What’s in a Name?: The Girl Chewing Gum, Rabbit, A Walk Through H • (Fixing a Hole: Avant-Garde Month)

We began avant-garde month by defying language – with silent films whose currency was visual, whose ideograms were images. Today we openly confront, pull apart, and reassemble language, on a kind of a cracked-looking-glass Sesame Street, numbers and words thrown in the air, land where they may, brought to you by the letter X – as in crossed-out, mysterious value, or X marks the spot. Today each avant-garde selection touches on a different base: documentary, animation, and narrative, all while remaining resolutely experimental. Two short entries are followed by a longer one (covering A Walk Through H, a fantastic film that seems to aptly round out all our themes). Bring your map, but don’t expect it to help any.

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Film as a Subversive Art: Hallucinations, Bells of Atlantis, Aos • (Fixing a Hole: Avant-Garde Month)

by Joel

Fixing a Hole is a series whose purpose is to cover films not yet discussed on Wonders in the Dark. This month’s theme is the avant garde. Check out this list for the hundreds of films included in “Film as a Subversive Art.”

Many years ago, while living in New York, I found myself reading Rousseau on a park bench, studying for a course on Political Theory. In this case homework would have more long-lasting benefits (however short the actual meeting) than an A on a test. An elderly man, about eighty, was sitting nearby with a female companion and, noticing my book, began talking to me. He had been educated by his parents according to the precepts of Rousseau’s Emile, and this early education had given him a lifelong openness to all sorts of experiences, a fondness for the offbeat and unconventional, and a unique way of seeing the world. We talked for a while, and I discovered his life story was fascinating. He had fled Hitler’s Austria, and in New York, just after the war, he had founded one of the first major film societies in the U.S., Cinema 16 – which would grow to become the most successful membership-based film society in American history.

Cinema 16 screened everything from political documentaries to foreign films to scientific movies to the occasional Hollywood picture (Hitchcock appeared at the theater to introduce The Man Who Knew Too Much). But its bread-and-butter was avant-garde cinema, a form (in all its different forms) that its administrator adored with the passion many reserve for their favorite genre or movie star. Frustrated by the inability of many friends and proteges to get onboard with experimental cinema, and eventually drawn into a rivalry with Jonas Mekas, whose Anthology Film Archives was founded in the early sixties in part as an alternative to Cinema 16’s operation, this man eventually decided to write a book, exploring and celebrating not just the avant-garde, but all forms of subversive cinema from the political to the aesthetic to the topical to the completely personal. When Cinema 16 folded in the early seventies (never having received funds from government or corporation, it was reliant on the support of its members, which eventually dwindled), this book would remain as his enduring legacy.

The man was Amos Vogel, and the book was Film as a Subversive Art. At the end of our pleasant conversation, Vogel gave me his business card and I still have it – a playful sketch of an absent-minded bearded man trotting off with a reel of film unspooling from under his arm. He did not mention his book at the time and only years later would I purchase it, but it’s become one of my cinematic treasures. While focusing on the offbeat and provocative, it is in fact a manifesto for a wide-ranging cinematic love with a keen eye for how subversion is ingrained in the very substance of the material itself – its ability to freeze, preserve, repeat and upend the physical world around us. Today I cover three films introduced to me by this book, and my entries include Vogel’s capsule on the film in question and an embedded video of each movie.

But that’s not all – such a brief sample could hardly convey the vast riches contained in this great book. I’ve tracked several of the selected shorts on You Tube and so a dozen videos follow the post. Some of these selections are narrative, some purely abstract, some are animated, some live-action, some documentary while others are fiction, and still others defy any description. They demonstrate Vogel’s broad taste, and his talent for spotting cinematic treasures in every corner. The avant-garde is, in many ways, not the far wing or the margin of cinema, but its very heart and soul, the – if you will – main stream of the medium. I would suggest watching all of these films when you get the chance, perhaps one each day after finishing the main entry. You won’t be sorry; if some of these are new to you, as they were to me, then you’ll be as thankful as I am for that warm spring day in New York.

