Continuum Film Blog

my review of "red tails" (2011) d. anthony hemingway

 "6 Smashing Reels!"

Here's an earlier draft of this review that has the clip of GL mentioned in the text.

You can also read the review online at Film Comment.

And I'm reposting this clip from our friends at

Fantasy of Flight 'cause I love it!

 

oh davey, happy easter!

I'm a little melancholy today. My parents weren't very religious but but they did religiously celebrate Easter. No matter what or where there was always at least a card for me even after I had gone away to college, and when I was young, I got an Easter basket (made by mom, not store bought) or a stuffed animal. On the air base in Panama I remember going to the officer's club for Sunday brunch. Usually this called for a new dress or lace tights and mom and I would wear hats. Dad wore a springy dress uniform.

Back in New York there would be dinner with the Wilkins and dad would roast a lamb, a ham, a turkey or a fresh ham -- sometimes all of the above! There would be dyed eggs and I would search the house and the yard.

So much nostalgia-- I guess cause I'm sick this weekend and couldn't make the choco-roonies. And mom and dad aren't here...

Here's a little more Easter memorabilia...

 

 

 

 

Still, happily, I have an invite to dinner and many wonderful memories to resurrect!

Happy Easter!

"paris is small for those who share so great a passion as ours."

I had a crush on this film before I even saw it...

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) d. Marcel Carné

I'm going to see the restoration tonight.  It will be my 15th or 16th time seeing it--I've lost count. I would always cry at the end.  I saw it once at the theater in Paris that plays it continuously.  But I stopped seeing it long before it became available generally on DVD.  Before I had heard of a dvd. I've never watched a videotape of it.  I may have watched it on TV once.  You went to see it--if it was playing somewhere...like France. I had a book of the film. The cover is tattered and that's how I "saw" the film in between it's rare outings. But some time after college I saw l'Atalante by Vigo and fell in love with it instead. I would cry at the end but with delight. Still, I can recite whole scenes of Paradis in english and in french (well, at least the men's roles). Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) was my obessesion.  I tried to turn innocent young guys attempting to be my boyfriend into him--rather like crazed surgeon, Pierre Brasseur, in Eyes Without a Face.  Speaking of Pierre, I find him, as Frédérick Lemaître, much more alluring now than pining, pale, white-faced Baptiste. Black-faced-Othello, agressive, Frédérick!

Brasseur...

who always reminded me of...

Le Pew!

Anyway, can't say more now--I have to go and fight for a premium seat not in the "paradis" of Walter Reade--and take a trip down the "Boulevard du Crime" to my old days.

And cry?

It's a big movie at 3 hours+ but with a passion like ours...

 

"a very serious picture about death"

A gorgeous, irreplaceable trio...

"Those three dahk Noo Yawk fellas!"

Below is a clip of the opening shots of Husbands, my favorite Cassavetes film. Now all three fellas are gone and it seems like the end of an era. Or the end of something. I love this LIFE cover but it makes me sad.  And happy. That it makes me sad. Because all three worked so hard to make us feel...

 
Husbands (1970) d. John Cassevetes

“He just buried us!”

 

The Dick Cavett Show w/ John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara

extended!! pop on over to governors island for 3 more weekends!

 
EXTENDED!

pop-up screening at governors island 3 MORE weekends!

sept. 10/11th, 17/18th and 24/25th, 2011

I'm happy to be included in a "Pop-Up Screening" of 3 of my short videos as part of The West Harlem Art Fund's

LOOSELY COUPLED, a group exhibition on Governors Island.  We'll be at No. 17 Nolan Park. Pop on over!

This weekend, The West Harlem Art Fund will host a “pop-up” film screening on Governors Island. What better way to enjoy a house but to watch movies. And these movies deal with the issues of home, memories and important places. These films are a part of a series called Upstairs in the Basement. Read more about each individual work and the artist.

