flavour, the sexual grapplings are often layered together transforming bodies into surreal liquid flesh. Annette Haven is very good too, clearly the best player in the film, and is a rather delicate, ethereal beauty (and it some ways reminded me of Lynn Lowry). But perhaps my favourite aspect of the film was the brilliant electro-acoustic score by the delightfully named Ohm's Law, who appropriately enough, I can't find any info about!

The Man Who Came Back From the Dead

Lots of Bowie stuff on the Web today in the wake of news of Bowie's participation in Lazarus, a theatre production inspired by Walter Tevis' 1963 novel The Man Who Fell To Earth. It pleases me too that Bowie's collaborator is Irish playwright Enda Walsh... It's always a treat to see The Man Who Fell To Earth film being revived. I'm seeing some great Facebook posts on the film this morning, and it remains a tremendous, integral piece of the Bowie mythology, made during Bowie's infamous sojourn in LA when he was up to his neck in coke, occultism and eccentric dieting. Later when filming began on The Man Who Fell To Earth, he developed an interest in UFOolgy - Bowie's total immersion in Roeg's film apparently had him keenly watching the skies of New Mexico for interstellar visitors. When filming was completed Bowie barely paused for breath before rushing back to LA to record what is arguably his finest album Station To Station. Still, The Man Who Fell To Earth continued a cast a shadow over Bowie, the cover of his 1977 album Low featured artwork based on the film, while Low's final track, Subterraneans used a reverse bass, an idea Bowie originally conceived for the abandoned soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth.

The White City

I've just come to the end of Season 1 (1958-59) of The Naked City, and have thoroughly enjoyed the 39-episode run of this police procedural drama. The show's raison d'être was to present New York City warts and all, and much of the series was filmed fast and loose on the streets and neighborhoods around South Bronx and Manhattan. In addition to the principal actors, The Naked City featured an excellent roster of no-nonsense staff directors (including a prolific Stuart Rosenberg and a revolving door of talented players making multiple appearances - part of my enjoyment of the show was seeing an actor playing a villain in one episode reappear as a victim in another. This first season features some well known faces too - Peter Falk, Vic Morrow, Martin Balsam, Roberts Blossom and an incandescent Diane Ladd (looking like her 23 year old Laura Dern). The one reservation I have for the show (and this perhaps this would be indicative of the era), is the absence of black actors. There might have been 8 million stories in the Naked City but none of them were black it seems. I think I counted two appearances by black actors throughout the entire season and both played indentured servants. More galling still, episodes often focused attention on the situation of other minorities living in NYC such as Hispanics or European émigrés... I'm now looking forward to delving into the 2nd season of Naked City, revamped to lose the definite article of the original title, but adding an additional half-hour to each episode.

Post-Apocalypse All'Italiana

Mad Max fever is currently revving up on the Web, and with the fourth film in the series due for release this summer, I had an idea to check out a more modest vision of the apocalypse courtesy of two Enzo Castellari films, The Bronx Warriors from 1982 and The New Barbarians made the following year..

The Bronx Warriors, or to give it its slightly clumsy full title 1990: The Bronx Warriors is not strictly a post-apocalyptic film, rather it posited a future where whole tracts of urban neighborhoods have slipped into lawlessness and become no-go zones. Looking at the locations where Enzo Castellari and his crew filmed, it appears the future had already arrived, with the action framed against endless blocks of rubble-strewn, abandoned tenements. In the film, Ann, a young runaway and daughter of a wealthy industrialist takes refuge in the Bronx where she hooks up with Trash, the leader of a biker gang called the Riders. Ann's father who has been grooming his daughter to take over his multi-million dollar corporation sends Hammer, a ruthless, sadistic police lieutenant into the Bronx to retrieve Ann by any means necessary... Inventive, energetic and propelled along by a sure-fire confidence, The Bronx Warriors is one of the great Italian action films. Not nearly as grim or ultra-violent as similar films that followed in its wake, Castellari's film often feels like a Western in disguise, in fact the rousing climax has the gangs of the Bronx pitted against heavily armed riot police on horseback. As well as raiding ideas from Escape From New York, the film takes inspiration from The Warriors, with the Bronx kitted out with even more outrageous looking gangs, like the roller skating Zombies or the camp, toe-tappin' high-kickin' Iron Men. Leading man Marco de Gregorio at least looks the part if nothing else, while Fred Williamson playing Bronx kingpin The Ogre, and Vic Morrow, effectively appearing in Lee Van Cleef role bring much class to the picture., not to mention Zombie-leader George Eastman who effortlessly livens up every scene he appears in. An excellent beginning...