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The Legends: At Land, Scorpio Rising, Cat’s Cradle • (Fixing a Hole: Avant-Garde Month)

by Joel

Two weeks ago, I turned the “Fixing a Hole” series over to Maurizio Roca. However, he indicated that he did not want to pick it up until January, so as December was left unclaimed, and I like to finish what I started, I will be posting the last three entries in avant-garde month. Since I missed last Sunday, two will go up today – the second at 4pm EST, and the final entry will go up on Christmas. Happy holidays and hope you enjoy the pieces.

In the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, there was a very clear divide between the mainstream and the avant-garde in cinema. While the modernist obsession with abstraction and experimentation swept the other arts, making celebrities out of artists who defied or reinvented conventions, when it came to movies, you either told a story – with a budget and release schedule provided by the Hollywood system – or you disappeared into the margins. Yet talent thrived on those margins and the postwar era saw the growth of a vital underground cinema, fostered and facilitated by institutions like Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, an inexpensive film society in New York (Vogel and his views of cinema will be the subject of the next installment in this series, going up Sunday evening).

Three figures – Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage – probably had a bigger impact and wider reach than any others, and so here I will focus on three of their early works: Deren’s At Land (1944), Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), and Brakhage’s Cat’s Cradle (1959).

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The Silents: Entr’acte, Emak Bakia, Ghosts Before Breakfast • (Fixing a Hole: Avant-Garde Month)

by Maurizio Roca

“Fixing a Hole” is a series whose purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. December will be “Avant-Garde Month.” Each week, three related films will be covered in one entry, with videos of the work included.

While Joel has selected the weekly theme, the films were chosen by this week’s guest writer. Today Maurizio Roca, last seen conducting the noir countdown on Wonders, investigates three of his favorite experimental films from the riches of the silent era.

In the 1920s, avant-garde filmmaking slowly emerged as more intellectuals started to take cinema seriously as an art form. The scorn and ridicule that greeted movies in earlier times gradually subsided and was replaced by a general enthusiasm for the medium’s possibilities. A few members of certain cultural movements, notably the Surrealists and Dadaists, started to realize that their philosophical and personal concerns could be administered quite effectively on celluloid. This was another area of visual art where the creator could manipulate the tools he placed in front of him to construct a result he deemed aesthetically satisfying. It’s no coincidence that many early directors in this new enterprise had already established themselves in other forms of art. Just scan some of the names that graced early avant-garde pictures—Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger—and you can see that a healthy dose of cross-pollination was occurring quite frequently. Yet this new cinematic form was also attracting young budding filmmakers that understood that the relatively cheap, independent spirit that lay at the heart of this new medium was a way to break into cinema without relying on a studio for finances. Many future narrative filmmakers that worked almost exclusively in motion pictures had gotten their start in the avant-garde films of the ’20s. In this essay, I will be focusing on three such films of that decade.

For some readers that are unfamiliar with what constitutes an avant-garde film (as it can be considered in the confines of the 1920s), one needs to look at prevailing elements that were generally found in such works. For one, the absence of a linear, chronological narrative is usually present (or at least fractured to an exorbitant level). Second, a strategic use of cinematic techniques is abundantly added to abstract and consciously alter the images for the viewer by rapid editing, out of focus imagery, animation, filtered lenses, expressive and exaggerated camera movements, optical effects and non-diegetic sound. Third, it provides a highly ambiguous or symbolic message (sometimes even being completely nonsensical) that is meant to be reflexive and/or opposite of what can be found in more mainstream fare. These pictures are basically designed to offer the audience a sort of contradictory experience to what they would generally find in most theaters back then.

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Bambi (1942, prod. Walt Disney) • (Fixing a Hole: Animated Animals Month)

by Joel Bocko

“Fixing a Hole” is a series whose purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. The theme for November is “Animated Animals.”

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The Story: One spring, a little fawn is born into a world of sunshine and flowers – but as the seasons pass, and the young deer comes of age, neither he nor the world around him will remain so innocent.