Films: “Upstairs in the Basement”: 

My maternal grandfather was a contractor and a kind of inventor. He built our two homes in Macon, GA. The first one burned to the ground as firemen and the Salvation Army watched from several yards away.  I only knew the 2nd house, built in the early 1960s.  It was a fascinating collage made of discarded materials from my grandfather’s job sites where he did decorative plaster-work in both antebellum mansions and modern city buildings. As a child, I was fascinated by the precarious ladder-pull attic where he kept his inventions and other antiquated curios. I had never seen a house with an attic.

Granddaddy loved to tell humorous stories and jokes but he also told bible and ghost tales.  An anecdote that he would laughingly recount (to my embarrassment) was the time he and I were in the attic and my mother was calling for me from just below. I yelled; “I’m with Grandaddy! I’m Upstairs in the Basement!!” Telling this story would bring tears to his eyes.

The Macon house is in ruins now; our family home in New Rochelle where we lived for 40 years was sold after my father died, and my 1st apartment of my very own was overtaken by developers and recently razed. These 3 little films all have to do with movies, memories, spaces and lost or hidden images. And not incidentally, they were all created "at home"...

Short Films

“Leader Film (Civitella Ranieri)” (2009) 5 min. video/digital animation w/Viet Le, Vladimir Pistalo & Shyam Selvadurai. Divertissement set in the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Italy.  This “scrappy” short video emulates a reel of discarded outtakes used as film leader and filler when learning to edit.

"The Lincoln Film Conspiracy Prologue" (2007) 15 min. “trailer”. A multi-generic short film and multimedia installation that combines archival film footage, new video segments and digital image manipulation, collage and montage.

Based on the history of African-American independent silent and sound cinema, LFC is the story of an archivist who is investigating the disappearance of a collection of technologically progressive black films. Did the films disintegrate or explode like many other nitrate films? Evidence of great heat was found in the vicinity of the studio’s site.  Conspiracy theories are outlined: Was there a government plot in conjunction with Hollywood to destroy these “positive” movies leaving only denigrating images of black people? Or have the movies been Abducted by Aliens?

"Il Giallo della Paine!" (2011) 8 min.   A “scary” montage of vanished spaces playfully using the visual tropes and aural cues of 1970s, American and British horror and of the Italian thriller films known as "Giallo" (Yello).

 Ina Archer — Artist

Ina was born in Paris, France. She earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a MA, in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, early sound cinema and technology.  Ina’s multimedia works/films have been shown  nationally including Cinema Project’s EXPANDED FRAMES: a celebration and examination of critical cinema in Portland,OR. and “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970” at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, GA. and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. Her awards include residences at Vermont Studio Center,  Blue  Mountain Center and Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and 2010 nominee for the Anonymous Was A Woman award. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund and a board member of IMAP, Independent Media Arts Preservation.  

Ina’s film writing includes reviews for Film Comment, The NY African Film Festival, Framework, The Journal of Cinema and Media, and Black Camera. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School for Design in the Foundation Program of the School of Design Strategies.

I'll see you in the basement!

 

 

top of world, ma/s!!

Miss ya, Ma!

 

White Heat (1949) d. Raoul Walsh

Happy Mother's Day, where-ever you may be!

"and now i'm gonna howl!"

 elizabeth taylor abides...

 
No wonder it's raining. It's the end of an era.  She's with all the other stars now.  I want to try live some part of my life with an atom of the brio with  which she lived hers.

Meanwhile, this ALWAYS cracks me up!

 

Rest in Peace, Liz.

home sweet homewood...

I like him. He's a little smarmy yet urbane and charming...

I had an excellent dream last night in Freeport.  I dreamt that Gig Young was courting me!  Not sure why he appeared just now but he was welcome! I dig Gig in Twilight Zone's "Walking Distance"--the theme?: You can't go home again and maybe that's what Gig was trying to remind me of. It's a very moving episode. The music is by Bernard Herrmann.

 

"Walking Distance" (1959) directed by Robert Stevens. With Rod Serling, Gig Young, Frank Overton and  Irene Tedrow.

but even better...darro + moreland

No, you can't win...in the movies!

 

repost: lee "buddy" archer

 Landing: September 6, 1919...Take off: January 27, 2010.

 

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