The ever industrious Enzo Castellari quickly followed up The Bronx Warriors with another post-apocalyptic film, and this time, it genuinely was, with The New Barbarians set in the nuclear ravaged wasteland of 2019. To say that The New Barbarians leans heavily on Mad Max 2 would be a kind way of putting it, the film a virtually remake of George Miller's film, right down to the customized vehicles and gloomy looking leading man. In the film, a nomadic loner named Scorpion driving a souped up Firebird car defends an isolated community against the Templars, a sadistic religious sect intent of purging the earth of the human race. Putting aside the film's shameless plunder of George Miller's film, The New Barbarians is severely compromised by the production's penny-pinching budget, the entire film taking place in the same damn stone quarry throughout (in some shots, the excavation machinery clearly visible), or the same stretch of abandoned road, all to numbing effect. Even the vehicles look strictly low-rent, a few dune buggies tricked out with spiked fenders, the occasional rotating blade or in the case of Scorpion's car, an impossibly dainty rocket launcher in the booth. And yet, The New Barbarians is strangely compelling, thanks to Castellari's heroic attempt to make something out of nothing - the idea of the Templars cashing in their horses for automobiles is rather good, and there's one particularly out-there moment where the subtle homosexual subtext of The Road Warrior is picked up and ran with - but I will leave that for unsuspecting viewers to discover themselves. Cast wise, Fred Williamson returns to the fold and he's easily the film's biggest asset, as does George Eastman, playing the Templar's leader with disarming intensity. Incidentally, the film comes with a health warning for the inclusion of Giovanni Frezza (or Bob from House by the Cemetery) playing a whiz kid mechanic. You have been warned.

The Remote Viewer

I'm pursuing a Coil obsession at the moment (is there any other way to experience Coil?) and I'm thinking about the various film references scattered throughout their work. There is the unused music for Hellraiser of course, but I'm thinking of song titles like Tenderness of Wolves, Vanishing Point, Red Queen (possibly a reference to the 1972 giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times). And there's the homage to Pasolini on Coil's second LP, with the song Ostia (The Death of Pasolini). The Horse Rotarvator album also contains a song referencing Salo, entitled Circles of Mania, and getting back to Hellraiser, one of the titles from the Worship the Glitch album We Have Always Been Here is a line of dialogue from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2... Elsewhere Coil have sampled dialogue from Salo (on the track Homage to Sewage), The Wizard of Gore (pictured below) and Trash (Further), Performance and Trash (Further Back And Faster), The Reflecting Skin (Omlagus Garfungiloops) and Marat/Sade (Answers Come In Dreams 1). In addition the track Further Back And Faster samples some dialogue from a Charles Laughton spoken word album based on Night of the Hunter ("The fingers of the left hand spell...love, those of the right spell... hate"). Have I missed anything ?

Juliette Gréco

Just revisited Jean Cocteau's 1950 fantasy Orphée, a truly astonishing film which transposes the classic Greek myth of Orpheus to a contemporary Paris of petulant Left Bank intellectuals and an Underworld that resembles a WWII ravaged city. This is a magician's film in every sense, and Cocteau dazzles the eye with some remarkable devices - trick shots, reversed film, back projection and in one moment, an impromptu costume change between shots. Cocteau's film also features three beautiful actresses - María Casares as Death, Marie Déa as Eurydice and Juliette Greco as Aglaonice. Juliette Gréco's appearance in the film is all too brief, but she's an incredible beauty, and as I watched her tossing her luminous long black hair to one side I thought of an another enchanting actress - Mirella D'Angelo from Tenebrae. Both women do share a similarity I think. Or perhaps it's just Cocteau's mirrors working me over...

I was reading Juliette Gréco's potted biography on wiki and she has lived an extraordinary life, among other things she had a relationship with Miles Davis. Miles writes about first meeting her in 1949 in his autobiography...

I met Juliette at one of my rehearsals. She would come in and sit and listen to the music... I asked this guy who she was.
He said "What do you want with her?"
I said "What do you mean what do I want with her. I want to see her"
Then he says "Well you know she's one of those existentialists"
So I told him right there and then "Man fuck all that kind of shit. I don't care what she is. That girl is beautiful and I want to meet her"

The Hardest Working Man in Show Business

I caught just one film over the w/end, but it was a good one - the 2014 Mick Jagger produced documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. Running a brisk 90mins, the film offered a potted history of the hardest working man in show business - from his early days singing for dimes in his aunt's whorehouse in Georgia thru to the formation of the J.Bs in the early 70's. Incomplete as it was, the documentary still took care of business, with a wealth of fantastic live footage and a near definitive roster of central players in Brown's musical life - members of The Famous Flames and the J.B.'s (including Bootsy Collins and Danny Ray, James' "capeman") who all bring along some priceless anecdotes, as well as the aforementioned Rolling Stone who fondly recalls smoothing a few of James' ruffled feathers when he was displeased with the filming arrangements of the T.A.M.I. Show. And while the film sidesteps the thorny issue of Brown's mistreatment of his women, the interviewees are given free reign to air their grievances about their boss' thriftiness, and his near-tyrannical control over how they played and looked; and I was genuinely surprised to discover James was an unapologetic Nixonite, publicly supporting Nixon's administration (which was only begrudgingly reciprocated by the President). A shame the film wasn't longer, although if you have a copy of the fabulous Soul Power, it pretty much picks up from where Mr. Dynamite bows out.