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“You’d be forgiven for picturing cute, wide-eyed little critters wandering through daisy fields and singing happy songs,” I wrote when introducing this month’s theme, adding pointedly, “Not so.” And I meant it – yet here we are! Well, let this prove that clichés obscure more than they illuminate. The cute, wide-eyed little critters of Bambi inhabit a violence- and sex-filled world of tragedy, stoicism, and carnage. Despite frequent light and happy moments, this is ultimately a very dark forest indeed. Why? To unearth Bambi‘s roots, I dug up the book that gave it birth.

Felix Salten’s Bambi was published in 1923, and it shares the qualities of much classic children’s literature: quiet, thoughtful, with a delicate playfulness, yet fundamentally somber, elementally instructional and subtly allegorical – simple yet deep. Walt Disney more scrupulously balances the dark and light, yet much of the book’s mood and atmosphere is effectively conveyed. Those majestic moments when Bambi and his mother cautiously approach a meadow, or tiptoe through the snow to hunt for food, admirably capture Salten’s spirit. Even those prototypical Disney elements – anthropomorphized chattering forest critters, resembling gossipy housewives or restless schoolkids – have their source in Salten, who devotes many pages to the silly conversations of little birds.

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An Open Letter to Toontown

November 20, 2011

Toontown City Council, c/o Cloverfield Development Co.
Acme Avenue & Avery Alley
Toontown, CA 90@#!

Dear Toons,

Well, gang, I just watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, this time for an online series called “Fixing a Hole.” (You know, holes, those convenient black discs you carry around in your pockets, portable escape hatches when you’re in a pickle – incidentally, how much those go for nowadays?) Anyway, the movie was a delight as always; though the climax is a bit drawn-out, the appearance of a one-dimensional Judge Doom, crushed and cackling like some maniacal cross between Johnny Paper and Johnny Rotten, is well worth the wait.

I dug that, and I laughed along with Roger, cringed for Baby Herman (somebody tell that middle-aged infant about Viagra, or better yet, don’t), and marveled at Bob Hoskins’ ability to play it straight even as he was acting against thin ai-  er, I mean, against real, live Toons who must have been rather intimidating “in the flesh.” And Jessica Rabbit. Oh Jessica Rabbit. With her in their extended family, it’s no wonder the fluffy-tailed little mammals are so eager to breed.

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Dumbo (1941, prod. Walt Disney) • (Fixing a Hole: Animated Animals Month)

by Stephen Russell-Gebbett

“Fixing a Hole” is a series whose sole purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. The theme for November is “Animated Animals.”

While Joel has selected all the titles, certain films have been assigned to guest writers. This week Checking on My Sausages‘ Stephen, who conducted the Animation Countdown on Wonders in the Dark, takes a look at the pros and cons of Disney’s 1941 cartoon.

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Dumbo (1941/United States/directed by Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen)

stars the voices of Edward Brophy, Sterling Holloway, Cliff Edwards, Herman Bing

written by Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Otto Englander, Bill Peet, Aurelius Battaglia, Joe Rinaldi, Vernon Stallings, Webb Smith from the book by Helen Aberson, Harold Pearl • music by Frank Churchill, Oliver Wallace • animation department: Art Babbitt, James Bodrero, Ward Kimbell, John Lounesbury, John P. Miller, Maurice Noble, Elmer Plummer, Martin Provenson, Woolie Reitherman, Vladimir Tytla, John Walbridge, Frank Thomas, and others • produced by Walt Disney

The Story: Dumbo, an elephant with big ears, is born to a circus animal. Shunned by the rest of the herd (“his disgrace is our own shame”), he is mocked and ridiculed by man and beast alike. Mrs. Jumbo, his mother, is whipped and caged for trying to protect her child. Separated from her, a sad Dumbo tries, with the help of a mouse and a band of crows, to get by in the circus business and find a way to be reunited with his mother.

Maybe those ears, those very things that held him down, will carry him up and up…

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The character of Dumbo, the elephant who can (spoilers ahead) fly, is said to have been inspired by a comic strip on the back of a cereal box. Dumbo the story is itself a brief and simple sketch, but one hour long. The style is simple too, recalling the animations of pioneer Winsor McCay (Gertie the Dinosaur) in both line and movement. After the flamboyant excesses, and financial losses, of Fantasia, Dumbo is Disney pared down and relatively unassuming.

The opening scene in which the animals board a (anthropomorphised) train, is as colourful as a nursery and has a curiosity and energy that is quite different from the sickly nannying charm offensive that afflicts many Disney films. It is during this journey a stork delivers a child to Mrs.Jumbo. The train choo choos through the landscape and as it grinds to a halt at its destination, the music too slows down to a stop. It’s fun.

Once the characters are properly introduced and the story gets going, this energy becomes trying when applied to every situation and almost every animal and person. It’s all big. There are quite a lot of children’s films that think that, to be enjoyed by children, everybody in them has to act like a child or a fool. It is like the adult who leans into the pram and goes “coochy-coo!”.

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The Story of the Fox (1937, dir. Wladyslaw and Irene Starewicz) • (Fixing a Hole: Animated Animals Month)

by Joel Bocko

“Fixing a Hole” is a new series on Wonders in the Dark whose sole purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on that site. The theme for Novembered is “Animated Animals.” Some spoilers are discussed below.

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The Story of the Fox (1937/France/directed by Wladyslaw and Irene Starewicz)

stars the voices of Claude Dauphin, Romain Bouquet, Sylvain Itkine, Marcel Raine

written by Jean Nohain, Antoinette Nordmann, Roger Richebe, Irene Starewicz, Wladyslaw Starewicz from Johann Wolfgang Goethe • photographed by Wladyslaw Starewicz • designed by Wladyslaw Starewicz • music by Vincent Scotto • animated by Wladyslaw and Irene Starewicz

The Story: The royal lion seeks to punish Monsieur Renard (Mr. Fox) for eating his fellow creatures, yet the crafty animal tricks, manipulates, and fights his way out of every scrape.

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 “Animated Animals”: you’d be forgiven for picturing cute, wide-eyed little critters wandering through daisy fields and singing happy songs. Not so: this month there’s one cuddly creature (albeit too mute to sing), an amiable buffoon, a murderous yet still sympathetic monster, and then there’s Monsieur Renard (French for “fox”), the eponymous antihero of the brilliant stop-motion feature The Story of the Fox. Crafty, nasty, and carnivorous, Renard may have the least redeeming qualities of all the November beasts; unsurprisingly, he may also be the most human.

Watching as he assaults and semi-cannibalizes his fellow creatures, regarding us every now and then with an ambiguously conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, we titter nervously.  We recognize we aren’t really compatriots in crime but rather spectators in a show enacted only for the fox’s own benefit. Renard has the gifted performer’s contempt for the audience – and we’d probably be his next victim were we onscreen ourselves. Not only the fox but his master are winking at us with raw, mischievous relish.

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Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning) & Drácula (1931, dir. George Melford) • (Fixing a Hole: Universal Horror Month)

by Jaime Grijalba

“Fixing a Hole” is a new series whose sole purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. The theme for October is “Universal Horror.” Some spoilers are discussed below.

While Joel has selected all the titles, certain films have been assigned to guest writers. This week, Exodus 8:2‘s own Jaime Grijalba digs up the two Draculas: the English- and Spanish-language versions, shot simultaneously in 1931.

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Dracula (1931/United States/directed by Tod Browning)

stars Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye, Edward Van Sloan, Helen Chandler, David Manners

written by Louis Bromfield, Tod Browning, Max Cohen, Dudley Murphey, Louis Stevens from the play by Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston, Garret Fort from the novel by Bram Stoker • photographed by Karl Freund • designed by Charles D. Hall, John Hoffman, Herman Rosse • no music • edited by Milton Carruth

The Story: On a dark and stormy night, an Englishman arrives at a gloomy castle in Transylvania and meets Count Dracula, who would like to invite him for a drink.

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Drácula (1931/United States/directed by George Melford)

stars Carlos Villarías, Pablo Álvarez Rubio, Eduardo Arozamena, Lupita Tovar, Barry Norton

written by B. Fernandez Cue, Dudley Murphey from the play by Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston, Garret Fort from the novel by Bram Stoker • designed by Charles D. Hall • music by David Broekman • edited by Andrew Cohen

The Story: En una noche oscura y tormentosa, un inglés llega a un lúgubre castillo en Transilvania y cumple con el Conde Drácula, a quien le gustaría invitarlo a tomar una copa. (Forgive the Google translation! – Joel)

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‘I am Dracula’/’Yo soy Drácula’

The only survivor of a practice that was more common than anyone would admit, Drácula, the Spanish version of the Tod Browning film Dracula, is also from 1931, filmed at the same time with the same sets and the same script, but with different actors, directors, DP’s, everything. Universal, of all the studios, used to do this all the time, not to expand the film to foreign Spanish-talking regions (that was more of a consequence) but more to appease the growing Latino population that began not only to populate the United States. And also to compensate with work the many Latino-related actors and actresses that came to Hollywood to find a work and a way to shine in the movies, even if they didn’t really speak any English, which I don’t know if it’s the case of this particular case, but I’m pretty sure there are some who are.

Anyway, back to the films. Dracula may be one of the most famous movies in the world, much like Frankenstein, because you don’t need to actually see it to know what it’s about. You can sometimes predict what the acting, the framing, the sets and all the little details will be: countless parodies, remakes and maybe a genetic memory have been important when we give this film the status of legend. Maybe it’s Lugosi, or Browning, or Frye, or who knows what it is, maybe the cinematography has something familiar that resonates with us when we see it for the first time, as if it were a world that we already know, but that we longed to return to, a film that has always played in our minds until we see it for the first time, and that’s when the film will start playing in your heart.

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The Old Dark House (1932, dir. James Whale) • (Fixing a Hole: Universal Horror Month)

by Joel Bocko

“Fixing a Hole” is a new series on Wonders in the Dark whose sole purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on that site. The theme for October is “Universal Horror.” Some spoilers are discussed below.

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The Old Dark House (1932/United States/directed by James Whale)

stars Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart, Lillian Bond, Raymond Massey, Brember Wills, Elspeth Dudgeon

written by R.C. Sherriff and Benn Levy from J.B. Priestley’s novel • photographed by Arthur Edeson • designed by Charles D. Hall • music by David Broekman • edited by Andrew Cohen

The Story: On a dark and stormy night, a married couple and their bemused third-wheel friend are forced to stay the night at a gloomy old home, inhabited by the very strange Femms, a family full of neuroses and dark secrets.

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See a movie called The Old Dark House and you think you know what to expect. Well, unless you’re psychic, half-mad yourself (you’d have to be to come up with this scenario), or have already seen it, you’d be dead wrong. Sure, there’s an old house on a hill. Okay, a bickering young couple and their friend wind up having to spend the night there. Yeah, the residents of the house are a bunch of freaks, weirdos, and psychopaths. But the devil’s in the details and if the outline sounds familiar, the details are anything but. Every line of dialogue, every gesture, every plot development is unexpected and off-the-wall.

Who could predict the lesbian onslaught of sister Rebecca Femm (Eva Moore), pausing every now and then in her overbearing religiosity to a cop a feel from the heroine? Who would expect the appearance of 102-year-old Sir Roderick Femm, bedridden, cackling, and despite the misleading cast listing (actor’s name supposedly “John Dudgeon”) quite clearly an old lady with a scraggly beard glued to her wrinkly chin? And best of all, who should foresee the climactic revelation of Saul Femm (Brember Wills), outcast brother locked in his room for twenty years, set free to plead sanity – almost convincing us (we’ve certainly seen how nuts his siblings are) before the hero turns his back and Saul’s meek expression dissolves into a mask of fantastically cunning dementia?

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